> As you yourself write in another post today of Ticktin's perpicacity:
> "Others, including the marxologue Hillel Ticktin, were predicting many
> of the events which took place as the SU unravelled, by the
mid-1970s."
>
The fact is that a great many people made those kinds of predictions.
Two weeks after the October Revoltuion, The London Times predicted that
the 'feeble' coup led by the 'obscure anarchist-pacificist Ulyanov'
would
not last out the year. In 1941 the British military attache told His
Majesty's Government that the Red Army would collapse 'in three weeks'
under Wehrmacht attack. It's just as interesting to speculate why the
monotonous stream of similar predictions, of which Trotsky's in 1936 was
one, did NOT happen, as it is to understand why the Soviet Union DID fall in 1991.
I notice a surprising degree of unanimity on LBO-talk (surprising to me anyway) about the proposition which Doug and others have forcefully advanced, that the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster for all of us
(excluding LM, perhaps). Actually, I did not spend all my life actively supporting Khrushchev and Brezhnev. But I never made it a task of my life to attack the Soviet Union and to do everything in my power to hasten its destruction, as, for example, Hillel Ticktin has done. The idea that Ticktin was motivated by a disinterested love for the common people of Russia or a deep desire to salvage the honour of Marxism does not seem plausible, since he is such a clever chap anyway and always knew what he was doing and what the likely consequences were.
People can judge for themselves whether the results of his efforts and the efforts of the CIA, MI5, Nato, the yellow press, etc etc -- ie, the destruction of the USSR -- were generally beneficial or not.
It was almost impossible that the Soviet Union should survive, and as we all know, Lenin himself did not expect it. That's the thing which needs explanation. Predicting its downfall was always a very easy (and profitable) thing to do.
Mark
-- Mark Jones http://www.geocities.com/~comparty