Professor says the Russians made their biggest mistake back in 1917.

Looking at the very bottom of the problems Russia has struggled with during the past century, a dissident Russian professor says that communism is the mother of all evil that has caused a tremendous suffering both inside and outside the world’s largest country.

According to Igor Lipsits, an economist who co-founded the Higher Economic School in Moscow and helped forge the post-Perestroyka reforms, very few people admit that there’s been no power transition in Russia or Soviet Union since the Bolshevik (Communist) revolution in 1917 – which he named “the biggest ever mistake Russians committed” in the past century.

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The Communist nomenclature stayed in power after the death of the fearful Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953, after the deposing of his liberal successor Nikita Khrushchov in 1964, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and departure of Mikhail Gorbachov in 1991, and even after the openness of Russia to the world under the rule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, the expert reminded in a new interview.

While many people believe the communists surrendered or lost power in the 1990s, “this is actually not true: since the communists grabbed the power in 1917, they still keep it… Therefore, one will find the roots of the nation’s true problem in 1917,” he noted.

Lipsits explained that one and the same group has been holding the power ever since, only changing generations and picking up new representatives whose only use is loyalty.

“Let’s remember that Yeltsin himself was a Communist political figure in the Soviet Union and the entire vertical of power [in post-Soviet Russia] has been made up of former communists who were never bothered by a lustration process,” the economist said, adding that Yeltsin refused to get rid of his fellow communists for the mere reason that “they were too many in numbers.”

What happened in the 1990s can be called a “revolution of second[-level] secretaries” who longed for true power and, for this, they carried out market economy reforms in order to obtain legal grounds for redistribution and seizure of assets, Lipsits went on.

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The new faces in Russian politics didn’t really care about human rights or private property, or business, or citizens’ livelihoods, just like their predecessors gave no shit for these things, and corruption has always been their main weapon, he suggested.

While corruption is indeed a problem in Russia, getting rid of a toxic ideology needs more attention, because right now Vladimir Putin is rebuilding communism in its worst traditions, concluded Lipsits, who emigrated to Lithuania in 2020 and is catalogued as “a foreign agent” and “undesirable person” in Russia.

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