Authors

Discussion

The resolution passed by the Russian State Duma on 15 March 1996 to declare the Belovezh Agreement signed on 8 December 1991 null and void marks a political paradigm shift. While in the 1980s, such documents were only circulated in official announcements and by the state press, the two documents mentioned above were widely discussed and publicly criticised in the 1990s, the El'cin era. Unsurprisingly, satire also took up the discussion of these documents, including in the satirical TV puppet-show ‘Kukly’, which, modelled on ‘Les Guignols’ and ‘Spitting Images’, satirically tackled everyday political events in Russia between 1994 and 2002.

As an immediate reaction to the Duma resolution, regime critic Viktor Shenderovich, ‘in-house author’ of ‘Kukly’, wrote an episode entitled ‘Denonsacija’, which was broadcast on 23 March 1996. In 2021, a quarter of a century later, Shenderovich, wrote a foreword for the silver anniversary of the Duma resolution and the ‘Kukly’ episode of that time. The latter had presented a thought experiment: What would happen if world history was allowed to run backwards? What disruptions would occur and what other disruptions would they lead to? There would probably be no end to new disruptions. This paper will look at how these disruptions are being dealt with from the perspective of representatives of the Russian Federation, the defunct Soviet Union and other countries - are any lessons being learnt from history, especially when we consider that it is not only since the silver jubilee celebrated by Shenderovich in 2021 that world history has actually been running backwards?

… if we could turn back time.