From the day the August coup failed, the conspirators ended up in prison and their very serious responsibilities became clear to everyone. […], I feel like asking a question that arises in the West but reaches this far, in Moscow: is communism dead or does it survive and can it be reborn? I can answer today, with a clear conviction. What has ended forever is the model created by Stalin, which was from the beginning an adventure, a regime that ignored democracy, the rights of men, the needs of the people, a system that violated society and betrayed ideas. socialists. So this is my opinion: Stalin’s model is dead. And I want to add, thank God.
With the same certainty, I must immediately point out that this death is not about socialism. The idea of socialism is very much alive, and I feel the effort of research, the eagerness to experiment, to find a new form of life for this ideal. Here, in this new terrain, the principles of democracy will naturally have to occupy the first place, together with humanitarian principles.
The thing that strikes me most today is that this research attempt does not concern only our country, but the whole world, including of course the capitalist countries. […]
I have had the opportunity to reflect a lot on these issues. The truth is that today all of us, in the East as in the West, aware or not, are moving towards a kind of new civilization. And precisely this makes me believe that many schemes of our own way of thinking today no longer make sense and must be changed. Above all, we can no longer oppose capitalism and socialism. This means that the society and civilization we are creating must be read in all their complexity, in the multiplicity of their aspects […]. Basically, this and nothing else is the sense of political and intellectual freedom in which we believe, the sense of pluralism.
And this is the meaning, too, of economic freedom. I was told the words of the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, who said that the socialist system went into crisis due to the lack of the market. But for me the concept of economic freedom means just that: coexistence of all kinds of ownership – state, cooperative, private. And this presupposes the market […].
Leaving the old patterns also means giving up reading past and recent history for the use and consumption of one’s particular interests. It would be unfair to rethink the history of the USSR only as a story of lost opportunities. This is an extremely one-sided approach. The real great opportunity was in fact lost together by the East and the West, dispersing the enormous opportunities that arose from the victory against Nazism and Fascism.
There are different causes and motivations for this historical error: some feared the democratization of their country and the strengthening of the dialogue between the two parties that together had won the war; others were afraid of the expansion of Soviet influence. The result was an opposition that led to the Cold War. A great opportunity for Europe and the world was lost, in 1945-47. Perhaps the largest of this century.
President George Bush said the United States won the Cold War. I would like to answer this: by remaining immersed in the climate of the Cold War, everyone has lost. And today, when the world was able to free itself from that climate, […] everyone has won. I think this controversy no longer has great relevance. If not for an election campaign …