Gorbachev and the Russian Republic
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Perhaps no Russian has ever been more taken by surprise by the lightning collapse of the "inner" Soviet empire than the Soviet president and Communist party general secretary. From the time of his accession in 1985, Gorbachev had repeatedly shown himself to be blind and insensitive to ethnic issues. An ardent "Soviet patriot," Gorbachev fought hard to preserve the "Russian” / “Soviet Union" identification in the minds of Russians which had served as vital cement for the unitary Soviet state during the pre-perestroika period.

Once glasnost and democratization had begun to loosen things up, Gorbachev found himself in an unexpected squeeze between two groups which thoroughly detested one another but for whom, for different reasons, the political and economic autarchy of the Russian republic was a high-priority desideratum. The first group was a conservative alliance of neo-Stalinists, National Bolsheviks, and conservative Russian nationalists who, in a sense, wanted to resurrect policies which had obtained during the reigns of Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II. The decaying official ideology of Marxism-Leninism was to be boosted by potent doses of Russian imperial nationalism. As for the Russian republic, members of the conservative coalition insisted that it be granted the same institutions – and especially a Russian Communist party – as were enjoyed by the minority republics.

Another group, who were sworn opponents of the conservatives, also emerged to champion the cause of Russian autarchy. This was a coalition of so-called democrats, whose standard bearer was, of course, Boris Yeltsin, and who advocated turning the RSFSR into an economically and politically sovereign republic, with the USSR becoming a confederation of fully self-governing republics. (The conservative coalition, by contrast, believed that Russia should suppress the separatist leanings of the periphery, by force if necessary.) Throughout his period of rule, Gorbachev attempted to counter the agendas of these two powerful coalitions. Contrary to the wishes of the conservatives, he struggled to maintain the traditional structural asymmetries, whereby the RSFSR was denied institutions – such as its own Academy of Sciences – enjoyed by the other republics. Like Brezhnev before him, Gorbachev wanted to preserve the Russian/USSR linkup in the minds of ethnic Russians. Contrary to the goal of the increasingly powerful democrats, he struggled to maintain the USSR as a unitary state, permitting only a modest and largely cosmetic devolution of power to the republics.

An important Party Central Committee plenum on the nationalities question which was held in September 1989 showed the extent to which Gorbachev was determined to resist the encroachments of Russian autarchy. The plenum's platform stoutly resisted the thesis that the RSFSR should be granted its own Communist party, advocating instead the resurrection of a body which had existed under Nikita Khrushchev: a bureau for RSFSR affairs at the USSR Party Central Committee. Russia, it emerged, was to be denied the powerful post of first party secretary of the Russian Republic.

In an interview published in Izvestiya, Afeksandr Vlasov, a close Gorbachev’s ally who had been selected to chair the RSFSR Council of Ministers and, in May 1990, ran unsuccessfully against Yeltsin for the post of chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, defended the continued existence of such structural asymmetries. The RSFSR, he said, should be given a Secretariat for Russian Affairs at the All-Union Central Trade Union Council and a Bureau for Russian Affairs at the All-Union Komsomol. These changes fell short of establishing parity with the positions of the minority republics, which possessed their own trade union and Komsomol organizations.

Another close Gorbachev’s ally, Central Committee Secretary Yurii Manaenkov, vigorously defended the maintenance of structural asymmetries between the position of Russia and of the other fourteen republics. Manaenkov pointed to the immense size of the RSFSR and its large population (146 million inhabitants) as justification for special treatment. The fact that there were 10.6 million Communist party members living in the RSFSR also constituted, he said, grounds for a special approach. "The formation of a Russian Communist Party . . . ,"he warned, "could strengthen the centrifugal forces in the CPSU and, obviously, in the country as well. . . . As we know, V. I. Lenin stood for a federation of peoples but repudiated a federation within the party. The duty of communists is not to admit any divisions on national grounds”.

 

3 . Answer the questions.

 

1. Who was most of all taken by surprise by the collapse of the “inner” Soviet empire?

2. What issues had Gorbachev shown himself to be blind to?

3. What did he fight hard to preserve?

4. What situation did he find himself in when glasnost had begun to loosen things up?

5. What were two political groups which detested one another?

6. Whose standard bearer was Boris Yeltsin?

7. What did Gorbachev attempt to do throughout his period of rule?

8. What did a Party Central Committee plenum of 1989 show?

9. Who was Aleksandr Vlasov?

10. What did another close Gorbachev’s ally defend?

4. Match the words on the left with the definitions on the right.

 

1. accession     a) a union of separate political parties for a special purpose,

usually for a limited period of time

2. collapse        b) to destroy or bring to an end by force

3. desideratum c) government of a country by one person with unlimited power

4. alliance        d) the act of bringing back into use, existence, or fashion; renewal

5. coalition      e) something desired as necessary

6. autarchy      f) the act of coming to a high position

7. suppress       g) to oppose; fight against something

8. resist            h) the state of living or being real

9. resurrection  i) a sudden fall as a result of pressure or loss of strength or support

10.existence     j) a group or association of people formed for the protection of

their interests

 

5. Find antonyms to the following words in the text.

 

1. outer                     6. majority

2.tighten up              7. sensitive

3. love                       8. supporter

4. progressive            9. remote

5. different                10.uniting

 

6. Translate the following sentences from Russian into English.

 

1. «Гласность» – это термин, который вошел во все языки мира без перевода.

2. В период перестройки и гласности существовали две политические группы, которые ненавидели друг друга.

3. Ярые противники консерваторов выступали за превращение РСФСР в экономически и политически независимую республику.

4. Россия, как выяснилось, должна была отказаться от могущественного поста первого секретаря партии Российской Республики.

5. Республики меньшинств также имели свои собственные профсоюзы и комсомольские организации.

 

7. Look through the text and suggest a headline.

 

Under Brezhnev, the post of RSFSR foreign minister had been a symbolic one, since the Russian Republic's interests had been wholly subordinated to those of the USSR as a whole. In the fall of 1990, a young thirty-nine-year-old specialist in international affairs, Andrei Kozyrev, was appointed to the post of RSFSR foreign minister, and he immediately began to elaborate upon Yeltsin's view of a new role for Russians in a revamped confederation. In his numerous writings and public statements, Kozyrev has taken note of the fact that the tendency in Western Europe in recent decades has been toward integration, not disintegration. The task at hand, he believed, was to bring about a similar process of integration on the territory of the former unitary Soviet state, on the basis of full sovereignty for each constituent republic.

"Usually the opponents of this process," Kozyrev observed, "point to the fact that the [present] republican borders inaccurately represent the ethnic make-up of the population," His rejoinder to this argument: "Let this be the case. But does this mean that the republics must now carry on endless territorial disputes with one another? Germany and France conducted wars for centuries over Alsace and Lorraine until they finally understood the principles of a civilized resolution of an ancient conflict. They simply made the border conditional”.

Kozyrev expressed a firm conviction that a sovereign Russia had a good chance of reconstituting the present union, or at least a major part of it: "as Russia learns to stand on its own," he wrote in a piece which appeared in The New York Times, a "democratic Russia will become a national center of gravity for the older sovereign republics. . . . "The new treaties and agreements which the RSFSR concluded with such republics as Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Kazakhstan were, he maintained, intended to provide "an alternative to disintegration." De facto, the new agreements laid "the basis for a new union."

One wonders whether Kozyrev's views on reintegration may not represent wishful thinking. Could the union in fact be reconstituted on the basis of granting full political and economic sovereignty to its members? Aieksandr Tsipko, deputy director of the Institute of International and Economic and Political Research of the USSR Academy of Science, was one who held that it cannot. "If the Federation Council will rule the country,” he predicted, "then, of course, the country will once again be ruled by the head of the largest republic, that is, by Russia." Russians like Kozyrev, Tsipko believed, were suffering from "the inertia of imperial thinking." Not all the republics which sought full independence from the USSR would in the future opt for reintegration with Russia, and for the specific reason that Tsipko cited. Indeed, one wonders whether in the long run the paths of the USSR's three Slavic and its six Muslim republics lie in the same direction. Writing in the journal Foreign Policy, Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, observed that “In the wake of Gorbachev's revolutionary recognition of long suppressed national yearnings for greater autonomy, about 50 million Soviet Muslims will soon be re-entering the broader Muslim world, creating an entire new calculus of Muslim power and regional blocs. . . . Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey may well be competing for allies in the Muslim reserve of Soviet Central Asia, dramatically altering the weight and influence they have wielded in the Middle East”.

Finally, it appears to be far from certain that even the three Eastern Slav republics – Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus – will hold together over the coming decades.

Together with the Gorbachev’s "center” and the Yeltsin’s "democrats," the so-called hardliners represented a third major political force impacting the future of the Russian Republic. With strong representation in such elite institutions as the KGB, the party bureaucracy, the military command, and the Soviet military-industrial complex, this group was in a position to attempt to impose its will on the Russian Republic and on the union as a whole. In January 1991, the hardliners seemed to have played the key role in attempting a putsch in the Baltic and they were, of course, supporters of the August 1991 coup. There was, however, as has been mentioned, a basic contradiction in their position. On the one hand, they were vehement champions of the unity of the Soviet state; on the other hand, paradoxically, they were ardent defenders of Russian autarchy, a stance which de facto served to weaken the very cohesion of the USSR which they sought to preserve.

 

8. Find the key-words in each paragraph of the text and translate them into Russian.

 

9. Find the English equivalents of the following word combinations in the text and translate the sentences with them into Russian in writing.

 

1. первоочередная задача                               6. в конце концов

2. указывать на факт                                      7. держаться вместе

3. вести бесконечные дебаты                         8. так называемый

4. стоять / действовать самостоятельно          9. с одной стороны

5. управлять страной                                     10.с другой стороны

 

10. Give the summary of the text in Russian using the key words and word combinations from exercises 8 and 9.

 

11. Read the following text.

 

Why Perestroika?

 

1. The fall of Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed an ocean of dewy-eyed commentary on his place in history, as Man of the Year, the decade, and so forth. Gorbachev is indeed a very important figure of the twentieth century. But comparatively, the failure of perestroika is one of those major and rare historical sea changes that will influence the course of mankind henceforth.

2. Perestroika became Gorbachev's policy centerpiece because there was simply no other choice. Sooner or later, even without Gorbachev, Soviet leadership would have had to attempt a restructuring. The Soviet command economic system was profoundly corroded and corrupt by the early 1980s. Anticipated rises in production and Soviet living standards were not being achieved. Moreover, Soviet leaders were already concerned about their country's inability to compete with the West in many fields of scientific research and technological development — the foundations of Soviet military power. Well before Gorbachev's tenure, many Soviet leaders recognized the need for reform of some kind, but did not understand how rotten were the foundations of the Soviet economy.

3. Republic and regional leaders quickly found that the center would yield its authority to set economic policy only grudgingly. A lengthy contest, fought with conflicting economic laws and decrees, began between central authorities and republic leaders. In particular, the Russian government under Boris Yeltsin's leadership took the lead in attempting to apply more market-oriented economic reforms on Russian territory, often against the will of the central government. Most importantly, the trend toward economic autarky also inflamed separatist movements in many parts of the Soviet empire, lending them mass support, in many cases for the first time. Nationalist leaders, based in both Russian and non-Russian ethnic groups, began to assert that only separation from the universally hated central government in Moscow (and its failed policies) would stabilize the economy and permit real movement toward the market place, although they themselves had little understanding of market economics. In the words of one Ukrainian member of that republic's legislature, "Gorbachev doesn't have enough energy to save the whole country from economic collapse, so the only way out is to allow the component parts to save themselves."

 

12. Combine the following sentences to make one complete statement. Make any changes you think necessary, but do not change the sense of original. Refer the passage when you have finished the exercise.

 

Nationalist leaders were based in Russian ethnic groups. They were based in non-Russian ethnic groups too. They hated central government in Moscow. They also hated its failed policies. National leaders began to assert that only separation from this government would stabilize economy. The separation would permit real movement toward the market place. But they themselves had little understanding of market economics (paragraph 3).

 

13. Find sentences with: a) “would” in different functions; b) passive voice. Analyse them and suggest different ways of their translation.

 

14. Translate the text in writing.

15. Before translating the text from Russian into English translate the following words.

1. enter, entrance, entrant, entertain

2. express (n), express (v), expression, expressional, expressive

3. solve, solution, soluble, solubility

4. state (n), state (v), state (a), statehood, statement, statesman

5. conclude, conclusion, conclusive, conclusively, conclusiveness

6. rebel (n), rebel (v), rebel (a), rebellion, rebellious

7. relate, relation, relational, relationship, relative (n), relative (a)

8. result (n), result in, result from, resultant

9. strong, strength, strengthen, strengthless

10. treat (n), treat (v), treatment, treatise, treaty

 

16. Match word combinations on the left with the English equivalents on the right.

 

1. вступить в решающую стадию         a) from the point of view

2. чрезвычайно емкое слово                 b) the ruling regime

3. разрыв непрерывности                     c) to play an active and important role

4. большой исследовательский материал d) to enter a decisive stage

5. с точки зрения                             e) redistribution of power and wealth

6. перераспределение власти и богатства f) the way of life and culture

7. правящий режим                              g) an extremely capacious word

8. образ жизни и культуры                   h) shadow economy

9. играть активную и важную роль       i) large research material

10.теневая экономика                           j) the break of continuity

 

17. Translate the following sentences into English.

 

1. Смысл и теоретическая база перестройки рассматривались и продолжают рассматриваться историками и политическими деятелями России.

2. М.С.Горбачев определил перестройку как революцию.

3. Хотя все еще есть много «белых пятен» в исследовании перестройки, некоторые общие выводы сделать уже можно.

4. В «революциях сверху» кризис легитимности государства разрешается через государственный аппарат.

5. Завершение перестройки рассматривается на Западе как поражение СССР в холодной войне.

 

18. Translate the text in writing.

 

Дата: 2019-04-23, просмотров: 243.