Good fucking God (reprise)...
Martin Peretz, riffing on his blog:
Who knows what animates Gorbachev? Maybe he hopes just to be remembered. He won't be. Certainly not by the Russian people. A passing figure. Not even one on whom American colleges will bestow honorary degrees.
That's just too wacky. Here's the first hit on Google for "Gorbachev Honorary degree". And that he won't be remembered by the Russian people? Maybe not fondly, but my guess is he'll be remembered. And the Europeans like him. Of course to Marty, that's probably a big minus...
Who knows what animates Gorbachev? Maybe he hopes just to be remembered. He won't be. Certainly not by the Russian people. A passing figure. Not even one on whom American colleges will bestow honorary degrees.
That's just too wacky. Here's the first hit on Google for "Gorbachev Honorary degree". And that he won't be remembered by the Russian people? Maybe not fondly, but my guess is he'll be remembered. And the Europeans like him. Of course to Marty, that's probably a big minus...
2 Comments:
Gorbachev will be remembered far into the future as the first person in history to manage the demise of an empire as powerful as the Soviet Union without catastrophic war, barbarian invasion, or the like.
The people I met in Russia recalled the end days of the Soviet Union with fear - they nearly had a famine - but they also remembered Perestroika with fondness.
In the West, we see Gorbachev as the last of the communist leaders, but they see the Gorbachev as the start of post-communism.
Yes, well said. In the poll I linked to, or one on the same page, a small majority of Russians said they think retrospectively that Perestroika was a bad thing. I've never been to Russia, but from my reading, it seems a lot of Russians feel like Gorbachev was responsible for the reduction of Russia to a small player on the world stage.
Maybe that will change over time. I think Gorbachev's place history in the West as the guy who peaceably dismantled the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War is solid. Russian views may change over time, but the idea that Gorbachev will go down as "a passing figure" is just weird. He's a giant of history, whatever.
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