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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

the breakfast table
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from: Andrew Sullivan

Boris and Bill

Posted Friday, May 1, 1998, at 1:14 PM ET

Katha,
The reason Russia's economic and social woes are still terrible is related to the many-decades long genocidal regime that destroyed its polity and economy, and terrorized half the planet. Economic and social decline were accelerating in the last years of the evil empire, and any attempt to put them right will inevitably make some of them worse in the meantime. You can't solve such problems before you expose them. I remember the pain exacted by Thatcherism in its early years, when half a century of disastrous socialist economics had wrought another mess of poverty, stagnation, and resentment. And, of course, people at first blamed Thatcher, not socialism, for the mess. Now ask neo-Thatcherite Tony Blair who was really responsible. And Yeltsin's attack on the Parliament was, in my view, a necessary evil, given the Communist Party's continuing attempt to derail democratization and market reform. And while there are plenty of old communist hacks still in charge in Russia, their opposition to Yeltsin, and the opposition of the big business cartels to his new cabinet, suggests whose side he's really on. Why won't you give him credit? It still seems to me part of the Left's inability to come to terms with its intellectual and moral complicity in the murderous regime in Moscow for several decades that leaves it reluctant to get clearly and unequivocally on the right side in today's Russia.

As to Bill, I agree with you about his enemies, but they are worthy of him. The responsibility for all this mess lies with the president and him alone, not with the special prosecutor who was appointed by the Justice Department, for good and obvious reasons. Again, it seems to me you cannot see the wood for the trees.

But you're right. I can't imagine you in tweeds.

best
Andrew

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Andrew Sullivan

Boris and Bill

Posted Friday, May 1, 1998, at 1:14 PM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist at The Nation. Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at the New Republic.
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