December 25, 1991: ” Early evening in the heart of Moscow on Red Square, relate West France, a few guards are busy. They were ordered to change the flag that flies over the Kremlin. Earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev announced on television that he was ending his functions as President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In fact, it was the USSR itself that was coming to an end, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.. “
All this week, with a little advance, therefore, the dailies have largely returned to this historic date of December 25, 1991.
Fear returned
Release opened the ball on Monday, December 20, recalling first of all this little sentence from the presenter of the television news that evening: ” Today begins a new era, a new state. We welcome it with hope and may we be spared the repetition of the sad mistakes of our past. “And the newspaper to wonder:” Thirty years later, what remains of this hope? Not much “, respond Release.
” Insidiously, the fear returned. That of expressing oneself freely. Democratic pluralism has shrunk and the right to remember is being violated a little more every day. At the borders, and beyond, the noise of boots intensifies. Putin’s Russia has once again become a country of which we are wary, which worries. A few courageous voices still dare to dream, to resist, such as those of the opponent Alexeï Navalny or the journalist Dmitri Muratov, Nobel Peace Prize 2021. But they remain rare and are targets. Thirty years later, concludes Release, the USSR is still not written in the past tense. And Russia is struggling to start living its future freely. “
► To read also our file: Fall of the USSR, 30 years later
The arsenal of the weak
Le Figaro, for its part, returned at length this Wednesday, December 22 on this anniversary date, with more or less the same observation.
” Nostalgic for an empire of which he was the zealous agent in the KGB, Vladimir Putin runs after Russia’s lost power and withered honor, says the newspaper. His quest goes through the establishment of a strategic balance with NATO, which he wants at all costs to keep away from Russian space – whatever those who inhabit it think. But once the Soviet empire is reduced to dust, it only has the arsenal of the weak., valued Le Figaro : attack smaller than oneself, bite into borders, maintain latent conflicts, support accountable dictators, deploy mercenaries, act masked in interference, disinformation, sabotage, cyber warfare. From Soviet power, we have moved on to Russian nuisance. […] The equilibrium of the blocs was succeeded by the strategy of a thousand cuts – more often the prerogative of terrorists and rogue states. Putin repays Russia’s great historic humiliation with small change. And as for centuries, concludes Le Figaro, it is first and foremost the Russian people who pay the price, their dream of freedom swept away by the reign of repression and fear. “
Nothing romantic
Soviet heritage, The Latest News from Alsace linger there this Thursday morning, December 23, with this bitter observation: “ The fall of the USSR left a huge void that Vladimir Putin has not ceased to fill for two decades, with the support of religion and the mirage of the Western threat. He modernized the army, points out the Alsatian daily newspaper, restored the old tensions of the Cold War, annexed Crimea in 2014 and just deployed 175 000 soldiers on the border with Ukraine. Lenin’s legacy still serves the mythology of power which knows that the Russians are capable of great things when they feel threatened in their foundations. Soviet nostalgia is not romantic. “
Omicron invites itself under the tree
Also on the front page this Thursday: ” The troublemaker virus Is the headline of The union. Indeed, ” Omicron invites itself under the tree », Deplores The Marseillaise. ” Health authorities recommend avoiding the multiplication of contacts while hospitals, devastated by the pandemic and years of accounting logic, are saturated. “” Omicron forces executive to toughen strategy “, title The world. ” A few days before Christmas, the surge of the Omicron variant panics Europe. In France, the government does not rule out restrictions. “
Little hope. What if Omicron wasn’t that bad after all? The Parisian wants to see the glass half full with recent observations from scientists who find that Omicron appears to cause fewer severe forms than the Delta variant, ” which could limit the scenario of a massive hospital overload “. But this is yet to be confirmed.
► To read also : Faced with the threat of the Omicron variant, France is betting everything on vaccination