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AFP. 8 December 2001. Sombre Russians mark 10th anniversary of Soviet collapse. MOSCOW -- Russians marked the 10th anniversary Saturday of December 8, 1991, when the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist, with mixed feelings and an awkward silence from the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin, winding up a three-day official visit to Greece, remained tight-lipped about the historical milestone, and there was no official commemoration of the anniversary. But Russian lawmakers captured the general mood in describing the fall of the Soviet block in negative terms, while conceding that it was now too late to turn back the clock. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and two other former Soviet republics signed a treaty on December 8, 1991, in Belarus's Belovezhskaya Pushcha officially dismantling the Communist-era union. The deputy leader of the liberal Yabloko party, Sergei Ivanenko, described Saturday the Soviet Union's collapse as a tragedy. But Ivanenko added that he fully shared the opinion of a political scientist who said that "whoever is not sorry about the Soviet Union's collapse has no heart, but whoever wants to restore it today is insane," ITAR-TASS reported. "There can be no return to the past," he added. However, the leader of the pro-Kremlin People's Deputies group, Gennady Raikov, sounded a more pessimistic note. "The collapse of the Soviet Union was unjustified, and it has brought no real benefits either to Russia or to the other former Soviet republics," he said. Seventy-two percent of Russian citizens deplore the break-up of the Soviet Union, according to an opinion poll by the independent ROMIR centre quoted Saturday by ITAR-TASS. Only 10.4 percent approved of the events of December 8, 1991. Around 58 percent of the 2,000 Russians polled believe the liquidation of the Soviet Union could have been prevented. At a glance Russia has made remarkable progress in the 10 years since the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist, with individual freedom, democracy and a market economy apparently taking root. But look closer and the picture is less rosy -- a mixture of stagnation and decline -- with nobody in Russia's political or economic elite seemingly able to halt the downward slide that hastened the Soviet defeat in the Cold War. Freedom and free enterprise sprouted in the post-1991 hothouse atmosphere, with a new generation of entrepreneurs acting as the shock troops of President Boris Yeltsin's blitz on the Soviet system. The first wave of reforms brought hyperinflation and food shortages, and the ensuing chaos almost sparked a civil war after Yeltsin, in 1993, turned heavy artillery on the Russian parliament building. But the dawn of democracy also saw many pro-Yeltsin reformers nurturing unrealistic hopes of an economic miracle that would have taken Russia's income per head above Spain's by 2010. Devaluation, default and a banking collapse in August 1998 dispelled the mood of optimism, and prompted much hand-wringing in the United States, where Congress and the Clinton White House answered the question "Who lost Russia?" with a bout of finger-pointing. Even President Vladimir Putin recognises that Russia still lags behind its Soviet-era performance levels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
