MOSCOW

THE FALL OF the Soviet Union may come to be seen as the catastrophe that Vladimir Putin claims it is, says a prominent historian.

Professor Neelovich Ferguzonskev of the Gulag University in Siberia, says that Soviet Communism, for all its faults, was the conservative version of Marxism. That it helped control the spread of far more brutal versions of its own doctrine. And when it left the stage, these actors in the wings inevitably filled the void and took over.

“It’s hard to recognize the inner conflicts of any belief system,” he says. “Communism was always just seen as Communism by the West, homogeneous, to be defeated as a whole. Alas, what the anti-Communists failed to see was that some forms of the practice kept more virulent manifestations down, or at least slowed them. Stalin’s war on Trotskyism; Vietnam’s destruction of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; the battle between hard Maoism its opponents in China; the various attempts at liberalization in Eastern Europe. They helped keep the left divided, and more importantly, kept the most potent practices fragmented and marginalized; and controlled. And then the Chinese put Communism on the back burner and the Soviet Union dissolved itself. But these events did not release the hard left in their own spheres of influence – there was little tolerance for all that left in Russia and China after decades of failed Marxist policies. No, what happened was the hard left in the West, which had always been hiding from the powers that be, and under the sway of Moscow and Beijing to varying degrees, they found themselves ignored by a Western world that thought it had won and abandoned by an East that just wanted to be prosperous. Free of inquiry and any control, these people changed simply their logos and liberated from any impediments, they went to work at multiples of the pace they had done before, virtually unnoticed. Communism had been defeated by Western Democracy everywhere but where it really mattered: at home. And so it poured forth: Gender politics, Woke politics, identity politics, victimhood, pronoun politics, the Green movements, they all spread like species with no predators. They found willing audiences in universities, among the isolated, the anxious, the lonely, and by those left behind by techno-capitalism. So much so, that now it may be too late to meet the challenge. Unlike the Soviet Union, there are few conservative heads in the modern left. And they have Western wealth. All that’s left is paradise. Or hell. Like when Mao killed all the sparrows and lost his crops and China suffered a famine.”