Geopolitics of Perestroika and the Collapse of the USSR Katehon think tank Geopolitics & Tradition

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GEOPOLITICS OF PERESTROIKA

AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR

13.06.2016

Alexander Dugin

The geopolitics of Perestroika
Right up until 1985, the attitude in the USSR towards

connecting with the West was on the whole rather

sceptical. Only in the period of Y. Andropov's rule did

the situation change somewhat, and according to his

instruction, a group of Soviet scientists and academic

institutes received the task of actively cooperating with

globalist structures (the Club of Rome, the CFR, the

Trilateral Commission, etc.). On the whole, the

principle foreign policy aims of the USSR remained

unchanged during the entire stretch from Stalin to

Chernenko.
Changes in the USSR begin with M. S. Gorbachev's

arrival to the office of General Secretary of the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He took office

against the backdrop of the Afghanistan War, which

more and more came to a deadlock. From his first

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more and more came to a deadlock. From his first
steps in the office of General Secretary, Gorbachev

came up against serious problems. The social,

economic, political, and ideological car began to stall.

Society was apathetic. The Marxist worldview lost its

appeal and continued to be broadcasted by inertia. A

growing percentage of the urban intelligentsia was

more and more attracted to Western culture, wishing

for "Western" standards. The national outskirts lost

their modernizational potential, and in some places the

repressive processes of archaization began; nationalist

sentiments flared up, and so on. The arms race and

the necessity of constantly competing with a rather

dynamically developing capitalist system exhausted the

economy. To an even greater extent, discontent in the

socialist countries of Eastern Europe came to a head,

where the appeal of Western capitalist standards was

felt even more keenly, while the prestige of the USSR

gradually fell. In these conditions, it was demanded of

Gorbachev to make some kind of definite decision

concerning the further strategy of the USSR and of the

entire Eastern bloc.
And he made it; it consisted of this: in a difficult

situation,

to adopt as a foundation theories of

convergence and the propositions of the globalist

groups and to begin drawing closer to the Western

world by means of the implementation of one-sided

concessions. Most likely, Gorbachev and his advisers

expected symmetrical actions from the West; the West

should have responded to each of Gorbachev's

concessions with analogous movements in favour of

the USSR. This algorithm was laid up in the

foundations of the policy of perestroika. In domestic

policy, this meant the abandonment of the strict

ideological Marxist dictatorship, the relaxation of

restrictions in relation to non-Marxist philosophical and

scientific theories, the cessation of pressure on

religious institutes (in the first place, on the Russian

[Russkii] Orthodox Church), a broadening of the

permissible interpretations of the events of Soviet

history, a policy on the creation of small enterprises

(cooperatives), and the freer association of citizens

along political and ideological interests. In this sense,

perestroika was a chain of steps directed towards

democracy, parliamentarism, the market, "

glasnost'",

and the expansion of zones of civic freedom. This was

a movement

away from the socialist model of society

towards a bourgeois-democratic and capitalist model.

But at first this movement was gradual and remained

within the framework of the social-democratic

algorithm; democratization and liberalism were

combined with the preservation of the party model of

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combined with the preservation of the party model of

the administration of the country, a strict vertical and

planned economy, and control of the party agencies

and special services behind social-political processes.
However, in other countries of the Eastern bloc and on

the periphery of the USSR, these transformations were

perceived as a manifestation of weakness and as

unilateral concessions to the West. Such a conclusion

was confirmed by Gorbachev's decision to finally

remove Soviet military contingents from Afghanistan

(1989), by oscillation over a series of democratic

revolutions unfolding throughout Eastern Europe, and

by his inconsistent policies in relation to a series of

allied republics: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and also

Georgia and Armenia, which were the first involved in

the process of the establishment of independent

statehood.
Against this background, the West took up a well-

defined position: while encouraging Gorbachev and his

reforms in word only and extolling his fateful

undertaking, not one really symmetrical step was taken

in favour of the USSR; not the smallest concession was

made in a single direction to Soviet political, strategic,

and economic interests. As a result, Gorbachev's

policies led, by 1991, to the gigantic, planetary system

of Soviet influence being

brought down, while the

second pole, the USA, and NATO quickly filled the

vacuum of control that had opened up. And if in the

first stages of perestroika it was still possible to

consider it as a special manoeuvre in the "Cold War"

(not unlike the plan of the "Finlandization of Europe",

worked out by Beria; Gorbachev himself spoke of a

"European house") then by the end of the 1980’s it

became clear that we were dealing with a case of direct

and one-sided

capitulation.

Gorbachev agreed to remove Soviet troops from the

German Democratic Republic, disbanding the Warsaw

Pact, recognizing the legitimacy of the new bourgeois

governments in the countries of Eastern Europe,

moving to meet the aspirations of the Soviet republics

to receive a large degree of sovereignty and

independence, and to revise the conditions of the

agreement for the formation of the USSR on new

terms. More and more Gorbachev also rejected the

social-democratic line, opening a path for direct

bourgeois-capitalist reforms in the economy. In a

word, Gorbachev's reforms amounted to

recognition of

the defeat of the USSR in its confrontation with the

West and the USA.
From a geopolitical point of view, perestroika

From a geopolitical point of view, perestroika

represents not only a repudiation of the ideological

confrontation with the capitalist world, but also a

complete contradiction of Russia's entire historical path

as a Eurasian, great-continental formation, as the

Heartland, as the civilization of Land. This was the

undermining of Eurasia from within; the voluntary self-

destruction of one of the poles of the world system; a

pole that did not at all arise in the Soviet period, but

took shape for centuries and millennia in the riverbeds

of the natural logic of geopolitical history and in

accordance with the lines of force of objective

geopolitics. Gorbachev took the position of

Westernism, which quickly led to the collapse of the

global structure and to a new version of the Time of

Troubles. Instead of Eurasianism, Atlanticism was

adopted; in the place of the civilization of Land and its

sociological set of values were placed the normatives of

the civilization of the Sea, contrary to it in all regards. If

we compare the geopolitical significance of these

reforms with every other period in Russian [Russkii]

history, we cannot escape the feeling that we are

dealing with something unprecedented.
The Time of Troubles in Russian [Russkii] history did

not last long and was replaced by periods of new

sovereign rebirth. Even the most frightening

dissensions preserved this or that integrating centre,

which became in time a pole of a new centralization of

Russian lands. And even the Russian [Russkii]

Westernists, orientated towards Europe, adopted along

with European customs ideas, technologies and skills,

used to reinforce the might of the Russian [Rosiiskii]

state, to secure its borders, and to assert its national

interests. Thus, the Westernist Peter or the German

Catherine the Second, with all their enthusiasm for

Europe, increased the territory of Russia and achieved

for it newer and newer military victories. Even the

Bolsheviks, obsessed by the idea of world revolution

and having easily agreed to the fettering terms of the

Brest-Litovsk world, started in a short period to

strengthen the Soviet Union, returning under the

control of Moscow its outskirts in the West and the

South. The case of Gorbachev is an absolute exception

in Russian [Russkii] geopolitical history. This history did

not know such betrayal even in its very worst periods.

Not only was the socialist system destroyed; the

Heartland was blown up from within.
The geopolitical significance of the collapse of the USSR
As a result of the collapse of the USSR

Yalta World

came to its logical end. This meant that the two-polar

model ended.

One pole put an end to its existence by

model ended.

One pole put an end to its existence by

its own initiative. Now one could say with certainty

what the theory of convergence was in fact:

the

cunning plan of the civilization of the Sea. This cunning

plan conceived an action and brought victory to

thalassocracy in the "Cold War". No convergence

occurred in practice; and according to the extent of the

one-sided concessions from the side of the USSR, the

West only strengthened its capitalist and liberal

ideology, expanding its influence further and further

throughout the ideological emptiness that had formed.

NATO's zone of control also expanded together with

this. Thus, at first almost all of the countries of Eastern

Europe joined NATO (Romania, Hungary, The Czech

Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia),

and then also the former republics of the USSR

(Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia). This meant that the

structure of the world after the end of the "Cold War"

preserved one of its poles, the civilization of the Sea,

the West, Leviathan, Carthage, the bourgeois-

democratic bloc with its centre in the USA.
The end of the two-polar world meant, therefore, the

victory of one of its poles and its strengthening at the

expense of the loser. One of the poles vanished, while

the other remained and became the natural

dominating structure of the whole global geopolitical

system. This victory of the civilization of the Sea over

the civilization of Land represents the real content of

globalization, its essence. Henceforth the world

became simultaneously both global and unipolar.

From a sociological point of view, globalization

represents the planetary dissemination of a single

model

of the Western bourgeois-democratic, liberal,

market society, the society of merchants. This is

thalassocracy. And at the same time the USA is the

centre and core of this (henceforth global) bourgeois-

democratic thalassocracy reality. Democratization,

Westernization, Americanization, and globalism

essentially represent various aspects of one and the

same process

of the total attack of the civilization of the

Sea, the hegemony of the Sea. Such is the result of that

planetary duel that was the major content of

international politics in the course of the 20th century.

During Khrushchev's rule, the Soviet edition of

tellurocracy suffered a colossal catastrophe, and the

territorial zones, separating the Heartland from the

warm seas came, to a significant degree, under the

control of the sea power. Precisely, thus should we

understand both the expansion of NATO in the East at

the expense of the former socialist countries and allied

republics and the subsequent strengthening of the

influence of the West in the post-Soviet space.

The collapse of the USSR, which ceased to exist in 1991,

put an end to the Soviet period of Russia's geopolitics.

This stage ended with such a severe defeat that there is

no analogue to it in Russia's preceding history; not even

falling into complete dependence on the Mongols, and

even that was compensated for by integration into a

political-governmental model of the tellurocratic

persuasion. In the present case, we are dealing with

the impressive victory of the principle enemies of all

tellurocracy, with the crippling defeat of Rome and the

triumph of the new Carthage.
The disintegration of the USSR signified, from a

geopolitical point of view, an event of colossal

importance, affecting the entire structure of the global

geopolitical map. According to its geopolitical features,

the confrontation of the West and East, the capitalist

camp and socialist one, with its core in the USSR,

represented the peak of the deep process of the great

war of the continents, a planetary duel between the

civilization of Land and the civilization of the Sea, raised

to the highest degree of intensity and to a planetary

scale. The entire preceding history led to the tense

apogee of this battle, which received precisely in 1991

its qualitative resolution.

In this moment, together with

the death of the USSR, the collapse of the civilization of

Land was realized

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Katehon think

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major trends in

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2015 and

forecasts for

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