Experimental Blog # 231

Comments on and quotations from "In Putin's Footsteps"' - Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones by Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler

It has been almost 28 years since both the end of the Soviet Union and Communism in Russia, which soon followed. However, only now are American and other outsiders really beginning to find out what life in the "new Russia", its many cities and provinces, has become. This book presents both some of the old and familiar negative and, sometimes surprising, new positive evaluations.

"After taking over from Yeltsin as acting president on the first day of the new Millennium"{the year 2000}, the authors then point out that eighteen years later Vladimir Putin is still very much in charge and is just beginning his fourth presidential term in office.

"At times you can't help feeling that Moscow is Byzantium, its modernized version, with Mercedes and gourmet supermarkets."

"Cities of the Mighty Volga" - Ulyanovsk did not revert to its pre-Soviet name, Simbirsk. Whereas Samara did not keep its Soviet name of Kuibyshev.
"Examining the museum's exhibits{in Ulyanovsk} < > we realized that only four leaders have remained in Russia's recent, and well-curated, official historical memory. First, Lenin, < > Stalin comes second < > Leonid Brezhnev is the third < > {Putin is the fourth, of course.}"
"And what of the "reformers" - Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin? They have almost completely dropped out of history, at least as the Russian state now presents it."

The more positively presented cities seem to be:

"The Urals' Holy Trinity":
"Perm is the Urals' culture capital - the "first city in Europe," < > Others view it as the last European city < > The Perm Paradox."
 Yekaterinburg is called a "well-kept city" and it is compared to Chicago!
"Founded in 1586, Tyumen, the current hub of the Russian oil industry, has had an even shinier look than most." It is called the "Capital of Russia's Klondike".

Novosibirsk is told as "A Story of Science{ because of nearby Akademgorodok} and Serendipity". It is apparently Russia's third largest city and is positively described as "a stunning success."
 And, not for the first time, Vladivostok is compared to San Francisco. 

Magadan is called the "Gulag Capital". Even though this chapter is about 22 pages long it does not mention that an American politician named Henry Wallace, who became Secretary of Agriculture and then Vice President from 1940 to 1944, was reported to have visited this city, probably in the 1930s, and praised what he saw there![ Further checking-up turned up the fact that Vice President Henry Wallace visited Magadan in 1944]

Experimental Blog # 230

Quotations from and comments on "The Cold War" - A World History by Odd Arne Westad

"The human cost of Stalin's state-building was immense. Lenin had set a bloody pattern by executing at least one hundred thousand people without any form of judicial process."
"At least ten million Soviet people were killed by Stalin's regime from the late 1920s up to his death in 1953. < > In addition, at least three million died in the Ukrainian famine, which the regime did much to provoke and nothing to prevent."
"How could the Soviet system, based on terror and subjugation, appeal to so many people around the world?"

"Eastern Europe was remade by Communism, western Europe was remade by capitalism. < > Part of the reason for the success of the new were the disasters of the old. After Europe's calamitous half century, any stability would do, even one that was imposed by outside powers through the Cold War."

"Communism was to be China's weapon for modernization < > It would make the country rich and strong."

"By the late 1970s much of Latin America was ruled by military dictators. < > In all, fifteen out of twenty-one major states in Latin America were led by military dictators by the end of the decade."

"The Cold War in Europe ended because years of closer association between East and West had reduced the fear that the two sides had for each other, and because of western Europe's proven record of successfully integrating peripheral countries into the European Community."

    This is a very long book with about 629 pages of text and about 638 footnotes. The author was born, in 1960, and grew up in Norway. He later seems to have spent years in Britain at the London School of Economics; and only very recently has become a professor at Harvard University.
    Of course, everybody can only have their own subjective point of view; and this author can not be an exception. Norway has a short border with Russia; and the author is very involved with the Western European and American points of view.
    Although Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev seem to be, by far, the most written about people in this book, there are only 2 other Russians, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev, as compared to 9 Americans, in total, in the top 20 people talked about in this book. The Americans are, in alphabetical order: James Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
    The remaining 7 of the top 20, in alphabetical order, are: Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharal Nehru, and Zhou Enlai.
    It seems that the author, Odd Arne Westad, might say that these 20 people are the most important "world players" in the Cold War era.