Learning from history - More than the economy at stake
Each year Moscow’s Red Square was the stage and the armies of the Soviet Union goose-stepped by saluting the USSR’s venerable leadership. These men were usually ageing despots, many wearing campaign medals marking Russia’s absolutely pivotal role — 30m plus dead — in the defeat of one of the greatest evils this world has known.
The apex males wore no medals. Stalin, Molotov or Zhukov did not need to flaunt their authority. It was absolute, unquestioned and, as the YouTube clip of the 1950 parade reminds us, seemingly unchallengeable. Yet that entire construct has vanished. Many of the huge and diverse population of the former Soviet Union live in some of the most corrupt, reactionary, violent and unmanageable countries in the world. Those vast populations are slipping back into a kind of dark age, where the tyranny of the Communist Party and, earlier, the tsars, has been replaced by something more local but just as inhuman. The oligarchs and warlords have replaced the Politburo and the Romanov aristocracy but the consequences for ordinary people are just the same.