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

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Aug 18 05:58:28 PDT 2011


On Aug 18, 2011, at 7:58 AM, SA wrote:


> On 8/18/2011 7:53 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> On Aug 18, 2011, at 1:09 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>>
>>> But the question wasn't whether Gorbachev was "good" or a "loser," but
>>> rather how important he was.
>> Wasn't he the tool of a CPSU that had pretty much decided that it wanted to end Communism and be like, say, the Christian Democrats in Germany? That's what I got from Boris Kagarlitsky when there still was a USSR.
>
> Balderdash. They picked him to make Communism work better. He and his hand-picked advisers had other ideas.

I just don't buy that. The CPSU was a giant bureaucracy. There was no way that a handful of personalities could operate on their own.

By the way, Kagarlitsky wrote and said that when it still looked like Gorby wanted Communism to "work better." The CP elite was jealous of its counterparts in the west. The guy who ran the construction industry in Leningrad lived in a three-room apartment. They wanted villas.

Doug



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