Justin said (responsing to me):
>
>
>It's not very historically materialist, but quite a few people in Russia
>subscribe to the "Yeltsin was a power-hungry dickhead who dismantled the
>USSR to get rid of Gorbachev" thesis (including Gorbachev). :)
>
>
Gorby's talk, and this thesis, is really about the timing of breakup, nit
it's long term causes. It's like asking, why August 1914 ratherthan why
World WarI? Or: answering the question, why the Civil War with Ft Sumter
ratherthan slavery. So far as the thesis goes, it is probably right in
answering the question it is addressed to. But if we ask: how did the fSU
get in a situation where power hungry dickheads could do that, you need a
combination of Hayek and historical materialism. Actually I think the
Hayekian thesis is historically materialist" it explains why a centrally
planned economy could not develop the productive forces enough to compete
with capitalist market economies.
jks
---------
I would tend to agree, but I think more important than the economic angle is that the USSR gave rise to a ruling elite that at a certain point no longer identified their interests with the survival of the country (I'm thinking mainly of the territorial collapse of the Union, not that of central planning and/or one-party rule.)
I lopped off the most interesting part in Gorbachev's press conference:
(PS. Please bear with Mikhail Sergeyevich's trademark wandering speaking manner. I was at a press conference with him about a year ago, and damn does he take a long time to get to the point.) ---------------
Q: ... (inaudible)... Could you tell us if you could name some symbolic milestones of what happened ten years ago and why it happened as it did?
Gorbachev: Like a timer.
Q: Yes.
Gorbachev: There are several such milestones. First, Yeltsin went away, and he negotiated with me. There are several points. And before his departure, he told me that he was going to meet with Kravchuk and how he should steer the conversation? I told him that he should tell Kravchuk that we have draft Union Treaty and that we have already initialed it, a treaty preserving the Union State. Obviously he would be against because they had all conducted referendums in favor of independence. I tell him: "You have all proclaimed your independence. Well, this only strengthens the positions of each republic in the process of hammering out a new Union Treaty, but no more."
We are going to name it the Union of Sovereign States. So, this is independence. How can a dependent republic or dependent state take part in creating a union? No way. There is nothing new to it. Everyone has already proclaimed his independent. I knew that in parallel Yeltsin -- although he created quite a few problems in the process of drafting the new treaty because the Congress of People's Deputies approved the President's statement and the statements of the heads of the republics to the effect that a new Union Treaty, an economic treaty, should be developed and many other problems should be solved. And he was involved in all these matters. I have a document of the Union Treaty with Yeltsin's marks which he sent back to me on the 26th. And he recognizes everything, the Union state and so on.
Some provisions he wanted struck out or couched in a different way, but all that was in place by September 26. On November 14 everyone went on television and everyone said that the Union would be preserved. They initialed it on 25. And then came the first hitch, the trip there. And at the same time he was coming under pressure from Burbulis and all the others who said we don't need a Union state, that we needed a diverse mechanism and no more than that. And they were gone.
So, I began to find out. And I found out that they were talking to Shaposhnikov. I talked to Shaposhnikov, too. He wriggling. But he was a protege, he had been appointed by the Defense Minister to oppose the putsch. We did this together and he cooperated. He was promised that he would command the united armed forces and he agreed as if he had any authority to decide. In reality he was a hired man, no more than that. But such was the time.
When I pressed harder, I was contacted by Shushkevich and we had a conversation that is well known to everybody. Kravchuk has also disclosed many things, but not all. He came and brought two documents with himself -- a union of states and associated membership, or something like that. But he did not need them. Yeltsin was waiting for an opportunity -- he says that hardly had he mentioned a soft version in the form of a commonwealth, as everybody echoed him.
I was shocked by such treacherous behavior of the people who ruined the country and cut whole peoples into pieces in order to settle scores, in order to secure themselves the royal status. We know what this led to. It was the beginning of December.
Then Yeltsin came back and had a conversation with Nazarbayev before coming to a meeting with me. I telephoned him in 20 minutes and said that I was waiting for him. And he said, I am wondering if I should go and see you. Won't be there an attempt on my life? Do you guarantee my security? And I said, why? The Kremlin is packed with cars, the military and others. I said, as long as I am in the Kremlin, there is no threat to your life. And then he came. What could he say? He couldn't say anything. He had already done his dirty work and he was trying to -- he only did not like it when I gave him the dressing before Nazarbayev. Nothing else worried him. The union, the state, that was not his scale.
And then things started moving. I was shocked. I made a statement and said that the supreme soviets must determine their attitude toward the Belovezhye accords and think about how they could harmonize them with the new draft they had. But nobody paid any attention to this draft. Instead the Belovezhye accords were being pushed through.
Byelorussia, only Lukashenko avoided voting. Russia, Yeltsin didn't care, for he only wanted to destroy the Union. Ukraine, it came up with several important observations, that the foreign policy could not be coordinated, that there could be no united armed forces, that there could be no concerted social and economic policy, but then what could there be? And everybody had his own money.
And the Belovezhye accords began to be disavowed for they only created a semblance of preserving the economic space and concerted actions and security matters. But the Russian Supreme Soviet did not react.
Someone shouted after the second or third speech that it was time to stop this. I think it was Sevostyanov who shouted that the most important thing was that Gorbachev would not longer be in the Kremlin. It seemed that everybody had gone mad. But the press kept silent. Intellectuals kept silent. The people kept silent and the army kept silent. And I was thinking, could it be true that only I needed the union state? Indeed, I had been accused of struggling to preserve the Union only in order to keep the post of president. I brushed this off and urged everybody to decide on the future of the Union and I said that I would write a statement refusing to participate in the next elections that were supposed to follow the adoption of the treaty. It was a dramatic situation, of course.
I appealed to the Alma-Ata meeting, and my appeal was published before the meeting, on the 19th, in all newspapers. If you read what I said there, everything was true except that things turned out to be even more dramatic. But no one in Alma-Ata paid my appeal any attention. They did not even discuss it. Then the day came, it was the 23rd, when I met with Yeltsin and we worked out a procedure, it was after the Alma-Ata agreement, for the Union administration to terminate its work. December 30 was the last day of work and we all moved out.
On the 25th I made a speech. I wanted to show you the last version of the speech, it's all covered with corrections. Yeltsin had to come to pick up the nuclear suitcase as was agreed. But he didn't come. Actually he was outraged by the fact that I had delivered my speech not the way we had agreed on. But then, what could I have agreed with him on? Did he want me to discuss my speech with him? I would have been ridiculous to make any deal with him. And yet I had to pass over the suitcase to make sure that the process did not become uncontrollable like the falling stone that can trigger an avalanche.
Yeltsin proposed to meet at the Kremlin on the neutral land so that I would bring him the suitcase to save him the trouble of picking it up. You may think, good God, these are the people who ran the country. What nonsense they were talking about. Right, I feel ashamed even to tell you about this.
You know, I propose to meet in the St. Catherine Hall. I told the generals, Take the suitcase, the letters and go give him this paper to sign and bring it back to me. Half an hour later everything was finished.
When I was delivering my speech, the flag was already being lowered. Everybody was in a hurry. And the following morning, at 8:00, I received a telephone call from my office because I was scheduled to meet with a Japanese delegation on the 30th. We still had five days before the meeting. Yeltsin, Khasbulatov and Burbulis got together in my office and drank a bottle of whisky for the victory.
I have never set my foot into that office again and I don't know what is there now. By the way, I have never talked to Yeltsin since then.
--------------------- Chris Doss The Russia Journal