SOLIDARITY ESTABLISHED IN POLAND, THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO

SOLIDARNOŚĆ 

b. August 31, 1980 

KATOWICE (POLAND) COAL MINE  

Published in the February 15, 1982, 

issue of BUSINESS WEEK (p. 68) 

On August 31, 1980, Lech Walesa, representing the striking workers in the Gdansk shipyard, signed the August Accords wrenching certain rights from the Polish communist government. 

The development of what became a ten-million-strong movement growing out of the strike, called Solidarność, or Solidarity, was amazing, but also fraught with complications. 

One of them was the relationship between Warsaw and Moscow, discussed in the Sol W. Sanders Business Week article ("The high price Russia will have to pay in Poland") for which the photograph above was the illustration.  His conclusion:  "The Soviet Union can only lose economically in the continuing crisis insider her largest satellite." 

The USSR ultimately lost far more than economically; a brief discussion can be found here. 

Today, thirty-one years after the founding, Poland's president, Bronisław Komorowski, came to Gdansk to honor Solidarity.  Walesa had a more bittersweet take on the movement:  "'It was such a big victory, but the effects don't match it,' he was quoted by TVN24 as saying." 

THE NAZIS ATTACK LENINGRAD, SEVENTY YEARS AGO

THE GERMANS 

REACH THE NEVA RIVER 

August 30, 1941 

THE NEVA RIVER 

LENINGRAD, USSR 

Now St. Petersburg, Russia, again 

Nine hundred dark days were to follow, with catastrophic casualties.  The Wehrmacht cut off the last rail connection to Leningrad on August 30, 1941, and the last land connection on September 8, 1941, which seems to be taken generally as the start of the Siege of Leningrad.  There is a new book by Anna Reid on the seventieth anniversary called LENINGRAD: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-44 (see here). 

THE END. OF THE PARTY. TWENTY YEARS AGO. AND THE ROLE OF BORIS YELTSIN.

THE SUPREME SOVIET 

OF THE USSR 

SUSPENDS ALL ACTIVITIES OF 

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF 

THE SOVIET UNION (CPSU) 

August 29, 1991 

BORIS YELTSIN IN HIS SEAT AT 

THE 28TH (AND LAST) CONGRESS OF 

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION 

(CPSU), MOSCOW, JULY 1990 

YELTSIN WALKING OUT OF THE PARTY, here 

Twenty years ago today, the USSR Supreme Soviet, then the highest government authority in the then Soviet Union, voted to suspend the activities of the previously ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union "pending an investigation of its role" in the August coup. 

As the New York Times report on the subject noted, "The fate of the party was already sealed before Parliament's vote. Individual republics had closed its offices and seized its vast properties and funds and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had quit as its General Secretary and had called on the leadership to step down." 

"Individual republics" -- yes, but, the individual republic that mattered was that of the RSFSR, or Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, whose duly elected president was Boris Yeltsin.

On July 20, 1991, Yeltsin had signed a "departization" decree "aimed against Party activity (officially, all parties' activities) in government organizations and state enterprises on Russian soil" (to quote myself in SIC TRANSIT, Chapter 8, "Endgame").

On July 30, 1991, after his meeting with American president George Bush in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin was happy to interpret his actions and intentions to those of us waiting to listen. [See here and here.] 

To continue quoting "Endgame," "Gorbachev, facing another hostile Central Committee meeting shortly, should thank him [Yeltsin] for opening a second front and providing a diversionary action, he gloated. The decree, due to come into effect on August 4th, had stirred up a storm of protest and condemnation from CPSU and Russian Communist Party bodies.  Its timing may have been chosen, as Yeltsin alleged, to draw conservative ire away from Gorbachev at a crucial juncture, but its main thrust continued the battle to break the Party's power from within. ... However weakened the Party might have been already, through Gorbachev's initiatives and subsequent internal hemorrhaging, it still had a grip on the Soviet polity and economy that enabled it to stifle real reform.  Yeltsin's decree was intended to cut off its tentacles in the government offices and workplaces of the Russian Republic, his domain, more than a month before Gorbachev was finally moved to take action against its head -- after the coup." 

WILLIAM S. COHEN IS THREE SCORE AND TEN PLUS ONE

WILLIAM S. COHEN 

b. August 28, 1940 

CHAIRMAN & CEO, THE COHEN GROUP 

Photographed as U.S. Senator (R-Maine) 

at a hearing of the Armed Services Committee 

William S. Cohen was the highest ranking Republican in the administration of Democrat Bill Clinton, a former Senator (and earlier, Representative) from Maine chosen to be Secretary of Defense (SecDef) in Clinton's second term (1997-2001). 

His Congressional-plus biography is here; the lengthy and quite informative Pentagon report on Cohen's time as SecDef is here; his own Cohen Group website is here. 

HERBERT STEIN b. August 27, 1916

HERBERT STEIN  

August 27, 1916-September 8, 1999 

Author, PRESIDENTIAL ECONOMICS 

Reviewed in the March 5, 1984, issue of 

BUSINESS WEEK (photograph on p. 10), 

"A Conservative Rebuff to Reagaonomics," 

by Seymour Zucker 

Herbert Stein was on the Council of Economic Advisers (including as Chair) under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and professor of economics at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute afterwards. 

The obituaries and appreciations (see here and here, for example), mention his wit and his original, or contrarian, approach to, and prescriptions for, U.S. national economic policy-making. 

Some of what Dr. Stein said and wrote resonates quite strongly today:  he was, for instance, scathing on the subject of supply-siders, "who hold that tax cuts will help bring the budget into balance by raising the gross national product enough to produce more, not less, tax revenue and that government expenditures can be reduced simply by cutting waste.  Stein now refers," Zucker writes in Business Week, "to these theories as 'the economics of joy'" -- and, more importantly, demonstrates that they do not work in practice. 

ZHOU JI TURNS SIXTY-FIVE

ZHOU JI 

b. August 26, 1946 

PRESIDENT, CHINESE ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING 

Minister of Education, People's Republic of China (PRC) 

2003-2009 

Poster here 

Some discussion of the controversy over Zhou's 

losing his post as Minister of Education, here 

EDWARD M. "TED" KENNEDY GONE TWO YEARS

EDWARD M. KENNEDY 

February 22, 1932-August 25, 2009 

Simplicity 

THE GRAVESITE OF 

SENATOR & FORMER PRIVATE 

"TED" KENNEDY 

Arlington National Cemetery 

The obituary and much more; 

multi-media stories of a life; 

from the Boston Globe, here 

GORBACHEV RESIGNS AS GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION, August 24, 1991

GORBACHEV 

GIVES UP ON 

THE PARTY 

LOOKING OUT ON THE KREMLIN 

THROUGH A WINDOW 

IN THE PALACE OF CONGRESSES 

ON A RAINY DAY 

DURING THE TIME OF THE 

28TH CONGRESS OF THE CPSU 

MOSCOW, JULY 1990 

Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), was still planning in the summer of 1991 to hold a 29th Congress.  Even after the coup that targeted him collapsed and he was able to return to Moscow, he did not immediately see the need for changes.  He pleaded with Boris Yeltsin not to suspend the activities of the Party in Russia (Yeltsin's bailiwick).  On August 24 he got it, and resigned as General Secretary. 

More on the story here and here and here and here. 

"RUSSIA REDUX" 

WAR & PEACE II: SARAH CALDWELL'S & SERGEI PROKOFIEV'S & LEO TOLSTOY'S

WAR & PEACE  

II 

SARAH CALDWELL'S PRODUCTION 

OF PROKOFIEV'S OPERA 

WAR AND PEACE 

Boston 1974 

For a photograph of 

Donald Gramm as Marshal Kutuzov, 

see here 

BORIS YELTSIN "THE OBSCURE" & THE COUP III

'THE COUP MADE 

BORIS YELTSIN' 

BORIS YELTSIN OUT IN TYUMEN' 

TEN DAYS BEFORE THE COUP 

WORKING ON BUILDING A 

NEW RUSSIAN STATE 

(see here and here) 

August 22, 1991:  Mikhail Gorbachev arrives back in Moscow from his imprisonment in the Crimea, and fails to notice the new realities on the ground. 

Boris Yeltsin does. 

Why the coup plotters did not actually grab Yeltsin, however, puzzled him. 

Now we have a commentary in the New York Times, by one Victor Sebestyen, invoking once again the image of Yeltsin on the tank:  "This stirring scene was foolishly allowed to be shown on TV that evening, turning the obscure Yeltsin into a figure of world significance overnight." 

The "obscure Yeltsin".... 

Well, if you had not been paying attention. 

There had, for example, been an election in which millions of Russians had voted, and a few other developments before that.... 

YELTSIN THE HARD HAT AND THE COUP II

RUSSIAN STATE 

RUSSIAN ENERGY 

 

BORIS YELTSIN 

meets with 

Tyumen' Oblast oil rig workers 

August 1991 

The hardliner coup attempt dominates our collective memories of August 1991 in the USSR, but Boris Yeltsin had not been idle before he suddenly broke into the news by climbing on the tank in front of the Russian White House. 

Yeltsin had won his election as the first Russian president; gotten his proper American tour and two meetings with the U.S. president, one in the White House and one in the Kremlin; and cut a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev on the future of the USSR. 

Now, in the first full week in August, as Gorbachev headed off for a vacation in the Crimea, Yeltsin took off on his first inspection tour of Russia as its president. His destination: the province (oblast') of Tyumen' in Western Siberia, home of the country's biggest oil-and-gas complex. 

Declarations of sovereignty were all very well and good; electing your own president even better.  But a sovereign Russia had to be able to fund itself; having oil and gas production plummeting was devastating to its chances of really making a go of it. 

The story in RUSSIA REDUX Chapter Five 

"On the Road Again on the Eve of the Coup: 

Tyumen' and Oil and Gas" 

BORIS YELTSIN & THE AUGUST 1991 COUP, TWENTY YEARS ON

THE (SOVIET) UNION- 

BUSTING COUP 

August 18-21, 1991

BORIS YELTSIN 

 making a presidential inspection tour 

of Tyumen' province, 

ten days before the coup 

The web is awash with stories marking the twentieth anniversary of the failed August coup in the USSR, many full of buyer's remorse.  New angles are sought; one has Boris Yeltsin climbing up the tank in front of the White House knowing that no one would shoot at him, so big deal. 

I have long thought that there was more to Yeltsin than this iconic moment; and put it on the record:  "It is his [Yeltsin's] mounting of the tank outside the White House in August of 1991 that remains in most people's minds, but it is his actions on behalf of Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia in January of 1991 that are perhaps the more remarkable." [SIC TRANSIT, Ch. 8, "Endgame"] 

I think there is still a story to be told about what Yeltsin was actually doing in that fateful 1991 summer of his election to the presidency of Russia, a country within a country.  That is coming in RUSSIA REDUX. 

BILL CLINTON HITS SIXTY-FIVE

BILL CLINTON

b. William Jefferson Blythe III

August 19, 1946

BILL CLINTON

AT THE 1988

DEMOCRATIC

NATIONAL CONVENTION

In four years he would win the nomination and then the presidency,

and keep it through eight years and one impeachment (and one acquittal).

So -- now we have the second of our older Baby Boom presidents turning Medicare age. George W. Bush is the elder by forty-four days; both he and Clinton are first year Boomers (the first year after World War II). Barack Obama, who just recently did fifty, was born near (1961) but not at the end (1964) of the Boomer years.

For both Bush and Clinton I have given you pre-presidential pictures to compare what the office and the years did.

I have a riff on the subject of age -- or youth ("Youthiness Can Be Overrated") -- of presidents American and Russian here (the March 5, 2009, entry).

More on Clinton as the "Russia Hand" here. More to come in RUSSIA REDUX.

The news of the day about Bill Clinton is that he has become a Vegan (see here).

For more on this Clinton, click the label "Bill Clinton," below.

CASPAR WEINBERGER b. August 18, 1917

CASPAR WEINBERGER 

August 18, 1917-March 28, 2006 

"CAP" WEINBERGER 

as Ronald Reagan's 

Secretary of Defense 

Published in BUSINESS WEEK 

September 28, 1981 (p. 73) 

A product of San Francisco on the one coast and Harvard College and Harvard Law School on the other, with a stint in the Pacific Theater in World War II, Caspar Weinberger fairly quickly entered Republican politics in California.  In time he went to work for Governor Ronald Reagan in Sacramento and then for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in Washington.  He came to head the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); Office of Management and Budget (OMB); and Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). 

But Weinberger's career peaked when Reagan named him Secretary of Defense right at the outset of his presidency, and he stayed for almost seven years; only Robert McNamara before him and Donald Rumsfeld before and after him lasted longer in the office. 

As Nixon's OMB director Weinberger gained a reputation as "Cap the Knife."  As Reagan's head of the Pentagon he was anything but.  It turns out what he was interested in cutting was not budgets generally but social programs in particular. 

My direct impression of Weinberger at the time was that he was much more Cap in the Candy Store than Cap the Knife -- or that he was an enabler for Pentagon procurement sometimes run amuck. 

It is quite interesting reading now how a range of observers seem to agree with this assessment.  One of the most interesting comes from the Pentagon itself, and can be found here. 

There are many other notable points in this long career.   Besides his role the defense buildup in general (and what it did to the budget), Weinberger was influential in the Reagan administration on the Soviet Union, the missile build-up, and SDI ("Star Wars") and the many crises of the day, and nearly undone by the Iran-Contra scandal (saved by a pardon by President George Bush).  Some informative sources besides the DOD one cited above can be found here and here and here. 

(A side note:  As the Pentagon biography talks about Richard Perle's work with Weinberger, you may want to have a look here.)