The beginning of the end of Putin
That was the front page headline on a recent issue of the British news magazine The Economist (one of the world's leading publications). There was no question mark, and the leader as well as a long article predicted that Russia's current leader (not to say dictator) would not last too long.
This started me thinking.
I remembered how we Swedes, almost all of us, minus a few crackpots, admired the Russians' valiant battle at Stalingrad and around Moscow. How fervently we wanted Uncle Joe Stalin to win over that madman Hitler. How we saw Communism as—yes!—the wave of the future.
That was then.
After the war, it slowly—or not so slowly—dawned on us that Uncle Joe was indeed a mass murderer bent on ruling the world. Eastern Europe gave evidence enough. All over the place satellite governments were doing the dirty work for the commies. Perverting and abolishing democracy, jailing and/or killing dissidents, indeed making the whole Eastern Bloc a giant prison.
It ain't so, our own homegrown commies said, and all too many believed them. Then came the revolts in Poland and—more dramatically—Hungary in the mid 1950s.
I was sent to Budapest at the time, a 23-year-old rookie. For the first time in my life, I saw dead bodies, hundreds of them, lining the streets. For the first time, I got to look at pictures of people who had been tortured in various cruel and revolting ways. I saw bodies of political police officers hanging upside down in the trees. And I saw, it can not be denied, people spitting and pissing on them.
It all said hatred. It all said that under the Russians, Hungary had been led by an evil hand and an oppressed country. People sang in the streets and waved Hungarian flags where the hammer and the sickle had been cut out.
Myself, I cried. Up to then, I had not understood how much people can hate. I thought the world was going to hell and would never be good again.
But I was wrong.
Many years later, I saw the Berlin Wall fall. Even later, I heard Gorbachev himself proclaim that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The evil empire was no more. Or at least, it was no longer an empire.
And there we are. Europe is, to borrow a phrase from George Bush Sr., "whole and free." Russia is still Russia, a dangerous and corrupt country, run by Putin and his friends as the maffia runs areas under its control. It's poor and inefficient, and were it not for the oceans of oil on which it floats, it might well be bankrupt as well. As we recently saw, elections are still rigged and personal freedom is a dream only.
And yet. ...
Communism has lost its shine. Something very important died in Stalin's gulag and on the streets of Budapest. The Russia of today does not command respect. Communist parties in the west—in Sweden for example—have been forced to change. Indeed, sometimes, you have the impression that many members would rather have somewhere else to go.
So ... we won.
The great fight of our time gave Democracy a one, Communism a big fat 0.
Our countries, whether they are named the U.S., France or Sweden (to name the three where I have lived) are not perfect. Not at all. There is still poverty, still crime and some unrest. But we are free to improve, and improve we will.
As the Soviet example shows, the battle for a better world is winnable, after all.. ..
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World Reporter
Ulf Nilson, World reporter since his first assignments to Hungary in 1956. Correspondent and Sweden’s man in America for 20 years, Ulf Nilson is still a regular columnist in Sweden’s daily Expressen, and regular contributor in Nordstjernan. He has authored or co-authored over fifty books. He lives in southern France or at his beloved Värmdö, just 30 minutes north of Stockholm. He
• covered the US, including Vietnam during the war years
• marched in the civil rights marches
• interviewed Martin Luther King
• met presidents Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and George H. W. Bush
• and, as one of Sweden’s most well-known journalists, also met with every politician, industry leader or cultural personality—all the movers and shakers of Sweden through five decades of a proliferate professional life.
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