WORLD

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HOW RUSSIA SEE YELTSIN

FRED WIER, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - To Western eyes, it was the new,
democratic Russia. Boris Yeltsin, the man who had wrested the country
from the grip of communism two years earlier, was facing what he
described as an armed "mutiny" by communist holdovers in the country's
elected parliament. So when Mr. Yeltsin sent troops and tanks to
disperse the Supreme Soviet legislature and arrest its leaders, Western
leaders cheered his actions.

"When I heard [then US President Bill] Clinton describing Yeltsin's
actions as 'a triumph for democracy,' I was horrified," says Viktor
Kremeniuk, deputy director of the official Institute of USA-Canada
Studies in Moscow. "The president shelled parliament, killed lawmakers,
and destroyed the only elected branch of government capable of
challenging him. That had nothing to do with democracy.". . .

In Russia, even many of Yeltsin's former close allies temper their
eulogies with references to his "serious errors," while much of the
commentary has been sharply negative. During Yeltsin's nearly nine years
in power, Russia's gross domestic product slumped by over 50 percent,
millions of people lost their savings in repeated financial crises, and
life expectancy plunged to third-world levels.

"Yeltsin inherited the Russian state in 1991, and left it in much worse
shape than he found it," says Roy Medvedev, one of Russia's foremost
historians, who has known all three leaders. "His legacy was mostly
unhappy, and I don't think the Russian people will remember him with
much warmth."

That disconnect between Russian and Western perceptions was present from
the outset of Mr. Gorbachev's perestroika campaign to reform the USSR.
Selected as Communist Party leader in 1985, Gorbachev launched sweeping
measures to expand freedom of expression, release political prisoners,
and slash the USSR's gargantuan military expenditures. Gorbachev's
program initially seized the Soviet popular imagination, while it was
greeted with skepticism in the West. Yet ultimately, even the
quintessential US cold warrior Ronald Reagan, seemed convinced. Asked
whether he still regarded the USSR to be an "evil empire" during a visit
to Moscow in 1988, Mr Reagan replied: "No, I was talking about another
time, another era."

As Gorbachev's popularity grew in the West, it waned in the USSR. As
economic travails multiplied and lineups for basic products grew, the
Soviet public stopped listening to Gorbachev's lengthy speeches and
flocked to a new breed of radical reformers, foremost among whom was a
gruff Siberian with a shock of graying hair, Boris Yeltsin.

Largely ignored in the West, Yeltsin moved from strength to strength at
home, becoming Soviet Russia's first elected president in June 1991,
facing down a hard-line coup attempt that August, and engineering the
USSR's downfall in December.

If Gorbachev's stock remains high around the world, it has never
recovered in Russia. When he ran in 1996 presidential elections,
Gorbachev won less than 1 percent of the votes. While Russians recall
Gorbachev as a leader who fumbled and lost his kingdom, many say they
think of Yeltsin as the "destroyer".

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0425/p06s02-woeu.htm

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A LETTER TO RUSSIA

[In October 1991, when it was uncertain who was in charge in Russia, the
Review published this open letter]

Dear Mike and/or Boris,

Excuse the first names but I understand that you want to become more
Americanized and we use first names the way you use comrade, including
the subtlety that a comrade is not always a comrade.

This Americanization business is tricky. There is no one American way of
doing anything, only an American way of letting things happen. Much of
America's success to date can be traced to one simple rule: don't make
too many rules. Much of America's failure to date has come from ignoring
this rule. Think of America not as a system but as an environment and
you'll begin to get the hang of it.

Sadly, Americans aren't taking very good care of their political
environment these days. They still talk about political freedom and free
enterprise, but those in power increasingly have something else on their
minds.

Thus, you should be careful when you go to George Bush for advice about
democracy or Harvard for ideas about your economy. Neither has any great
interest in freedom and a great deal of interest in getting people to do
things just their way.

You've probably figured that out about Bush already. He's shrouded his
government with more secrecy than any peacetime president in history and
he has seldom met a human right he likes.

If you really want to find out about democracy go to a town meeting in
Vermont. Watch a baseball game, the sport that perhaps best blends the
democratic ideals of individuality and community. Spend some time in one
of those wacky computer software firm's where no idea is considered too
wild to examine. Listen to jazz and note how each musician is allowed
extreme freedom during a solo and yet how conscientiously they back up
the other musicians when it's their turn.

Democracy is not the answer, only an excellent way of finding answers.
If you presume to have too many answers, you'll start acting like George
Bush and not be very democratic at all.

Of course, since there's no patent on Americanism; anyone can claim it
for their own. Remember that your goal should be the American ideal, not
American practice. If you copy our current behavior you'll end up in as
much trouble as we are. One of our historians has said that early
America invented every important new political institution of that time
--- and none since.

So if you want to Americanize, there's no better way to start than at
the beginning. Read Paine, Thoreau, Emerson and, of course, Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Enjoy not only their wisdom, but their
idiosyncrasies and their failings. It will give you hope. Mike already
has a leg up on Jefferson. Jefferson was a slave-owner, who attempted
unsuccessfully to abolish slavery. Mike was a communist, but he got rid
of his demon.

You should also jump ahead a hundred years or so and read Mark Twain and
H. L. Mencken; it will give you a good feeling for how greed and
foolishness corrupted the American ideal over the decades. To show you
how perceptive Mencken was, back in 1930 he wrote that communism "will
probably disappear altogether when the Russian experiment comes to a
climax, and bolshevism either converts itself into a sickly imitation of
capitalism or blows up with a bang. The former seems more likely."

Then leap forward and read Martin Luther King and learn how the sturdy
American ideal could withstand the worst abuse and still permit dreams
again. America's history has always been one of saints and scoundrels
and the difficulty of telling them apart, especially when they were the
same people.

Here's a good American saying: necessity is the mother of invention.
Things aren't working out quite like you planned it, but there's at
least a chance that you'll be forced to invent some good ideas as a
result.

The nation state was never much to brag about. Its major contributions
to human history has been incredible death and destruction. After World
War II, nation states started to disintegrate as institutions that had
some of the characteristics of countries began to take their place. The
United Nations, NATO, the World Bank and multinational corporations all
helped to weaken the idea of a nation long before the Armenians and the
Muscovites got restless. Sure, you and we thought we were the most
powerful nations in human history but that's because we only counted the
assets and didn't consider what the charade was costing us. I mean,
couldn't you use some of that money you sent to Cuba now? And it would
be kind of nice to replay Vietnam all over again knowing what we know
now.

So, Mike, don't feel too bad over the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Nobody really needs it anymore. Besides, the real struggle in the world
today has become that between the peoples of the world and their
increasingly authoritarian, corrupt and unproductive governments. Your
country was one of the first to collapse in the wake of this conflict,
but that just gives you a head start into the new frontier.

Unfortunately, most of the people who might advise you on where to go
have spent much of their life figuring out how to increase centralized
authority. Their expertise won't help you much now. The people who can
help are to be found in little noticed corners. For example, have you
talked to the Swiss about democratic confederations? They've got over
five hundred years of experience. Have you checked out any books on
Green philosophy or read the works of E.F.Schumacher or Human Scale by
Kirkpatrick Sale?

You're sort of on your own here, but remember: they don't teach
devolution at Harvard and they don't practice it in Washington. You'll
have to look elsewhere.

Finally, about this economic business. You've got keep a sharp eye on
those Harvard types and the Wall Streeters and the Fortune 500 experts.
These guys have spent the past decade figuring out how to borrow money
to buy corporations rather than making things. As a result, as one of
our Democratic presidential candidates said the other day, "The cold war
is over and Japan won."

As far as Harvard goes, Jonathan Rowe, in a Washington Monthly article
on Poland put it nicely:

"Though any number of Western advisers have had a hand in this program,
the one who has gotten the most attention is Jeffrey Sachs, the
globe-trotting whiz kid from Harvard. Sachs preaches a kind of
macro-economic machismo. Raise prices, hike interest rates, welcome
bankruptcies and unemployment as evidence that the fat of the communist
years is sweating off the body economic. 'Western observers should not
over-dramatize layoffs and bankruptcies,' Sachs wrote in The Economist.
'Poland, like the rest of Eastern Europe, now has too little
unemployment, not too much."

This is the sort of Cambridge machismo that got us into years of trouble
in Vietnam. Nothing is more dangerous than a Harvard professor proving
his virility in national or international policy.

I understand they're trying to get you to buy something called the
market system. Back before the Reagan administration they always called
it the free market system but increasingly the adjective is being
dropped. That makes sense because the only thing free its most ardent
advocates want is their own way. And mostly, under Reagan and Bush,
they've been getting it. Peter Ustinov said the other day that
monetarism invites the money changers into the temple and then sells
them the temple.

At its core, the market system is nothing more than what humans have
been doing since they first traded a stone axe blade for a hunk of meat.
There is nothing mystical, sacred or moral about it. And above all,
there's nothing in the US Constitution about it. The idea that
capitalism and democracy are inexorably intertwined is one of the worst
conceits of our business classes.

It ain't so. For example, most people in this country were self-employed
well into the 19th century. Businesses that sprung up didn't flourish on
competition because there often wasn't any. You didn't need two banks or
two drug stores in the average town. Prices and business ethics were not
regulated by the marketplace but by a complicated cultural code and the
fact that the banker had to go to church with his depositors. If you
wanted to form a corporation you had to get a state charter and prove it
was in the public interest, convenience and necessity.

With the industrial revolution that all changed. By the end of the 19th
century the Supreme Court had declared corporations to be persons and
entitled to the same protections as real people. And the myth of the
virtue of competition was blooming -- justifying one of the great
rapacious eras of American business.

Over the years it's gotten worse, until sometime in the 1980s even the
economic hustlers had to admit tacitly that enterprise isn't very free
anymore. Not only isn't it free, it's not working well either, a fact
that has been neatly obscured by constant and largely irrelevant
comparison to communism.

I'll tell you a secret, which maybe you know already. Our system is on
the skids, too, another ungainly monster of an economic system based too
much on greed, centralization and unfairness. So if you look for
salvation in our way of doing business you may only be buying yourself a
few years grace.

Perhaps it has dawned on you that to do it right you're going to have to
replace both communism and capitalism with something better. Again
you'll have to do a lot of looking. The Swedish model has much to offer
-- although it, too, as the Swedish voters have suggested -- has its
excesses. There is the cooperative system of Mondragon, Spain, and the
mini-industries of Bologna. Even in this country, you'll find ideas
worth considering. There are big consumer cooperatives like Land of
Lakes Butter and the United Services Automobile Association that thrive
happily amongst the conventional capitalists. The town of Green Bay,
Wisconsin, holds its professional football team in community ownership.
As a result, it's about the only professional sports team in America
that we know won't be moving to someplace else. And, of course, in any
small communities the farmer's coop is taken for granted as a major
economic unit. These are, I hasten to say, real consumer-owned coops
where real people rather than party bureaucrats make the decisions.

In the matter of money, it may help to know that in the early stages of
this country, regional and local currency was common, meeting the needs
of communities that had labor and products but lacked the paper by which
to evaluate them. America didn't even have a central banking system
until 1913.

Remember that money is just another way of accounting for the trading of
time and goods. American farmers do this trading all the time without
ever writing it down or exchanging pieces of paper. One imaginative
American, Edgar Cahn, has come up with a system under which people can
earn time credits by assisting the elderly, to be redeemed in services
when the creditor becomes aged. It's all done on computers. And there
are a number of places in America and Canada where they're using 'green
dollars' -- no bills or notes are issued, just computer records of
services provided and received.

So don't just think of America as a place built with money. In reality
it was also built by a lot of people who found some good ways to
function without it. One of those ways was to help one another, which is
why some Washingtonians still call a suburban volunteer rescue squad
before they call 911. They know it will get there faster and do the job
better. As Rowe put it: "Free market ideology stresses the impersonal
nature of contracts. Life is a succession of deals, all to maximize
personal benefits." And despite what you hear, that's not the way a lot
Americans view life, nor practice it,

On the other hand, another great American prototype is the snake oil
salesman. We spend a lot of time in this country trying to fool each
other. We call it marketing. So be careful when you make your deals and
listen to your American experts. Keep in mind what a real American
expert, a southern farmer, told his son: "Trust everyone but get cash
for your cotton."

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