#8 - JRL 7169
From: "Albert L. Weeks" <AWeeks1@compuserve.com>
Subject: Response to Nina Khrushcheva
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003

Nina Khrushcheva, Nikita Sergeyevich's granddaughter, writes (JRL 7168) as though she were the Voice of Russia. Yet not "all" Russians agree with her dismal view of the Bush Administration as the Bobchinsky of Brezhnev's Dobchinsky. That forced comparison in itself is ludicrous. Ms. Khrsucheva seems to be among those Russians for whom the Soviet experience not only "boggled" the minds of many Russians but turned them into inveterate cynics and skeptics. Hence, her false analogy between the methods of Leonid Ilyich and his team of propagandists and Ustinovite arms-builders and the methods of Bush and his post-9/11 team of world-purifiers and evil-impugners. The latter may be naive but they aren't the hegemonists and Brezhnevist no-goodniks the Khrushchevas, et al., make them out to be.

The liberation of Afghanistan by that same team is a case in point. The team's cooperation with today's Russia in noble enterprise provided a good example of the difference between the "stagnation" under Brezhnev and the sea-change wrought in Russian foreign policy since the 1970s. This change has been abetted by a number of U.S. presidents, not the least of whom is George W. Bush.