Soviet Presswatch/Solidarity With Saddam
Young, Cathy
SOVIET PRESSWATCH SOLIDARITY WITH SADDAM T ast September, when the middleaged man outside the office of Moscow News who tried to sell yours truly a photocopied manual of "365 sexual positions"...
...The same issue includes a little story entitled "Retribution," which in the old days would have earned the author a lengthy sentence for advocating terrorism...
...Since the West still takes a wait-and-see attitude on this issue . . . one may conclude that the bold offer of the Iraqi president was not well received in certain Western capitals...
...One of them added that Lockshin was very active these days, meeting with factory workers and giving them the straight dope on capitalism...
...As I braced myself for a philippic against U.S...
...How many times am I supposed to tell you, this is not where they are going to hang Politburo members...
...Well, having stood up to the FBI, he's not about to let Communism go down without a fight...
...Honest Communists and politically conscious workers and peasants will be terrorized and subjected to sophisticated psychological isolation...
...and "Hands Off Iraq...
...about a hundred hot-headed Muscovites, however, have expressed the desire to enlist in the Iraqi army and Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...In solving the food problem, you should understand, before you rush to implement our model of production, that this model helps cultivate greed...
...one of the slogans said, "Together, the USSR and the USA Defeated Hitler...
...indeed, with Gorbachev getting so friendly with the KGB and the generals, the likes of "Ivan Petrovich" may yet have the last laugh...
...They're all taken...
...The men said that "the guest was tired," and therefore not available for interviews...
...Embassy in Moscow with such slogans as "Long Live Arab Unity Against Zionism...
...The time...
...SOVIET PRESSWATCH SOLIDARITY WITH SADDAM T ast September, when the middleaged man outside the office of Moscow News who tried to sell yours truly a photocopied manual of "365 sexual positions" found out that he was speaking to an American, he immediately wanted to talk politics...
...We American socialists find it difficult to comprehend the things happening in the Soviet Union today," complains Christensen, who is especially baffled and hurt that the Soviets are soliciting advice from American capitalists but not from American socialists...
...He's about to receive personal services for the very last time...
...Christensen concludes on a note of alarm...
...Soviet Presswatch has already noted the sad plight of Arnold Lockshin, the American traitor who told Komsomolskaya Pravda in January of last year how upset he was about the bourgeois revival in the Soviet Union...
...Why not drop them a line...
...On the other hand, he is a protege of Gorby the Great Liberator, who was recently seen on Soviet TV yelling at Moscow mayor Gavriil Popov over the Polozkov imbroglio...
...By and large, the coverage of the Gulf crisis in the Soviet press has been anti-Hussein and cautiously pro-American, with full reports of Iraqi atrocities in occupied Kuwait...
...Protection from bedsores guaranteed...
...While not many Russians go to such extremes, most of them share the gentleman's basic sympathies and antipathies...
...Together, We'll Defeat Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad...
...2Actually, the Bolsheviks did try worker self-management early on, with predictable results...
...Comrade Polozkov need not worry about a long commute, since the Central Committee will probably give him an official residence, and he already has a country house just outside the city...
...If he's looking for a pen pal back home, there's Russ Christensen of Augusta, Maine, a "social democrat" whose letter appears in the November 9 Izvestia...
...What do you mean, this one is not good enough...
...And so on, to fervent applause...
...the same cannot be said of a November 5 report by the weekly Golos Rodiny ("Voice of the Motherland"), an official sheet turned out in Moscow by the Russia Society for the benefit of "compatriots abroad...
...Useless Idiots While the fate of Comrade Polozkov is hardly terrifying, little things like that are liable to be distressing if you have taken the trouble of fleeing the United States to live freely as a Communist...
...Just as the hanging is about to proceed, despite a shortage of boards for the gallows, "Ivan Petrovich woke up and remembered that he was sitting at a regional Committee meeting...
...The CPR represents the "conservative" wing of the Communist establishment, and is widely hated and ridiculed...
...In Leningrad, says the paper's October 30 edition, about forty local pamyatniki' picketed the U.S...
...But that's relatively harmless...
...The independent weekly Express-Chronicle reports that, on October 13, a Pamyat group, led by one Alexei Yemelyanov (an eccentric author of "anti-Zionist" tracts who has spent several years in psychiatric hospitals, not for his views but for the axe murder of his wife) picketed the U.S...
...Ah-hah, here they come...
...Part of the country is disintegrating into petty bourgeois republics...
...Russian Patriots Are With You...
...Presumably, soon after the final collapse of commie power...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991...
...He went up to the microphone and announced that he was quitting the Communist party...
...That is the idea that the working class is a revolutionary class which must be the mover of the revolution...
...Passport...
...Izvestia correspondent A. Illesh points out (November 6) that Polozkov is lucky people are no longer arrested for living in Moscow without a permit, a treatment once reserved for "such segments of our population as vagrants, prostitutes, and dissidents...
...The problem with the Soviet system, explains Christensen, is that it has been run by bureaucrats, not by workers themselves...
...Ticket...
...2 Similarly, the failures of Soviet agriculture are caused by top-down decision making, not absence of private ownership...
...Then it becomes clear that this is no ordinary line for meat or soap: "Where am I going to get a Politburo member for every one of you...
...There are increasingly frequent verbal attacks on the Soviet Armed Forces, which frees the hands of foreign and domestic reactionaries...
...Listen," he said, "I think your President Bush was wrong to send troops to Saudi Arabia...
...and "Sad-dam Hussein, We Are With You...
...On July 18, the Leningrad Journalists' Union newspaper Chas Pik ("Rush Hour") described Lockshin's THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 31 appearance at the founding congress of the Communist party of Russia, Polozkov's outfit...
...Socialism is in grave danger...
...Number...
...However, in one interesting development, Ivan K. Polozkov, the hard-line chief of the Communist party of Russia, has been denied Moscow residence registration by the Moscow City Council...
...Many of the fifty or so protesters were holding portraits of Saddam Hussein...
...Zionism Is the Plague of the 20th Century...
...The sketch opens with the monologue of a person directing people in line: "Next...
...It seems," he writes, "that you are abandoning a radical experiment which expresses the very essence of the socialist idea, without really giving it a chance...
...An article describes an October meeting in Iraq between a Russia Society delegation and a number of Iraqi big-shots...
...Beware of privatizing land...
...a poll taken last August and published in September's Democratic Russia shows him to be Russia's most unpopular politician...
...The bombshell comes when the journalist sums up the Iraqi case as stated to the Soviet guests: "The campaign against Iraq began" after Hussein proposed, at last February's Arab summit, that "Arab investments, or 'petrodollars,' should be channeled into the economies of the USSR and Eastern Europe to help perestroika...
...Kuwait was used as a pawn in the oil price-cutting game, which led to the regrettable use of force and aggression...
...Here's a sample from his speech which he read in Russian: The transformation of the socialist system has already begun...
...They're selling tickets at 50 rubles apiece down where the Lenin monument used to be...
...and is devoted entirely to political satire, has this comment on the "500 Days" economic plan: "The Lethargon Deluxe cooperative offers its services to individuals and organizations who would like to hibernate for 501 days starting October 1, 1990...
...Get him over here...
...These may be the shenanigans of a bunch of loonies...
...fight the Yankee imperialists...
...You must block all attempts to carry out imperialist designs...
...consulate on October 28, with such slogans as "Let's Have an Intifada on Russian Soil...
...Tickets number three will be filled with KGB men and trade union officials...
...Nonetheless, Hussein is receiving support from unexpected quarters in the Soviet Union: the anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalist Pamyat ("Memory") fringe...
...Only to those who regularly attended rallies...
...If capitalism takes full power in the USSR, all remnants of truly Communist parties will be destroyed...
...Incidentally, the October 23 issue of Express-Chronicle reports that at the Iraqi consulate in Leningrad, anyone who picks up a portrait of Hussein gets a free pack of Camels...
...The address of Izvestia is Pushkin Square 5, Moscow, USSR...
...It is then, the Iraqis claim, that conflict began to simmer...
...The October issue of Iskra ("Spark"), which describes itself as "a very independent Russian newspaper 'Pamyatnik literally means "monument," but is now widely used to refer to members of Pamyat...
...Chas Pik reporter Alla Repina and a colleague from another Leningrad paper caught up with Lockshin in the lobby and tried to interview him about the alleged conspiracy between Soviet democrats and the CIA...
...Payment upon waking, in hard currency only...
...Now, that really clears the whole thing up...
...Gallows Humor It is well known that wit has always helped Russians weather tough times, and now it has even come out of the closet...
...Across the street, members of the radical Democratic Union held their own rally...
...In the event of martial law, the company bears no liability for disturbances of the client's sleep...
...If it goes on like this, the Russians will form a pretty low opinion of the American IQ...
...Certain Soviet politicians, including deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, are consulting with the CIA on how to cut the Soviet Armed Forces...
...I'm giving you a good comrade...
...imperialism, the man continued, "He should have just dropped a neutron bomb on that Hussein guy...
...Comrade Polozkov himself has become something of a bogeyman for the democratically minded...
...People of Iraq...
...Tickets...
...Name...
...Because it's no good for American soldiers to die over there...
...Lockshin, straining to understand their Russian, pointed to his two brawny escorts and said, "Ask them...
...No word on how many Soviet citizens have taken up the offer...
...Is that by any chance Ivan Petrovich, the ex-first secretary of the ex-regional Party committee...
...This is not to say that Communists by Cathy Young are really at the end of their rope...
...Citizens, we've run out of Communist bosses...
...The people, it turns out, are waiting to participate in the hanging of Communist apparatchiks...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
