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Marking 25 years after ‘perestroika’ sparked the end of the USSR
Published: 23 April, 2010, 07:44
Edited: 28 April, 2010, 15:42
April 23 marks 25 years since former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev first announced the series of political and economic reforms that profoundly changed the USSR – and the entire world.
Marzipan, However you evaluate Russia's performance on the field of democracy, you should always take the context in account (as is in general, with all evaluations). That is, you take the beacons of democracy, its spiritual leadership, so to say, and you compare against that. And if you take U.S. of America and Israel -- those proverbial beacons -- then, you know, suddenly Russia doesn't look half-bad. I'd even say, we're going 110%. We're not using huge underground installations to deal with illegal immigration, like you-know-what-country, and we don't have two-tiers citizenship[1], and de-facto institutionalized apartheid as in another you-know-what country. You see we're not half-bad, and I didn't even touch a whole world of other issues, somewhat tarnishing the image of the valiant, chivalrous knights in shining armor... 1. "Why There Are no ‘Israelis’ in the Jewish State: Citizens classed as Jewish or Arab nationals", http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18521
Perestroika is an infamous word for many Russians. It was launched by M. Gorbachov, first and last President of the Soviet Union, who quit in 1991 humiliated by B. Eltsin. He was not the right person to see it through and, therefore, he should not have started what he could not finish. He was a romantic communist who attempted to replace Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist dogmas and taboos with 'perestroika' - aka social-democratic way of thinking. In essence, he turned into an unfortunate alchemist-experimentator who tried to distil the best of capitalism out of socialism in 5 years. Alas, due to his delusion and misuse of gears such as glasnost (openness), acceleration, command and control he lost his steer and crashed the state... Where is a SatNav when you need it? M. Gorbachov tried to convince everybody afterwards in his memoirs that USSR would hit the tree anyway, 'so it was not my fault'. What followed after his departure with the assent of B. Eltsin curls my blood…(see more at -http://russiabacktothefuture.blogspot.com/p/daily-mirror.html).
P. Vereshagin says that what followed the end of the Soviet Union curdles his blood. For nations held captive by Soviet Moscow, what happened BEFORE the collapse of the Soviet Union curdled their blood, as almost anything is better than foreign occupation and oppression. They bless the day it ended.
To Samium Gromoff: I find it remarkable how consistently Russia apologists seek to excuse Russia’s actions on the basis of what someone else, somewhere else, may or may not have done. Yes, the world is imperfect, including democracies. But no one asks Russia to be perfect, merely acceptable. Failure to require even one solitary person who committed crimes against humanity in the service of the Soviet State to answer for those crimes in a court of law, continuing to deny the Soviet past and continuing to embrace some of Stalin’s lies regarding the past is not acceptable if Russia wishes to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of its neighbours and of the world. If the US and Israel had never existed, Russia would still have to deal with its own Soviet history. You tell of “context”: THIS is the context within which Russia is judged. The nature of post-Soviet relations with its neighbours is indicative of the appropriate judgment that has so far been passed, and changing the subject to Israel or to the US will not change the judgment.
Regretfully, marzipan6, you saw in my comment what you wanted to see, not what I wanted to say. You simply don’t and won’t get it. I write to RT and genuine readers of the website, not ‘you’ who is hanging online 24 hours for the last few years, splashes mud on the posts and drums up puny crusades against Russia for a living.
To P. Vereshagin who says I saw in his comments what I wanted to see. I respectfully point out that the exact opposite is the case: I DID NOT see what I wanted to see. I would have liked to have seen some regard for captive nations which the Soviet Union occupied and brutally oppressed for decades, whose people it killed or deported, whose economies, institutions, natural environments and even moral and spiritual orientations it ruined, and some word of regret for all these things that Russian chauvinism under the Soviet flag accomplished.. But I did not see that. Rather, I saw what I hoped NOT TO see, namely an exclusively Russia-centred orientation on the Soviet events as if the sufferings Russia’s Soviet victims either did not matter, or as if being under Soviet Moscow’s oppression was their natural place in the scheme of things. P. Vereshagin’s only regrets were about the failure of those who tried to preserve the Soviet Union, and about the entirely predictable chaos that followed its crumbling. Meanwhile, what P. Vereshagin sees in my posts borders on the magical. He sees mud and a crusade against Russia where there are only matters of fact and suggestions whereby Russia may make a better future both for itself and for its neighbours, and he sees pay cheques emerging from my posts whereby I supposedly make a living while I haven’t seen as much as one brass razoo, and don’t ever expect to.
The Soviet Union was an empire built on lies and held together by fear. The article quotes Vitaly Korotich as saying, “…people were not ready for openness, people were not ready for glasnost really, and when it started we had so many protests, we had so many attempts to stop us…” Sadly, so many Russians aren’t ready for openness (= truth) even today. Only now has the Russian leadership acknowledged the truth about Katyn, and it still refuses to release all documentation pertaining to it. And the Kremlin hasn’t even begun to acknowledge the truth about the Soviet occupation of the Baltics and still clings to Stalin’s lies on that issue, thus ensuring that Russia’s relations with Europe continue to be strained. As the article rightly concludes, Russia still has a long way to go, but there are those who try to help. The Unitas Foundation, established by former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar with the mission of working for reconciliation in societies shattered by the crimes of totalitarianism, has just awarded its European Memory and Reconciliation award to the European Parliament (for its 2 April 2009 resolution condemning crimes against humanity of all totalitarian regimes), to former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt (for his tireless efforts at working for unity between East and West), and to Dmitry Medvedev for his refusal to heroize Stalinism and for his pursuit of reconciliation over Katyn. In announcing the award, Laar said “We hope that President Medvedev has laid a foundation for a moral unity in which both the victories and losses of the 20th Century will be commemorated.”