Good ol’ days: In Putin’s Russia, people increasingly identify with the Soviet Union

Many Russians hanker for the old USSR, but it has more to do with cultural and economic nostalgia than wanting the old Soviet empire back.

Stephen Whitefield& Paul Chaisty, The Conversation

File photo of Russian Communist party supporters at Red Square in Moscow. 

| Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP

The view that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, wants to restore territories of the Soviet Union has been a big part of the commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But how much is he in tune with the wishes of the Russian people? Our research suggests that while Russian citizens increasingly identify with the Soviet Union, this is only partially explained by their desire to expand Russia’s borders.

People’s identification with the Soviet Union appears to have a clear and growing basis in Russian public opinion. Surveys we have conducted throughout the Putin period show that Soviet identification among the general population – something that had been steadily declining after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – began to increase in 2014 when the Russian government annexed Crimea and supported rebellions in the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. By 2021, almost 50% of those surveyed identified with the Soviet Union rather than the Russian Federation.

Survey asks respondents to consider the statement: ‘I identify more strongly with the Soviet Union than I do with the Russian Federation.’ The responses are reported in percentages.

 Data: Survey conducted by R-Research Ltd, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Author provided

This pattern was also evident among Putin’s supporters. As the graph below shows, after we have controlled for age and affluence – two variables that are strong predictors of identifying with the Soviet Union, with older and less affluent people more inclined to identify with the Soviet Union – the probability that Putin voters are likely to be Soviet rather than Russian identifiers increases significantly after 2014.

In this figure, we report the differences between the predicted probabilities that Putin voters would identify with either the Russian Federation or the Soviet Union, holding all other factors (including controls for age and economic affluence) at their means.

 Data: Survey conducted by R-Research Ltd. Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Author provided

But is this growth in Soviet identity motivated by support for Putin’s expansionist policies? In other words, did the annexation of Crimea create a bedrock of expansionist support for the Kremlin’s military assault on Ukraine in 2022?

Hankering for past

Identification with the Soviet past can derive from many sources. These tend to include nostalgia for Soviet-era economic and welfare policies as well as a cultural nostalgia for a particular Soviet “way of life” and traditional values. It can also manifest as a desire for direct worker participation in politics, and a rejection of “elitist” forms of representative liberal democracy.

Finally – and in line with the primary focus of our research – identifying with the Soviet Union may stem from hostility towards perceived western interference and a desire to expand Russia’s borders to include parts of the former Soviet Union – the so-called “near abroad”.


So which of these is most important among Russian citizens? Our data do not support the idea that expansionist or anti-western attitudes are the primary reason people want to identify with the Soviet Union, although they may have been a strong catalyst in 2014.

The chart below reports the probabilities for a direct measure of support for “expanding Russian borders to include the ‘near abroad’”, which we asked in 2001, 2003, 2014 and 2018. We also asked about people’s views of the market economy, whether they had conservative cultural views, “Leninist” notions of worker political participation and anti-western sentiment.

Our findings suggest that expansionism played a little role for Russian citizens in 2001 or 2003 – and was not the most significant element driving Soviet identity in 2018 either. Its effect was greatest in 2014, which is consistent with the “rally around the flag” effect that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Note: Each variable is binary. In this figure, we report the differences between the predicted probabilities for each explanatory factor, holding all other factors (including controls for age and economic affluence) at their means. 

Data: Survey conducted by R-Research Ltd, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Author provided

Likewise, anti-western sentiment has not been the main driver of recent Soviet identification among Russians. Our fourth graph, below, summarises probabilities for the effects of anti-western attitudes across all the surveys we conducted from 2001 to 2021, along with the other measures.

As can be seen, the effect of anti-western attitudes has largely diminished over time. In most years, we find that cultural conservatism and anti-market sentiment have been the main reasons why people might prefer to identify with the Soviet Union.

Note: Each variable is binary. In this figure, we report the differences between the predicted probabilities for each explanatory variable, holding all other factors (including controls for age and economic affluence) at their means. 

Data: Survey conducted by R-Research Ltd, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Author provided

Support for Putin

The magnitude of the current conflict has the potential to deepen anti-western attitudes in Russia and to stimulate a further bout of “rallying around the flag” in support of Putin’s expansionist war.

Yet the economic and cultural bases of Soviet identity are likely to remain key to Putin’s support. These factors have enabled Putin to broaden his political coalition since returning to the presidency in 2012.

Support for Soviet-style social benefits featured in his election campaign in 2018 and was part of the political offer made to the Russian people in 2020 to secure constitutional changes that could keep him in office until 2036.

The economic costs imposed on Russians through sanctions could undermine this appeal, but as we argue in other research, this is unlikely to have an immediate impact.


Stephen Whitefield is a Fellow in Politics and Paul Chaisty is Professor of Russian and East European Politics at the University of Oxford.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Yeltsin Schmeltsin

It is whispered,,in fine old Stalinist fashion, that at the passing of the Great Leader Yeltsin nobody knew for sure at first because they thought he was dead....drunk.

Vodka Part II: Sobering Up the USSR by Alexei Bayer

When the Soviet Union finally disintegrated at the end of 1991,

Vodka rationing exposed the true misery of everyday Soviet life — without any alcoholic shock absorber.

Boris Yeltsin — the new Russian leader — decided not to repeat Mr. Gorbachev’s error of restricting access to vodka.

That was to be expected not just on grounds of political smarts. After all, Mr. Yeltsin himself was far from a teetotaler.

From abroad, Mr. Yeltsin might have appeared rather ridiculous. But to Russians, his drunkenness was a hopeful sign that their own love of vodka would never be denied.

A poll done shows 70% of Russians consider Boris Yeltsin a failure and the reason for the collapse of their political economy and social order. He is not their hero.

A poll by the Levada Analytical Centre in December found 70 percent think the Yeltsin era did more harm than good. Half thought he should be prosecuted.

He is however a hero to the Cold War leaders in the West, which is why they showed up at his funeral, while the common people stayed away in droves.

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While praised for bringing Democracy to Russia he did so in fine old Stalinist fashion by using tanks.

In August 1991, Yeltsin won international plaudits for casting himself as a democrat and defying the August coup attempt of 1991 by hard-line Communists. But he left office widely despised as a desperate, ailing autocrat among the Russian population. As president, Yeltsin's conception of the presidency was highly autocratic. Yeltsin either acted as his own prime minister (until June 1992) or appointed men of his choice, regardless of parliament. His confrontations with parliament climaxed in the October 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, when Yeltsin called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents in parliament. Later in 1993, Yeltsin imposed a new constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in December.

All the praise for Yeltsin is misplaced, he was a mere opportunist in the right place at the right time to become America's Man to run in the first American style elections for an American style Presidency, in post cold war Russia. His legacy? Putin.

While some in the media will foist on the public the myth that Yeltsin was some how responsible for the end of the Soviet Union, that too is American wishful thinking. He will go down in history as a footnote in biographies of Gorbachev.

The Soviet Collapse

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust. There were three options--or a combination of three options--available to the Soviet leadership.

First, dissolve the Eastern European empire and effectively stop barter trade in oil and gas with the Socialist bloc countries, and start charging hard currency for the hydrocarbons. This choice, however, involved convincing the Soviet leadership in 1985 to negate completely the results of World War II. In reality, the leader who proposed this idea at the CPSU Central Committee meeting at that time risked losing his position as general secretary.

Second, drastically reduce Soviet food imports by $20 billion, the amount the Soviet Union lost when oil prices collapsed. But in practical terms, this option meant the introduction of food rationing at rates similar to those used during World War II. The Soviet leadership understood the consequences: the Soviet system would not survive for even one month. This idea was never seriously discussed.

Third, implement radical cuts in the military-industrial complex. With this option, however, the Soviet leadership risked serious conflict with regional and industrial elites, since a large number of Soviet cities depended solely on the military-industrial complex. This choice was also never seriously considered.

Unable to realize any of the above solutions, the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a policy of effectively disregarding the problem in hopes that it would somehow wither away. Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely.

When the situation in the Soviet Union is examined from financial and hard currency perspectives, Gorbachev's policies at the time are much easier to comprehend (see figure 6). Government-to-government loans were bound to come with a number of rigid conditions. For instance, if the Soviet military crushed Solidarity Party demonstrations in Warsaw, the Soviet Union would not have received the desperately needed $100 billion from the West. The Socialist bloc was stable when the Soviet Union had the prerogative to use as much force as necessary to reestablish control, as previously demonstrated in Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. But in 1989 the Polish elites understood that Soviet tanks would not be used to defend the communist government.

The only option left for the Soviet elites was to begin immediate negotiations about the conditions of surrender. Gorbachev did not have to inform President George H. W. Bush at the Malta Summit in 1989 that the threat of force to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not be employed. This was already evident at the time. Six weeks after the talks, no communist regime in Eastern Europe remained.

Tags
state capitalism, USSR, Russia, Putin Lenin, Bureaucratic Collectivism, , Soviet Union, Bolsheviks, Boris Yeltsin, socialism, marxist, communist, state-capitalist,

Nazi invasion of Soviet Union was 'murderous barbarity'

Commemorating the upcoming 80th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the suffering of the former Soviet people should be "burned into Germany's collective memory.

Watch video 02:09 80 years since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke at the German-Russian museum in Berlin-Karlhorst on Friday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II.

The museum is located in the same building where the German Wehrmacht signed the unconditional surrender to representatives of the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France on May 8, 1945.

"Nobody during this war mourned more victims than the people of the former Soviet Union," Steinmeier said, adding that the German war against the Soviets was carried out with "murderous barbarity."

"It weighs on us that our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers who waged this war, were involved in these crimes," he added.


German President Steinmeier opened the exhibit "Dimensions of a Crime: Soviet Prisoners of War in World War II."

Steinmeier's remarks opened an exhibition at the museum called, "Dimensions of a Crime: Soviet Prisoners of War in World War II." The Wehrmacht captured around 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war, of whom 3 million died in captivity.

On Monday, Steinmeier visited the Sandbostel camp in the northern state of Lower Saxony, a former prisoner-of-war camp that today is a memorial site. Steinmeier spoke with former prisoners and laid a wreath.

President Steinmeier lays a wreath at the Sandbostel memorial on Monday

On Tuesday, June 22, a wreath-laying ceremony is scheduled at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin-Pankow.

Representatives from 15 ex-Soviet states were invited to Friday's exhibition. Ukrainian Ambassador Andrij Melnyk rejected the invitation, calling the museum venue "an affront" because of its "Russian" focus and because the wartime persecution of other countries such as Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states was being "simply ignored."

UKRAINE , BELARUS (WHITE RUSSIANS) BALTIC STATES COLLABORATED WITH THE NAZI'S AGAINST THE RUSSIAN COMMUNISTS

The German-Russian museum is the building where Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945

What was Operation Barbarossa?

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the former Soviet Union, which was code-named Operation Barbarossa.

The attack involved 3.3 million troops along an 1,800-mile (2,900-kilometer) front, making it one of the largest invasion forces in history.

Adolf Hitler famously broke the non-aggression pact, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, signed in secret between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union weeks before the war began in August 1939. 

GIVING STALIN MUCH NEEDED TIME TO BUILD MASS MANUFACTURING OF WEAPONS SYSTEMS LEARNED FROM THE GERMANS THE T90 TANK IS ONE RESULT

The German invasion less than two years later caught the Soviets by surprise, and their forces were initially overwhelmed and incurred heavy losses before consolidating to block the German offensive.

Eastern Europe's WWII killing fields

Operation Barbarossa opened the Eastern Front in Europe, the largest of the entire war, which witnessed some of its fiercest battles and worst atrocities until Nazi Germany's capitulation in May 1945.

An estimated 30 million people were killed on the Eastern Front — far more than any other theater during World War II.


RUSSIA MARKS 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF STALINGRAD WITH PARADES AND NOSTALGIA

One of Soviet Russia's greatest World War II triumphs
Russia celebrated the 75th anniversary of the defense of Stalingrad on Friday with somber memorials and patriotic military parades. Russian President Vladimir Putin was a highly visible presence throughout the day, laying wreaths, addressing veterans and attending military parades. He is seen here in front of 85-meter The Motherland Calls statue in what is now called Volgograd. PHOTOS 1234567

Soviet civilians in areas under Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe were subjected to brutal and arbitrary killings. Nazi racial ideology targeted both Jews and Slavs, millions of whom were executed or sent to concentration camps.

"From the first day the German campaign was driven by hatred, by antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism, by racist madness against the Slavic and Asian peoples of the Soviet Union," Steinmeier said.

"Those who waged this war killed in every possible way, with unprecedented brutality and cruelty," he added. "It was German barbarism, it cost millions of lives and devastated the continent."

Learning from history

Steinmeier's office said in a statement that the series of memorial events this week is intended to draw attention to the suffering of the Soviet Union, which at 27 million incurred the highest number of casualties during World War II, 14 million of whom were civilians.

"Only those who learn to read the traces of the past in the present will be able to contribute to a future that avoids wars," Steinmeier said.

"And yet these millions are not as deeply burned into our collective memory as their suffering and our responsibility require," Steinmeier said.

He added that after the war, many Germans did not want to hear about the wartime suffering of people in the Soviet Union, whose story had been obscured by the Cold War and the division of Europe behind the Iron Curtain.

"Only those who learn to read the traces of the past in the present will be able to contribute to a future that avoids wars, rejects tyranny and enables peaceful coexistence in freedom," Steinmeier said Friday.

Famine, subjugation and nuclear fallout: How Soviet experience helped sow resentment among Ukrainians toward Russia

Jacob Lassin, Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Russian and East European Studies, Arizona State University 

Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Harvard University

THE CONVERSATION
Sun, February 5, 2023 

A statue commemorating the Ukrainian famine, in which millions died. Ukrainian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Ukraine and Russia share a great deal in the way of history and culture – indeed for long periods in the past, the neighboring countries were part of larger empires encompassing both territories.

But that history – especially during the Soviet period from 1922 to 1991, in which Ukraine was absorbed into the communist bloc – has also bred resentment. Opinions of the merits of the Soviet Union and its leaders diverge, with Ukrainians far less likely to view the period favorably than Russians.

Nonetheless, President Vladimir Putin continues to claim Soviet foundations for what he sees as “historical Russia” – an entity that includes Ukraine.

As scholars of that history, we believe that an examination of Soviet-era policies in Ukraine can offer a useful lens for understanding why so many Ukrainians harbor deep resentment toward Russia.

Stalin’s engineered famine

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of Europe and later of the Soviet Union. Its rich soil and ample fields made it an ideal place to grow the grain that helped feed the entire continent.

After Ukraine was absorbed into the Soviet Union beginning in 1922, its agriculture was subject to collectivization policies, in which private land was taken over by the Soviets to be worked communally. Anything produced on those lands would be redistributed across the union.

In 1932 and 1933, a famine devastated the Soviet Union as a result of aggressive collectivization coupled with poor harvests.

A deliberate famine? Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Millions starved to death across the Soviet Union, but Ukraine felt the brunt of this horror. Research estimates that some 3 million to 4 million Ukrainians died of the famine, around 13% of the population, though the true figure is impossible to establish because of Soviet efforts to hide the famine and its toll.

Scholars note that many of the political decisions of the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin – such as preventing Ukrainian farmers from traveling in search of food, and severely punishing anyone who took produce from collective farms – made the famine much worse for Ukrainians. These policies were specific to Ukrainians within Ukraine, as well as Ukrainians who lived in other parts of the Soviet Union.

Some historians claim that Stalin’s moves were done to quash a Ukrainian independence movement and were specifically targeted at ethnic Ukrainians. As such, some scholars call the famine a genocide. In Ukrainian, the event is known as “Holodomor,” which means “death by hunger.”

Recognition of the full extent of the Holodomor and implicating Soviet leadership for the deaths remains an important issue in Ukraine to this day, with the country’s leaders long fighting for global recognition of the Holodomor and its impact on modern Ukraine.

Countries such as the United States and Canada have made official declarations calling it a genocide.

But this is not the case in much of the rest of the world.

Just as the the Soviet government of the day denied that there were any decisions that explicitly deprived Ukraine of food – noting that the famine affected the entire country – so too do present-day Russian leaders refuse to acknowledge culpability.

Russia’s refusal to admit that the famine disproportionately affected Ukrainians has been taken by many in Ukraine as an attempt to downplay Ukrainian history and national identity.

Soviet annexation of Western Ukraine

This attempt to suppress Ukrainian national identity continued during and after World War II. In the early years of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian national movement was concentrated in the western parts of modern-day Ukraine, part of Poland until the Nazi invasion in 1939.

Before Gemany’s invasion, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany entered into a secret agreement, under the guise of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, which outlined German and Soviet spheres of influence over parts of central and east Europe.

David Low’s famed cartoon depicting Stalin and Hitler’s pact over Poland.

David Low/British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent

After Germany invaded Poland, the Red Army moved into the eastern portion of the country under the pretense of stabilizing the failing nation. In reality, the Soviet Union was taking advantage of the provisions laid out in the secret protocol. The Polish territories that now make up western Ukraine were also incorporated into Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, subsuming them into the larger Russian cultural world.

At the end of the war, the territories remained part of the Soviet Union.

Stalin set about suppressing Ukrainian culture in these newly annexed lands in favor of a greater Russian culture. For example, the Soviets repressed any Ukrainian intellectuals who promoted the Ukrainian language and culture through censorship and imprisonment.

This suppression also included liquidating the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, a self-governing church that has allegiance to the pope and was one of the most prominent cultural institutions promoting Ukrainian language and culture in these former Polish territories.

Its properties were transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church, and many of its priests and bishops were imprisoned or exiled. The destruction of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is still a source of resentment for many Ukrainians. It stands, we believe as scholars, as a clear instance of the Soviets’ intentional efforts to destroy Ukrainian cultural institutions.

The legacy of Chernobyl in Ukraine

Just as disaster marked the early years of Ukraine as a Soviet republic, so did its final years.

In 1986 a nuclear reactor at the Soviet-run Chernobyl nuclear power in the north of Ukraine went into partial meltdown. It remains the worst peacetime nuclear catastrophe the world has seen.

It required the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people in the areas surrounding the power plant. And to this day, approximately 1,000 square miles of Ukraine are part of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where radioactive fallout remains high and access is restricted.

Soviet lies to cover up the extent of the disaster – and missteps that would have limited the fallout – only compounded the problem. Emergency personnel were not given proper equipment or training to deal with the nuclear material.

It resulted in a heavy death toll and a higher than normal incidence of radiation-induced disease and complications such as cancer and birth defects among both former residents of the region and the workers sent in to deal with the disaster.

Other Soviet republics and European countries faced the fallout from Chernobyl, but it was the authorities in Ukraine who were tasked with organizing evacuations to Kyiv while Moscow attempted to cover up the scope of the disaster.

Meanwhile, independent Ukraine has been left to attend to the thousands of citizens who have chronic illnesses and disabilities as a result of the accident.

An abandoned fun fair, two kilometers from the Chernobyl power station. 

Martin Godwin/Getty Images

The legacy of Chernobyl looms large in Ukraine’s recent past and continues to define many people’s memory of living in the Soviet era.

Memories of a painful past

This painful history of life under Soviet rule forms the backdrop to resentment in Ukraine today toward Russia. To many Ukrainians, these are not merely stories from textbooks, but central parts of people’s lives – many Ukrainians are still living with the health and environmental consequences of Chernobyl, for instance.

The presence of Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s soil serves as a reminder of past attempts by its neighbor to crush Ukrainian independence.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

It was written by: Emily Channell-Justice, Harvard University and Jacob Lassin, Arizona State University.

Read more:

Russia’s recent invasions of Ukraine and Georgia offer clues to what Putin might be thinking now

Why Putin has such a hard time accepting Ukrainian sovereignty

The US military presence in Europe has been declining for 30 years – the current crisis in Ukraine may reverse that trend

Jacob Lassin receives funding from the National Council for Russian and East European Research.

Emily Channell-Justice does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HOLODOMOR 

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KGB archives show how Chrystia Freeland drew the ire (and respect) of Soviet intelligence services


OCTOBER 11, 2021

The Soviet secret police, the notorious KGB, praised his knowledge and scholarship, even as he thwarted their spying efforts in Cold War Ukraine. He tagged her with the code name Frida. But today we know Chrystia Freeland as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Canada.

Ms Freeland’s ties with Ukraine are no secret, but material uncovered from the KGB archives in Kiev highlights her role in the Ukrainian independence movement during an exchange with Harvard University.

In the former Soviet republic – now Moscow’s anti-communist – access to information from the communist period is guaranteed, both as part of reckoning with Ukraine’s past and apparently as a rebuke to Russia, which is once again the country. But seeking to impose itself.

Materials show that the attention of Soviet intelligence services was drawn to the then troubled young Canadian, who was the subject of condemnation in the Soviet press and even guaranteed a feature in top-secret KGB documents.

In articles titled “Abuse of hospitality”, Soviet newspapers publicly reprimanded the Canadian visitor for interfering with the affairs of the Soviet Union with malice.

What business, asked the Kiev newspaper Pravda Ukrainian, has someone from Edmonton led a civil organization for the preservation of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine? Why did someone in Ukraine spend so little time sponsoring his trip to university to study Ukrainian – and why studied, when he repeatedly spoke and clearly showed at television rallies, he uttered the language impeccably Spoken?

Even Pravda, the official broadsheet of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced her, under her name and others like her, for her efforts to separate Ukraine from the USSR.

Ms. Freeland said in a written statement to: “I know that my work with pro-democracy and environmental activists provoked the anger of the Soviet KGB. I remember being the target of smear campaigns in the Soviet press.

“Although I was eventually forced to leave the country, I have no regrets about my time in Ukraine during Soviet times. What I found very powerful from this experience was how quickly a rotten street The political system can collapse, and how important can the work of brave dissidents be.”

Ms. Freeland was part of an influx of tourists, activists, missionaries, students and even historians to work in the archives (but with questionable motives by the authorities, including the KGB) during her final years in the Soviet Union. wanted. . But he is unique for the KGB in becoming a top-secret published case study of how much damage a determined foreigner could do to the USSR as they knew it.

The Soviet Union’s state media tended to adopt a breathless style, highlighting what they saw as the wicked moves of foreigners such as Ms. Freeland. However, the KGB’s Colonel A.I. based in Kiev. Stroi, in his report of so much suffering to the woman in the pages of the KGB’s top sborne KGB SSSR (Digest of the KGB of the USSR), shrugged off the pretentious indignation. Secret, in-house journal.

Ms. Freeland, and her like, was a threat to the Soviet Union – but one that had to be handled delicately: treating her too harshly could give credence to the “outrageous” stories told in Ukrainian expatriate communities that the KGB did nationally. How did you treat minorities? in the Soviet Union.

According to the KGB, Ms Freeland was more than just an agitator, as Colonel Stroi called it “the liberation of Ukraine”, which forced Soviet citizens to stage marches and rallies to attract Western support. He gave cash, video- and audio-recording equipment, and even a personal computer to his contacts in Ukraine.

All this happened under the watchful eye of the KGB, which surveyed Ms. Freeland. Its officers followed her wherever she went, tapped her phone calls to Ukrainians abroad, disturbed her residence, read her mail, and had an informant, codenamed Slav, herself Ms. Involved in the siege of Freeland and gained the trust of young Canadians.

Freeland warns Canadians to beware of Russian propaganda

But Ms. Freeland knew the rules of the road. He used a Canadian diplomat at the embassy in Moscow, known to the KGB as Bison and suspected of being a spy, to send material abroad in a diplomatic pouch that could not be intercepted or read.

She increasingly avoided large gatherings, lest her participation draw too much attention to her. And the Soviet secret police’s attempt to curtail his activities failed: his teacher at the Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev, on the orders of the KGB, increased his workload. But the student, apparently on a visa to study Ukrainian, was so fluent that he didn’t even need to appear first in class to make the grade – much to the KGB’s concern.
Instead, she spent her time traveling to Ukraine, meeting far-flung family members, but actually working as a fixer for journalists from Canada, Britain and the United States, for example the BBC. Taking the film crew to Lviv to meet the leaders. Ukrainian Catholic Church. Among the countless “major” news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially the lives of non-Russian citizens, were her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland, noting her future career prospects. She was ready to make a name for herself in the field of journalism.

Colonel Stroi certainly objected to what Ms Freeland was doing in Ukraine, but KGB officers could not help but be impressed. She was “a remarkable person” with “an analytical mindset”. Young Canadians were “scholarly, sociable, persistent, and inventive in achieving their goals”, as they were nefarious in the eyes of Soviet intelligence.

The student who caused so many headaches clearly hated the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. He skillfully concealed his actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with his Ukrainian contacts), and expertly smuggled in “misinformation”. The conclusion is inevitable: Chrystia Freeland, this KGB officer was saying, would have made an excellent detective herself.

Ms Freeland’s time in the Soviet Union ended when customs agents at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, the KGB reported, searched her luggage while returning from a trip to London and found anti-Soviet material. Even more worryingly, he discovered a genuine guide to running elections destined for use by non-Communist Party candidates campaigning for Ukrainian independence in the Soviet Union’s first free elections. He was denied re-entry on March 31, 1989.

Nearly 30 years later, no love is lost between the deputy prime minister of Canada and the current leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin himself, a former KGB official. And she still can’t fly into Moscow – since 2014, Chrystia Freeland has once again been the target of Kremlin sanctions, barred from entering the country.

Simon Miles is an assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

Famine, subjugation and nuclear fallout: How Soviet experience helped sow resentment among Ukrainians toward Russia

The Conversation
January 30, 2022

‘We have a chance to show the truth’: Inside Chernobyl's 'death zone' 30 years later
Ukraine and Russia share a great deal in the way of history and culture – indeed for long periods in the past, the neighboring countries were part of larger empires encompassing both territories.

But that history – especially during the Soviet period from 1922 to 1991, in which Ukraine was absorbed into the communist bloc – has also bred resentment. Opinions of the merits of the Soviet Union and its leaders diverge, with Ukrainians far less likely to view the period favorably than Russians.

Nonetheless, President Vladimir Putin continues to claim Soviet foundations for what he sees as “historical Russia” – an entity that includes Ukraine.

As scholars of that history, we believe that an examination of Soviet-era policies in Ukraine can offer a useful lens for understanding why so many Ukrainians harbor deep resentment toward Russia.

RAWSTORY+
Revisiting 'The Lost Boys of Ukraine': How the war abroad attracted American white supremacists

Stalin’s engineered famine

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of Europe and later of the Soviet Union. Its rich soil and ample fields made it an ideal place to grow the grain that helped feed the entire continent.

After Ukraine was absorbed into the Soviet Union beginning in 1922, its agriculture was subject to collectivization policies, in which private land was taken over by the Soviets to be worked communally. Anything produced on those lands would be redistributed across the union.

In 1932 and 1933, a famine devastated the Soviet Union as a result of aggressive collectivization coupled with poor harvests.


A deliberate famine?
Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Millions starved to death across the Soviet Union, but Ukraine felt the brunt of this horror. Research estimates that some 3 million to 4 million Ukrainians died of the famine, around 13% of the population, though the true figure is impossible to establish because of Soviet efforts to hide the famine and its toll.

Scholars note that many of the political decisions of the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin – such as preventing Ukrainian farmers from traveling in search of food, and severely punishing anyone who took produce from collective farms – made the famine much worse for Ukrainians. These policies were specific to Ukrainians within Ukraine, as well as Ukrainians who lived in other parts of the Soviet Union.

Some historians claim that Stalin’s moves were done to quash a Ukrainian independence movement and were specifically targeted at ethnic Ukrainians. As such, some scholars call the famine a genocide. In Ukrainian, the event is known as “Holodomor,” which means “death by hunger.”

Recognition of the full extent of the Holodomor and implicating Soviet leadership for the deaths remains an important issue in Ukraine to this day, with the country’s leaders long fighting for global recognition of the Holodomor and its impact on modern Ukraine.

Countries such as the United States and Canada have made official declarations calling it a genocide.

But this is not the case in much of the rest of the world.

Just as the the Soviet government of the day denied that there were any decisions that explicitly deprived Ukraine of food – noting that the famine affected the entire country – so too do present-day Russian leaders refuse to acknowledge culpability.

Russia’s refusal to admit that the famine disproportionately affected Ukrainians has been taken by many in Ukraine as an attempt to downplay Ukrainian history and national identity.

Soviet annexation of Western Ukraine

This attempt to suppress Ukrainian national identity continued during and after World War II. In the early years of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian national movement was concentrated in the western parts of modern-day Ukraine, part of Poland until the Nazi invasion in 1939.

Before Gemany’s invasion, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany entered into a secret agreement, under the guise of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, which outlined German and Soviet spheres of influence over parts of central and east Europe.


David Low’s famed cartoon depicting Stalin and Hitler’s pact over Poland.
David Low/British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent

After Germany invaded Poland, the Red Army moved into the eastern portion of the country under the pretense of stabilizing the failing nation. In reality, the Soviet Union was taking advantage of the provisions laid out in the secret protocol. The Polish territories that now make up western Ukraine were also incorporated into Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, subsuming them into the larger Russian cultural world.

At the end of the war, the territories remained part of the Soviet Union.

Stalin set about suppressing Ukrainian culture in these newly annexed lands in favor of a greater Russian culture. For example, the Soviets repressed any Ukrainian intellectuals who promoted the Ukrainian language and culture through censorship and imprisonment.

This suppression also included liquidating the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, a self-governing church that has allegiance to the pope and was one of the most prominent cultural institutions promoting Ukrainian language and culture in these former Polish territories.

Its properties were transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church, and many of its priests and bishops were imprisoned or exiled. The destruction of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is still a source of resentment for many Ukrainians. It stands, we believe as scholars, as a clear instance of the Soviets’ intentional efforts to destroy Ukrainian cultural institutions.

The legacy of Chernobyl in Ukraine

Just as disaster marked the early years of Ukraine as a Soviet republic, so did its final years.

In 1986 a nuclear reactor at the Soviet-run Chernobyl nuclear power in the north of Ukraine went into partial meltdown. It remains the worst peacetime nuclear catastrophe the world has seen.

It required the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people in the areas surrounding the power plant. And to this day, approximately 1,000 square miles of Ukraine are part of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where radioactive fallout remains high and access is restricted.

Soviet lies to cover up the extent of the disaster – and missteps that would have limited the fallout – only compounded the problem. Emergency personnel were not given proper equipment or training to deal with the nuclear material.

It resulted in a heavy death toll and a higher than normal incidence of radiation-induced disease and complications such as cancer and birth defects among both former residents of the region and the workers sent in to deal with the disaster.

Other Soviet republics and European countries faced the fallout from Chernobyl, but it was the authorities in Ukraine who were tasked with organizing evacuations to Kyiv while Moscow attempted to cover up the scope of the disaster.

Meanwhile, independent Ukraine has been left to attend to the thousands of citizens who have chronic illnesses and disabilities as a result of the accident.


An abandoned fun fair, two kilometers from the Chernobyl power station.
Martin Godwin/Getty Images

The legacy of Chernobyl looms large in Ukraine’s recent past and continues to define many people’s memory of living in the Soviet era.

Memories of a painful past

This painful history of life under Soviet rule forms the backdrop to resentment in Ukraine today toward Russia. To many Ukrainians, these are not merely stories from textbooks, but central parts of people’s lives – many Ukrainians are still living with the health and environmental consequences of Chernobyl, for instance.

As Russia amasses troops at Ukraine’s borders, and the threat of an invasion increases, many in Ukraine may be reminded of past attempts by its neighbor to crush Ukrainian independence.

Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Harvard University and Jacob Lassin, Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Russian and East European Studies, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SEE

 LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for Holodomor 

Book Review: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/05/book-review-marxism-and-philosophy-of.html

Nikolai Vavilov in the years of Stalin's ‘Revolution from Above’ (1929–1932)

Abstract

This paper examines new evidence from Russian archives to argue that Soviet geneticist and plant breeder, Nikolai I. Vavilov's fate was sealed during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (‘Revolution from Above’) (1929–1932). This was several years before Trofim D. Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist and widely portrayed archenemy and destroyer of Vavilov, became a major force in Soviet science. During the ‘Cultural Revolution’ the Soviet leadership wanted to subordinate science and research to the task of socialist reconstruction. Vavilov, who was head of the Institute of Plant Breeding (VIR) and the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), came under attack from the younger generation of researchers who were keen to transform biology into a proletarian science. The new evidence shows that it was during this period that Vavilov lost his independence to determine research strategies and manage personnel within his own institute. These changes meant that Lysenko, who had won Stalin's support, was able to gain influence and eventually exert authority over Vavilov. Based on the new evidence, Vavilov's arrest in 1940 after he criticized Lysenko's conception of Non-Mendelian genetics was just the final challenge to his authority. He had already experienced years of harassment that began before Lysenko gained a position of influence. Vavilov died in prison in 1943.

Politics of Perseverance: Ukrainian Memories of “Them” and the “Other” in Holodomor Survivor Testimony,

 1986-1988

 Johnathon K. Vsetecka,
.Unpublished Master of Arts thesis,
 University of Northern Colorado, May 2014.

ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, now known as the Holodomor, from a survivor’s point of view. The Commission on the Ukraine Famine, beginning work in 1986, conducted an investigation of the famine and collected testimony from Holodomor survivors in the United States. This large collection of survivor testimonies sat quietly for many years, even though the Holodomor is now a recognized field of study in history, among other disciplines. A great deal of scholarship focuses on the political, genocidal, and ideological aspects of the famine, but few works explore the roles of everyday Ukrainian people. This thesis utilizes the testimonies to examine how everyday survivors construct memories based on their famine experiences. Survivors often share memories of themselves, but they also elaborate on the roles of others, which included Soviets, German villagers, and even other Ukrainians. These testimonies transcend the common victim and genocide narratives, showing that not all Ukrainians suffered equally. In fact, some survivors note that the famine did not disrupt their everyday lives at all. Collectively, these testimonies present a more complex narrative of everyday events in Ukraine and elucidate on the ways that survivors remember, interpret, and construct memories related to the Holodomor.

'Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union'
Vladislav Zubok's monumental book is shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize.

By Leyla Latypova

MOSCOW TIMES

Author Vladislav ZubokElena Vitenberg


In 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously labeled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Years later, analysts, pundits and casual observers have repeatedly returned to the phrase to find a possible explanation for the Kremlin’s geopolitical moves from the 2008 war in Georgia to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But how much do we actually know about the event that dramatically altered the global geopolitical landscape and ended the nearly half-a-century-long Cold War?

While some may know much more than others, everyone — newbies and seasoned observers alike — will find new answers and food for thought in Vladislav Zubok’s Pushkin Prize-nominated “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.”

Zubok, one of the world’s leading experts on the history of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

This comprehensive, wide-ranging work, which tracks the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership in the 1980s and early 1990s, is an encyclopedia of the Soviet demise. But the rich factual material is carefully interwoven with first-hand accounts of the events — derived, in part, from personal diaries provided to Zubok by the participants — resulting in a captivating, emotionally-charged read.

In “Collapse,” Zubok refutes the notion that the fall of the Soviet empire was pre-determined. Instead, he argues that the country that is no more “fell victim to a perfect storm and a hapless captain” —Gorbachev himself.

Though Gorbachev is often pictured as a hero in the collective Western imagination, Zubok doesn’t shy away from exposing the faults and character flaws of the last Soviet leader that ensured his instrumental role in the process of destroying the Union. In contrast to the many flattering biographical accounts and several autobiographies written by Gorbachev himself, Zubok’s Gorby is a man blinded by his idealism, striving for recognition by the liberal West and inability to acknowledge his own failures. These are the traits that made him an ideal fit for the role of a destroyer of the Soviet project.

Zubok, however, doesn’t attribute the end of the Soviet project solely to one personality. The economic collapse and role of the West are also explored in great detail.

Though “Collapse” explores events that took place more than a quarter of a century ago, it is difficult to shake off an ominous feeling when reading it against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.

As the former Soviet imperial core and its neighbors once again face a turbulent, uncertain future — that, as some argue, could even bring about the collapse of Russia itself — it’s difficult not to draw parallels with the events of the 80s and seek answers for the questions about the present in Zubok’s book. The author, however, firmly cautions the reader against searching for remedies to present problems in the distant past.

“The economic calamity and social traumas of the Soviet collapse do not explain, even less justify, what happened many years later,” Zubok writes.

“What they point to, however, is the possibility of great reversals and historic surprises…down the road.”

Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union


From Chapter Three: Revolutions

History Accelerates

In the spring and summer of 1989, another dramatic development occurred within the Soviet political elites: the Iron Curtain that prevented them from going abroad suddenly parted. This had revolutionary implications for Soviet politics, especially for the educated Moscow-centered intelligentsia. Since Stalin’s times, the West had been the forbidden fruit and the object of intense curiosity for Soviet citizens. The post-Stalin intelligentsia held an “imagined West” as a vital part of their identity, dreams, and cultural self-validation. Several educated cohorts had grown up with a veritable obsession with and idealization of Western culture and music, first jazz, then rock. Many of those people who learned to despise the Soviet system under Brezhnev felt uncritical admiration for all things Western.

In Leonid Brezhnev’s household, the General Secretary and his wife had watched Soviet news and entertainment. Their grandchildren instead watched Western movies and cartoons on a large Sony TV screen with a video-cassette recorder (VCR). By 1989, VCRs, along with personal computers, became the most coveted object of social status, as well as an informational tool. Hundreds of new “cooperatives” began to import and sell them in great numbers on the Soviet market, a trade more lucrative than still illegal currency exchange. Yet nothing could be a substitute for the experience of crossing borders. “Trips to the West were the most important status symbol,” wrote the Russian scholar Dmitry Furman. “See Paris, and die,” was a popular joke, but also a dream for many in the Soviet Union. Scientists, artists, dancers, symphony orchestras, and many Soviet Jews lived in fear that they would not obtain clearance from “competent organs” to cross the Soviet borders— for no apparent reason other than that somebody higher up the pyramid of power questioned their loyalty or someone close to them informed on them. Memoirs from the post-Soviet period are replete with anger and drama regarding the abrogation of that clearance.

In early 1989, the Soviet rules for foreign travel were radically relaxed. It was no longer necessary to grovel and conform to Soviet authorities, including the Party and the KGB, in order to obtain permission for a private trip abroad. During the first half of 1989, the number of approved applications for exit visas reached 1.8 million, three times more than two years earlier. During the same period about 200,000 people received official permission to emigrate, mostly to Israel and the United States. 36 The majority, however, applied for a foreign Soviet passport and a permit to leave the USSR and return— for the first time in their life. Bureaucrats and officials, directors of enterprises, cooperative managers, academic scholars, scientists, artists and actors rushed under the rising curtain. Performers went to perform, artists sold their art, intellectuals delivered talks. The glasnost journalists, academic scholars, government officials, especially those who knew some English and other foreign languages, were in high demand abroad. Western universities, the United States Information Agency (USIA), think tanks, fellowship programs, foundations all used their funds to invite Soviet visitors. Intellectuals were invited by Western foundations.

Scholars have studied this phenomenon exclusively as a factor in bringing the Cold War to an end. Yet, it also delegitimized the Soviet system. Most Soviet diplomats, KGB officials, and military representatives abroad had become habituated to navigation between the West and their homeland; they lived in a kind of controlled schizophrenia. Gorbachev traveled abroad several times in the late 1960s and 1970s, and began to see a humiliating gap between the abundance in Western stores and a dearth of goods in Soviet ones. Yet this was nothing compared with the shock that thousands of Soviet people experienced when they crossed Soviet borders and visited Western countries from early 1989 onwards— many of them for the first time. In May of that year, Shevardnadze’s aide and speechwriter Teimuraz Stepanov wrote in his diary about West Germany: “The Devil took us to this Federal Republic, so groomed, preened, accurate, and caressed, where it is particularly painful to think about my beloved country— dirty and exhausted from futile efforts to overcome the utmost ugliness created by the most inhumane regime in the world.” A few days later in Irkutsk, on the way to the Sino-Soviet summit, he wrote with even more bitterness: “Who said that my Motherland is less beautiful than the German Heimat . .  .? It is, however, gutted [by the apparatchiks] armed with Party directives and a never-ending Marxist-Leninist world view.”

For first-time Soviet travelers to the West a visit to a supermarket produced the biggest effect. The contrast between half-empty, gloomy Soviet food stores and glittering Western palaces with an abundant selection of food was mind-boggling. Not a single Soviet visitor was prepared for the sight of pyramids of oranges, pineapples, tomatoes, bananas; endless varieties of fresh fish and meat, in lieu of a butcher cutting chunks from bluish hulks from a freezer; efficient cashiers with a smiling attitude, instead of rude saleswomen doling out greasy cans and jars to a long line of desperately hungry customers. And then actually to be allowed to touch, to smell, to savor! A severe aftershock awaited Soviet visitors upon their subsequent return to the Soviet Union, and to scenes of misery. This experience changed Soviet travelers forever. Western standards, unimaginable before, immediately became the new norm. Soviet realities, part of everyday habit, suddenly became “abnormal” and therefore revolting, unbearable.

Most of the newly elected deputies of the Supreme Soviet traveled to the West in March– August 1989 for the first time at the invitation of Western parliamentarians, universities, non-governmental institutions, and émigré friends and relatives. Gennady Burbulis, elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, had grown up as an admirer of Lenin and joined the Party on his centennial in 1970. Because of his security clearance (he had served in strategic rocket forces during his obligatory draft), he never had a chance to travel outside the Soviet Union. In June 1989, however, he joined the MDG opposition [Inter-regional Deputies Group- MT] in the Supreme Soviet and traveled with a group of other deputies to Stockholm for a seminar on “Swedish socialism.” Many years later he still recalled the shock from visiting a giant fish supermarket: a mile of stands and aquariums filled with fresh fish, oysters, calimari, shrimp, and other sea creatures. Equally amazing for Burbulis was the absence of long lines of customers. Burbulis left Stockholm as an enthusiast of “Swedish socialism” and an even more bitter enemy of the Soviet Party system. Another member of this group, Nikolai Travkin, a construction worker and Soviet patriot, joined the MDG as a fan of “democratic socialism.” His Soviet identity also crumbled in Stockholm. He returned to Moscow an angry man, convinced that the communists had been fooling Soviet people all along. In March 1990 he quit the Party and launched the Democratic Party of Russia in an attempt to seize power from the nomenklatura.

The most consequential eye-opening experience occurred to Boris Yeltsin. In June 1989, he asked the American ambassador Jack Matlock to help him visit the United States. The idea came from Yeltsin’s aides Lev Sukhanov and Pavel Voshchanov, who wanted to raise his international profile. Matlock’s attempt to contact US Congressmen and their staff did not produce results; then Yeltsin’s people discovered Gennady Alferenko, a remarkable cultural entrepreneur, founder of one of the first cultural NGOs of Gorbachev’s era. Alferenko specialized in East-West public diplomacy and operated under KGB supervision. He contacted Jim Garrison from the Esalen Institute, an esoteric cultural center in Big Sur, California. The two worked out a ten-day lecture tour for Yeltsin across the United States; the proud Russian wanted to pay for all his expenses abroad. The tour began in New York on 9 September 1989 and covered eleven cities in nine states. This visit was more intense than Khrushchev’s “discovery of America” in 1959. And it was to have even more impact on the fate of the Soviet Union. Available accounts of Yeltsin’s journey vary from stories of drinking bouts, scandals, and gaffes to descriptions of his eye-opening experiences. All of them were true. Yeltsin’s political agenda was still to build a “democratic socialism,” but without the Party monopoly on power. This was what he wanted to tell Americans and their leaders. He relished attacking Gorbachev on every occasion and in every interview. At the top of Yeltsin’s list of engagements was a meeting with President George Bush. Jim Garrison knew Condoleezza Rice, who worked at the National Security Council on Soviet affairs, and contacted her. Ultimately, Yeltsin met instead Bush’s National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft. President Bush “dropped by” for a chat during that visit. The Russian and his aides left the White House in a triumphant mood. Sukhanov recalled: “Yeltsin was the first among the high-placed Soviet leaders who broke ‘the seal’ on the White House during the rule of Bush. Not Gorbachev, but Yeltsin.” The United States was the first country that Yeltsin had ever visited outside the Soviet Union on his own rather than as part of an official Soviet delegation. He was feted and dined by wealthy Americans, flown by private jets, and stayed in the houses of American millionaires. Although he expected the lifestyle of the super-rich to be a never-ending feast, the real shock for him was his impromptu visit to Randalls discount supermarket, on the way to Houston Airport. As a regional party secretary, Yeltsin had spent years battling with lack of food supplies in his Sverdlovsk region. His greatest achievement had been to establish a system of poultry farms near Sverdlovsk that supplemented the meagre diet of workers in the industrial plants and factories. Randalls supermarket amazed him. This was an average place where the poorest American could buy what even the top Soviet nomenklatura could not back home. In the sweltering Texan desert Yeltsin and his entourage entered an air-conditioned paradise. The aides saw Yeltsin brooding, as if he was thinking: “Does this cornucopia exist every day for everyone? Incredible!”

Yeltsin realized how stupid he must have appeared in the eyes of his American hosts when he repeated the slogans of “democratic socialism.” He said to his aides: “What did they do to our poor people? Throughout our lives, they told us fairy tales, tried to invent the wheel. And the wheel already exists . .  . yet not for us.” An aide wrote that “the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevist mentality decomposed” at this moment. After returning from his American trip, while speaking to journalists and his MDG colleagues, Yeltsin regaled them with details of his supermarket visit. He waxed lyrical about the “madness of colors, boxes, packs, sausages, cheeses,” and rhapsodized that the average American family spent one-tenth or less of their salaries on food, while a Soviet family spent over half of their salaries on food, and more. Yeltsin decided that his mission now was to bring the “American dream” to the Russian people.

Excerpted from “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” by Vladislav M. Zubok, published by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2021 Vladislav M. Zubok. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Footnotes have been removed to ease reading. For more information about the author and this book, see the publisher’s site here.

“Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” has been shortlisted for the 2022 Pushkin House Book Prize.

Russia bids farewell to Gorbachev in low-key funeral snubbed by Putin

Issued on: 03/09/2022

05:56 Honour guards stand by the coffin of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, during a memorial service at the Column Hall of the House of Unions in Moscow on September 3, 2022. 

 Alexander Nemenov/Pool, Reuters

Text by: NEWS WIRES

Muscovites lined up near the Kremlin on Saturday to pay their respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who was widely admired in the West for his reforms and who lived long enough to see Russia's leadership roll back much of that change.

Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday aged 91, was set to be buried without state honours or President Vladimir Putin in attendance.

He was however granted a public send-off, with authorities allowing Russians to view his coffin in the imposing Hall of Columns, within sight of the Kremlin, where previous Soviet leaders have been mourned.

Pallbearers hoisted Gorbachev's wooden coffin, covered in a tricolour Russian flag, and placed it in the centre of the hall, where a soft recording of melancholic music from the film "Schindler's List" played in the background.

It was little surprise that Putin, a long-time KGB intelligence officer who has called the Soviet Union's collapse a "geopolitical catastrophe", denied Gorbachev full state honours and said his schedule did not allow him to attend the funeral.

Putin, however, paid his respects to Gorbachev alone on Thursday and the Kremlin said its guard of honour would provide an "element" of a state occasion at the funeral for Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in ending the Cold War.

01:46

Gorbachev became a hero to many in the West for allowing eastern Europe to shake off more than four decades of Soviet communist control, letting East and West Germany reunite, and forging arms control treaties with the United States.

But when the 15 Soviet republics seized on the same freedoms to demand their independence, Gorbachev was powerless to prevent the collapse of the Union in 1991, six years after he had become its leader.

For that, and the economic chaos that his "perestroika" liberalisation programme unleashed, many Russians could not forgive him.

Hungary's Orban to attend

The many Western heads of state and government who normally would have attended will be absent on Saturday, kept away by the chasm in relations between Moscow and the West opened up by Putin's move to send troops into Ukraine in February.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a conservative nationalist and one of the few European leaders to have good relations with Putin, will attend the funeral, spokesman Zoltan Kovacs wrote on Twitter.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RIA news agency that Putin had no plans to meet with Orban during his visit to Moscow.

Several Russian officials and cultural figures, including senior lawmaker Konstantin Kosachyov and singer Alla Pugachyova, also paid their respects to Gorbachev's family, who were seated left of his open coffin.

Gorbachev's funeral strikes a sharp contrast with the national day of mourning and state funeral in Moscow's principal cathedral that was granted in 2007 to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who was instrumental in sidelining Gorbachev as the Soviet Union fell apart and who later hand-picked Putin as his own successor.

After the ceremony Gorbachev will, however, be buried like Yeltsin in Moscow's Novodevichy cemetery, alongside his adored wife Raisa, who died 23 years ago.

On entering the Kremlin in 2000, Putin wasted little time in rolling back the political plurality that had developed from Gorbachev's policy of "glasnost", or openness, and slowly began rebuilding Moscow's influence over many of its lost republics.

Gorbachev's long-time interpreter and aide said this week that Russia's actions in Ukraine had left the former leader "shocked and bewildered" in the final months of his life.

"It's not just the operation that started on Feb. 24, but the entire evolution of relations between Russia and Ukraine over the past years that was really, really a big blow to him. It really crushed him, emotionally and psychologically," Pavel Palazhchenko told Reuters in an interview.

(REUTERS)

Mikhail Gorbachev funeral draws thousands in Moscow

Scores of mourners streamed into central Moscow on Saturday to bid farewell to Mikhail Gorbachev. Though admired in the West, the late Soviet leader is far less popular in his home country.

A long line of people began forming in central Moscow on Saturday morning, past the city's famous Bolshoi theater and leading into the House of the Unions' Hall of Columns, where mourners paid their respects to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Ceremonial guards watched over Gorbachev's open casket as they filed past.

Though no state funeral, the ceremony certainly felt like one. And indeed, previous leaders received similarly opulent funerals in the Hall of Columns, near the Kremlin, since the end of the Soviet Union.  

No state burial

Many of those who come to pay their respects hold Gorbachev in high esteem. Viktoria, a 49-year-old Muscovite, says his tenure represented the best six years of her life. "We came to expect freedom, and the best possible outcome; unfortunately, we could not make use of all this, as they took away all those freedoms." An elderly man nearby agreed, telling DW: "Sadly, we were unable to preserve his legacy. Everything went wrong. This pains everyone who reveres Mikhail Gorbachev."

Scores of mourners wait to pay their respects to Gorbachev

Not everyone in Russia, however, feels such admiration for the late leader. It was in Gorbachev's time in office, after all, that the Soviet Union collapsed. This tension became clear when one mourner told DW that one should not speak ill of the dead, and that "not everything was bad during Gorbachev's rule."

Many Russians across the nation feel conflicted about Gorbachev. They appreciate that he granted them freedoms they could previously only dream of, opened up the Soviet Union and changed many people's lives for the better. And yet, many believe this came at too great a cost. Indeed, the vast majority of mourners DW spoke to said Gorbachev had allowed their "good old" Soviet Union fall apart.

While many Russians feel nostalgic about the Soviet Union and blame Gorbachev for its demise, people in the former Soviet satellite states accuse him of having refused them independence for too long.  

Many remember how the Soviet leader suppressed pro-independence movements in Georgia, Latvia, and above all Lithuania in the early 1990s. It was there, on January 13, 1991, that Soviet forces killed 13 people and injured hundreds in what became known as Lithuania's Bloody Sunday. Until recently, Lithuanian prosecutors were still trying to bring Gorbachev to justice, though the trial has now been shelved.

Gorbachev likened to prison warden

Lithuania's Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis drew attention to this grim chapter when he tweeted: "Lithuanians will not glorify Gorbachev. We will never forget the simple fact that his army murdered civilians to prolong his regime's occupation of our country. His soldiers fired on our unarmed protestors and crushed them under his tanks. That is how we will remember him."

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda compared the late Soviet leader to a prison warden who wanted to implemented minor reforms instead of overseeing a major overhaul.

Gorbachev is fondly remembered in Germany

He said these small reforms were not enough, as "prisoners wanted to break free. They did that but against the will of Mikhail Gorbachev."

In Latvia, Gorbachev's death sparked similarly critical reactions. Several people were killed in January 1991 in the capital Riga, when Soviet police prevented protesters from storming the government building.

On Twitter, Latvian President Egils Levits said his country had gained independence from the Soviet Union against Gorbachev's will. This was echoed by Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics, who tweeted that the "collapse of the USSR was the best moment of the 20th century. The end of the Cold War was great but the killing of people in Tbilisi, Vilnius, Riga is also part of his [Gorbachev's] legacy. It is up to the History to judge him."

Gorbachev evidently continues to divide opinions, with some seeing him as a visionary, others as the destroyer of the Soviet Union - and still others as a tragic hero.

This article was translated from German.

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Funeral held for Mikhail Gorbachev