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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

Happy May Day to you too, Andrew. I must protest the imputation of tweed, however. In addition to being quietly devoted to family values, without wishing to force them on others, we Nation staffers are quite modern in our dress, while agreeing, of course, that others should be able to wear tweed, if that is their own personal preference.

Maybe the press portrays Yeltsin as a drunken autocrat because that is what he is. Are we not talking here about the man who shelled his own Parliament? Who threatened to dissolve Parliament if they didn't go along with his choice of a 35-year-old nobody for prime minister? Who involved Russia in the disastrous Chechnya War? As for the wonderful new ex-Soviet Union you mention, I wonder what you make of such facts as the significant decline in the Russian life expectancy (virtually unique in the world), hordes of homeless people, unemployed people, people working at jobs who haven't been paid in six months. The living standard in the ex-Soviet Union has risen for the new entrepreneurial class in Moscow and a few other places. But most people are worse off: something like half of children have significant health problems.

The foregoing should not be taken as nostalgia for the Soviet system. The people that were running the Soviet Union are the same people who are robbing the country blind now.

More anon,
Katha

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