Short reflection on Ilya Budraitskis' book of essays “Dissidents among Dissidents.”

I just finished reading Ilya Budraitskis' book of essays “Dissidents among Dissidents.” It is a book about post-Soviet Russia and its society, problems, ideology, issues, hopes, politics, forgotten and remembered revolutionary traditions, its left and history.

It is also a book everyone on the left from the "other" side of the wall ought to read. Us Yugoslavs as well, formally between, but perceived in the West as those from the other side of the Iron curtain. All heirs of historically unforgivable mistake called communism. Similarities and analogies are many, too many, all striking and incredible. Inevitable too.

Anyways, the quote at the bottom is from a text Budraitskis wrote with Ilya Matveev and captures so well, too well I'd say the sentiment of not only liberals, but huge sections of the left in post-socialist geographies. They are writing about Navalny, but you are free to substitute Navalny with most political actors and you get a clear image as to what the stakes are and where the problems are to be sought. Not to mention the almost non existing left and all other issues that we are all too familiar with.

Photo: Borko Vukosav, from the Cycle Ruins of Yugoslavia

For us in the Balkans, old ghosts and old specters haunting again.

So the (hi)story repeats itself: unable to solve our problems ourselves, in the absence of the left alternative, riven by profoundly intertwined nationalist and class divisions, devastated by the failures of the so called "transition", criminal privatisations and plunder, all political problems are ultimately externalised, in particular in Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo, where, rather than ourselves, the actors immediately become either NATO (US) or Russia.

Elites mostly see things like this, that is as great powers jumping in and intervening (for me personally this is the single most abhorrent element, complete forgetfulness of our own revolutionary tradition that we are- for now- only nominally heirs of). Add a strong ideological component of anti-communism and historical revisionism, in ex Yugo in particular, debt-driven economy plus massive wave of exodus of Biblical proportions, emptied lands and territories, ghost cities alive only because we are now part of migrant routes towards the West, and the concoction is as gloomy as the English weather today, blocking any and all perspectives for the organised left.

The civil society, phantom as it is, need not be liberal or left-leaning. Those who came to "teach" us democracy, experts who apparently know exactly what democracy is, usually Westerners, forgot to tell us this. It can be, and indeed is very right wing-leaning. They have put a lot of money to ensure it remains thus. Corruption is apparently endemic only to Eastern Europe. In the "polite" world it's called capitalism and business.

External factors, historically as well as today, are disruptive and destructive of any prospects for the left, which amidst poverty, high rates of unemployment and thorough divisions of the society is also externalised and funded through various EU funded Stiftungs and other civil society initiatives and organisations.

Therefore, dependent and unable to act independently. And comrades in the West unable to understand this position of the periphery, nor the fact why the EU creates more problems than solutions, blinded by their own position of being in the centre, often, in all honesty of intentions, in fact impede and hinder.

“Navalny’s personal views seem to be unchanged: he advocates “normal” capitalism with functioning democracy, a large middle class, and a welfare state capable of smoothing out income inequality.’ They add that ‘he does not seem to dwell on the difficulty of attaining these goals in a poor, semi-peripheral country without implementing wider structural change’.”