Revising Russia's History

Penraker links to an article where Stephen A. Cohen analyzes the precarious conundrum that is Russia:

The most important event of the late twentieth century began twenty years ago this month. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold. Perestroika, as Gorbachev called his reforms, officially ended with the Soviet Union and his leadership in December 1991. The historic opportunities for a better future it offered Russia and the world have been steadily undermined ever since.

...The opportunities that Gorbachev created for international relations have also been missed, perhaps even lost--here, however, primarily because of the United States. Instead of embracing post-Soviet Russia as an equal partner in ending the cold war and the arms race, both the Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations undertook a triumphalist winner-take-all policy of extracting unilateral concessions first from Yeltsin and then from Putin. They have included the eastward expansion of NATO (thereby breaking a promise the first President Bush made to Gorbachev); the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had discouraged a new nuclear arms race; the bogus nuclear weapons reduction treaty of 2002; and the ongoing military encirclement of Russia with US and NATO bases in former Soviet territories.

Within the first paragraph, Cohen is already engaging in utopian fantasy. Here he speaks of perestroika as if it was an enduring truth such as "liberty" or "freedom," instead of a utilitarian term to describe what it really was: "reform." Perestroika has become one of those connotation words that has lost its orginal meaning over the years--it was a reform movement that sought to liberalize, or de-centralize, the central Soviet economy. It was very important in that it provided a vehicle for the Soviet people to see their first glimmer of freedom, but the ball was already rolling. The Soviet economy had been in complete shambles for years; they couldn't keep up in the arms race and while Americans were taking their families to Disneyland, the Soviet people were standing in breadlines--the contrast between the two superpowers was night and day. By 1985, the Soviet Union, regardless of perestroika, was doomed.

The centralized system in the Soviet Union actually produced results. If you read my analysis on Stalin and the industrialization of the Soviet Union, you'll find a leader who was successful in industrializing a previously aggrarian based economy in a very short period of time. However, like all totalitarian regimes, it came at a huge price with millions of Soviets being purged as enemies of the state, but the Soviet Union was industrialized and, with the defeat of Germany in WWII and their aquisition of the atom bomb, also a military superpower.

After Stalin's death, the Soviet Union was reeling from the Reign of Terror. Nikita Kruschev tried to heal this wound by rehabilitating jailed "dissidents," but the Soviet economy was built with Stalin's iron fist. His ruthlessness drove Soviet production through fear, but subsequent leaders eased their reigns (comparative to Stalin) and the centralized Soviet economy slowly began to unravel as corruption and inefficiency snowballed. By the time Gorbachev became Premier, the Soviet Union's economy was run by criminal gangs under the title of "Communist Officials." When the Soviet Union fell, these criminal cartels joined ex-KGB officials to form the main structure of the corruption-based, Russian economy. Their corruption wasn't caused by Clinton or Bush triuphalism, it had always been there.

Historical events, such as a collapsing empire, don't happen in a vacuum. Cohen's desire to take pot shots at America's policies cause him to glance over a hundred years of Soviet/Russian history. The real tragedy is the 100-years of oppression and horror that the Russian people have had to endure; the sad tragedy is the fact that many Western elites won't even acknowledge it.