One of the pillars of President Vladimir Putin's new
national ideology is that Russia should occupy the Soviet Union's onetime
prominent place in the world. That aspiration, however, keeps hitting snags in
areas where the Soviet Union excelled, such as space launches and ice hockey.
These misfires may present a bigger threat to Putin's regime than falling
living standards.
On Saturday, a Russian Proton-M rocket carrying a
Mexican satellitecrashed less than
10 minutes after takeoff. It was the latest of at least seven Proton mishaps
since 2010, and the second major Russian space incident in three weeks. Earlier
this month, a Progress cargo ship failed to dock with the International Space
Station, apparently because a Soyuz rocket malfunctioned. There have been
plenty of successful launches, too, but the Proton failures have become so
frequent that Khrunichev State Research and Production Space
Center, the rocket's maker, is facing mounting insurance premiums and
difficulties finding foreign clients.
Dmitri
Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of Russia's defense industry,
pointed to similarities among the Soviet and Russian programs. "What
happened to the Proton yesterday has already killed these missiles in 1988 and
2014," he wrote in
his blog. "The Soviet and Russian experts have rushed to conclusions and
never found the reasons for the engines' anomalous behavior."
If he's right, the problems plaguing the
Proton in recent years have been known since the dying days of the Soviet
Union, but were never fixed. They now have a more damaging effect, because the
system as a whole is more fragile. "In the U.S.S.R.," Andrei Sinitsyn
wrote in the business daily Vedomosti, "critically important dual-use
industries such as aerospace worked under threat of reprisals and enjoyed
unlimited resources. Now threats are ineffective and resources are limited,
both objectively and subjectively (because of corruption)."
Then there are the setbacks in sports.
On Sunday, the Russian national hockey team lost 1 to 6 to Canada in the final
game of the world championship in Prague. This compounded Team Russia's failure
at the Sochi Winter Olympics, an event that Putin intended to use to showcase
his country's post-Soviet glory. Canada, often beaten by the formidable Soviet
team in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, triumphed there, too.
The Canadian team that went to the
championship in Prague was weakened, because some of its stars were kept at
home by the National Hockey League play-offs. Russia had more of its top
players available, but wilted disgracefully in the second period. Then, the
Russian team did something no Soviet squad would ever have done: It skated off the ice before the Canadian national anthem was played
to honor the winners. Only a handful of players remained, led by NHL star
Alexander Ovechkin, who tried to stop his teammates but mostly failed.
This happened just a few days after
Putin had a much-publicized hockey triumph of his own. In a May 16 exhibition game of the amateur Night Hockey League, with Soviet
hockey stars such as Sergei Makarov and Viacheslav Fetisov, as well as some top
pro-Putin politicians and businessmen on the ice, Putin scored eight goals. He
only took up the game in 2011, but few retired professionals, let alone
governors or billionaires, would be willing to tackle him or deny him a
pass. I'm not sure he would have done as well against non-Russian opposition.
The Prague defeat was a cold shower for
the pro-Putin breed of Russian patriots: This is not how hockey was played in
the Soviet team's golden days. "We need to become a normal power
first," the Russian team's spokesman, Igor Larin, said after
the game. "Once we become a normal power, we will play like
Canadians." Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Russian Parliament's foreign
affairs committee, immediately tweeted: "What is he talking about? Has he forgotten
that we've beaten Canadians many times?" And in fairness, Russia's squad
did make it to play Canada in the final.
That modern Russia isn't the Soviet
Union is both a blessing and a curse for Putin's regime. It's a blessing
because the country is, despite Putin's dictatorial leanings and efforts to
strengthen the state sector, an open capitalist economy. That makes Russia
more resilient in times of crisis, confounding analysts who fail to understand
that, at least as far as the economy is concerned, the Soviet revival is only
skin-deep. Russia's economic performance in the first quarter of this year beat expectations.
The differences are also a curse,
because even as Putin uses propaganda to raise the hopes of revanchist
Russians, he's unable to deliver on his promises. So he's unable to create
Soviet-style showcases meant to demonstrate the nation's power to the world,
such as the aerospace industry that sent the first satellite and the
first man into space, or the invincible USSR ice hockey machine.
According to a recent survey by the
Levada Center polling agency, 19 percent of Russians believe the country should go back
to the Soviet development path, and 55 percent believe it should have a path of
its own, distinct from the Western one. Given almost universal support for
Putin's actions in Ukraine and pride in the country's Soviet past (30 percent of Russians think of Stalin with
"respect" and only 5 percent with "fear and disgust"), that
special path may be just a modernized, idealized idea of Soviet
policies.
I suspect that the failure to repeat
Soviet glories hurts Putin more than higher inflation and lower wages: In the
70 years of Soviet communism, Russians endured much worse economic hardship for
the sake of living in a proud superpower. Putin needs to deliver more
world-beating successes for his nostalgia-based strategy to triumph,
but that's impossible without either recreating the repressive Soviet system or
creating a business climate that would allow the private sector to restore the
country's glory. He seems incapable of either, and that makes him vulnerable.
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