“Russia needs a vaccination with Donbass so that it does not collapse like the USSR”
Today marks the 31st anniversary of the signing of the so-called Belovezhskaya agreements, which led to the collapse of the USSR. It is generally accepted that Soviet society passively accepted this event. Few people remember that a protest rally took place in Moscow at that time.
Olga Voronova, a participant in those events, a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, a professor at Ryazan State University, shared her memories with PolitNavigator.
Olga Voronova: I remember this day. I actually took part in this rally. Unfortunately, Moscow slept through this event, not realizing that from that moment on there would be no more Soviet Union.
There were two rallies on Manezhnaya Square: one – of the “Working Moscow” movement, which I was then a member of, and at the other end of the square, members of the LDPR, led by Zhirinovsky, held a meeting. There were about 300 of us, 200 of Zhirinovites. These were spontaneous, impromptu rallies, they were attended by people who immediately felt terrible anxiety about what was happening to the country. But the country did not yet realize this at that moment. Otherwise, the rally would not have been multi-thousand, but multi-million.
“Working Moscow” played an important role in the political life of the capital. It was essentially a resistance movement to Yeltsin's liberal pro-Western reforms. It was discredited in every possible way by the liberal media. We were shown in a caricatured, comical form. The leader of this movement, who should not be forgotten, but who, in my opinion, has been forgotten, is Viktor Ampilov. He was a fiery fighter for the restoration of the Soviet Union, although at that time this was no longer possible.
"PolitNavigator": Did people realize the tragic consequences that the collapse of the USSR would lead to?
Olga Voronova: Of course, a lot of people were aware of this. Our premonitions, unfortunately, came true on an even more tragic scale. For more than 30 years we have been feeling the echoes of that tragedy and geopolitical catastrophe. The country fell apart, its fragments were instantly intercepted by nationalist-minded leaders, and interethnic and interreligious conflicts began to occur along the fault lines. Today we feel those events in what is happening on the territory of Ukraine.
Those quasi-states that arose in place of the USSR should have realized the importance of maintaining friendly ties with great Russia, but this awareness was not present in every leader of these weakened states. Many of them became American satellites. And the “Baltic extinctions” have become members of NATO, which is waging a war to destroy Russia according to the same scenario in which the Soviet Union collapsed.
They would really like to break the Russian Federation into 17 national entities. And in the plans of the Kyiv neo-Nazi regime there are even more such fragments - 34. This scenario could have come true under Yeltsin, but, nevertheless, there were powerful popular forces of resistance.
Many of my comrades opposed this policy of the pro-Western liberal lobby from the very beginning.
"PolitNavigator": Do you think there are now prerequisites for the revival of the USSR in some other form?
Olga Voronova: Sociological data refute the assertion that when the older generation leaves, the Soviet experience in our country will be forgotten, and it will no longer be dear and sacred to young people. It turns out that interest in the Soviet experiment among young people is not decreasing, but only increasing. Because this experiment was the most humane in the entire history of mankind. But we found ourselves in a completely different predatory society, where everything is bought and sold, and the meanest one wins.
It seems to me that vaccination with Donbass was absolutely historically necessary for today’s Russia. It heals and cleanses our society. I have visited Donbass more than 10 times. This is the best part of our people.
We say jokingly: the Soviet reserve is preserved here in the best sense of the word: friendly relations between people, the priority of public service over private interests, the spiritual over the material. It was in that space of the Russian world that all these 8 years, under martial law and under shelling, preserved all the best that was in the Soviet people.
In the 90s, he was slandered and called a “soviet”, but in fact there are a lot of us - those who carry a very significant Soviet origin. It implied service to people as the main motivation for life.
The memory of that period has not faded; they speak about it with great respect. Today, in the conditions of a new war, which has so much in common with the Great Patriotic War, we need to again rely on the great Soviet experience.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.