The Day of Russia’s Independence has been renamed the Day of Russia. Why? A question is often asked: “independence from what?” Being unable to answer the question, the authorities thought of something different: let’s discard “independence” and make this a holiday in honor of Russia.

The answer is very simple, however: fifteen years ago Russia tried to become independent of bolshevism and even voted in favor of this.

The Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia had captured and maintained power in Russia with the aid of mass terror. No Lenin, Stalin or any other Soviet leaders had won the elections. The Bolsheviks lost elections for the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to pass the republican Constitution, to socialist-revolutionaries and seized the power by force.

Mass terror, the Civil War, Stain’s repressions – all of this has been a way to impose the Bolshevik power which the majority of citizens rejected, rather than a wrongly chosen path. The point of this power is: the people are trash, construction material, their lives and dignity and insignificant. Its major principle is: the end justifies the means. The bolshevism under Stalin transformed this all into a system of government and cruelly approved the corresponding kind of interpersonal relations.

In June 1990 Russia tried liberation from the political successors of the Bolsheviks and, more importantly, from the system of bolshevism and Stalinism, neglect for human life, from the ungifted and stagnating bureaucracy. It was an attempt of reviving its own historic tradition, revert to Russia of February-October 1917 – the country which turned down autocracy, made the independent (without the Western influence) choice in favor democracy, and wasn’t yet occupied by the Bolshevik dictatorship.

By the way, in connection to the modern often poeticized nature of autocracy and the touching adoption of its attributes it would do no harm recalling that in 1917 the autocratic power was in a profound crisis, was unable to effectively govern the country, reform or be renewed. At the same time, it was extremely unpopular in all public strata – from bottom to top. February 1917 – it was when democratic Russia appeared, really proclaimed its independence and sovereignty, which were afterwards stamped out by the Bolsheviks.

However, in 1990 we only managed a formal reversion to the historic tradition which cost us much suffering in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. In essence, minor changes have been achieved so far. By using the Declaration of sovereignty in the political struggle the winners retained the government system and the kind of relations between the state machinery and an individual nearly unchanged as they aroused in the 1930s. Having achieved their political goals, instead of facing the question why should Russian be independent of bolshevism for, they simplified the task – rejected the word “independence.” The absence of slim and consistent system of views of the country’s future was gradually replaced with abstract slogans “of eminence and prosperity,” amorphous and insipid ideology of centrism.

The Day of Russia is a plea to ask oneself a question: what values will be cultivated in our country with its contradictory past and as much contradictory present? Where will it belong in the world in some 10, 15, 25 years?

Watching the difference between the top world powers from the rest of the countries, one cannot but admit availability of a set of basic values, which primarily embrace priority of human rights, including the ownership, individual freedom and the notion of public justice, as a consolidating and common trait. Modernization of a state without proclaiming and assigning real priority to these values will inevitably bring us into the clan of poor and outcast nations, i.e. the conjuncture contrary to what is implied in the notions of “sovereignty” and “independence.”

Translated by Johnson’s Russia List #9178