Johnson's Russia List #5599 15 December 2001 davidjohnson@erols.com A CDI Project www.cdi.org [Note from David Johnson: 1. Luba Schwartzman: ORT Review. 2. BBC Monitoring: Self-exiled tycoon levels accusations at Russian authorities. (Berezovsky) 3. RFE/RL: Jeremy Bransten, USSR Breakup: Tracing The Collapse Of The World's Last Great Empire (Part 1). 4. Le Monde diplomatique: Moshe Lewin, Why the World Needs to Know About the Soviet Past. The history of the Russian future. 5. The Nation book review: Walter Uhler, Gorbachev's Revolution. (re Robert English's Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War, and Anatoly Chernyaev's My Six Years with Gorbachev] ******* #1 ORT Review www.ortv.ru Compiled by Luba Schwartzman (luba7@bu.edu) Research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and Policy at Boston University HEADLINES, Friday, December 14, 2001 - Heavy snowfall in Moscow has brought traffic throughout the city to a standstill. Temperatures dropped all over Europe, and the first major snowstorms in years have hit Italy. In the Far East a powerful cyclone has paralyzed air and sea transport; lessons have been cancelled in all schools. - Air traffic controllers are not allowed to strike by stopping work, so the dispatchers are going on a hunger strike to protest the new Labor Code, which they claim impinges on the rights of the labor unions. The air traffic controllers also want their salaries increased. Most currently earn 6,000 to 8,000 rubles a month [$200 to $267]. - Federal service troops continue a special operation in the Chechen settlement of Argun. Twelve fighters have been killed and several dozen men suspected of belonging to illegal armed formations have been detained. - The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology is 50 years old today. Many renowned alumni -- from scientists and economists to actors and politicians -- gathered to celebrate. - Salman Raduev and his accomplices were given an opportunity to address the court for the final time today. Raduev said that he was not surprised at General Prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov's demand of a life sentence, and asserted that the only thing he disagrees with is the accusation that he planned the explosion at the railroad station in Pyatigorsk. Raduev claims that Vakha Dzhafarov, who is no longer alive, planned the terrorist action. - Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Kharkov to meet with Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and discuss bilateral relations. The presidents also visited the state aviation enterprise that produces AN vehicles. President Putin noted that one of the common goals for Russia and Ukraine is membership in the World Trade Organization. - December 14th is the Day of Memory for Andrei Sakharov -- Nobel Prize winner, creator of the hydrogen bomb, and preeminent human rights activist. - Yevgeni Primakov has been unanimously elected President of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the Chamber's forum, in which 500 delegates representing all of Russia's regions and over 20,000 enterprises and organizations of the Russian Federation met. - Two more bodies have been found in the third section of the Kursk nuclear submarine, bringing the total up to 80. - A convoy of 18 Russian trucks carrying about 100 tons of humanitarian aid has traversed 700 kilometers of winding mountain roads and arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan. - Russian State Duma deputies are reacting strongly to the decision of the US administration to leave the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The committee on international affairs may be entrusted with preparing a draft resolution to support President Putin's position and express the negative reaction of the State Duma to the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. - The State Duma has accepted the 2002 federal budget by a vote of 280 to 106 with 3 abstentions. The review of the Labor Code draft has been postponed. - Russian computer programmer Dmitry Sklyarov has been cleared of all charges of violating copyright laws. Sklyarov will return to Russia shortly, but he will have to telephone the California courts once a month for the next year. The responsibility for the copyright violations will now be transferred to his employer: ElkomSoft. - The Fourth All-National Ecological Russian Forum is meeting in the Moscow suburb of Dubna to develop an Ecological Doctrine for the Russian Federation. ******* #2 BBC Monitoring Self-exiled tycoon levels accusations at Russian authorities Source: NTV, Moscow, in Russian 1600 gmt 14 Dec 01 The well-known entrepreneur Boris Berezovskiy appeared in Moscow today - admittedly it was a virtual appearance. He addressed participants in the conference, "Civil Society and Human Rights" via a TV link. It has to be said that the entrepreneur's address was more like a prosecutor's speech. Boris Berezovskiy openly declared that the Russian special services had been involved in the explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk. He compared the present situation in Russia to Nazism. Vladimir Kondratyev has all the details. [Kondratyev] The conference, mounted by the New York-registered Berezovsky Foundation, has been lavishly organized: not in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, as was recently the case with the Civic Forum, but in the fashionable Balchug Hotel nearby. The organizers say that the Balchug Hotel has the facilities for organizing the central event of the programme - a TV link between the conference participants and the disgraced oligarch... Berezovskiy once again explained why Putin is unlikely to get to the end of his first presidential term. [Berezovskiy, shown on screen in conference room] Realistically: the creation in the country of an authoritarian, Nazi-type state, or, after all, a choice in favour of liberal development - that is the crossroads we are now at. [Kondratyev] Admitting that he met Chechen leaders even after leaving the post of deputy secretary of the Security Council, Berezovskiy, perhaps for the first time, publicly levelled extremely serious accusations against the Russian authorities. [Berezovskiy] There was information that a military act was being planned in Dagestan. And I reported this to [former Prime Minister] Mr [Sergey] Stepashin. What happened in Dagestan was a calculated provocation by the Russian special services, just as I am certain that the Russian special services were involved in the explosions at buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk [all in 1999]. I am certain of this. The only thing I cannot do is say that [Vladimir] Putin gave the order for these operations, that Putin personally commanded these operations. Here I cannot say anything. And if anybody reckons this is a provocation on my part, I am prepared to meet these people in court. [Kondratyev] Berezovskiy commented on the American decision to quit the ABM treaty. This is a game Russia is losing. [Berezovskiy] It is the president's lack of experience, and, on the other hand, the absence of solid intellectual forces around the president, that prevent him from fathoming the steps of our allies and rivals. [Kondratyev] And finally, the situation at TV-6. After Berezovskiy was cheated and forced to sell a package of ORT shares worth more than 100m dollars in exchange for the release of his friend Nikolay Glushkov from gaol, he will not give up shares in TV-6. It is another matter that if TV-6 journalists who are being leaned on and beaten up say they can't stand it any more, Berezovskiy is prepared fully to delegate to them a decision on the fate of the station. I asked Berezovskiy to clarify this idea. What is it - another attempt to hand over shares to journalists? [Berezovskiy] What I say is that the authorities can't hide from freedom of speech. There is the internet, there are satellite links. And I shall offer alternative work to all who want it, and resource the work materially. But I shall not push anyone into specific actions. I shall offer an alternative. But I won't condemn under any circumstances if the choice goes the other way. And that is why I said that the fate of TV-6 is fully in the hands of those who work there today.... ******* #3 USSR Breakup: Tracing The Collapse Of The World's Last Great Empire (Part 1) By Jeremy Bransten Ten years ago this month, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met at a hunting lodge near Minsk. On 8 December 1991, they signed the Belovezh Agreement, dissolving the Soviet Union and establishing a Commonwealth of Independent States. Later that month, the crimson flag bearing the hammer and sickle was lowered at the Kremlin for the last time. The USSR died quietly, 74 years after its founders had vowed communism would triumph across the world. In the first of a three-part series, RFE/RL correspondent Jeremy Bransten traces the collapse of the world's last great empire. Prague, 14 December 2001 (RFE/RL) -- When he began his twin campaign of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev intended to reform the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev had not counted on the fact that greater freedom would fan the forces of nationalism, and he vastly underestimated the speed of the country's economic decay. Together, these factors led to the rapid disintegration of the world's last major empire. By 1990, Lithuania had declared independence. Armenia and Azerbaijan were at war over Nagorno-Karabakh. The Kremlin was linked to the brutal clampdown on revolts in Tbilisi, Riga, and Vilnius. Shortages of basic household goods and foodstuffs were growing. At times, it felt as if Moscow was losing control. Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, in an interview with RFE/RL, recalled the atmosphere: "The whole country was falling apart before our very eyes and not because we were planning it. The Baltics had left the fold, the war in Armenia, Azerbaijan, the events in Tbilisi. The whole country was waiting in lines. The economy was plummeting, and we needed to find a way out." In December 1990, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze abruptly resigned, warning of a creeping coup by those opposed to reforms. The rest of the winter, into 1991, was lived in an atmosphere of escalating tension as the leader of the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin, increased his rhetoric against central Soviet institutions amid discussions of a new union treaty to loosen the bonds of the USSR. Hard-liners -- as Shevardnadze predicted -- spoke out with increasing agitation against what they saw as the country's dissolution. Gorbachev zigzagged in his policies, trying in vain to pick a middle course between the two camps. On 8 March 1991, the Kremlin unveiled a draft union treaty. The document offered the republics greater sovereignty, granting them control of economic and cultural development, and allowing them to establish diplomatic ties, sign international treaties, and join international organizations. A new name for the country was to be discussed, excluding the words "Socialist" and "Soviet." Despite the conciliatory language, six of the USSR's 15 republics chose to ignore a referendum on the issue. Undeterred, Gorbachev continued to work on the treaty. At the start of August, presidential adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev -- called by some the "architect" of perestroika -- resigned, warning his boss of the dangers of a coup. Before that, then-U.S. President George Bush had taken the unprecedented step of telephoning Gorbachev from Washington to warn him of the same. The Soviet president was unfazed, as he recalled in a 1996 interview with RFE/RL: "Bush phoned me, and I said: 'George, you can sleep soundly. Nothing's going to happen.' That's what I said." On 4 August, Gorbachev left with his family for his annual vacation in the Crimea, intending to complete a new version of the union treaty. On 18 August, shortly before five in the afternoon, Gorbachev's chief of staff, accompanied by Politburo member Oleg Shenin and a small clutch of senior government officials, arrived at the presidential dacha. They demanded that Gorbachev sign a decree declaring a state of emergency, or resign. Gorbachev refused to do either. The officials confiscated the codes needed to launch the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, the so-called "nuclear briefcase." Gorbachev and his family were, in effect, under house arrest. The next morning, on 19 August, the coup leaders went public. TASS news agency carried an announcement that Gorbachev had been relieved of his duties for health reasons. His powers were assumed by Vice President Gennadii Yanayev. A State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP) was established, led by eight officials, including KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov, Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, and Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov. All strikes and demonstrations were banned. Soon, the "Gang of Eight," as they were later dubbed, appeared on television. Yanayev seemed especially nervous -- or perhaps drunk. His hands shook. He told viewers that, due to illness, Gorbachev had been forced to give up his duties. Yanayev said he would be the country's acting president. "Because of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev's inability to perform his duties as the president of the USSR, due to health reasons, in accordance with Article 127 of the Constitution of the USSR, the vice president of the USSR has temporarily assumed the office of acting president." Although he pledged that the GKChP would continue Gorbachev's policies, Yanayev said the disintegration of the USSR could not be allowed to proceed. "In many regions of the USSR, as a result of ethnic conflicts, blood is being shed, and the disintegration of the USSR would have the most serious consequences, both domestic and international." Later that morning, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and other key Russian politicians denounced the coup as unconstitutional and called for a general strike. A joint statement -- by Yeltsin, Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev, and Ruslan Khasbulatov, who was to become chairman of the Supreme Soviet -- was issued, condemning the motives of the coup-plotters. "On the night of 18-19 August 1991, outside of the ruling power and the law, the president of the country was removed. No reasons can be given to justify this removal. This is a case of a right-wing, reactionary, anticonstitutional coup. We believe, and believed, that these methods of force are unacceptable. They discredit the Soviet Union before the entire world, damage our prestige in international society, and return us to the Cold War era and the isolation of the Soviet Union from the rest of the world." Yeltsin told a news conference that the GKChP's orders would not be carried out in Russia. Demonstrators began gathering on Moscow's Manezh Square, outside the Kremlin. At 1 p.m., Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside parliament -- known as the White House -- and issued a call for mass resistance. Tanks took up positions on all the bridges in central Moscow. Movement on the capital's main Tverskaya Street was blocked by armored personnel carriers. Moscow military commander Nikolai Smirnov said a state of emergency had been declared and that troops had been brought in to defend order and interdict "terrorist acts." At 4:30 p.m., Moscow Deputy Mayor Yuri Luzhkov denounced the coup and called on citizens to heed Yeltsin's call for mass protests. A few minutes later, Yeltsin issued a decree declaring all USSR government bodies located on Russian territory, including the KGB, subordinate to his authority. Demonstrators around the White House spent the afternoon building barricades in anticipation of an army assault. That evening, Russian Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, whose legendary military career made him a powerful spokesperson, urged his fellow soldiers to side with those fighting the coup. His words were to take an ironic significance just two years later, when Rutskoi himself was arrested for participating in an armed uprising against Yeltsin, his former ally. "Comrades, I am an officer of the Soviet Army, a colonel, a hero of the Soviet Union, vice president of the Russian Federation. I have walked through the fiery path of Afghanistan and seen the horrors of war. I call on you, my comrade officers, soldiers and sailors, do not take action against the people -- against your fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. I appeal to your honor, your reason and your heart. Today the fate of the country, the fate of its free and democratic development, is in your hands. I call on you to cross over to the side legally elected by the people, the organs of power, the president of the Russian Federation and the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics." That same evening, Leningrad Mayor Anatolii Sobchak called for a citywide strike to begin the next day. Across Russia, confusion reigned, as some officials publicly declared their allegiance to Yeltsin. Others adopted a wait-and-see attitude. The night passed without incident, amid mounting tension. On 20 August, Yeltsin spoke by telephone with then-U.S. President Bush, who told him Washington would not recognize the Yanayev government. In the evening, with reports of tanks moving toward the White House, Yeltsin offered amnesty to all military personnel and police who switched their allegiances and ignored the GKChP's orders. Radio Liberty correspondent Andrei Babitsky, who went on to cover the wars in Chechnya, filed frequent reports from inside Russia's White House during the attempted coup. On the night of 20 August, he reported on attempts to prepare the defense of the parliament building. "The action around the parliament building is reminiscent of an anthill. People continue to build barricades, although the entrance to the building is already blocked with layers of material and all the nearest points are firmly secured. Granite blocks are surrounding the building, cars have been turned on their side. In the past several hours, security headquarters has moved to the center of the parliament building, where people are working out the plan for the defense of the building and coordinating the action of the defenders. The defenders have at their disposal automatic weapons and bottles of homemade incendiary liquid, boxes of which are standing right here." Shortly after midnight on the morning of 21 August, a column of military vehicles approached the barricades around the White House. Clashes ensued. Two protesters attempting to block the vehicles' way were shot, a third was crushed under tank treads. Crowds swarmed the vehicles. One armored personnel carrier was set on fire. The others soon retreated. The coup had collapsed. The next day, the "Gang of Eight" was arrested. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police in 1917, was toppled in front of KGB headquarters in central Moscow. Gorbachev was free to return. But the crowds were chanting Yeltsin's name. Yeltsin and the entire Russian leadership would not give up this chance. As Gorbachev himself noted, in his 1996 interview: "The initiative shifted fully to the Russian leadership, which had defended democracy and naturally felt itself to be in the saddle." Yeltsin, speaking on 23 August 1991, called on an exuberant crowd of supporters to work for the rebirth of Russia. "The people have already freed themselves from the fear which they harbored just a few years ago. I call on all my fellow citizens, in the name of unity, to get to work for the renewal and resurrection of Russia, to work for the victory of democracy over reactionary forces, so that things can be as they were in the times of [the early Russian state of] Rus'! Hurray!" Within days, the USSR's republics would declare their independence, and by December, the USSR would formally cease to exist. Gorbachev resigned as a leader without a country. "Dear compatriots, dear fellow citizens. In view of the situation that has arisen, with the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am ending my term as president of the USSR. I am making this decision as a matter of principle. I campaigned for the independence of peoples and for the sovereignty of the republics. But at the same time, I campaigned for the preservation of a single state on the territory of the whole country. But events have gone in another direction. Yet what has been accomplished should be properly valued. Society has received liberty, it has been freed from its shackles -- both politically and spiritually -- and that is the main achievement." The dream and promise of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, made in 1918, was now consigned, ironically, to the ash heap of history. "Soviet power, no matter what happens -- to the supporters of communism in various countries -- Soviet power is inescapable and in the near future will triumph across the world." For a time during the 20th century, it appeared Lenin's prediction might have come close to being realized. But like all regimes and ideologies, Soviet communism had a limited lifespan. Ten years hence, however, Lenin himself remains in his mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square -- the inheritors of his legacy still debating whether to curse him or honor him. (This is the first of three parts.) (RFE/RL's Pavel Boutorine in Prague and Francesca Mereu in Moscow contributed to this report.) ****** #4 Le Monde diplomatique December 2001 WHY THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE SOVIET PAST The history of the Russian future By MOSHE LEWIN (mlevine@sas.upenn.edu) Professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania. Author of The making of the Soviet system: essays in the social history of interwar Russia, Methuen, London, 1985, and The Gorbachev phenomenon: a historical interpretation, Radius, London, 1988 The Soviet system created in 1917 finally collapsed a decade ago with Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation, and was replaced by the Russian Federation. But we still do not understand what the Soviet system was like. What was the relationship between Stalinism and Tsarism? How did conservatism andbureaucracy defeat the need for reform? Russia now is divided between nostalgia and rejection of its past. We need to correct two mistakes in contemporary thought about the Soviet Union: the confusion of anti-communism with real analysis of the USSR and the belief that the entire history of the Soviet Union was Stalinism, or one long gulag. Anti-communism is an ideology that pretends to be scientific. Under cover of a commitment to democracy, it ignores reality and promotes conservatism by exploiting the dictatorial nature of a hostile regime. German intellectuals who emphasised Stalin's atrocities to whitewash Hitler did this. McCarthyism in the United States was based on the fear of communism. The West, in defending human rights, has been indulgent to some and castigated others, but has contributed little to a proper understanding of the Soviet system. We cannot easily classify the Soviet system because except during the civil war period, when it was little more than a military camp there were several different Soviet systems. Russian history is a laboratory in which we can study the development of different authoritarian systems and their crises down to the present day. Socialism has been understood as a deepening, rather than a rejection, of political democracy. Its tenets are socialisation of the economy and democratisation of the political regime. But in the USSR, there was only statification of the economy and bureaucratisation of politics. We cannot describe the Soviet system after the death of Stalin in 1953 as socialism, since a prerequisite of socialism is that economic assets are owned by society as a whole, not by a bureaucracy. The Soviet system has been discussed for too long in the wrong, "socialist" terms: the confusion arose because the USSR was not a capitalist economy its economic assets were owned by the state and entrusted to top-level bureaucrats. So the Soviet system belongs in the same category as traditional regimes where the ownership of vast estates conferred power over the state. The pre-Soviet-Revolutionary Muscovy autocracy maintained an influential bureaucracy, even though the sovereign held absolute power. The bureaucracy also became all-powerful in the Soviet Union, and the resulting "bureaucratic absolutism" was a modern version of Tsarist rule. Although the bureaucratic Soviet state recruited its personnel from among the lower classes, it inherited Tsarist institutions and used Tsarist methods. Even Lenin complained that whole sections of the Tsarist administration remained in place after the revolution unavoidably, since the new regime had much to learn, and had to rely on the experience of government departments, which operated by the old methods. A new state was created, but its civil servants were ancien regime. Lenin's problem was improving efficiency. Whenever a new government department was needed, a special commission was appointed to supervise its establishment. The usual practice was to ask a historian of government administration or an experienced civil servant to study the functioning of a similar department under the Tsarist regime. When there was no Tsarist precedent, Western models were used. Stalin went even further, taking the Tsarist state based on the absolute power of a bureaucratic hierarchy as his quasi-official model. Maintaining that model was essential to the Soviet system. Even the apparently new office of general secretary kept Tsarist features. The imposing ceremonies of both the Tsarist and Soviet regimes derived from a common culture, in which the emphasis on icons, and on images of strength and invincibility, disguised internal fragility. In the last decades of the Soviet era, the favourite name for the strong state the construction of which began in the late 1920s, was derzhava (great power), a term borrowed from the Tsarist vocabulary, and particularly popular in conservative circles. In Lenin's day derzhavnik (an advocate of derzhava) was a derogatory term for supporters of ruthless nationalism. Its later popularity came from an association with samoderzhets (autocrat) the official term for the power of the Tsar. The hammer and sickle replaced the Tsarist golden globe and cross, but they became empty relics of a revolutionary past. State ownership of all land, entrusted to an absolute monarch, had been the distinguishing feature of several pre-revolutionary regimes in central and eastern Europe. In the name of socialism in the USSR, state ownership was extended to the entire economy and other sectors. This system, despite its more modern appearance, was essentially a continuation and strengthening of the earlier model of state ownership of land, which had been the main economic resource. The state as developer Although the Soviet state belonged in the same category as earlier land-owning autocracies, it fulfilled a specifically 20th century purpose that of the state as developer. There was a historical need for a state capable of directing economic development. The state played and continues to play this role in Eastern and Middle Eastern countries, including the old rural empires of China, India and Iran. The emergence of the Stalinist state was partly determined by this need, even if Stalinism was a dangerous distortion of it. And the elimination of Stalinism, like the elimination of Maoism in China, proves that a transition to dictatorship can be reversed. By the 1980s the Soviet Union had reached a high level of economic and social development, but the system was entrenched. The reforms envisaged by Yuri Andropov could have given the country what it needed desperately a reformed, active state still capable of directing economic development, but while gradually freed from its obsolete authoritarianism and keeping pace with social and political change. Instead, recourse to the tired symbolism of derzhava, reflecting the interests of the groups in power, showed that the state had run out of steam. Political power was used for personal ends. This prevented the state from acting as developer. Rather than setting the computer beside the hammer and sickle, Soviet leaders took refuge in a conservatism at odds with the aspirations of the people, who were living in the 20th not the 18th century. A gap opened between state and citizens. The Soviet system is best described as "bureaucratic absolutism", a term borrowed from studies of the 18th-century Prussian monarchy. The Prussian monarch, though titular head of the bureaucracy, was dependent on it. Party leaders in the USSR, supposed monarchs of the state, lost all power over their bureaucrats. The memoirs of former Soviet ministers reveal nostalgia for the Soviet super-state. They fail to understand that infatuation with great-power status was at its height just as the state ceased to fulfil its earlier functions. Derzhava was the last form of a system about to share the fate of other outmoded regimes with which it had many features in common. The Soviet period was typical of Russian history because of the importance of the international environment. Russia's history has been a series of upheavals largely determined by relations with its neighbours. Russian sovereigns were forced to develop such relations through all possible channels, including ideology: whether they borrowed their ideas from abroad or opposed foreign ideas with home-thought concepts, they had to keep a constant watch on the outside world. International developments also had a major influence on the history of the Soviet Union. The first world war decided the course of Leninism and Soviet Russia in the 1920s, while Stalinism was conditioned by the depression of the 1930s and by the second world war. At the height of its power in the 1930s, the Stalinist regime enjoyed considerable prestige in the West despite the persecution of Soviet citizens; this was mostly the result of the West's negative self-image, caused by the depression. Russia seemed to have impressive industrial impetus and many believed its poverty would soon be ended by industrial growth. At the time of victory over Germany in 1945, Stalinism also looked good, although the Soviet Union was suffering from extreme poverty that could not be explained just by the war. The cold war ended this positive image of the Soviet regime. According to Stalin's interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, it really began with Stalin's annoyance at the US delay in landing in Normandy and opening a second front. Stalin was convinced that Roosevelt was manoeuvring to keep the US out of the war in Europe until the two major belligerents, Germany and the USSR, were exhausted. From Moscow, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan seemed to confirm that the US intended to assert a new relationship with the USSR and the rest of the world. Whether that was the intention, the effect was to impose the role of superpower on the Soviet Union, beginning an arms race that perpetuated the most conservative features of its state system and undermined its ability to reform them. At the same time, the US replaced the old powers of Britain, France and Germany as a model for Soviet leaders, and became the secret measure for all Soviet performance. As a result, some Soviet leaders realised that their country was increasingly lagging behind. Others refused to accept reality. After the Soviet defeat in the race to the moon, the country's inability to carry through a computer revolution spread helplessness in some ruling circles, while conservatives continued to bury their heads in the sand. The infatuation with everything American led many former members of the nomenklatura to court favour with the US when they took control of the Kremlin under Boris Yeltsin. Welfare paradise or disaster? It is natural that those researching Russia in the 1990s should make comparisons with the last years of the Soviet system, although it is strange that sociologists who wrote books highly critical of the Soviet system should now depict that as a welfare paradise: the standard of living of the Russians has fallen constantly since the early 1990s. Not just social welfare benefits have been eroded. Attendance at theatres, concerts and circuses is in steep decline. People use libraries far less and newspaper subscriptions have fallen dramatically. There was much more time for cultural activities in the last years of the Soviet Union, when leisure hours were increasing. Now longer working hours are the rule, and many Russians also work on their smallholdings or allotments to supplement their incomes or just to survive. New rights and freedoms, like the expensive services now offered, have benefited only the richer, better-qualified and more entrepreneurial Russians. Outside Moscow, access to culture has been considerably reduced. Now that television has become the main recreation, sociologists are critical of the dismal quality of Russian TV. There has been a even more significant decline in scientific research, student enrolment, and medical and social services and a fall in demographic vitality, suggesting the survival of the nation is at stake. To divert attention from the decline, the new authorities have begun a big campaign vilifying the Soviet system, using all the tricks of the West. The Soviet Union is shown as a monstrosity from the original sin of 1917 through to the failed coup of August 1991, which began the new era of freedom. Modern Russia, already pathetically weakened, is abasing itself as well: not content with plundering the economy, the "reformers" are also attacking history, and from ignorance rather than through critical analysis. They search frantically for other versions of the past to satisfy the national craving for a new identity. First came reappropriation of anything Tsarist and pre-revolutionary, then rejection of the Soviet Union and all its works, followed by rehabilitation of the civil war Whites. This enthusiasm for anything that the Bolsheviks opposed is stupid. Many Russians have reacted by seeing the elite who grabbed power in 1991 as Tartar invaders, hostile to the interests of the nation. And many of Russia's best minds now see no prospect for Russia other than a decline to the level of the third world. Despite the adverse effects of obscurantism, there are some signs of recovery. At a well-attended conference of scholars in Moscow, the political philosopher Boris Mezhuev stressed that a country cannot exist without its history. Russian reformers, he said, whether communists, democrats, slavophiles or Westernisers, all fail to establish a rational and morally justified continuity between Russia's past and future. Some see the past as the only model; others deny it any validity. For the former, the future can only be a renarration of old themes. For the latter, there is only a mechanical acceptance of an opposite that has no precedent in Russian history. Mezhuev argued that the future had to be seen primarily in its relation to the past, especially the past Russia was only just leaving behind. A total loss? He challenged free-market economist Andrei Illarionov's view that the 20th century had been a total loss for Russia. According to Illarionov, the socialist revolution diverted Russia from the path to liberalism, turning it from giant to midget; he believes that the only hope is a return to the free market. Mezhuev argues that it is easy to be wise after the event, hard to analyse reality. To reproach Russia with not having become a free-market economy early in the 20th century was to be profoundly ignorant both of Russian history and liberal economics. Liberalism was the outcome of a long historical development through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Renaissance, often involving revolutions against absolute monarchies. Mezhuev contends that it is wrong to focus on the Bolshevik revolution as the key to Russian history in the 20th century. There had been three revolutions in 12 years; the first, in 1905, was defeated; the second, in February 1917, saw the victory of moderate revolutionary forces. The October revolution, which brought the radicals to power, was simply the last phase. As an earlier philosopher, Nikolai Berdiaev, correctly perceived, the Bolsheviks were the instruments of the revolution, not its makers and it was pointless to condemn the cruelty on moral grounds. All civil wars are cruel. Revolutions are not moral or judicial acts: they are acts of coercion. All have been bloody. To condemn the Russian revolutions, Mezhuev continued, was to condemn the Russian intelligentsia and the course of Russian history, which had prepared the ground for them. Revolutions always disappoint expectations, but they open new historical chapters. The important thing was to understand the meaning of the chapter, and not to rely on the interpretations of victors and vanquished. The socialism of the Soviet Union had been "Russian capitalism" capitalist in technological content and anti-capitalist in form. Mezhuev argued that it was difficult for a country on the periphery of the West to combine modernisation with democracy, since one must give way to the other for a time. Because the Bolsheviks understood this, they were victorious in the civil war and second world war. China also understood this, when it chose to combine accelerated modernisation and a market economy with an undemocratic political system. No regime was wise to reject the past as empty. The past should be used to encourage new progress, and any real grandeur it had should be preserved. With its nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era, modern Russia is more distant from the West than the Bolsheviks were, Mezhuev observed. Russian liberals had nothing to boast of but the destruction of past achievements. But Russia had to build its future on the preservation and development of those achievements. It must maintain continuity while defining new tasks. The link with the past was broken, but it would be restored. He was not calling for a return to a pre- or post-revolutionary past. Russians had simply to ask themselves what in the past was dear to them, and what would help them face the future. The 20th century had been a time of great catastrophes, but those who sought to erase it from memory would then dismiss the greatness of Russia. One may not always agree with Mezhuev, but he identifies the crux of the problem: Russia's past is of vital concern for 20th-century European and world history, and that cannot be understood without impartial study of the Soviet system. Translated by Barry Smerin ****** #5 The Nation December 31, 2001 book review Gorbachev's Revolution By Walter C. Uhler (WaltUhler@aol.com) Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War. By Robert D. English. Columbia. 401 pp. $40. My Six Years with Gorbachev. By Anatoly Chernyaev. Translated and edited by Robert English and Elizabeth Tucker. Penn State. 437 pp. $32.50. In speeches delivered to the State of the World Forum in September 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev blamed the United States for squandering unique post-cold war opportunities to bring "new thinking" (novoe myshlenie) to the problems of globalization, arms reduction and nuclear disarmament. He's entitled. For, paradoxically, it was Gorbachev-the product of an ostensibly moribund, so-called totalitarian regime-whose idealism and dynamism went farthest in demilitarizing the cold war, assuring its peaceful resolution and ushering in those very opportunities. Nevertheless, Gorbachev erred when he blamed the United States. In fact, it appears that the United States "won" the cold war (this month marks the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union) without ever recognizing, let alone understanding, the indispensable role played by Soviet ideas. Thus, a corresponding paradox: Vibrant, dynamic, democratic America had no new thinking to squander. Such conceptual disarmament can be traced to the US political leadership's cold war embrace of the concept of totalitarianism to explain Soviet behavior, and to the post-cold war support it found in the work of the "totalitarian school" thinkers. Apparently it mattered little to them that Richard Pipes and Martin Malia, two of the school's most prominent members, could not even agree on the origins of Soviet totalitarianism: Pipes indicted virtually all of Russia's history by finding fully developed totalitarianism to be the legacy of "patrimonial" rule under the czars, with the addition of Lenin's militarized lust for dominance. Malia simply blamed socialist ideology. Having learned from Merle Fainsod that "the totalitarian regime does not shed its police-state characteristics; it dies when power is wrenched from its hands," both historians denied the very possibility of systemic change from within and, consequently, credited pressure from the West, best symbolized by the Star Wars program of the Reagan Administration, for precipitating the collapse of Soviet Communism. If a flawed idée fixe like this could capture such erudite Russia scholars, imagine the blank spots that impoverished the thinking of lesser "totalitarian school" Sovietologists, especially those primarily concerned with national security problems. Suffice it to say that these scholars' intense search for the slightest improvements in Soviet weaponry obscured much bigger developments: the mellowing Soviet leadership identified by George Kennan, the "friends and foes of change" detected by Stephen F. Cohen and the potential implicit in generational change in the Soviet leadership suggested by Jerry Hough and Archie Brown. Imagine how much worse were the unschooled cold war politicians of both major political parties, who further militarized and coarsened the worst of cold war scholarship-which continues to this day, in some cases. Serious and comprehensive early post- cold war scholarship by Raymond Garthoff and Archie Brown properly credited Gorbachev. Garthoff concluded that, "in bringing the cold war to an endSwhat happened would not have happened without him; that cannot be said of anyone else." Brown, in addition to proclaiming Gorbachev "the individual who made the most profound impact on world history in the second half of the twentieth century," explicitly rebutted the totalitarian argument by concluding: "From the spring of 1989 [thus, well before its collapse] it is scarcely meaningful to describe the Soviet Union as a Communist system." The publication of Gorbachev's memoirs should have deflated the Star Wars claims made by Pipes, Malia and others. Rather than compelling the Soviet leaders to undertake the reforms that precipitated the regime's collapse, as they claimed, Star Wars was actually trumped by a comparatively cheap asymmetrical response-the Soviets' development in the mid-1980s (and deployment in the late 1990s) of the Topol-M ICBM. It remains capable today of penetrating any foreseeable missile defense system the United States might deploy. Gorbachev advised Reagan about his countermeasure in late 1985, but neither Reagan nor the totalitarian school paid much attention. In 1999 Matthew Evangelista, in Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War, dealt another blow to the totalitarian interpretation when he demonstrated the emergence, early in the post-Stalin period, of influential, dissenting Soviet "policy entrepreneurs" whose sources of information were often Western colleagues in transnational organizations. Evangelista's evidence thus demonstrated that Gorbachev's "new thinking" had deeper intellectual roots than is commonly assumed. Now Robert English confirms in his impressively researched new book, Russia and the Idea of the West, that the sources of Gorbachev's novoe myshlenie date back to the early post-Stalin period, when liberal, "Western" thinking began its slow but steady proliferation. Before turning to those sources, however, English explains the origins and nature of Soviet "old thinking" from which it departed. Beginning with Peter the Great's compulsory Westernization of the Russian nobility, English examines the impact of Western influence in such events as the Decembrist revolt and Great Reforms of Alexander II, during the early and mid-nineteenth centuries, until he reaches the pinnacle of such influence in Russia's intellectual history, at century's end. Western inroads then, of course, brought Marxism, which appealed to many Russian intellectuals who sought absolute answers to life's fundamental questions. (English claims that an "Asiatic" disposition distinguished the Bolsheviks from other Marxists; a dubious assertion, but it scarcely detracts from his most critical conclusions.) World War I precipitated the Russian Revolution and eventual seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, which in turn virtually guaranteed civil war and foreign intervention. In the wake of that extremely brutal civil war, the ranks of the Bolshevik Party swelled with half-worker, half-peasant "sovietized workers" who were "ill-educated, xenophobic and militant." They viewed the civil war as a heroic struggle against Western invaders and preferred the war's harsh, ad hoc system of requisition and supply (dubbed "War Communism") to the subsequent, if temporary, compromise with capitalism-the New Economic Policy. Purges of Westernized, non-Marxist scholars and intellectuals only increased their influence, leading English to the critical conclusion that "their 'puerile' views of socialism, 'warfare' ethos, and crude anti-Westernism changed the Bolshevik Party radically." Stalin exploited these beliefs by manufacturing the War Scare of 1927, decrying "hostile capitalist encirclement," exposing the "wrecking" by domestic and foreign subversives, substituting relentless propaganda for outside sources of information, rooting out ideological nonconformity and orchestrating the great purge trials of the late 1930s. Such measures not only secured Stalin's undisputed political power but also embedded what English labels "hostile isolationism" into Soviet life. Such was the "old thinking," which was not surmounted until Gorbachev came to power. English correctly identifies the thaw era following Stalin's death in 1953 as "a critical turning point in Soviet history." Highlighted by Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, which denounced Stalin's crimes, it "led to freedom and rehabilitation for millions, economic changes to benefit society instead of the militarized state, a cultural rebirth, and considerable truth-telling about Soviet history, politics, and the world." Less noticed was Anastas Mikoyan's speech at the Twentieth Congress, which led to the creation of new research centers that became "oases of creative thought." A special oasis, however, was the journal Problemy Mira i Sotsializma (Problems of Peace and Socialism), based in Prague. In the early 1960s, its staff variously included talented young liberals, including Georgy Arbatov, Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov, who were to play an important part in articulating and implementing Gorbachev's reforms two decades later. The creation of new Central Committee consultant groups provided a pipeline for the "Praguers" and other liberal thinkers to move into the party apparatus, thereby enabling a critical mass to develop within the broader rebirth of the Russian intelligentsia. From that time forward, it challenged the legions of "proletarian intelligentsia" molded by Stalin. According to English, on the literary front, it was not only questions raised about the Stalinist system by Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Vladimir Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone but the work of the literary avant-garde of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Vasily Aksenov, who increasingly brought a Western orientation to their work. In philosophy, for example, a "revolt of the young" questioned limitations in the thought of both Lenin and Marx. In history, Mikhail Gefter was calling for a "'perestroika' of Soviet historiography" and subsequently established a section on methodology at the Institute of History. His seminars, which attracted scholars from many fields, were devoted to reconsidering "fundamental issues of the world-historical process." In economics, we have the word of Otto Latsis, who recalled "that by the early 1960s 'the urgent necessity of market reforms [was agreed on by] all serious economists.'" New and influential institutions like the Novosibirsk Institute of Economics and Industrial Organization and the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute were established in the early 1960s. Both became centers for liberal and reformist research. Finally, English addresses the evolving views of the mezhdunarodniki, the scholars, analysts, journalists and practitioners particularly concerned with foreign affairs. Compelled to re-evaluate foreign policy as a consequence of Khrushchev's substitution of "peaceful coexistence" for Stalin's "inevitability of war," reformist impulses were abetted by the need to obtain accurate information about the West, especially the United States, in order to successfully manage arms control negotiations. Borrowing from the work of Evangelista, English also notes how leading Soviet scientists utilized information provided by their Western colleagues to rethink "international confrontation, especially when the Soviet leadership entered serious arms talks." After Khrushchev's forced retirement in 1964, a mild retreat toward Stalinism was followed by more forceful repression after Soviet tanks crushed the "Prague Spring" in 1968. Yet a Brezhnev "thaw" accompanied the SALT and ABM treaties, the Helsinki Accords and the joint Apollo-Soyuz space flight under détente, resulting in expanded Soviet-Western contacts. English describes much of the liberal intellectual activity during Brezhnev's rule as one of "public conformism, private reformism." Privately, the intelligentsia pursued a "much more serious study of the outside worldSthat went well beyond that of the thaw era." Inspired by Andrei Sakharov's 1968 samizdat work Reflections on Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, they came to embrace "universal human" values and repudiate their class-based worldview-years before détente flourished and more than a decade before Gorbachev made it the foundation of his new thinking. But implementation required not only Gorbachev's selection as Soviet leader-by no means a sure thing during the period 1980-84, when the new thinkers, armed only with the power of their ideas, waged an uphill battle against the entrenched power of the conservatives, who were aided by the arms buildup and bellicosity of the Reagan Administration. According to English, implementation also required Gorbachev's deeper immersion into such thinking before the Soviet Union could finally escape Stalin's "hostile isolationism" to undercut America's militarized Soviet policy. Anatoly Chernyaev's diary-memoir, My Six Years With Gorbachev, provides invaluable evidence of that very immersion. Chernyaev served as Gorbachev's top foreign policy aide from February 1986 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. His account of those years pulls no punches. The reduction of cold war tensions was considered an indispensable condition for undertaking urgent domestic restructuring, or perestroika. By 1986, according to Chernyaev, Gorbachev had "decided to end the arms race no matter what." Consequently, he aimed his January 15 proposal for a nuclear-free world by the year 2000 directly at Reagan's professed desire to render all nuclear weapons "obsolete." Gorbachev subsequently introduced his new thinking, including "reasonable sufficiency" in military expenditures and "mutual security," based upon universal human values rather than class conflict, to the participants at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress. Chernyaev, however, had his doubts: "As for guiding reform and guaranteeing its success, this role is still reserved for the Communist Party.S It never occurred to him that changes might bog down because of the system itself, even if people became more active." Nevertheless, when Gorbachev met President Reagan at Reykjavik in October of 1986, the Soviet delegation was prepared to "sweep Reagan off his feet" by appealing to his antinuclear sentiments. Sure enough, an ill-prepared and overwhelmed Reagan ultimately suggested the elimination of all nuclear weapons-which Gorbachev eagerly embraced. Only a disagreement over Star Wars and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty prevented two antinuclear radicals from formalizing an agreement to eliminate the very weapons that, in many Western minds, deterred a Soviet invasion of Europe. Margaret Thatcher likened Reykjavik to "an earthquake." Senator Sam Nunn observed that, had the negotiations not broken down over Star Wars, "it would have been the most painfully embarrassing example of American ineptitude in this century, certainly since World War II." Chernyaev correctly placed some blame for Reykjavik's collapse on Gorbachev. Like Reagan, he wouldn't budge on Star Wars. Nevertheless, Reykjavik convinced Gorbachev that Reagan was a fellow nuclear radical who intuitively "felt the challenge of the times." Gorbachev and Reagan brought starkly different approaches to Reykjavik, though. As Chernyaev's pre-Reykjavik Politburo notes clearly demonstrate, the concept of "mutual security" guided Gorbachev's plans: "We are by no means talking about weakening our security. But at the same time we have to realize that if our proposals imply weakening U.S. security, then there won't be any agreement." For contrast, note the questions that an exasperated US representative, Max Kampelman, asked a fellow member of the Reagan team: "Then why do we do this? Why propose something he'd [Gorbachev] never accept, something even we might not want?" The approaches demonstrate why Gorbachev was so instrumental in bringing the cold war to a peaceful conclusion, and why the United States still embraces the state-centered "realism" and unilateralism that guarantees an adversarial relationship, fifteen years later. Although this watershed event opened the floodgates for subsequent foreign policy successes, it had little effect at home. Chernyaev still doubted Gorbachev's willingness to undertake economic reforms that would "change the system's essentials." He observed too much talk and too little action. Worse still, the actions taken were disastrous; an anti-alcohol campaign that cost him much popular goodwill and "predetermined much in the tragic course of perestroika," and a law on enterprises in 1987 that "was probably the first step toward the economy's collapse." Nevertheless, by the middle of 1986, Gorbachev had "begun referring to the ills of 'the system,'" prompting him, at the January 1987 plenum of the Central Committee, to deliver a blistering critique of the party. Gorbachev used that plenum to schedule what would prove to be an extraordinary Nineteenth Party Conference during the summer of 1988. Soon after that January 1987 plenum, Andrei Sakharov persuaded Gorbachev that Star Wars was a "Maginot line in space-expensive and vulnerable to counter-measures" that should not prevent the Soviet Union from concluding arms reduction agreements with the United States. A late-March meeting with Margaret Thatcher, to which Chernyaev devotes considerable attention, succeeded in persuading Gorbachev that Europe genuinely feared Soviet military power. Consequently, when Mathias Rust's Cessna aircraft landed in Red Square in late May, Gorbachev seized upon the ensuing scandal to replace his defense minister, the head of the air defense forces, and approximately 100 generals and colonels who opposed Gorbachev's mutual security initiatives. Thus, by the summer of 1987, it was discontent with domestic perestroika (and not Reagan's Star Wars fantasy) that prompted Gorbachev's threat of harsh measures. For example, Chernyaev recounts one Politburo meeting where Gorbachev furiously tossed a "big stack" of letters on the table at which his colleagues were seated, before remarking: "They write many different things, but it all comes down to one and the same. What's this perestroika? How do we, ordinary people, benefit from it? We don't.S Here, in our Soviet state, big bosses enjoy every luxury and remodel their apartments at government expense. They couldn't care less about the people.S I'm warning you-this is our last conversation about such issues. If nothing changes, the next time I'll be talking to different people." Gorbachev replaced rhetoric with action in the wake of the "Nina Andreyeva affair"-an ill-disguised but more formidable attempt by second-in-command Yegor Ligachev to bring perestroika to a halt in the spring of 1988-by compelling the participants at the Nineteenth Party Conference to schedule both the overhaul of the Central Committee apparatus and elections to a Congress of People's Deputies. Once implemented, both actions would break the party's stranglehold on political life. Chernyaev's May 1989 diary entry vividly captures the political turmoil wrought by these changes: All around Gorbachev has unleashed irreversible processes of "disintegration"S the planned economy is living its last days and the 'image' of socialism is fading. Ideology doesn't exist anymore. The empire-federation is falling apart. The Party is in disarray, having lost its place as a ruling, dominating, and repressive force. Governmental authority has been shaken to the breaking point. And nothing has yet been created to take its place. The disarray and shaken authority cost Gorbachev much of his domestic influence. Yet, according to Chernyaev, even as late as November 1990, "the disruptions and uncertainty of the domestic situation hadn't yet affected the authority of the Soviet Union as a great power." Gorbachev used it to conclude a treaty with Reagan on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in December 1987. In April 1988, the Soviets signed the Geneva accords for removing Soviet troops from Afghanistan. And in December, Gorbachev stunned the United Nations and the world by denouncing both the threat and use of force in international relations-moral idealism he subsequently and courageously lived up to in 1989, when faced with the revolution his actions sparked in Eastern Europe-and announcing that the Soviet Union would reduce its armed forces by 500,000 men, withdrawing many from Eastern Europe. During that extraordinary period, America's conservatives vilified Reagan for signing the INF treaty. Later, as Frances FitzGerald has reminded us in Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Henry Kissinger, William Safire and George Will seized upon Reagan's subsequent performance at the Moscow summit (May 1988) to accuse him of "creating a false 'euphoria' that would give a breathing space to the unchanging enemy." Finally, who can forget Will's memorable bouquet to the departing President: "Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West-actual disarmament will follow." Nevertheless, in January 1989 a nonplussed Reagan proclaimed, "The cold war is over." And so it was-notwithstanding needless obstacles created by the first Bush Administration. For, as Chernyaev notes, "beginning in the summer of 1990S Gorbachev was paying attention only to the major areas of foreign policy and almost entirely from the point of view of their necessity for solving domestic problems." Meetings with foreign dignitaries "were increasingly of a ruminating, 'philosophical' character." Thus, during President Bush's visit to Moscow, in July 1991, Gorbachev not only suggested a new strategic paradigm to replace nuclear parity but also engaged Bush in discussions about the best approaches for advancing the interests and solving the problems of other countries. In a word, "mutual security." The meetings with Bush marked the culmination of Gorbachev's efforts, but only because a failed putsch against him in August facilitated the countercoup by Boris Yeltsin, in December, that ended his political career. Few should dispute Chernyaev's conclusion that Gorbachev's "epoch stands out as one of the most remarkable of the centuries." Nevertheless, prior to September 11, 2001, America's post-cold war triumphalism-distorted by the totalitarian school's refusal to countenance the very possibility of meaningful change from within the USSR-prevented the cold war "victor" from embracing Gorbachev's revolutionary lead. But triumphalism collapsed momentarily with the World Trade Center, thereby creating yet another opportunity for new thinking. And who, better than Gorbachev, to both suggest and remind us? "It is now the responsibility of the world community to transform the coalition against terrorism into a coalition for a peaceful world order. Let us not, as we did in the 1990s, miss the chance to build such an order," he wrote recently. *******