Whence Stalin's popularity?

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Fri Mar 7 06:22:41 PST 2003


On Fri, 7 Mar 2003 17:01:44 +0300 "ChrisD(RJ)" <chrisd at russiajournal.com> writes:
>
>
> On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, ChrisD(RJ) wrote:
>
> > Everybody hates Gorbachev though.They guy really was an incredible
> > loser.
>
> But you like him, right? So why does everyone hate so much?
> Because they
> blame him for the break-up of the Soviet Union? Isn't that unfair,
> since
> he wasn't for it?
>
> Michael
> --
> I like him much less than I used too. I consider him an idealistic,
> bumbling
> oaf.

Gorbachev, was in my judgement, very well intentioned, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with though.


> People blame him for permitting the breakup of the USST, and,
> moreover, for
> perestroika. "Perestroika" is a dirty wotd in Russia. Economic
> collapse
> began under Gorbachev, not Stalin.

In fairness to Gorbachev, he was put into power because the Soviet economy had stopped growing, and this at at time of increasing military competition with the US. Gorby and his advisors, at least initially, attempted to resuscitate the Soviet economy by attempting to restructure it, into a form of market socialism. The problem was they had no idea of how to go about this in an effective manner. The dismantling of central planning, simply encouraged the managers of enterprises to act in rapacious ways which maximized their self-interests, at the expense of everyone else. Gorby's attempt to transform state enterprises into cooperatives based on a form of workers' control was a disastrous failure. All it accomplished was to make it easy for managers to seize state assets and to turn state enterprises into the private property of the top managers. This set the stage for the looting under Yeltsin that led to the rise of the oligarchs. Perestroika led to a situation which combined the worst features of both bureaucratic state socialism and capitalism.


>He did really stupid things, like
> ploughing under Moldova's wine field's as part fo his anti-alcohol
> campaign.
> Moreover, he stupidly believed the West when they verbally assured
> him,
> WITHOUT EVEN A WRITTEN DOCUMENT, that NATO would be dissolved if he
> let the
> Warsaw Pact go. Outside of allowing openness (probably too much
> openness)
> into the public sphere, Gorbachev did absolutely nothing for people
> in the
> Soviet Union.

Gorby seems to have swallowed at face value a lot of the promises that the West was making to him at the time. Remember he was also promised billions of dollars in economic assistance to ease the hardships which perestroika was causing. Those billions of dollars, of course, never materialized. Instead, the kind of economic assistance that Russia ultimately received was in the form of collaboration with the oligarchs at robbing the country blind.


>
> I was walking with a 23-year-old girl on Red Square the other day
> and we
> were looking at the graves of the Soviet leaders. I asked her if she
> thought
> they would bury Gorbachev there. Her response was, "I never thought
> about
> it. Who cares about Gorbachev? He did his 'black deeds' (chyorniye
> dela, her
> words) and went away."
>
> Yeltsin his hated far more deeply, though.
>

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