(Gary Farber's home blog is Amygdala.)
How do today's Russians feel about Reagan? Here's a look.There are two groups; those who welcomed his part in their liberation from Communist rule, and those who resent his part in contributing to the fall of their great empire.
Andrei Zorin was practicing his English that memorable day back in 1983, listening to the forbidden BBC World Service on the shortwave radio when President Ronald Reagan made his declaration that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" that must be defeated.Many on the left underestimated, or were entirely wrong, about the hollowness of the Soviet empire, about its evil nature, and about how much it was hated by much of the populace. Reagan was right, they were wrong, and there are plenty of Russians, and other members of the former empire, to testify to that.Zorin, a dissident-minded literary scholar, was so stunned that he risked speaking openly on the telephone to his friends to tell them about Reagan's forceful words. "I jumped out of my chair and started calling," he recalled Sunday. "Of course, to us it was no surprise that the Soviet Union was such an empire, but the idea that somebody would say it from the podium, out loud, was a revelation." For many Russians, Reagan was then, and remains today, a hero whose challenge to communism in the 1980s led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and inspired a generation of pro-democracy activists. "Walls are crushed by words," Zorin said.
But the most significant point, now, is this, and it has nothing to do with Ronald Reagan at all:
But Russia under President Vladimir Putin is hardly the free society that Reagan once envisioned. Instead, it is a country deeply ambivalent about democracy, where many are nostalgic for its lost superpower status. Putin is a popular former KGB officer who has embraced Soviet symbols that Reagan sought to discredit, and Putin has all but eliminated opposition voices from the political scene. Recent surveys show that 70 percent or more of Russians regret the Soviet collapse that Reagan pursued so relentlessly -- a sentiment captured by Putin earlier this year when he called the empire's breakup "a national tragedy on an enormous scale."And, of course, Putin is the man whom President Bush has found to have "a good heart." The problem of contemporary Russia, and its continuing moves away from democracy in the present, is now of more pressing concern than what happened over a decade ago.
See, also, Natan Sharansky, and reporter Joe Klein in TIME Magazine. Not to mention blogger Michael Totten.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5.
I like some of the dissidents' quotes in this story, particularly where Andrei Sakharov's widow mentions what high esteem the couple held/holds him in.
Meanwhile, I dug up an op-ed from an English language outlet for Turkmen propaganda that has great praise for Reagan, who "broke the back" of Peter the Great's command for the empire to expand to the Indian Ocean. I dislike a lot of the piece, so if you want to see just the good part, it's over at The Argus. The whole thing is at News Central Asia.
Reagan should be remembered for something else as well:
"What made Reagan's vision for victory particularly remarkable is that it stemmed from the belief in the power of technology as both a force multiplier and a game changer. "
Reagan's Way of War