James wrote: > > REPLY: right. But there was also the class issue of > workers vs. bureaucrats. >
I wrote: Which Yeltsin appealed to brilliantly -- "we must get rid of the priviliges of the bureaucrats!" (This sounds hilarious today, at a time when bureaucrats in Russia live at a level beyond their wildest Soviet dreams.) --- I add: It occurs to me that we are confusing the historically related but distinct issues of a) the collapse of the USSR as a geopolitical unit and b) the collapse of the Soviet system and Communist Party. The nationalism issue concerns mostly a, and the bureaucrat-worker conflict concerns mostly b. You could conceivably have had b without a or vice versa. (There was nothing _requiring_ the newly-independent states from adopting more-or-less Western models. Certainly Belarus and Turkmenistan haven't adopted Western models even rhetorically: the former is quasi-Soviet in political and economic organization, and the latter is dominated by a Cult of Personality similar to North Korea, with lots of state intervention in the economy.) ===== Nu, zayats, pogodi! __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com
