--- Michael Pugliese <michael.098762001 at gmail.com> wrote: I wondered in print how Galloway could appear to be so sensitive to the issue of faith while at the same time lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union (what he called the 'biggest catastrophe of my life'), an atheist state in which many people had been imprisoned for 25 years in slave labour camps for the crime of praying.
---
Solzhenitsyn, a Russian Orthodox Russian nationalist and former object of American right-wing hero-worship, doesn't seem to have a problem with lamenting the collapse of the USSR:
TV INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, TV RUSSIA, JUNE 5, 2005 Source: www.fednews.ru
Anchor: This week school students in Russia were passing end-of-year exams. Eighty thousand school graduates in Moscow were writing compositions on one of five topics offered. The topics offered were Lermontov, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky and what teachers admitted was a particularly difficult topic, "The Individual and Power in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Prose".
Alexander Solzhenitsyn devoted his whole life brooding on the issues of where in Russia is the individual, where is power and what the relationship between them is. It was only in recent years that we haven't heard from him. But today the Nobel Prize Winner receives us in his home and this interview breaks the silence of the classic writer.
Alexander Isayevich, in this day and age when everybody is talking about democracy, people, I think, diverge on the main thing, what is democracy? Everyone has his own idea of it. Perhaps, it is a myth, rather like communism is. And who better to direct this question to than you are?
(snip)
What kind of democracy have we seen, starting from early Gorbachev period? And I am not speaking about the pre-Gorbachev period. One of the first moves of Yeltsin's democracy -- what was the prime task of democracy under Yeltsin? To knock down Gorbachev. How? By breaking up the Soviet Union. How to do it? Three persons got together in Belovezhskaya Pushcha for a booze party. Were they aware that they were tampering with a huge state process? Okay, you can divide up if it is necessary. But it should be done in a statesman like way. You should weigh everything: What orders? Who lives where? What economic ties? It is a process that takes many years. But instead they did everything at one stroke, by issuing just one order.
What kind of democracy did we have? We had a referendum. That was all the democracy we had. Bureaucrats in their offices decided that prices should be floated. At once. In this country, in general, we tend to do everything at once and as quickly as possible. Nothing is done gradually or slowly, nothing is thought over. Hurry up! Free up the prices quickly. But in the process millions of people will lose their lifetime's savings. To hell with them. And -- off they go.
But at the breakup of the Soviet Union 25 million of our fellow countrymen found themselves living abroad, in another country. Did our leaders, headed by Yeltsin, think about them? Did they think about how the 25 million people would live? Won't their rights be infringed upon, won't their culture be suppressed? What will be their economic situation, how will they be linked with their homeland? Not a thought was given to all this. People were thrown into the water like blind kittens to be drowned. Is that democracy?
For centuries governors in Russia were appointed. It makes sense. The governor implements the will of the central government locally. Yeltsin, with his broad sweep, introduced free elections of governors. Ninety governors? Okay, let it be 90. Were these elections prepared? Not at all, there was a total mess in the local elections.
The local moneybags interfered, money, bribes, cheating decided everything, and in some places the elections were downright criminal, run by the local mafias. But the worst of it was that the government thought it was not enough to rob people of their savings. A lot more was up for grabs. What riches! They are there for the taking. They robbed Russia, quickly, quickly. Chubais bragged at the time that no country in the world had seen such rapid privatization. And he was right, nobody in the world had ever witnessed such quick privatization.
Quite right, nobody in the world had there been such idiots. With immense speed our God-given resources, minerals, oil, non- ferrous metals, coal and production were distributed. Russia was stripped naked. Nothing is left. Is that democracy? Was there a referendum on this issue? Was anyone's opinion asked? Was it a case of the people exercising its power and deciding its future? And so they created out of filth some kind of billionaires who had done nothing for Russia. At best they grabbed what was given to them for free or almost for free. They grabbed chunks of property to become billionaires and in our impotent despair we now admire them. We have a cult of millionaires.
We don't mind living as we do as long as billionaires feel happy. If it is democracy, you have to go out into the street and complain of having been robbed, of having been deprived of some of your benefits. If you have to stage hunger strikes in order to get paid your wages, this is no democracy. Fifteen years ago I printed an article in the Soviet Union, "How Should We Develop Russia?" I addressed many questions, and I envisaged the disintegration of the Union, and Gorbachev laughed it off. Breakup of the Soviet Union? Nonsense, Gorbachev laughed. And I said that the breakup was inevitable and imminent. I said we should prepare commissions to discuss what would happen with people: prepare compensations, ways how they should behave, decide on what citizenship they should have. Nothing was done, they just laughed at it.
(snip)
.. We have deprived the people of everything, absolutely everything. Starting from the first day of the Gorbachev era, and onward and onward. We have never had democracy. I have repeated many times, we don't have even a semblance of democracy. I can repeat again: democracy is a state and social system in which the people in their mass direct their destinies. This is not the case but the authorities are under pressure to deliver democracy. There is a danger everywhere. People should have responsibility for their country in their heads, the opposition too. You can break up any country. But if citizens are responsible, they shouldn't break up the country, they should treat it. They should proceed carefully and apply reforms.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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