And a Dentist Shall Lead Them

Though the movement to reaffirm Soviet sovereignty dates back to 2010, it took a few years for the media and the State to pay it much attention.  Like so many other countries, the Russian Federation  has no shortage of crackpots and cranks. When Sergei Taraskin, an ethnic Russian dentist who had moved from Tajikistan to the outskirts of Moscow to open an initially successful clinic, announced in 2010 that he was the "Acting President of the USSR," there was no reason to assume he was anything other than a novelty.  Taraskin founded the "Union of Slavic Forces of Rus'", a group that managed to sound both ethnonationalist and retro-Soviet at the same time (in Russian, its initials are "CCCP" (i.e, the "USSR).

Indeed, Taraskin's announcement looked like little more than a desperate attempt to avoid his financial responsibilities.  One of his clinic's investors had pulled out, and he was faced with eviction.  In the Moscow Court of Arbitration, instead of declaring, say, bankruptcy, he declared himself the Soviet president.  As he explained at the time, the office of the Soviet presidency had been "vacant for more than 18 years" since the "deserter" Gorbachev stepped down.  "None of the soldiers and officers of the Soviet army, who were supposed to carry out their military oath, had filled the position" (Климова. “Аутсайдеры) Where Taraskin allegedly fit in the Soviet military chain of command is an open question, but against the backdrop of the "president's" increasingly outlandish claims, it can be considered moot. 

Taraskin gathered a following both in person and on YouTube.  By some metrics, his movement has been a great success.  Unlike so many anti-government groups of the past two decades, his "USSR" (and the various offshoots and affiliates) is not confined to the capitals.  The sheer geographic breadth of the criminal cases brought against Taraskin and his fellow travelers attests to the wide reach of his ideas. Like Philip K. Dick's secret Christians subverting the Roman Empire in Berkeley, California, Taraskin's people were creating a shadow Soviet Union in opposition to the illegitimate authorities who refused to acknowledge the USSR's continued existence.

This success is, of course, fraught with irony.  Despite Taraskin's own origins in the Soviet Tajik Republic, his followers and epigones were marking their territory primarily within the bounds of the very entity whose legal existence they rejected: the Russian Federation.  Even more troublesome (if entirely predictable) were the centrifugal forces that would threaten to tear their restorationist movement apart.  Despite the early post-Soviet fears that the Russian Federation might, like its predecessor, collapse into its constituent parts, the Russian state has proved quite powerful and stable, while Taraskin's organization has been unable to match the centralized dominance of Putin's power vertical.  Taraskin's undead USSR has demonstrated its vulnerability to separatism.

Thus Taraskin is the center of attention in media coverage of the Union of Slavic Forces of Rus, but not when the story is about one of the many offshoots that do not recognize his authority.  Even if we accept for the moment that the USSR never fell, there is no escaping the fact that this shadow state has yet to develop its own TASS, Pravda, or Channel One that can speak for the country with one voice.  The head of the  "State Registration Chamber of the USSR in Ekaterinburg," told his followers on social media in late 2019 that if they did not immediately register with his office after watching his video, this could be considered a "renunciation of USSR citizenship" (Zhilova, "Sekta grazhdan SSSR). In the Siberian city of Surgut, Anton Bulgakov heads a group of "Living People" (more on that in a bit) whose belief system is so syncretic that the insistence that the USSR still functions is among the least bizarre elements of their doctrines. Valentina Reunova, the head of the "Supreme Soviet of the USSR," not only issues passports but also excommunicates enemies.  Thanks to her, both Putin and Medvedev have been deprived of Soviet citizenship (whether or not they know or care is beside the point). 

In 2014, Sergei Torgunkov, another financial wizard who had fallen on hard times, followed up his earlier book about Christ's impending second coming in 2012 and proclaimed himself the acting president of the USSR's Novosibirsk regional branch.  On November 23 of the following year, he paid a visit to the Novosibirsk police in order to give them his latest presidential decrees, only to find himself involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. 

In some cases, Taraskin's rivals are outright imitators. Chief among them is Sergei Demkin, a St. Petersburg businessman whose resume is more suggestive of "would-be titan of industry" than "die-hard communist revanchist."  After serving in the army in the 1990s, he became an oil trader, construction company director, and electrical services company owner.  In 2016, he "realized that something wasn't quite right;"  everything he had could be taken from him in an instant, leaving his family with nothing.  As he puts it, he could have either emigrated, or stayed and taken action.  He met with Taraskin, only to decide that an organization consisting of "grandmas selling documents" was not the way forward. 

He thought about Soviet history, and about how "Lenin and Stalin relied on labor unions."  Concluding that Russia needs a "revolution of consciousness" rather than a political revolution, he formed an organization called "profsoiuz 'Soiuz SSR" (the "Union of the SSR" Labor Union). It is easy to conflate Demkin's "Union" with Taraskin's, since both are built on a very specific economic appeal (again, more on this soon).  But where Taraskin (and Bulgakov) use their economic policies as a starting point for much more baroque ideologies, Demkin's approach is more technocratic. 

Demkin's "Labor Union" has distilled the movement down to its features that have always attracted the most attention. Like Taarskin, Bulgakov, and the rest of the this fractious paranoid politburo, Demkin offers would-be Soviet citizens a set of very practical incentives.  Since the Russian Federation is an illegal entity, squatting on a large chunk of Soviet territory, Soviet citizens are under no obligation to pay any bills they might owe to the RF.  In other words, Soviet citizens are on an extended utilities strike. The economic appeal is straightforward, especially when considering how many of these citizens are senior. Utility bills can be particularly burdensome to people on a fixed income.  

Of course, these same senior citizens have no qualms about receiving their RF pensions.  Nor do the contradictions end there.  The leaders of the various "Citizens  of the USSR " groups claim that Russian money is not legal tender, with some of them even issuing Soviet rubles as a replacement.  But, again, these groups accept payment for membership and services in supposedly worthless Russian rubles.   Their rates are not necessarily high, unless  we continue to keep in mind the limited resources of their elderly target audience. The most noteworthy (or notorious) "Citizens  of the USSR " product costs anywhere from 2000 to 4000 rubles (twenty-five to fifty dollars):  a Soviet passport.