Thanks Dan for another astute post and a priceless sense of humor.

The US also planted several thousand tulip bulbs in Bishkek during the run-up to the Februrary parliamentary elections. US warplanes flew from NATO bases in The Netherlands to the Kyrgyz base to execute Operation Enduring Tulips.

And since tulips are perennials, the protest movement will just keep returning, year after year. Insidious.

Hee hee. And *sigh*. We can laugh, but I wonder how many people believe this stuff?

It must have been Karl Rove. He's the go-to guy in the Evil Genius department. He is rumored to be fond of tulips.

"Well bowl me over, Symonenko talking about how many Central Asian countries fell into authoritarianism after the Soviet Union. Can it be that he's actually admitting that the Soviet Union left behind a mess?"

Well, to be fair, the Central Asian countries (maybe not Kazakhstan) are far more autocratic than they were in the Brezhnev era, and a hell of a lot poorer too. As a matter of fact the sexy Uzbek waitress who serves me beer in the bar by my apartment here in Moscow hates Gorbachev and Yeltsin even more than she hates Islam Karimov and almost as much as she hates the Taliban.

It's also true that the fall of the USSR left behind a mess in large part because it was carried out irresponsibly without thought on the part of the leadership of the various republican CPs. This was not a popular bottom-up revolution. (Western Ukraine and the Baltic States being exceptions.) The USSR was broken apart first and foremost by one wing of the Soviet elite to get rid of Gorbachev by using nationalism as a lever, not to "liberate the people."

Hell, two-thirds of the population was against perestroika by 1990. (Cf. the opinion polls published this year in the great book by the Gorbachev fund Pereryv k svobode: perestroika 20 let spustya.)

Chris: I'm disappointed I didn't get to address this comment on Friday, because I am most intrigued by it.

I must admit that my understanding of the actual fall of the USSR is far weaker than my understanding of the aftermath. I also did not think of the revolution as being top-down in the way you describe it, but your argument is persuasive.

However, the fact that a clatch of bureaucrats could jockey for more power by tearing apart the system, as well as the unchecked economic decline and bureaucratic waste that led to the collapse, should be arguments against the way the country was run. In this issue, I was kinda beating up a straw man by arguing against Symonenko, but he volunteered for the position. While your view has nuance, his is just absurd.

Not to put to fine a point on it, the FSU wound up with a bunch of dictators because the SU was corruption-ridden, unaccountable, and inefficient. It's not Gorbachev's fault that the SU was unreformable by the time he got there; what he was doing was, in general, something the SU needed.

When it did collapse, huge majorities in Ukraine, at least, voted for independence. They must have seen the decline of the SU. Some of the older people now say that this was wrong, but I'm not sure staying with the old system might not have lead to an even worse end a few decades down the line.

Your thoughts?

I'm not disagreeing with you really, but I think your POV might be changed if you hung out with, say, Uzbeks, Takiks, Kyrgyz, and Dagestanis instead of West Ukrainians and Balts. These people all had very different historical experiences. For Ukraine, the USSR means the famine and the Terror. For people in Kyrgystan and Dagestan, the USSR meant electrcity and flush toilets.

I must admit that my understanding of the actual fall of the USSR is far weaker than my understanding of the aftermath. I also did not think of the revolution as being top-down in the way you describe it, but your argument is persuasive.

---
I don't think its very complicated. Yeltsin and the rest of the CP heads at that time wanted to seize control of the state, and used the GKCP ad an excuse.The Yeltsins and Kuchmas wanted power, so they decided to screw the soviet people.

Chris: You are a commenting machine! I think you've added more content in the last week than I have. Impressive.

Maybe I'd like the USSR more if I hung with Kyrgyz and Uzbeks and Dagestanis. But, maybe I'd like it just as little by hanging out with Poles, all those Balts you talk about: Czechs, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, basically anyone whose country has anything even resembling a democratic government.

And I most certainly hung out with Eastern Ukrainians as well. Some of them said nice things about the USSR, but their arguments were weak. I didn't have to only hang out with Western Ukrainians to hate the USSR, I just had to see what it did to huge numbers of people today and read what it did to the generations before them.

You mentioned famine and terror, how about strangling bureaucracy, no freedom of movement, mass deportations, public protest of any kind punishable by extreme measures, gross inefficiency, artificial scarcities, powerful and invasive secret police, closed borders, heavily censored media (when stories weren't fabricated, most crushing capitalist poverty articles, or ignored, Chernobyl) and publishing, indoctrination classes, suppression of religion and persecution of believers of any religion other then strictly controlled Moscow Patriarchy believers, destruction of religious buildings, forced collectivization of farms, and all the many other ways in which the USSR showed us what "undemocratic" means.

Furthermore, the Soviets that brought the Kyrgyz electricity and flush toilets also brought them an unaccountable and undemocratic political system with hugely powerful secret police. It produced all the tools the dictators of the 'Stans are using today. Shouldn't I hold it accountable for all the ways it which it helped these men gain power?

Take an analagous situation: Shouldn't I lay a lot of blame on colonialism and the colonial powers for the frightening border disputes of the Middle East and India that erupted immediately after they left?

"Take an analagous situation: Shouldn't I lay a lot of blame on colonialism and the colonialowers for the frightening border disputes of the Middle East and India that erupted immediately after they left?"

Of course you should!

My provisional view of the Soviet system is that it was a mechanism for modernizing peasant societies -- and it was very effective at doing that -- using an ideology that was about 10% Marxism and about 90% 19th-century peasant communitarianism. I have very very mixed thoughts on the Soviet era, as I think most people in Russia do. On the one hand, it brought the region into the 20th century. (Pre-WWII, Poland was practically midieval, whereas now it is a member of the EU. Could it have done that without the forced industralization of the Communist era? Maybe, but I doubt it.) On the other hand, secret police aren't something to be proud of. Also, I don't think any serious historians doubt that the USSR could have beaten the Wehrmacht without the nightmarish forced industrialization of the 30s. History is an ugly thing.

"You mentioned famine and terror, how about strangling bureaucracy, no freedom of movement, mass deportations, public protest of any kind punishable by extreme measures, gross inefficiency, artificial scarcities, powerful and invasive secret police, closed borders, heavily censored media (when stories weren't fabricated, most crushing capitalist poverty articles, or ignored, Chernobyl) and publishing, indoctrination classes, suppression of religion and persecution of believers of any religion other then strictly controlled Moscow Patriarchy believers, destruction of religious buildings, forced collectivization of farms, and all the many other ways in which the USSR showed us what "undemocratic" means."

Well, see, I could turn this around and say "what about starving pensioners, people not getting paid for years on end, legions of homeless children, women becoming prostitutes, the 10-year (!) drop in male life expectancy, the civil wars in Armenia, Moldova, Georgia and Chechnya that have killed thousands and thousands of people, the election Yeltsin stole in 1996, the shelling of parliament with tanks in 1993, and all the many other ways in which the post-USSR showed us what "undemocratic" means.


I am NOT a Communist, and I do NOT want the USSR tout court to come back. I think, though it may have been impossible, that it would have been better to morph the state into something like the EU.

I do not seem to have gotten an answer my question, about a week later. So, are hundreds of thousands of homeless Ukrainian children worth the hope that Ukraine will, hypothetically, join the EU? Or is it that making an omellette means smashing a few eggs?

Chris: nope, you didn't get an answer because I've been working/looking for work all week. Man, will I be happy when I can just work, and not have to spend half my time working and half looking for work.

From the top: History isn't ugly. (I'm a history major, I've got to defend my field) When done right, it is an accurate description of the lives of people. If the result is ugly, it's because the people are. Unfortunately, people everywhere usually are, when pressed.

I guess it really all comes down to the question: "Compared to what?" I was kinda wondering if you would nail me on the point I made that "basically anyone whose country has anything even resembling a democratic government" after the USSR hates it. Of course they do, because they have a better alternative. Your comments about Poland came close to hitting this topic.

Poland of 1935 could not get into the EU of 2003. I'd have to know a lot more about Polish history to speculate what would have happened had the USSR not taken over when they did.

Take examples of other countries: Japan was able to rebuild and excel after the war - despite having had an unaccountable government in the war years and a truly feudal one in the mid 1800's. Germany recovered within a couple decades, too. On the other hand, many Latin American countries seem to have had less clear, and less direct success at fostering democratic capitalism. (though I'm no Latin America expert) Do you have any data that might suggest whether Poland would have stagnated or succeeded without Soviet controls? You talk about it being "near mideaval"; what do you mean?

Likewise for the Wehremacht. I don't know what other form of government might have existed in Eastern Europe if not the Soviets. It probably wouldn't have been as industrialized, but it would probably have had millions more Ukrainians not starved to death in the thirties. Maybe one or two of those Ukrainians could have been a better strategist than Stalin (not hard) and organized Ukrainians against the Nazis from the start, and more effectively carried out guerrilla war. If Russia had a good military leader, it might also have had success with the same strategy. On the other hand, maybe Ukraine would have been just another occupied one, Russia would have had no unity and disintegrated , and Germany could have turned around and finished off Western Europe.

I'm bad at determining the answers to "What if?" questions in the thirties and fourties, so better to get back to today.

About your Aug 27 response, I just have to say "touche!" Yeah, that is a great list of the horrors of the FSU. I'll talk about it in a second.

"So, are hundreds of thousands of homeless Ukrainian children worth the hope that Ukraine will, hypothetically, join the EU? Or is it that making an omellette means smashing a few eggs?"

Hehe. Are you trying to needle me with pointy questions because I didn't work on Orange Ukraine for a week? If so, don't worry about it, I already feel badly.

Joining the EU is a distant dream, but also largely immaterial. I've long been of the opinion that by the time Ukraine has prepared itself to join, it will probably no longer be in the country's best interst to do so. (because of the weight of bureaucracy and reduced agility that comes with reduced independence, etc.) So what? The benchmarks Ukraine will be attempting to reach in the meanwhile will be increased transparency of government and business, less corruption, more responsiveness to citizens and stronger democratic institutions.

The homeless children are not the price of freedom, they are the result of a number of failures, most of which I think I can blame on the SU:

1) The Botched Transition: the disintegration of the Soviet Union was great for all the countries now in the EU. Most of the rest got dictators.

Blame: goes on Soviets for letting the system go to pot first, and everybody, include Western governments, for thinking everything could be wrenched into the right position quickly. this is linked to:

2) A Legacy of Dictatorship: simply put, if the Eastern European countries had had any experience with being able to choose their leadership, they would have been more effective at defending their interests, less susceptible to talk like "I can clean this place up, I'm just going to need some more power first...", and so forth.

Blame: Soviet system. If they'd allowed even a little bit of democratic choice or listened to citizens even a little, they could have set the stage for a more measured transition like we hope China will continue to have)

3) Secret Police: even economically weak Soviet country's could boast of having sophisticated secret police, waiting for anyone able to effectively use them. They made it much easier for post-Soviet dictators to project power.

Blame: ultimately goes to the Russian Tzars for developing the Cheka, but the Soviets get it to for continuing them and keeping them always on the cutting edge of manipulation through fear.

4) Background of Economic Stagnation: Things wouldn't have been so bad if, for example, the tractors people were making weren't of such bad quality they had negative value-added.

Blame: Soviets again. They really did modernize peasant societies, as you suggested. But on a basic level they were responsible for a couple decades of growth and murder, then less murder and stagnation. The one thing the SU was better at than democratic and capitalistic countries was getting people to do what they didn't want to do, usually under the threat of death. That may work when forcing peasants to industrialize and become literate, but it sure can't make for a successful modern country.

Maybe Central Asia had no hope for an accountable regime in the early, mid, or late 1900s, and the Soviets messed the area up less than local governments would have. But do you really want to make that argument?

Nice answer. I'll get back to you on it later in detail.

In essence, I'm a Gorbachevian (is that even a word?). What the USSR needed was rational, well-though-out, gradual reform, leading perhaps to separation of certain regions in an intelligent, well-coordinated way, that would not have resulted in economic ties being torn asunder and people having to get visas to visit their family members. The sudden collapse of the USSR was an unarguable disaster. Pointing to the evils of the USSR is irrelevant. It's like saying "the fall of the Roman Empire was a good thing; look at the Collisseum and Roman slavery!" and omitting the whole ensuing Dark Ages thing (and Central Asia and the Caucuses are in a quasi-dark ages right now; I read a poll recently in which 90%(!!!) of people in Tajikistan wanted to have the USSR restored.

Yes, I know you were a history major. FWIW, I'm ABD in philosophy, specializing in Heidegger and Aristotle, and used to work for a major Russian English-language newspaper that no longer exists as an editor and writer. For instance: this is me: http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?cat=Mar%2016,%202004&type=3&art=435

Not the greatest piece in the world, esp. at the end, but Hell I tried.

FWIW, all of the Big Four dissidents who are still alive (Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev, Zinoviev) think the collapse of the USSR was a disaster and crime. I wonder what Sakharov would have thought -- he wanted to break up Georgia (ahich later happened), so who knows.

The former dissidents have taken strange career paths. Solzhenitsyn hates the West with a passion, Medvedev is a passionate Putinist (like me), and Zinoviev is an adviser to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (WOW!).

In fact, almost NO ONE in Russia thinks that breaking up the USSR was a good thing. Stating publically that you were in favor of breaking up the USSR would be political suicide.

Chris - I like your article. In general I think Levalle is way off on Ukraine, and I keep my nose out of Russia as much as possible, so I can't comment well enough on his Russian coverage.

I would say I'm also provisionally pro-Gorbachev. I wish Russia had had more of a reformation than a collapse. But it's like China now: things are looking good, they may be able to pull off a much smoother transition than the USSR did.

But it's still a Communist state right now. And that means it's still not answerable to the people, so on an ultimate level, you're never going to be able to trust it not to do something totally counter to the interest of Chinese people. Maybe everything will go along fine to the end, but tracking the future as a straight line from the present is not very effective at predicting what will actually happen.

Any major reversion away from democratic principles is very bad news. And this leads in to my next point.

The Problem With Putin (you're getting such long answers out of me, I have to put titles on them now!)

There is no way Putin's going to recover any of my respect after the 2004 election.

That, to me, is the most glaring error in Levalle's Putin defense here.

Just like with all his coverage of Ukraine, he's totally dismissive of the advances made during the protest. He says those poor protests now watch Tymoshenko revert to Putin's tactics against oligarchs. That's it, no advance has been made.

That's hogswallop. The current government is more accountable and democratic than the last one. It's ineffectiveness is disappointing, but in reality it's a plateau many meters above where Ukraine was in November of 2004.

Second, Tymoshenko doesn't have enough power to fight oligarchs the way Putin does, and I'm hard-pressed to even know what he is trying to refer to.

Finally, and by far most importantly, even if Ukraine were no better off now, it would not justify Putin's meddling. He came to stump for Yanukovych three times during the campaign! Once within a week of each round! He donated Gleb Pavlovsky to the Yanu campaign. He is now providing safe haven for dozens of people who fleed retrobution after the fixing of the election went sour. Russian media excoriated Yu, Ty and all the other oppositionists. The SBU made loud noises about it's warrant for Ty.

Ultimately, Putin knew (from many, many visits and consultations) that Yanukovych was bad news for Ukraine. He obviously supported him anyway. I would bet that is because he calculated Yanukovych (without popular support) would be more reliant on his, Putin's, patronship than Yushchenko (some electoral mandate and an actual interest in maintaining Ukraine's national interest).

The theory that western (or sometimes US) NGO interference was more blatant is a total canard. Levalle should be ashamed of perpetuating it. I talked about this issue during the election crisis in entries here and here. What I said there still hold true.

So, if Putin is so willing to throw all democratic principles out the window as he did in Ukraine, he's just not trustworthy as a "democratic" president. No amount of good economic policy can change the fact that his heart isn't in democracy. All I hope is that the small prosperity he helped give ordinary Russians will empower them enough to hold on to their democratic rights when they need to.

That's why I would consider myself pro-Gorbachev, anti-Putin. Reasonable?

Lavelle is a personal friend of mine. I used to be his editor. ;)

IMHO Putin supported Yanukovich for the same reason he supported Bush: the Kremlin almost always supports the incumbent, and ALWAYS supports the faction they think is going to win. That way, they get brownie points when the person they back wins. ;) In the case of Ukraine, I think they foolishly bought Kuchma's claim that his successor would be the winner, which was a major f-up. That said, some of the anti-Russian rhetoric coming out of Ukraine at the time was out of control (e.g. "there are a thousand Russian special forces troops in Kiev ready to crack heads." What was up with that?).

FWIW I do not think Western NGOs were a major factor in the OR.

I give kudos to Vladimir Vladimirovich for presiding over 5 years of economic growth, a big jump in living standards, and giving the oligarchs a massive kick in the teeth that God knows needed to happen. This fawning over the gangster Khodorkovsky in the Western press truly makes me nauseous.

(Kh. guy has had a serious PR workover. In the 1990s, he looked like he stepped out of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" video.)

BTW Gorbachev is an enormous fan of Putin. For instance, in a recent Ekho Moskvy interview. Sorry for the length:

Thw whole thing is far too long to post -- these are just little snippets.

RADIO INTERVIEW WITH MIKHAIL GORBACHEV EKHO MOSKVY
RADIO, 20:00, APRIL 26, 2005
SOURCE: FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE (http://www.fednews.ru/)

Ganapolsky: Good evening. I am Matvei Ganapolsky. And welcome to our usual evening program Eshcho Vykhod, although our guest is anything but usual. I wish we had him more often. An outstanding man of our times, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, President of the USSR.
Good evening, Mikhail Sergeyevich.

Gorbachev: Good evening, good evening dear listeners.

----

Venediktov: Mikhail Sergeyevich, it's a strange story. On the one hand, we are conferring citizenship on the daughter of General Denikin who was born in Yekaterinodar at the time it was the scene of fighting. On the other hand, we put up monuments to Stalin who was a commissar of the Revolutionary Military Council precisely at that time. A strange story. Is it part of our destiny to always combine hot and cold, white and black?

Gorbachev: Yes, it is a unique story, and it's hard to think of more complicated and tangled life stories than the life stories of our people. Part of the reason may be that we have been living on this space for a thousand years.

Venediktov: And fighting each other.

Gorbachev: And still so many peoples have been brought together here. In the Soviet Union 220 languages and dialogues were spoken. A world of cultures, a world of religions and of course all the processes here are very complicated. But I think, it's great that she has got Russian citizenship. I welcome the President's move. When the President makes such a move, it is different than when somebody puts a monument to Stalin or carries a portrait of Stalin.

But I was stunned when Gryzlov suddenly started talking in this vein and I reacted promptly. True, by the evening of the same day he began to deny his words. But the fact remains.

One shouldn't confuse things. One shouldn't trample underfoot our difficult history, one should study it and find grounds there for strengthening our spirit so that you should always feel that you are standing with your feet on your own land.

Venediktov: But, Mikhail Sergeyevich, you used to be the leader of the same party as Stalin. You were the General Secretary at the time.

Gorbachev: I am just coming to that, to Iosif
Vissarionovich Stalin.

Venediktov: Yes.

Gorbachev: When I delivered my report in 1987 and said that Stalin's hands were dripping with blood and that he had given orders to liquidate outstanding people, hundreds of people. I had to say this. But there were many who were not pleased. Why is he going after Stalin? You know what my life has been like. The war ended and I finished school. I joined the Communist Party. My granddad approved of it, my father, a war veteran approved of it. Soldiers came back from the war. They had won the war and they brought hope with them. But they also discovered that people lived better in the countries where they had been. This was the mood of the time.

When I was in the tenth grade at school, I joined the Party and wrote a composition on the topic "Stalin Is Our Battle Glory". I did it sincerely. Absolutely. But having lived my life and gone through everything and when I was at the very top and looked at the things that had been done... Even my grandfather who was sentenced to death, but survived by miracle, didn't believe that it was done on Stalin's orders. It was hard to believe. Soviet government had given us land, otherwise we would have died. My father died and we lost our breadwinner. But Soviet government saved us. And it was associated with Stalin.

When victory came, Stalin was getting the whole credit for it. But as soon as the war veterans presented their claims, Stalin said, too many heroes, too many victors. There is only one winner.

So, for me, I would put it this way: I reject these moves, these portraits and busts, etc. It means not to respect one's own history. We should know history, but we should call things by their real names. But we must understand our history.

Ganapolsky: We'll make a brief pause now. They say that once Gorbachev starts talking, there's no stopping him. But amazingly
--

Gorbachev: I've stopped.

Ganapolsky: By yourself.

---


Radzikhovsky: I just wanted to ask you, Mikhail
Sergeyevich. How do you account for it? After all, nobody knew anything before 1956. The 20th Party Congress was like a bombshell. When you spoke in 1987, people already knew a lot more, but still, it came as a revelation to many people. Now, of course, everyone knows that there were tens of millions of people murdered and they know that Stalin himself signed death sentences on thousands of people. All that is known. And yet it is the same old story: monuments are being erected, etc.

Gorbachev: The older generation attribute it to his leadership during the war. They don't look at the details of how he exercised his leadership and just how much credit is really due to him. But whole generations attribute victory to his leadership.That's one thing. Secondly, two thirds of the people live in misery, in poverty, they are humiliated. And they believe that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a great misfortune -- and I agree with them there. 60 percent of all our misfortunes should be attributed to this. All the links have snapped. We are trying to extricate ourselves from this situation. They live in poverty and they look back to the Stalin times.

---

Ganapolsky: A question from psychologist Alexander Surmalo, perhaps, the main question of this program:
"Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich, I absolutely agree with you that the current Duma and the current government are too bad. But they are what President Putin would like to see. He created this mechanism in his vertical, tuned it in, lubed it and polished it. Do you think that the next Duma elected under the wise guidance of our President, Mr. Surkov and Mr. Veshnyakov will be different?" But this will be done by the next president. Could you comment?

Gorbachev: If the President fails to think it over and decide what should be done to perform the program he outlined in his two latest addresses, the President's history will be over. Those problems should be resolved. This explains why I think that we should support the President. They are tearing him apart and perhaps he is lacking support. We need to support him in those initiatives. Let him work.

Venediktov: Have I got you right that he is surrounded by the likes of Yanayev, who used to be your supporters and then started tearing your apart? Is he following the same path?

Gorbachev: You know, nothing repeats itself. All
analogies are conventional.

You journalists like doing this, but as a politician I cannot afford this. I just think that he is facing a choice: either he makes everything possible for the people to feel economic growth, see their incomes grow letting them keep their families, deal with cultural problems or the people will resolutely protest. I will be disappointed to see the people coming out with protests.

Radzikhovsky: Perhaps, it would be wrong to ask you this question as a prominent Marxist, but still. Another outstanding Marxist, Vladimir Lenin, wrote that people will always be deceived as along as they cannot see the interests of particular social groups behind certain words. You certainly know those words by Lenin. There is a point of view that the President represents all Russian residents, that he is the President of the whole country, the President of all Russian residents, and this is fixed in the Constitution. But in fact he represents the interests of very particular social groups, bureaucracy surrounding him, even narrower groups of this bureaucracy, and he has pursued his policy in the interests of this group. Words are one thing, and interests are a different thing.

Gorbachev: During his first term of office the President accomplished what he had to accomplish. He inherited chaos, decline, disintegrating army and other sectors in a dire state. Had President Putin only done what he managed to do during his first term in office, had he stepped down after that, his name would have gone into history. People feel that. People are smarter than we think. This explains why there is support of 60, 70, 80 percent. They hope that now that the situation has stabilized, he will go farther. And I share their hopes.

When there were doubts that he will not be re-elected. I said he would be elected without any problem. But my question is: how does he use this power? Does he use it to resolve national problems, work in the interests of the majority? Will he service certain interests to divide property and the like? I think he has failed to get out of that. He has to get out and make a choice.

---
Ganapolsky: Now we are asking our listeners a very simple, an ideal question. Does the speech by President Putin mark the start of Perestroika-2, an effective change of course, as Mr. Gorbachev is suggesting. If your answer is yes, dial 995-81-21, if no, dial 995- 81-22. The voting is on.

Venediktov: While the commercial was running Mikhail Sergeyevich and I were talking. There are two points of view: either it is indeed a turning point, the start of a new course, or it is the inertia of the previous four years.

Gorbachev: What the government has been trying to foist on him, has already foisted early this year --

Venediktov: What can the government impose on him? What could the Ryzhkov government impose on you?

Gorbachev: It is imposing. This is the continuation of Gaidar's approach. It's the radicals, the liberals.

Venediktov: Who, Fradkov?

Radzikhovsky: All of them.

Ganapolsky: But you put the right question. Is it Fradkov or --

Radzikhovsky: The liberal, the democrat is always to blame.

Gorbachev: Why? Kudrin and Gref are my good
acquaintances.

Ganapolsky: I see this scary picture. Gref and Kudrin driven into a tight corner in a Kremlin corridor.

Venediktov: It's we who are in a tight corner.

Ganapolsky: The tiny Putin squeezed between huge
bodies, and only his command of karate saves him.

Radzikhovsky: Gref is not so huge.

Gorbachev: I do not rule out that the President is always present but having said what he said, he can no longer continue acting in this way.

Ganapolsky: 200 listeners have already called us. Is President Putin's speech actually --

Venediktov: A divergence from Gorbachev.

Gorbachev: You put the wrong question. What does that
have to do with Gorbachev and perestroika? So,
everyone who has a grudge against Gorbachev
will blame it all on me. Okay, I am responsible for
perestroika, I answer for the time that I was in
power.

---

Gorbachev: We have a running argument with Yakovlev. I
ask him, why are you being so harsh on Lenin? Almost
calling him a bandit.

Ganapolsky: Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev?

Gorbachev: Yes, yes. After four years Lenin declared
that we had taken the wrong road and made a major
mistake and we should revise our policy drastically,
small and medium property, private trade, concessions
and cooperatives and so on sprung up. This is Lenin
for me. In a critical situation, to force Lenin to
change his point of view... You know that he could
split parties, newspapers, anything, but in the event
the man realized that the wrong path had been chosen.
He said before the Revolution that the proletariat
would win power through democracy.

Venediktov: Yes, yes.

Gorbachev: And that it governs through democracy.
History did not work out as he intended to. It
followed a different course. And they seized power and
established a Bolshevik dictatorship. But he saw what
the "war Communism" and all that led to.

And Stalin took over after his death. And Lenin's
letters, etc., had been hidden from everyone. When did
we learn about them? I still didn't know about them
when I was at university. Stalin was everything -- the
fundamentals of Marxism and Leninism -- there was a
thick gray volume, he wrote it on the basis of war
Communism and he buried it. He overcame Bukharin,
Kamenev and Trotsky. And so, the path of dictatorship
was embarked on, a rejection of democracy. And we
lived under a totalitarian system for 30 years. These
were not just authoritarian methods, they were
totalitarian. It had its own ideological instruments.
So, why do we deny the current rulers --

Venediktov: Is Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) a
latter-day Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin)?

Gorbachev: Hold on a minute, hold on. Vladimir
Vladimirovich is Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Incidentally. here is Solzhenitsyn mourning the USSR:

It's 25k, so I cut out a lot.

TV INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, TV RUSSIA,
JUNE 5, 2005
Source: www.fednews.ru

Anchor: This week school students in Russia were passing end-of-year exams. Eighty thousand school graduates in Moscow were writing compositions on one of five topics offered. The topics offered were Lermontov, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky and what teachers admitted was a particularly difficult topic, "The Individual and Power in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Prose".

Alexander Solzhenitsyn devoted his whole life brooding on the issues of where in Russia is the individual, where is power and what the relationship between them is. It was only in recent years that we haven't heard from him. But today the Nobel Prize Winner receives us in his home and this interview breaks the silence of the classic writer.

Alexander Isayevich, in this day and age when everybody is talking about democracy, people, I think, diverge on the main thing, what is democracy? Everyone has his own idea of it. Perhaps, it is a myth, rather like communism is. And who better to direct this question to than you are?

Solzhenitsyn: Indeed, of late the word "democracy" has been very popular and many speakers flog it. But I don't see, I am not aware of a full understanding of what democracy is.

They hastily pluck out individual features instead of the concept as a whole. For example, one feature is freedom of expression and the press. The assumption is that where there is freedom of expression and a free press there is democracy. But that is not so. This is only one feature of democracy. That feature alone does not produce democracy.

Or take parliament. If there is parliament, the
argument goes, democracy is assured. But what is
parliament and what is it for? It is people's
representation, and it should be truly representing the people. People's representatives should represent their electorate and no one else. In this country, especially considering Russia's size, such contacts are still not established, they are weak. And yet there must be two-way communication. The voters should keep a close eye on what their representative is doing. As soon as they feel that they don't like what he is doing, they should recall him.

(snip)

What kind of democracy have we seen, starting from early Gorbachev period? And I am not speaking about the pre-Gorbachev period. One of the first moves of Yeltsin's democracy -- what was the prime task of democracy under Yeltsin? To knock down Gorbachev. How? By breaking up the Soviet Union. How to do it? Three persons got together in Belovezhskaya Pushcha for a booze party. Were they aware that they were tampering with a huge state process? Okay, you can divide up if it is necessary. But it should be done in a statesman like way. You should weigh everything: What orders? Who lives where? What economic ties? It is a process that takes many years. But instead they did everything at one stroke, by issuing just one order.

What kind of democracy did we have? We had a
referendum. That was all the democracy we had.
Bureaucrats in their offices decided that prices should be floated. At once. In this country, in general, we tend to do everything at once and as quickly as possible. Nothing is done gradually or slowly, nothing is thought over. Hurry up! Free up the prices quickly. But in the process millions of people will lose their lifetime's savings. To hell with them.And -- off they go.

But at the breakup of the Soviet Union 25 million of our fellow countrymen found themselves living abroad,in another country. Did our leaders, headed by Yeltsin, think about them? Did they think about how the 25 million people would live? Won't their rights be infringed upon, won't their culture be suppressed? What will be their economic situation, how will they be linked with their homeland? Not a thought was given to all this. People were thrown into the water like blind kittens to be drowned. Is that democracy?

For centuries governors in Russia were appointed. It makes sense. The governor implements the will of the central government locally. Yeltsin, with his broad sweep, introduced free elections of governors. Ninety governors? Okay, let it be 90. Were these elections prepared? Not at all, there was a total mess in the local elections.

The local moneybags interfered, money, bribes, cheating decided everything, and in some places the elections were downright criminal, run by the local mafias. But the worst of it was that the government thought it was not enough to rob people of their savings. A lot more was up for grabs. What riches! They are there for the taking. They robbed Russia, quickly, quickly. Chubais bragged at the time that no country in the world had seen such rapid privatization. And he was right, nobody in the world had ever witnessed such quick privatization.

Quite right, nobody in the world had there been such idiots. With immense speed our God-given resources, minerals, oil, non- ferrous metals, coal and production were distributed. Russia was stripped naked. Nothing is left. Is that democracy? Was there a referendum on this issue? Was anyone's opinion asked? Was it a case of the people exercising its power and deciding its future? And so they created out of filth some kind of billionaires who had done nothing for Russia. At best they grabbed what was given to them for free or almost for free. They grabbed chunks of property to become billionaires and in our impotent despair we now admire them. We have a cult of millionaires.

We don't mind living as we do as long as billionaires feel happy. If it is democracy, you have to go out into the street and complain of having been robbed, of having been deprived of some of your benefits. If you have to stage hunger strikes in order to get paid your wages, this is no democracy. Fifteen years ago I printed an article in the Soviet Union, "How Should We Develop Russia?" I addressed many questions, and I envisaged the disintegration of the Union, and Gorbachev laughed it off. Breakup of the Soviet Union? Nonsense, Gorbachev laughed. And I said that the breakup was inevitable and imminent. I said we should prepare commissions to discuss what would happen with people: prepare compensations, ways how they should behave, decide on what citizenship they should have.Nothing was done, they just laughed at it.

But even more importantly, I warned in that article,that democracy could not be imposed from the top by any clever laws, by any wise politicians. It cannot be put on like a cap. Democracy can only grow like all plants grow: from the bottom up. Above all, there had to be democracy in small place, there had to be local self- government as the start of democracy. Only then can democracy develop.

(snip)

(On "Orange Revolutions")

Solzhenitsyn: There are two concepts involved, two questions, I'll stick to two, okay. The first question is the state of the CIS. I am not suggesting that things are better in the CIS. When they announced the creation of oriental dictatorships in the CIS, the West promptly wrote: democracy is assured. Central Asia and Kazakhstan are awash in democracy.Turkmenistan -- that's a democracy. Yes, they were in a hurry to recognize. Yes, the situation in the CIS countries is still more complex.

But it is no longer any of our business to educate the CIS countries. We have drifted apart, we are separate, we would be lucky if we manage to preserve a common economic space. I am sure that Ukraine will ruin the common economic space of the four countries. But let us try to preserve it if we can. For the rest, our relationships with the CIS should boil down to this to be the best so that they should envy us. To run this country in a way that everybody would look at us and say: Ah, how wonderful, we wish we could learn from Russia.

As it is, who can respect Russia if they see that Russians can be trampled underfoot in any national republics without Russia ever stepping in to defend them. It fails to interfere, it provides no consular protection. That alone rules out any respect for Russia. Thinking about the relations with the CIS, I think we should first of all try to cure ourselves. And let the CIS cure itself. The common economic space may be saved. You speak about "orange revolutions".Strangely, I myself marveled when the orange revolution occurred. The methods are reminiscent of our revolution in February 1917.

(snip)

.. We have deprived the people of everything,
absolutely everything. Starting from the first day of the Gorbachev era, and onward and onward. We have never had democracy. I have repeated many times, we don't have even a semblance of democracy. I can repeat again: democracy is a state and social system in which the people in their mass direct their destinies. This is not the case but the authorities are under pressure to deliver democracy. There is a danger everywhere. People should have responsibility for their country in their heads, the opposition too. You can break up any country. But if citizens are responsible, they shouldn't break up the country, they should treat it. They should proceed carefully and apply reforms.

(snip)

Anchor: And democracy as an instrument for making the world over. You know the mentality of the American people very well, you have lived there for a long time. Do you think democracy, as understood by the Americans, as an instrument for changing the world is some kind of childish delusion or is it a deliberate bogey behind which is the simple desire to rule the world?

Solzhenitsyn: America now -- in fact, for more than ten years now -- has been carried away by a
harebrained project or impulse: to impose democracy throughout the world. To impose it. And they set about doing it with a vengeance. First, they staged a bloodbath in Bosnia. Then they bombed Yugoslavia. In Afghanistan they claim to have installed democracy, and in Iraq too. Iraq is a great success in democracy.Who is next? Maybe Iran.

This is just amazing. There are thinkers, free
thinkers there. They understand that democracy cannot be imposed from without. A democracy that is sustained by bayonets isn't worth a penny. Democracy should grow slowly in response to human needs, to the human impulse of togetherness, of friendship. It should grow up slowly, stage by stage. But our democracy is a travesty.

I really really have to look at jobs, so I'm going to have to respond to your new stuff later. Before that, though, I want to strongly suggest you comment some of my more recent postings (and new ones as they come out), though. This entry went in in March, so we're effectively having a one-on-one conversation. (I doubt I get a lot of clickthrough on links to old comment streams, even when I highly recommend them)

If you comment some of the more recent stuff, some of my other regular visitors are likely to look at your opinion, too. It would do a lot of good for them to see what you have to say, because most are from the US and you've obviously done a lot of thinking and research.