Gorbachev

. . . .For useful political description is in a vocabulary which suggests answers to the question: “What is to be done?” just as useful scientific description is in a vocabulary which increases our ability to predict and control events. Orwell gave us no hints about how to answer Cherayshevsky’s question. He merely told us how not to try to answer it, what vocabulary to stop using. He convinced us that our previous political vocabulary had little relevance to our current political situation, but he did not give us a new one. He sent us back to the drawing board, and we are still there. Nobody has come up with a large framework for relating our large and vague hopes for human equality to the actual distribution of power in the world. The capitalists remain as greedy and shortsighted, and the Communist oligarchs as cynical and corrupt (unless Gorbachev surprises us), as Orwell said they were. No third force has emerged in the world, and neither the neoconservatives nor the post-Marxist left has come up with more than exercises in nostalgia. The possibility that we shall be able to look back on Orwell as blinkered and shortsighted remains, alas, purely theoretical. For nobody has come up with a plausible scenario for actualizing what Orwell called the “technical possibility of human equality.” ~ Page 174

. . . .consider the use of words in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, such as “democratization” (demokratizatsiya), used incessantly by Gorbachev to define his own aims. Lenin, of course maintained that the Soviet Union has achieved a truer form of democracy through the dictatorship of the party than the “formal democracies of the West. Yet nobody in the contemporary Soviet Union who uses the term “democratization” has any illusions that it means anything other than Western democracy, and not Leninist centralism. Similarly for Soviets the term “economic” (as in “economic considerations” or “economically optimal”) today means “efficient” as defined by capitalist laws of supply and demand. And any number of Soviet young people, despairing of the deteriorating quality of life in the USSR, will tell you that their only desire is to live in a “normal” country, that is to say, a liberal democracy undistorted by the ideology of Marxism-Leniniism. As one Soviet friend told me in 1988, she has had a hard time getting her children to do their homework since “everybody knows” that democracy means “you can do whatever you wish.” ~ Page 30 (Excerpt "The End of History And the Last man") Author Francis Fukuyama

'When we started, we did not understand the depth of the problems we faced.' ~ Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990 ~ page 637

'Our country has not been lucky. It was decided to carry out this Marxist experiment on us. In the end we proved that there is no place for this idea - it has simply pushed us off the path taken by the world's civilized countries.' ~ Boris Yeltsin, 1991 ~ page 637 (Excerpt: "Post War" ~ Tony Judith