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 not the kind of employment market reforms on the basis of central control in from moscow you really had to devolve power to the good the various republics and this is the scene of this integration and we're seeing similar such processes in central europe as well in czechoslovakia and yugoslavia so you know i don't i don't believe that the idea that the soviet economy could be skewed in some form i think it's as delusional if i can add on top of it he would use a good economic reform here finally stephen here and then having political freeform simultaneously they create high expectations when the shelves are empty i mean at a certain point there is a collision and there was a collision there was a collision and i would i would i would build on what you say because of course 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 by gorbachev and then by you also and for example the moment that gorbachev and yeltsin once you 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 so 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 and i'm and i'm a gorbachev skeptic i'll be open about it if i have my one of my biggest problems with him is historical figures that i never really got to grasp it he had a grasp on really what he wanted to do it was basically. a makeshift decision going from crisis to crisis to crisis like i never understood any kind of broad plan it was forced upon him well many way now i don't entirely. 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 mission and when he started to implement it have really kept on running up against difficulties or steve has said i think in fact the economic decisions were mainly economic ones but in order to carry in the through it was necessary to carry out political reform as well and that further destabilize the country i think that gorbachev didn't have a good understanding of the nationalities problem in the soviet union because the sooner she loosened up the political system then the non russian nationalities began to raise their heads for their own political organizations and igitur hate for greater autonomy or even in the end to secede from the soviet union it seems to me gentlemen that go ahead lie but it seems to me that forgot about to succeed he had to fail it's

a very ironic go ahead yes i think you're probably right but i'm just like to return to your point about his plan i actually believe that it was impossible to have a plan like this you know you cannot you cannot resolve an organization such as the soviet union in any sort of peaceful coherent very pre-planned fermenter you know you just have to go along and try your best and i think this is really where god watches show reveal his strengths because he was he was at every point when the system started to resisting when it was the possibility of retreating to the previous system he pushed for average you know so i don't i don't believe that although he did did not have a plan but it was he had the inside him in there feeling very he could actually achieve this process so you know i think it's really you know if you look at the situation i would say middle east do we have a plan for the need to. play if you know you see we see how things happen you know i think it's unrealistic to expect anyone to have a. plant steve even if you look at he going to jump he had

a detailed plan here i don't think he had a detailed 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 cheated 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 gorbachev as a result of his vision 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 our original you know to a short break or after a short break we'll continue our discussion i got a chance like if he stayed with r.t. . if you.

wealthy british style polls sometimes that's right. and the. markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy in cars a report on r.t. . claims of team spain to the currency and republic. the center of russian defense production. quality heads to central russia. candy crush sofa come an industry. the harsh winter make schools even more enjoyable. and when everyone can train to be a stop. to the campus last. push a close up oxy. that

is the tom foreman and is told me oh the creation of the food system the global food system is not created to feed the people of the world is created to maximize the profits. gernot trading the actual cash physical grain or trading promises for grain to be delivered a month or six months or twelve months or eighteen months in the future. for reasons madi regulate silver or gold they can be negotiated and accorded to some degree in. some places. water. possibly it's not traded now. but it could be in the future. to keep.

it going to keep. well. we're talking about the legacy of the help of a chance. but first let's see what russians think about it the last leader of the soviet union gorbachev is now eighty years old and his name is forever linked with the times to reform the soviet system and his policies have received different assessments through the years the russian public opinion research asked russians to define historical role. of the respondents said his opponent who was thinking about the betterment of this country but made a number of mistakes sixteen percent called him. almost to my dad the collapse of the country and another twelve percent see him as a brave man who took responsibility to oversee

a vital role in the country gorbachev attempted to create a more open and prosperous country through the polish glasnost and perestroika back to peter that's what russians think about the legacy of mr gorbachev well sophie shevardnadze interviewed mr gorbachev and this is what he said to her about what he thinks his legacy is. i think it is you know world. a world where he's overcome. the world. particularly. if you put this is perhaps the most important creating new series prerequisites and conditions to move them. ok stephen you heard that ok you know and you know got a bunch of extremely well and i mean things you get you know both are friends. do

you think he's being fair to himself you think fair to reality when his seventy fifth birthday five years ago he had a conference and i gave what i could think recall there was a new cold war and he became very angry at me because he considers it is a great achievement certain achievement the ending of the last course of his new cold war something went wrong the fact that something went wrong after nine hundred ninety one we could have a whole separate program but remember the soviet union into twenty years ago and yet obama said we have to have a reset which suggests something that's gone badly wrong a relational you and i disagree on a lot of things but on this one we do what we are told russian is did what did we squander did we i mean i don't squander something that grow rich off had given us i think i think the answer is we have it could possibly be retrieved i'm not very optimistic but it's possible but i think this legacy into might have been squandered jeff if i go to you this is this is good because one of the interesting

things is here is that a lot of russians don't have a good opinion about 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 certainly has changed certainly changed here in russia. ok well i do think that ending the cold war was called which was 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 handled his 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 for the kind of renewal of the cold war really

does lie with the west because we didn't respond strongly enough to gorbachev 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 best the criticism i hear all of the time and it's already been mentioned is what did good of a child get 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 pre-trained the new russia and that's what you still consistently gary. i

would very much like what you have to say i would suggest that gorbachev was a peacemaker but unfortunately the west has not responded in a lark manner and the expansion of nato over thing is an aggressive and rightly so and as you as you mentioned the events in georgia have a very little terry fator. really very very dangerous very concerning and i can understand why why does the russian population see this as a retreat as giving up concessions to the west but we have to understand that you know it's in through europe eastern europe to be free. we are now imposing what was the imperial face and i think that's one of the major major achievements of the world actually also understood that this need to be done and so he has restored the balance of power in in europe again and he's a great maker. you just go back years project of democratizing.

of the soviet union at the time again you know him very well how did he understand that live without think 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 democratized 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 crushed off and the speech you can style and gorbachev was an anti stalinist later when he got power he wanted to be a de stalin iser 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 nine hundred eighty seven he said when and made a big mistake he carried out an economic new policy and 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. off gorbachev's road

to democracy was we moving stalin's controls not only on society but on the party itself now he may have had a real man a size view of what the communist party had been in 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 part and they nearly passed out from us it was the last thing in the world of course but why not why couldn't a party of split into a group which offer electoral party and the party this now headed by the granite 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 until something else happened i we can debate what happened but the party had an 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 or some kind of four or five million members i mean you actually can always 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 it was on to say it was on reform i mean why things are only formal if the process was underway well it jeff if i go to you i mean we've been living in poland at the time when this was going on and 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 thing what was going on in eastern europe that some of you could be the entire party could be electable which in retrospect seems sort of more cynical but i sure was a national party wasn't a party perceived as being a russian party in poland here they could call even on nationalism as they do today james i guess maybe the question is is it do you think i mean did lack of social democracy and i mean that because that's what a lot of eastern european communist party said it just one social democratic. well i do think actually that 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 armenia and so on they started to go their own way and at that point the communist party of the soviet union really lost much of its reason that now gorbachev 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 that the communist party of the soviet union was really unreformable ok vlad you want to go yeah i would i would i definitely agree it's conclusion and i would press i just the united russia party is in a sense a revival communist 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 united russia in a sense a revival of the of the idea would be communist party can you spark it was beyond reform in my opinion ok one of the gentlemen one of the things i think is very interesting is that if we we look at what got a child left behind he left a lot of new republics the former soviet republics became independent in italy and interestingly if i go to you on this one joke 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 go because the baltic peoples hated communism the soviet union and russia all three. they had memories of the terrible people at the end of the second world war beginning of the

second world war two actually and they just wanted to get out as soon as they thought it was practically possible 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 at all they had no particular reason for me to do so i knew crane was somewhere in between you claim with was clear it's weird to simplify things a bit on the whole western koreans feel 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 here put 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 can say ok stephen got thirty seconds left what's his legacy well i was astonished by your hundreds report their poll

shows that fifty one percent of russians today thankee did have even if he made mistakes in three times change the best interest of his country and 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 word 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 roberts off 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 do so 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 crosstalk. can slow.

hundreds of tanks and anti-aircraft artillery pieces have turned the city of two million into a fortune the u.s. and britain beat the drums of war the target this time libya but as the rest of the world remains cautious the pentagon and mainstream media may have found a rhythm they can dance to. and who can you really trust in times of war well it turns out for so many both in and out of the establishment no one will have much more on a report that showed some u.s. soldiers were ordered to use psychological operations on their own people the last people who may have expected and. nobody ever had buyer's remorse that's that's for

sure no regrets from a one thousand dollars desert i want their paycheck well while wall street elites block the pleasures of new york main street tastes of their bite of reality. it's wednesday march second four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine freeze out in watching our team. major violence at this hour across the north african country of libya according to recent reports the libyan air force has bombed an oil refinery there and battles between those who are loyal to more mortgage off and those who want to step down continue in several towns across the country meanwhile the u.s. is flexing its military muscles and may find a partner in the u.k. but as our g.'s laura and that reports maybe where it ends. we do not in any way

the use of military assets we must not tolerate this regime using military force against its own people is this history repeating itself the british government getting the guns on standby as a country crumbles to impose a no fly zone in this case libya in two thousand and three it was iraq it's looking very dangerous looking quite possible that they will launch such an attack with or without un approval and so we're looking at almost a repeat of what happened in iraq and indeed the results i suspect really largely the same but not every country is getting that treatment and libya is not the only african nation in turmoil somalia is drawn out conflict has been called a slow genocide but there's little sign of u.s. or european military inputs and it's a similar story on the other side of the continent there are events unfolding right now in ivory coast where there is also

a conflict an armed conflict between rebels and the government but nobody seems to be thinking of that it's only because fashionable attention is focused on libya but also for the political implications of the middle east as a whole as we all know the west including my own country has got its hands very dirty with the libyan leadership over recent years. with black gold and libya has the largest proven oil reserves in africa more than three percent of the global too so and there could be a lot more undiscovered the only reason you're interested in. your oil here anybody screaming and yelling about all those people they were killed in new york is very close. i guess cocoa was not that much of a national priority because in somalia there was precious little help while the body count rose over the years except for one brief but disastrous intervention involving u.s. soldiers immortalized in the movie. black hawk down american forces failed at great

cost to stabilize the country they know quickly and haven't returned and the lessons were learned when it came to iraq which remains of a staple even now with only feeble sheets of the much vaunted democracy allied troops are equally down in afghanistan convincing timeline for withdrawal and an ever rising death toll could be clear to an idiot but the mess that's been made in afghanistan parable calls. on anymore countries in the middle east it's a model today's troubled african nations will post on their puppet government which is still ruling. american occupation of iraq really. help the. middle east need and american and european government shouldn't look for backing at home either up to a million marched in london for the invasion of iraq in two thousand and three and

times have changed this is now austerity britain was starting another war wasn't factored into the budget british troops are already fighting an unpopular war in afghanistan it's highly unlikely the public has the appetite for again getting involved in someone else's struggle battling as they are at home in the face of deep cuts rising unemployment and it's unlikely to be popular inside this building the ministry of defense has to slash spending by more than seven and a half billion dollars in the next four years it's an intervention britain which pipes hard to afford on many levels your average hearty. all right so here's what we know the u.s. sixth fleet has been repossessed and ships in the mediterranean and u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton stated that quote nothing is off the table and as we just saw british prime minister david cameron have echoed the sentiments so the u.s. and britain considering i think it's fair to say yet another invasion and if they

do who will join how not the u.n. while china and russia for starters don't seem to be interested and want to know nato well probably not since turkey's prime minister has called the idea nonsense and absurd so could this yet be another instance of going in alone our to contributor an investigative journalist wayne madsen joins me to discuss when is history repeating itself here well in some people's minds i think it is because one thing we have to remember about moammar gadhafi he became the leader of libya in one thousand nine hundred thirty nine let's put that in perspective richard nixon was president of state's plane and brezhnev was the general secretary of the soviet communist party and the beatles were still together so this guy is not a knock over he of course or as many people but remember the reagan administration he drew the. line in the gulf of certain so you cross your american.

fighters will be shut down we bombed. tripoli killed the kid our fees daughter he was implicated with the rebel discotheque bombing in west berlin and a couple of course lockerbie so there are some people in the neo con war hawk. ranks who would love to really get khadafi but could i feel of course changed his director of intelligence. that has been a socio to the cia in tracking the a.q. khan nuclear proliferation network in participating in the cia's rendition and torture program just like omar saleman was in egypt so he's got he's got good friends. the cia. but we have people who remember the 1980's and would just love to get our free and i want to talk about some of the chatter that's going on from lawmakers that to the mainstream media many people out there seem to be laying the groundwork and making the case for a potential invasion of libya take a look.