Prof. Stephen Cohen accused me of intellectual dishonesty for misquoting
him, and being out of touch with realities of Russia (JRL 5308). After
having checked the sources I admit that I did overlook that direct quotation
marks in the Prof. Alex Danchev's description of Prof. Cohen's book weren't
there.
So the following belongs to Prof. Danchev's interpretation of Prof.
Cohen's book (JRL #5284):
"Russia has suffered an economic and social catastrophe unprecedented
in modern times... Most of the population is impoverished. Three of every
four Russians grow their own food in order to survive. Barter is commonplace.
Epidemics of typhus, typhoid and cholera have reemerged. Millions of children
no longer attend school; many suffer from malnutrition. Male life expectancy
has plunged to that of Dostoevsky's day and continues to fall. Russia is
truly Upper Volta with rockets."
I am sorry for the mistake, yet I don't think that by attributing the
passage to Prof. Cohen I had committed intellectual dishonestly.
Here are his own words: "Because of what has happened in Russia ten
years ago& infrastructures-economic, social, technological-are in various
stages of disintegration. The country has been asset-stripped, impoverished
and left on the verge of a "demographic apocalypse& Russia has been
plunging back into the nineteenth century& The state is virtually bankrupt&
a fully nuclearized nation is in a process of collapse& clock of nuclear
catastrophe ticking inside Russia." [The Nation June 25, 2000 Russian Nuclear
Roulette].
So how far off from the "Upper Volta with rockets" this picture is?
Professors Danchev and Cohen seem to be in total accord on all the main
points. So while characterizing Prof. Cohen's book as full of anger, moral
outrage and sorrow, a disturbing yet convincing indictment, Swiftian in
savagery if not in style and reproaching him for "rough edges, perfervid
critique" and for having "scabrous fun," Prof. Danchev seems to admire
Stephen Cohen [as] "a hanging judge, but an earnest author."
As for being "so wildly out of touch with Russian realities" he accuses
me of, this reminds me about one funny episode when in 1988 one postgraduate
American student accused me of ignorance because I left the USSR a decade
ago and he had just visited it on a two-week trip.
Just for the record, not only I was born and educated in Russia and
served six years in the KGB camp, not only I have written three books and
God knows how many articles about USSR/Russia, for the last three years
I live and work in Russia. I teach macro-economy and leadership at a business
school, and, perhaps more importantly, I analyze Russian companies, write
business games for them, create customized educational programs and see
them implemented.
But never mind books, articles, real life and business people. Perhaps
a professor from New York can see something we people on the ground don't?
I am sure he does -- it is a Russia, with disfigured human face of Gorbachevian
socialism -- a VIRTUAL RUSSIA, sorry for quoting myself.(JRL5325)
So, lets leave the issues of intellectual honestly and competence behind.
The actual dispute is about the ways we look at the same glass, about our
attitudes toward an important country and its role in the world. My book
Russia Transformed (Hudson, 1996) says Russia broke out of communist tragedy
and is evolving in the right direction, while Cohen speaks of 'the Tragedy
of Post-Communist Russia." I try to encourage people to trust and help
Russia get integrated in the civilized community, while Prof. Cohen tells
young Americans that they are graduating into a world more dangerous than
ever before, that a clock of impending nuclear catastrophe is ticking.
I would like to encourage young people of Russia, Europe and America
to trust each other and cooperate, while Prof. Cohen stops one step short
from advising young American graduates to start digging bomb shelters in
the basements as their fathers did in the sixties.
Prof. Cohen said that he would like to "express optimism about the future"
but he cannot because "an optimist is an uninformed pessimist." Mark Twain
said that "pessimism is the name men of weak nerve give to wisdom" On my
part, I would insist that a pessimist could be as uninformed or misinformed
as an optimist. And uninformed pessimism can be very dangerous indeed because
it borders with paranoia. By pouring their morbid "wisdom", "anger, moral
outrage and sorrow" onto others and thus scaring people out their wits
the titled paranoiacs can do tremendous harm.
They have to be treated with patience, compassion and perhaps some Prozac
because nothing can make an optimist out of an uninformed pessimist.
Dmitry Mikheyev, director of Corporate Training Center, IBS
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