Here is a sobering little paragraph from Michael Scammell’s useful New York Times essay on the centenary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, pundits offered a variety of reasons for its failure: economic, political, military. Few thought to add a fourth, more elusive cause: the regime’s total loss of credibility.
Solzhenitsyn’s centenary has not gone unnoticed here at National Review: Here is the author himself on his famous Harvard address and here is his Templeton address.
Russia has been very much in the news lately, for obvious reasons.
October saw another Russian anniversary: 25 years since the 1993 constitutional crisis. Boris Yeltsin, most familiar to many in the West as that man standing atop a tank and athwart the attempted 1991 coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev, dissolved the Russian parliament, which declined to be dissolved and impeached him. Depending on whose numbers you trust, either 187 or something on the order of 1,500 people died in the subsequent fighting.
Yeltsin pushed through a new constitution giving the president more powers — and the new parliament chosen in the same election was dominated by Communists and nationalists opposed to Yeltsin’s liberalizing agenda but very much interested in that expanded executive authority.
What happened next may seem inevitable in retrospect — but it was not inevitable.
On the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously observed: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” I can’t help but thinking of the post-Cold War history of Russia as a series of missed opportunities — and not missed only by the Russians.
In his excellent primer What’s Wrong with Protectionism? Answering Common Objections to Free Trade, Pierre Lemieux includes a graph showing Chinese exports to the United States as a share of total U.S. consumption expenditures: Those Chinese products account for 2.7 percent of U.S. consumption — or 1.2 percent, if you take out the money that actually goes to American intermediaries.
How about that?
The Times headline describes Solzhenitsyn as “the writer who destroyed an empire.” Empires rise and fall, and we Americans are all torn up over a few shiploads of flip-flops made in Chendai and destined for Walmart.
“Total loss of credibility”? Not total, no.