RON RIDENOUR—In October, soldiers and civilians demonstrated and collided on the streets. Pro-Yeltsin demonstrators removed police cordons around the parliament, took over the mayor’s offices and tried to storm the Ostankino television center. Initially, most of the army declared neutrality. Some backed the parliament, but most generals did not want to take chances. On the morning of October 4, under Yeltsin’s orders, generals instructed soldiers to storm the Supreme Soviet building. By noon, troops occupied the White House, and arrested the leaders of the legal resistance. The “second October Revolution”, as some called it, was much more deadly than in October 1917. According to government estimates, 187 people were killed and 437 wounded. Non-governmental sources put the death toll as high as 2,000. Many of the deaths, including legislators, occurred when Yeltsin ordered the parliament bombed.
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GAITHER STEWART—I try not to stray from the subject of who these modern day Russians are but this minor and limited incursion into the complex story of the origins of Slavs and their state is necessary in order to know what we are talking about. Suffice it to say here that the Kievan state has the place in Russian history as does, say, the thirteen original colonies in the formation of the USA. An important and influential world capital in those times appears today as a second-class, boring puppet city-state controlled by a failing and waning US world power, a power with no concept of the significance of history.
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S. JONAS—”Many critics of the Soviet Union conveniently forget that the Soviet experience was shaped in a significant part by what someday will come to be known as ‘The 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union, 1917-1992.'”
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GAITHER STEWART—Stalin writes that contrary to metaphysics, the essence of dialectics is that quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes which occur rapidly, in the form of a leap from one state to another. Not circular movement, nor repetition, but as an onward and upward movement, as a transition from an old qualitative state to a new one, from the lower to the higher. Stalin cites Engels’ The Dialectics of Nature to make his point: “In physics … every change is a passing of quantity into quality…. For example, the temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state, but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, the moment arrives when … the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice.”
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GAITHER STEWART—Solidarnosc had the solid backing of a powerful man and institution: Karol Wojtyla from Krakow, then known as Pope John Paul II, tough but widely loved boss of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome. Devout Catholics forever, those Poles! And now Solidarnosc, the mortal enemy of Communism, had their man in Rome who dedicated his Papacy to undermining the foundations of world Communism in Moscow. Operation Overthrow was underway. In Poland, in the Vatican, in Washington.
From 1985, the new General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, launched his program of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring) headed pell-mell toward social democracy and free-market capitalism. Walesa and Solidarnosc, Wojtyla and the Vatican and Washington were right on schedule.
