#11 - JRL 8089 - JRL Home
From: "Bill Mandel" <wmmmandel@earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: 8093 and 8092: Glazyev
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004

In 8093, Mary Dejevsky's piece in the Independent describes the opposition candidates as "singularly unimpressive." Lilia Shevtsova refers contemptuously to "little Sergei Glazyev." Apparently neither of them -- and I wonder how many others -- has ever read his report of May 7, 1994, "On the Socio-Economic Situation in the Russian Federation," in his then capacity as Chairman of the Duma Committee on Economic Policy, published in the short-lived, small-circulation journal Rossiia 2010, #3, 1994.

It was an accurate forecast of what has happened since and a platform for taking a different direction. For those reasons, it is quite similar to the article by him just now, published in JRL 8092. It also resembles my responses to a Russian Academy of Sciences' questionnaire late in 1993, excerpted on pp. 560-562 of my Saying No To Power, 1999, Creative Arts, Berkeley.

In consequence, I foresaw a major future for Glazyev, and sought an interview with him when in Moscow in 1998. For whatever reason, I did not obtain it. Unlike many, I was not surprised by his rise in political prominence and his unexpected showing in a provincial election not long ago which for the first time brought him to international attention. Nor is it at all strange to me that a man who is both a patriot with faith in his own people and a humanist with concern for its rank-and-file should have earlier run as an independent on the Communist ticket, without being a member of that party, and now that the Communists have demonstrated an inability to break with both the crudity and bureaucratic practices of the many decades since Lenin, who had the flexibility to develop the New Economic Policy, should have established his own party and be running for president.

There is no reason to expect Glazyev to make a major showing in this election. After a century of turmoil, the Russians want stability above all else. They will probably stay with Putin so long as he can provide it. But it rests to so great a degree on today's oil prices that any major change in the world scene, never mind failures at home, can destroy it.

Glazyev is still quite a young man, only 43. If Putin permits other candidates access to TV four years hence, I would see Glazyev as having a very good chance. If Putin does not permit such access, and if events cause him to be seen as a failure, Russia also has a tradition of violent upheaval long antedating Lenin, as Pushkin wrote in the first third of the 19th century hoping against a genuine Russian "bunt". I have the sense that Glazyev's convictions are so firm and, in my view, so soundly grounded, that he would rise to the occasion even under such circumstances.