Now is the time to provide economic aid to pro-reform republics of the new Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia and any other republics that break decisively with their communist past in 1992 deserve our help no less than did the new democracies of Eastern Europe in 1989. To put it bluntly, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and those like him in other republics must not fail.
It would have been a catastrophic mistake to provide large-scale assistance to the former Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. Dominated by communist hard-liners until the August 1991 coup, hostile to free elections and self- determination for...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
