An Open Letter to Mikhail and Bohs
PUBLIUS
AN OPEN LETTER TO MIKHAIL & BORIS FROM PUBLIUS Dear Mikhail and Boris, Please excuse this unsolicited advice on forming a more perfect union. I know the way I would have felt in 1787...
...We were all able to agree in the colonies that King George was no good...
...To make a revolution you merely need to work up a common hate...
...The people would have found out what we were actually doing and probably that would have been the end of that...
...I have also spent about 150years in a quiet tomb with nothing to do but watch revolutions and counterrevolutions, the making and unmaking of constitutions...
...That is a hard job...
...I know the way I would have felt in 1787 if some Russian had tried to tell me how to write a constitution...
...The others were all those illogical people who did not understand what the elements of a truly democratic constitution should be...
...After years of enforced silence, people find their tongue...
...The nonsensical notions came from the mother's side of the family...
...As long as you have an enemy, everything goes along nicely...
...And if you do know, what leads you to believe you are smart enough to advise us...
...Why, then, do I have the chutzpah (my English is now modern) to write you at all...
...But there is one bigger difference between your situation and ours...
...Nobody wants to go from one authority to another...
...Not only did I help make a revolution and write the Constitution of the United States...
...I know it is hard for individuals of principle to compromise...
...We all spoke English...
...This is especially the case following a revolution...
...A decade of loose—I mean, really loose—confederation preceded the Philadelphia convention...
...I would have admonished...
...I don't know whether we could ever have produced such a document if, in those days, we had coverage by the media...
...Yet what is the alternative...
...The first thing you have to understand is that you can't simply jump from a revolution to a constitution...
...We decided at the outset that we would not even take minutes of our meeting...
...Please, Mikhail and Boris, listen carefully to this: I took notes because, although I was the "father" of the Constitution, I knew that nothing could be born without a "mother...
...I did jot down a few notes, but they were strictly for myself...
...Democratically yours, Publius...
...After the revolution, you find out that Pogo was right when he announced: "We have met the enemy and they is us...
...Every colony had its independence: its own government, its own currency, its own tariffs, its own army...
...Not because I happen to know that such high Soviet precincts as the Kremlin and the Academy of Sciences have been subscribers, but rather because this publication has kept an honest, caring eye on you for almost seven decades...
...a constitution builds up...
...We had 13 of them...
...Before anything else, I must tell you that it is easier to make a revolution than to make a constitution...
...Surely you know how people are...
...It could read something like this: "We, the people of the USSR, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do declare and ordain this Constitution of the United States of Sovereign Republics...
...A constitution, by its very nature, establishes authority...
...Why am I writing to you via The New Leader...
...Ten years went by—the time it takes for two Five Year Plans—before we met again in Philadelphia to "fix up" the Articles...
...A properly balanced House of Representatives would have been sufficient...
...We didn't dare to attempt the leap either...
...you have 15, counting the three Baltic states...
...It always pays to have a celebrity in stock...
...To make a constitution you have to get people to work for the commonweal...
...Nevertheless, out of that four-month meeting came the Constitution of the United States...
...Although we did get together now and then to talk about our mutual objectives, we were separate and sovereign states...
...Today, I would say "in the nature of man and woman...
...If you try to reconstruct a house, you don't have to quarrel with the bricks and mortar, the plaster and paint...
...I needed them to help me do what I didn't want to do—make uncomfortable compromises...
...The mother was the "others," whose ideas I wanted to remember so that I could pay them proper respect in the final draft...
...Since it is more than 200 years later and the statute of limitations on lying has run out, I can tell you that had I told the truth about what I had in mind, none of the delegates would have come to Independence Hall...
...Without a unifying adversary, what is thereto hold the people together...
...Because I have an advantage you do not have, and I want to share it with you...
...I always hated giving in...
...I wrote in the Federalist (Number 10) that the spirit of faction has always "divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosities, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for the common good...
...I am speaking of my experience in developing and defending democracy...
...At least that's what I said we were going to do...
...One final piece of advice: Write a good preamble to your Constitution...
...What is true of buildings is true of fashioning a new union—only more so...
...Yet despite our speaking the same language and hating the same King, we did not form a United States of America...
...I further said that the spirit of faction "is sown in the nature of man...
...Something else happens after a revolution: You lose your enemy...
...But to produce a child, a nation, a Constitution of the United States, I—the father—had to make compromises with the mother, to whom I was married by fate...
...You could all agree—well, almost all—that Stalin and Stalinism were no good...
...In the course of making your inevitable compromises, your principles may have gotten blurred—not for you, of course, but for the people who will follow you...
...And by now you must realize that if you had heeded its words a long time ago, instead of periodically denouncing it in Pravda as an "organ of black reaction," you would have saved yourself a lot of tzoris...
...A preamble can be a reminder, a statement of collective purpose, an impossible dream without which even the possible becomes impossible...
...If you don't want to make compromises, then you must live like a hermit— without a wife, without children, without a constitution...
...You are in the same position at the moment...
...If there are two celebrities—like you, Mikhail, and you, Boris —that's even better...
...When you try to rebuild a nation, you have to quarrel with everyone...
...They can't resist using it...
...By now, I am a maven on how to throw things over and how to put them back on their feet...
...What do you know about our problems...
...Indeed, there was no necessity to have a Senate and a House...
...Consider, for instance, the concern ? f Rhode Island...
...There was no logical reason for that small state, with its minuscule population, to have the same number of seats in the Senate asmy Commonwealth of Virginia, which had about one third the population of the colonies within its boundaries...
...The trouble begins once the King or the dictator is kaput...
...A revolution tears down...
...Not right away...
...One year after we declared our freedom, we wrote the Articles of Confederation...
...Alas, some of my own observations, made over 200 years ago, still seem valid...
...With one bomb you can destroy a building that could take a year to replace...
...As it was, practically nobody agreed to show up until I wangled George Washington into presiding...
...So, if you don't mind, I'd like to discuss the steps you should be taking in Russia—excuse me, in the separating Soviet Union...
...you don't all speak Russian—at least, not most happily...
...That's not too much of a difference...
Vol. 74 • September 1991 • No. 10
