Kremlin Kapers

I am a people guy of sorts, like to turn them inside out and see what makes them tick. I had a russian woman in last week, heavyset, bleached hair, maybe a year or two younger than I. My mother's family were forced out of Moldavia in the early twenties, barely escaping the pogrom in Kishinev that decimated so much of soviet jewry. They lived in a tiny shtetl called Yednitz. Family lore has it that we are cousins of Sholom Aleichem, the great yiddish writer.

Anyway, we got to talking and I quizzed this woman about the breakup of communism and her feelings about Gorbachev. Her reaction shocked me. Her hatred for him was palpable. She had a cushy nurse job and never any stress in the old days. Capitalism evidently made her get off her ass. She would trade her newfound freedoms for a few rubles in a moscow minute. She mourned the crumbling of the wall. Very parochial and disturbing. Reminded me of an old holocaust documentary I once saw where a Polish peasant woman said that they never mourned the passing of their jewish schoolmates because it meant more potatoes for the rest of them.

I don't think that Gorby ever got his proper due. Yeltsin might have achieved more tangible results but Gorbachev was the intellectual father of Glasnost and set the table. Yeltsin was a classic drunk. Of course, the whole government is now run by the KBG and it seems like business as usual. Now the man with Florida tattooed on his forehead is largely forgotten. But he has some interesting things to say about Putin and capitalism in general. Link to a recent interview here.


© 2009 Robert Sommers