PRINCETON: Few politicians nowadays -- Russians or Americans, Europeans or Asians -- possess a sense of history. Judging from the fact that most need ghostwriters for their memoirs, they don’t even know their own personal histories very well. Had Boris Yeltsin read Leo Tolstoy's "Khadzhi-Murat" and "The Captive of the Caucasus" carefully, he might not have triggered the tragic war in Chechnia. If Bill Clinton had read the books of George Kennan, that father of the Marshall Plan and policy of "containment" toward the USSR, and a lifelong scholar of Russian civilization, the thoughtless rush to expand NATO might not have occurred, at least not as it did.
PRINCETON: Few politicians nowadays -- Russians or Americans, Europeans or Asians -- possess a sense of history. Judging from the fact that most need ghostwriters for their memoirs, they don’t even know their own personal histories very well. Had Boris Yeltsin read Leo Tolstoy's "Khadzhi-Murat" and "The Captive of the Caucasus" carefully, he might not have triggered the tragic war in Chechnia. If Bill Clinton had read the books of George Kennan, that father of the Marshall Plan and policy of "containment" toward the USSR, and a lifelong scholar of Russian civilization, the thoughtless rush to expand NATO might not have occurred, at least not as it did.