How we were weaned from the fact that Russia is a superpower

At one time (December 2010 of the year) Dmitry Medvedev (the then President of Russia), giving a lecture at the Indian Institute of Technology, unexpectedly for many, said that the Russian Federation does not claim to be a superpower. He noted that he was not thrilled that someone uses such terminology, because such terms do not help ensure the competitive development of the state. Of course, Medvedev wanted to emphasize that in the modern world he sees the desire for multipolarity, which means that the statement about Russia as a superpower can cause someone to have a non-standard reaction - a reaction to the attempt of the Russian Federation to stand out against others. Although how can you stand out when it comes to multipolarity? ..



In general, the president (then) wanted it to be diplomatic, but everything turned out somehow doubtful.

I remember that many of those who then had the opportunity to evaluate Dmitry Medvedev's speech in real time, after what he heard, subjected the words of Medvedev to sharp criticism. And it is not strange, we are talking about both the Russian and the Indian public. In India, Russia, no matter what happens on our political and economic platforms, is used to being perceived by that power, which has a fairly large weight in the world. The words of the Russian leader were actually aimed at debunking such an image, and therefore many of those who gathered from Medvedev's message had a somewhat ambivalent feeling: if the President of a Great country declares that this country does not need to be considered Great, but the epithet is sufficiently competitive, or simply close to the possibilities of economic competition, then begin to torment vague doubts, what about the so-called foreign partners in general to behave with today's Russia ...

No less doubt began to torment the public in Russia. And these torments have not come to naught to this day. Let us try to understand what these contradictions are today, which, by and large, strike Russians in self-consciousness, and in relation to Russia, citizens of foreign countries.

So, at one time, literally with mother's milk, we came to understand that the country in which we were born is a truly great power, which is capable of solving even the most complex problems with a great desire. The ideological background was so solid that any doubts that arose about this could be considered from the evil one. We knew for sure that We are one sixth of the land, that We have the largest mineral reserves, that We are the most reading nation in the world, that We created the best education system on the planet, that We have two allies - the army and the fleet and that Our strength is in the friendship of nations.

But now the era of change has come (or, more accurately, to say that this era has been dragged by the ears), and the changes have hit the country and our self-consciousness in such a way that it’s noisy. We suddenly began to actively grind into the mind the idea that we are all different, and that we have little in common, that we were united solely on blood, and not on the fact that there is a desire to unite, and that the main benefit over the years of its "hopeless existence" we missed, but our "friends" from the West can still help us - they will at least hold onto the tip of the tail of this very good. Of course, we grabbed the end of the tail, but at the same time we had to “taste” and everything that periodically jumped out of this tail, in our direction, and even feel the blows of the “blessed” rear hoofs ... Naturally, we immediately they began to wean the notion that we are a superpower. At that time there was only one superpower in the world, and she decided to observe her unique status, which she inherited as a gift from those who had split the Soviet Union with their own hands.
At one point, the geopolitical symbiosis that had developed over decades was disrupted. Most of the former Soviet republics did not know what to do with the independence that had fallen on them, the countries of Eastern Europe began to look around in search of new strategic partners, the overseas socialist territories (Vietnam, Cuba, DPRK, a number of African countries) were actually completely isolated.

But in order for people not to have a desire to grieve about this, ideological inspirers of building a unipolar world quickly declared that no such thing was a symbiosis, but the most common economic and political parasitism ... They say that Russia parasitized in the Baltic States, the Warsaw Pact countries on Russia, Moldovans drank the juice of Ukrainians, Ukrainians parasitized on the lands of the Crimean Tatars and so on to infinity. Thus, the “open” eyes of people who have already lost faith in themselves and their country saw the total disunity and the thesis declared from somewhere outside that man is a wolf. Such slogans as equality, fraternity, friendship of peoples, continuity of generations began to give up their places to slogans of a completely different nature: personal enrichment, neglect of social values, legal nihilism, complete and unlimited freedom at the expense of the freedom of others. We swallowed this pill, taking it out of a beautiful package, and only after some time realized all its bitterness, we are aware of it to this day ...

In the meantime, this awareness came to us, representatives of many foreign countries wondered, Russia finally lost its face and turned into one of the pillars of the unipolar world, supporting star-striped "democracy" with the export version, or, sooner or later, that the role of a pillar to support ideas and interests alien to her is not her role. Someone obviously wanted Russia to play precisely this role until the end of its existence on the world map, and someone openly declared that if Russia didn’t perk up, the world would finally plunge into chaos. And plunging into chaos manifested itself in ever more ugly forms: from the shameless invasion of the "peace bearing" NATO troops into Yugoslavia to the transformation of North Africa and the Middle East into a zone of incessant military clashes.

However, chaos, as a symptom of unipolarity, showed and shows itself not only in military terms. Chaos has come into the economy, which in recent years has been trying to reduce exclusively to the Western version with a foundation on an endless series of loans and lending. Soap economic bubbles began to inflate in different regions of the world, bursting and splashing everyone. Chaos came to culture. If earlier we were inculcated with the need to care about our native nature, respect for the older generation, soldiers-liberators, then today, it turns out, we should show paramount concern, except in relation to the LGBT community, rejoicing in the manner of kisses in front of the audience. Ivan is combined with Ivan, and Marya with Marya ...

It is obvious that today there is a definite request that Russia determine for itself the role in the global world. If she (that is, we) is going (going) to position herself as a state that is able to solve global geopolitical tasks, defend its interests and protect the interests of its strategic partners and friends, then it is time to satisfy this request. There are a lot of sites for this (the Customs Union, the SCO, and the BRICS). Well, and if our fate continues to be - dumb accomplices in the cultivation of one pole of the world, then we can continue to declare that we are far from a superpower, and this is not ours ...