The topics of Russia’s plight and future prospects came up again and again last week, in the December 7 video-conversation between Presidents Joseph Biden and Vladimir Putin, at the Summit of Democracies that the Biden administration organized and hosted on December 9–10, as well as during this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, held on December 10, where Dmitri Muratov and Maria Ressa gave traditional lectures. Muratov’s remarks were foreboding for the leadership in the Kremlin: Although the world seems to be turning away from democracy toward dictatorship (Novaya Gazeta, December 10), he recalled Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov’s assertion in his 1975 Nobel lecture, when the Soviet Union also appeared to be going strong, that dictatorships had no future, because without human rights and civil liberties there could be no progress. The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 delivered positive proof for that thesis. However, in Putin’s Russia, this anniversary only increases Moscow’s urge to reconstitute its position of power, which was undercut three decades ago by that happenstance “geopolitical catastrophe” (Izvestia, December 8).
The Anniversary That Russia Fails to Internalize – Jamestown
