An attentive reader (whose name we have, alas, misplaced, so we urge him to write in again and tell us who he is) offers the following:
It might help better to understand Russia, her fate and future, if we paid more attention to her past, and not just the past seventy years. Consider the last time Russia had a leader named Boris: His surname was Godunov, and the time was the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Time of Troubles, by Sergei Platonov (1860-1933), is the classic study. With the downfall of Boris Godunov, Russia entered a period of anarchy called the Time of Troubles. Only in 1613, after a popular revolt led by the butcher Kuzma Minin and Prince Pozharsky, two of the true heroes of Russia’s history, was Russia able to expel the Poles and establish a new legitimate order under the Romanov dynasty, in an air of enhanced xenophobia.
Furthermore, as the neo-Communists make their increasingly unlikely effort to retake Russia, it is worth remembering as well that at least one visionary of Lenin’s time foresaw communism’s collapse. Yevgeny Zamyatin was one of pre- revolutionary Russia’s most talented short story writers and a prewar member of the Bolshevik party. However, he discerned the totalitarian nature of Bolshevism in power. In 1920-21 he wrote We, the first of the modern anti- utopian novels, which satirized the collectivist future. In its own right a thoroughly entertaining and still timely parable, it was also an acknowledged inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984.
