A Congressman Defends Putin + Ukraine

choi

Jonathan Weisman, Kremlin Finds a Defender in Congress. New York Times, Mar 29, 2014
www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/us/po ... er-in-congress.html
("'There have been dramatic reforms in Russia that are not being recognized by my colleagues,' he said. 'The churches are full. There are opposition papers being distributed on every newsstand in Russia. You’ve got people demonstrating in the parks. You’ve got a much different Russia than it was under Communism, but you’ve got a lot of [Western] people who still can’t get over that Communism has fallen'”)

Note:
(a) US "Representative Dana Rohrabacher speaks up for Moscow with pride. He is, he says, a bit frosted with the Russian government in one respect. 'I kind of wish I would get some sort of word back. But I haven’t even gotten so much as a thank you.'”

frost (vt): "to make angry or irritated <that really frosts me>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/frost

(b) The published article is about half the size of the online version.

choi

Serhii Plokhy, The Roots of the Ukraine Crisis; Putin's Russia is using military might to rewrite the history of the Soviet collapse. Wall Street Journal, Mar 15, 2014,
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304185104579437483495506904

Quote:

"Russians, who numbered close to 150 million people, constituted only 51% of the Soviet population. The Ukrainians were the second-largest group, with more than 50 million people, accounting for close to 20% [my guess is ~17%: 50m divided by 150m] of the Soviet population. When Ukraine voted for independence on Dec. 1, 1991, it sealed the Soviet Union's fate. More than 90% of Ukrainian citizens voted in favor of statehood. Even in the Crimea, which then (as now) had an ethnic Russian majority, 54% voted for independence.

"The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had drawn up a template for a new, looser union, but Boris Yeltsin of the Russian republic and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine refused to join. On Dec 8, 1991, in a hunting lodge in the forests of Belarus, Mr Yeltsin and Mr Kravchuk dissolved the USSR and created a Commonwealth of Independent States to link the former republics. Neither Mr Gorbachev nor Mr Yeltsin could imagine a viable union without Ukraine. * * * The result was a chain reaction: Ukraine didn't want to be in the union that Mr. Gorbachev envisioned, Russia couldn't imagine a union without Ukraine, and those republics that still wanted to be in the union couldn't imagine it without Russia.

Note:
(a) Ukraine, whose population CIA World Factbook (2014 ed) estimates is 44.6m. If ones googles (Ukraine population)--not inside quotation marks--a graph of population shift (1960-2012; based on World Bank) will appear, showing population of 52m in 1991 and indeed population decline.
(b) Dissolution of the Soviet Union
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union
(USSR formally ceased to exist on Dec 26, 1991; section 7.4 The August Coup: Gorbachev's looser union; section 7.5 The fall -- August-December 1991: By nearly all accounts, the secession of the second-most powerful republic ended any realistic chance of the Soviet Union staying united even on a limited scale)

Russian SFSR = Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
CPSU = Communist Party of Soviet Union

(c) "During the Russian Revolution, Lenin had claimed that the new Soviet state wouldn't survive without Ukrainian coal, but by 1991, the USSR's greatest riches—especially its vast mineral resources—were on Russian soil, not in the republics. The Soviet Union was different from other empires: Russia, the empire's resource-rich center, could cut off its former colonial possessions in the republics from easy access to those resources. As such, Russia stood to benefit more than any past empire from the loss of its imperial possessions—as Mr Yeltsin and his people well knew. * * * But Mr Yeltsin never gave up hope that the Soviet Union could be revived in a different form that would benefit Russia. His advisers thought that the republics would come back to Russia once it had recovered economically and militarily. In September 1991, Mr Yeltsin's right-hand man, Gennady Burbulis, told a key aide to Mr Gorbachev, 'We must save Russia and strengthen its independence, separating ourselves from the rest. After that, when it is back on its feet, everyone will rally to it, and the question [of the union] can be resolved again.' Mr Yeltsin's advisers hoped that the post-Soviet republics would return voluntarily to the Russian fold."

Donets Basin
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/169077/Donets-Basin
("south of the Donets River, but coal deposits also extend westward to the Dnieper River [see map in this Web page] in the greater Donets Basin. Coal was first discovered in the Donets Basin in 1721, but exploitation did not begin until the early 19th century and became significant only after the first railway reached the area in 1869. Development in the last two decades of the 19th century was rapid, and by 1913 the Donets Basin was producing 87 percent of Russian [empire] coal")