Posted on 12/24/2006 12:45:17 PM PST by DeaconBenjamin2
December 21, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Nearly every week in the month of December features a key date in the history of the Soviet collapse. This year, which marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the USSR, finds some in Russia looking back wistfully as there seems to be a rise in historical revanche.
The last days of the Soviet Union began on December 8, 1991, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus announced that the USSR had "ceased to exist as a geopolitical reality."
They culminated on December 31 -- a week after the resignation of the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev -- when the Soviet flag was lowered at the Kremlin for the final time.
Spinning History?
The tumultuous course that Russia has followed ever since has generated, perhaps inevitably, a fervent desire among some to recast the past in a rosy hue.
The shelves of Moscow bookstores are stuffed with more than 500 new books on the life of the Josef Stalin; more than half of them are apologist in tone.
In recent weeks, national television networks have aired two films on the life of Leonid Brezhnev that depict the "stagnation" leader as a genial, sympathetic patriarch with a penchant for mocking his political advisers.
Even more startling has been the public rehabilitation of the Soviet-era intelligence and secret political police, the KGB. Authorities in the city of Tver recently unveiled a monument to former Chekists.
On December 8, the KGB's successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), launched for the first time in the country's post-Soviet history a series of awards recognizing literary and artistic achievement in works depicting the agency and its work.
Soviet Symbols
The awards are modeled on similar KGB prizes which from 1978-1989 rewarded artists for the "creation of a positive Chekist image."
Another sign of the times is the resurgent Cold War antagonism toward the West in general, and the United States in particular. It's a mind-set that appears to captivate nationalist-patriots, centrists, and liberals alike. It has become fashionable in Russia to accuse the West of Russophobia.
Mikhail Leontiyev, the Kremlin-friendly commentator for Channel One television, recently repeated a phrase attributed to former presidential chief of staff Aleksandr Leontiyev: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over" -- so much so, the reasoning apparently went, that they are incapable of understanding that Russia has changed.
The occasion of the 15th anniversary of the USSR's collapse has also sent into overdrive efforts to revise the Soviet legacy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin led the charge in his 2005 state-of-the-nation address, during which he called the demise of the Soviet Union "the great geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."
This year, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov referred to the collapse as "a mistake that could have been avoided."
'Cultural Counterrevolution'
Vladimir Zhirinovksy -- the outspoken deputy speaker of the State Duma who can usually be relied on to put the Kremlin's thoughts into words -- predicted that in the next decade, Russia would create a new Soviet Union. "There will be no 25th anniversary of the disintegration of the USSR," he told a television talk show.
Nostalgia for the Soviet Union -- as well as for tsarist Russia -- is only one element of the gigantic "cultural counterrevolution" that has marked Putin's presidency. The rise in nationalist and pro-imperial sentiment has gained currency in Russia, as has the mockery of Western liberal values.
The main contributors to this process are a massive and aggressive propaganda campaign eagerly advanced by the national television networks; the Russian Orthodox Church; pro-Kremlin intellectuals, and the myriad quasi-civic and youth organizations created by the presidential administration.
In such an atmosphere, it's hardly surprising that many polls show the majority of Russians expressing regret about the decline of the Soviet Union and even desiring its resurrection together with other former Soviet republics.
Even the theories explaining the Soviet collapse are beginning to evolve. Until recently, there were two popular justifications.
The first, liberal, rationale: The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution wrenched Russia off the road of natural progress and civilization. The democratic trends that emerged after 1991 returned the country to that road, and Russia is continuing the journey, albeit with great difficulties.
The second, national-patriotic, version: The Soviet Union collapsed because of a plot between Western intelligence agencies and traitors among the Soviet nomenklatura. If such a plot had never been devised, the argument goes, the Soviet Union would still exist.
Reasons For The Collapse
Both interpretations, however, betray the Soviet system as inherently weak and inefficient. They also both dwarf the role of the KGB, which was created to guarantee the power of the Communist Party but ultimately failed in its task.
In 2006, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) released a fresh volume of its history, including an analysis of the Soviet collapse. The SVR dismisses the theory that the death of the USSR was historically predetermined. Instead, it depicts the downfall as a chance combination of adverse historical circumstances and the "failed policy" of Gorbachev.
The study notes efforts by the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the American intelligence community to weaken the USSR during the final stages of the Cold War. These efforts included the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative -- better known as "Star Wars" -- that aimed at exhausting the Soviet economy by setting a new bar in military and defense parity. They also included restrictions of exports of Western hi-tech to Russia, the fall in oil prices, and U.S. support to anti-Soviet operations in Poland and Afghanistan.
But, in the view of SVR analysts, it was neither Reagan's strategy nor special operations by the CIA that created the crisis in the Soviet system. In the words of the report, it only "aggravated" it.
This conclusion was recently echoed by former KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. In a December 14 interview with "Izvestiya," Kryuchkov revealed that he had been warned about the possible collapse of the USSR by his U.S. counterparts. In 1987, he said, he met with Robert Gates, the future CIA director (and current defense secretary), who asked him if he was concerned about the possible disintegration of the USSR.
"I believe that Americans at that time already realized that because of our policy...we would ruin [the USSR] even without their help," Kryuchkov said.
Your statement strikes me as distinctly Russian :)
I am trying to speak with everyone using their language as far as I'm able to do so.
A little time lines (from Wikipedia):
March 1919 Adolf Hitler finishes job of guarding Russian prisoners. April 6 and April 7, 1919 Bavaria declared a Soviet Republic. April 14, 1919 Freikorps suppress Communists in Dresden. April 18, 1919 Freikorps suppress Communists in Brunswick. Also: Battle of the Bavarian governments at Dachau. Communists defeat republican forces. April 27, 1919 Battle for Munich between Communists and Freikorps units. April 29, 1919 German representatives arrive in Paris. May 1, 1919 Communist defences at Munich breached. May 2, 1919 City of Munich taken; not declared secure until May 6th; aprox. 1200 Communists killed. May 10, 1919 Freikorps suppress communists in Leipzig.
Weimar Republic took credit for the suppression of the Communist Revolution, but would never succeed without activity of the volunteers and proto-Fascists in Freikorps, paramilitary organizations of veterans etc ... German version of Fascism grew out of this milieu.
The struggle did not end in 1919, but continued until Nazi takeover in many political skirmishes, street fights, acts of intimidation, competition for the followers (many former Communists change the allegiance to from Red to Brown) etc ...
The forces of Weimar Republic were demoralized and disorganized, undermined from the left and right.
You can find some descriptions in Mein Kampf.
The right wing forces defeated Communists in Spain thanks to the help from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Nostalgia for those good old days is nothing new or unusual.
I know little Russian but it not my language. But I am familiar with the Russian tradition of hyper-Westerners, who "managed" to shed their Russian character and become more Western than any ACTUAL Westerner could ever be.
You see, the real Westerners always have some roots and identity, they can be English from Yorkshire, or Welsh or southern French speaking Languedoc, they are Flemish Catholic or Orthodox Serbs or Reformed Swiss.
Perhaps they are of mixed origin, some of them get uprooted and then can ascend to the lofty status of cosmopolitan nihilist with a cosmic mission. In the last undertaking XIX Russians managed to be first. :)
In a country with a nomadic population like the United States, the notion of "roots" is rather tenuous and does not extend much beyond the major regions like "Southerner". So, the proper "roots" I will acquire in retirement, when I will finally choose a location and settle down in it. Till that time I am a generic Westerner. Further speciation could be left to the succeeding generation.
But you believe in your genetics. Do you have Russian accent, or did you lose it too?
lets ask Ukrainians... which half? Half of them are pro-Russian
Just a tidbit of factual history......
Quote: "A Bolshevik victory, financed by American Bankers, guaranteed preferential treatment for John D. Rockefeller, and world domination of the oil business" at that time. This started the Russian reign of terror, financed and supported by us....
Quote: from U.S. News & World Report, March 13, 1967 page 67
"The government of Alexander Kerensky, an interim government between the Czar and Lenin, received support provately from industry in America. It was hinted that this financial support came from the same Americans and American banks that had supported Lenin 1n 1905".
The reason for such large cash gifts to the Bolshevik cause was simple. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company has seen an international competitor surface. The source of all this oil ....The Baku oil fields, Caspian Sea, Russia. Russia's Czar Nicholas II invited the European partnership of Rothschild and Nobel to develop his oil fields, and even constructed a railroad for their use. (Collier, Peter & David Horowitz, "The Rockefellers; An American Dynasty. hold, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1976, Page 40)
In other words, The history books are full of it...in truth, the people wanted the Czar to remain as ruler. The media and history books are wrong. Our money provided the funding necessary for the beginning of the most despotic government of all history. I have a problem with that. Then guess who takes the communist out later.....yep...
Quote:
"Finally, lest this explanation seem too radical, remember that it was Trotsky who appointed tsarist generals to consolidate the Red Army; that it was Trotsky who appealed for American officers to control revolutionary Russia and intervene in behalf of the Soviets; that it was Trotsky who squashed first the libertarian element in the Russian Revolution and then the workers and peasants; and that recorded history totally ignores the 700,000-man Green Army composed of ex-Bolsheviks, angered at betrayal of the revolution, who fought the Whites and the Reds. In other words, we are suggesting that the Bolshevik Revolution was an alliance of statists: statist revolutionaries and statist financiers aligned against the genuine revolutionary libertarian elements in Russia.3
'The question now in the readers' minds must be, were these bankers also secret Bolsheviks? No, of course not. The financiers were without ideology. It would be a gross misinterpretation to assume that assistance for the Bolshevists was ideologically motivated, in any narrow sense. The financiers were power-motivated and therefore assisted any political vehicle that would give them an entree to power: Trotsky, Lenin, the tsar, Kolchak, Denikin — all received aid, more or less. All, that is, but those who wanted a truly free individualist society.
Neither was aid restricted to statist Bolsheviks and statist counter-Bolsheviks. John P. Diggins, in Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America,4 has noted in regard to Thomas Lamont of Guaranty Trust that
Of all American business leaders, the one who most vigorously patronized the cause of Fascism was Thomas W. Lamont. Head of the powerful J.P. Morgan banking network, Lamont served as something of a business consultant for the government of Fascist Italy."
quote:
"In 1910 Carnegie donated $10 million to found the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and among those on the board of trustees were Elihu Root (Root Mission to Russia, 1917), Cleveland H. Dodge (a financial backer of President Wilson), George W. Perkins (Morgan partner), G. J. Balch (AIC and Amsinck), R. F. Herrick (AIC), H. W. Pritchett (AIC), and other Wall Street luminaries. Woodrow Wilson came under the powerful influence of — and indeed was financially indebted to — this group of internationalists. As Jennings C. Wise has written, "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson... made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport."12...
...it appears to be the foreign counterpart of Carroll Quigley's claim that J.P. Morgan infiltrated the domestic left. Morgan also infiltrated the international left....
Ludwig Martens, the Soviet's first ambassador, had been vice president of Weinberg & Posner, which was also located at 120-Broadway. Guaranty Trust Company was next door at 140 Broadway...
It is significant that support for the Bolsheviks did not cease with consolidation of the revolution.... The American-Russian syndicate formed in 1918 to obtain concessions in Russia was backed by the White, Guggenheim, and Sinclair interests. Directors of companies controlled by these three financiers included Thomas W. Lamont (Guaranty Trust), William Boyce Thompson (Federal Reserve Bank).... This strongly suggests that the syndicate was formed to cash in on earlier support for the Bolshevik cause in the revolutionary period. And then we found that Guaranty Trust financially backed the Soviet Bureau in New York in 1919."
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/index.html
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/index.html
We were on the same side as the Soviets, you mean. Russian nationalists tell me that Russia had nothing to do with the Soviets. Shouldn't Russians resent us for supporting the non-Russian Soviets against Russia?
Yes. As soon as the tyrant died we changed the constitution to keep this from ever happening again.
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