20th Anniversary of Soviet Union Collapse

choi

Rodric Braithwaite, The Myth of Russia Old and New. Financial Times, Dec 22, 2011.

Excerpt in the window of print: Our [Britons'] advice was discredited as Russians came to believe we were unable even to run our vanted liberal economy.

Quote:

"Contrary to what you might gather from the western press, Russia is not the Soviet Union.

"Mr Putin's decision to run again for the presidency may turn out to be his biggest political mistake as he begins to slither down teh other side of the bell curve.

"Historians will never settle o why the Soviet Union collapsed: they still don't agree about why the Roman Empire fell. But they may strip away some of the myths: that the event was foreseen by no one, for example * * * From the 1960s onwards there were clear signs that the Soviet system was in serious decay: the lack of consumer goods, the primitive living conditions, the decrepit factories, the dysfunctional agriculture, the lopsided emphasis on heavy industry and defence, the growth rates approaching zero.

"For the next 15 years the Union floated on a sea of high priced oil. Even so, the dissident Andrei Sakharov openly predicted that without genuine political reform the economy would stagnate. The head of the state planning body was equally gloomy in private.

"But he [Gorbachev] ran into a familiar problem: the attempt to reform a falling system can simply destabilise it further. At the beginning of 1990--two year before teh collapse--I wrote to London that a messy, but steady, disintegration of Russia's empire was on the cards.

"So why did US intelligence analysts conclude, as late as April 1989, that the Soviet Union would remain the west's main adversary for the foreseeable future?

"He [Gorbachev] can be criticised for failing to tackle the economic problem. But he feared the disruption that a radical free market solution would bring. Yeltsin's helter-skelter reforms did  indeed bring runaway inflation and years of impoverishment to many Russians: the unavoidable, perhaps, of necessary change.

My comment:
(a) This is an excellent article. Please read it. There is a hint of China in my eyes.
(b) "The writer was British ambassador in Moscow from 1988 to 1992."
(c) mince pie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mince_pie
(a small British sweet pie traditionally served during the Christmas season; stuffed with mincemeat)

It seems to me that MODERN (without meat) mincemeat is what, judging from dictionary and photos, Taiwanese call 蜜餞. But I have not seen a mince pie in US (after having been in this country for more than a quarter century), so I really do not know.
(d) Soviet Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_union
("On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev yielded to the inevitable and resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin, the President of Russia.)

(e) The "true" in "Russians came to believe that we were untrue to our principles" ian an adjective that means:
"CONSISTENT <true to character>"
(f) helter-skelter (adv, adj, n; perhaps from Middle English skelten to come, go):
": in undue haste, confusion, or disorder <ran helter–skelter, getting in each other's way — F. V. W. Mason>
2: in a haphazard manner"
(g) The "grubby" in Russia's politics became increasingly grubby" is an adjective that is defined as:
"2a : DIRTY, GRIMY <grubby hands>
* * *
3: worthy of contempt : BASE <grubby political motives>"

All definitions are from www.m-w.com.