• Пожаловаться

Victoria Bonnell: Russia at the Barricades

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Victoria Bonnell: Russia at the Barricades» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию). В некоторых случаях присутствует краткое содержание. Город: London, год выпуска: 2015, ISBN: 978-1-563-24271-7, издательство: Routledge, категория: История / Культурология / sci_social_studies / Политика / Публицистика / на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале. Библиотека «Либ Кат» — LibCat.ru создана для любителей полистать хорошую книжку и предлагает широкий выбор жанров:

любовные романы фантастика и фэнтези приключения детективы и триллеры эротика документальные научные юмористические анекдоты о бизнесе проза детские сказки о религиии новинки православные старинные про компьютеры программирование на английском домоводство поэзия

Выбрав категорию по душе Вы сможете найти действительно стоящие книги и насладиться погружением в мир воображения, прочувствовать переживания героев или узнать для себя что-то новое, совершить внутреннее открытие. Подробная информация для ознакомления по текущему запросу представлена ниже:

Victoria Bonnell Russia at the Barricades

Russia at the Barricades: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Russia at the Barricades»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

On August 19, 1991, eight high-ranking Soviet officials took over the government of the USSR and proclaimed themselves its new rulers. Less than seventy-two hours later, their coup had collapsed, but it would change the course of history in a way that no one—certainly not the plotters themselves—could have foreseen. The editor of this volume, who witnessed these momentous events, have assembled firsthand accounts of the attempted coup. They include testimonies from “junta” members and military officers, resistance leaders and ordinary citizens, Muscovites and residents of other locales, Russian and foreign journalists, foreign visitors and returning émigrés, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Key documents and photographs complement the individual accounts. The provocative introduction to the volume places the August events in the larger context—from the early days of perestroika and glasnost to the second confrontation at the White House, in October 1993.

Victoria Bonnell: другие книги автора


Кто написал Russia at the Barricades? Узнайте фамилию, как зовут автора книги и список всех его произведений по сериям.

Russia at the Barricades — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Russia at the Barricades», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

In the political sphere, the Gorbachev reforms led to a restructuring—perestroika—of the system of government, which since 1917 had been firmly controlled by the Communist Party. Representative bodies, from local soviets to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, were staffed in single-candidate elections and functioned as rubber stamps for decisions taken at the higher echelons of the Communist Party apparatus. Gorbachev revamped these pseudo-democratic institutions. His first major innovation was the creation of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies as a national assembly that would select the standing legislature—the Supreme Soviet—from among its members. Two-thirds of the deputies to the new Congress were chosen in elections in the spring of 1989, and—in a radical break with the Communist past—many of these were free elections with competing candidates. The remainder of the deputies were selected by so-called “public organizations,” including such stalwarts of the old regime as the “official” trade unions and, of course, the Communist Party. (Gorbachev himself chose to become a deputy not by election, which he could easily have won, but through the Communist Party quota—a decision that deprived him of any popular mandate, with fateful consequences for his future in politics.) Similar legislative institutions were then created at the republic level (elections for Russia’s Congress of People’s Deputies took place in 1990), and, for the first time, genuine elections for local soviets were held in cities throughout the country.

Though often dominated by old-guard elements (including Party bureaucrats, industrial managers, and military officers), the new legislatures provided a powerful forum for discussion of a wide range of political opinion. Most important, they made it possible for democratic politicians, like Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin, to speak directly to the Soviet public. Incessant television coverage of parliamentary debates and political commentary practically took over the air waves and the print media. The secretive or largely ceremonial politicking of the Soviet era gave way to full-blown political theater, open to all. For a while it seemed that the whole country was glued to television sets, watching the thrust and parry between Gorbachev and Sakharov and clashes between the liberal deputies of the Interregional Group and the conservatives of the “Soiuz” (Union) faction. In the process, the political horizons of the attentive public expanded so much that what seemed only yesterday a daring political move appeared today as an exercise in timid half-measures—and would be seen tomorrow as a betrayal of democracy.

The heady atmosphere of those days was propitious for the creation of voluntary associations, and they quickly proliferated during the Gorbachev era, evolving into a multitude of political parties and movements with diverse aims. These opportunities for open expression and political involvement helped to draw people into new forms of activism in the public sphere. At first encouraged, protected, indeed nurtured by glasnost and perestroika, the new political activists eventually began to chafe under the restrictions implicit in these policies. Little by little, they distanced themselves from Gorbachev, whose position (or, some would say, convictions) did not allow him to stray too far from the center of the Soviet political spectrum.

Nowhere was this process more evident than in the Baltic republics, where the first advocates of glasnost and perestroika soon emerged as champions of national independence. In a matter of months after the first free elections, this phenomenon spread throughout the Soviet Union, not excluding its heartland, the largest republic of them all—the Russian Federation.

At the republic level, the new legislative bodies, in which former dissidents sat side by side with old-style Soviet bosses, did not take long to develop their own political dynamic. The “democrats,” who were gaining in authority at the expense of the Party but still had little power, and Party apparatchiks, who held on to the levers of power but were losing their mantle of authority, found common ground on issues of nationalism—the ideological heir of communism in the modem world. Across the Soviet Union they formed powerful coalitions to challenge the authority of “the center,” namely, the top Soviet political elite presided over by Gorbachev. By the summer of 1991, many republics, acting through the newly elected legislatures, had declared their sovereignty. Among them was the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, led by its newly elected President, Boris Yeltsin.

For the first time since the revolution of 1917, the integrity of the empire was threatened from within. Whether they sought disintegration or opposed it, most responsible and foresighted politicians, among them Gorbachev and Yeltsin, understood that the old Union structure had to be replaced by a new arrangement that would transfer much of the center’s power to the republics. This became especially clear after Moscow’s attempt to overthrow the nationalist government in Lithuania in January 1991 ended in bloodshed and failure. In an effort to institutionalize the new status quo in relations with the center, Gorbachev and the heads of nine republics (the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia did not participate) drafted a new Union Treaty, initialed the final version of it, and agreed to have it signed on August 20, 1991. It was to prevent this from coming to pass that opponents of change attempted their coup d’état on August 18.[3]

Another important aspect of perestroika was the program of economic restructuring. Although the Gorbachev government failed to move decisively in the direction of a market economy, it did create opportunities for certain types of private enterprise, known by the catch-all term kooperativy, or cooperatives. This easing of central controls over economic activity made it possible for people to leave employment in the state sector for the first time since the 1920s, and by August 1991, new groups of private entrepreneurs had proliferated throughout the country.

* * *

It should not be surprising that the policies of glasnost and perestroika found some of their most ardent supporters among urban, educated, “middle-class” citizens who appreciated—and took advantage of—the new opportunities for individual and collective activity in the economy and in politics. This group emerged as a critically important new force in the country during the Gorbachev era.

At the same time, three pillars of the old system still clung to the resources and power, if not the authority, that they had enjoyed throughout the Soviet era: the military-industrial complex, which included a large part of the heavy industrial sector of the command economy; the all-pervasive Committee for State Security, the KGB; and above it all, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or more precisely its central apparatus, which controlled virtually all top government appointments from the revolution of 1917 until August 1991. Whether for lack of will or lack of power, out of tactical considerations or out of conviction, and most likely for all of these reasons at once, Gorbachev did not break with the Communist Party. Yet his policies continuously undermined the position and authority of the Party apparatus and fostered the emergence of reform groups within the Party at all levels as well as rival political movements outside the Party.

Until its suspension on August 24, 1991, the Communist Party was the sole political organization spanning the entire Soviet Union. Using the art of political maneuver of which he was a consummate practitioner, Gorbachev tried to enlist the Party in the cause of reform and to use its organizational resources as a counterweight to the centrifugal forces that were pulling the country apart. This paradox lies at the heart of Gorbachev’s achievement, but it was the cause of his failure as well. In the year preceding the coup, grassroots political forces that Gorbachev himself had helped to unleash were becoming increasingly radicalized in frustration over the seemingly slow pace of change. At the same time, conservative elements within the Party were stiffening their resistance to reform. To placate them, Gorbachev retained key conservative figures in his government even as he was preparing to sign the new Union Treaty that would have dealt a fatal blow to their power.

Читать дальше

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Russia at the Barricades»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Russia at the Barricades» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё не прочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Russia at the Barricades»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Russia at the Barricades» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.