To the Great October holiday!
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On 6 November, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko stated that many ideas of the October Revolution undergird the foundation of the policy of the present Belarusian state, emphasising, “We celebrate the holiday of the October Revolution on 7 November. I accept all the ideas that the revolutionaries put forth before the people. They had good ideas back then… land for the peasants, factories for the workers, order and recovery in the country, and so on. There wasn’t a single bad idea. These ideas won the revolution. Our present policy relies on many of these same ideas. When we celebrate the October Revolution, primarily, we attach importance to those ideas”.
Lukashenko spoke about why some post-Soviet countries don’t celebrate this holiday, observing, “They didn’t have guts at the time. They faced a storm of criticism, as some said that the Revolution brought misery and killed people. Yes, people were killed afterwards. However, we’re talking about ideas. These bad effects involving the slaughter of people and deviation from the ideas declared prior to the revolution were wrong. However, they happened afterwards, and we condemn it. Nevertheless, one shouldn’t condemn what happened in 1917, and scrap the good ideas that Lenin and his team went forward with”.
Lukashenko advised a careful attitude to an evaluation of the past, noting, “Never hurry to evaluate what happened. It can be politically biased. Whatever past we may have, it’s ours. We can’t get around it. For us to look at our past properly, it’s necessary to see problems, we can’t hush them up, but we should highlight all the good things that happened, too. It’s all our past. Even today, we understand that we did the right thing by preserving this holiday. For this holiday we put aside the best… gifts for the people”. Speaking about the construction of new Minsk Metro stations, Lukashenko remarked that the construction of every kilometre of new metro lines cost 50 million USD (1.575 billion Roubles. 39 million Euros. 31.25 million UK Pounds), stating, “We didn’t do it for executives or rich people. We did it for the people. Isn’t that an embodiment of the ideas that [the Revolution] declared?”
6 November 2012
Voices from Russia 
A Romney Victory Would Likely Expand Income Inequality
Tags: 2012 US Presidential election, Barack Obama, Cold War, Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, political commentary, politics, poster, Romney, United States, University of South Carolina, USA, Willard Romney
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Charles W Kegley, Jr is a founding partner of Kegley International, Inc. and Distinguished Pearce Professor of International Relations Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, where he served as chairman of the Department of Government and International Studies. Professor Kegley spoke to VOR about the upcoming American presidential election and his view of the candidates.
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The overall contours of American foreign policy are likely not to change very much no matter who’s elected, because, historically, elections don’t determine changes in policies. They do change the style and the emphasis. For President Obama, should he be elected, and I think that might happen and I hope it happens, I think we’d have a deepening of relations between the USA and Russia. Romney is harder to read, as he previously called Russia “the Number One Foe of the USA”. Should he win the election, as he has no job experience in the foreign affairs whatsoever, he’d have to learn fast. I hope he doesn’t go back to a Cold War vision of what it means to conduct American foreign policy. Most people in the USA, both policy-makers and the informed electorate, criticised him for ill-informed and ill-advised comments on the USA. It became a joke in the USA, as he didn’t seem to have a coherent and rational approach. I don’t know if he has one. Unfortunately, he relies on advisors that previously worked in the Bush administration. That doesn’t bode well, because some of those people are responsible for misguided policies.
Romney claims that he’s a businessman and that he knows how to fix things. However, there isn’t much evidence to support that. He made himself a lot of money, but when he was Governor of the State of Massachusetts, his state ranked almost at the bottom of job creation. Frankly, his policies would harm the poor and small businesses, and reward the very wealthy. Therefore, it’s likely that income inequality would expand under his policies. I don’t know how to describe his thinking about international economics. He claims he can cut the deficit, but the numbers don’t add up. He can’t expand the military budget enormously and reduce the deficit, too. I’m very pessimistic about what would happen, but I think too much weight has been put on the fact that he was a businessman most of his life and not in the public sector.
7 November 2012 (MSK)
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_11_07/Romneys-win-would-likely-expand-the-inequality-expert/