Are you seriously saying, Neo, that if it were not for Yeltsin, "there would have been civil war...perhaps from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok..."?
What reason do you have to think so, Neo?
In the first place, if it were not for Yeltsin, the Soviet Union would not have dissolved quite as abruptly as it did. I would agree that it was a good thing that Yeltsin, at the time, did not take a Russian nationalist position, or else there might have been armed conflict (over territorial claims)between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, etc. But, on the other hand, he would not have signed the Belovezhsky documents to begin with if he had taken such a position.
But civil war within Russia? Are you thinking of the Parliament-President shoot-out in 1993? If it had not been for Yeltsin's confrontational temperament, things would never have reached the point of a shoot-out at all.
Americans tended to swallow the Yeltsin line that he was the only guarantee against "Communist revanche." But it was a line.
Joan |
