Why is it that France and the United States have unifying national holidays to freedom, but Russia does not? According to columnist Anatoliy Bershtein of the opposition newpaper Yezhednevniy Zhurnal, the reason is simple: Russia lacks a historic basis for such an event, and it’s people have no taste for the sacrifices freedom demands.
For the Yezhednevniy Zhurnal, Anatoliy Bershtein writes in part:
Both the storming of the Bastille, which in France signifies the beginning of the French Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence by the American states from Britain, symbolize for the people of those countries the same thing – freedom. And this very same freedom remains one of their chief priorities to this very day.
In the new Russia, defending the White House in August 1991 could have become such a holiday. But it didn’t. First the 1993 October rebellion sowed doubts; then an incomprehensible and failed war in Chechnya cast a bloody shadow; followed by elections in 1996 that largely discredited democratic government; and finally, the people turned their backs on the “regime of freedom” because of the emergence of an oligarchic regime and its attendant criminal activities. The condescending and cynical decade of the zeros created such a basis for disappointment – “zeroing out” the 90s, and declaring the start of a “souvenir” democracy, that replaced freedom with authoritarian political stability, the loyalty of subjects and the defense of corporate interests.
one has to note that in every opinion poll, for an overwhelming majority of Russians, freedom is not a priority – and it is not a priority by a wide margin. They don’t directly associate freedom with having a well-fed, just and safe existence. They have a very tiny, even non-existent, experience of living under conditions of this aforementioned freedom – and the experience they do have is not at all simple or for the most part, positive. So Russians aren’t prepared to sacrifice even a shred of well-being or sense of stability, even if it’s mostly illusory, for the sake of an even more elusive freedom, which, by the way, threatens new shocks and a loss of an artificially-bred bird in the hand.
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