I'm not really interested in a dialogue of the deaf. I don't frankly see the point of lists of monarchs and dictators. And I think that most ordinary Russians are likely to be insulted by the suggestion that they are not capable of anything more cute about the past than 'nostalgia', which is a code-word used by everyone from Richard Pipes to Yeltsin himself meaning 'they're too fucking stupid to remember how it really was'. But they're not stupid, in fact.
As for elections, size of demos and weird opinion polls, I think it's all red herrings and doesn't really tell us anything about history, how it was lived, what it meant and what kinds of judgments (of a non-incantatory, knee-jerk kind) we ought to be making about it. So I'm not even going to get into that little dispute. Let us respect the past for what it was, and the sacrifices that were made for and against it.
The main thing to remember is that if the Soviet Union really was just an episode internal to the history of capitalism, then its tragedies and farces tell us more about the pathologies of capitalism than they do of socialism. But insofar as it pointed to horizons beyond capitalism, the Soviet Union and the Soviet people were collectively more daring and more courageous than the Americans ever have been, weren't they?
Mark
Tom Condit wrote:
> At 07:43 AM 5/11/1998 +0100, Mark Jones wrote:
> >
> >
> > Odd how many Russians yearn to be back in that 'police state': ...
>
> Odd how many Frenchmen yearned for the return of Bonaparte, or Scots for the
> Stuart monarchy. For that matter, I met Italians in the 1950s who yearned
> for the good old days of Mussolini when the government finally brought
> running water to their villages, and Peronism still has a grip on large
> sections of the Argentine working class. Also note the Teamsters who plan to
> vote for Junior Hoffa because the union was strong back when his father was
> the Duce.
>
> The politics of nostalgia are an interesting subject for another discussion,
> but I suggest that rather than look at how many Russians would like the old
> regime back (not that huge a number, judging by both size of demonstrations
> and votes in the elections), he should look at how many wanted to get rid of
> it while it was there.
>
> The fact is, when the one and only Gallup poll among Russians and Ukrainians
> was done in the Gorbachev years, it came up with only 10% supporting
> "socialism as we have known it", 17% for Reagan-Thatcher style capitalism,
> and the rest fairly evenly divided between "democratic socialism" and a
> capitalist welfare state like Sweden. Since there wasn't any real democracy
> in the old SU (and isn't in the Russian Federation today either), the "real"
> debate devolved into a quarrel among the apparatchiki as to whether they
> could best loot the country under the old bureaucratic system or the new
> capitalism, with no democratic alternatives allowed.
>
> The only way to get mass participation in real planning for intelligent use
> (and preservation) of natural resources is to have a system under which (a)
> people can put forward and argue for solutions to problems without the prior
> permission of any self-appointed philosoher kings and (b) those responsible
> for carrying out decision can be tossed out from below, not merely judged by
> their peers like a gang of feudal barons.
>
> As the Internationale so well puts it:
>
> "We want no condescending saviours
> To rule us from a judgment hall;
> We workers ask not for their favors,
> Let each consult for all."
>
> Tom C.