A recently released documentary film produced by murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anticorruption Foundation is making waves among Russians. Titled “The Traitors,” the film tries to figure out what went wrong in Russia in the 1990s — and points fingers at former President Boris Yeltsin and a number of oligarchs and reformers.
As two Russian analysts see it, the film’s “main goal … is to seek an understanding of how Russia derailed in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. In the film-makers’ view, the country had a chance to become a normal, rules-based democratic country, but failed because those entrusted with the people’s hopes betrayed them.”
A serious stock-taking in Russia is long overdue, and one hopes that Russians will do more than place the blame for Vladimir Putin’s malevolent rise to power, and his dismantling of Russia’s quasi-democratic institutions, on a few individuals. Russian history, Russian culture, Russian elites and the Russian people also bear much of the blame.
Western policymakers and analysts also need to take stock. They, too, got it wrong, largely supporting the policies that “The Traitors” denounces.
The intellectual roots of the West’s mistakes predate the Soviet Union’s collapse. The conventional wisdom within the Sovietological community in the 1980s was that while the USSR required radical reform, it was fundamentally stable. The dissidents were dismissed; the population was believed to be quiescent or coopted; the military and KGB were thought to be fully in control; the non-Russians were deemed........