177 Putin rehabilitates Stalin - with Reservations

(1) Putin rehabilitates Stalin - with Reservations
(2) Medvedev blasts Stalin defenders
(3) Stalin's grandson Yevgeni Dzhugashvili mounts a Libel action over Stalin's detractors
(4) Russian train bomb points to Islamists as perpetrators - Eric Walberg
(5) True Extent of 1930s Ukraine Famine Revealed in British Journalist's Diaries
(6) The Berlin wall had to fall, but today's world is no Fairer - Mikhail Gorbachev

(1) Putin rehabilitates Stalin - with Reservations

From  The Times 

December 4, 2009

Vladimir Putin praises Stalin for creating a superpower and winning the war

Tony Halpin in Moscow  

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6943477.ece

Joseph Stalin sent millions to their deaths during his reign of terror, and his name was taboo for decades, but the dictator is a step closer to rehabilitation after Vladimir Putin openly praised his achievements.

The Prime Minister and former KGB agent used an appearance on national television to give credit to Stalin for making the Soviet Union an industrial superpower, and for defeating Hitler in the Second World War.

In a verdict that will be obediently absorbed by a state bureaucracy long used to taking its cue from above, Mr Putin declared that it was “impossible to make a judgment in general” about the man who presided over the Gulag slave camps. His view contrasted sharply with that of President Medvedev, Russia’s nominal leader, who has said that there is no excuse for the terror unleashed by Stalin.

Mr Putin said that he had deliberately included the issue of Stalin’s legacy in a marathon annual question-and-answer programme on live television, because it was being “actively discussed” by Russians.

The final part of the four-hour broadcast focused on questions selected by Mr Putin from among two million submitted by Russians. He told viewers: “I left this question in, because I understand what a fiery issue it is. And the problem is: you say something positive and someone will be unhappy; you say something negative and someone else will be.

“It’s obvious that, from 1924 to 1953, the country that Stalin ruled changed from an agrarian to an industrial society. We remember perfectly well the problems, particularly at the end, with agriculture, the queues for food and such like ... but industrialisation certainly did take place.

“We won the Great Patriotic War [the Russian name for the Second World War]. Whatever anyone may say, victory was achieved. Even when we consider the losses, nobody can now throw stones at those who planned and led this victory, because if we’d lost the war, the consequences for our country would have been much more catastrophic.”

Mr Putin said that positive aspects of Stalin’s rule “undoubtedly existed”, but had been achieved at too high a price. He went on: “There was repression. This is a fact. Millions of our citizens suffered from this. And this way of running a state, to achieve a result, is not acceptable. It is impossible.

“Certainly, in this period we encountered not only a cult of personality, but a massive crime against our own people. This is also a fact. And we must not forget this.”

Mr Putin’s willingness to praise Stalin put him at odds with Mr Medvedev, who issued a forceful condemnation of the dictator’s regime on October 30 — the day that Russia commemorates victims of political repression in the Soviet Union.

“Millions of people died as a result of terror and false accusations ... But we are still hearing that these enormous sacrifices could be justified by certain ultimate interests of the state,” Mr Medvedev said. “I am convinced that neither the goals of the development of the country, nor its successes or ambitions, should be achieved through human suffering and losses. It is important to prevent any attempts to vindicate, under the pretext of restoring historical justice, those who destroyed their own people.”

Mr Putin answered 80 questions in a broadcast that demonstrated his continuing dominance of politics. Most focused on the economic crisis, and questioners in different parts of the country repeatedly asked Mr Putin to intervene to save their factories from closure. He told one that he had “plenty of time” to decide whether to return to the Kremlin as President at the next election in 2012. When another asked whether he was planning to leave politics, Mr Putin replied: “Don’t hold your breath.”

He said that he and Mr Medvedev could “work together effectively” because they shared the same university background, and values, as graduates of Leningrad State University. Mr Putin had said in September that the two men would “come to an agreement” about which of them would stand in 2012. While Mr Putin was holding court Tsar-like with the nation, Mr Medvedev was in Italy to meet the Pope and re-establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Asked if he would stand for a second term, Mr Medvedev replied: “If Putin doesn’t rule out running, neither do I rule myself out.”

During the television programme, Mr Putin demonstrated his populist instincts by lashing out at Russia’s billionaire class for their vulgar displays of wealth. His comments came after a scandal in Geneva, when an elderly man was critically injured in an accident after an alleged road race involving the children of wealthy Russians in a Lamborghini and three other sports cars.

“The nouveaux riches all of a sudden got rich very quickly, but they cannot manage their wealth without showing it off all the time. Yes, this is our problem,” Mr Putin said. “In Soviet times, some of our rich showed off their wealth by having gold teeth. The Lamborghinis and other pricey knicknacks — they are today’s gold teeth.”

(2) Medvedev blasts Stalin defenders

By Richard Galpin

Page last updated at 14:47 GMT, Friday, 30 October 2009

{photo} One of Stalin's slogans was recently restored to a Moscow metro station {end}

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8334009.stm

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has made an outspoken attack on those seeking to rehabilitate former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Millions of Soviet citizens died under Stalin's rule and Mr Medvedev said it was not possible to justify those who exterminated their own people.

He also warned against efforts to falsify history and defend repression.

Some Russian politicians have recently tried to portray Stalin in a more positive light.

Under President Medvedev's predecessor, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Stalin was often promoted as an efficient leader who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower.

Brutal regime

Mr Medvedev made the unusually critical comments in a videoblog posted on the Kremlin's website.

It appeared on the day the country is supposed to honour millions of people killed under Stalin's brutal regime which lasted from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.

President Medvedev said Stalin's mass killings could not be justified

Mr Medvedev said it was impossible to imagine the scale of repression under Stalin when whole groups of people were eliminated and even stripped of their right to be buried.

The president said there were now attempts to justify the repression of the past, and he warned against the falsification of history.

All this flies in the face of the current trend to promote Stalin as an effective manager and a leader who transformed the Soviet Union.

Under Mr Putin, the order was given for school history books to be re-written, highlighting Stalin's achievements.

In Moscow there is now even a Stalin-themed cafe and a metro station with one of Stalin's famous slogans on its walls. In northern Russia a historian investigating crimes committed by the former Soviet dictator was recently arrested.

(3) Stalin's grandson Yevgeni Dzhugashvili mounts a Libel action over Stalin's detractors

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6866958.ece

Joseph Stalin's grandson in legal battle to defend tyrant's reputation

Tony Halpin in Moscow  

In what must rank as one of Russia’s strangest legal cases, a court began a libel hearing yesterday in defence of the reputation of Joseph Stalin.

Yevgeni Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s grandson, is taking part in a demand for ten million roubles (£200,000) in damages from Novaya Gazeta, a liberal opposition newspaper, over an article that accused the Soviet tyrant of personally approving executions.

The case is being brought by Leonid Zhura, a devoted Stalinist, who insists the dictator never actually killed anybody — despite the deaths of millions in purges and slave labour camps under his rule.

Hearings opened yesterday at Basmanny Court in Moscow into his complaint that Anatoli Yablokov, an historian, had insulted Stalin’s memory.

Mr Stalin's son allegedly argued to a Polish officer that the liquidation had been necessary

Mr Yablokov wrote that the Soviet leader had signed orders to murder Soviet citizens, and that Stalin and the KGB were linked “by the gravest crimes, above all against their own people”. The newspaper reproduced documents from Soviet archives showing Stalin’s signature on lists of people for execution, some with handwritten notes insisting that all of the accused should be killed.

Mr Zhura, who runs a pro-Stalin website, claims that the signatures are forgeries. Mr Dzhugashvili, 73, said that he had come to Moscow from his home in Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, to give evidence as a witness. He told The Times: “Of course I am happy the case has come to court, because I adore Stalin and bow down before his memory. I’m fighting all these bastards telling lies about him.”

Mr Dzhugashvili said that the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers at Katyn in 1940 — also the subject of Mr Yablokov’s article — was among the lies told about his grandfather. Despite the existence of a secret Soviet document showing that Stalin approved the slaughter, his grandson said: “They all accused Stalin, and our Government just swallowed the story.” Mr Zhura, 62, insists that Soviet apparatchiks, not Stalin himself,were to blame for mass killings during his rule. Mr Zhura accepts that Stalin created the Gulag prison system, but argues that only criminals were sent to the labour camps.

The case is being seen as another step in Kremlin-backed efforts to rehabilitate Stalin as a strong leader who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. Vladimir Putin, during his time as President, endorsed a new school textbook describing Stalin as an “efficient manager” who behaved “entirely rationally, as the guardian of a system”.

Mr Dzhugashvili’s father, Yakov, was Stalin’s son by his first wife Yekaterina. Yakov was captured by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp in 1943, allegedly committing suicide after being told details of the Katyn massacre.

The libel case comes as a pro-Kremlin youth group is waging a campaign of intimidation against a former Soviet dissident in a dispute over a restaurant that changed its name from “AntiSoviet” to “Soviet”. The group, Nashi, began daily pickets outside the home of Alexander Podrabinek after he attacked a war veterans’ association for pressuring the restaurant to change its name.

Mr Podrabinek, who spent time in a labour camp in the 1970s for exposing Soviet misuse of psychiatry, is in hiding. This week President Medvedev’s human rights council denounced Nashi’s “persecution campaign”. But yesterday members of Mr Putin’s United Russia party backed Nashi, and called for the head of the rights council to be dismissed.

Rehabilitation

• An inscription praising Stalin reappeared in a mural in a Moscow metro station in 2008, 50 years after it had been removed

• In the same station, plaques featuring the city of Volgograd have been returned to their early Soviet name of Stalingrad

• A history book which claimed that Stalin acted rationally in killing millions was published last year to be used as a teaching guide in Russian schools

• In 2008 Stalin came third in a TV poll of the most popular Russian people of all time

• Billboards featuring Stalin’s image were put up round the city of Voronezh for a month in June, promoting his tough methods as the solution to the world economic crisis

• Lyrics from the Soviet anthem declaring: “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation, inspired us to labour and great deeds” carved in stone were recently restored to their original place in the hall of Kurskaya station in Moscow

Sources: Times database, BBC, Reuters

(4) Russian train bomb points to Islamists as perpetrators - Eric Walberg

From: efgh1951 <efgh1951@yahoo.com>  Date: 02.12.2009 07:46 AM
Subject: [shamireaders] Terror in Russia: Nothing comes from nothing

Nothing comes from nothing

Russia's terrorist train chugs on, says Eric Walberg

http://ericwalberg.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=206:nothing-comes-from-nothing&catid=37:russia-and-ex-soviet-union-english&Itemid=90

The worst terrorist attack to hit Russia in five years, the bombing of the Nevsky Express train last week, was almost certainly by Islamist extremists, and security forces are just not prepared for these less spectacular acts of terrorism, Russian security experts say.

The cause of the crash was identified as a homemade bomb that exploded on the tracks between Moscow and St Petersburg, killing 26, wounding scores and raising fears of a new era of terrorism in Russia. At the attack site, 320km northwest of Moscow, investigators found remnants of the bomb, equivalent to 15 pounds of TNT, that left a crater 1.5m deep. The bomb was apparently planted on the tracks and detonated while the second half of the train was passing. A second, less powerful explosive went off later at the site of the crash.

Russia suffered a wave of attacks in the early part of the decade as Muslim separatists from Chechnya struck trains and public places in Moscow and elsewhere, but there have been no such deadly assaults in recent years.

However, another Nevsky Express train was derailed in 2007 by an explosion, wounding more than two dozen people. Two men from Ingushetia were arrested, and just last month confessed to involvement in that blast. But the main suspect, a former Russian soldier-turned-Islamic-extremist, Pavel Kosolapov, remains at large. This previous blast and the sophistication of the present bombing, which involved two explosions, point to Islamists as the perpetrators. Aleksandr Bobreshov, a senior official of the state railway company, noted, "the second explosion, which occurred some time later, is the so-called double-blast method, carried out by North Caucasus sabotage groups."

Police issued a sketch of a middle aged "stocky, red-haired man" seen in the vicinity of Friday's blast, who may be Kosolapov. Kosolapov is believed to have been a close associate of Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, killed by Russian security forces in 2006, who was the mastermind of several large-scale terrorist attacks, including the tragic 2004 Beslan school siege, which left 330 people dead, mostly children.

The 1990s were a violent and unstable period in Russia, though the only large-scale terrorist attack was during the 1994-96 First Chechen War -- the 1995 Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, which resulted in 200 deaths. It was Basayev's first major "success" in as much as it led to peace talks with the Yeltsin's government and resulted in the establishment of a quasi-independent Chechnya.

The next major terrorist acts were the five bombings of mostly Moscow apartment buildings that killed nearly 300 people in September 1999. None of the Chechen field commanders, including Basayev, accepted responsibility for the bombings and Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov denied involvement of his government. However, they coincided with border skirmishes between Chechnya and Dagestan, and evidence that Al-Qaeda and Wahabism were increasingly active in Chechnya. A ground offensive was launched from Dagestan by Russian troops in October which now marks the beginning of what is called the Second Chechen War, on which Vladimir Putin staked his presidency after he was appointed president by Boris Yeltsin in December 1999.

There followed a decade of gruesome war in Chechnya, with tens of thousands dying. There were also several spectacular terrorist attacks which this time Chechen rebels led by Basayev did take responsibility for. Russia's security forces had to deal with the 2002 siege of a Moscow theatre which resulted in up to 200 deaths and the 2004 Beslan school assault. But Russia suffered no major attack after that, as the Chechen war ground to its supposed end.

Andrei Soldatov, editor of Agentura.ru, criticises Russian counter-terrorist efforts since Beslan, comparing officials to generals preparing for the last war, focussed on averting big attacks like Beslan, instead of preparing for smaller-scale strikes such as the bombings of the Nevsky Express, despite the 2007 warning blast. "We see new modus operandi taking shape, in which tiny cells of terrorists of three to five people plan and execute acts of sabotage," he says. "But our security forces have militarised this problem, and are not set up to deal with small threats like that."

Confirming his point, yet another bomb went off Monday in the southern republic of Dagestan, hitting a train travelling from the Siberian city of Tyumen to Baku in Azerbaijan. No one was injured in that blast, but analysts argue it was also by terrorists, who have never stopped operating in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya, and warn that more ambitious attacks on Russia will no doubt follow. The northern Caucasus is witnessing a growth of forces that are no longer interested in local nationalism, or separatism, but "see themselves as being at war with Russia. Until lately, the most adventurous Russian Islamists tended to head for Afghanistan, or somewhere else, to wage jihad. Now there are signs that they are going to the Caucasus area, and this bodes very ill," says Soldatov.

The Kremlin declared "mission accomplished" in Chechnya on 16 April 2009 after a decade and a half of military campaigning, pulling most of its forces out of the tiny republic, and leaving it under the control of local strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. Kremlin leaders argue that the harsh pacification of Chechnya, political crackdown and smarter security operations explain the fact that there has been no major terrorist attack on the Russian heartland since Beslan.

But it remains a fact that the terrorist tragedies in Russia during the past decade coincide with the brutal Second Chechen War, and that President Kadyrov himself is a loose cannon who has assassinated more than one opponent in the past year. Chechnya is also suspected of being a prime transit route for drug smugglers, and the lawlessness and threat to Russia emanating from Chechnya are not lost on other parties, in particular, the US and Israel. This latest incident is a serious blow not only to Putin's strategy of holding on to Chechnya at all costs, but to overall Russian security. ***

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/

(5) True Extent of 1930s Ukraine Famine Revealed in British Journalist's Diaries

From: IHR News <news@ihr.org> Date: 21.11.2009 05:06 PM

The Times (London)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6914869.ece

November 13, 2009

Jack Malvern

Millions of peasants were starving. Children were turned against adults as they were recruited to expose people accused of hoarding grain. Stalin sealed the border between Russia and Ukraine to ensure that news of the famine would not spread, but one journalist was able to break through to discover the truth.

Gareth Jones, who revealed the story of the forced famine that claimed the lives of four million people in Ukraine in the 1930s, recorded the words of Stalin’s victims in his diaries, which he then used to prepare his dispatch.

The public can see the diaries for the first time today as they go on display at the University of Cambridge.

One entry from March 1933 describes how Jones illegally sneaked across the border from Russia to interview peasants. “They all had the same story: ‘there is no bread; we haven’t had bread for two months; a lot are dying’,” he wrote.

“They all said: ‘The cattle are dying. We used to feed the world and now we are hungry. How can we sow when we have few horses left? How will we be able to work in the fields when we are weak from want of food?’ ”

Jones escaped without being detected and sent a “press release” from Berlin, which was printed in Britain and America. The report included an encounter on a train with a Communist, who denied that there was a famine. “I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A fellow passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided.”

Despite his first-hand account of the starvation, the story of what has become known as the Holodomor (Ukranian for “the famine”) was not widely followed because it was disputed by other Western journalists based in Moscow who wished to placate their contacts. Walter Duranty, a British-born correspondent for The New York Times, opined that Jones’s judgement had been “somewhat hasty”. He suggested that Jones had a “keen and active mind” and that his 40-mile trek near Kharkov had been a “rather inadequate cross-section of a big country”.

Jones, who wrote occasionally for The Times, was forced to leave the Soviet Union and was dead within two years after a mysterious encounter with bandits in China. He was 29.

Jones’s relatives, who discovered his diaries in the 1990s, believe that his kidnap in China may have been arranged by Soviet spies. David Lloyd George, who consulted Jones on foreign affairs after he stepped down as Prime Minister, hinted that Jones was killed because of something he knew. The diaries, which are on display at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge until mid-December, lay forgotten for more than 50 years.

Then Gwyneth Jones, who was 94, discovered a suitcase containing her brother’s belongings. Margaret Siriol Colley, 84, Jones’s niece, said: “I remember when he was captured, and the 16 days of awful agony as we waited to learn whether he would be released.”

Rory Finnin, lecturer in Ukranian studies at Cambridge, said that Jones’s diaries finally give a voice to the peasants who died as a result of Stalin’s collectivisation policies. Grain was requisitioned for urban areas and for export to countries including Britain.

Historians continue to debate whether Stalin was deliberately punishing Ukranian nationalists, but it is clear that he allowed the famine to occur. He sealed the border between Russia and Ukraine and punished peasants accused of “hoarding grain”.

Mr Finnin said: “There were a smattering of stories here and there [but] but I don’t know if Western historians gave [the famine] the serious attention that it receives today.”

Diary extracts

“With a bearded peasant who was walking along. His feet were covered with sacking. We started talking. He spoke in Ukranian Russian. I gave him a lump of bread and cheese. ‘You could not buy that anywhere for 20 roubles. There just is no food.’ We walked along and talked, ‘Before the war this was all gold. We had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are ruined. We are the living dead. You see that field. It was all gold but now look at the weeds.’”

“He took me along to his cottage. His daughter and three little children. Two of the smaller children were swollen... ‘They are killing us.’ ‘People are dying of hunger.’ There was in the hut a spindle and the daugher showed me how to make thread. The peasant showed me his shirt, which was home-made and some fine sacking which had been home-made. ‘But the Bolsheviks are crushing that. They won’t take it. They want the factory to make everything.’ The peasant then ate some very thin soup with a scrap of potato. No bread in house.”

“Talked to a group of peasants. ‘We’re starving. Two months we’ve hardly had bread. We’re from Ukraine and we’re trying to go north. They’re dying quickly in the villages.’”

“[In Karkhov] Queues for bread. Erika [from the German consulate] and I walked along about a hundred ragged, pale people. Militiamen came out of shop whose windows had been battered in and were covered with wood and said: ‘There is no bread’ and ‘There will be no bread today’.”

(6) The Berlin wall had to fall, but today's world is no Fairer - Mikhail Gorbachev

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date:  05.11.2009 01:33 PM

The Berlin wall had to fall, but today's world is no Fairer

by Mikhail Gorbachev

The Guardian (U.K.), October 30, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/30/1989-capitalism-in-c risis-perestroika

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall, one of the shameful symbols of the cold war and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way.

The first optimistic observation to be made is that the announced "end of history" has not come about, though many claimed it had. But neither has the world that many politicians of my generation trusted and sincerely believed in: one in which, with the end of the cold war, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of the arms race, dangerous regional conflicts, and sterile ideological disputes, and enter a golden century of collective security, the rational use of material resources, the end of poverty and inequality, and restored harmony with nature.

Another important consequence of the end of the cold war is the realisation of one of the central postulates of New Thinking: the interdependence of extremely important elements that go to the very heart of the existence and development of humankind. This involves not only processes and events occurring on different continents but also the organic linkage between changes in the economic, technological, social, demographic and cultural conditions that determine the daily existence of billions of people on our planet. In effect, humankind has started to transform itself into a single civilisation.

At the same time, the disappearance of the iron curtain and barriers and borders, unexpected by many, made possible connections between countries that until recently had different political systems, as well as different civilisations, cultures and traditions.

Naturally, we politicians from the last century can be proud of the fact that we avoided the danger of a thermonuclear war. However, for many millions of people around the globe, the world has not become a safer place. Quite to the contrary, innumerable local conflicts and ethnic and religious wars have appeared like a curse on the new map of world politics, creating large numbers of victims.

Clear proof of the irrational behaviour and irresponsibility of the new generation of politicians is the fact that defence spending by numerous countries, large and small alike, is now greater than during the cold war, and strong-arm tactics are once again the standard way of dealing with conflicts and are a common feature of international relations.

Alas, over the last few decades, the world has not become a fairer place: disparities between the rich and the poor either remained or increased, not only between the north and the developing south but also within developed countries themselves. The social problems in Russia, as in other post-communist countries, are proof that simply abandoning the flawed model of a centralised economy and bureaucratic planning is not enough, and guarantees neither a country's global competitiveness nor respect for the principles of social justice or a dignified standard of living for the population.

New challenges can be added to those of the past. One of these is terrorism. In a context in which world war is no longer an instrument of deterrence between the most powerful nations, terrorism has become the "poor man's atomic bomb", not only figuratively but perhaps literally as well. The uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the competition between the erstwhile adversaries of the cold war to reach new technological levels in arms production, and the presence of the new pretenders to an influential role in a multipolar world all increase the sensation of chaos in global politics.

The crisis of ideologies that is threatening to turn into a crisis of ideals, values and morals marks yet another loss of social reference points, and strengthens the atmosphere of political pessimism and nihilism. The real achievement we can celebrate is the fact that the 20th century marked the end of totalitarian ideologies, in particular those that were based on utopian beliefs.

Yet new ideologies are quickly replacing the old ones, both in the east and the west. Many now forget that the fall of the Berlin wall was not the cause of global changes but to a great extent the consequence of deep, popular reform movements that started in the east, and the Soviet Union in particular. After decades of the Bolshevik experiment and the realisation that this had led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the form of Soviet perestroika, which was also available to the countries of eastern Europe.

But it was soon very clear that western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.

Today's global economic crisis was needed to reveal the organic defects of the present model of western development that was imposed on the rest of the world as the only one possible; it also revealed that not only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal capitalism are in need of profound democratic reform, their own kind of perestroika.

Today, as we sit among the ruins of the old order, we can think of ourselves as active participants in the process of creating a new world. Many truths and postulates once considered indisputable, in both the east and the west, have ceased to be so, including the blind faith in the all-powerful market and, above all, its democratic nature. There was an ingrained belief that the western model of democracy could be spread mechanically to other societies with different historical experience and cultural traditions. In the present situation, even a concept like social progress, which seems to be shared by everyone, needs to be defined, and examined, more precisely.

[Mikhail Gorbachev was the last president of the Soviet Union; he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1990]