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Tuesday, September 19, 2006
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 HE'S NOT THAT INNOCENT: THE DEVIL & MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH
Most people of my age well remember the deification of one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Within months of his installation as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he became everybody's favorite guy who ran a totalitarian police state. Consequently, the period of 1985 - 91 was the era of "Gorbymania." At several points, Gorbachev had higher approval ratings in the United States than did President Ronald Reagan.
The above paragraph should be a clear demonstration that people didn't just go stupid in the last six years, like you might think. Most people have actually always been borderline retarded.
By the time Gorbachev assumed power in March of 1985, he knew that communism was rotting from within. To save it, he implemented a series of reforms commonly known as glasnost ("openness") and peristroika ("reconstruction.") The media couldn't stop reporting the details of these reforms, but they seemingly forgot their purpose, which was to save communism, not to bury it.
It should be remembered that nearly half of the Soviet Union's brutal war of occupation in Afghanistan was fought during Gorbachev's tenure. The deservedly feared and reviled Stalinist gulag system memorialized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continued apace, and any deviation from the Communinst Party line was swiftly and inflexibly punished. True, Gorbachev was not Stalin, but this hardly seems like the sort of thing Nobel Peace Prizes are made of.
Many who view Mikhail Sergeyevich as a Russian Thomas Jefferson seem not to have noticed that he has not - to this very day - renounced communism. Yes, he did ban the party, but only after it threatened his personal power. He sought to make the system more efficent and therefore ensure its survival, but he wasn't a democrat then and he certainly isn't now. Most people are actually surprised to learn that Gorbachev never once stood for election before a constituency larger than the Soviet Politburo until well after the Soviet Union's demise . In fact, he named himself president of the U.S.S.R. Saving the Soviet Union - the epitome of nastiness and the greatest source of anguish in human history - was the great goal of his life.
Because the Soviet Union was essentially fourteen countries that had been conquered by the fifteenth, Russia, Gorbachev's dream was an imperalist ambition. Indeed, he only allowed the liberation of his Eatern Eurpoean sattelites when he saw its inevitability.
Thankfully, he wasn't very good at achieving his goals. Gorbachev may indeed be history's most spectacular failure. He's certainly the most celebrated. He ended communism in Russia the same way Hitler ended National Socialism in Germany, unintentionally and through the permanent destruction of his empire.
Gorbachev's theory was that if he introduced a very, very small measure of political freedom, the people would then support the government's attempts to reform the economy, the real source of the U.S.S.R's misery.
The Chinese knew this was amateurish folly. Once the people were allowed to speak, they would make their displeasure with the economic situation known, and that would only increase the pressure on the Communist Party. And that's precisely what happened. The Chinese took a different road. They reformed the economy as they increased political repression, gambling that if the people were rich, they wouldn't object to the one-party rule of the Communist Party. Deng Xiaoping's gamble has paid off handsomely. There is no evidence that the People's Republic of China will become democratic for at least another generation. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam followed the PRC's lead, and you'll notice that Communist China and Veitnam are still with us, while the U.S.S.R is but an unpleasant memory.
Gorbachev's legacy to the world is the destruction of the Soviet Union and its twisted and brutal treatment of those in Eastern Europe subjected to its ugly embrace. But that was never his intention. His legacy as he sees it must be one of monumental failure and unprecedented political self-immolation. His miscalculations not only ended his career, they destroyed his country and consigned its empre to the cemetary of history. Nothing like it had ever happened before, and isn't likely to be seen again.
Former president Richard Nixon famously described Gorbachev as being "an iron first in a velvet glove." I personally suspected that he harbored darker impulses than he was given credit for. Well, now Mikhail Sergeyevich isn't so shy about telling you about them himself.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on Tuesday he supported tough measures taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin and wished he had adopted them.
Gorbachev, whose political reforms led to the collapse of the communist empire, said he should have squashed the challenge from Boris Yeltsin, his arch-rival and subsequently first Russian president, by sending him into diplomatic exile.
Like him or not, Yeltsin actually was elected to something, unlike Gorbachev. Gorbachev actually expelled Yeltsin from the CPSU. On June 12, 1991, Yeltsin was overwhelmingly elected as the president of the Russian Federation, and was instrumental in saving both Gorbachev's job and likely his very life during the Commuinist Party's internal coup against him in August of that year.
It certainly is good to hear that Gorbachev remains so grateful.
Boris Yeltsin's was a highly imperfect government, corrupt as the day was long and given to massive over-reaction, but it was the most democratic in Russian history. Obviously, Gorbachev loathes this with every fiber of his black little soul.
And he said separatist outbreaks that plagued his last years in power should have been crushed by taking their leaders to court.
Far from being a reformer, Gorbachev now admits that he should have resorted to show-trials to protect the Soviet Union's illegal conquest of the republics that constituted his country. Rather than renouncing the imperial ambitions of Lenin and Stalin, he now wishes that he had done more to salvage them from the march of history. I hope everyone rembers this when Mikhail Sergeyevich is favourably compared to Deng, Kim Il Sung and the Vietnamese leadership. They just succeeded where Gorbachev failed. Anyone who praises Gorbachev as they denounce the Chinese occupation of Tibet is an insufferable idiot and should be treated accordingly.
"I have reviewed my values and made conclusions," Interfax news agency quoted the father of perestroika as saying during presentation of a new book "In the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party".
"I now support Putin as far as resorting to tough measures to maintain stability is concerned," he said.
Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin in 2000, has moved to restore Kremlin control over Russia, lost in the first post-Soviet decade marked by unending political crises and economic hardships for the majority of the population.
In achieving his goals, Putin has subdued political opposition and put political forces, government and regional administrations under strong Kremlin control triggering Western fears that Russia could be backtracking on democracy.
President Putin has resorted to some rather draconian measures in "maintaining stability." Freedom of the press, hard-won under Yeltsin, is under attack by the Russian state. Regional governors, previously elected by the people, are now appointed and answerable only to the Kremlin - not the Duma or the people. And Putin's "anti-corruption campaign" is increasingly seen as nothing more than a means by which to criminalize his political opposition. Despite having "looked into his eyes and seen his soul," President Bush and his adminstration now have serious reservations about Putin's goals and the means by which he achieving them. Furthermore, Vice-President Cheney has been rather undiplomatic about saying so.
Of course, Gorbachev is applauding those same goals and means.
Gorbachev had earlier said that the destruction of the Soviet Union in late 1991, spearheaded by Yeltsin, was an unnecessary shock to the nation rather than a help in achieving liberal goals.
"Yeltsin should have been sent away to a diplomatic post," he added. "Separatists should have been hit -- I mean confronted with criminal responsibility rather than attacked with machineguns."
By "seperatists," Gorbachev can only be referring to the leadership of the Baltic Republics - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. For those of you who are unaware of how they became part of the Soviet Union, it was part of the Ribbentrop/Molotov Pact of 1939, which allowed for the Nazi invasion of Poland and started the Second World War. Stalin used that invasion as a pretext to annex those formerly independent nations. The United States and the United Nations never recognized that annexation.
The liberation of the Baltics never would have happened were it not supported by their people. Those leaders reversed the criminal takeover of their nations in a manner that the world cheered and gave hope to oppressed peoples everywhere. Gorbachev has now said in public that he wishes that he did more to sustain the legacy of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
What Gorbachev isn't telling you is that he in fact did confront the seperatists with machine guns. On January 13, 1991, Gorbachev ordered a Special Forces assualt on the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, which killed 14 and injured at least 600 innocent people who sought only their own natonal self-determination.
If Mikhail Sergeyevich thinks that arresting the leaders of the Baltics would not have lead to a popular uprising and massive bloodshed, then he is even more ignorant than I believe him to be. To see evidence to the contrary, he need look no further than Romania and what happened there thirteen months before. It is entirely possible that the Soviet military might have refused to follow orders to engage in large scale pacification measures and, as happened in Romania, sided with the people. That would have accelerated the already rapid destruction of the Soviet Union, but it almost certainly have been much more violent than it eventually was.
Gorbachev has now publicly renounced what people percieved his reforms to mean. Furthermore, he is applauding his successor's more Stalinst instincts and regrets that he didn't engage in those tactics hmself.
It is telling that Mikhail Gorbachev is popular everywhere but in his homeland. Russians hate Gorbachev almost beyond words. In 1996, he ran for the presidency and recieved but 3% of the vote. The people who know him best continue to denounce him, his memory and his policies. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was a smooth criminal, to be sure, but one should never forget that he was still a criminal.
Hopefully, the rest of us will someday follow suit and recognize this pervert of history for what he really is.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Recovering the Sattelites By: Counting Crows From: On A Wire - Live in New York
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Labels: The Serious Side of skippy
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