A view from inside
Spiegel is running a fascinating interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, who is 80 years old now. The interviewer is testy, even confrontational, but well-informed, and Gorbachev stands up for himself with remarkable candor. It's hard for me to imagine a former Soviet premier speaking in this unguarded way: quite unlike a politician, more like a statesman with a conscience. Which is not to say that I understand a single thing either about how the USSR came to be or about how it abruptly fell apart.
Gorbachev notes that a majority of former Soviet citizens will say today that they regret the USSR's breakup, but only 9 percent say they want it back.
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4 comments:
Not a statesman, I think, but surely a man who tried his best in a difficult time.
Other men might have done better (and those others will prefer their own definitions of "better"), but he did try, and he did have an impact.
Eric Hines
Funny, I was reading this article.
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/08/19/the-beam-in-our-eye/
Goldman doesn't know what he is talking about, of course, vis a vis Robert E Lee. But like the majority of people I find myself at odds with, they have pieces of the puzzle. They are only beginning to connect the dots, they don't have all the pieces yet though.
While Goldman may have a better picture than some people, it's not nearly enough to know what happened in Civil War I.
The only problem with Goldman's essay is that he doesn't realize that it's still too close to the event.
Come back in a couple hundred years.
That's not the only problem with it.
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