Russian Presswatch/Dead Meat
Young, Cathy
How much was your advance? Didn't you have something to gain from testifying against Clarence Thomas?" Meanwhile, those who might have been brazen enough to ask such questions during a radio or...
...Top Communists such as Gorbachev's former prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, reactionary bogeyman Yegor Ligachev, former head of the anti-reform (republic-level) Russian Communist party Ivan Polozkov, and the CPSU' s last ideology chief Alexander Dzasokhov took the stand one by one—a remarkably charmless procession of men who'd helped run an empire...
...Persistent refusal to comply with Constitutional Court orders is apparently punishable by up to six-months imprisonment...
...Whatever the accusations, they are all old hat...
...Paul Simon the right to determine that show's guest: David Brock had been approached about being on the show, but Simon said that he would not be paired with the investigative journalist, and so he was not...
...Other accounts of Hill's Georgetown speech left out this remarkable business of "I and my reality...
...Gorbachev's foreign passport, as has been widely reported, was cancelled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the request of the Constitutional Court until he complies with the subpoena...
...Your confusion is compounded each time you turn on the news and see tanks in the streets, helicopters, anti-aircraft guns, rockets, and young men running around with machine guns and other young men carried away on stretchers...
...My favorite Hill story was filed by Felicity Barringer of the New York Times, a report on the professor's October 15 appearance at the Georgetown University Law Center...
...Consider the Independent Gazette's recent interview with Leonid Kravchenko, who as chief of the Soviet State Broadcasting Company presided over the 1991 effort to roll back glasnost in broadcasting...
...These properties were transferred to the newly created Financial Academy of the Russian Government, from which the ill-fated foundation can still lease no more than 9,000 square feet—compared to the 31,000 it used to occupy...
...Hill," the rest of the sentence went, "gave her retrospective view of the hearings in the arcane language of the academic doctrines currently fashionable in legal and literary criticism...
...adopted since Brezhnev's 1977 revision)—has entered a lively phase...
...Second, the Foreign Ministry answers only to the government not to the Constitutional Court, so by what authority did the judges obtain the passport cancellation...
...It took the Gorbachev flap to revive interest in the case...
...On October 8, Russian TV viewers were entertained by an angry, media-mobbed Gorbachev brandishing a fist on the steps of thefoundation's main building: the police had prevented him and his staff from entering...
...Barringer evidently did not want to quote Hill before letting readers know this was Dr...
...A legal affairs commentator for Radio Russia introduced a discordant note into the general Schadenfreude, observing that from the perspective of what Russian liberals call pravovoye gosudarstvo (translatable as "a rule-of-lawstate"), Gorbachev's tribulations were suspect...
...Hill chose that day to set up—she was an organizer—a conference at the law school on "Race, Gender, and Power in America...
...Hill...
...Why the Dr...
...is not a criminal case, merely a hearing on the constitutionality of Yeltsin's decrees, and it is therefore unclear whether Gorbachev can be compelled to appear as a witness...
...Kravchenko, whose first move at Soviet broadcasting was to pronounce that he was first and foremost a loyal servant to President Gorbachev, now says that he Dead Meat by Cathy Young 58 The American Spectator December 1992 never took any steps to curb the media on his own will: Gorby made him do it...
...In any event, the humiliated ex-president, barred from taking a scheduled trip to South Korea, reiterated his refusal to take part in a "politicized trial" and thus invited further retribution, in the form of a 100-ruble fine...
...otherwise the quote would look, well, strange: "Because I and my reality did not comport with what they accepted as their reality," Hill said, "I and my reality had to be reconstructed by the Senate committee members with assistance from the press and others...
...NBC's "Today Show" had on a solid phalanx of pro-Hill types—no Thomas supporters allowed...
...October 15 was the first anniversary of Thomas's confirmation by the Senate...
...Now, Ph.Ds are sometimes referred to by the press as Dr...
...Hill...
...Other subpoenaed witnesses were more cooperative, perhaps because they had no international reputation to defend...
...When asked about the decision to suppress news of the Chernobyl disaster, Ryzhkov reared up: "Don't you try to use Chernobyl against me...
...Publications that once obligingly airbrushed the famous birthmarks out of Gorbachev's photos now miss no opportunity to kick the man...
...On the other hand, ex-Soviets can be forgiven for gloating when the former General Secretary of the Communist party becomes, as the Moscow daily Kuranty put it, neviyezdnoy, forbidden to travel outside Soviet borders...
...Ostensibly, the anti-Communist side wants to prove that the CPSU arrogated to itself supreme powers over the state and the economy, but then it shifts focus and says the party's real crime was to abuse those powers to the detriment of the people...
...Gorbachev claims he is being scapegoated, and may have a point...
...It's something I feel very deeply about...
...Pavel Felgengauer, a political and military affairs reporter for the Independent Gazette, suggests that the nearby horrors might have one salutary effect: anything that scares Russian viewers out of their wits might deter them from rash actions that could lead to ethnic and civil warfare...
...To most, his refusal to testify is yet another manifestation of arrogance...
...The amount of the fine for defying the orders of the Constitutional Court was established a year ago, when 100 rubles actually meant something...
...First of all, the CPSU trial...
...They managed to sound reasonably articulate when questioned by the lawyer for the Communist side—at leastto the extent that they could repeat all the old phrases about the great achievements of the Soviet people under the party's leadership, and maintain with a straight face that the CPSU was nothing more than a political party with no undue influence over the government or the economy...
...II Moscow How quickly your world changes after a few days in Moscow...
...Closer to home, the "trial of the century"—the Communist party's suit to have Yeltsin's ban on its activities overturned by the Constitutional Court (even though no one knows exactly what constitution its rulings are supposed to be based on, since no new one has been Cathy Young, our regular Russian Presswatch columnist, is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...Hill or Professor Hill, as per the newspaper's style, Barringer, moving to a discussion of the professor's speaking style, suddenly called her Dr...
...So-and-so, but J. D.s are never doctored...
...appearing instead was a former aide to John Sununu, Ed Rogers, who did a pathetic job...
...The "democrats," of course, despise Gorbachev for trying to save the Soviet empire while the Communists hate him for wrecking it...
...Read on...
...71 The American Spectator December 1992 59...
...Hill at this point in the story...
...Few Russians, other than the small group of loonies demonstrating in front of the Lenin Museum, seem to care about the fate of the late CPSU...
...Unbowed, the ex-president soon faced a new atrocity: on October 7, a Yeltsin decree deceptively entitled "Measures to Support the Training of Personnel for the Banking and Financial System" deprived Gorbachev's foundation (set up after his ouster) of the properties it had been allotted by an earlier government decree...
...Moments later, solid evidence was presented that his government had knowingly allowed contaminated meat to be sold to the population, with no greater safety measures than washing off the carcasses...
...its former functionaries, with few exceptions, care least of all, having moved to cushy jobs in private firms and joint ventures...
...At least "Larry King Live" had the pretense of two sides...
...The commentator may have been on to something, though in Russia's current political and judicial disarray it's hard to tell...
...Meanwhile, those who might have been brazen enough to ask such questions during a radio or television retrospective have not been given equal time—or, in some cases, any time...
...This is all happening not in faraway Latin America or Yugoslavia, but in places familiar to many in the audience—cities like Gagry or Sukhumi, once-blooming resort towns where "middle-class" Muscovites would spend summer vacation...
...When confronted by opposing lawyers with documented facts of the Politburo's role in ratifying government decisions, approving visits by foreign delegations, and selling the country's gold (even after Article 6, which codified the CPSU's status as a "leading and guiding" force in Soviet society, was dropped from the USSR constitution), they could find nothing better to say than "Well, that was just our traditional way of doing things...
...Suddenly, the American presidential campaign, which interests very few people here—and for various obscure reasons, they seem to like Bush—is on the periphery...
...In late September, subpoenaed as a witness, the former Soviet president refused to appear in court...
...Perhaps next October Katie Comic can ask Anita—er, Dr...
...Hill—what she meant...
...Having referred in the first several paragraphs to Ms...
...today, it won't even buy you a kilo of butter...
...The weekly Stolitsa now speculates that Gorbachev's reluctance to testify stems from his fear of losing popularity in the West if his complicity in the party's dirty deeds is revealed—and that he may be gearing up to emigrate...
...Instead, you find yourself preoccupied with privatization vouchers, the Communist party trial, soaring prices, the war in Georgia...
...Larry King Live" in effect allowed Sen...
...Most people can't even figure out what is being contested...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
