On this day, December 26, in i991, the Soviet flag was replaced atop the Kremlin with the Russian flag, symbolizing the dissolution of the USSR. The night before, Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as leader of the Union, leaving it to crumble into Russia and a host of new states that most of us still can’t name, other than to note that some end in “stan.”
If you are under thirty, the Soviet Union probably seems vaguely like another Ottoman Empire from the later chapters of European history books, and like them all, it too faded into history. It was, however, for half a century, a genuine threat to the West, because of its centralized control of its nuclear weapons, too many of which still exist in Russian hands. The USSR was never Communist in anything but name, but the risks from its ideology to democracy or capitalism, or whatever name you give to the Western way of life, were considered a serious existential threat.
Francis Fukuyama published a book entitled “The End of History and the Last Man” suggesting that in some Hegelian sense that liberalism might have finally triumphed, instead of Marxism. In order to maintain a society however, a common enemy seems to be necessary as a uniting threat, and soon enough we found the threat of terrorism to replace the once Red enemy. The COVID 19 virus should be a real enough enemy to bring us all together, but it seems to have been subsumed in the rush to divide our nation into warring factions, turning masks, or their lack, into symbolic flags.
Russian troops now sit on its border with Ukraine, one of the former Soviet states, testing perhaps whether history merely took a much needed rest, only to return and perhaps repeat itself with its own form of vengeance. We should certainly hope as one that it does not.
