And then there were 15
John Lloyd
July 31, 2006 06:31 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_lloyd/2006/07/post_273.html
In his valedictory piece for the Guardian (How I learned to love Vlad),
Nick Paton Walsh described a Russia, and a former Soviet Union, a
decade on from the one I wrote about as the FT's correspondent in
Moscow in the early 90s. There is no point in second-guessing, and I
have no wish to do so: he has been an active and an insightful
chronicler of his beat, and his final long telegram is one that
acknowledges, as have his reports, the complexities, contradictions and
switchbacks that present themselves to all who follow the
Russia-watching trade. Only those who, like the John Reed of Ten Days
that Shook the World, put on the ideological blinkers before crossing
the border can produce a seamless narrative of either triumph or
despair.
This is by way of a series of observations, not a correction or an
argument. And the main observation is as simple as this: that the
collapse of the Soviet Union - which included within it the deaths of
the Communist party and of the command-economy state it ran - was a
comprehensive crisis, and that much of what followed, even until now,
must be understood under the shadow of that event, or series of events.
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