The Cold War was ended by Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his team. It was
not "won" by Ronald Reagan as some myth-makers would have it. Several
years ago I saw a TV documentary in which Gorbachev stated something
like: "We tried to reform the stalinist system, but it had become so
bad that it could not be reformed."
The following article was also published in The Hartford Courant on 10
Oct. 2004, Page A18, which also contained the last paragraph. DR
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http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/nation/9882850.htm
Perestroika author fears backlash
Russians grow wary of political reforms
By Kim Murphy
Los Angeles Times
MOSCOW - There was a time when the word "perestroika" evoked visions
of hope and change.
The term means "reconstruction," and what was being rebuilt in the
late 1980s was the Soviet Union's entire relationship with its
citizens and the world outside.
These days, many Russians talk about perestroika with more scorn than
reverence because millions here have been plunged into poverty by its
free market reforms. People have become so disenchanted with the
restructuring that leaders of Russia's democratic movement have been
warning of a backlash.
Alexander N. Yakovlev, the man widely acknowledged to be the architect
of perestroika, said recently that Russia's democratic revolution was
in danger of reversing course after 15 years of political reform.
"Six years ago, I spoke about how a setback was unavoidable. I meant
there would be a certain stoppage in the movement forward. But I never
thought that it would take the shape of a movement backward, of a
restoration of what was before. Unfortunately, this is what we are
seeing today," said Yakovlev, who crafted much of the reforms
instituted by former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
"And when I was speaking about setbacks, I don't think one could have
forecast beforehand the depth and the size of the current setback," he
said.
In recent weeks, both Gorbachev and his successor, Boris N. Yeltsin,
have raised questions about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's
moves to consolidate his power after a wave of attacks blamed on
separatist rebels from Chechnya. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were mild in
their criticism compared with Yakovlev, who accused Putin of trying to
impose a Chilean model of economic liberalism and political
authoritarianism.
In an interview at the office of the Moscow-based program he heads,
the International Democracy Foundation, Yakovlev, 80, said Putin had
shown signs early on of returning to Russia's Soviet past. In 2000, at
the end of his first year as president, he restored the former Soviet
national anthem with updated lyrics.
"This anthem was the backdrop for the execution by shooting of a
million people. Millions more were thrown into labor camps. And now,
when they begin to play this anthem, some listen to it with disgust.
But others listen with pleasure," Yakovlev said. "Bringing this anthem
back was an immoral deed, a sacrilegious step."
Putin's more recent steps, proposals to eliminate independent seats in
the parliament and cancel direct election of regional governors are
equally worrying, he said.
"When the parliament is represented by one party in the majority, the
opposition ceases to exist, and without an opposition, I'm convinced
there can be no democracy," he said. "No new leader can grow without
an opposition, and the situation in which we have no alternative is
being created."
Yakovlev, a historian who drafted the first Kremlin policy papers for
perestroika, is often blamed for the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in a country where a majority of the population longs for
Russia's restoration as a superpower.
He is occasionally branded an American spy, and said he recently
turned down a teaching post at Stanford University because he didn't
want his critics "to be able to say that all the supporters of
perestroika are unwilling to live in the country they made."
Indeed, he said, some of Russia's early builders of democracy were
only now beginning to realize the mistakes they had made.
In pursuing market reforms, democrats neglected "the social sphere,"
he said, and millions of teachers, doctors and pensioners were "turned
into paupers, and turned away from democracy."
"When you hear about nostalgia for the Soviet Union now," Yakovlev
said, "this nostalgia is not for concentration camps, and it's not for
executions. It's nostalgia for when salaries were big enough to buy
bread and milk with."
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