You and I may be disappointed that Brian Williams, onetime NBC network news anchor, is not Walter Cronkite. It is sacrilege to mention both in the same sentence after Williams’ bogus self aggrandizement. But Williams did indeed cover the start of the Russian Revolution-- the Gorbachev Glasnost one. I was there in December 1988 as one of the pollsters who fielded the first comparative survey of the public's state of mind in Moscow and American cities.
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| Brian Williams, then of WCBS, interviews Dr. Valeriy Korobeinikov of the Institute of Sociology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Cosmos Hotel, Moscow, December 1988. Taped by cameraman Donald Silverman and Arthur Athens, back to camera. Copyright (c) 1988, 1989, 2015 John Polich |
Deja vu:
The similarities are as striking as the differences. In the U.S. cities, the most urgent problems facing the United States were identified as economic, along with drugs and the homeless. In Moscow, economic problems also topped the list.
As I wrote 25 year ago,
January thaws are rare but not unknown in Moscow, and always followed by a hard freeze. The test for American policy and Soviet and American citizens is whether that weather pattern will now be broken.
The following November the Berlin Wall fell.
Vladimir Putin was a KGB major in Dresden.
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| Copyright (c) 1988, 1989, 2015 John Polich |
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