15 years after Soviet collapse, Russians nostalgic for superpower

Dec 7, 2006, 16:46 GMT

Moscow - Exactly 15 years ago, the leaders of three of the Soviet Union's biggest republics gathered in a village near Brest, Belarus, and just so happened to end the superstate's 75-year existence.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk and Belarussian Supreme Soviet chairman Stanislav Shushkevich met 'to discuss questions of gas and oil deliveries into Ukraine and Belarus,' Shushkevich said in remarks carried Thursday by the Vremya Novostei newspaper.

'We spoke literally a half-hour when the question arose of whether we could agree to sign our names under the phrase: 'The USSR has ceased to exist as a geopolitical reality and a subject of international law,'' he said. On December 8, 1991, the document was signed.

Today, with Russians marking a decade and a half of capitalism and democracy, the country's relationship with its former, communist self remains paradoxical and nostalgic, even as a generation that never wore the uniform of the Pioneer youth group comes of age.

Nearly 70 per cent of Russians say they're wistful for the Red Army, planned economy and powerhouse Olympic teams that symbolized the USSR, a survey conducted by the VTsIOM polling centre ahead of the anniversary showed.

Russia's 68 per cent compares with 59 per cent of Ukrainians and 52 per cent of respondents in Belarus.

As Russia and other former republics continue to search for a post-Soviet identity, roughly half of Russians and Ukrainians would vote in favour of a new union, VTsIOM's poll showed - compared to the one-quarter of the population in each state opposed to unification.

With racial tensions higher than ever in Russia and political problems abounding with the former republic of Georgia, many in today's Russia nostalgically speak of the harmony they say prevailed among the brother republics.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last year called the Soviet collapse 'the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.'

'Whoever doesn't regret the fall of the Soviet Union has no heart,' Putin said at the time. 'But whoever regrets it has no head.'

But with gross domestic product growth averaging 6.7 per cent over the last seven years in Russia, some of the sting of the Soviet collapse seems to be leaving.

While a majority of Russians - 56 per cent - regret the collapse of the 15-republic state, that number has shrunk from 84 per cent in 1997, according to the Bashkirova and Partners polling group.

Young people especially find the idea of a communist Russia to be increasingly alien.

The Soviet Union was 'something old and ancient, with which nothing good is associated,' Anton Yevseyev, 15, told the magazine Ogonyok.

Few of the 15-year-olds interviewed by the publication knew what the letters USSR - or, as the Cyrillic abbreviation looks, CCCP - stood for. (Answer: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.)

Yeltsin, also, said he saw no room for regret: The Soviet Union's end, he told state-owned Rossisskaya Gazeta Thursday, could have been softened only by the creation of the looser Commonwealth of Independent States.

'It was the only alternative to the inevitable and unmanageable catastrophic failure of the former Soviet Union,' he said.