Happy to be gloomy about the future

James MeekProphecy is something anyone can turn their hand to making in Russia, easy as a cup of tea, and often served with it. It can be...

James MeekProphecy is something anyone can turn their hand to making in Russia, easy as a cup of tea, and often served with it. It can be light and simple or intricate but there’s something about Russia which makes everyone feel they have a right, if not a duty, to predict the future. Preferably a gloomy one, of course.

In Russia, to prophesy doom is a conscious act of therapy. If you are surrounded by people predicting the worst, and what actually happens is merely bad, it can be almost pleasant. Across the country, they’re saying their sooths for the New Year. The death of Yeltsin, and subsequent calamities, are being predicted a million times over, in spring, in summer, in autumn.

But the gulf between Russia’s boisterous New Year and the darkness of political folk predictions for 1999 is one of the reasons why the most extreme predictions are unlikely to come true. Another is that when you talk to people about what they think is going to happen next, the more doom-laden their narrative, the less likelythey are to see themselves as characters in it.

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There’ll be a revolution: but it’ll be someone else’s revolution, you wouldn’t catch me getting involved. There’ll be a dictatorship: but it’ll just happen, somehow, like a lump appearing on your neck one day. I’m gloomy, rather than doomy, about Russia next year, and the year after that. I don’t expect a year of extremes or a year of action in 1999. I see economic stagnation, continuing wage arrears, inflation, corruption, the chaotic reform of the military and the drift of the north-east Caucasus, Chechenia and Dagestan, towards Islamic fundamentalism.

I don’t see a Communist takeover contrary to popular belief, there are no Communists in Russia or a fascist putsch. I don’t see a popular uprising. Apart from the north Caucasus, which is already half-detached, I don’t see parts of Russia splintering off. Where would they go? If Yeltsin dies, as he may well do, he will be replaced through a reasonably fair election by one of a handful of politicians whocould hardly rule less effectively than the first Russian President.

There are two drawbacks to prophesying. One is that in our anxiety not to miss the next Russian upheaval, and not to make light of ordinary people’s troubles, we tend to forget the real possibilities for liberty and the pursuit of happiness the last seven years have brought to Russia today, whatever evils are in attendance. The other is that the amateur prophets work short-term. Instead of what they should be, historians working in reverse, they’re more like racing tipsters, only interested in the next race.

I’m calm about the next couple of years, and optimistic about Russia’s eventual future. But the doomsayers, I fear, will have their day. A decade or two from now, at the time when Russia seems to have achieved some prosperity, I dread that prophecy will slip into anticipation, anticipation ino expectation, and expectation, at last, into action, as a proud, humiliated, destiny-conscious Russia, like some nuclear-armed version ofMilosevic’s Yugoslavia, finally does the worst that it expects of itself.