HISTORY AND PROPAGANDA: BUSH-41 AND THE THREE DRUNKS

“Rub-a-dub-dub,

Three men in a tub,

And who do you think they were?”

The history of events which hit Europe like a thunderbolt out of the blue sky nearly a quarter of a century ago in the year 1989, known as the year of miracles, have little to do with the propaganda version of them, which currently rules over the history books. The American President George HW Bush was apparently in a kind of panic, and tried to use his personal influence to slow down the process of radical transformation. Eastern European communist leaders were perplexed, and even the toughest opposition in their countries had no intention of going as far as they were being carried by the violent stream of change coming out of… the USSR! According to Arbatov, the cataclysmic chain of events was further precipitated in 1991 by three drunken sots sitting in a steam bath--- the leaders of Russia (Boris Yeltsin), Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk) and Belarus (Stanislav Shushkevich), who, after letting Eastern Europe go, now decided to break up the Soviet Union itself…

But was it up to them to decide? I think that Arbatov is disingenuous here: yes, there was a conspiracy all along, coming directly out of Moscow, but it was a different kind of conspiracy, which was put together by people of a much higher caliber than the said three drunks; and what it wanted to achieve was the collapse of the old world order itself, which would hurt Russia the most, in the short run, but ended up undermining the global power of the United States in the long run, restoring Russia’s power to an unprecedented height, far greater now than at the peak of the Cold War. A good analogy of this occurrence would be the other two Russian catastrophes of the twentieth century: in 1917 and in 1941, each lifting up the nation out of its dire misery onto a higher plane of “self-actualization.”

…History is not made by “three men in a tub.” So, “who do you think they were?” I say they were the same people who had ``previously plunged Russia into the Bolshevik Revolution; the same people who had stood behind the Starets Philotheus when he had prophesied Russia’s Third Rome Destiny.

(Regarding the Third Rome Doctrine, see my entry The Russian National Idea, posted on January 22, 2011.)