Has anyone heard anything about this?
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11 years ago
Showing posts with label Soviet history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soviet history. Show all posts
Monday, January 26, 2009
Horbach vs. Gorbachev
I have recently heard that Gorbachev's original family name was Horbach and that they are Ukrainian. Apprently, the -ov was added during Stalin's big name-change operation, when all Muslim lastnames in the Soviet Union and many Ukrainian lastnames were changed in such a fashion on Stalin's orders. A Ukrainian member of the British Parliament, Stefan Terlezki, has also claimed in his book "From War to Westminster" that Gorbachev spoke with him in perfect Ukrainian when he visited Britain.
Has anyone heard anything about this?
Has anyone heard anything about this?
Friday, November 21, 2008
Gorbachev, Obama and the end of USSR
This is a response to the following blog post on Lex Libertas:
I think it was a wonderful thing because it made liberty and democracy possible for tens of millions of people who were languishing in the Soviet system (Ukrainians, Georgians, the Balts, the 20-30 million slaves in the gulags.). Freedom is well worth the price of a decade of economic hardship following the collapse of communism. And Gorbachev was not necessarily to blame for it. The seeds of the Soviet system's collapse were planted long before the 1980s. (And much of the post-Soviet economic hardship was the result of post-Soviet government policies, and especially so in Ukraine, where the government kept printing money to meet its social obligations, jacking up inflation to 14,000% at one point, and causing the longest post-Soviet economic decline until the year 2000.)
The first seed of destruction, philosophically speaking, was in the beginning, when the entire system was founded on official godlessness and state socialism. But more to the point, Brezhnev (and Reagan) was responsible for the credit hole the Soviet Union was in. A lot of old Soviet citizens remember his senile rule with nostalgia, because sausages were cheap (read subsidized) and there was general internal peace in the empire. But this lifestyle was supported by the countless credits extended by Western institutions, which doomed the Soviet economic system to the 1990s-style downturns. If it wasn't for the West stupidly extending credits to the Soviet Union, it would have collapsed much sooner.
Another reason for collapse was the fact that Saudi Arabian monarchs performed a wonderful service for their American ally at the request of Reagan. Just like Russia today, the Soviet Union was an energy tiger. (So, in a sense this is nothing new.) The Soviet leadership was planning to rely on its energy might for economic stability and political influence in the world, as well as hard currency receipts. Reagan asked the Saudis to start pumping out significantly more oil (I think they doubled it), which collapsed the world price of oil, and undermined the entire Soviet strategy. Russia today is in the same place. The price of oil falls 3 times and the Russian market is down over 70%. (Something similar in Ukraine as well, with the price of steel down 4 times, the markets are down almost 70% now.) Pretty predictable, really. Another "problem" was his anti-alcoholism campaign, which deprived the Soviet central government of significant revenues. The Russian government today is relying on these revenues to take them through the rough times. Sure, they are killing their people with alcoholism and lowering the life expentancy of Russians even further, but at least they are ensuring the excise tax revenues are coming in.
Blaming the collapse of the USSR on Gorbie is at best disingenuous, unless you believe communism and repression is a good thing, and certainly not the whole story. It was inherent in the illiberal system itself. As soon as Gorbie allowed the Soviet people to breathe a little more freedom, the Balts and the Georgians demanded their independence, and were met with some violence. Certainly not in the hardline Soviet style, but there were tanks on the streets in their Republics. The rest of the Soviet system held together, until Yeltsin went around Gorbachev's back, and while demanding the independence of Russia from the Soviet Union, met with his Belarusian and Ukrainian counterparts in Belarus in 1990, sealed an agreement with them and officially declared the end of USSR. The Ukrainian (Communist!) parliament immediately voted for independence. And a year later, in 1991, the Ukrainian people confirmed in a referendum by a vote of 96% (including a majority in Crimea!) that they wanted independence for Ukraine. That was the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union.
What you need to understand about Gorbachev is that he is a social-democrat, Western European style. What he wanted to do was to make the Soviet Union more like the rest of Western Europe, by changing it into a socialism with a soft face. This is precisely what he is asking Obama to do, to make the United States more like Western Europe. Needless to say, that would be bad, as most Western European economic growth rates are at 1-2% per year. Social democracy lowers economic growth by consuming productive capital that's needed for growth.
Gorbachev Urges Obama to Carry Out PerestroikaYou are talking about the downfall of the Soviet Union like it was a bad thing. The only people who think it was a bad thing are the Communists and the Russian nationalists.
http://lexlibertas.com/2008/11/11/gorbachev-urges-obama-to-carry-out-perestroika/
I think it was a wonderful thing because it made liberty and democracy possible for tens of millions of people who were languishing in the Soviet system (Ukrainians, Georgians, the Balts, the 20-30 million slaves in the gulags.). Freedom is well worth the price of a decade of economic hardship following the collapse of communism. And Gorbachev was not necessarily to blame for it. The seeds of the Soviet system's collapse were planted long before the 1980s. (And much of the post-Soviet economic hardship was the result of post-Soviet government policies, and especially so in Ukraine, where the government kept printing money to meet its social obligations, jacking up inflation to 14,000% at one point, and causing the longest post-Soviet economic decline until the year 2000.)
The first seed of destruction, philosophically speaking, was in the beginning, when the entire system was founded on official godlessness and state socialism. But more to the point, Brezhnev (and Reagan) was responsible for the credit hole the Soviet Union was in. A lot of old Soviet citizens remember his senile rule with nostalgia, because sausages were cheap (read subsidized) and there was general internal peace in the empire. But this lifestyle was supported by the countless credits extended by Western institutions, which doomed the Soviet economic system to the 1990s-style downturns. If it wasn't for the West stupidly extending credits to the Soviet Union, it would have collapsed much sooner.
Another reason for collapse was the fact that Saudi Arabian monarchs performed a wonderful service for their American ally at the request of Reagan. Just like Russia today, the Soviet Union was an energy tiger. (So, in a sense this is nothing new.) The Soviet leadership was planning to rely on its energy might for economic stability and political influence in the world, as well as hard currency receipts. Reagan asked the Saudis to start pumping out significantly more oil (I think they doubled it), which collapsed the world price of oil, and undermined the entire Soviet strategy. Russia today is in the same place. The price of oil falls 3 times and the Russian market is down over 70%. (Something similar in Ukraine as well, with the price of steel down 4 times, the markets are down almost 70% now.) Pretty predictable, really. Another "problem" was his anti-alcoholism campaign, which deprived the Soviet central government of significant revenues. The Russian government today is relying on these revenues to take them through the rough times. Sure, they are killing their people with alcoholism and lowering the life expentancy of Russians even further, but at least they are ensuring the excise tax revenues are coming in.
Blaming the collapse of the USSR on Gorbie is at best disingenuous, unless you believe communism and repression is a good thing, and certainly not the whole story. It was inherent in the illiberal system itself. As soon as Gorbie allowed the Soviet people to breathe a little more freedom, the Balts and the Georgians demanded their independence, and were met with some violence. Certainly not in the hardline Soviet style, but there were tanks on the streets in their Republics. The rest of the Soviet system held together, until Yeltsin went around Gorbachev's back, and while demanding the independence of Russia from the Soviet Union, met with his Belarusian and Ukrainian counterparts in Belarus in 1990, sealed an agreement with them and officially declared the end of USSR. The Ukrainian (Communist!) parliament immediately voted for independence. And a year later, in 1991, the Ukrainian people confirmed in a referendum by a vote of 96% (including a majority in Crimea!) that they wanted independence for Ukraine. That was the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union.
What you need to understand about Gorbachev is that he is a social-democrat, Western European style. What he wanted to do was to make the Soviet Union more like the rest of Western Europe, by changing it into a socialism with a soft face. This is precisely what he is asking Obama to do, to make the United States more like Western Europe. Needless to say, that would be bad, as most Western European economic growth rates are at 1-2% per year. Social democracy lowers economic growth by consuming productive capital that's needed for growth.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
New Documentary: The Soviet Story
There's a new European Union-sponsored documentary out about Soviet history. I just saw it and highly recommend it.
This is the official film site: http://www.sovietstory.com/
This is a trailer for the film:
You can see it for free here.
Part 1:
Part 2:
The film features newly discovered evidence from the archives on the close Soviet-Nazi cooperation before the German attack on the Soviet Union. Molotov even made a major speech in the Kremlin in 1939 or in 1940 which he said it would be "a crime for the Western nations to fight against Hitler"! The page with the speech was then removed from newspapers in all the Soviet libraries, after the Soviet Union started portraying itself as an eternal enemy of fascism.
The German naval attack on Norway was also made from the Soviet port of Murmansk! In addition to that, the SS actually visited the Soviet concentration camps to learn how to build them, because the Soviets already had 20 years of experience. And Soviet engineers went to Germany to help them build it. They even have footage in there of Soviet officers greeting the German officers with a Nazi salute! They have also found documented evidence that Stalin had transferred a number of Soviet Jews to the Germans, who promptly put them into concentration camps, where most of them perished.
No wonder this movie was prohibited and castigated in today's Russia...
Russian imperial ambitions predate the Soviet period by hundreds of years (and Russia's military might is largely a function of the price of oil, which seems to constantly increase). Ukraine spent over 300 years under Russian domination, and there was plenty of ideological basis for Moscow to justify its domination and control well before Lenin's revolution, along with the brutal suppression of Ukrainian language and culture within the Russian Empire. The Soviet Union was actually in a way kinder to Ukrainian culture than the Russian Empire was, because at least the Communists preserved and supported the languages of the Soviet minorities, despite the general Russification of education and government.
The post-Soviet nostalgia in the post-Soviet Republics is largely an ethnic Russian phenomenon, and is actually a post-imperial nostalgia. Many Russians want to be part of a great and dominant Russian nation again and think that the partial disassembly of the Russian empire in 1990 was the biggest accident of 20th century history, a sentiment voiced by Putin early in his presidential career. (I was surprised to learn a while back that despite the fact that over 80% of Belarusians want Belarus to remain independent, it is part of the Russia-Belarus Union. In Ukraine, only 2/3rds actually want Ukraine to remain independent, but it is much more independent politically. I think part of the reason for the numbers is that Ukraine has a much larger Russian minority. But the reason for Ukraine's independence vis-a-vis Belarus is a function of the democratic nature of its politics.)
How do you explain the fact that Stalin is seen as the Greatest Russian in History in recent public opinion surveys in Russia? Serious Russian historians have said that this is due to the fact that people in Russia are no longer taught about Soviet crimes, but Stalin is glorified in the textbooks for making Russia a great and respected nation.
Having read "The Rape of Nanking", I agreed with the author that unlike in Germany, there was no national repentance in Japan for the crimes committed by its imperial regime. I woud have to say that the same is true of today's Russia. Soviet crimes are white-washed and presented as necessary by the current government. As a results of this, the history of Japanese atrocities is still largely seen as Chinese and Korean propaganda in Japan, just like this movie is seen as Western provocation in today's Russia and serious criticism of the Soviet Union in general is seen as criticism of Russia. There is no willingless to learn from history. And we all know what happens to those who don't learn from it.
This is the official film site: http://www.sovietstory.com/
This is a trailer for the film:
You can see it for free here.
Part 1:
Part 2:
The film features newly discovered evidence from the archives on the close Soviet-Nazi cooperation before the German attack on the Soviet Union. Molotov even made a major speech in the Kremlin in 1939 or in 1940 which he said it would be "a crime for the Western nations to fight against Hitler"! The page with the speech was then removed from newspapers in all the Soviet libraries, after the Soviet Union started portraying itself as an eternal enemy of fascism.
The German naval attack on Norway was also made from the Soviet port of Murmansk! In addition to that, the SS actually visited the Soviet concentration camps to learn how to build them, because the Soviets already had 20 years of experience. And Soviet engineers went to Germany to help them build it. They even have footage in there of Soviet officers greeting the German officers with a Nazi salute! They have also found documented evidence that Stalin had transferred a number of Soviet Jews to the Germans, who promptly put them into concentration camps, where most of them perished.
No wonder this movie was prohibited and castigated in today's Russia...
Russian imperial ambitions predate the Soviet period by hundreds of years (and Russia's military might is largely a function of the price of oil, which seems to constantly increase). Ukraine spent over 300 years under Russian domination, and there was plenty of ideological basis for Moscow to justify its domination and control well before Lenin's revolution, along with the brutal suppression of Ukrainian language and culture within the Russian Empire. The Soviet Union was actually in a way kinder to Ukrainian culture than the Russian Empire was, because at least the Communists preserved and supported the languages of the Soviet minorities, despite the general Russification of education and government.
The post-Soviet nostalgia in the post-Soviet Republics is largely an ethnic Russian phenomenon, and is actually a post-imperial nostalgia. Many Russians want to be part of a great and dominant Russian nation again and think that the partial disassembly of the Russian empire in 1990 was the biggest accident of 20th century history, a sentiment voiced by Putin early in his presidential career. (I was surprised to learn a while back that despite the fact that over 80% of Belarusians want Belarus to remain independent, it is part of the Russia-Belarus Union. In Ukraine, only 2/3rds actually want Ukraine to remain independent, but it is much more independent politically. I think part of the reason for the numbers is that Ukraine has a much larger Russian minority. But the reason for Ukraine's independence vis-a-vis Belarus is a function of the democratic nature of its politics.)
How do you explain the fact that Stalin is seen as the Greatest Russian in History in recent public opinion surveys in Russia? Serious Russian historians have said that this is due to the fact that people in Russia are no longer taught about Soviet crimes, but Stalin is glorified in the textbooks for making Russia a great and respected nation.
Having read "The Rape of Nanking", I agreed with the author that unlike in Germany, there was no national repentance in Japan for the crimes committed by its imperial regime. I woud have to say that the same is true of today's Russia. Soviet crimes are white-washed and presented as necessary by the current government. As a results of this, the history of Japanese atrocities is still largely seen as Chinese and Korean propaganda in Japan, just like this movie is seen as Western provocation in today's Russia and serious criticism of the Soviet Union in general is seen as criticism of Russia. There is no willingless to learn from history. And we all know what happens to those who don't learn from it.
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