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CDI Library > Johnson's
Russia List |
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June
22, 2000
Johnson's Russia List
#4382
22 June 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com
[Note from David Johnson:
2. Rossiiskaya Gazeta: Vladimir KUCHERENKO, PROGRAM
FINAL,
NOT SUBJECT TO APPEAL.
3. Moscow Times: Yevgenia Albats, Two Evils Once
Again On Our Plate.
4. Reuters: Bush adviser faults Clinton on Russian
offer.
(re missile defense)
5. Gordon Hahn: Knight on Tblisi.
6. Anthony D'Agostino: Putin, Schroeder, and
American Hegemony.
7. John Wilhelm: re Brumberg/4354.
8. Abe Brumberg: A Response to Wilhelm.
9. Baltimore Sun: Scott Shane, Poetic justice.
Russia's Yevgeny
Yevtushenko mined the depths of bigotry for the powerful
poem that inspired a masterful symphony -- 'Babi Yar.']
******
Yavlinsky Accuses Russia Spy Agency
June 22, 2000
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
MOSCOW (AP) - The leader of a reform-oriented political party says the
former
KGB is up to its old tricks, spying on him and harassing his supporters.
Liberal politician Grigory Yavlinsky has been shadowed for about three
weeks,
Yevgenia Dilendorf, a spokeswoman for the Yabloko party, told The
Associated
Press on Thursday.
``He has been followed by agents and his conversations have been
bugged,''
she said, adding that Yavlinsky believes the Federal Security Service (FSB)
was behind the surveillance.
Yavlinsky also said the FSB has been trying to blackmail his supporters.
In a
letter posted on Yabloko's Web site, a student in St. Petersburg, Dmitry
Barkovsky, claimed two FSB officers had gotten him to agree to spy on
Yabloko
activists by threatening to have him drafted to fight in Chechnya.
Barkovsky said the agents were interested in Yabloko's links with
foreigners.
``The action against Yabloko activists in St. Petersburg was the first
recruitment attempt, but journalists close to Yabloko have been under
FSB
pressure throughout Russia,'' Dilendorf said. ``FSB officials would
usually
call them and ask that they suspend one or another publication.''
The FSB, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, refused to comment
Thursday on
the accusations.
In a letter to FSB director Nikolai Patrushev, Yavlinsky has demanded a
response to Barkovsky's accusations, and to what he called
``information''
that Patrushev was spying on Yavlinsky on orders from President Vladimir
Putin. The president is a former KGB agent.
Dilendorf refused to name the sources or give any other details of the
tip
Yavlinsky claimed to have received.
Yavlinsky urged Patrushev to investigate Barkovsky's allegations. In his
letter, Barkovsky said he was withdrawing his consent to help the FSB,
saying
it was given under duress.
Barkovsky said officials at Baltic State Technical University in St.
Petersburg had refused to let him take exams, and he was now facing
expulsion.
Another student at the university, Konstantin Suzdal, said in a separate
letter on the Web site that he was expelled last month for failing to
attend
classes while working for Yavlinsky's presidential campaign earlier this
year.
Suzdal said university officials had ignored his plea for time off and
suggested that he ``should have shown better judgment in choosing a
party.''
He asked Yavlinsky to protect him from what he called ``political
persecution'' by university head Yuri Savelyev.
Savelyev last year dismissed four American professors in protest of the
NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia. The United States placed an aid and trade ban on
Savelyev - which prevents him from receiving any U.S. assistance or
being
party to U.S. trade deals - saying he had taken actions that could
transfer
sensitive weapons technology to Iran.
In the letter to Patrushev, Yavlinsky said his party was law-abiding and
offered to provide any information about his political activities that
the
FSB wants.
``You must not take the country back to the atmosphere of surveillance,
informers and political repression,'' Yavlinsky wrote. ``This is
shameful and
violates the constitution.''
Yavlinsky finished a distant third in the March 26 presidential
election,
which Putin won with 52 percent of the vote.
******
Rossiiskaya Gazeta
June 22, 2000
[translation from RIA Novosti for personal use only]
PROGRAM FINAL, NOT SUBJECT TO APPEAL
Vladimir KUCHERENKO
The Russian government will spend the whole day
June 28
pondering a program of further reforms drafted by German Gref's
Center of Strategic Research with the participation of various
ministries and agencies.
But it is already clear that the program,
permeated as it
is with the Liberal spirit and continuing the reformist
traditions of 1992, will be approved. Minor corrections in the
wording are only possible. In the runup to the meeting of the
Great Seven and Russia with the participation of Vladimir Putin
in Okinawa and Russia's admission to the World Trade
Organization (WTO), the government is announcing the course to
maximum openness of the Russian economy.
On June 17, premier Mikhail Kasyanov gathered
German Gref
and a better half of the program's authors plus vice-premier
Alexei Kudrin in his office to hone the document.
Our source in the government reports that the
rumor of
cardinal differences between Gref's team and Kasyanov has been
hugely exaggerated. Kasyanov, Kudrin and the president's
economic adviser Andrei Illarionov have been closely monitoring
the work on the program from the very beginning. Illarionov
focused exclusively on a reduction of state expenditures, taxes
and customs duties.
The ideology of the 10-year program was
streamlined during
the May holidays in Sochi by Gref, Illarionov and Kudrin.
What are the highlights of the program that
will have to
be realized in the next two years?
To start with, the Russian economy will be
maximally open
to an inflow of imports. The import duties are to be minimized
in line with either a single rate or four separate rates
applicable to enlarged groups of commodities. It is officially
acknowledged that for reason of 'transparency' of the Russian
borders with the CIS countries the state is incapable of
operating differentiated rates or levying high duties to
protect the domestic market. The State Customs Committee
admitted the other day that 40% of imports in Russia are
pure-water contraband.
The policy of protecting the domestic producer
by way of
raising import duties is recognized as pernicious. Vice-premier
Kudrin says it violates the rights of consumers and does not
stimulate technological progress in Russia's economy. Russia's
openness will accelerate the demise of loss generating
production facilities and will improve the investment climate
when it channels resources into competitive plants and
projects, the vice-premier holds. He declines to name these
projects. Special sections of the program aim to accelerate
this process and generate migration of workforce from
enterprises facing closure.
Budgetary and tax transformations come next. In
line with
the current policy, Russia's budget does not have enough money
to meet all its obligations under the social and 'Northern'
laws and international covenants. Thus, Russia cannot meet the
terms of the chemical weapons ban convention, and is facing the
prospect of economic sanctions. The above certainly affects the
country's economic attractiveness.
The state will have to bring the restricted
capacity of
its budget in line with its commitments within the next two or
three years. On the one hand, the tax revenues are to be
centralized as announced in the 2001 draft budget. Dividing the
tax revenues between the Federation and the provinces on a
fifty-fifty basis is no longer acceptable. Currently, twelve
Federation members, donors to the budget, account for 66% of
all tax revenues. What with the old approach, they may claim at
least a third of all taxes collected nationally. Residents of
all other provinces turn into second- and third-grade citizens
- the per capita monetary incomes would be so many times lower
in their case.
Thus, a resident of the Khanty-Mansi autonomy
is liable to
get 25 times more budgetary allocations than a resident of,
say, Tuva. That is to say, Russia is no longer a single state
financially. All attempts to bridge the crying difference in
budgetary allocations by way of providing loans from the center
are doomed to failure: loans have to be paid back, something
that impoverished regions cannot do.
Centralizing budgetary revenues - 100% of VAT,
for
instance - will not run into any serious opposition from the
governors - only twelve out of the 89 regions stand to lose.
The regions' standing will also be ameliorated by way of
scrapping tax, housing and communal benefits to the military
and law enforcers.
On the other hand, he state will finally make the unpopular
move and jettison those social laws which simply cannot be
financed from the budget for want of resources.
Alexander Pochinok, chairman of the
intersectoral
commission for benefits, talked to this newspaper about these
plans in detail the other day.
Indicatively, the state, having consolidated
the
employment fund into the budget, will no longer extend credits
to commercial structures to make them create new jobs.
There are other ways of reducing state
expenditures. The
finance ministry will draft a separate document sometime before
July 1 - a veritable concept of raising the efficiency of state
expenditures. The expectation is that savings will be
appreciable. The finance ministry is positive that this course
will boost the growth of the economy on the whole and of
budgetary revenues in particular in three years, which will
help improve per capita budgetary allocations.
Lastly, the program aims to unchain private
enterprise: to
introduce a simplified procedure of registering companies with
a single agency - the one-counter rule - and to drastically
shorten the list of activities subject to licensing. The list
will be compiled only on the federal level.
A month from now, the ministry for
anti-monopoly policies
is expected to present a report on the freedom of trade in the
Russian Federation which will draw a sad picture of 'internal
customs offices' existing in the country today. The government
is hell bent on clearing all regional barriers in the way of
free circulation of commodities and capitals throughout the
country.
An exceptionally liberal course is thus on the
agenda. The
new program will soon be finalized and no sectoral criticism
will be accepted.
******
Moscow Times
June 22, 2000
POWER PLAY: Two Evils Once Again On Our Plate
By Yevgenia Albats
The nation's political arena is trapped between two evils: bad and very
bad.
The first evil is the oligarchy, whose desire for exclusive rules for
the few
and total disrespect for the common good has been much condemned in the
press. The second evil should be called the Chekists: those who made
their
careers within the ranks of the Soviet Union's political police and who
see
themselves f many quite sincerely f as the only true patriots capable of
saving Russia from all dangers, oligarchs included. The ideology of the
latter interest group may be described as including the following
elements:
state-run capitalism, distrust of everyone from outside the corporation,
disrespect for the media, xenophobia and, if worse comes to worse,
racism in
domestic policies, with isolationism and use of the
"West-as-the-enemy"
approach in international affairs.
Until the events of last week, both the oligarchs and those known as
"the
family," who helped bring President Vladimir Putin to power,
believed the
loss of some political freedoms and the squeezing of civic society were
the
only price the nation had to pay in exchange for substantive economic
reforms.
The arrest of Media-MOST's Vladimir Gusinsky has awakened the oligarchy.
It
has become clear that no one will be safe f not even members of
"the family"
f if the Chekists take over.
This week's events provided further justification of their fears. The
Moscow
prosecutor's office is contesting the privatization of Norilsk Nickel by
Uneximbank. Rumors are flying that the Kremlin, wanting to show it jails
recent allies as well as opponents, has ostensibly compiled a list of
oligarchs for whom all the inferno's circles are being prepared.
Suddenly, the oligarchs realized that continuity of power f the
retaining of
Boris Yeltsin's rules of the game, for the sake of which they invested
in
Putin f is not happening. The honeymoon between those with money and the
president seems to be ending earlier than expected. Those to whom the
oligarchs had become accustomed and who worked for them as consultants,
government liaisons, even bodyguards, are sensing it is time to take
over.
"I'm sick of changing oligarchs' diapers," I was told by one
very genteel
retired KGB general who hasn't managed to create his own business f much
like
many of his colleagues. They sincerely believe that democracy is not for
Russia f although a market economy is f and they believe everything that
has
followed the Soviet Union's demise has been nothing but humiliation of
national pride.
But restoring national pride is not the only thing on their minds; the
chance
of getting some nice pieces of property is no less an inspiring idea.
Dreams
of property redistribution and renewed superpower status are the driving
motivations for the interest group moving on the Kremlin.
There are no doubts that Putin, weak and inconsistent as he has seemed
up to
now, is being torn apart by the two loyalties he inherited over the
years:
first, to the corporation, to the brotherhood, the KGB, which made him a
man;
second, to "the family," which made him president. Which of
these two
loyalties will win out remains to be seen.
A pure catch-22 is in place; the choice of the lesser evil has once
again
been served up on society's political table. Aren't there any other
meals?
Yevgenia Albats is an independent, Moscow-based journalist.
******
Bush adviser faults Clinton on Russian offer
WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) - A foreign policy adviser to Texas Gov.
George
W. Bush faulted the Clinton administration on Wednesday for belittling a
Russian proposal to cooperate with the United States on a missile
defence
system.
Robert Zoellick, a former under secretary of state and White House
deputy
chief of staff, said this was ``a terrible mistake'' that indicated the
administration was shortsighted and lacked intellectual agility.
His remarks reinforced the impression that a Bush administration, if the
presumptive Republican nominee wins the U.S. presidential election on
Nov. 7,
would take a profoundly different, possibly more flexible, approach to
arms
control talks with the Russians.
The Russian government came up with the proposal earlier this year in
response to U.S. plans to develop a national defence against long-range
missiles of the kind that Iran and North Korea have been developing.
The United States said the type of system Russia proposed might
complement
its own plans but alone it could not deal with the new threat that
Washington
foresees.
President Bill Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to
agree
on cooperation when they met in Moscow this month.
But Zoellick said: ``This is a good example of where some lack of
intellectual agility is going to hurt.''
Answering a question from a Russian at a Washington lunch, he said:
``When
your government came out with this proposal about looking at boost-phase
missile defence, I think it was a terrible mistake for the
administration to
slap it down.''
``Is it necessarily something that we will embrace fully? No, but it's a
step. You work with that. There are some possibilities there.
``All of a sudden you've got a Russian government saying, 'Well, maybe
we can
consider working on missile defence with a boost-phase system,' which is
probably the best approach anyway, so intellectually that's a big shift,
and
for people to ignore it strikes me as having blinders on,'' Zoellick
added.
In a boost-phase system, interceptor missiles would try to hit hostile
missiles as they rise from launch, not as they soar through space toward
their target. Experts differ sharply on what is the most effective way
to
make a missile defence system work.
Bush already has outflanked the Clinton administration and the campaign
of
Vice President Al Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee,
by
proposing even steeper cuts in the number of nuclear warheads the United
States maintains.
The Russians, strapped for cash to maintain their own arsenal, want
reductions to about 1,500 nuclear warheads each. Clinton has been
reluctant
to go below 2,000 because his military commanders say they could not
manage
with fewer.
******
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000
From: Gordon Hahn <hahn@hoover.stanford.edu>
Subject: Knight on Tblisi
Gorbachev's historical role, I agree with Archie Brown's JRL remarks
about
Amy Knight's view of Gorbachev's role in the Tbilisi massacre. My brief
account in my forthcoming book, Russia's Revolution From Above,
1987-1999
(Rutgers University: Transaction Publishers, forthcoming in spring
2001),
agrees with Brown's conclusions on the Tblisi affair and all the
evidence I
have seen confirms a view that is completely at odds with Ms. Knight's
view. There are numerous sources showing that Gorbachev ordered
Shevardnadze to fly to Tbilisi, including from Shev himself. The mystery
is
why Shevardnadze delayed his departure by almost a full day. There is a
Politburo stennogram excerpts showing Gorbachev reprimanding Yazov for
allowing troops to be deployed without a Politburo decision.
investigation was passed on by Sobchak's widow to Shevardnadze this
spring
after his main opponent in the presidential election (eventually won by
Shevardnadze), Patiashvili, the Georgian CP CC First Secretary in April
1989, charged Shevardnadze and Gorbachev with the massacre in order to
win
over Georgian nationalist sentiment in the election. Publication of some
documents in the press fully supported the Gorbachev-Shevardnadze
account
and discredited Patiashvili, costing him votes. The publication of some
of
these documents in Russian newspapers also supports an interpretation
that
puts Ligachev, Patiashvili, and General Rodionov at the center of
events.
her preconceived take on events. A few years ago, I was part of a
series
of lectures on the collapse of the USSR under the Olin Harvard series on
the collapse of the USSR, from which a book of research articles edited
by
Mark Kramer will be available from Westview in autumn. Archie Brown gave
a
paper, I gave one on party-state reorganization and the Soviet collapse,
John Dunlop gave a paper on the August coup, Joel Hellman on
disintegration
of the centralized financial and mono-banking systems, and there were
many
others. Ms. Knight gave a paper on the KGB's role during perestroika. I
was
appalled to hear Ms. Knight's take that Gorbachev was the mastermind of
all
the details in all the cases of regime violence or coercion during
perestroika, 3 the key ones being - Tbilisi, Vilnius/Riga (also Kaunus),
and August 91. Her main source for all of this was.......Kryuchkov's
memoir, Lichnoe delo!! I found it astonishing (and I said this at
Knight's
lecture) that someone specializing on the KGB for perhaps decades would
indiscriminately use as her virtually sole supporting documentation the
words of the former chief of the greatest disinformation-producing
organization in the annals of history.
Gordon M. Hahn, Hoover Inst., Stanford U.
********
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000
From: "Anthony D'Agostino" <dagostin@sfsu.edu>
Subject: Putin, Schroeder, and American Hegemony
Josef Joffe's extraordinary New York Times piece announces a shocking
message to the United States: "Europe," for whom Germany makes
bold to
speak at present, retains the option to tilt toward the
"anti-hegemony"
bloc of Russia and China. This is dictated, he tells us, by
"history and
political theory," that is, lesser powers will always coalesce
against the
hegemon. The details of the case follow. Russia's Putin and
Germany's
Schroeder are now talking about a strategic relationship.
Schroeder's eyes
have been opened by the overbearing behavior of the Pentagon during the
Kosovo war. American ideas about ballistic missile defence
threaten to put
"European" nuclear weapons still further in the shade.
It is intolerable.
Europe must have a Humanitarian Intervention capability comparable to
the
United States but without the United States. And the United States
must
stop throwing its weight around.
Quite a recital! Let us try to understand it. First, the
reading of
history according to which "Nos. 2, 3, and 4," according to
Joffe, "will
always seek to balance against Mr. Big." Is that on this
planet? The
continental "hegemons" against whom the balance of power wars
were fought
in the past, Charles the Fifth, Louis the Fourteenth, Napoleon, Kaiser
Wilhelm, and Hitler, were not defeated by a string of lesser powers
alone
but by the greatest power who held the position of balance wheel,
Britain,
with the crucial assistance in the last cases of the United States and
Soviet Russia. No continental hegemon was ever "Mister
Big" in relation to
these three. There has been no war of lesser powers against one
primus.
If that is indeed what the United States now is, Joffe describes an
historically unique condition.
Should we put the Putin-Schroeder talks into a narrower context?
When
Gorbachev and Kohl signed the Stavropol agreement of 1990 that blessed a
united Germany in NATO, reporters immediately asked whether this was
"a new
Rapallo," referring to the Russo-German agreement of 1922.
Rapallo posed a
threat to the Versailles order of European security. They were
asking: Was
there a new order now? Certainly Russian leaders would have
delighted if
it were so, a new Rapallo with Germany against the NATO order. But
Germany
has let them down.
Is she available now? She may be looking for an exit from some
NATO
responsibilities in Kosovo, increasingly burdensome for the Greens and
Social Democrats in Schroeder's cabinet. She may be eager to send
her
200,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees home. She may even be drawn
toward a
policy of balancing her NATO ties with Russian ones because she holds
one-third of the Russian foreign debt.
But in the end, Germany cannot make much of a bloc with Russia.
Germany is pointed toward East Central Europe. She has the asset
of the
European Union as Prussia once had the zollverein. A German Europe
expands
eastward with the European Union just as inexorably as she does with
NATO.
In the end this expansion must be against Russia. Talking with
Putin about
a strategic relationship merely softens the blow that the expansion of
Europe seems set to deliver to Russian interests. In the meantime
Germany
can enjoy a familiar position of balancing between east and west,
between
NATO and a Bismarkian Reinsurance treaty with Russia.
Joffe speaks of a new European armed force "capable of slugging it
out
without the United States." Not slugging it out with the
United States,
but without the United States. The point is that Kosovo did not
announce
to the Europeans their inferiority so much as a new era of opportunity
astride the doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention. This may amount
to a
new aggressive struggle to expand the world's human rights or, more
likely,
merely a prosaic scramble for the world.
In order to come into this new world power status, it will surely not be
necessary for "Europe" to join a coalition with Russia and
China such as
Joffe is insinuating. Perhaps the only real reason for such hints
is to
suggest to the United States that the proper policy to adopt toward the
new
continental hegemon is the time-tested one of appeasement.
*******
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000
From: John Wilhelm <jhw@ams.org>
Subject: re Brumberg/4354
While I have high regard for A. Brumberg and found his piece on
Problems of Communism (JRL 4354 June 8, 2000) of interest, there are
some important points in it on which I have some major reservations,
not the least of which is its methodological approach. While it
may
be a useful exercise to go back and reread the journal in assessing
its and the profession's performance in studying the Soviet Union, I
doubt its usefulness in making judgements on this important issue.
It
would seem to me that it would be a much more meaningful exercise in
assessing this to ask the question of how well the journal and its
contributors performed in comparison with other sources and
individuals. My answer to this question, would be not nearly as
well
as Brumberg seems to believe.
As a graduate student and subsequently a specialist (albeit a
marginalized one) in the Russian/Soviet area during the last three
decades of the Soviet Union, I did read on an ongoing basis Problems
of Communism as part of my efforts to keep up on what was taking place
in the Soviet Union and the profession's assessment of it. But I
would not be truthful if I did not admit that I generally found it
much less useful than a number of other sources in judging the
situation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, especially from the
mid 1970s on. In terms of sources, I would mention such
publications
as Encounter, Russia, Survey, Partisan Review, and popular
publications such as Harpers. I simply do not recall a single
article from Problems of Communism that was as perceptive and
prophetic in assessing the Soviet situation as Vadim Belotserkovsky's
article in Partisan Review in 1975 on Soviet Dissenters which I used
in my own teaching in the early 1980s as I thought the article set out
the dilemma of reform of the system very well. Given what happened
with Gorbachev's attempt at reform and the kleptocracy that succeeded
it, I do not see how anyone rereading the article could fail to
appreciate how well Belotserkovsky, as opposed to our specialists,
understood the problem of Soviet reform.
Based on my own assessment at the time and subsequent events, I
believe that readers of such articles as those by Belotserkovsky in
Partisan Review, George Pfeifer's Russian Disorders in Harpers
(February 1981), numerous pieces by Igor Birman in Russia in the early
and mid 1980s which Birman edited and books like A Message from Moscow
(by Pfeifer if I remember correctly) and Khrushchev's Last Testament
(Little Brown and Company, 1974), got a better picture of the
situation in the Soviet Union than did readers of our professional
journals and monographs, Problems of Communism included.
While Brumberg's account of his encounter with Ilya Ehrenburg may be
of some interest to those with a background in cultural affairs, I
think it illustrates some of the weaknesses in western encounters that
took place with people from the Soviet Union. Too many specialists
from the West in my judgement spoke to the wrong people and as a
consequence did not get a accurate picture of the extent of
dissatisfaction within the country as did George Pfeifer. As a
graduate student at the University of Michigan it was astonishing to
me the degree to which Soviet exchangees told the late N. T. Koroton,
an emigre and retired professor from Dartmouth, things that they would
never tell me. When I finally was able to arrange to study in the
Soviet Union on my own in the late 1970s and mid 1980s many of the
things I had learned from many hours I spent with Mrs. Koroton were
very valuable in exchanges with people there. I found contacts
with
people in the churches there particularly valuable in getting a feel
for the situation in the country though too many of our Western
specialists, Archie Brown is one that comes to mind, regarded such
sources as biased and unreliable.
Given what I know from my own experiences and readings, particularly
in light of subsequent events, I cannot accept Brumberg's statement
that "To blame Sovietology for its failure to predict the collapse
of
the Soviet imperium is to confuse it with astrology." In
their report
to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on the CIA's
performance in assessing the Soviet situation in 1991, James
R. Millar, et al. argued that even in retrospect the fall of the
Soviet system was an unlikely event. This report; which I regard
as
both an incompetent and a dishonest assessment of the profession's,
both academic and CIA, performance; reflects the degree to which
Brumberg and others in the profession cannot understand the magnitude
of the failure of most specialists to foresee the real possibility of
the collapse of the Soviet system well in advance. Rather than an
analogy to astrology, I believe a more appropriate analogy would be to
astronomy and the failure of astronomers to perceive visible reality
and forsee an event like the meteors that struck Jupiter some years
ago.
Given what Belotserkovsky told us in 1975 and given what Igor Birman
started telling us in the late 1970s and early 1980, I would argue
that the collapse of the Soviet system was a highly likely event.
Indeed, partly influences by these sources amongst others and my own
observations, I argued in the analysis we did in the statement which we
passed out at the 1980 Republican Platform Hearings in Detroit that
the Soviets could be defeated in Afghanistan with serious consequences
for the stability of the Soviet system--I believed based on what I
knew then that it would lead to the likely collapse of the system in
Eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union. Many people who read
my
analysis in our statement have commented that it was very prescient.
I do not think that it was, it was if you knew Soviet and East
European reality--and it was knowable--rather obvious. (A item
with
excerpts from our 1980 Afghanistan statement was published on JRL
in January 1998. For any who missed the item and would be
interested in it, I can provide an e-mail copy, just send me a
note at my e-mail address: jhw@ams.org).
Based on what I know, I cannot accept what I perceive as Brumberg's
rather negative assessment of Martin Malia's and Richard Pipes's
positions and am troubled by his characterization of their positions
as eloquent articulations of the theory of Soviet totalitarianism.
I
would characterize their positions as rather articulate descriptions
of Soviet history and reality. At the time it came out, I found
Malia's z article rather convincing and knowledgeable even if he had
published little before on the Soviet Union. Malia's position on
the
workability and reformability of the Soviet economic system was not
that different from that of the great Russian economist Boris D.
Brutzkus who argued that the Soviet system was basically unsound and
must eventually break down. And despite the fact that I have some
disagreements with Pipes's views of Russian history, I find based on
what I know, as I explained in a recent piece I wrote on the Soviet
experience for a former student of mine, that Pipes's description and
characterization of Soviet history has been quite accurate. (I can
also send a copy of that piece to anyone interested).
It would be interesting to me to know why Malia published little on
the Soviet Union prior to his z article. I am particularly curious
to
know, and I suspect only Malia could tell us, if it was because it was
not possible for him to do so. I know from my own research and
observations that in the area of economics those specialists who
clearly had, as we now know, things right like Naum Jasny and Igor
Birman had great troubles in publishing in American professional
journals. Indeed if one looks at the historical record that Jasny
left, at what happened to Birman which I saw myself and what happened
to G. Warren Nutter from what a former student of his told me, those
in economics who had a better grasp of the Soviet economic situation
suffered at the hands of many in the profession here what can only be
described as persecution for their views. (I have an article on this
which I have not been able to get published, but which in my opinion
very much should be because there are many methodological issues here
that need discussing.)
It is interesting to me the degree to which specialists in the Russian/
Soviet area are in denial about the failure of the profession to get
many things right that they could have. Since the collapse
of the Soviet Union, Post-Soviet Affairs, for instance, has published
a couple of articles defending the works of economists on the Soviet
economy but from what I can tell from my own observations is unwilling
to publish anything on the opposite side. Brumberg in his piece on
the record of Problems of Communism does present a convincing picture
of a pluralistic approach on the part of the journal he edited to
entertain the widest range of interpretations of the processes taking
place in the Soviet Union. Yet, I do not find that he makes a
convincing case that the "evolutionary" school of Soviet
studies as
he describes it was able in the end to get the Soviet Union right.
Perhaps, it was impossible, though based on my own experience, I
doubt it. If there was a failure in this school or approach and
if it is true that there were others who did get things right in
terms of understanding the ultimate outcome in the Soviet as I would
argue was true in the case of people like Vadim Belotserkovsky and
Igor Birman, the question needs to be asked why the profession
performed as poorly as it did. I think that Brumberg given his
clear broad knowledge of the profession could do a great service
by explicitly dealing with this issue in the paper he prepared
for the Oxford conference this coming July.
*******
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000
From: abe brumberg <ABrumberg@compuserve.com>
Subject: A Response to Wilhelm
Mr. Wilhelm is obviously au courant about many things in Russia and
the former Soviet Union, and his letter also shows that he has thought
about them deeply and for a long time. While I agree with some of
his
observations, I must nevertheless point out a few errors and
misunderstandings.
First, had he read my memoir more carefully, he would have noted that
I speak only of the first twenty years of Problems of Communism,
whereas his remarks pertain to the journal after I had left it, and
which I passed no judgment on.Thus the article by Vadim
Belotserkovksy, which as I recall was one of two he published in
Partisan Review, came out seven years after Problems of Communism
first covered the subject of dissidence, in two issues, later
republished under my editorship under the title In Quest of Justice:
Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union Today. This was at a time
when the first harbingers of organized dissent appeared in he USSR
(not to count the Slutsky samizdat poems which we published several
years earlier ). In retrospect, I think we assessed this new
phenomenon correctly, though possibly with a soupcon of optimism--easy
to understand in the dismal conditions of Brezhnev's "zastoy."
I
cannot remember what Mr. Belotserkovsky had to say on this
subjcect,
perhaps he was indeed as astute a Mr. Wilhelm claims, and I shall
make it my business to reread his piece later on this summer. I
must
confess to a certain skepticism, however, in view of the singularly
unpersuasive essays on the possibility of "workers '
self-government"
or "co-determination" in the USSR (I am far away from any
library
right now and am unable to check the sources), a subject on which
Mr. Belotserkovsky expostulated several times in the following years.
Also, if Mr. Wilhelm rereads my essay, I trust he will agree that I
nowhere defend one school, such as the "evolutionary" school
versus
another as far as its predictive qualities were concerned. I am a
partisan of the evolutionary school because I think it was more open,
more tolerant, less dogmatic than some of the others. But no one
was
able to foretell the denouement of the Soviet Union (e.g. my remark
about astrology which Mr. Wilhelm is so exercised about). If
indeed
Mr. Wilhelm feels that the analysis he unfolded before his
fellow-Republicans was that prescient, I can only congratulate him.
Most of the Republicans I knew about were rather inclined to agree
with Norman Podhoretz, Getrude Himmelfarb, Willi am Buckley, Irving
Kristol and other members and/or sympathizers of the Committee on the
Present Danger, which insisted that only force and weapons of various
hues of intelligence could ever bring this monstrous system
down. (Incidentally, on the various "schools" I sugest that Mr
Wilhelm
read the introduction to my book of readings on perestroika,
published by Pantheon in 1970.)
On Messrs. Yasny and Birman. De mortuis nil nisi bonum (forgive my
Latin...), but it may interest Mr. Wilhelm to know that I knew Yasny
when I first started editing PoC, that I considered him (as did so
many others) a brilliant economic historian, but also a man quite
difficult to get along with. (Actually I did get on with him
splendidly, but that was I dare say because he considered me a mere
pipsqueak, a sounding board for his ideas , some of them quite
preposterous ,such as insisting that Rafael Abramovitch, the
distinguished Menshevik and Editor of sotsialisticheski vestnik resign
forthwith to make room for a younger man (all the Mensheviks at that
time were already over 70...). To get an article out of Yasny was
a
herculean task to which I simply was not equal.
As for Birman, I found him a bird of a somewhat different feather.
When he first started thinking of a journal, he came to me (and
presumably others ) to ask for our opinions. I couldn't get him to
tell me wheher he thought the journal should appear in Engish or in
Russian, who his contributors were to be, whether and if so how much
would he pay them. Finally, visibly annoyed by my insistent questions,
he explained: he was fed up, he said, with writing articles which no
one wanted to publish, and therefore hit upon the idea of his own
journal which presumably would accept all his pieces, no questions
asked...I honestly don't think American Sovietologists disliked
him--many in fact respected his work as an economist, if not a
political analyst which he fancied himself as), and he received
several grants to continue his research. But no financial help or
compliments made any difference: he was firmly convinced that American
Soviet specialists were united in a conspiracy against him.. I
confess that unlke Mr. Wilhelm I wasn't overly impressed with his
essays in RUSSIA ...
Was Martin Malia also fearful of persecution, as Mr. Wilhelm seems to
suggest? I find this, I hope Mr. Williams forgives me, amusing.
I
know that Malia used to travel frequently to the Soviet Union, and did
not want to endanger any of his contacts there, which explains his
taciturnity. The one article he wrote for PoC also had to appear
under a pseudonym. Yet he was sought after and could have
published-- if he so desired-- in any journal of the profession. I
certainly don't criticize him for his wish to stay anonymous, though I
cannot fully understand why he had to publish his famous article,
too, under a penname (z)...
Mr. Wilhelm and I disagree on Malia and Pipes. So be it. As
for
Feiffer , I admired him no end. He has a superb pen and and
an understanding of Russia few can match. (If he is reading these
lines, will he please come forward to acknowledge the praise?)
I mentioned my encounter with Ehrenburg not only for anecdotal
reasons, but also because he was both an intgellectual and political
figure of no mean impotance. ...Perhaps I did not succeed in speaking
always to the right people--I had come to understand how much luckier
were the exchange students, especially those boasting friendly and
inquisitive disposition s, who spent months among Soviet citizens.
I
will have more to say on this and other topics in my memoirs, which I
am now writing, and of which my paper for Oxford is but a small part.
In the meantime, my thanks to Mr. Wilhem for his remarks, and as
they
say here in Italy, where I am spendi ng my vacation: pazienza,
pazienza!
Sperlonga,Italy, June 17, 2000
******
Baltimore Sun
June 22, 2000
[for personal use only]
Poetic justice
Russia's Yevgeny Yevtushenko mined the depths of bigotry for the
powerful
poem that inspired a masterful symphony -- 'Babi Yar.'
By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
One day in March 1962, the telephone rang at the Moscow apartment of
Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, wunderkind poet of the Soviet Union's post-Stalinist thaw.
It was someone claiming to be the famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
So
Yevtushenko's wife, Galya, hung up on the man, grumbling about stupid
pranks.
Then the phone rang again, and the diffident voice of the same man
explained
that he really was Shostakovich, and if it was convenient, he'd like to
have
a word with Yevgeny.
And so began an extraordinary collaboration between a 29-year-old poet
and a
56-year-old composer that produced one of the great choral symphonies of
the
20th century. The 13th Symphony of Shostakovich uses Yevtushenko's
"Babi Yar"
and four other poems to build an artistic contemplation of the Holocaust
and
of the soil of bigotry and dictatorship from which mass murder grows.
"It was hard to believe Shostakovich was calling me. He's a great -
absolutely - genius, and nobody knows who am I," says Yevtushenko
in his
rich, Russian-accented English by telephone from, of all places,
Oklahoma. He
teaches one semester each year at the University of Tulsa, and says he,
his
fourth wife, Maria, and their two young sons feel at home there.
Yevtushenko, who will read his poems at the Meyerhoff this week as the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs Shostakovich's masterpiece, says
he
finds Oklahoma reminiscent of his native Siberia. He says he likes
introducing "the sons and daughters of oil workers and
cowboys" to the riches
of Russian literature.
"I'm a provincial man, and I like provincial America," he
says. "I like
Okies."
But Yevtushenko, the best-known living Russian poet, was never a simple
frontiersman. Nor is it true that nobody knew who he was in 1962, that
being
the year he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He enjoyed the
considerable privileges of the Soviet literary elite. He roamed the
world
throughout the Soviet period, when permission to travel was rare,
learning
Spanish, French and Italian as well as English.
Today, gaunt, lanky and still youthful at 66, Yevtushenko divides his
time
among Tulsa, New York, Moscow and Peredelkino, a cozy writer's colony
outside
the Russian capital.
He embraces a political role, saying Russian poets have long been
guardians
of truth against tyranny.
"The best book of Russian history is Russian poetry," he says.
"It was poets
in hard times that witnessed everything that happened. In metaphorical
form,
Russian poets were publishing and saying much more than our prose."
Many poets have paid dearly for their political engagement. In the
1820s, the
greatest of them all, Alexander Pushkin, was exiled and later personally
edited by Czar Nicholas I. A century later, before dying in Stalin's
Gulag,
poet Osip Mandelshtam famously declared: "Only in our country is
poetry
respected - they'll kill you for it."
In this charged literary atmosphere, Yevtushenko has suffered from an
ambiguous reputation. His very success under Communist rule made him
suspect
in the eyes of some Western critics and Russian émigrés who believed
that
being officially published - as opposed to, say, arrested or shot - was
proof
of some unsavory moral compromise.
And some experts on Russian literature consider his transparent,
straightforward poetry quite uneven. He has been as prolific as he is
topical: one poem denounces the neutron bomb; another mourns those
killed on
the space shuttle Challenger.
Yet Yevtushenko repeatedly risked his privileged status by taking
stands. His
intervention helped win freedom in 1964 for the imprisoned Leningrad
poet
Josef Brodsky, who went on to win the Nobel Prize and serve as U.S. poet
laureate. In 1968, he publicly denounced his country's invasion of
Czechoslovakia. More recently, he refused a prestigious medal to protest
the
war in Chechnya.
And he earned his eminence with certain courageous works of the 1960s
that
thundered against Stalinism and anti-Semitism. Such poems won him
celebrity
no American poet could dream of. For many years he could draw 10,000 or
more
people to a stadium to hear him declaim his poetry in the dramatic
Russian
style.
One such poem was "The Heirs of Stalin," a meditation over the
dictator's
grave:
I appeal to our government
To double, triple the guard on this slab
So that Stalin cannot rise again ...
His one-time henchmen
Don't like these times in which the prison camps are empty
And the halls where people hear poetry are overcrowded.
First published in 1962 in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, the
poem
served Khrushchev's goal of de-Stalinization. But it was heartfelt: Both
his
grandfathers had been arrested by Stalin's secret police.
Its publication was possible only because of the status Yevtushenko had
gained the year before with his most famous poem, "Babi Yar."
It was "Babi Yar" that prompted the unexpected call from
Shostakovich to
Yevtushenko, asking permission to use the poem in a musical composition.
Flattered, Yevtushenko instantly agreed. For him, Shostakovich was a
titanic
figure, one associated with a powerful boyhood memory.
Born in a hamlet on the trans-Siberian railroad, son of a geologist and
a
singer, Yevtushenko moved to Moscow with his parents. But when World War
II
broke out, 8-year-old Zhenya was sent back to Siberia to live with his
grandmother. There he worked alongside other children assembling
artillery
shells.
He remembers the chilly day his teacher summoned the class to an outdoor
loudspeaker for a broadcast from besieged Leningrad.
"From the black dish on the pole, we were listening to the premiere
of the
so-called 'Leningrad Symphony' by Shostakovich," Yevtushenko
recalls. "It was
a great impression, you know, so this man was something more than just
composer for me. ...We were listening to this symphony as a sign that
people
in Leningrad didn't give up, and so there is hope."
A strong-willed young man, he was kicked out of both school and a
literary
institute. But Yevtushenko published his first poems at 19 and never
looked
back.
In 1961, a fellow writer took Yevtushenko to see the ravine outside the
Ukrainian capital of Kiev where a Nazi killing squad had ordered the
Jews of
the city to gather on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941. There, according to the
meticulous records kept by the SS, 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned,
bodies
tumbling into the abyss.
The Nazis continued to use Babi Yar - the name translates roughly as
"old
woman's ravine" - as a killing field, and the number of victims
climbed to
more than 70,000. Yevtushenko was appalled to see that the Soviet
government
had erected nothing to mark the spot.
In a few hours after the visit, Yevtushenko penned 59 lines, beginning:
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
Just a sheer ravine, like a crude grave.
I'm terrified. Today I am as old
As the Jewish people.
Now it seems to me I am a Jew...
The poem linked the slaughter at Babi Yar to anti-Semitism around the
world,
and especially to the Russian pogroms with their cry: "Beat the
Yids and save
Russia!"
It ended:
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
But in their furious malice
All anti-Semites hate me like a Jew,
And in that I am a true Russian!
After they met to discuss "Babi Yar," Yevtushenko sent
Shostakovich his
latest book of poetry. He was surprised when the composer chose four
more
poems from the book to set to music in his symphony.
"I didn't imagine how it's possible to combine these poems,"
the poet says.
"They are absolutely different."
After "Babi Yar" comes "Humor," a ditty about how
humor cannot be eradicated
by imprisonment or execution. Next is "In the Store," on the
patience of
Russian women waiting in endless lines.
Then comes "Fears," about the receding terror of the
post-Stalin years,
recalling "the secret fear of a knock at the door."
Finally there is "Career" - one of two Yevtushenko poems that
Shostakovich
later said he recited daily "in place of prayers." It is a wry
look at those
who cling to their jobs at any price:
A scientist of Galileo's age
Was not stupider than Galileo.
He knew the earth revolves -
But he had a family.
For Yevtushenko, in this juxtaposition of tragic, comic and ironic is
the
genius of Shostakovich's work, which he calls "the combination of
two
courages, civic courage and artistic courage." He compares the mix
to
Shakespeare's "Hamlet," which puts the low comedy of the
gravediggers beside
the lofty soliloquies of Hamlet.
In retrospect, Yevtushenko believes the poems "are probably
connected by one
thread which I didn't see ... the thread of taking responsibility."
By failing to place a monument at Babi Yar, Soviet authorities were
refusing
to take responsibility for what happened there, Yevtushenko says. True,
the
Nazis had committed the slaughter. But they were assisted by some Soviet
Ukrainians, and they were acting in a shameful tradition of Russian
anti-Semitism.
When authorities threatened to ban the first performance of
Shostakovich's
symphony in 1962, Yevtushenko penned eight additional lines to soften
the
poem's political force. The new lines referred to "Russia's heroic
deed" in
defeating the Nazis and declared: "Here Russians and Ukrainians /
lie with
Jews in a single grave" - technically true, since perhaps 10
percent of those
executed were not Jews.
It is the kind of compromise Yevtushenko's critics have seized upon. But
he
has no regrets. "Without those lines, this great symphony might not
have been
heard for 25 years," he says.
When BSO music director Yuri Temirkanov, who knew Shostakovich well,
first
conducted the work as a leading Soviet conductor in the late 1960s, he
quietly restored the poem's original text.
Yevtushenko, who first met the conductor and heard the story many years
later, says Temirkanov's act showed real courage. In Temirkanov's
telling,
"it sounds like a joke," the poet says. "But it was
incredibly risky. He
could be just fired. He was a state worker, even being already an
internationally famous conductor."
In 1968, six years after the symphony's premiere, Yevtushenko witnessed
one
more wrenching moment in Shostakovich's life. The composer had been
asked to
sign a letter denouncing Czechoslovakia's experiment in humane
socialism,
which would soon be crushed by the Soviet army.
Shostakovich told Yevtushenko he intended to sign the letter. "'He
said to
me, 'I am already broken. In the '30s I signed so many letters that now
my
signature is worth nothing.' "
But the poet sensed that Shostakovich wanted to be talked out of it.
"I told
him, '... For God's sake don't sign this letter. You know this could be
a
dangerous example to young composers. ... You know that words signed by
you
can later be turned into tanks.'"
Hands shaking, Shostakovich crumpled the letter and threw it away, the
poet
says.
"For him, I was an example of the new generation that would live
longer than
him, you know?" Yevtushenko says. "And I'm very happy that I
saved him from
signing this letter."
*******
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