-Caveat Lector- All I can say is: 'no shit'. How amazing! Did anyone really think that power changes hands easily, without bloodshed and a lot of it? Do Americans really think that our present crop of robber barons (ie, read elected and non elected government and corporate elite) will treat them any better than their Russian counterparts? Veteran Journalist: 'Soviets' Still Run Russia NewsMax.com Monday, Sept. 18, 2000 The Soviet Union may have collapsed almost a decade ago, but the same people who ran Russia then still do today. Thatšs the conclusion of veteran British journalist Patrick Cockburn, who last year went back to Moscow where he had served as a foreign correspondent in the 1980s. Cockburn believes that communist party barons saw Gorbachevšs reforms during the 1980s as an opportunity for them to hang onto power and become capitalist princes. They did both. Writing in Britainšs Independent newspaper, Cockburn explained that when Gorbachev launched his campaign to modernize the communist state and went after the local party bosses who had been running large areas of the Soviet Union for decades, he failed to understand that they would not go peacefully. "They got their revenge," he wrote "when they dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. The key to the present state of Russia is that the final collapse of Communism came about because the party and state bureaucracy did not want change. They wanted to hang on to power and turn that power into money. By and large they have succeeded. They have done so because there was no popular revolution in 1991. The old ruling elite found that they could happily cohabit with the free-market reformers by turning themselves into capitalists." And they succeeded, picking the bones of the Soviet Union clean, while remaining in power. "It is difficult to think of any historical parallel with this mass looting of the state," Cockburn wrote. Secure in their fiefdoms, the men who had run all the state-owned industries simply sold the statešs holdings to themselves at bargain basement prices, becoming multi-millionaires overnight. As a result, Russia has undergone the worst industrial decline of any nation in history. When Cockburn came back to Russia he discovered that "some 38 per cent of the population were living in extreme poverty." He quotes historian David Satter as writing, "In the period since 1992, the country's gross domestic product fell by half. This did not happen even under German occupation. Russia now resembles a classic third-world country, selling its raw materials oil, gas and precious metals in order to import consumer goods." Cockburn is less than optimistic about President Vladimir Putinšs chances of making any real changes in the situation. He writes that Putin is in the same situation Gorbachev found himself in when he challenged the power of the local chieftains who rule much of Russia. Gorbachev, he recalls, tried to exercise control over the local party bosses in the provinces by charging them with corruption and trying to dismiss them. Putin, he says, wants to do much the same thing, relying on the power of the security forces. "He has appointed seven "super-governors" as his presidential envoys to reimpose the authority of the central government over Russia's 89 regions. It is unlikely that they will have much success. Local "dukes" stand at a pyramid of local interests dependent on the provincial governor. As Gorbachev discovered, they are not going to depart quietly into the political wilderness on orders from the Kremlin... "In the Eighties, the Soviet intelligentsia used to yearn for a "civil society", by which they meant a society which was not dominated by an all-powerful state. They somehow believed that Russia had a middle-class society in embryo, much like that in the US and Britain, which would emerge from its egg once state controls were lifted. "They forgot that the rulers of the Soviet state were also part of society. They were not going to disappear just because the state disintegrated. In the event, they lived on, sudden converts to the virtues of the free market, feeding, like vultures, on the carcass of the Soviet Union," Cockburn concluded.
