lbo-talk-digest V1 #4166

Chris Doss chrisd at russiajournal.com
Tue Apr 3 23:40:59 PDT 2001



>I read Kagarlitskys' article, and about the only objection I had to it
>was that it didn't mention that eastern european governments were
>toppled by masses of people in the streets. And hence their cumulative
>mass movements were responsible for the subsequent tidal effects in
>FSU, not the western powers, the US, or capitalism. Now those movements
>(at least as seen from here some ten thousand miles away and ten years
>later) may have been co-oped by a counter-revolutionary middle class
>seeking to become the new capitalist elite---but it still started in
>the streets.

This is hardky true. Though mass movements did play a large role in destabilizing the USSR in 1988 and 1993 and (unfortunately) in cementing Yeltsin's rule, Perestroika and, even more so, the dissolution of the Union were top-down phenomena. 80% of the population of the Soviet Union was opposed to its dissolution (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia not participating) and virtually everybody in Russia is anti-capitalist. This is hardly the model of a populist revolution.



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