Jonathan Brent on 1989
by Joshua Ellison · 11/15/09
Our Moscow issue will go on sale this week, and it features an excellent conversation with Jonathan Brent, author of Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia
When the Berlin Wall was torn down and a new beginning was about to unfold across Europe, Russia was completely unprepared for the changes that appeared to many in the West to be the natural result of the love of freedom and a widespread desire to throw off the repressive, criminal, monstrous legacy of Soviet communism. The impetus behind the desire to tear down the Soviet system in Russia, however, had many sources. A desire to establish a free market, liberal democracy was only one of them—that is to say, a free market in the context of the legal structures without which liberal democracy is impossible. This stream of Russian/Soviet thinking was best characterized during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin regimes by figures like Alexander N. Yakovlev, Yegor Gaidar, and most recently Grigory Yavlinsky, the founder of the Yabloko Party. But another stream was characterized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and many other writers and thinkers who viciously attacked the Stalinist system, yet did so from a very conservative position defined by Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity. Others more extreme than Solzhenitsyn challenged Soviet rule based on a nationalism considerably more xenophobic and anti-Semitic, and less humane.
