September 6, 2022
"In [Putin's] eyes, Gorbachev was contemptibly weak, a heedless custodian of a great empire. He was naïve. He fetishized..."
"... foreign democratic values. He failed to see the United States and Europe as bastions of hypocrisy and aggressive intent. In the course of a seven-year reign, Gorbachev, Putin clearly believes, granted the people freedoms they did not deserve and reduced a superpower to the level of a global supplicant.
Putin seems to view himself as the anti-Gorbachev, an imperial revivalist reasserting Kremlin authority over Russian institutions, Russian citizens, and former Soviet republics. He calls the collapse of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe' of the twentieth century, and he doubtless blames the 'necessity' of invading Ukraine on Gorbachev....."
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This is an example of regression to the mean (average).
The USSR was initially dominated by the aggressive expansionists Lenin and Stalin. They had to be aggressive to push through massive cultural changes.
The USSR became a stagnant bureaucracy by the 1970s with Leonid Brezhnev, and was economically a false-front Potemkin village.
Gorbachev came to power as a naïve and sincere believer in soft, compassionate, generous Communism. He was bringing into practice everything that Karl Marx said would happen when the workers of the world united. He either bought the propaganda about Lenin or never debated with nonbelievers, so he went in blind.
BUT, the selfish will-to-power of human nature never went away. So, the kind sheep Gorby was soon eaten by wolf Putin. The pendulum swings and always passes through the midpoint on the way to another extreme.
Now where is the US now? Biden = Brezhnev?
Then: Gorby was weak, Reagan was strong.
Now: Putin is strong, Bidas Touch is weak, befuddled and lost.
Then: Soviet Union dismantled.
Now: The US ...........
Boy, that David Remnick is an astute observer of world affairs. He has sized up Putin early and well! I hope our State Department people read this.
Seriously: why is The New Yorker wasting electrons on the obvious? Is this part of some CYA or disinformation op?
Gordy lost to Reagan,Thatcher, the Pope, Solidarity, and basic economics. Putin ascribes Gorby's fate and the end of the USSR to Gorby,not to the victorious ations of his opponents. May Putin err in similar fashion in Ukraine and the Baltics and everywhere.
He calls the collapse of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe' of the twentieth century
Like all revisionist historians he will fail to learn the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to economic fundamentals. Like all douchebags who achieve a modest amount of career success he believes it is only his leadership that will lead to success…
Central planning always fails.
Since we are mind-reading Putin, and stripping quotes of context, I am thinking that Putin views the splitting up of the ethnic Russian nation as the tragedy, and the desire of ethnic Ukrainians to assert total control over the Russian half of Ukraine, and the desire of NATO to arm up the Ukraine’s already formidable army 300 miles from Moscow was a red line. Biden said that Putin could shove his red lines, or at let his words be characterized as such in one of his party’s mouthpieces.
Agreeing to the neutral Ukraine that existed before we backed the coup in 2014 would have avoided this war and saved thousands of Ukrainian lives just this past couple of weeks. Instead Biden sent a letter last November that all but guaranteed the Ukraine’s entry into NATO.
We threatened nuclear war over missiles in Cuba, tell me how it’s not the same thing.
Uncle Joe was a psychopath. His Union only came to kill, steal and destroy. Ask the Poles. Putin just wants their stolen real estate back. And Ukrainian real estate is the Dems favorite play ground where money gets laundered
I question the assertions on freedoms. While the Ukraine war and sanctions have adversely impacted this, Russian citizens have generally had greater civil rights under Putin than they did under Gorbachev. Are they up to current Western standards, no, but as one example, the 21st century has been a very good time for Russian literature with many books that would not have seen the light of day under the USSR being published.
[Putin thought Gorbachev] failed to see the United States and Europe as bastions of hypocrisy and aggressive intent.
Putin got that part right.
I can see how the Russian people would judge Gorbachev a failure. The first obligation of a country's leader is to look after the interests of the people he leads. The lives of the people in Russia became significantly worse after the fall of the Soviet Union. Their lives weren't all that good prior to the fall, but they became worse.....I can understand the metrics by which Gorbachev is judged a failure, but I can't understand how Lenin or Stalin can be judged successful. Lenin's path to power involved a civil war, mass murder of class enemies, famine, an unsuccessful war in Poland and all this to establish an economic system that guaranteed further war and famine.....Gorbachev was a failure, but, unlike the Romanovs and the Russian Empire, there were no mountains of bodies to mark the fall of the USSR..... Putin had some success early in his career, but his body count is high and rising. He may yet prove to be a failure on the grand scale of Lenin.....(One of the truly awful things about Lenin is how much New Yorker writers such as Edmund Wilson considered him the bright hope of humanity. To the Finland Station and beyond.)
The Ukraine’s foreign minister has called on Europe to outlaw opposition parties, that’s who we have crawled into bed with.
It’s an appropriate description for Biden as well.
"He fetishized foreign democratic values."
Well, not quite.
"He failed to see the United States and Europe as bastions of hypocrisy and aggressive intent."
True. But I'm not sure Vlad himself played it right. He tried to split the US-EU axis, bribing Germany with gas, which worked for a while, but he could have done more. He is a ruthless rational power player who severely miscalculated.
"an imperial revivalist reasserting Kremlin authority over Russian institutions, Russian citizens, and former Soviet republics."
OK, you can see that's what he was trying to do. But then what? Sure, "authority" matters. But authority without substance and security is fragile, and in practice Vlad traded the old dependence for new dependence on China. What kind of "empire" is that?
Bob Boyd said... [Putin thought Gorbachev] failed to see the United States and Europe as bastions of hypocrisy and aggressive intent. "Putin got that part right."
Yeah, Putin got that part right. This is Reagan's last ambassador to the USSR, writing in Feb 2022:
"So far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep—to the point of seeming to select a prime minister. It also, in effect, supported an illegal coup d’etat that changed the Ukrainian government in 2014, a procedure not normally considered consistent with the rule of law or democratic governance. The violence that still simmers in Ukraine started in the 'pro-Western' west, not in the Donbas where it was a reaction to what was viewed as the threat of violence against Ukrainians who are ethnic Russian."
Without defending the invasion, it's possible to understand we provoked the Russian response, just as Russia would have invited a similar response from us if they had helped depose a pro-American prime minister in Canada and then invited the new government to join an anti-American military alliance.
The weirdest aspect of this is that many conservatives simultaneously think Biden stole the 2020 election and that he's defending freedom and democracy in Ukraine because they're permanently stuck in a Russia-is-USSR-is-Russia feedback loop.
Remnick wants to make Putin sound as horrible as Putin is, but actually portrays him as an admirable realist -- at least until you get to the last sentence.
I'm glad the Soviet Union is gone, and Gorbachev, even in failure and even if only by accident, played a laudable role in its downfall, but relations between Russia and the West might have evolved differently. The mess that came afterwards gave us Putin, and our government is at least partly responsible for the mess and for Putin and for the current war.
Or were the mess and the eventual rise of someone like Putin inevitable, given what Russia has always been?
Perhaps Gorbachev learned something about the true strength and fighting ability of the Soviet army that Putin is learning the hard way about the Russian army?
Without defending the invasion, it's possible to understand we provoked the Russian response
Yup. Well stated.
It struck me recently after discussion elsewhere that Gorby was in a sense the USSR's Hirohito. Both participant and prisoner in structures that had no future.
Both, to their credit, broke radically with their upbringing and tradition, in situations that had no precedent in history.
As for democracy and rule-of-law and all that jazz: the ideas have penetrated everywhere by now, but the original practitioners are losing their touch and backsliding, and in the low-rent districts of the globe any chance of improvement in condition has gone already.
Enjoy the First World while the power lasts, folks.
Once the Soviet Union used up their pre-revolutionary heritage, they stagnated. Industrialization was an 19th century development that they could copy, the modern world began in the middle of the 20th century, and they missed it completely.
Hate Putin. hate Putin. hate Putin.
Here's some unsupported Bullshit Mindreading.
Hate Putin. hate putin. hatin Putin.
Sorry, guys. I do NOT hate Putin. Putin got elected, Gorby didn't. Putin's just looking out for Russia and is fairly popular there.
And I ain't going to fight Russia 'cause you don't like him. Putin never called me a "white supremist racist fascist".
Gorby realized the USSR had outlived its purpose. IRC, he was the first leader who hadn't reached adulthood before 1945. I don't think he did a good job of transitioning Russia to the New Democracy. And he was far too trusting of the West.
I can see why Russians have mixed feelings about him. Russia should have gotten a much better deal for giving up Eastern europe. but then I'm not Russian, so I can see that as a good thing.
Hillary denounced Putin, and the New Yorker is not going to rile the Harridan of Chappaqua(2nd mention).
Hillary denounced Putin six years ago as an election thief and all around dastardly villain, and the New Yorker is not going to rile the Harridan of Chappaqua(2nd mention).
Agreeing to the neutral Ukraine that existed before we backed the coup in 2014 would have avoided this war and saved thousands of Ukrainian lives just this past couple of weeks. Instead Biden sent a letter last November that all but guaranteed the Ukraine’s entry into NATO.
I agree and Biden's handlers seem intent on open war with Russia. The lefties on this blog, like Howard, are OK with it too. I am pretty sure that Trump would not have stumbled into this crisis. Iron ically, the Democrats are destroying the US military while ramping up war talk.
Okay, Gorbachev was a product and anti-product of the Soviet system, but Putin is strictly a product of the KGB. Putin not Gorbachev seems to be the heir of all the evil in the Soviet system.....Putin has tried to impose a military solution to a diplomatic problem. It's a border dispute. The cost of the invasion has already exceeded any possible benefit Russia can reap...Maybe, as some here are arguing, there are merits to Russia's side of the argument. But contra that, Russia launched an invasion that has left millions homeless and thousands dead, and the sunk costs keep sinking. Putin is the villain in this drama, and he's a Bond villain. Gorbachev was a failure, but his failure was more like that of a tragic hero.
Gorbachev, like Putin, was probably getting bad information, and ironically made the same mistake, underestimating how badly the Russians were hated in eastern Europe.
Gorbachev's weakness enabled the progress of oligarchs under ethical religious constructs in contempt of the People, Posterity, and general Fitness of the nation.
"Gorbachev's weakness enabled" civilized forces in the former EE to organize with the goal of establishing something close to Western-style economies and societies. The Russians of course felt a very real national humiliation because they knew like everyone except some dumbass lefties that the EE/WP were solely Great Russian ambitions and projects, for the benefit of the Organs.
But let's all pretend that what happens to a few million unfortunate people in the eastern Ukraine--on a table set by the Reds--is worthy of war and world-crisis, because Putin says so.
What Russia demands is a Tsar.
Tsar Vladimir (Ice, Ice Baby) Putin the First.
Gorby v. Reagan -- Gorby lost, Reagan won. That was the US objective per Reagan.
Of course, we hoped that the USSR would become a friendly member of the community of nations, but it didn't work out that way.
Russia isn't the USSR, but it is a powerful adversary. Right now, Western aid to Ukraine seems to be working well (at a really big cost to Ukraine, of course).
Is there anyone in the US administration who can undermine the current regime in Moscow? If not, why not?
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