A queda... e a queda do Mercosul? - Leonardo Vera (Venezuela)

Cabe destacar, antes qualquer outra informação, este trecho:

"[Nicolas Maduro] Llegó a Montevideo como ya acostumbra en sus más recientes giras como Presidente de Venezuela: En un avión de Cubana de Aviación, rodeado de un ejército de guardaespaldas y de una comitiva de centenares de burócratas.

No más llegar a la sede de Mercosur en Parque Hotel, el primer impase se suscito entre su escolta y la policía uruguaya, todo esto frente a reporteros y cámaras de televisión. Los escoltas intentaron tomar las instalaciones e ingresar por un acceso prohibido, la policía uruguaya se mantuvo firme, vetó el ingreso y esto originó la primera ofuscación del encuentro."

Boa sorte nos próximos encontros.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Leonardo Vera: Venezuela y la Cumbre Mercosur

Mercosur: Espacio Regional de Incertidumbres

Infolatam
Caracas, 14 julio 2013
Por LEONARDO V. VERA

(Especial Infolatam).- Nicolas Maduro, asume no sin contratiempos y desafíos, la Presidencia Pro Tempore de Mercosur. La asume en un momento por lo demás crítico para la alianza que ya cumple 22 años desde la firma del Tratado de la Asunción. Llegó a Montevideo como ya acostumbra en sus más recientes giras como Presidente de Venezuela: En un avión de Cubana de Aviación, rodeado de un ejército de guardaespaldas y de una comitiva de centenares de burócratas.
No más llegar a la sede de Mercosur en Parque Hotel, el primer impase se suscito entre su escolta y la policía uruguaya, todo esto frente a reporteros y cámaras de televisión. Los escoltas intentaron tomar las instalaciones e ingresar por un acceso prohibido, la policía uruguaya se mantuvo firme, vetó el ingreso y esto originó la primera ofuscación del encuentro.
Durante el primer día los presidentes de los cuatro países activos del acuerdo se reunieron por casi tres horas. De ahí sólo tres decisiones políticas merecen ser destacadas. La primera condenando en forma unánime el percance sufrido por Evo Morales en Europa el pasado día 2 de julio, cuando su vuelo fue obligado a aterrizar en Viena, debido a la negativa de las autoridades de Francia, Italia, Portugal y España de permitir el paso aéreo por sus jurisdicciones. En ese sentido los Presidentes acordaron llamar a consulta a sus embajadores en estos países.
La segunda, condenando las acciones, cada vez más evidentes, de “espionaje cibernético” conducidas por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos y solicitando la suspensión de éstas prácticas.La tercera, correspondió al anuncio de asumir la incorporación de Paraguay como miembro pleno y activo en los órganos del Mercosur (a partir del 15 de Agosto), valorando positivamente las elecciones en ese país y considerando al mismo tiempo cumplidos los requisitos establecidos en el artículo 7 del Protocolo de Ushuaia.
Es en éste último punto donde la tensión no ha disminuido. Aunque Paraguay no fue invitado a las deliberaciones, el Canciller paraguayo, Fernández Estigarribia, se refirió de inmediato al levantamiento de la sanción política y señaló que con Venezuela a la cabeza del bloque, se complica el regreso de Paraguay, ya que el Congreso de su país no aceptó en su momento la inclusión del país caribeño. Es decir, desde la perspectiva del gobierno saliente de Paraguay, Venezuela y Maduroejercen ilegítimamente la presidencia del bloque.
Pero desde la perspectiva del gobierno entrante también hubo pronunciamiento y las pocas horas el presidente electo de Paraguay, Horacio Cartes, descartó la incorporación al Mercosur tras manifestar que el ingreso de Venezuela y la entrega de la Presidencia Pro Tempore a Nicolás Maduro, no se ajusta a los tratados internacionales firmados por los socios fundadores. Cartes no pudo ser más claro y preciso al señalar: “Las características jurídicas del ingreso de Venezuela como miembro pleno al Mercosur, en julio del 2012, no han sido subsanadas conforme a las normas legales… El derecho concerniente, internacional y nacional, debe ser reconocido, respetado y cumplido, tal como se ha acordado”.

La realidad es que las ventas dentro del propio Mercosur han descendido sensiblemente (7% en 2012)

La realidad es que en cierto sentido la cumbre ha perdido una vez más un momento valiosísimo. Más allá de estas polémicas en la intimidad política del bloque, y de las declaraciones y formulas de denuncia a los oídos del mundo, un conjunto de problemas económicos y comerciales asechan el desempeño de Mercosur y obstaculizan el avance de la integración en su seno. Ni una mención a estos problemas hubo en el encuentro. Tampoco un detalle sobre la naturaleza de los desafíos. Pero los problemas y los desafíos están allí.
Evidencia de que algo no está funcionando al interior del bloque resulta de comparar la evolución que han tomado los flujos comerciales en otros bloques de la región. Al tiempo que las exportaciones de la Comunidad Andina en 2012 crecieron 5,1%, las del Mercado Común Centroamericano 5,5%, y las de México en 6,3%, las de Mercosur cayeron 2,2%. Cierto es que los países miembros de Mercosur encaran sus propias dificultades internas, y que la situación europea, hacia donde existe una concentración importante del comercio, ha significado una merma en las exportaciones del bloque, pero ¿no se supone en esta circunstancia que el comercio intra-regional debe constituirse como un mecanismo compensatorio?
La realidad es que las ventas dentro del propio Mercosur han descendido sensiblemente (7% en 2012). De hecho, después de la caída en las ventas a Europa (en crisis) lo que más ha caído son las ventas intra-mercosur: el reflejo de medidas restrictivas unilaterales, retaliaciones en la demora de licencias, restricciones en frontera por regulaciones. En fin, como bien señaló Pepe Mujica en alguna oportunidad, “Mercosur es una mala unión aduanera”.
Uno de los más importantes desafíos del Mercosur es la necesidad de que pueda moverse en una matriz de intereses comunes. Quien observa la evolución del bloque, notará que las motivaciones de cada país a menudo han estado atadas a los intereses de gobiernos de turno y por lo tanto el bloque sufre de frustraciones y malos entendimientos. Este argumento puede ilustrarse con ejemplos simples pero reveladores. En los años noventa la participación brasileña en el Mercosur estuvo movida más por consideraciones estratégicas de negociación internacional que por razones puramente comerciales de alcance regional. En parte esto explica la inclinación brasileña hacia una forma de integración del tipo “unión aduanera”, en oposición a un área de libre comercio.
En el año 2012 cuando Hugo Chávez decide aceptar la entrada de Venezuela en el acuerdo, la economía venezolana se encontraba (y se encuentra) en una de las peores condiciones para encarar los desafíos de un acuerdo de éste tipo. Con una tasa de cambio fija y sobrevaluada con respecto al dólar (en más de 100 por ciento), con un parque industrial en desmantelación y sin ventaja competitiva alguna, con una caída en las exportaciones no tradicionales de más de 50% en sólo dos años y con un sector agrícola arruinado por las malas políticas y la expropiación de más de 4 millones de hectáreas de tierra, Venezuela no está en capacidad de beneficiarse en forma alguna de las facilidades de Mercosur, y por el contrario, ahora avanza hacia una simple relación de intercambio de petróleo por espejitos ¿Qué buscaba afanosamente Hugo Chávez en Mercosur? Influencia geopolítica sobre la región con la expansión de un proyecto político sobre el bloque que consideraba más permeable.
Sin una matriz común de intereses que vaya más allá de las simpatías políticas y sin una adecuada combinación de flexibilización de sus instrumentos y reglas con la aceptación de sus países miembros de un mínimo de disciplinas colectivas que estén dispuestos a respetar, el Mercosur puede entrar entonces en una fase de creciente incertidumbre y desintegración, donde prevalecerá el escape unilateral de sus miembros hacia otros espacios de integración más promisorios.

LEONARDO V. VERA. Economista por la Universidad Central de Venezuela, Master en Economía por Roosevelt University, Chicago, Ph.D. en Economía en la University of East London. Ex economista Senior de la Oficina de Asesoría Económica del Congreso, Consultor de la Segunda Vice-Presidencia del Senado, de la Comisión de Energía y Minas del Congreso, de la Oficina de Análisis y Programación Macroeconómica del Ministerio de Finanzas y Director de Investigación Económica de la Pro-Competencia. Ganador del Premio Peltzer en el año 1999. Actualmente es profesor de la Cátedra de Teoría Económica Avanzada y de Macroeconomía de la Escuela de Economía de la UCV, profesor de la Maestría en Teoría y Política Económica de FACES, "Andrés Bello Fellow" de la Universidad de Oxford y Economista Senior de la Unidad de Investigación Económica del Banco Mercantil. Autor del libro "Stabilization and Growth in Latin America: A Critique and Reconstruction for Post Keynesian and Structuralist Perspectives", Palgrave, London, 2000 y de numerosas publicaciones en revistas internacionales arbitradas.
 

A OTAN, nas portas do Brasil? O que vao dizer os militares brasileiros? - Carlos Alberto Montaner

Na verdade, o autor deste artigo, um jornalista muito conhecido, mais preocupado com a Venezuela, sequer toca no Brasil ou no que podem pensar, ou deixar de pensar, seus militares e diplomatas.
Na verdade, já sabemos o que pensam alguns deles, os mesmos que tinha lamentado o Plano Colômbia que os EUA  montaram para ajudar os colombianos a combater os seus narcotraficantes, os terroristas das FARC, aliás aliados dos companheiros. Na época, Bill Clinton até chegou a propor a FHC que o Brasil participasse nesse esforço, o que tem todo sentido, uma vez que a droga dos narcoterroristas também entra, e em parte fica, no Brasil, junto com a do Peru, da Bolívia, etc. FHC declinou gentilmente de participar, pois sabia das debilidades e limitações das FFAA brasileiras, o que pode ter sido um erro, ou pelo menos uma perda de oportunidade.
Agora que a Colômbia deseja aprofundar os laços com a OTAN, o que vão dizer os anti-imperialistas brasileiros?
Vamos ver como reagem aos passos concretos que a Colombia empreender...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Colombia, Venezuela, OTAN: “Pa´que se acabe la vaina”

Infolatam
Miami, 9 junio 2013
Por CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER

(Infolatam).- El presidente Juan Manuel Santos se propone vincular Colombia a la OTAN, aunque sea por la puerta trasera. Me parece una iniciativa responsable.
La OTAN es la más formidable coalición militar de la historia. La creó Harry Truman en 1949 en medio de la Guerra Fría, cuando la URSS experimentaba su peor espasmo imperial. Aunque se llama Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte, la institución no toma demasiado en serio esa circunstancia geográfica. Italia, Grecia o Turquía radican en otro vecindario y forman parte del acuerdo.
En realidad, la OTAN no surgió para hacer la guerra, sino para evitarla. Truman, que leía a los clásicos y amaba la historia, solía repetir la frase latina: si vis pacem, para bellum. Si quieres la paz, prepárate para la guerra. Eso fue lo que hizo. Estaba bajo la influencia del pensamiento estratégico del joven diplomático George Kennan. Había que contener a la URSS, sin desatar otra guerra mundial, hasta que las contradicciones del colectivismo, la ineficiencia y la opresión la hicieran implosionar. Demoró unas cuantas décadas, pero sucedió.
Juan Manuel Santos tiene buenas razones para proteger a su país de los peligros potenciales de una guerra regional. Nicolás Maduro acaba de anunciar la creación de una milicia obrera de dos millones de soldados. Quiere fabricar uno de los mayores cuerpos armados del planeta. Es perfectamente lógico que sus vecinos se asusten. Esto se suma a las decenas de aviones de combate, tanques de guerra y sofisticados equipos antiaéreos que Venezuela lleva años acumulando. Armas, todas, que no son las adecuadas para mantener el orden interno ni enfrentarse a un enemigo local. Son equipos diseñados para librar guerras convencionales, presumiblemente contra otros países.
Hay una norma de oro que suele regular el modus operandi de las Fuerzas Armadas: “la forma define la función”. Cuando crecen, se desbordan y se hacen muy peligrosas. El momento en que el régimen cubano, con el apoyo soviético, pudo construir el ejército más poderoso de América Latina, se lanzó a las aventuras africanas y allí estuvo entre 1975 y 1990: la más larga operación militar internacional en la que ha participado un cuerpo militar de América (incluido Estados Unidos).
La manera más económica que tiene Colombia de impedir que Venezuela la arrastre a una guerra, como en el pasado amenazó Hugo Chávez, que hasta llegó a ordenar públicamente a sus generales que movieran los tanques y la artillería hasta la frontera, es colocarse bajo la protección simbólica de la OTAN.
Las otras dos opciones son peores. Una de ellas sería no hacer nada y arriesgar a la sociedad colombiana a un conflicto bélico, precisamente por la indiferencia del Estado ante un riesgo real. La otra, consistiría en iniciar una costosísima carrera armamentística que desangraría al país. Ya Colombia, como consecuencia de las acciones de las narcoguerrillas comunistas, es el país de América Latina que más recursos gasta en asuntos bélicos con relación a su PIB (un 3.8%). ¿Para qué invertir más dinero en ese campo cuando las necesidades de la sociedad son inmensas?
La OTAN tiene este disuasivo efecto benéfico. En general, evita las guerras. A lo que puede agregarse un factor pedagógico: induce un mejor comportamiento en los militares y, en cierta medida, genera una mayor subordinación a los gobiernos civiles. Por lo menos, eso fue lo que supuso el socialista español Felipe González cuando propició la asociación permanente de su país al organismo. Lo hizo en el referéndum convocado por su gobierno en 1986, pese a su rechazo original de 1981, cuando estaba en la oposición.
Evo Morales ha dicho que la iniciativa de Santos es una amenaza para su país. Pero Morales también aseguró que el Imperio Romano había atacado a Bolivia. Frente a Evo hay que recordar la cumbia de Carlos Vives: “¿Qué cultura va a tener, si nació en los cardonales?”. Moralito es así. Hay que entrar en la OTAN “pa´que se acabe la vaina”.

China reduz papel do Estado e fortalece setor privado: o que vao dizer os companheiros?

Os companheiros, que são muito néscios nessas matérias econômicas, costumam citar a China como exemplo de economia de sucesso que combina um grande papel do Estado, como força diretora e propulsora da economia como um todo, embora a China seja, sob vários aspectos, mais capitalista do que o Brasil, e bem mais aberta.
Agora eles correm o risco de ficar órfãos nas suas recomendações de política econômica.
Que pena...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The New York Times, May 24, 2013

China Plans to Reduce the State’s Role in the Economy

By DAVID BARBOZA and CHRIS BUCKLEY

SHANGHAI — The Chinese government is planning for private businesses and market forces to play a larger role in its economy, in a major policy shift intended to improve living conditions for the middle class and to make China an even stronger competitor on the global stage.

In a speech to party cadres containing some of the boldest pro-market rhetoric they have heard in more than a decade, the country’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, said this month that the central government would reduce the state’s role in economic matters in the hope of unleashing the creative energies of a nation with the world’s second-largest economy after that of the United States.

On Friday, the Chinese government issued a set of policy proposals that seemed to show that Mr. Li and other leaders were serious about reducing government intervention in the marketplace and giving competition among private businesses a bigger role in investment decisions and setting prices. Whether Beijing can restructure an economy that is thoroughly addicted to state credit and government directives is unclear. But analysts see such announcements as the strongest signs yet that top policy makers are serious about revamping the nation’s growth model.

“This is radical stuff, really,” said Stephen Green, an economist at the British bank Standard Chartered and an expert on the Chinese economy. “People have talked about this for a long time, but now we’re getting a clearly spoken reform agenda from the top.”

China’s leaders are under greater pressure to change as growth slows and the limitations of its state-led, investment-driven economy are becoming more evident. This month, manufacturing activity contracted for the first time in seven months, according to an independent survey by HSBC. Economists are lowering their growth forecasts and weighing the risks associated with high levels of corporate and government debt that have built up over the last five years.

“There are quite a number of messages coming from these new leaders,” said Huang Yiping, chief economist for emerging Asia at the British bank Barclays. “They realize that if we continue to delay reforms, the economy could be in deep trouble.”

The broad proposals include expanding a tax on natural resources, taking gradual steps to allow market forces to determine bank interest rates and developing policies to “promote the effective entry of private capital into finance, energy, railways, telecommunications and other spheres,” according to a directive issued on the government’s Web site. “All of society is ardently awaiting new breakthroughs in reform,” the directive said.

Foreign investors will be given more opportunities to invest in finance, logistics, health care and other sectors. For years, Western governments, banks and companies have complained that the China government has impeded foreign investment in banking and other service industries, despite promising to open up. The latest directive, however, did not give details about the specific changes to foreign investment rules that policy makers in Beijing have in mind.

China’s leaders are also promising to loosen foreign exchange controls, changes that are likely to reduce price distortions in the economy and allow the market to determine the value of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. On Friday, the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, issued a statement that repeated such vows.

The push does not signal the end of big government in China. The Communist Party, experts say, is unlikely to abandon the state capitalist model, break up huge, state-run oligopolies or privatize major sectors of the economy that the party considers strategic, like banking, energy and telecommunications.

Beijing seems to be pressing ahead because it has few alternatives. The economy has slowed this year because of fewer exports to Europe and the United States and slower investment growth. Rising labor costs and a strengthening currency have also reduced manufacturing competitiveness.

China’s leaders, including a group of pro-market bureaucrats who seem to have gained in the leadership shuffle this year, seem to think that more government spending could worsen economic conditions and that the private sector needs to step in.

China is also facing significant changes in its demographics and drivers of economic growth. The population is rapidly aging, and the number of young people entering the work force has begun to decline. Those shifts are forcing China to upgrade its industrial operations and compete using something other than inexpensive goods and low-cost labor, analysts say.

Nicholas R. Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and an authority on the Chinese economy, said government controls on interest rates, the exchange rate and the price of energy had resulted in a huge misallocation of capital and unbalanced growth. “These reforms would raise household income and reduce savings, providing a double-barreled boost to private consumption,” Mr. Lardy said.

To succeed, China’s leaders will have to fend off powerful interest groups, as well as corrupt officials who have grown accustomed to using their political power to enrich themselves and their families through bribes and secret stakes in companies.

The previous administration, led by President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, also promised to deepen economic overhauls and strengthen the private sector. But analysts say they lacked the political clout needed to succeed. During their two five-year terms, the state’s role in the economy actually expanded.

The new leaders, who took office in March after a once-in-a-decade leadership transition, seem more determined to change course. In his speech this month, delivered to party officials nationwide by teleconference, Mr. Li, the prime minister, said, “If we place excessive reliance on government steering and policy leverage to stimulate growth, that will be difficult to sustain and could even produce new problems and risks.”

“The market is the creator of social wealth and the wellspring of self-sustaining economic development,” he said.

He spoke of deregulation and slimming down the role of government.

“Li Keqiang thinks like an economist,” said Barry J. Naughton, a professor of Chinese economy at the University of California, San Diego. “He wants the government to get out of the way.”

Chris Buckley reported from Hong Kong.

O Ocidente, o resto e o mundo de ninguem - book review, Charles A. Kupchan

International Affairs, July 2013

Book review

Charles A. Kupchan:

No one’s world: the West, the rising rest and the coming global turn

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. 272pp. 

Index. £16.99. isbn 978 0 19973 939 4. Available as e-book.

What will replace the western world order once the United States is no longer capable of exercising global leadership? Will China’s rise be ‘unpeaceful’ and prove to be disruptive, as John Mearsheimer argues, or will rising powers support today’s system that is ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’, as G. John Ikenberry predicts? Who will rule the world once the United States’ reign ends, and what will such a world look like? Is it a ‘post-American world’, a ‘Chinese world’, or simply a western world order under non-western leadership?

Rejecting such predictions, Charles Kupchan predicts that tomorrow’s world will ‘belong to no one’. Before elaborating on this claim, the author briskly moves through centuries of history to explain why the West was quickly able to develop economically and leave other, traditionally successful, regions behind, thus initiating western global dominance. While the world had historically been compartmentalized, with each region operating according to culturally particular and exclusive principles, the author argues that Europe’s rise helped create one single global system: as European powers conquered the world, ‘they also exported European conceptions of sovereignty, administration, law, diplomacy, and commerce’ (p. 65)—thus creating what we now call the ‘western world order’.

Kupchan writes that ‘remaking the world in its own image was perhaps the ultimate exercise of Western power’ (p. 66). The West’s capacity to define modernity caused generations of non-western thinkers to argue about whether there was a difference between modernization and westernization. Kupchan shows that in a few decades, at least three BRIC countries will be among the world’s five leading economies, and he predicts that there will be multiple versions of modernity. Not only do the characteristics of Brazil’s, India’s and China’s rise differ markedly from Europe’s, but their cultural DNA is different, too, he argues. This is hardly news; the author fails to explain how internal peculiarities affect countries’ strategy vis-àvis the global system. His assertion that ‘much of Latin America has been captivated by left-wing populism’ and that this represents ‘an alternative to the West’s brand of liberal democracy’ is controversial (p. 90). What exactly are the characteristics of the ‘West’s brand of liberal democracy’? Is Brazil’s democratic system fundamentally different from, say, Portugal’s?

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko: obituario por Anne Applebaum (WP)

Recomendo a leitura do livro desta historiadora sobre o Gulag, já traduzido e publicado no Brasil, para os que ainda se pretendem simpáticos ao socialismo soviético.
Segundo esse extraordinário autor, o stalinismo foi "gangsterism enthroned." Nada mais correto.
Conhecemos um pouco do gangasterismo no poder, também por aqui...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, historian and survivor of Stalin’s gulag, dies at 93

By Anne Applebaum

The Washington Post, July 13, 2013

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a Soviet historian and dissident who survived the gulag under Stalin and in later decades brought new attention to the scope of the regime’s barbarism, died July 9 in Moscow. He was 93.
The cause was a stroke, said Russian scholar Stephen F. Cohen, who played a crucial role in the English-language publication in 1981 of Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s best-known work, “The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny.”
“Anton was one of a handful of Soviets who were able and brave enough and resourceful enough to break the silence about the real history of the Soviet Union, which was completely falsified under Stalin,” said Cohen, a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University. “He told the truth as he knew it, the uncensored truth of the Stalin era.”
Anton Vladimirovich Antonov-Ovseyenko led a life that might be said to mirror the fate of his country.
He was born in Moscow on Feb. 23, 1920, just after the Russian revolution, into a prominent Bolshevik family. His father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, was a military commander who in 1917 led the revolutionary assault on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and, together with Leon Trotsky, helped create the Red Army.
A founding member of the Soviet state, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko later served as adviser and arms supplier to the anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
In the 1930s, the Antonov-Ovseyenko family fell victim to Stalin’s purge of the Soviet Communist Party and in particular to his persecution of “Old Bolsheviks” — who might challenge his claim to power — and their relatives.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko was 16 when his mother committed suicide in prison and 18 when his father was executed.
In 1940, when he was 20 years old, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko was himself arrested after he refused to denounce his father as an “enemy of the people.” He spent most of the subsequent 13 years imprisoned in Soviet jails and concentration camps, including Butyrka, one of the most notorious Moscow prisons, and Vorkuta, a mining camp above the Arctic Circle, where he suffered from illnesses caused by malnutrition.
In a 2011 interview with the Public Radio International program “The World,” Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko said criminal gangs were common in the gulag, but they treated him better than other prisoners because of his ability to recite stories and poems.
“And I was expected to do this after a while,” he said. “So I always enjoyed this special status. But of course thieves are thieves. They can still steal from you even if they like your stories.”
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko was released. He sought obscurity and settled in what was then the Soviet republic of Georgia. But despite poor vision — his eyes were ruined in the labor camps, and he needed special assistance to read and write — he began to chronicle the fate of his father’s generation, and of his own.
Thanks to family and friends who had old Communist Party connections, he eventually gained access to documents and records that were not at that time available to historians, let alone to the general public.
His father’s status as an “Old Bolshevik” gave him access to people and witnesses who would not have trusted others. Among other things, he had access to material produced by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who conducted a secret inquiry into Stalin’s life and reign in 1954.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s first book, published under a pseudonym during the short-lived political “thaw” after Stalin’s death, was a sympathetic biography of his father. But his best-remembered work, “The Time of Stalin,” written in the 1960s and ’70s, was never officially published in the Soviet Union.
Instead, it was smuggled out of Moscow by Cohen, whose biography of Nikolai Bukharin, a founding father of the Soviet state, won him trust among an inner circle of anti-Stalin, post-gulag intellectuals that included Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko.
In an interview, Cohen recalled first meeting him: “He was like something out of Dostoyevsky — half-blind, wiry, lean and embattled. He challenged me to chin-ups equal to my age. I did 1, and he did 82.”
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s book about Stalin first appeared in Russian in 1980 and then in English. Writing in the New York Times, journalist Harrison E. Salisbury called it “an extraordinary endeavor” and “a milestone toward the understanding of three-quarters of a century of Russian trauma.”
“The Time of Stalin” is best described as a biography of Stalin combined with an extended polemic against Stalinism, a political system Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko defined as “an entire historical epoch during which the vilest and bloodiest kind of evildoing flourished upon this earth. It was gangsterism enthroned.”
The book was one of the first to number the victims of Stalin in the millions, rather than the hundreds or thousands, and it contained many insiders’ stories of life inside Stalin’s Kremlin.
Not every detail of the book has held up to archival research, and the book is very much a product of its era. It shies away from criticizing Vladimir Lenin, for example, who launched the first reign of terror in the Soviet Union.
The book was remarkable — and remarkably brave — for its time, because the author criticized not only Stalin, who was dead, but also his “apologists,” who were very much alive. “I have striven for truthfulness,” he wrote, “there are no fabrications in this book. What would be the need? The truth is horrendous enough.”
The book made Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko into a political dissident. Upon hearing of its publication, Soviet authorities ordered a day-long search of his Moscow apartment, and he was kept well away from mainstream historians. Russian versions of the book were subsequently smuggled back into the Soviet Union, where they found an avid clandestine readership.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s bravery and dedication to truth-telling made him a singular figure during the Soviet era. In his later years, his obstinacy shaded into fanaticism. He quarreled with other historians and fell out with other groups of survivors and activists who also were trying to chronicle the history of Stalinism. Foreign royalties from sales of his book abroad made him relatively well-off, however, which enabled him to function independently.
Survivors include his wife, Yelena Solovarova, and a son, Anton.
In 2001, he founded, almost entirely on his own, the State Museum of the History of the Gulag in Moscow. The project, which opened in 2004, once featured a replica of a barrack from the gulag, kept purposefully chilly, and near it was an interrogators’ room.
The museum received mixed reviews from other survivors and scholars in the former Soviet Union. The museum is poorly funded, not least because Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko did not cooperate with others in its construction.
Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko remained committed to the remembrance of Stalin’s crimes until the end of his life. At the age of 87, he attended a ceremony at Bukovo, a vast killing field outside Moscow where his father was murdered along with more than 20,000 other people. In 2010 he told a Radio Liberty interviewer that Russia should have removed the Lenin mausoleum as well as Stalin’s tomb from Red Square long ago.
These were “monuments to a great betrayal,” he said, and should be destroyed.

Applebaum is a columnist and historian whose 2003 book, “Gulag: A History,” won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko (1920-2013): o homem que falou a verdade sobre Stalin

Russia Mourns Stalin Scholar, Gulag Museum Founder

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko

MOSCOW, July 11 (RIA Novosti) – His father was executed on Josef Stalin’s orders, his mother committed suicide in jail, and he survived 13 years in the Gulag – to become one of the most outspoken critics of Stalinism.

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko wrote several seminal books denouncing the Soviet tyrant, his henchmen and the political system that devastated Russia and doomed millions to exile, disgrace, prison or death. Even blindness, exacerbated by merciless prison conditions, did not stop him from writing and running the Moscow branch of the Union of Victims of Political Purges.

Yet Antonov-Ovseyenko was best known as the founder and president of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow, where a modest memorial service was due to be held Thursday, two days after his death.

He died Tuesday at the age of 93 – having outlived the Communist system his father helped create and witnessed the sweeping and chaotic changes in post-Soviet Russia. But his twilight years coincided with attempts to whitewash Stalin's legacy and political system that Antonov-Ovseyenko described and denounced in his books.

“The sad thing is that now there is a new wave of reviving the cult of Stalin, of worshipping him,” he told Radio Liberty in 2005. “There is a new Stalinization.”

In February, almost half of all Russians said that Stalin played a “very positive” or “quite positive” role in the nation’s history, according to a poll by the independent Levada Center. Scholars, politicians and bloggers have debated recent history textbooks and Stalin biographies that either denounce his atrocities or praise him as an “effective manager” who helped crush the Nazis and turned Soviet Russia into an industrial superpower with a nuclear arsenal.

© RIA Novosti.

GULAG History and Fact Sheet

In 2008, Stalin was ranked third in an online vote organized by a Russian television channel for a show on the greatest Russians in history – and a poetic line from the 1940s Soviet anthem mentioning Stalin was recently restored to a metro station in central Moscow.

Antonov-Ovseyenko described Stalin as a common criminal – a claim he said his own experiences as a Gulag prisoner, historian and son of a Communist leader meant he was entirely qualified to make.

He was born in 1920, the son of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, a revolutionary who organized some of the key events of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Red Army commander fiercely objected to the rise of Stalin within the Communist Party ranks and sided with Stalin’s archenemy, Leon Trotsky.

When Anton was nine years old, his mother was arrested and sentenced to jail. The year was 1929 – the year of Trotsky’s deportation from the Soviet Union. She committed suicide seven years later. Her husband publicly rejected his Trotskyist affiliations and served as a justice minister and a consul to Spain.

However, he was executed in 1938, after being arrested at the peak of the Great Purge of 1936-1939 that decimated the Communist ranks, resulting in at least 700,000 death sentences – about 1,000 executions a day – according to declassified KGB archives. Millions more were exiled and jailed.

Antonov-Ovseyenko, who studied history and began working at art museums, was branded the son of an “enemy of the people” and was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment three times. He spent 13 years in five Gulag camps, and was eventually released in 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death.

While working unremarkable day jobs, Antonov-Ovseyenko gradually collected data and interviews with purged Communists in order to write “The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny,” a book that was published in the West in 1981 and nearly got him jailed again back home. In 1984, he came under pressure yet again for “anti-Soviet propaganda.”

Despite almost completely having lost his eyesight, Antonov-Ovseyenko penned several more books that cemented his reputation as a leading expert on Stalinism.

In 2001, Antonov-Ovseyenko founded the Gulag History Museum in central Moscow, which features models of prison cells and a watchtower, as well as a gallery of art depicting prison life and personal items of former convicts. It also holds exhibitions, seminars and theater performances on topics ranging from mass deportations of entire ethnic groups to the persecution of the Russian Orthodox clergy under Communists.

In one of his last interviews, he deplored the decades of Stalinist “degeneracy” that will hinder Russia’s development for years to come.

“I look to the future with cautious optimism,” he told the Rossiiskiye Vesti weekly in March 2012. “It will take more than a generation to revive a nation gripped by physical and spiritual degeneracy.”

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Stalin, o maior criminoso da historia - Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko

Resenhas, no site da Amazon, sobre o livro mais importante desse escritor-historiador, ele mesmo, e seus pais, entre as incontáveis vítimas do mais nefando sistema de escravidão criminosa jamais existente na história da humanidade. Possivelmente, Hitler foi um assassino ainda mais abjeto, mas ele teve pouco tempo para eliminar suas vítimas, não desprezando o inacreditável crime de tentar eliminar todo um povo apenas em função de seu odioso racismo antisemita. Finalmente, quem matou mais gente, foi Mao Tsé-tung, mas seu inspirador era justamente Stalin, que fez primeiro, e de forma mais ampla.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny 

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko 

• Hardcover: 374 pages
• Publisher: Harper & Row; 1st edition (1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060101482
• ISBN-13: 978-0060101480

This book was written by a man who suffered unspeakable crimes under Stalin's reign of Communist terror. His insights and often ironic humor are insightful and very interesting. A must-read for those interested in Russian history and the history of Communism and how it affected (and still affects) those in its grip.
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Incredibly passionate and insightful from a man who was personally touched by the action of Stalin. Oftentimes, almost sarcastic, the stories are very disturbing and told as if Antonov-Ovseyenko was a fly on the wall. A very different perspective from other Stalin texts.
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"Who is Rehabilitated?" April 28, 2011

By Jesse M. Parrish

Format:Hardcover

To a person who is, like myself, young enough to have forgotten the Soviet Union, `Stalin' is too often a mere curse word, some bad but otherwise shapeless thing used mostly for ominous-sounding references. But to such a person, what could be the value of understanding the reality of the Stalinshchina?

For Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, the need is clear. The epilogue, which is in my opinion the most valuable part of the book, pulses with disgust at the treatment of Stalin's victims, officially `rehabilitated' or otherwise, and the continued grip of Stalinism on the Soviet government. Antonov-Ovseyenko writes for the Union that still existed at the time of publication, the need for full acknowledgment of what happened under Stalin. But even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this need is still relevant. The massacre at Katyn is a canonical example: though the Russian government recently admitted Soviet responsibility, there is still a significant Stalinist contingent in political and popular Russia - one which continues to claim that the Germans did it. To many, despite the crushing reality of mishandling and sabotage of the war effort, Stalin remains the Great Hero of the Great Patriotic War. To many, even now, Stalin can do no wrong.

But to Antonov-Ovseyenko, the Gensek - this and `Politburo' are perfect examples of pre-Orwellian Newspeak - did everything wrong. In a recent speech on the Axis of Evil, Christopher Hitchens claimed that Saddam added the element of the crime boss and mafioso to the totalitarianisms of Stalin and Hitler. But actually the element of thug and criminal is almost the definition of Stalinism. From his earliest revolutionary activity, the Gensek reeked of the underworld, e.g. the illegal `expropriations', and might well have been an agent provocateur serving the Tsarist Okhrana, though this latter suspicion is still contentious. The remaining contentions, the personal orchestrations of the purges of the Old Bolsheviks, the forced famine in the Ukraine, the various deportations, ethnic cleansings, the creation of a Gulag-based economy, and the countless betrayals, are not.

The references to Antonov-Ovseyenko's time in the Gulag are limited; the account focuses overwhelmingly on Stalin's misdeeds and accomplices, and how those accomplices and misdeeds are relevant to the time of writing. The account also contains some novel revelations. As Professor Stephen F. Cohen notes in his introduction, Antonov-Ovseyenko's status as the son of an old Bolshevik - his father is Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, leader of the Bolshevik charge on the Winter Palace in 1917 - gained him access to sources unavailable to other dissident writers, such as Solzhenitsyn. And like Solzhenitsyn, Antonov-Ovseyenko does not write a dispassionate, detached account. He is a bitter survivor, angry with the continued defamation of his father and other victims. And though the book consequently drips with sarcasm at times, it never devolves into ranting. It chronicles hundreds of tragedies, some famous like the assassination of Kirov, others not.

But was Stalin just excessively zealous in his dedication? One of Stalin's many titles, the "Great Master of Daring Revolutionary Decisions and Abrupt Turns", was well-earned. The Russo-German Pact and the subsequent destruction of anti-facists movements is a perfect example. No, he was not ruthlessly dedicated to principles: he discarded them as needed. Rather, he was wholly unprincipled. Such `abrupt turns' would lead Orwell to comment on the instability required of Stalinist mind.

The Time of Stalin is an excellent read for those who really want to understand what Stalin and his subordinates actually did. It is for those who are concerned with understanding totalitarianism.

China e India desaceleram: noticia ruim para o Brasil - Pranab Bardhan (NYT)

The New York Times, July 14, 2013

The Slowing of Two Economic Giants

By PRANAB BARDHAN

KOLKATA, India — THE world’s two most populous countries are slowing down. To be sure, China’s output is expected to grow by 7.8 percent this year, and India’s by 5.6 percent — far superior to 2 percent for Japan, 1.7 percent for the United States, 0.9 percent for Britain and a shrinkage (negative 0.6 percent) in the troubled euro zone, the International Monetary Fund projected last week.

But there is no sequel in sight for the 10-percent-plus growth China and India posted in 2010. The West can no longer count on their continued expansion to lift its sagging economies. For 2.5 billion people, the consequences are more dire: in India, less money to strengthen the threadbare social safety net, and in China, possible political instability. What does the slowdown mean for these two giants, and which will come out ahead?

Let’s start with China, the bigger of the two economies. Talk of a global “Beijing consensus” — state-controlled capitalism as an alternative to the “Washington consensus” about how poor countries should develop — has largely disappeared. China’s new leaders are focused on problems at home: battling corruption, reining in the overheated housing market, scaling back the government’s outsize role in the economy, and cracking down on financial speculation.

China may be close to exhausting the possibilities of technological catch-up with the West, particularly in manufacturing. For China to move up the value chain, and become an advanced-manufacturing powerhouse like Germany, it must move beyond off-the-shelf technology and copying rival designs and reap gains from genuine innovation, which can come about only through research and development.

China has amassed huge foreign exchange reserves, partly by keeping the value of its currency low. It now has to rebalance its economy away from the construction boom and financial speculation and toward private consumption and improvements in pensions, health care and other forms of social protection. Crony capitalism has been allowed to misallocate capital toward too-big-to-fail, low-productivity state-owned firms operated by loyal apparatchiks and away from dynamic private small firms.

Concentrated wealth poses problems for both countries. The Hurun Report, a Shanghai-based wealth monitor, estimated last year that the 83 richest delegates to the National People’s Congress and an advisory group, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, had a net worth of over $250 billion. By comparison, the declared assets of all of the roughly 545 members of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, amount to only about $2 billion.

In India, the collusion between Indian billionaires and politicians, while rampant, is somewhat less direct and more subject to political and media scrutiny. In China, collusion between party officials and commercial interests, especially at the local level, has caused widespread popular anger against arbitrary land acquisition and toxic pollution.

The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen recently argued on this page that India has lagged behind China because it had not invested enough in education and health care, which raise living standards and labor productivity.

He rightly emphasizes that deficient social services and the inequality that results are not just a matter of social justice, but of economic growth as well, as the history of much of East Asia shows. But one should not get the impression that progress in social services is by itself sufficient for growth. Exemplary welfare programs in the state of Kerala in India, and in Sri Lanka, have not been matched by spectacular economic performance. The latter also requires improvements in infrastructure, less cumbersome regulations and a culture that fosters entrepreneurial investment.

Mr. Sen raises but does not examine a puzzle: why voters in the world’s largest democracy cannot get politicians to effectively deliver social services. Infant and maternal mortality and poor sanitation are not salient electoral issues. This is partly because India’s fractious society (more heterogenous than China’s) has often emphasized uplifting the dignity of former oppressed social groups over basic good governance.

What of the Chinese model? The history of developing countries shows that authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. The Communist Party will find it increasingly tough to manage a complicated economy (without independent regulators) and political system (without an independent judiciary or effective rule of law).

Without innovation, China cannot sustain high growth, as the artificially low prices of land and capital for politically favored firms become difficult to maintain and the supply of cheap labor dwindles. Unlike in India, a significant slowdown could be regime-threatening for China — today’s young people, with higher expectations than their forebears, will have less tolerance for a shortage of good jobs and affordable housing. China’s leaders may be riding a tiger that will be hard to dismount.

On the other hand, India’s experience, like America’s, shows how partisan fragmentation in a rambunctious democracy can undermine effective governance. In the last few years the headline economic stories in India have been about pervasive corruption: politicized allocation of high-value public resources (land, mineral rights, oil and gas, telecommunications), shady public-private partnerships and the galloping cost of elections financed by the illicit incomes of politicians. India’s administrative system, where promotion has little connection to performance, encourages even more malfeasance than China’s. But India has independent judges, government auditors and a free press — checks on corruption that are absent in China.

As inequalities rise and resentment of official corruption, corporate oligarchy and economic and environmental depredations heats up in India, pressure for short-term populist palliative measures — subsidies, handouts, loan waivers and underpricing of energy and water — will also rise, at the expense of long-term investments in infrastructure, education and public health. China has deflected some of the same frustrations through high-profile construction projects, spectacles like the 2008 Olympic Summer Games and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and carefully orchestrated campaigns of nationalist fervor.

IN both giant countries there are glimmers of hope. China is making substantial advances in energy-efficient technology and improving health care and pensions. In India, voters are starting to demand good governance, and vigorous social movements against injustice — caste oppression, sexual violence and environmental degradation — are making a dent.

But China’s rigid political system makes it heavily dependent on enlightened consensus among its nonelected rulers, while India’s ramshackle, pluralistic democracy has been surprisingly supple, even if its citizens haven’t reaped the material benefits yet. They share a fundamental problem — a lack of accountability, especially at the local level — that, if not addressed, will make it impossible to sustain strong economic growth and provide a social safety net. In India, democracy is weakest at the village level: electoral participation is vigorous, but local elites often capture the local government, leaving bureaucrats little autonomy (or money) to carry out substantial improvements. In China, the failure of accountability is national, and inherent in the authoritarian system.

In the short term I expect China to do better than India in improving the material condition of its people, primarily because China has more money to spend on redistribution projects and because its infrastructure and administrative capacity are somewhat better. In the medium term, I anticipate that the two countries’ rates of economic growth will converge in the not-too-distant future, as India reaps the benefits of having a younger population. But in the long run, which country does better will depend on political reform, or its absence.

Pranab Bardhan, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India.”