Gorbachev Urges Obama to Carry Out Perestroika
Gorbachev calls on Obama to carry out ‘perestroika’ in the U.S. . . . because it worked so well in the Soviet Union!
Does even he believe this version of history??
Gorbachev said that after transforming his country in the late 1980s, he had told the Americans that it was their turn to act, but that Washington, celebrating its Cold War victory, was not interested in “a new model of a society, where politics, economics and morals went hand in hand.”
Let’s be clear on what Perestroika was - an absolute disaster!
The Soviet economy went from stagnation to deterioration. At the end of 1991, when the union officially dissolved, the national economy was in a virtual tailspin. In 1991 Soviet GDP had declined by 17 percent and was declining at an accelerating rate.[citation needed] High inflation was becoming a major problem. Between 1990 and 1991, retail prices in the Soviet Union increased 140 percent.
Under these conditions, the general quality of life for the Soviet people deteriorated. The public traditionally faced shortages of durable goods, but under Gorbachev, food, clothes, and other basic necessities were in short supply.
Now, doesn’t that sound like fun! Since he brings it up, Obama’s plans do have some similarities to Perestroika, as even an Australian child could tell you:
A key part of perestroika was to reduce the amount of money being spent on defense, and to do this Gorbachev felt the Soviet Union should:
* Pull out of Afghanistan.
* Negotiate with the United States about arms reductions.
* Cease interfering in other communist countries (The Sinatra Doctrine).
Obama wants to:
* Pull out of Iraq.
* Unilaterally disarm.
* Cease helping our democratic allies.
Moreover, Obama’s support not only of the bailout, but his desire to prop up the auto industry are echoes of another perestroika policy:
Government spending increased sharply as an increasing number of unprofitable enterprises required state support and consumer price subsidies continued.
I really don’t know why anyone pays much attention to Gorbachev these days. I mean, I understand why he keeps talking. He desperately wants his name to go down favorably in history, as a heroic reformer instead of the man who destroyed the Soviet Union and brought so much economic hardship to so many. But why do we listen to someone with his track record?
The failure of perestroika was exacerbated by Gorbachev’s continual boasting about the results that the reforms would have.
To be fair, he’s not the only one with a history of hot air and propaganda slogans . . .
Вперёд!
Forward to New Successes in Work and Study!
O,
I am having a hard time with the bailout as well. My gut instinct is to oppose such legislation and allow these companies to go under. After all, the failures of Enron and Anderson are now an integral part of B-School curriculum. But there has to be something else to the bail-out. Something more than the mere desire to avoid adding to the already overwhelming number of case studies in bad business practices and ethics. I think that saving these last few American (for the most part) giants is done with the genuine hope that it will lead to a trickle down effect. Give money to the big guys so they can make their payroll and not have to fire thousands of Americans all while they restructure and improve. Whether the trickle will actualize is another question. What bothers me is the lack of oversight as to how the money is spent.
As to Garbageov, he is a media whore desperately trying to improve his image in the last few years he has left. Remember him in the Pizza Hut Commercials? Or the oh-so-hideous Louis Vuitton ad? I am never buying or accepting another Vuitton.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/fashion/26ROW.html
Comment by MAlex — November 11, 2008 @ 6:38 pm
Owen,
You are talking about the downfall of the Soviet Union like it was a bad thing. The only people who think it was a bad thing are the Communists and the Russian nationalists.
I think it was a wonderful thing because it made liberty and democracy possible for tens of millions of people who were languishing in the Soviet system (Ukrainians, Georgians, the Balts, the 20-30 million slaves in the gulags.). Freedom is well worth the price of a decade of economic hardship following the collapse of communism. And Gorbie was not necessarily to blame for it. The seeds of the Soviet system’s collapse were planted long before the 1980s. (And much of the post-Soviet economic hardship was the result of post-Soviet government policies, and especially so in Ukraine, where the government kept printing money to meet its social obligations, jacking up inflation to 14,000% at one point, and causing the longest post-Soviet economic decline until the year 2000.) The first seed of destruction, philosophically speaking, was in the beginning, when the entire system was founded on official godlessness and state socialism. But more to the point, Brezhnev (and Reagan) was responsible for the credit hole the Soviet Union was in. A lot of old Soviet citizens remember his senile rule with nostalgia, because sausages were cheap (read subsidized) and there was general internal peace in the empire. But this lifestyle was supported by the countless credits extended by Western institutions, which doomed the Soviet economic system to the 1990s-style downturns. If it wasn’t for the West stupidly extending credits to the Soviet Union, it would have collapsed much sooner.
Another reason for collapse was the fact that Saudi Arabian monarchs performed a wonderful service for their American ally at the request of Reagan. Just like Russia today, the Soviet Union was an energy tiger. (So, in a sense this is nothing new.) The Soviet leadership was planning to rely on its energy might for economic stability and political influence in the world, as well as hard currency receipts. Reagan asked the Saudis to start pumping out significantly more oil (I think they doubled it), which collapsed the world price of oil, and undermined the entire Soviet strategy. Russia today is in the same place. The price of oil falls 3 times and the Russian market is down over 70%. (Something similar in Ukraine as well, with the price of steel down 4 times, the markets are down almost 70% now.) Pretty predictable, really. Another “problem” was his anti-alcoholism campaign, which deprived the Soviet central government of significant revenues. The Russian government today is relying on these revenues to take them through the rough times. Sure, they are killing their people with alcoholism and lowering the life expentancy of Russians even further, but at least they are ensuring the excise tax revenues are coming in.
Blaming the collapse of the USSR on Gorbie is at best disingenuous, unless you believe communism and repression is a good thing, and certainly not the whole story. It was inherent in the illiberal system itself. As soon as Gorbie allowed the Soviet people to breathe a little more freedom, the Balts and the Georgians demanded their independence, and were met with some violence. Certainly not in the hardline Soviet style, but there were tanks on the streets in their Republics. The rest of the Soviet system held together, until Yeltsin went around Gorbachev’s back, and while demanding the independence of Russia from the Soviet Union, met with his Belarusian and Ukrainian counterparts in Belarus in 1990, sealed an agreement with them and officially declared the end of USSR. The Ukrainian (Communist!) parliament immediately voted for independence. And a year later, in 1991, the Ukrainian people confirmed in a referendum by a vote of 96% (including a majority in Crimea!) that they wanted independence for Ukraine. That was the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union.
What you need to understand about Gorbie is that he is a social-democrat, Western European style. What he wanted to do was to make the Soviet Union more like the rest of Western Europe, by changing it into a socialism with a soft face. This is precisely what he is asking Obama to do, to make the United States more like Western Europe. Needless to say, that would be bad, as most Western European economic growth rates are at 1-2% per year. Social democracy lowers economic growth by consuming productive capital that’s needed for growth.
Aleks’s last blog post..Yulia Tymoshenko Congratulates Obama On Victory
Comment by Aleks — November 21, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
You talk with glee about the misery and suffering of hundreds of millions of people. I find that attitude inhuman. No, the system didn’t have to just crash and fall apart, it’s dissolution could have been better managed. Also, I disagree that the Soviet Union fell apart because people wanted freedom and democracy. It fell apart because of nationalism. Democracy was simply the best way for each nationality to demonstrate how much they wanted out, and break things apart.
Comment by Owen — December 2, 2008 @ 3:57 pm