One hundred years of ... "Inquilab Zindabad"?

The Russians who talk with Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time are pissed off at how their lives have been ruined.  Their hate for Mikhail Gorbachev, whom we in the west laud, is not superficial.

Their lives were ruined because they were told that if they kept doing whatever they were doing, then the state would take care of them later on in their lives.  And then Gorbachev introduced perestroika and glasnost and the system fell apart.  The Soviet Union fell apart.  Their lives fell apart. As the book portrays, at the top of the system,  Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, chief military adviser to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, committed suicide, while a "commoner" literally set himself on fire.

The book also  helps me understand the frustrations of the typical middle-class people here in the US, or in Britain.  They were told that if they kept doing whatever they were doing, then their lives were set and that everything would work out fine.  The Soviet Union fell apart. China and India opened up. The world's economy dramatically changed. The lives of the typical middle-class were altered forever, and tomorrow seems immensely more uncertain than yesterday ever was.

What puzzles me is this: Observing the world from the banks of the Willamette, and working at a podunk university where I am ignored and shunted away to a voiceless corner, I have been commenting for a long time about the urgency to fundamentally restructure the social contract, fully recognizing that the economic forces of today do not resemble those from the New Deal era, with technology further complicating things with innovations that keep upending more jobs.

So, ... I wondered when it was for the first time that I argued about the need for a new social contract.  I was curious not about my writings in my blog, but in this guy's--I thought it might be a good indicator of how I have been yelling outside like a mad man ;)  I tracked it down--May 23, 2013.  At the end of a lengthy rant, I wrote there:

 it is one loud reminder that the social contract is in tatters.
Of course, we are not going to agree on how to re-work and re-word a new contract. But, the shame of it all is that while a bunch of us folks from different parts of the world are talking about it here, the ones who should talk about these--the Congress--will stage some dramas, take a few photos, and then go home to screw people up some more.

Imagine if three years ago Congress here, and the Parliament in the UK, had really done constructive things in order to ease the new challenges that the typical middle class was facing.  Instead, they didn't do shit.  To make things worse, they further tightened the screws on the middle class. by slowly dismantling the little bit that was left.  For instance, Mike knows well how expensive college has become now compared to his father's days when the government offered his father a much better social contract.  College is merely one aspect of the social contract.

I didn't give up.  Almost exactly three years ago--June 26, 2013--at the end of another lengthy comment at another post, I wrote (note that OWS is Occupy Wall Street):

I don't think it is about economic growth as much as it is a disagreement over how the growth ought to be shared. It will be easier if only it were about economic growth alone. Turkey has had some fantastic growth over the years. It is really not about wanting more growth there. OWS was not about more growth, and neither are the protests in Brazil.
In a few previous posts, here and at my blog, we have agreed, while disagreeing, that the time is ripe, or even overripe, in terms of rewriting various aspects of the social contract that exists within each country. Mere economic growth does not seem to be sufficient, though at least modest rates might be necessary.
I suspect that these issues will not go away any time soon because rewriting those contracts won't be easy.

I tell ya, it is the story of my life that nobody listens to me--not even Ramesh! ;)

David Brooks notes in his column over at the NY Times:

Their pain is indivisible: economic stress, community breakdown, ethnic bigotry and a loss of social status and self-worth. When people feel their world is vanishing, they are easy prey for fact-free magical thinking and demagogues who blame immigrants.

Brexit, Bernie, and Trump are, therefore, no surprise to me.  It is an interesting ironical coincidence that these are fomenting another revolution nearly a hundred years since that history-changing October Revolution. Oh, wait, the October Revolution was in November, and the US elections will be almost exactly the same date: November 8th.  Cue the Twilight Zone theme ;)

I wonder how Putin and Russia will mark the one hundredth anniversary--not by inviting Gorbachev, I am sure!

ps: I intentionally used "Inquilab Zindabad" in the title of this post--to remind Ramesh about his post in 2013 ;)

Why doesn’t people’s suffering translate into freedom?

"My grandmother saw so many changes during her own life" the visitor from Europe said.  The grandmother lived through Hitler's maniacal swallowing up of the Sudetenland and the big war after that, the Soviet tanks rolling in, and the barbed wire fencing and the guard dogs to make sure nobody could leave.  Fortunately, she lived a life long enough to also experience freedom after the fall of the Communist Bloc.

I remember the excitement when the Berlin Wall fell.  To this day, I am amazed at how the experts never saw that coming.  History just happens, more often than not.  The man who was behind that historic collapse, Mikhail Gorbachev, has authored a new book, which provides the context for this NY Times report:

In his twilight years, Mr. Gorbachev has become an isolated figure. Most of his contemporaries are dead. He is just critical enough about the lack of democracy under Mr. Putin that state-run television channels avoid him. His death has been announced more than once.

A once tremendously powerful and feared man is now "an isolated figure."  

Mr. Gorbachev enjoys no immunity from prosecution, and hence like many government critics, feels increasingly uneasy as the Kremlin chips away at civil liberties. He said he feared being declared a “foreign agent,” a revived Stalinist label that basically means “spy,” and that is now being used to shutter dozens of civil society organizations.
“There are quite a few reactionary-minded people in this country who are already declaring me a foreign agent — they think that I am working for someone,” he said. It is quite a statement from a man, who if he had changed nothing, might still be the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, as previous leaders tended to rule for life.

And here in the US we are very close to electing America's Putin as the President!

Svetlana Alexievich, whose Secondhand Time is one of books that I have ordered for this summer's reading, has an interesting observation about Putin:

“In the West, people demonize Putin,” Ms. Alexievich, who turns 68 later this month, said in a recent interview here, speaking Russian through a translator after a conference on her work at the University of Gothenburg. “They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West, ” she added. “There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.”

Apparently there is a little piece of Putin within quite a few million Americans too :(

Alexievich "has never considered writing fiction."  Why?

Life is much more interesting.

I am sure the European visitor's late grandmother, too, would have agreed with that. 

China's Charter 08, and the Nobel Peace Prize

Liu Xiaobo was one of the first to sign on to a document, Charter 08, the contents of which will/should astonish every American because we have, and take for granted, the basic rights and treatment that this document seeks for every Chinese.

The NY Review of Books presents the entire Charter, and the notes before and after are wonderfully explanatory both about the Charter itself, and about the people involved.

The planning and drafting of Charter 08 began in the late spring of 2008, but Chinese authorities were apparently unaware of it or unconcerned by it until several days before it was announced on December 10.

Soon, the authorities knocked on several doors, including that of the Nobel Peace Prize recipient:

It was also late on December 8 that another of the charter’s signers, the literary critic and prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo, was taken away by police.

I just can't see how the Chinese system can continue with its authoritarian structures forever.  I wonder what the endgame will be.  After all, how many experts--inside and outside--predicted the quick and sudden collapse of the Soviet Union?  And along with that, a redrawing of the political maps of Europe?  Most were caught flat-footed, including the CIA and even Condi Rice!

Here is to hoping for a quick and peaceful collapse of the Chinese Communism.

When the Chinese state collapses

So far at least, Deng Xiaoping's approach to open up the economy without political liberalization seems to be working, and much better (?) than Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost.

The latter quickly triggered the demise not only of the feared USSR but the entire Eastern European Communist bloc.

China, meanwhile, is going strong, and a pretty good economic speed.

Like many, I thought that the protest movements in 1989 would fundamentally restructure China's internal political arrangement.  But, Deng and Li simply wiped out the protesters. 

There is still a part in me that hopes that the Communist government would collapse. Soon.  But, there are no signs of such an apocalypse.

At least, that is what I thought until I read this blog post over at the New York Review of Books.  Pretty darn exciting:

On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China. 

How fantastic it would be if slowly various secrets begin to leak out ... It has the potential for not only the downfall of the Communist government, but even for a completely new global order.

So, what are the kind of secrets that we might want to know about first?  Apparently there is a list of seven party secrets that have a priority over others:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?
2. The death of Mao’s military commander General Lin Biao in 1971. The official version of events, which to this day exists only in bare outline, strains credulity: Mao’s “closet comrade in arms” suddenly plotted a coup, failed in it, tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and was shot down in his plane. What really happened? Why? Why shouldn’t we know more?
3. Mao’s will and personal lockbox. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing said at her trial (as part of the “Gang of Four”) that Mao had a written will that mentioned her. Did he? What did it say? Mao also apparently kept his own lockbox of “most core secrets” that, in his later years, not even Jiang Qing could see. Mao’s mistress Zhang Yufeng kept the key until September 21, 1976, twelve days after Mao’s death, when Hua Guofeng, Mao’s anointed successor, is said to have taken it from her. What’s in the box?
4. The Beijing Massacre of 1989. The basic story is fairly well known from The Tiananmen Papers, Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, and Li Peng’s diary. But the records of some key meetings still are classified, and responsibility for the massacre remains an extremely sensitive question in Chinese politics.
5. The brutal suppression of the Falun Gong after 1999. Falun Gong claims there are concentration camps for their members and that internal organs of executed believers are surgically removed and sold. True? Untrue? What do the records say?
6. Beijing’s huge but secret “stability maintenance” budget. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences reports that Chinese government spending on domestic “stability maintenance”—the monitoring, intimidation, roughing-up, and illegal detention of petitioners, aggrieved workers, religious believers, professors, bloggers, twitterers, and other sources of “trouble”—now exceeds what the government spends in any category except the military. What are the details of this budget?
7. Bank accounts of Communist Party officials. Corruption and graft are widely viewed to be problems at every level of Chinese government, but exactly how much money have officials squirreled away? How much have they sent abroad?

 I can't wait ... here is to wishing that it will happen soon. Real soon.

Gorbachev is ticked off--at America!

In the NY Times opinion piece, Mikhail Gorbachev writes that Russia did not have any choice, and that Putin and Medvedev acted appropriately and wisely. Gorbachev writes,
For some time now, Russians have been wondering: If our opinion counts for nothing in those institutions, do we really need them? Just to sit at the nicely set dinner table and listen to lectures?
Indeed, Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts. Here’s the independence of Kosovo for you. Here’s the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring countries. Here’s the unending expansion of NATO. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade?

And, Thomas Friedman offers a different take. He does agree with Gorbachev that expanding NATO--supported by Clinton and Bush--was stupid. That Georgia was reckless with the military incursion. But, Friedman writes that Putin takes the gold:
That is why the gold medal for brutishness goes to Putin. Yes, NATO expansion was foolish. Putin exploited it to choke Russian democracy. But now, petro-power-grabbing has gone to his head — whether it's invading Georgia, bullying Western financiers and oil companies working in Russia, or using Russia’s gas supplies to intimidate its neighbors....
Russia would be wise to reconsider Putin’s Georgia gambit. If it does, we would be wise to reconsider where our NATO/Russia policy is taking us — and whether we really want to spend the 21st century containing Russia the same way we spent much of the 20th containing the Soviet Union.

Stalin in the Russia-Georgia war

Russia has now full control of the city of Gori in Georgia, according to reports. Gori's other notoriety comes from Stalin--"Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis Dzhugashvili in Gori, ", says Wikipedia.

So, where were some of the Soviet leaders born? (all from Wikipedia)
Lenin: (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) Born in Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk after its most famous son), in the Russian Empire
Trotsky: born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (alternative English spelling: Bronshtein) on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, Kherson Province of the Russian Empire (today's Ukraine)
Khrushchev: born in Kalinovka (Russia/Ukraine border)
Brezhnev: born in Kamenskoe (now Dniprodzerzhyns'k) in Ukraine
Andropov: born in Stavropol --way southwestern tip of Russia
Chernenko: born in the village of Bolshaya Tes (now in Novosyolovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai).
Gorbachev: born in Stavropol. (hey, the same place as Andropov, or are these two different Stavropol?)
Yeltsin: born in the village of Butka, in Talitsky District of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia.
Putin: born in Leningrad (well, St. Petersburg now)

Now you know :-)