Word: coups
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Since the failure of last month's hardline coup and the apparent triumph of democracy, capitalism and the right for every Soviet to do whatever she wants to anyone else, American politicians and journalists, each more gushing than the next, have been lauding the new Soviet UnUnion and excoriating the old. If we are to believe them, the defeat of the coup means "freedom" and "opportunity" for Russians, Lithuanians, Kirghizians and Georgians. Now every last one of them can set up a flourishing small business and vote for dozens of exciting new politicians...
THIS SECOND Russian Revolution was, as all are, a revolution of young people. If you saw the crowd outside the Russian Parliament building during the coup, you saw that almost everyone was under 35. Revolution is the work of young people because young people can afford risk. They can afford to lost their jobs, because they don't have families they need to support. They can afford to speak out. They can afford to go to jail. They are strong enough to go hungry through a long winter seige, if they must. Most others...
...victory of capitalism in Russia is the victory of youth. These young people who defeated a coup and who brought down the statues can risk forming the Russian stock exchange, or organizing an import-export deal for the destruction of the Communist bureaucracy because they don't belong to it. They can ask for free-floating currency because they don't have any life savings tied up in rubles...
...young people fighting bravely to win the chance to make their million dollars and be elected president. And we wish them the best of luck. But we must also remember those millions and millions who were not out in the streets, those millions who supported or acquiesced to the coup because they saw it as a chance to return to security, to bread lines that actually did have bread...
...before we start holding parties to celebrate the end of the awful Soviet state, we should briefly remember those who are unprotected. For them, the coup was a final, hopeless, misguided, destructive chance to save something for themselves. Now they will have to suffer and make a lot of stuff...