The most hated Russian

[luvdovz]

The whole (liberal) (Western) world worships him as the father of Perestroika, a person who hugely contributed for the fall of the Iron Curtain (Tear down that wall, Mr Gorbachev!)... But in Russia itself, Gorbachev is probably the most hated man. And is regularly a recipient of tons of verbal abuse. And no surprise, he's often erroneously declared

Comments

[papasha_mueller]

Russian news agency 'Novosti' does NOT have it's German TV program.

PS. Gorbachev IS disliked, damned and hated but NOT that much to become No.1, imho.

PPS. 'Being true to the endemic Russian proneness'
Errrr... WHAT??

[ddstory]

I expect a lot of hand-waving now, accompanied with "das ist bullshit, sonny" and the like.

[papasha_mueller]

Glad you're the first one to register. Come in, have a beer.

[ddstory]

I didn't expect anything of substance from you, anyway.

[sophia_sadek]

The rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated. Here in the US, they say that Elvis is dead. It remains to be seen. Elvis is alive and well and jumping from airplanes.

BTW, when Reagan died I told my students to have people pray for all those poor souls in Hell. Now that Reagan has arrived, the temperature has gone up a few degrees.

[dwer]

I can't imagine the chaos that would have happened had the USSR collapsed under another hard-line reactionary, rather than what happened with Gorbachev. I wonder if the wars would be over by now.

[papasha_mueller]

First, what exactly do you mean by saying 'another hardliner', may I ask you? Gorbachev wasn't one.
Next, the fact that it was HIM whom the collapse of USSR has to be attributed to, ruins the logic of your statement.

[dexeron]

I think he means a hard-line reactionary as contrasted with Gorby.

I don't know if I'd attribute the collapse to him. It happened under his watch, but the seeds of it were planted long before he took the reins.

[papasha_mueller]

Hard-line one?
Such as?
Trotsky?
Can't imagine myself such an animal.

[htpcl]

Of course your professor could've mentioned how most old Russian machines tend to be brought back into operation, once they've malfunctioned.

You hit 'em with your foot or bang on them with your fist. And they start working again. For a while.

Ps. How do I know? We used to have a Lada.

[telemann]

By all accounts since then, it was that Gorbachev wanted to save as much of the Soviet system as he could by changing the parts of it that held it back and could not be sustained. In retrospect that was a taller order than anyone could have managed.

Yeah, that's definitely true. I remember when there were votes to break up the Soviet Union ( I think Yeltsin was really pushing hard for the CIS at that time?) and Gorbachev was forced to watch it happen in his official capacity, but he tried everything in his powers (Democratic powers I hasten to add) to stop it. He was pretty emotional about the entire thing naturally.

[underlankers]

In a sense the USSR presented Russia with a dilemma. Officially Sovietism hated all nationalisms, especially Russian. Because a Russian nationalism would end the existence of the USSR in a meaningful sense. In practice the USSR was as Alexander Herzen put it the Tsar's barracks transformed. The further dilemma is that democratic Russian nationalism ceased to matter sometime around the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, leaving the liars (the USSR), the damned liars (what came after it), and the statisticians (the Russians and outsiders who proceeded to quibble about details which turned the USSR into something more incomprehensible after its existence than it was during it when it was already incomprehensible in certain profound ways).

[abomvubuso]

It looks as if at the time when the resistance to the communist regimes was the strongest, they somehow managed to squash it and survive (the 50s and 60s). And just when the people of the Eastern bloc looked likely to give up and embrace the notion that they'd be ruled forever by communist regimes, the system suddenly collapsed. Wonder why

[htpcl]

> The general population had already almost lost hope in their future at the time

That is exactly when a people is most dangerous. When they've lost all hope.