NOT everyone gets a chance to be at the confluence of time and space when history is made. As journalists, we get the chance to do that now and then. It appears, at least to us, that history happens where we are. The cynical call it coincidence. Life at times appears so.
History is about mega shifts. Not the minor quakes that make the headlines of district weeklies. Mega shifts are headline items for Breaking News.
Such a news broke not once, but twice. Once in what was the former Soviet Union in December 1991, and more recently in May 2018 here in Malaysia. The former was a great tectonic change as it not only created history but also new geographies. One huge nation of 12 time zones died to give birth to 15 new republics overnight. The case of Malaysia was a little different: a nation that was 60 years old was born anew. A birth no doubt, but from an existing old.
The history of Russia and the rebellious republics is different from ours not because they are a tale from elsewhere but because different men met different moments. The bell sometimes tolls differently in other climes.
Malaysia’s mega shift may perhaps make better sense if we begin with what happened in the land of the tzars. The Soviet Union was expansive. Perhaps, it is one reason why the disparate nation that was once one huge confederation fell to pieces. Differences are good because they give rise to ways of seeing one thing. But if seeing the one thing in many ways ignite fires, dreams can turn into ashes. No one loves nightmares, not even one who enjoys a deep slumber.
Two words tore the Slavic Russian nation asunder: glasnost and perestroika . Never was a people’s history so briefly summarised. The Russians were all shook up by them. The glasnost transparency and perestroika transformation of president Mikhail Gorbachev caused such a tectonic shift that it travelled the length and breadth of the vast land like floodwaters of a broken dam. Gorbachev, too, fell victim to the change he wrought and became the last president of the Soviet Union. Sometimes, the yoke you loosen does get out of control and takes history on another unexpected course. Some men miss moments. Some misuse them.
It must have been a very sad moment for Gorbachev to lower the hammer-and-sickle Soviet Union flag and raise the tricolour of Russia. Raisa, his lovely wife who was always by his side, must have felt a deep despair that only a loved one can feel on that desolate December day of 1991.
I was not there to see Gorbachev cut a lonely figure on that December day but was in one of the ration queues in Tashkent’s supermart during the last few days of a dying nation. Tashkent would soon become the capital city of independent Uzbekistan where time past meets time present. Fourteen other members of the confederation would quit to moult into independent republics. On that December day history gave birth to new geographies.
Perhaps, there never was in history a yesterday so different from a tomorrow. So unrecognisably different was Dec 26 that one would not be able to tell that moments ago it was Dec 25, 1991. You would have gone to sleep in the Soviet Union only to wake up in Russia. What a day it had been.
History just doesn’t happen like that. Men mend moments to make history. History isn’t an accident. It may have the appearance of a chance happening but history is really a story of cause and effect. Events unfold because we cause them to happen. There is, of course, the hand of God Almighty, but of this we understand little.
Scenario planners, knowing the mysteries of Fate, make assumptions based on strands of events that are let loose by people and moments. As the McKinseys of the business world will tell you, scenario planning helps you reach unexpected events by way of right questions. The idea is to settle on possible outcomes, and possible behaviours to be adopted should one of the outcomes come to be. Possible futures, but not necessarily probable. As poor Gorbachev found out on that despondent December day.
In Malaysia, history came all dressed up as Alliance of Hope on May 9, 2018. Like in the Soviet Union of the 1991, in Malaysia, too, men met moments head-on to cause a mega shift. Sixty years of rule just doesn’t get thrown away by some chance happenings. As the scenario planners say, events coalesce to move moments. And so they did on that fateful day in May. It truly was a call for help. May Day it surely turned out to be.
There was no Russian glasnost to speak of but perhaps there was a perestroika , a transformation of sorts. A move to transform this and that was brewing from the late 1990s. Only that we called it Transformasi. A gathering storm, so to speak. It didn’t happen because the equation of men and moment wasn’t there then. It waited for the Alliance of Hope to cause the magic mingling of men and moments. The Russian floodwaters of Gorbachev became a Malaysian tsunami on May 9. The rest is just the beginning of a Malaysian history.
I hope to be in position one day to say, as my late friend Rehman Rashid said in Peninsula, A Story of Malaysia: “Nowhere else on Earth was remotely Malaysia.”
Abdul Rahim Mydin is a leader writer with the NST