me 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 what do you think about that i think the soviet economical so dysfunctional so wasteful it was impossible to reform me the only way was actually what is a and concrete call ups 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 market county to implement market reforms on the basis of central control in from moscow you really had to devolve power to the group the various three probably 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 fall i think is delusional if i can add on top of it he would use

a good economic reform here frankly stephen here and then having political freeform simultaneously they create high expectations when the shelves are empty i mean it is certain point there is a collision and there was a collision there was a commotion and i would i would do 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 go by gorbachev and then by you also and for example the moment that gorbachev and yeltsin once your son had been elected president of the russian republic announced that prices would increase suppliers of goods refused to deliver into the markets 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 finally you let me give you my sense of it i'm a. gorbachev skeptical 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 like i never understood any kind of broad plan it was forced upon it 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 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 however he kept on running up against difficulties as stephen said i think in fact the economic decisions were mainly economic ones but it 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 as 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 that go ahead liability it seems to me they forgot about china to succeed he had to fail it is very ironic go ahead yes i think you're probably right well 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 thought peaceful coherent very pre-planned manner and you know you just have to go along and try your best and i think this is there it really they're going to 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 forward you know. so i don't i don't believe that he did

not have a plan but it was he had it inside him in the feeling that he could actually achieve this process so you know i think it's you know if you look at the situation i was in middle east do we have a plan for them it was certainly played we see how things happen and i think it's unrealistic to expect anyone to have a plan steve even if you don't think he got a job he had a detailed plan you know 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 retrieved a great deal by ending the cold war by reducing the number of nuclear weapons by achieving agreement with reagan those are 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 a chance of 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 are a gentleman of good order will sure break or after a short break we'll continue our discussion i got a chance legacy stay with r.t. . if you. wealthy british style. tires on. the market find out. why no one should really happening to the

global economy with much stronger a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars report on or keep. bringing you the latest in science and technology from the realms of. the future of coverage. you can. well imagine hostile gun control culture mind you we're talking about the legacy of the health of a child. can. but

first let's see what russians think about it the last of the soviet union myself is now eighteen years old his name is forever linked with the times to report on the soviet system and his policies have received different assessments through the years there were some public opinion research on os crisis the fine historical row . percent of the respondents said his opponent who was thinking about the betterment of his country but made a number mistakes sixteen percent called him this honest man who masterminded the collapse of the country and another twelve percent see 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 colas as of glasnost and perestroika

but to peter ok 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 the world. we move. the world for you can struggle you. can put it this is perhaps the most important creating necessary pre-requisites and conditions to. ok stephen you heard that ok you know any no such extreme label and i would even think you know that 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 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 called war so there's a new cold war something went wrong the fact is something went wrong after nine hundred ninety one we could have a whole software program remember the soviet union into twenty years ago and yet obama said we have to have a reset which suggests something on bad relations or you and i disagree on a lot of things but on this one we do agree on so your action is did what good we squandered did we i mean i don't squander something good growth which often given us and you know 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 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 go to the child but they are 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 is 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 gorbachev needs and then indeed to yeltsin's needs in the early years of posts 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 are forever overshadowed by ours that if i go to you is that's the criticism i hear all of the time it's already been mentioned it is what did go to each of you in return for helping to end the cold war and what russians will tell you today is that nato expansion that's what russia and this is 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 god just betrayed the new russia and that's what you still consistently gary. well i would very much like what you have to said but i would suggest that gorbachev was a peacemaker but unfortunately the west has not responded in a like manner and the expansion of nato thing is an aggressive arcs 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 why does the russian population sees this as a retreat is giving up concessions to the west but we have to understand that the you know sent through europe eastern europe to be free to tell you know we are not imposing post-imperial phase and i think that's one of the main nature achievements it will actually also understood that this need to be done and so he has restored the balance of power in europe again and he's a great peacemaker stephen. let's 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 the without the 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 control and the speech against our going to show off was an anti stalinist later when he got power he wanted to be a de star nizer that need 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 to democratize or he thought he had come at last and grab a choice. off 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 real man a size 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 this the last thing in the world well why not why couldn't the party and split into a gorbachev electoral carty and the party this now headed by sudan if which pride 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 like a party had an electoral capacity it had to get too big it wasn't a real party had nearly twenty million members in those twenty million members was some kind of four or five million men well i mean the actual can always be 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 say

things around reform or if it's the process was underway well jeff if i go to you i mean we i was living in poland at a time when this was going on and when they had their first democratic election there wasn't one called member of it with their version of the communist party that was elected to parliament they were completely white doubt 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 on electable which in retrospect seems sort of more cynical but it was she 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 the the i mean did lack of social democracy in it i mean that because that's what a lot of eastern european communist party said it's one 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 nationalities 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 or is on that now gorbachev perhaps could get a 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 chip in on this while you go yeah i definitely agree with this conclusion and i would prefer that the united russia party is in a sense a revival revived communist party because you know it's a party of the officials of the 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 russia in a sense a revival of the of the idea of the communist party communist party was beyond reform in my opinion ok well in germany one of the favorite is very interesting is that if we we look at woodleigh got a bunch of left behind he left a lot of new republics the former soviet republics became independent in an interesting way 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 really tie his name to them if i'm pretty 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 we were first to go 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 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 a new crane was somewhere in between you playing with was split to simplify things a bit on the whole western craniums felt rather like the baltic peoples whereas east ukraine is very much wanted to stay with russia in the soviet union we had at that time a human chain which extended from live with two key if 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 hundreds report your poll shows that fifty one percent of russians today think he did have even if he made mistakes in three high 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 were belong or 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 we're better off was trying to help the country but maybe did it the wrong way future leaders can join us the brain say ok he was right in his goal but i have a better way to do ok so where history will judge me thanks to my guess sitting in london in here in the studio with me and thanks to our viewers for watching us here . darkie see you next time and remember crosstalk. in the us.

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was. well i'm john harvey and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture wisconsin is in a stalemate and it looks like the republicans may get their way you know so if unions lose their will mean for workers across and speaking of america's dirty lands not exactly well known for its hauling trees so why was this video aired during a wisconsin sidemen on fox news. you

need you need to know this yesterday was constant sheriff david moore honing polls his deputies from patrolling the entrances of the state capitol in madison saying they shouldn't be in the position to be callous guards seems appropriate since governor scott walker is acting more like a king these days than a governor in an address to the joint session of the state legislature yesterday walter vowed to continue fighting to end collective bargaining rights and warn that if he doesn't get his way he's going to punish wisconsinites by dumping twelve thousand people onto the unemployment rolls although he's keeping his tax cuts for was constance richest people and companies in place now even the republican controlled wisconsin legislature is get into the act it passed a bill today that finds missing senators i or dollars a day meanwhile in ohio republican governor john k.

sick and republican state lawmakers have have such a huge majority that their democrats can't even flee across state lines or shut down the lightest later it's single party rule in ohio a party of the billionaires that wants to end forever those pesky unions. as a result republicans and ohio will soon pass an anti-union bill that's even worse than the one in wisconsin as many as forty thousand protesters showed up at that state capitol yesterday in columbus the largest protests in that state since cases started his dirty work two weeks ago so if the labor movement loses in ohio which is likely will be able to keep up the momentum to stop other into union measures around the country here with us here with us with some answers is james p. hoffa general president of the international brotherhood of teamsters mr have great to have you with us good to be here first of all that question ohio it looks like a since you were there i would argue all day we had forty thousand people was excited a lot of great speeches and a lot of people are fired up about you know the heaven their jobs taken away and

demonstrating that they want to fight back and they're mad as hell about what's going on public employees losing their right to negotiate right to collective bargaining that was the issue and it was a tremendous demonstration the same thing i was also in madison wisconsin the same thing we had a tremendous demonstration there and last saturday there were over one hundred thousand people showed up in madison so we're speaking out and the people are speaking out but we've had such a overwhelming republican majority in the house and senate in these various areas it's hard to fight it back so what we've got to do is to demonstrate get this word out create a buzz to talk about what's about fairness in america that's what we got to talk about you know that if there is a problem with the budget like we talked about you know in wisconsin in wisconsin the public employee said ok there's one hundred thirty eight million dollar deficit we'll sit down and we'll talk about it we'll feel that. we want to do that and the

governor said no that's not enough i want your collective bargaining rights so it shows that it's not about budget the budget is just a cover story the real story here is not about budget it's about union busting and that's what this is about as you can rid of the unions once and for all that's what's going on there it's going on in indiana it's going on in michigan it's going on in missouri going on in maine there is you know thirteen states have right to work pending and they were almost filed simultaneously there is a conspiracy so-called rights are absolute for the call and it's right on for less as well yes there you go yeah you have a right to work at wal-mart as if you can once unless the u.s. conference of bishops came out today and said that collective bargaining is a moral principle their word and a principle of justice and this was in a letter to the bishop the archbishop of milwaukee actually in the u.s. conference of bishops can you speak to them or rally of people like walker and

casey trying to deny people their rights to collectively bargain i talk about it in the term of equality of sacrifice and justice i mean what is the justice you know justice is economic is so right to live with dignity. you know you know freedom from. from you know having the four freedoms freedom of speech the freedom to you know be have a comfortable home you know to live with dignity that's what they're taking away you know if there is a problem in let's say ohio or there is a problem in wisconsin what about the equality of second place in other words if you want to go after some teacher who's got four years of college that's making fifty thousand dollars a year are you going to go after d.m.s. driver or you're going to go after a fireman or you're going to go after you know different people a nurse. there are going to settle it well what about the corporations and what about the may. what about the millionaires and the billionaires who is right about

those people and why we all believe out this both together you know it's like if there is a problem let's do it together you know if we're to have a tax on the rich it might be for a couple years but let's look at kid money you know if you're going to take money out of my paycheck and i'm a teacher and i have a family ok what about a billionaire how much is he going to give the guys a gated community get a private jet you know ok what are you going to kick in now to me that you know if you did that you say well ok what we have a problem patient but that's not what's being done they've selected these people and they're trying to turn people against each other they're trying to say that the private sector we have the teamsters here in the private sector we have a lot of public employees that we should not be with the public sector but in the labor movement we have seen an injury to one is an injury to well if we take it away from the public employees we're next and everybody knows where this is going is is so transparent where this is this is union busting plain and simple the

reagan began the process you know with patco he's sort of the super hero of mr walker and and now you know in the last decade we've seen the top the top tax rate the maximum tax rate if you make billions on wall street at fifteen percent that's the highest income tax you can pay but if you're a long haul truck driver something like that you make a pretty good eleven used to be anyone you can pay up to thirty six percent income taxes i mean it's this is this is nuts this is absolutely nuts you're right it's a shared sacrifice warren buffett said you know he says to my secretary more is based more taxes than i do and he's one of the richest men in america and she does and he's going what's wrong with this picture there same thing with corporations you know one of the big pushes now by the right wing is going to lower the corporate rate it's thirty five percent in america you know this is one of the highest anywhere in the world we can't believe this is going on but when you look at what they actually do you know boeing pays eighteen percent i thing.