25e: Conclusions

1. A funny Soviet anecdote
Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev are all travelling together on a train. Unexpectedly the train stops. Lenin says: 'Let's declare an extra work day, so that the workers and peasants can fix the problem together.' The train stays put. Stalin dispatches a bodyguard to the engine, and a shot is heard. 'So much for the engineer,' says Stalin. 'If the conductor doesn't get us moving I'll shoot him next.' But the train stays put and another shot is heard. Khrushchev then shouts, 'Let's take the rails behind the train and use them to construct the tracks in the front.' The train still stays put. Finally Brezhnev walks the length of the train car, pulling down all of the curtains and announces; "Now we're moving, comrades."

2. Lies, lies, and more lies
The Soviet Union collapsed in part because its lies became so preposterous even the Soviet people couldn't believe them. The nation which fought so heroically in the Great Patriotic War resented the lies told them about the war in Afghanistan. Unlike the lies which the Soviet Union told its people about the Americans, the Chinese, and the rest of the world, the lies about Afghanistan could be independently exposed by the stories of soldiers who came back alive, and the number of soldiers who did not. The Soviet people began to wonder in earnest about the rest of the lies they were being fed. Gorbachev's ham-handed attempt to contain the damage at Chernobyl also showed him at his absolute worst. He turned out to be no better than his predecessors at admitting his own mistake. When presented with proof that he had screwed up, Gorbachev just lied and made up something else. It eventually caught up with him.

3. A prophet has no honor in his home town
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is admired and adored in the West as the man who presided over the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. He is far less admired by his fellow Russians. One of my guides in Russia, an educated and well mannered woman with no illusions about the Soviet experience, gave me a lengthy impromptu lecture on what an idiot Gorbachev was. To the Russians, he was responsible for the economic chaos of the late 1980s, and his bungling foreign policy lost the network of Eastern European client states for which so many Soviet soldiers had fought and died. At present, Gorbachev is not only alive but also following international developments very closely. To judge from his public statements, he's not too happy with anybody these days.

4. The dominoes fall
One must not underestimate the role of the average man and woman in the street. Although Communism did its utmost to remake human nature into its own image, I believe that the human spirit proved too resilient. Perhaps none of the millions of acts of human resistance, great or small, was enough to turn the tide. For example - although 40,000 Hungarians lost their lives in the Revolution of 1956, freedom did not come for another 33 years. When the Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, instead of resisting as the Hungarians had done, a handful of individual Czechoslovakians protested the occupation by dousing themselves in gasoline and setting themselves afire. The Communist government of Poland declared martial law in 1981 to put the Solidarity movement out of business, but Solidarity leader Lech Walesa eventually wound up the President of a democratic Poland. As I have mentioned earlier, the client states were the dominoes which wound up toppling the entire rotten edifice of the Soviet Union... yet another potential downfall of empire.