Gagarin’s Flight Record Falsified

discoverynews.com/ By Amy Shira Teitel

On April 12, 1961, the world met Yuri Gagarin, a former Soviet Air Force pilot who shot from obscurity to international fame after making one full orbit around the Earth in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

But the mission records the Soviet Union submitted to international authorities to secure Gagarin's place as the first man in space present a very different mission. Specifically, his landing was deliberately falsified. During the year, lies about the Vostok landing system called into question whether or not Vostok 1 deserved its place as history's first spaceflight at all.

In 1905, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI, known as the International Air Sports Federation in English) was established to manage and maintain all records of accomplishments in aviation. By the 1950s, the FAI had grown to include aeronautic and astronautic categories under its umbrella. With spaceflight on the horizon, the organization established a set of guidelines for what constitutes a spaceflight -- if two nations were going to vie for the record of first in space, the FAI should have clear rules to determine a winner.

The terms of spaceflight reflected the organization's roots in aviation. For a flight to count, the pilot-astronaut or pilot-cosmonaut would have to land with his spacecraft. After all, if a pilot fails to land  with his aircraft, it's usually because something has gone wrong and the flight has been a failure. Why should spaceflight be any different?

The Soviet Union statement presented to the FAI stated  that the cosmonaut had landed inside Vostok 1 as per the organization's guidelines on spaceflight. Signed by the sports commissar of the USSR, the document asserts that "at 10:55 a.m. Moscow time on the 12th of April 1961 ... the pilot-cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyvich Gagarin landed with the 'Vostok' spaceship."

He hadn't. He couldn't have even if he'd wanted to.

The Vostok spacecraft was basic and unsophisticated and lacked a braking system. Gagarin did as he was trained to do: He ejected during the final phase of his descent. He and Vostok 1 touched down separately by parachutes.

ANALYSIS: Vladimir Komarov: The Unsung Space Hero

Gagarin's landing was much scarier than the innocuous one described in the FAI's formal record. Vostok 1 fired its retrorockets and began its fall through the atmosphere, but the cables connecting the crew module with the instrument unit failed to separate. The latter heavier unit fell first, exposing Vostok's fragile hatch to the fiery phase of reentry. Only after the cables burned away did Vostok reorient itself with its heat shield down. Its parachute deployed late, and when Gagarin ejected 23,000 feet above the ground, his own 'chute deployed late as well. He landed 10 minutes after and miles away from his spacecraft in the Saratova region near the border of Kazakhstan.

Farmers who saw the cosmonaut fall from the sky didn't know what to make of the man in the orange suit and helmet. A woman and her daughter reportedly reached Gagarin first; when she asked if he came from space, he confidently said that he had before asking to use a phone to call the Soviet Space Agency.

But the FAI accepted the Soviet-issued statement on the flight. At least, it did until Gherman Titov followed Gagarin into orbit four months later.

Titov, who had been Gagarin's backup for Vostok 1, spent a little over 25 hours in orbit before returning to Earth on Aug. 7, 1961. His landing was similarly veiled when the flight record was presented to the FAI, this time seeking to secure a duration record for the Soviet Union. It states that "pilot-cosmonaut Gherman Stepanovich TITOV and the spaceship 'Vostok 2 ... landed in the vicinity of the village of Krasny Koot." While the official record is ambiguous, the cosmonaut made no secret of his landing. He publicly admitted to ejecting before touching down by a personal parachute.

NEWS: Gagarin's Final Words: Is Sausage Packed?

Titov's admission called Gagarin's landing, and consequently his record as the first man in space, into question. If Gagarin and Titov both ejected before landing, the Soviet Union would lose its spot in history as the first nation to launch a man into space.

Controversy began to brew and the FAI held a special meeting of delegates to reexamine Titov's records and reconsider Gagarin's. The result of the meeting was a change to the parameters that defined spaceflight rather than a change to the records. The parameters switched to focus on the payload launched; this technical achievement mattered more than how the astronaut or cosmonaut landed. That Gagarin had orbited the Earth was the real achievement, and both his and Titov's records remain in the FAI's books.

Gagarin's true landing and the technical problems that very nearly killed him during his descent weren't publicized until 1971, three years after he died in a plane crash in 1968. The FAI posthumously honored Gagarin that year by established the Yuri A. Gagarin Gold Medal to recognize the achievements of space pilots in man's ongoing conquest in this new realm.

After the decision to keep Gagarin's record intact, the early Vostok landing system went from a controversial issue to a historical oddity of the transition from flight in aircraft to spaceflight in capsules.

Nuclear Treason: Who Was Leo Szilard? — Emerging Corruption

Emerging Corruption/  By Trevor Loudon 

Sane nations do not willingly surrender a position superior military strength to potential enemies,  for no reason.

Why then did  the U.S. Senate recently sign   START 2 with Russia, despite a long record of blatant and persistent cheating by Moscow?

Obama and Medvedev, START 2

The United States has  signed several nuclear disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union/Russia, always from an ever decreasing position of superiority. Always Moscow has gained and Washington lost ground.

Leo Szilard

Why has Washington always conceded advantages to Moscow, when there was absolutely no necessity to do so?  The blunt answer? Because U.S. policy makers have been  persuaded to do so, by American citizens who’s loyalty to their home country is questionable.

One of the most influential leaders of the U.S. disarmament lobby was former nuclear physicist and Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard. In 1962, two years before his death, Leo Szilard founded a little known organization that would come to have a huge impact on U.S. defense capabilities , the Council for Abolishing War, now known as the Council for a Livable World.

In the early 1960s, Szilard sought a way to influence U.S. defense/disarmament policies at the highest levels.; In 1962, he founded the Council for Abolishing War to raise money for U.S. Senators who favored arms-control treaties. By Szilard’s calculus, all states had two Senators, so votes came cheapest by supporting campaigns in the least populous states. The Council’s first successful candidate was Sen. George McGovern from South Dakota.
Today the Council supports candidates from all states and the House of Representatives as well.
It was America’s first and most successful Political Action Committee for arms control and disarmament.

Bela Kun

But who was this man, who sought to buy his way into the heart of U.S. defense policy making?
Leo Szilard was born in  Hungary in 1898.
In Budapest during the 1919 Bela Kun Hungarian Soviet Republic, Szilard founded a socialist students association to “help clarify political and economic issues.” The Hungarian Association of Socialist Students distributed a pamphlet on tax and monetary reform purportedly written by Szilard.

Leo Szilard was an enthusiastic supporter of Bela Kun’s communist regime. When Kun’s government fell, the backlash against communists and Jews persuaded Szilard to leave Hungary for Berlin. there he was involved in a study group dedicated to analyzing Soviet affairs.

In London in the 1930s, Szilard helped organize the Academic Assistance Council to aid refugee scholars. He also proposed enlisting Nobel laureates to protest Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, the first time the  group was politicized in this way. Both causes were legitimate, but both were also heavily infiltrated by communists and sympathizers.

Szilard’s best known political efforts involved his mentor,  friend, and fellow communist sympathizer  Albert Einstein. In New York in 1939, Szilard proposed and drafted a letter from Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that warned about German nuclear weapons research and urged a U.S. counter-effort.

Their letter prompted Roosevelt to convene a federal Advisory Committee on Uranium (with Hungarian physicists Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Szilard as members) that promised money for Enrico Fermi and Szilard to conduct chain-reaction experiments at Columbia University.

But when this funding from Washington hadn’t materialized by the spring of 1940, Szilard enlisted Einstein in an  effort at political blackmail. He drafted for Einstein a letter warning the White House that if those funds were not forthcoming, Szilard would publish a paper detailing just how a chain reaction in uranium could work. Soon, Fermi and Szilard received their money.

By 1942 Szilard was working on the Allied effort to develop the Atomic Bomb – the  Manhattan Project,

Einstein and Szilard

However Szilard  was already under suspicion.

General Groves, head of the Project  declared Szilard to be detrimental to the project and that he should be arrested and interned for the duration of the Second World War.

Were Groves’ suspicions founded?

According to Pavel Sudoplatov, former wartime director of the Administration for Special Tasks, an elite unit of the Soviet intelligence service, Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, knowingly supplied information to Soviet contacts during their work on the Manhattan Project.

Sudoplatov

Sudoplatov wrote in his 1994 book “Special Tasks, Memoirs of an unwanted witness-A soviet Spymaster”;

The most vital information for developing the first Soviet atomic bomb came from scientists engaged in the Manhattan Project to build the American atomic bomb – Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard.”
Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Szilard’s secretary were often quoted in the NKVD files from 1942 to 1945 as sources for information on the development of the first American atomic bomb. It is in the record that on several occasions they agreed to share information on nuclear weapons with Soviet scientists. At first they were motivated by fear of Hitler; they believed that the Germans might produce the first atomic bomb. Then the Danish physicist Niels Bohr helped strengthen their own inclinations to share nuclear secrets with the world academic community. By sharing their knowledge with the Soviet Union, the chance of beating the Germans to the bomb would be increased.”
As early as 1940, a commission of Soviet scientists, upon hearing rumors of a superweapon being built in the West, investigated the possibility of creating an atomic bomb from uranium, but concluded that such a weapon was a theoretical, not a practical, possibility. The same scientific commission recommended that the government instruct intelligence services to monitor Western scientific publications …
We were able to take advantage of the network of colleagues that Gamow had established. Using implied threats against Gamow’s relatives in Russia, Elizabeth Zarubina pressured him into cooperating with us. In exchange for safety and material support for his relatives, Gamow provided the names of left-wing scientists who might be recruited to supply secret information. …”

Another route was from the mole who worked with Fermi and Pontecorvo. The mole in Tennessee was connected with the illegal station at the Santa Fe drugstore, from which material was sent by courier to Mexico. The unidentified young moles, along with the Los Alamos mole, were junior scientists or administrators who copied vital documents to which they were allowed access by Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard, who were knowingly part of the scheme.

We received reports on the progress of the Manhattan Project from Oppenheimer and his friends in oral form, through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on. In all, there were five classified reports made available by Oppenheimer describing the progress of work on the atomic bomb.”
Not only were we informed of technical developments in the atomic program, but we heard in detail the human conflicts and rivalries among the members of the team at Los Alamos. A constant theme was tension with General Groves, director of the project. We were told of Groves’s conflicts with Szilard. Groves was outraged by Szilard’s iconoclastic style and his refusal to accept the strictures of military discipline. The “baiting of brass hats” was Szilard’s self-professed hobby.Groves believed that Szilard was a security risk and tried to prevent him from working on the Manhattan Project despite Szilard’s seminal contribution to the development of the first atomic chain reaction with Fermi. ...

Sudoplatov claims that Soviet spy chief Lavrenti Beria  had post war plans for their Manhattan Project friends.

Beria

After our reactor was put into operation in 1946, Beria issued orders to stop all contacts with our American sources in the Manhattan Project; the FBI was getting close to uncovering some of our agents.Beria said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and others around them in the peace campaign against nuclear armament. Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage. We began a worldwide political campaign against nuclear superiority, which kept up until we exploded our own nuclear bomb, in 1949. Our goal was to preempt American power politically before the Soviet Union had its own bomb. Beria warned us not to compromise Western scientists, but to use their political influence.

Comrade Beria’s advice turned out to be sound. Szilard’s usefulness to the Soviet cause only incresaed after the War.

One of Szilard’s first projects was the strongly pro-disarmament  Federation of American Scientists, started with former communist and alleged spy  Philip Morrison, and communist sympathizer  Harold Urey . F.A.S. was founded in 1945 with a membership of more than 2,000 scientists and an advisory panel that included several more communists or sympathizers, including  Robert Oppenheimer,  Harlow Shapley, andEdward U. Condon  , a known associate of several Polish embassy officials.

Leo Szilard was, co-organizer of the first Pugwash conference in 1957, a major series of gatherings involving Western and East Bloc scientists, diplomats and politicians.

Khruschev

In 1960, Szilard gained a private audience with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in New York City. During their two-hour conversation, Szilard gained the Soviet leader’s assent for a Moscow-Washington “hot line” to help prevent accidental nuclear war. As a gift, Szilard brought Khrushchev a new razor and promised to send him blades as long as there is no war. “If there is war,” said Khrushchev, “I will stop shaving. Most other people will stop shaving, too.”

Szilard was also an early affiliate of the far left and pro-disarmament Washington DC based think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies – once described by British security expert Brian Crozier as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the K.G.B.”

Leo Szilard died before his attempts to influence U.S. disarmament policies came to fruit, but bear fruit they did.

Remembering a Dissident: Yuri Glazov

FrontPage Magazine

Editor’s note: Yuri Glazov, Russian dissident and the father of Frontpage’s editor Jamie Glazov, died fourteen years ago on March 15, 1998. The editors felt it would be appropriate to mark this occasion by reprinting Jamie’s dedication to his father from our March 11, 2010 issue. We also hope readers will consider contributing to the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award to keep the memory of Yuri and his fight for freedom alive.  [See info at bottom of article for U.S. and international donations.]

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.  More >>

The 3 A.M. Phone Call: Zbigniew Brzezinski Received Warning of Incoming Nuclear Attack

http://www.nsarchive.org/

Zbigniew Brzezinski with Deng Xiaoping

Washington, D.C., March 1, 2012 – During the 2008 campaign, Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debated the question: who was best suited to be suddenly awakened at 3 a.m. in the White House to make a tough call in a crisis. The candidates probably meant news of trouble in the Middle East or a terrorist attack in the United States or in a major ally, not an 'end of the world' phone call about a major nuclear strike on the United States. In fact at least one such phone call occurred during the Cold War, but it did not go to the President. It went to a national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was awakened on 9 November 1979, to be told that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the combined U.S.–Canada military command–was reporting a Soviet missile attack. Just before Brzezinski was about to call President Carter, the NORAD warning turned out to be a false alarm. It was one of those moments in Cold War history when top officials believed they were facing the ultimate threat. The apparent cause? The routine testing of an overworked computer system.

Recently declassified documents about this incident and other false warnings of Soviet missile attacks delivered to the Pentagon and military commands by computers at NORAD in 1979 and 1980 are published today for the first time by the National Security Archive. The erroneous warnings, variously produced by computer tests and worn out computer chips, led to a number of alert actions by U.S. bomber and missile forces and the emergency airborne command post. Alarmed by reports of the incident on 9 November 1979, the Soviet leadership lodged a complaint with Washington about the "extreme danger" of false warnings. While Pentagon officials were trying to prevent future incidents, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown assured President Jimmy Carter that false warnings were virtually inevitable, although he tried to reassure the President that "human safeguards" would prevent them from getting out of control.

Among the disclosures in today's posting:

• Reports that the mistaken use of a nuclear exercise tape on a NORAD computer had produced a U.S. false warning and alert actions prompted Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev to write secretly to President Carter that the erroneous alert was "fraught with a tremendous danger." Further, "I think you will agree with me that there should be no errors in such matters."
• Commenting on the November 1979 NORAD incident, senior State Department adviser Marshal Shulman wrote that "false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence" and that there is a "complacency about handling them that disturbs me."
• With U.S.-Soviet relations already difficult, the Brezhnev message sparked discussion inside the Carter administration on how best to reply. Hard-liners prevailed and the draft that was approved included language ("inaccurate and unacceptable") that Marshal Shulman saw as "snotty" and "gratuitously insulting."
• Months later, in May and June 1980, 3 more false alerts occurred. The dates of two of them, 3 and 6 June 1980, have been in the public record for years, but the existence of a third event, cited in a memorandum from Secretary of Defense Brown to President Carter on 7 June 1980, has hitherto been unknown, although the details are classified.
• False alerts by NORAD computers on 3 and 6 June 1980 triggered routine actions by SAC and the NMCC to ensure survivability of strategic forces and command and control systems. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) at Andrews Air Force Base taxied in position for emergency launch, although it remained in place. Because missile attack warning systems showed nothing unusual, the alert actions were suspended.
• Supposedly causing the incidents in June 1980 was the failure of a 46¢ integrated circuit ("chip") in a NORAD computer, but Secretary of Defense Brown reported to a surprised President Carter that NORAD "has been unable to get the suspected circuit to fail again under tests."
• In reports to Carter, Secretary cautioned that "we must be prepared for the possibility that another, unrelated malfunction may someday generate another false alert." Nevertheless, Brown argued that "human safeguards"—people reading data produced by warning systems--ensured that there would be "no chance that any irretrievable actions would be taken."

Background

For decades, the possibility of a Soviet missile attack preoccupied U.S. presidents and their security advisers. Because nuclear hostilities were more likely to emerge during a political-military confrontation (such as Cuba 1962, the likelihood of a bolt from the blue was remote but Washington nevertheless planned for the worst case. Under any circumstances, U.S. presidents and top military commanders wanted warning systems that could provide them with the earliest possible notice of missile launches by the Soviet Union or other adversaries. By the early 1960s, the Pentagon had the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWs) that could provide about 15 minutes of warning time. By the mid-to-late1960s, forward-scatter systems (so-called "Over the Horizon Radar") could detect missile launches within five to seven minutes from while, while the 474N system could give three-to-seven minutes of warning of launches from submarines off the North American coast. [1]

By the end of the 1960s, the United States was getting ready to deploy the Defense Support Program satellites which use infrared technology to detect plumes produced by missile launches. DSP could be used to tell whether missile launches were only tests or whether they signified a real attack by detecting number of missile launches and trajectory. This provided25 to 30 minutes of warning along with information on the trajectory and ultimate targets of the missiles. As long as decision-makers were not confronting the danger of a SLBM launch, the DSP would give them some time to decide how to retaliate.

In 1972, the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) began to network warning systems into at "interlinked system" operated at its headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.[2] A complex computer-based system always bore the risk of failure, break-downs, or errors. Even before networking emerged, false warnings emerged as early as 1960 when a BMEWs radar in Greenland caught "echoes from the moon," which generated a report of a missile attack which was quickly understood to be false (see document 1). During the Cuban Missile Crisis false warning episodes occurred, some of them involving NORAD, that were virtually unknown for many years.[3] If there were significant incidents during the years that followed, it remains to be learned. But once the networked systems were in place, the possibility that they would typically produce false warnings became evident. 

The Events of 1979-1980

"As he recounted it to me, Brzezinski was awakened at three in the morning by [military assistant William] Odom, who told him that some 250 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. Brzezinski knew that the President's decision time to order retaliation was from three to seven minutes …. Thus he told Odom he would stand by for a further call to confirm Soviet launch and the intended targets before calling the President. Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back and told Odom to confirm that the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back, he reported that … 2,200 missiles had been launched—it was an all-out attack. One minute before Brzezinski intended to call the President, Odom called a third time to say that other warning systems were not reporting Soviet launches. Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour. It had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system." -- Robert M. Gates. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How they Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996),114.

The series of alarming incidents and telephone phone calls recounted by former NSC staffer (and later CIA director and future Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates took place in the middle of the night on 9 November 1979. Because of the potentially grave implications of the event, the episode quickly leaked to the media, with the Washington Post and The New York Times printing stories on what happened. According to press reports, based on Pentagon briefings, a NORAD staffer caused the mistake by mistakenly loading a training/exercise tape into a computer, which simulated an "attack into the live warning system." This was a distortion because it was not a matter of a "wrong tape," but software simulating a Soviet missile attack then testing NORAD's 427M computers "was inexplicably transferred into the regular warning display" at the Command's headquarters. Indeed, NORAD's Commander-in-chief later acknowledged that the "precise mode of failure … could not be replicated."[4]

The information on the display simultaneously appeared on screens at SAC headquarters and the National Military Command Center (NMCC), which quickly led to defensive actions: NORAD alerted interceptor forces and 10 fighters were immediately launched. Moreover, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), used so the president could control U.S. forces during a nuclear war, was launched from Andrews Air Force Base, although without the president or secretary of defense.

Some of this information did not reach the public for months, but at least one reporter received misleading information about how high the alert went. According to the New York Times' sources, the warning was "deemed insufficiently urgent to warrant notifying top Government or military officials." Apparently no one wanted to tell reporters (and further scare the public) that the phone call went to President's Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The behind-the-scenes story became more complicated because the Soviet leadership was worried enough to lodge a complaint with Washington. The Cold War tensions had already been exacerbated during the previous year and this could not help (nor could an impending Kremlin decision to invade Afghanistan). On 14 November, party leader Leonid Brezhnev sent a message via Ambassador Anatoly Dobyrnin expressing his concern about the incident which was "fraught with a tremendous danger." What especially concerned Brezhnev were press reports that top U.S. leaders had not been informed at the time about the warning. The Defense Department and Brzezinski took hold of the reply to Brezhnev's message which senior State Department adviser Marshall Shulman saw as "gratuitously snotty" (for example, language about the "inaccurate and unacceptable" Soviet message). The Soviets were indeed miffed because they later replied that the U.S. message was not "satisfactory" because it had taken a polemical approach to Moscow's "profound and natural concern."

About seven months later, U.S. warning systems generated three more false alerts. One occurred on 28 May 1980; it was a minor harbinger of false alerts on 3 and 6 June 1980. According to the Pentagon, what caused the malfunctions in June 1980 was a failed 46¢ micro-electronic integrated circuit ("chip") and "faulty message design." A computer at NORAD made what amounted to "typographical errors" in the routine messages it sent to SAC and the National Military Command Center (NMCC) about missile launches. While the message usually said "OOO" ICBMs or SLBMs had been launched, some of the zeroes were erroneously filled in with a 2, e.g. 002 or 200, so the message indicated that 2, then 200 SLBMs were on their way. Once the message arrived at SAC, the command took survivability measures by ordering bomber pilots and crews to their stations at alert bombers and tankers and to start the engines.

No NORAD interceptors were launched so something had been learned from the November episode, but SAC took same precautionary measures. The Pacific Command's airborne command post ("Blue Eagle") was launched for reasons that remain mysterious.[5] NEACP taxied in position at Andrews Air Force Base, but it was not launched as in November. That missile warning sensors (DSP, BMEWs, etc) showed nothing amiss made it possible for military commanders to call off further action. According to a Senate report, NORAD ran its computers the next 3 days in order to isolate the cause of the error; the "mistake was reproduced" in the mid-afternoon of 6 June with the similar results and SAC took defensive measures.[6]

When Harold Brown explained to President Carter what had happened and what was being done to fix the system, he cautioned that "we must be prepared for the possibility that another, unrelated malfunction may someday generate another false alert." This meant that "we must continue to place our confidence in the human element of our missile attack warning system." Brown, however, did not address a problem raised by journalists who asked Pentagon officials, if another false alert occurred, whether a "chain reaction" could be triggered when "duty officers in the Soviet Union read data on the American alert coming into their warning systems." A nameless U.S. defense official would give no assurances that a "chain reaction" would not occur, noting that "I hope they have as secure a system as we do, that they have the safeguards we do."

How good the safeguards actually were remains an open question. While Secretary of Defense Brown acknowledged the "possibility" of future false alerts, he insisted on the importance of human safeguards in preventing catastrophes. Stanford University professor Scott Sagan's argument about "organizational failure" is critical of that optimism on several counts. For example, under some circumstances false alerts could have had more perilous outcomes, e.g. if Soviet missile tests had occurred at the same time or if there were serious political tensions with Moscow, defense officials might have been jumpier and launched bomber aircraft or worse. Further, false warnings were symptomatic of "more serious problems with the way portions of the command system had been designed." Yet, defense officials have been reluctant to acknowledge organizational failings, instead blaming mistakes on 46¢ chips or individuals inserting the wrong tape. Treating the events of 1979 and 1980 as "normal accidents" in complex systems, Sagan observes that defense officials are reluctant to learn from mistakes and have persuaded themselves that the system is "foolproof."[7]

Bruce Blair also sees systemic problems. Once a "launch-under--attack" strategic nuclear option became embedded in war planning policy during the late 1970s, he sees the weakening of the safeguards that had been in place, e.g., confirmation that a Soviet nuclear attack was in progress or had already occurred. One of the arguments for taking Minuteman ICBMs off their current high alert status (making virtually instantaneous launch possible) has been that a false warning, combined with an advanced state of readiness, raises the risk of accidental nuclear war. The risk of false alerts/accidental war is one of the considerations that is prompting other anti-nuclear activists, including Daniel Ellsberg, to protest at Vandenberg Air Force Base against the Minuteman ICBM program and the continued testing of Minutemen.[8]

The Soviet nuclear command and control system that developed during the 1980s provides an interesting contrast with the U.S.'s. While the United States emphasized "human safeguards" as a firewall, the "Perimeter" nuclear warning-nuclear strike system may have minimized them. In large part, it was a response to Soviet concern that a U.S. decapitating strike, aimed at the political leadership and central control systems, could cripple retaliatory capabilities. Reminiscent of the "doomsday machine" in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Perimeter could launch a semi-automatic nuclear strike under specified conditions, for example, no contact with political or military leaders, atomic bombs detonating, etc. If such conditions were fulfilled, a few military personnel deep in an underground bunker could launch emergency command and control rockets which in turn would transmit launch orders to ICBMs in their silos. According to David Hoffman's Pulitzer-prize winning The Dead Hand, when Bruce Blair learned about Perimeter, he was "uneasy that it put launch orders in the hands of a few, with so much automation." While the system may have been operational as late as the early 1990s, only declassification decisions by Russian authorities can shed light on Perimeter's evolution.[9]

According to Bruce Blair, writing in the early 1990s, warning system failures continued after 1980, although they did not trigger alert measures.[10] The U.S. nuclear incidents that have received the most attention have not been false warnings, but events such as the Air Force's accidental movement of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB in 2007 and the mistaken transfer of Minuteman nose-cone assemblies to Taiwan in 2006. In any event, more needs to be learned about the problem of false warnings during and after the Cold War and pending declassification requests and appeals may shed further light on this issue. 
More  The National Security Archive >>

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Opción cero: embargo y otros (II)/ Arnaldo M Fernández

Desde el sitio de Ichikawa

 

Arnaldo M Fernández

A poco de apretar Washington las clavijas del embargo contra Cuba, por revocación (mayo 14, 1964) de la licencia general del Departamento de Comercio para alimentos y medicinas, el Che Guevara andaba ya diciendo que el bloqueo era «molestia de importancia secundaria» (Diario las Américas, abril 1, 1964, p. 1). Castro llegaría (enero 2, 1969) a tirarlo a relajo en la plaza de su revolución: «El bloqueo ya nos da ganas de reír —y no puede ser para menos. Y esa es la situación real». Tres planes quinquenales después, Castro sostuvo ante dos turistas americanos de aventura socialista y en libro con pimpante título: Nada podrá detener la marcha de la historia ( 1985): «No somos víctimas de la ley del intercambio desigual ni del proteccionismo ni de la sobretasa de interés [EE. UU.] tiene cada vez menos cosas que ofrecer a Cuba (…) Hablando con franqueza —me gusta la franqueza— las relaciones con Estados Unidos, las relaciones económicas, no implicarían para Cuba ningún beneficio fundamental (…) No se puede cambiar la vaca por la chiva. [Los países socialistas no sólo] nos pagan muchos mejores precios [y] nos venden más baratos sus productos, sino que nos cobran muchos menos intereses por los créditos».

Así, el giro dramático (septiembre 13, 1999) del castrismo hacia el embargo como «crimen internacional de genocidio» dista mucho de ser tan sólo un alarde más, que se desinfla por la renuencia de Cuba a llevar el caso al Tribunal Internacional. Este fervor por comerciar con el imperio entraña el doble error histórico de haberse plantado Castro demasiado radicalmente frente a los intereses creados y conducido la economía de la Isla con la arrogancia de la planificación central autoritaria, en tanto los cuadros de abajo procedían a descentralizar de manera anárquica.

Dizque el diferendo con EE. UU. empezó por la reforma agraria, pero se pasa por alto que esa reforma empujó hacia la situación descrita por Humboldt en su Cuadro estadístico de la Isla de Cuba (1825-1829): «Una importación anual de comestibles [a pesar de contar con] el suelo más fértil, y el más capaz, por su extensión, de alimentar a una población por lo menos seis veces más considerable». Dizque la desunión post-soviética provocó la entrada de Cuba en «período especial» con caída del 35% (1989-93) del Producto Interno Bruto (PIB), pero se soslaya que Castro dejó colgado a Moscú con préstamos y créditos comerciales sin pagar. Los estimados (2010) se cifran en unos $27 mil millones, esto es: la mitad del PBI cubiche.

Luego de este «tumbe» a los bolos, Castro urdió (octubre 30, 2000) otro con Chávez por detrás del Convenio Integral de Cooperación entre la República de Cuba y la República Bolivariana de Venezuela (2000). El bombeo de petróleo venezolano casi gratis hacia Cuba y el pago in cash de Venezuela a la asistencia técnica cubana (desde médicos hasta oficiales de inteligencia) pondrá a Caracas en 2015, con unos $30 mil millones, por delante de Moscú en la lista de acreedores graciosos de La Habana.

Castro se da el lujo de negarse a pagar la deuda con el bloque soviético desmerengado, acodar con Chávez no pagar la deuda con Venezuela y dar lagas a la deuda con el Club de París ($30 471 millones) y otras, que acaban sumando casi $72 mil millones, según los cálculos de Hans de Salas (ICCAS). Al parecer no tiene mucho sentido que EE. UU. dé rienda suelta al comercio con Cuba. Su economía arrastra una deuda externa equivalente al 125% del PBI ($58 mil millones en 2010) y sus exportaciones andan por apenas $3 mil 300 millones. Quien quiera ser socio comercial de semejante país, que arree.

Cuba no puede engatusar con asistencia técnica a EE. UU., donde no hacen falta ni espías ni médicos ni entrenadores de la Isla. Ni siquiera hace falta intercambio académico y cultural, máxime si el comisario castrista de la Educación Superior, Miguel Díaz-Canel, instruyó ya «la construcción de respuestas inteligentes [para enfrentar] la subversión ideológica imperialista dirigida a penetrar el sector académico cubano». Nadie se llame a engaño: las respuestas se construirán por los servicios de inteligencia. Así como todo académico cubano es «activista de la política revolucionara de nuestro Partido», toda embajada cultural de Cuba en EE. UU. será nuda tienda de recaudación de divisas (TRD) y a la inversa, mera continuación del turismo de aventura social por otros medios. Sin olvidar que hasta «la canción [es] un arma de la revolución» (Foto ©  MNT)

Tres días que precipitaron la caída del Imperio Soviético

PILAR BONET

El intento de golpe de Estado que mantuvo en vilo al mundo durante tres días de agosto de 1991 se desdibuja y mitifica en la memoria de los participantes y testigos de aquellos sucesos que condenaron a muerte a la URSS (Unión de Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas), un Estado de 22.400 kilómetros cuadrados desde el Báltico hasta el Pacífico pasando por las montañas del Pamir. Pero aquellos acontecimientos que acabaron con el sistema comunista soviético no son aún historia, porque sus consecuencias se sienten hasta el día de hoy.

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Las diez huellas soviéticas en Cuba - BBC

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The Berlin Wall, 50 Years Ago/ National Security Archive

National Security Archive

While Condemning Wall in Public, U.S. Officials Saw "Long Term Advantage" if Potential Refugees Stayed in East Germany. Three Days Before Wall Went Up, CIA Expected East Germany Would Take "Harsher Measures" to Solve Refugee Crisis.

Disturbed By Lack of Warning, JFK Asked Intelligence Advisers to Review CIA Performance

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 354

Washington, D.C., August 12, 2011 - Fifty years ago, when leaders of the former East Germany (German Democratic Republic) implemented their dramatic decision to seal off East Berlin from the western part of the city, senior Kennedy administration officials publicly condemned them.  Nevertheless, those same officials, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, secretly saw the Wall as potentially contributing to the stability of East Germany and thereby easing the festering crisis over West Berlin.  Indeed, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson had written that "both we and West Germans consider it to our long-range advantage that potential refugees remain [in] East Germany."  This surprising viewpoint from Thompson and Rusk, among others, is one of a number of points of interest in declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive.

"Forming a human chain, West Berlin police force hundreds of angry, jeering West Berliners, past the Soviet War Memorial and away from the Brandenberg Gate, 14 August 1961. East German forces held off the surging crow with water cannon before West Berlin police pushed them back to prevent a major incident" [from the USIA caption]

The previously secret documents also reveal new information about one of the remaining unknowns from the period—how well (or poorly) U.S. intelligence agencies carried out their responsibility.  In one record, President John F. Kennedy's frustration shows through over the fact that he did not receive adequate advance warning of the East German move.
Some of the documents posted today were released by the CIA through its CREST database at the National Archives, College Park.   As a few of them are heavily excised, the National Security Archive has requested further declassification review. Other relevant documents--CIA daily reports to President Kennedy during the Wall crisis--remain classified because of agency insistence that sources and methods are at risk.  The Archive has appealed these denials.

*********

On 13 August 1961, East German security officials imposed harsh controls at the East-West borders in Berlin designed to stop the flow of thousands of refugees, mostly fleeing through West Berlin.  Implausibly justifying the measures as a defense against West German aggression, the fundamental concern was the threat of economic disaster for the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). To stop its citizens from escaping, the GDR put up barbed-wire fences which soon turned into concrete barriers. A wall was being constructed (although it became a taboo in the GDR to call it a "Wall" (Note 1)).  Declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive shed light on how U.S. diplomats and intelligence analysts understood the East German refugee crisis and the sector border closings.

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The Far Side of the Soviet Moon: Ten of Russia's most disturbing unsolved mysteries

By David E. Hoffman

The 20 years since the Soviet collapse have been a gold mine for historians -- gold because of the valuable discoveries in archives and memoirs, and a mine because of the intense, frustrating labor that's often required to bring them to light. In many ways, we've still only scratched the surface of Soviet history; what we've found so far has made for engrossing accounts taken from records and testimony about once-secret events. But there's so much we still don't know.

Consider a hefty and valuable new volume, Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe. The book is like a secret vault that lays out the most fascinating top-secret documents about the revolutions of 1989. Vladislav Zubok, one of the volume's editors, compared it to the observable side of the moon -- there is still a far side that has not been seen.

In that spirit, here is my entirely arbitrary list of 10 Soviet mysteries waiting for us on the far side of the moon.

1. What happened to the billions of dollars' worth of gold and cash supposedly held by the Communist Party after the Soviet collapse? Some foreign press reports at the time suggested it was swiftly spirited away to foreign bank accounts, but there has never been any evidence. Yegor Gaidar, Boris Yeltsin's prime minister, once hired the international private detective firm Kroll Associates to help find it, but to no avail. How much was involved, and where did it go?

2. Did the Soviet Union ever develop a portable "suitcase" nuclear weapon? There has been lots of wild speculation, but never any proof. The Russian general Alexander Lebed said in 1997 that there were 100 Soviet-era suitcase nukes built and that about half were missing. But Lebed's account was vague and inconsistent, and others denied it or claimed he may have confused them with nuclear land mines. Who was right?

3. In the first weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in late April 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was strangely silent. He didn't speak out about it until May 14, more than two weeks later. What was said and done at the highest levels in those early days of the emergency? Why did this man of action seem so paralyzed?

4. From the early 1970s, Soviet leaders approved a secret biological weapons program. We know broad outlines of the research, but there is almost nothing known about the military side. Was there a "concept of use," or a military doctrine, for germ warfare, against whom, and on what battlefield? Were special-purpose weapons created for it? What happened to all of it after the Soviet collapse?

5. We're still missing key information about the Cuban missile crisis, like just what was said during visits to the Soviet Union by Cuban revolutionaries such as Raúl Castro and Che Guevara before the 1962 crisis, and Fidel Castro afterward. Although records have emerged of Politburo meetings and cables during the crisis, their talks with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev before and after could shed new light on why they deployed the nuclear weapons and what lessons they drew from it.

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The Soviet Union: The Blank Spots

By Maria Lipman

In 1992, barely a year after the collapse of the USSR, three Russian lawyers were granted unprecedented access to the holy of holies -- the minutes of the Politburo, the Soviet Communist Party's highest body. President Boris Yeltsin was anxious to secure his political triumph by seeking to outlaw the Communist Party, and his lawyers were entrusted with using the historical records to prepare his case before the newly formed Constitutional Court.

Secluded in a former Soviet government compound, the legal team went through boxes and boxes of secret documents. It was an incredible trove, inspiring the lawyers to dramatize Politburo sessions and then collapse with laughter at the absurdity of the discourse of late totalitarianism. (The earlier, Stalin-era documents were more likely to make them shudder in shock and pain.)

They had a rich variety of amusements to choose from: One evening I had a chance to join them in their seclusion as they re-enacted the 1985 Politburo session in which the communist leadership discussed what to do with Nobel-winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, at that time kept in internal exile in the city of Gorky. The astonishing archive also included descriptions of plans to cover up the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, private letters sent by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and intercepted by the KGB, and reams of minutiae such as the decision to place a KGB officer in the role of the Canadian correspondent for the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Massive disclosures filling in the "blank spots" of history, as they were commonly referred to at the time, had already begun emerging in the preceding years of glasnost, when the Soviet media, the mouthpieces of Soviet propaganda, were suddenly transformed into nationwide reviews on the country's history. At that time people's appetite for the exposure of the dark communist past seemed insatiable. But most of those secrets were not entirely news: Some had come out during the Khrushchev thaw in the 1950s and early 1960s, others through samizdat or Western media. The publication of truly secret documents began after the 1991 collapse of communism, when state control over the archives was eased and academic researchers, amateur historians, inquisitive journalists, and lawyers like those on Yeltsin's team rushed to see the newly available trove of data.

And yet these secrets, however fascinating, ultimately had a limited impact among the people they most directly concerned: Russians. In the hardship and insecurity that followed communism's collapse, disillusionment set in, and the interest in Soviet secret histories quickly faded away. More recently, and especially over the last decade of Vladimir Putin's rule, a majority of Russians have not wanted to be reminded of communist crimes; they often resent attempts to reinvigorate critical debate of the Soviet past. This may explain why top-level decision-making in today's Russia is no more transparent than it was in its communist predecessor. New dark secrets build up fast.

Below are ten out of a host of disclosures of the past decades that may have brought back pieces of history yet failed to add up to a nationally shared historical narrative.

1. In 1992, Yeltsin's government released secret documents from the special archive of the Communist Party providing definitive evidence that the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which 22,000 Polish nationals were killed, was ordered by Stalin. (The fact had been denied by all communist leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev.) But almost two decades later a plurality of Russians still stuck with Stalin's version of history and blamed Hitler for Katyn. After the tragic crash of the Polish president's plane last year and the broadcast on Russian television of Katyn, a movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda that told the correct story, the numbers shifted: In April 2010, 35 percent held Stalin responsible, and only 18 percent said it was Hitler's crime. A year later, however, the effect had somewhat worn off: While 34 percent blamed Stalin, 24 percent blamed Hitler.

2. Vast archival evidence accumulated over the post-communist years proves that Stalin was not just the mastermind behind the Soviet terror, but also directly responsible for the executions of innocent people. He routinely mocked justice by simply signing off on "shooting lists" put together by state security officials. The condemned would be executed within days or weeks. Today the Russian nation remains divided on Stalin: Thirty-eight percent consider him a "state criminal," but 44 percent do not.

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Don't Go There: Chasing the dying memories of Soviet trauma

By Orlando Figes

In November 2004, Nona Panova was being interviewed by a researcher from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, working under my direction on an oral history project about private life in the Stalin era. Nona, a 75-year-old woman whose father had been arrested during the purges of the 1930s, had been talking for several hours about her upbringing in St. Petersburg and her family when she saw the tape recorder with its microphone. The conversation went like this:

Panova: So that's how it was.… [Notices the tape recorder and shows signs of panic.] Are you recording this? But I'll be arrested! They'll put me into jail!
Interviewer: Who'll put you in jail?
Panova: Someone will.… I've told you so much; there's so much I've said.…
Interviewer: [Laughs.] Yes, and it was very interesting, but tell me, who today would want to put you in jail?
Panova: But did you really make a recording?
Interviewer: Yes, don't you remember? I warned you at the start that our conversation would be recorded.
Panova: Then that's it. It's all over for me -- they'll arrest me.
Interviewer: So where will they send you then?
Panova: I don't know -- no doubt to Kolyma, if I don't get killed before.
Interviewer: When?
Panova: Very soon.
Interviewer: What are you saying?
Panova: I won't be able to sleep tonight; I won't sleep.
Interviewer: Just because you told so much to me?
Panova: Of course!
Interviewer: But you know that I've come from Memorial.
Panova: Well.… But maybe you … maybe you're not from the true Memorial.
More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet regime, it was not unusual to find people of Nona's generation who were still afraid to talk about their private lives during the Stalinist period. Growing up in the 1930s, they had learned from an early age to hide their feelings and opinions -- people were arrested "for their tongue" -- and were still afraid of getting into trouble if they said too much to a stranger. The microphone was a device associated with the KGB.
In the interviews, we were entering a forbidden zone of memory. For though a wide range of new material has become available since the glasnost era of the late 1980s -- newly published diaries, memoirs, and letters -- there is much we still do not know, and it remains unclear what to make of this new material even now, two decades after the Soviet collapse. At the heart of this historical debate is a question: Did Soviet-era subjects allow themselves a private life at all?
That was the issue we wanted to approach in our interviews. All in all, we interviewed 454 people. Like Nona, many were reluctant to talk or very anxious about our conversations. At best, they were reflecting on traumatic events that had occurred several decades before, when most were no more than teenagers. The problems of memory and interpretation were daunting. But it seemed a worthwhile project. Today, more than half of those we interviewed just a few years ago have passed away, and most of the rest would now be too old or frail to answer intimate questions of the sort we asked. The door is closing on the last living sources of information about what it was like to survive in Stalin's Soviet Union.
  
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How'd We Do Covering the Revolution?

By David E. Hoffman

Yevgeny Bushmin seemed to embody all the promise of Russian democracy on a cold December day in 1995 as he campaigned for reelection to the lower house of parliament. When we met, Bushmin was 37 years old, had made it as a young businessman in the last years of the Soviet Union, had become the first chairman of the fledgling stock exchange in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, and now in a suit, black cloth coat, white scarf, and fur hat, was seeking a second term from District 122.

He had a reformist record in the Duma, but could see the tide was running the other way. In Nizhny, called Gorky in Soviet times and best known as the internal exile of Nobel-winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, the huge military-industrial complex stood idle, the workers uncertain about their future. People were hurting so badly the word "democracy" itself had come to be associated with hardship.

At 9:15 a.m., we arrived at the gate of a sprawling defense factory, which once made laser equipment but was now quiet and empty. This was only Russia's second post-Soviet parliamentary election, and the workers we met were sour. "I'm not allergic to democracy," Bushmin told them. "The only advice I have is let's give it a different name and keep doing it."

And indeed, a day spent watching Bushmin field complaints from angry, sullen voters left me still optimistic that despite the hardships, democracy might take root in Russia after seven decades of Soviet rule. I wrote in the Washington Post at the time that Bushmin's race highlighted the "fascinating, wobbly, yet striving character of Russia's young democracy."

A decade and a half later, however, Russian democracy is flat on its back. When parliamentary elections are held this December, there will be no individual districts like the one where Bushmin campaigned. They were abolished in favor of a party-list system that effectively makes it impossible for independents to win. Governors, once elected, are for all practical purposes now appointed by the Kremlin. While in 1995 there was a vibrant if uneven free press in Russia, today the main broadcast channels -- through which 90 percent of people get their news -- are all firmly under the Kremlin's thumb. Over the last decade, Vladimir Putin, as president and then prime minister, has established a monopoly on politics and the policy it drives.

It was not the outcome I expected while covering Russia's transition as the Post bureau chief in the 1990s. Russia zigzagged from oligarchic capitalism to crony capitalism, and in politics from proto-democracy to soft authoritarianism. All of us who witnessed the events of those years -- journalists, scholars, government officials, businessmen, and others -- ought to ask ourselves: Why did Russia turn out this way? What did we get right, and what did we get wrong?

For the most part, Russia had to choose its own direction, and the West's ability to change that path was always somewhat limited. No amount of aid, loans, or well-intentioned advice was going to endow Russia with a broad consensus about its identity, direction, or place in the world, all of which are still in play. But to the extent that outsiders could help, did the West try too hard to remake Russia in its own image? Were the basic choices -- democracy and free markets -- somehow wrong or alien for Russia? Were there alternative paths? These questions have reverberated for years.

The answers could be important for a new generation of democracy activists, particularly those in the Arab world. The protesters who gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011 will undoubtedly be facing many of the same frustrations that unfolded in Russia 20 years earlier. There are lessons to be taken from the collapse of Soviet communism. History may not repeat itself, but it can certainly be reusable. It should be examined with a generous dose of humility.

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The Long, Lame Afterlife of Mikhail Gorbachev

By Anne Applebaum

See a slideshow about Gorby's life in the limelight

In the most notable of the many photographs snapped at the gala held to mark his 80th birthday, Mikhail Gorbachev seems shorter and rounder than he did in his prime, back when he was one of the most important people in the world. He is inscrutable, only half-smiling; he also looks disheveled, and perhaps unsure of himself. Those impressions may of course be exaggerated by the fact that in this particular picture, the onetime general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has his arm around Sharon Stone. Stone is wearing a slinky, champagne-colored dress and bright red lipstick. She is grinning widely. In heels, she is a good 6 inches taller than Gorbachev, which certainly takes away from his aura of authority.
But then, it has been a very long time since Gorbachev actually had an aura of authority. In fact, everything about his garish birthday party screamed "B-list celebrity." Stone hasn't starred in a hit movie for a good while; neither has Kevin Spacey, who co-hosted the event alongside her. Also in attendance were Goldie Hawn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ted Turner, Shirley Bassey, and, I'm sorry to say, Lech Walesa. The gala was ostensibly a fundraiser for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, which helps raise money for the care of children with cancer. But mostly the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev's fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the dismantling of the Soviet empire and then the Soviet Union itself, one of the founding statesmen of modern Russia -- and yet his birthday gala was held in the Royal Albert Hall, in London, among people who hardly knew him.

This was not an accident: Twenty years after the dissolution of the USSR, Russia is ambivalent, at best, about Gorbachev. Far from being hailed as a hero, he is mostly remembered as a disastrous leader, if he is remembered at all. Yes, he launched a new era of openness with previously unthinkable freedoms in the 1980s, but in Russia he is also held responsible for the economic collapse of the 1990s. Most Russians don't thank him for ending the Soviet empire either. On the contrary, the current Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has described the dismantling of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. An opinion poll released in March, at the time of his birthday, showed that some 20 percent of Russians feel actively hostile toward Gorbachev, 47 percent of Russians "don't care about him at all," and only 5 percent admire him. And this was an improvement: Another poll, in 2005, found active hostility toward him in 45 percent of Russians. The word "perestroika" in Russia today has almost purely negative connotations.
In London and Washington, Gorbachev's reputation is of course more positive. He is regarded with affection -- he was invited to Ronald Reagan's funeral and to George H.W. Bush's own 80th birthday party -- and frequently hailed as a "symbol" of peace and the Cold War's welcome end. But he tends to be paid rather bland and even inappropriate compliments. At his birthday party, Paul Anka sang a duet with a Soviet-era rock musician. The chorus: "One day we'll recall, he was changing the world for us all." Stone then lauded him with a rhetorical question: "Where would Russia be if it weren't reaping the benefits of a free democracy?" I wish I'd been there to see the embarrassment on the faces of the spectators at the Royal Albert Hall -- for Russia has not actually reaped the benefits of free democracy, as every Russian in the room knew perfectly well. Even Gorbachev himself recently described Russian democracy as a sham: "We have institutions, but they don't work. We have laws, but they must be enforced."

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Soviet Union Meltdown

By Gennady Burbulis with Michele A. Berdy

"That scum!" Boris Yeltsin fumed. "It's a coup. We can't let them get away with it."
It was the morning of Aug. 19, 1991, and the Russian president was standing at the door of his dacha in Arkhangelskoe, a compound of small country houses outside Moscow where the top Russian government officials lived. I had raced over from my own house nearby, after a friend called from Moscow, frantic and nearly hysterical, insisting that I turn on the radio. There had been a coup; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been removed from power.
Five minutes later I was at Yeltsin's dacha, an unassuming two-story yellow brick building, where a small group of his closest associates soon gathered. In addition to me (at the time, his secretary of state), there was Ivan Silayev, the head of the Russian cabinet; Ruslan Khasbulatov, the acting chairman of the Supreme Soviet; Mikhail Poltoranin, the minister of press and mass information; Sergei Shakhrai, the state councilor; and Viktor Yaroshenko, the minister of foreign economic relations. Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, and Yuri Luzhkov, the deputy mayor of Moscow, arrived not long after. Everyone crowded into Yeltsin's small living room.

---

Three Days in Foros
In August 1991, Soviet hardlines held Mikhail Gorbachev captive in a last-ditch effort to save the Soviet empire. His foreign policy advisor tells the story.

For months we had half-expected something like this. By the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union was falling apart at the seams. The economy was imploding, the deficit was ballooning, hard currency and gold reserves had been decimated, and Gorbachev's stopgap reforms had only exacerbated the crisis. The notion of a "Soviet people," unified under the banner of socialism, was collapsing along with it. Legislatures in the republics, which had already demanded greater freedoms within the USSR, began calling for independence. By the spring of 1991, five republics -- Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- had declared it officially. In Russia, democratic forces wanted an end to Soviet totalitarian rule. Our aim was not to allow the chaotic dissolution of the USSR, but to transform it into a confederation that would afford each republic considerable self-determination under its aegis.

We had been moving in this direction for several years. Yeltsin and the other democratic candidates had been elected to the Russian parliament in 1990 with the goal of securing more legally protected rights and freedoms, as well as a market economy, and Yeltsin had been elected president of Russia in June 1991 with almost 60 percent of the vote. But while we were secure in our popular mandate, we were utterly powerless to deal with the greatest threat to Russia: economic collapse. More than 93 percent of the economy, by our estimation, was controlled by the Soviet government. Yeltsin and those of us in his circle of closest associates soon came to believe that unless we were to content ourselves with being nothing more than a ceremonial body, we had to change the legal and economic bases of the union itself.
Gorbachev and a small group of Soviet reformers had accepted this, too. We began to work together on a new union treaty that would transform the Soviet Union into a confederation of sovereign states with a limited central government. Yeltsin planned to sign the controversial pact on Aug. 20.
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