[lbo-talk] Gorbachev: I Should Have Left the Communist Party Earlier

[Wojtek S]

I do not think he handed over the country to IMF style oligarchs.  A
lot of literature on E Europe show the rapid growth of technocrats as
a new social class (sometimes referred to as "red bourgeoisie.")  It
was clear that the old central planning structures were an impediment
for the growing appetites of that social class - which btw admired
Thatcher.  So it was not as much as handing it cover to IMF oligarchs,
but rather the red bourgeoisie taking the formal possession of what
they already controlled as state employees.

wojtek

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 1:27 PM, // ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On Aug 17, 2011, at 11:13 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, // ravi wrote:
>>
>>> do you feel we (Russia and the world) would be the same today if Putin had succeeded Chernenko?
>>
>> There couldn't have happened.  Putin wasn't selected into the central committee.  He wasn't the kind of guy they were looking for then.
>
>
> True. But I suspect Gorbachev was still more than an apparatchik marching to a new central committee tune. If not for anything else, for those of us on the other side of the imperial curtain, he was the flesh behind “glasnost” and “perestroika”. I am curious: what part did he (as opposed to Yeltsin) have to play in handing over the country to IMF-style manipulators and oligarchs? I have assumed that Gorbachev having been ousted shortly after the Soviet Union crumbled, most of the blame for what followed rests with Yeltsin… but that’s just an assumption.
>
>        —ravi
>
>
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