Sarah Paine

He has a much lighter touch than Stalin.

I don't think communists let you know those things.

This is one for a lot of Russians, because my husband and I were in the Soviet Union in the 1988-89 academic year, and that's early Gorbachev, before everything totally falls apart and there's no food.

So there wasn't much food, but there was some food.

And it was just as the Russians were suddenly being able to read in a fairly free press about the things that had happened.

And they were appalled about what had gone on under Stalin.

And they just hadn't realized all of it.

Oh, Russia?

Well, there was tremendous rebuilding after World War II.

There's another piece.

It was so weird.

When we were in Russia in 88, 89...

Anything that was sold at the markets that came from somewhere else, they would market importnaya, means imported.

So the idea, and I remember thinking, this is really weird because normally you would say it's, I don't know, Hungarian this and that or whatever.

And I thought, ooh, this means that anything from somewhere else is better than what we got.

that it's a really bad sign and they had like a what I would call a donut empire normally when you think of an empire Mother Central is the most developed part and then there's the periphery where all the natural resources are taken away that it was an inverted empire Russia is the donut the rich places are places like Czechoslovakia and Poland had been much richer places and so the Russians are like surf owners are sucking in all the wealth from these places and I think that's another reason why the

shattering of the Soviet Union when they lost all of their inserved Eastern Europe, why it was such a mess for Russia.

They did not realize, they still don't realize, the degree to which they were living off the wealth produced in the European portions of Russia that since became independent.

Gorbachev was a true believer.

He did not believe it was possible to take a U-turn on the road to communism so that when he was doing his reforms, it was to improve communism, make it better.