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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 21 Mar 2022

Taken: 08 Mar 2022

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Excerpt •
Doom •
Author •
Niall Ferguson •
Glasnost •
Second excerpt •
Gulag •
Anne Appalbaum: Author •
Gorby •
Gorbachev •
Third Excerpt •

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Gorbachev

Gorbachev
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1990/gorbachev/lecture
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The most recent and familiar example of imperial collapse is, of course the dissolution of the Soviet Union shortly before its sixty-ninth birthday. With the benefit of hindsight, historians can see all kinds of dry rot within the Soviet system, dating back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian Stephen Kotkin has argued, if was only the high oil prices in the 1970s that “averted Armageddon.” But that was not how it seemed at the time. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Community Party of the Soviet Union, in March 1985, the Soviet economy was still estimated by the CIA to be around 60 percent the size of the U.S economy; the Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the American. The Third World had been going the Soviet’s way for much of the previous twenty years, with clients and proxies scattered across the globe. In the words of the historian Adam Ulam, “in 1985 no government of a major state appeared to be as firmly in power, its policies are clearly set in their course, as that of the USSR.” Yet within four and a half years of Gorbachev’s appointment, the Russian imperium in Central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself by the end of 19191. Only a very few dissidents had the temerity to foresee any thing like this -- notably Andrei Amalrik, whose 1970 essay asked, “Will the Soviet Union survive Until 1984?” Amalrik correctly en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Amalrik anticipated that a bureaucratic elite cut off from the reality of economic stagnation and “moral weariness,” and concerned only with perpetuating their comfortable lives, would eventually lose control of the centrifugal tendencies of the imperial periphery, “first in the Baltic area, the Caucasus and the Ukraine, then in Central Asia and along the Volga.”) If ever an empire fell of a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin. ~ Page 209

DOOM
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Since Gorbachev’s glasnost in 1989, however, a wider variety of memoir material has become available, along with some archival data. According to the latter, which must be treated with a great deal of caution, it now appears that the vast majority of prisoners were not intellectuals at all -- not people, that is, from Russia’s technical and academic intelligentis, which was effectively a separate social class -- but workers and peasants. Some figures for the 1930s, the years when the bulk of Gulag’s inmates were kulaks, are particularly revealing. In 1934, only .7 percent of the camp population had higher education, while 39.1 percent were classified as having only primary education. At the same tiem, 426 percent were described as “semiliterate,” and 12 percent were completely illiterate. Even in 1938, the year the Great Terror raged among Moscow and Leningrad intellectuals, those with higher education in the camps still numbered on 1.1 percent while over half had primary education and a third were semiliterate. ~ Page 292

They were wrong: he was different. Few knew, at the time, that Gorbachev came from a family of “enemies.” One of his grandfathers, a peasant, had been arrested in 1938 and tortured in prison by an investigator who broke both of his arms. The impact on the young Mikhail had been enormous, as he later wrote in his memoirs: “Our neighbors began shunning our house as if it were plague-stricken. Only at night would some close relative venture to drop by. Even the boys from the neighborhood avoided me. . .all of this was a great shock to me and he remained engraved on my memory ever since.”

. . . Only in April 1986, after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear complex in Ukraine, was Gorbachev ready to make genuine changes. Convinced that the Soviet Union needed to speak openly about the troubles, he came with another reform proposal: glasnost, or “openness.” ~ 556

GULAG
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
During [this] turbulent time, Soviet leadership reeked of decay. In the span of less than three years, a long-invalid Leonid Brezhnev, the frail Yuri Andropov, and the nearly catatonic Konstantin Chernenko, all died in office. As central authority teetered, regional aspirations grew. In 1985, a youthful Mikhail Gorbachev took office and recognized the need for reform. For years later, he decided to allow the nations of Eastern Europe to decide their futures for themselves. In a flash, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and Bulgaria waved goodbye. The gravitational pull that kept the Soviets’ spheres in their orbit had lost power. And the implosion did not end there. On December 31, 199, after a tumult-filled two years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disbanded. The Soviet Union was no more. ~ Page 252

OF FEAR AND STRANGERS
16 months ago. Edited 16 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
'When we started, we did not understand the depth of the problems we faced.' ~ Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990
14 months ago.

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