http://www.rferl.org/content/brezhnevs-children/24765431.html
Russia is not the Soviet union. The regime in Russia has little in common with the Soviet regime. To imply that the process of reforming Russia represents a continuation of attempts to reform the Soviet regime, as Whitmore does, distorts reality beyond recognition.
Failures of reform under the Soviet regime were mostly due to features of that regime which have disappeared: (1) the commando-administrative economic system, (2) the ideological...
- Опубликовано:
- 30.04.2016 20:15:00
Rereading my 1984 article “Misperception, Ambivalence, and Indecision in Soviet Policy-making,” for the first time in many years, most of the analysis strikes me as just as valid today as it was in 1984 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1903573.
There is, however, an important blind spot in the article. I did not fully appreciate the panic of hardliners among the leaders of the Soviet Bloc concerning the Prague Spring. It was clear that the Czechoslovak reform movement...
- Опубликовано:
- 10.03.2016 22:28:00
... But I wonder how seriously they have thought about this assumption. When I ask Russians if they see an alternative, they usually can say what they don't like about Putin. But I have I have yet to hear anyone present a credible alternative.
Mikhail Gorbachev, reflecting the view of a large part of the Russian public, once said that Putin literally saved Russia. Yet the difficulty of imaging a country after the departure of an extraordinary leader is not unique to Russia under Putin. Think ...
- Опубликовано:
- 25.01.2016 08:12:00
Mikhail Gorbachev was naive. Boris Yeltsin was obsessed by his power struggle with Gorbachev. As a result, Soviet citizens who overnight, without their consent found themselves living in foreign countries, were left without protection of vital rights ...
- Опубликовано:
- 19.09.2014 23:28:00