russia pleasure. issues that so much is going to be a lot of people if you're really looking to see turned to trust what you see. in me as glasnost and perestroika become distant memories we. welcome back here's a quick recap of our top stories on our t.v. the un the suspense libya from its human rights council following the government's aggression against protesters the u.s. is moving its naval forces closer to libya triggering speculation of possible strikes while the u.k. is also ruling out the use of force. as the on the rest of the middle east and north africa is shaking the world america's foreign policy is changing course along

with it its future direction top of the agenda for u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton at a key meeting on capitol hill this week. and the soviet union is first the last president celebrates his eightieth birthday gorbachev was considered the man who put russia on the path towards democracy. it's all next peter lavelle and his guests discuss how the legacy of the father of russian democracy is seen both in russia and on the other side of the atlantic that's coming up next. keep. following well in the cross talk i'm peter lavelle as he turns eighty neil got a bunch of salacious each season loved abroad in loath to home as glasnost and perestroika become distant memories we ask how will history judge the man who

seemingly ended history. can. you discuss the legacy of the last soviet leader i'm joined by stephen cohen here in the studio he's a professor of russian studies and history at new york university and his latest book is the victims return survivors of the gulag after stalin in london we go to geoffrey hosking he's at emeritus professor of russian history at university college london and his latest book is rulers and victims the russians in the soviet union and also in london we have lad sobel he's an analyst at the i would securities and another member of our crosstalk team on the hunt all right gentlemen this is cross that that means you can jump in anytime you want stephen i want to go to you first here as got off is eighty years old today and let's talk about global legacy and then let's go to specific to russia what is his contribution to history at eighty years old remembering his rule ending the soviet union well one card tribulation is already recorded in history he set free the countries of eastern and

central europe that's done where they go from here is up to them what's not said on the written history is the fate of democracy in russia there are different opinions about the condition of democracy in russia whether and he has very strong opinions and for good reason he wants to go down in history as the father of russian democracy in the west we attribute it to yeltsin but that's not true now if. democracy flourishes in russia one day and stabilizes russia will go. down as the greatest former russian history if democracy falters and fails and russia will go down in history as another tragic russian former he knows that and that's why his blood pressure about what's going on in russia is rising on his eightieth birthday already maybe he's just protecting his legacy here ok but i was i was going to go to you anyway go ahead life the thing is here is that maybe some people attribute

democracy to one leader or another but most russians don't attribute democracy to either yeltsin or got a bunch of go ahead. i would just like to make one point that i think that gorbachev was actually responsible for peaceful disintegration of the soviet union and i think this is a very important point especially when we see what's happening in the middle east so that's would be my first point and secondly i would argue that russian democracy is proceeding on course i don't think that little bit of a thirty thirty and isn't in the mean time to stabilize the political system to stabilize the economy billick actually do very much harm and i would argue that president president is now leading a new way if similar to perestroika and i would guess that in about ten years we'll see genuine democratization in russia it's very and jeff if i go to you in london i mean it's very interesting here because we see it live lived here for twelve years and and we don't hear the word perestroika but

a lot of people would attribute the attributes what we you all of us here would think of stratospheric is coming about under putin not under yeltsin or got a bunch of. well i was going to say that i don't think old rituals reputation depends on what happens in the future now i think his reputation is there to see he was in charge for five years he launched democratic reform there's no doubt about that he started the process he dissolved the communist party of the soviet union he set up elections in which they would change in parties conducting a fight with each other but he didn't and couldn't take the process through to its end i mean for one thing he never himself stood for election as president of russia which would have been or of the soviet union which would have been the logical outcome of his democratic reforms he didn't have the courage all the insight it seems to me to take that process of democratization through to its logical conclusion it steve if angry and one of the things we talk about what kind of striking glasnost is reforming the soviet union but was it reform a ball ok let's look at the economy ok the that type

a command economy failed now how do you fix that you just have to exit don't you know i mean many countries have introduced elements of another economic system into a very confusing survivor it would have worked but it was not a hybrid i mean most economies in the twentieth century have been next economy state market economies i mean what would roosevelt's new deal with the attempt to introduce a large state sector into what had been an uncontrolled private sector gorbachev tried to do the reverse to introduce market interesting economy the chinese did it the hungary and said done it even before gorbachev of course it's doable but it was going on around the world seriously it was going in reverse direction because what do you think that that's the general that's the difference what on the other hand there's no evidence that it wasn't possible i mean it's a long process and i don't actually agree with jeffrey in the sense that he didn't carry the process through to the end you would have had to have the temperament in the power of starting to impose full democracy on russia in one thousand nine

hundred nine hundred ninety the problem was group which off was the quintessential canty stalinist he had come to dismantle the system and let me remind you of one of the think i admit i've known orbit. for twenty years i'm not entirely objective to be fair but george washington was elected president united states by the american congress not by popular vote it's a process that has to begin someplace that was a step forward ok if you're talking about other countries and i agree with you that a mixed economy is in fact a general rule in the twentieth century but the question really is was the soviet union reformable now when introduced elements of private enterprise into the soviet economy what the private enterprise did was to suck goods out of the state economy and create an economic crisis where there were desperate shortages in the cities so that the way he carried out the reform did not work or it worked badly value what do you think about. i think the soviet economical so dysfunctional so wasteful it was impossible to reform it the only way was actually what has happened complete

collapse and disintegration of the soviet union and i would actually argue that the economic factors was really very much behind the disintegration of the soviet union because you couldn't carry on like a country implement market reforms on the basis of central control in from moscow you really had to devolve power to the with the various republics and this is the seed of this integration and we're seeing similar such processes in central europe as well in czechoslovakia in yugoslavia so you know i don't i don't believe that the idea that the economy could be risky would in some form and i think it's as delusional if i can add on top of it he would disagree economic reform here finally stephen here and then having political freeform simultaneously create high expectations when the shelves are empty i mean in a certain point there is a collision and there was a collision there was a question and i would i would build on what you say because the point is correct that the economic crisis that came in one thousand nine hundred ninety one was

actually a political crisis it wasn't caused by the economy it was caused by political decisions first made by you know by gorbachev then by you also. for example the moment that gorbachev and yeltsin when she also had been elected president of the russian republic announced that prices would increase suppliers of goods refused to deliver into the market to the stores because they were waiting for the price increase it wasn't a failure of production it was a failure of distribution that's not a failure of this of the economic system those were bad political decisions jeffrey if i'm going to you let me give you my sense of it i'm a i'm a gorbachev skeptic i'll be open about it. i had my one of my biggest problems with him is historical figures that i never really got to grasp if he had a grasp on really what he wanted to do it was basically. a makeshift decision going from crisis to crisis to crisis i never understood any kind of broad plan it was

forced upon him well in many ways and i don't entirely agree with that i think when he came to power he did have a vision about how to revive soviet communism and make it a real force in the world and he hoped at the same time to revive the soviet economy and to make it a country less hated in the world he had grasped that the soviet union was hated by most european peoples so i think it was a humane vision and an ambitious fusion and when he started to implement it have really kept on running up against difficulties as stephen said i think in fact the economic decisions were mainly economic ones put it in order to carry in the through it was necessary to carry out political reform as well and that further destabilize the country and i think the court which i didn't have a good understanding of the nationalities problem in the soviet union because it soon as he loosened up the political system then the non russian nationalities began to raise their heads for their own political organizations and educate for greater autonomy or even in the end to secede from the soviet union it seems to me gentlemen this for go ahead liability it seems to me they forgot about china to

succeed he had to fail and it's a very ironic go ahead yes i think you're probably right but i could return to your point about his plan i can. we believe that it was impossible to have a plan like this you know you cannot you cannot dissolve an organization such as the soviet union in any so peaceful coherent very pre-planned manner you know you just have to go along and try your best and i think this is that it really where god watches show reveal his strengths because he was he was at every point given the system started to resisting than it was the possibility of retreating to the previous system he you know so i don't i don't believe that although he did not have a plan but it was he had the insight into the inner feeling that he could actually achieve this process so you know i think it's really you know that if you look at the situation i'll say middle east do we have a plan for the need. lately obviously we see how things happen. and i think it's

realistic to expect anyone to have a plan steve even if you don't think he got a job or had a detailed plan b. i don't think he had a detail plan i think he had a vision both of the soviet union and of the world and let's face it on the world stage he cheap a great deal by ending the cold war by reducing the number of nuclear weapons by achieving agreement with reagan those were all tremendous achievements and we should remember that although of course in the end they also helped to lead to the breakup first of all of the warsaw pact and then of the soviet union so that got much of as a result of his vision kept facing problems which probably he had not fully anticipated and which led him into one crisis after another and then i think indeed he lost control of the process are a gentleman of good order was sure break or after a short break we'll continue our discussion i got a chance legacy stay with parking. tickets. if you

want to. camarena. wealthy british. markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy

with mike's culture the no holds barred look at the global financial headlines comes a report on our keep. in. mind you're talking about the legacy of the health. care. but first let's see what russians think about it the last leader of the soviet union gorbachev is now eighteen years old his name was for billing for the times to reform the soviet system and his policies have received different assessments through the years the russian public opinion research center asked russians to

define his historical role fifty one percent of the respondents said he is opposed to who was thinking about the betterment of this country but made a number of mistakes sixteen percent called him. the collapse of the country and another twelve percent save him as a brave man who took responsibility to oversee vital reforms in the country gorbachev attempted to create a more open and prosperous country through the paula says glasnost and perestroika that. that's what russians think about the legacy of mr gorbachev well our sophie shevardnadze interviewed mr gorbachev and this is what he said to her about what he thinks his legacy is. if you can use it you know the world. yes. it's a world where we come. to the logical struggle

you know he has to put this is perhaps the most important creating necessary pre-requisites and conditions to move for the us. ok stephen you heard that ok you know and you know which i think strangely well i mean thing you know that you know both are friends. do you think he's being fair to himself you think fair to reality on his seventy fifth birthday five years ago we had a conference tonight i gave i gave a paper called there is a new cold war and he became very angry at me because he considers his great achievement certain achievement the ending of the last cold war so there's a new cold war something went wrong the fact is something went wrong after nine hundred ninety one now we can have a whole separate program but remember the soviet union ended twenty years ago and yet obama said we have to have a reset which suggests something bad the relation or you and i disagree on

a lot of things but on this one we do worry i sold a russian is did we squander or did we i mean i don't squander something that grow rich off it given us i think i think the answer is we have it could toss about the retraining if i'm not very optimistic but it's possible but i think this legacy too might have been squandered jeff if i got to you this is this is good to have because one of the interesting things is here is that a lot of russians don't have a good opinion of got a child but they all most russians will say also is that it's the west that hasn't ended the cold war and that some of the greatest frictions we've seen over the last twenty years is that the mentality coming out of the west hasn't changed but the mentality certain his change certainly changed here in russia. ok well i do think that ending the cold war was just great a single achievement and it was a very great achievement i don't think he handled it terribly skillfully towards the end i think he had it his it end of the negotiations with the u.s. and with the west rather weakly i mean for example. he dissolved the warsaw pact

but didn't really get anything in return for it he loved the g.d.r. to join nato without getting any written commitments in return that nato would not expand further east would see understood that nato had made a promise but there was actually no very definite promise on the other hand i think obviously the main fault for the would be the kind of renewal of the cold war really does lie with the west because we didn't respond strongly enough to go to a child's needs and then indeed to yeltsin's needs in the early years of post soviet russia we needed to do i think much more to help them economically for example by creating a stabilization fund to provide against the inflation of the ruble which was catastrophic in the early years after the fall of the soviet union so we made a number of very serious mistakes i think of which i've made some mistakes but they're far of overshadowed by ours that if i go to you is that's the criticism i hear all of the time and it's already been mentioned it is what it got a bunch of good in return for helping to end the cold war and what russians will

tell you today is that nato expansion that's what russia got in this is really people are a very bitter about that and even to that we have to remember august two thousand and eight where we had a nato supply georgia start of war so that the this brings back the feelings that gorbachev betrayed the new russia and that's what you still consistently get right . i would very much like. i would i would suggest that gorbachev was a peacemaker but unfortunately the west has not responded in a lark manner and the expansion of nato was seen as an aggressive arc and rightly so and as you as you mentioned the events in georgia have a really terrific. really very very dangerous very concerning and i can understand why your ideas russian population sees this as a retreat as giving up concessions to the west but we have to understand that you know sent through europe eastern europe to be free we. are now impose most imperial

face and i think that's one of the named major achievements it will be actually also understood that this need to be done and restore the balance of power in in europe again and he's a great peacemaker stephenie. we did go back to his project of democratizing. of the soviet union at the time again you know him very well how did he understand that without that dissolving the communist party because you are of the you have the thesis that the communist party could have been reformed it could have been democratize and i think that's a minority opinion in the world right now but i mean it's a very interesting thesis knowing him how did he see that going about you have to remember who he was worry came from in his generation he was of this generation that came to consciousness under construction and the speech against stalin that gorbachev was an anti stalinist and later when he got power he wanted to be a de stalin nizer that meant to dismantle the controls that stalin had imposed on

the soviet union in the thirty's and then he said something remarkable in one thousand nine hundred seven he said lenin made a big mistake he carried out an economic new policy that after the civil war he didn't carry out a political policy in other words he said lennon's mistake was not becoming a democratize or he thought he had come at last in gorbachev gorbachev's road to democracy was removing stalin's controls not only on society but on the party itself now he may have had a romanticized view of what the communist party had been at the beginning but it certainly wasn't then in the beginning what it was when gorbachev came to power he then said in one thousand nine hundred ninety two the party you have to become an electoral party and they nearly passed out from there sort of the last thing on the other side of course well why not why couldn't a party of split into a group which offer electoral party and the party this now headed by zubrin if which by the way don't ever forget this that after the end of the soviet union the

new russian communist party was the most successful electoral party in the duma and till something else happened i we can debate what happened to the party had electoral capacity it had to get reduced to big it wasn't a real party had nearly twenty million members in those twenty million members what's. kind of for five million men well i mean you actually could almost make the argument today it's still the only political party in russia i mean well it is the only national nationwide electoral party in russia it's a fact so i don't i'm not prepared to say it was on reform i mean why say things around reform process was underway well if i go to you i mean we've been living in poland at a time when this was going on when they had their first democratic election there wasn't one cult member of their version of the communist party that was elected to parliament they were completely wipe that out and so i could well imagine that you would have the communist party of the soviet union seeing what was going on in eastern europe that some of them could be the entire party could be on electable

which in retrospect seemed sort of more secular better player she was a national party wasn't a party perceived as being a russian party in poland here they can call even on nationalism as they do today james i guess maybe the question is it will be the i mean the lack of social democracy and i mean that because that's what a lot of the eastern european communist party said they just want social democratic . well i do think actually steve is wrong about that i think the communist party was unreformable really because it was not really a political party and it couldn't really become one it was the backbone of the soviet union the soviet union as distinct from russia. and once there was no no more any will from moscow to hold the thing together by means of the communist party then the other national to starting with the baltic and carrying on with georgia and armenian so they started to go their own way and at that point the communist party of the soviet union really lost much of its or is on that now called a trough perhaps could lead to say in the early months of one thousand nine hundred one have split the communist party and lead

a kind of social democratic wing of it himself and that might have been successful but significantly he didn't do that so i think really the evidence suggests the communist party of the soviet union was really unreformable ok vlad you want to chip in on this margaret yeah i definitely agree business conclusion and i would press charges the united russia party is in a sense a revival of community party because you know it's a party of the officials that was of the state you know some wondering whether you know the russian political culture needs this kind of party you know and whether we could see you know i think the russia in a sense a revival of the of the idea of the communist party communist party was beyond reform in my opinion ok what do you gentlemen a lot of things i think is very interesting is that if we we look at what luggage of left behind left a lot of new republics the former soviet republics became independent in italy and interestingly if i go to you on this one joe he's really the father of a lot of new nations in the world even though we don't even really tie his name to

them if i'm thinking of all the republics minus of course the russian federation. yes well they had very different histories actually and they didn't all leave the soviet union in the same way i mean the baltic republics will first appear because the baltic pete rose hated communism the soviet union and russia all three. they had memories of the terrible deportations at the end of the second world war beginning of the second world war two actually and they just wanted to get out of soon as they thought it was practically possible that the georgians hated russians as well and of course the north cookies in peoples and yet in central asia you find people who really didn't want to leave the soviet union look at all they had will take a reason for a new crane was somewhere in between you claim with was clear to simplify things a bit on the whole west ukrainians felt rather like the baltic peoples whereas east ukraine is very much wanted to stay with russia in the soviet union we had that time a human chain which extended from live with to hear but no further east protesting

about ukrainian membership of the soviet union so it was really they were very different in their in their approaches to leaving the soviet union and they history has been similarly very different i think one could say ok stephen got thirty seconds left what's his legacy well i was astonished by your hunger as reports their poll shows that fifty one percent of russians today think he did have even if he made mistakes in three times change the best interest of his country what this means is that as the country starts demonizing gorbachev and focus not on its character but its mistakes we're going to have a new great debate in russia world belongs not in the united states about what happened in eighty five to ninety ninety one and that's going to be very valuable for russia because russia has to sort this out and now that fifty one percent think which i was trying to help the country but maybe did it the wrong way future leaders can join this debate and say ok he was right in his goal but i have a better way to the case of where history will judge me thanks to my guests

a day in london and here in the studio with me and thanks to our viewers for watching as you darkeys. see you next time and remember cross talk. systems. and.

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