Archie Brown
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Twenty years ago today in China the prolonged pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square was brought to a brutal end, when troops and tanks moved in and hundreds of people were killed on the streets of Beijing. While the western world remembers this event, it’s worth bearing in mind that June marks another, very different anniversary. Just 20 years ago democratic reforms in the Soviet Union also astonished the world. Contested elections brought into being the First Congress of People’s Deputies, held between 25 May and 9 June. From the outset, this was a legislature in which the executive was criticised and real debate took place. Its proceedings were televised live and watched by more than half the adult population.
In 1989 it looked as if Russia and China were travelling in opposite directions. What was then still the Soviet Union was moving towards democratic and accountable government. In China, radical economic reform had already made great progress, but the response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators of Deng Xiaoping (the father of the Chinese economic reform) was to impose martial law.
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Arkady Ostrovsky
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“Dear friends! The textbook you are holding in your hands is dedicated to the history of our Motherland… from the end of the Great Patriotic War to our days. We will trace the journey of the Soviet Union from its greatest historical triumph to its tragic disintegration.”
This greeting is addressed to hundreds of thousands of Russian schoolchildren who will in September receive a new history textbook printed by the publishing house Enlightenment and approved by the ministry of education. “The Soviet Union,” the new textbook explains, “was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.” Furthermore, over the past 70 years, the USSR, “a gigantic superpower which managed a social revolution and won the most cruel of wars,” effectively put pressure on western countries to give due regard to human rights. In the early part of the 21st century, continues the textbook, the west has been hostile to Russia and pursued a policy of double standards.
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Marko Attila Hoare
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“Georgia has lost South Ossetia and Abkhazia for good”—one can almost taste the relish in the Guardian’s editorial of 15th August, as it argued against even peaceful, diplomatic measures to punish Russia for attacking Georgia. For a significant strand of left-liberal opinion in the UK, the default position on the Russia-Georgia conflict is that it is payback for earlier western sins in Iraq and Kosovo; that US, not Russian, warmongering is the problem. Yet none of this is true. Russia’s intervention in Georgia and recognition of Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s “independence” are not equivalent to western action over Kosovo or Iraq, and we allow them to go unpunished at our peril.
Moscow’s apologists frequently refer to the alleged “Kosovo precedent.” They argue that if Nato can carry out military intervention without UN authorisation against a sovereign state (Serbia), to protect a persecuted ethnic minority (the Kosovar Albanians), then unilaterally recognise the independence of an autonomous entity (Kosovo) which had until then been internationally recognised as belonging to Serbia, then Moscow is justified in acting likewise vis-a-vis Georgia and South Ossetia.
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Stephen Kotkin
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What is it about Russia that drives the Anglo-American world mad? Soviet communism collapses, the empire is relinquished. Then come the wild hopes and failures of the 1990s—including the 1993 half-coup and the tank assault on Russia’s legislature, the results-adjusted referendum on a new constitution (still in force), the dubious privatisations, the war in Chechnya and the financial default in 1998. But after all that, in December 1999 Boris Yeltsin apologises, steps down early—and names his prime minister and former secret police chief Vladimir Putin as acting president. To widespread consternation, Yeltsin predicts that the obscure spy is the man to “unite around himself those who will revive Great Russia.” Incredibly, this is exactly what transpires.
And this is a grand disappointment, even a frightening prospect? The elevation of Putin—a secret deal promoted by Yeltsin’s personal and political family, motivated less by patriotism than self-preservation—will go down as one of the most enduring aspects of Yeltsin’s shaky legacy. Now, Putin, just like his benefactor, has selected his successor, Russia’s new president Dmitri Medvedev. Sure, Putin has no plans to retire to a hospital-dacha, where Yeltsin had spent much of his presidency. Still, in his crafty way Putin has abided by the constitutional limit of two presidential terms. In May, Medvedev will acquire the immense powers of the Russian presidency (a gift of Yeltsin) in circumstances whereby the Russian state is no longer incoherent (a gift of Putin). And this is grounds for near universal dismissal in the west?
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Jonathan Power
(See also Jonathan Power’s interview with Soviet foreign policy expert Georgi Arbatov)
Zbigniew Brzezinski remains, at 79, the feisty, acerbic figure he was when he served as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser between 1977 and 1981. Back then he was seen as the man who gradually dissuaded Carter of his more pacific convictions. Brzezinski was responsible for the administration’s confrontational tone on the Soviet Union’s human rights failings. He argued within the White House for arming the Afghan mujahedin to fight the Soviets, even before the Red army invaded. Today he has an important advisory role in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and has emerged as President George W Bush’s most searing foreign policy critic. Late last year I met him in Washington—a visit I describe in detail in an article on the Prospect website—to discuss the cold war, Putin’s Russia, Iran and US foreign policy.
JONATHAN POWER Was the end of the cold war a missed opportunity?
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Jonathan Power
Georgi Arbatov, the éminence grise of the Soviet foreign policy apparatus, was waiting for me at the bus stop an hour out of Moscow. A little bowed at 84, he grabbed me by the arm and leant on his homemade walking stick, cut from a nearby birch, and led me through the wood I had arrived in to a clearing in which stood a small, shabby block of flats, paint peeling in the entrance, a year’s dust and leaves on the staircase. Like his mentor, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief and later head of the Soviet Union, Arbatov has always shunned many of the perks of the apparatchiks, content with a modest flat in the city and this “dacha” in the countryside.
We talked, as we did 30 years ago, over vodka, coffee, cucumber and beetroot. The adviser to every Soviet president from Brezhnev to Gorbachev remains as lucid as he was when he told me in 1978 that if the west pursued a closer relationship with China, turning China “into some sort of military ally to the west”… then there would be “no place for détente.”
My full-page interview with Arbatov—which ran first in the International Herald Tribune and later in many other papers—caused an enormous stir. It was the first time a senior Soviet official had talked at length to a western journalist on the record, without notes and answering every question put to him. Edward Crankshaw, the distinguished Sovietologist, described it in the Observer as “the most interesting thing to come out of official Moscow since the fall of Khruschev 14 years ago.” The Economist made it its cover story.
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Jonathan Power
The stereotype of pre-revolutionary Russia lives on—a despotic tsar, a serf economy that lived long after the abolition of slavery by the Europeans (but not the Americans), and a malign, primitive, Asiatic influence rooted in the savage conquest by the Mongols and the Tartars.
But as the great historian of Europe, Norman Davies, has written, “[Late imperial Russia] was Europe’s chief source of agricultural exports… Russian aristocrats, merchants, artists and professors were thoroughly integrated into every aspect of European life… Politically, Russia was thought be making serious liberal progress after 1905.”
War with Germany threw Russia off the rails. But now it is back on them, where is Europe? When I put this question to Georgi Arbatov in Moscow last year, I could see him wring his hands with despair as he answered. When, in Washington DC a couple of months later, I asked Zbigniew Brzezinski more or less the same question, he answered that he thought that there was a real possibility that Russia would be invited into the EU within 20 years, but he also seemed to imply that in Yeltsin’s time, a blinkered western leadership meant that a great opportunity had been lost to bind Russia closer into the west.
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Erik Tarloff
White king and red queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard, by Daniel Johnson
(Atlantic books, £22)
Even the title, White King and Red Queen, is a muddle: the “red” alludes to communism, of course, but why queen? Was there anything inherently feminine about the Soviet Union or its chess representatives? And what’s the significance of “white king”? “White” is not an adjective customarily applied to the democratic west; when used in opposition to communist red, it references the anti-Bolshevik side in the Russian civil war. And who are these two mythical personages meant to represent? The cover photograph shows Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer facing off over a chessboard, but it’s hard to see Fischer as a white king, and downright impossible to imagine Spassky as a red queen.
The muddle persists between the covers. The book is competently written and well researched, but it calls to mind Winston Churchill’s famous admonition, “Take this pudding away. It has no theme.”
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Bernard Wasserstein
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Occasionally an event, in itself trivial, captures the essence of a historical moment: the Boston tea party, the first performance of The Rite of Spring, the incarceration of Paris Hilton. In England, such episodes often take place in Oxford: John Henry Newman’s passage from Anglicanism to Rome in the 1840s; the king and country debate at the Union in 1933; the dons’ rejection of Margaret Thatcher for an honorary degree in 1985.
The non-election of Yevgeny Yevtushenko as professor of poetry in Oxford in 1968 was one such incident that somehow fused the cultural switchboard of its time. As I played a minor part in stage managing this mixture of opera buffo and grand guignol, it falls to me to act as—an admittedly prejudiced—recording angel. Yevtushenko’s candidacy was my idea. A history undergraduate at the time, I had read a little of his poetry in translation and also his Precocious Autobiography. He struck me as a raw, individualist voice speaking boldly from within the confines of a conformist society. Some of the lines buzzed in my head. But I confess that my main motive for initiating his candidacy was political, though at the time I strenuously denied it to my fellow campaigners, to the press—and to myself.
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Ben Lewis
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes
Allen Lane, £30
Orlando Figes is the master of a new genre. Instead of historical novels, he writes novelistic histories. The Whisperers is a tragedy on the scale of Life and Fate and War and Peace, with a cast of characters to match. Take the story of the arrest of Ilia Slavin, as recalled by his daughter. “The NKVD men led papa to the door. I followed him. Suddenly he turned round to look at me once more. He could see the chaos of enormous emotions inside me. Choked by tears, I threw myself at him. He whispered in my ear: ‘Little one, my beloved daughter, there are mistakes in history, but remember we started something great. Be good young communists.’” Those parting words sum up both the moral challenge and the subtle beauty of this book.
Slavin was a Jewish lawyer who helped write the Soviet criminal code in 1926. An enthusiastic Bolshevik, he’d once justified an antisemitic pogrom on the grounds that it was a class war against factory managers. He was rewarded for his loyalty, and in 1933 was commissioned by the party to provide a legal justification for the gulag. After a few field trips, Slavin found himself unable to say anything good about this system of slavery. He failed to hand in a manuscript, telling colleagues: “I am politically bankrupt.” On the evening of his arrest, he had been celebrating his daughter’s 16th birthday. The NKVD arrived at 1am.
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