24.09.2025, Moscow.
Perestroika and the subsequent post-Perestroika agenda were the implementation of a project to integrate Russia into Western civilization after the country’s transformation into a national bourgeois state at any costs, philosopher, political scientist, and the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan wrote in his article Responsibility published in the Zavtra newspaper on August 21.
As the political scientist noted, a project aimed at integrating Russia into Europe and the Western world was implemented through Perestroika and the post-Perestroika period. He recalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke of his previous beliefs in this project and his proposals to George W. Bush, then US President, to begin implementing it. These plans, among other things, envisioned Russia joining NATO.
“Enormous sacrifices were made for this endeavor, as we understand,” the leader of the Essence of Time movement stressed. He also specified what those sacrifices were, naming the loss of Russia’s historical territory in the first place.
“And it was also claimed that these losses are not always negative, because the liberation from the excessive non-Russian population of Central Asia, for example, is positive in terms of (attention!) the success of building a Russian nation state on the ruins of a multinational empire,” the political scientist explained.
At the same time, Sergey Kurginyan stressed, there was constant talk about the modernizing character of the bourgeois reforms carried out in post-Soviet Russia. It was also said that the subject of modernization is the nation, and that “Russians must be transformed from the imperial glue – ‘An unbreakable union of free republics, the Great Rus’ has sealed forever.’ – into a nation that, of course, will not be frantically extremist, will be able to properly regulate relations with the other components of the imperial pluralism left to it as an inheritance.”
At the same time, it was proposed to abandon the idea of the empire and especially with the idea of being a superpower, the political scientist noted. He argued that the emphasis was on a national (in the best sense of the word) Russian state, which would, like its Western neighbors, become democratic, ruled by law, and bourgeois, and would be able to join Europe.
As Kurginyan noted, proponents of Russia’s joining Western civilization believed “that any costs associated with this integration were justified by its future brilliant results,” “and that this was the completion of the, so-called, great Kuusinen-Andropov project.”
The political scientist recollected a conversation he had at the funeral of Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov, the last KGB chairman, with one of his closest aides. This man was then relatively young, quite healthy, and successful by the standards of the post-Soviet era. He told to Sergey Kurginyan, “If Putin doesn’t complete the great work of Kuusinen-Andropov, then we should all shoot ourselves.”
“And he was far from being the only one who spoke about the fateful necessity of the so-called integration into the West,” the political scientist added.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
