Ekaterina Kudashkina: What kind of legacy does he leave for his successor?
Mark Perry: It is probably unknown to the wider world, but Robert Gates was the author of the weapons procurement reform in the Pentagon, and this is something he wrestled with outside of the public eye every single day, how to bring the Pentagon’s budget under control and how to make certain that the needs of the armed services were met and not oversubscribed. I think he began a long, slow process in America of breaking up the military-industrial complex.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: Do you think this process is going to continue under the new secretary?
Mark Perry: I think, in fact, that this is why the new secretary was appointed. Leon Panetta is a very capable political thinker, but his background is as a politician, not as a military man. In fact, this is exactly what the Pentagon needs, someone who can wrestle with and gain control of the Pentagon bureaucracy and run it and not to allow it to run him. So actually while it seems that Panetta is cast from a different mold than Gates, actually he is the most appropriate successor.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: If we move a little bit to foreign relations, do you think that the new appointment will make a difference in the current relations between the U.S. and Russia, the U.S. and the rest of the world?
Mark Perry: I think it is obvious to everyone who is in the policy-making establishment in the United States that our country is engaged in a military retreat, which is not the same thing as a strategic retreat. Our relationship with Russia has been rocky; I know that the Russian leadership has tried mildly to maintain stability in the relationship, but it is still fogged with misunderstandings. And I think that one of the reasons that it is fogged with misunderstandings is because of the justified fear on the part of Russia of an expansionist America.
Secretary Gates made it clear to them that while we will always defend our interests in Europe and South Asia, it is not our intention to subvert Russia’s interest and that we can work together.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: Now it’s time to move to our second section – Between the Lines – in which we discuss some of the most interesting articles published in the press this week. This time, I suggest a story in the Boston Globe about Yelena Bonner.
Yelena Bonner was the wife of Russian physicist and human rights activist Dr Andrei Sakharov, and a human rights activist and a prominent Soviet dissident herself. She was well-known and respected in the West, since for many years she served as Dr. Sakharov’s representative in the western community. She spent much of her life fighting for democracy and prisoners’ rights in the Soviet Union, but her ties to Boston ran deep: She split her time between Moscow and an apartment in Brookline from 1989 until her death June 18.
Because of her ties to Boston, the Boston Globe ran a story that was not exactly an obituary, but rather, a selection of interviews and accounts from those who knew her personally, and that is the reason we selected it for this program.
Here is a quote from the story: “Much of Dr. Bonner’s time in the spotlight came at the side of her husband, who was considered the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb before he became one of the leading advocates for disarmament and peace with the West inside the Soviet Union. Yet even before she met Sakharov, and after his death in 1989, she proved to be a voice that demanded to be heard.”
Mira Salganik: I think not only that she demanded to be heard, but she could always make herself be heard.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: Let us go into detail. Yelena Bonner was born in Turkmenistan into a family of staunch revolutionaries. When they got to Moscow, they lived in Hotel Luxe on Gorky Street, which lodged high-profile foreign communists working in Moscow. Her father, Gevork Alikhanov, was a prominent Armenian communist and a secretary of the Comintern, the "general staff of the world revolution." And her mother, Ruth Bonner, was born in Siberia and joined the Communist Party in 1924. In May 1937, her father together with many other Comintern officers was arrested, and the family had to leave Moscow. But upon leaving Moscow, Ruth and her two children moved to her mother's apartment in Leningrad. But later that year she, too, was arrested and sentenced to hard labor as the wife of a traitor. In 1954, Ruth was released, granted a special pension, and an apartment on Chkalov Street in Moscow. This apartment became Yelena's home and in 1971 Andrei Sakharov moved in.
Sergei Strokan: But getting back to the Boston Globe story –what did her American friends say about her?
Ekaterina Kudashkina: Friends and neighbors spoke of Dr. Bonner as a vibrant, intelligent woman who loved reading and writing poetry, spending time with her grandchildren, and chain-smoking acrid Russian cigarettes. Let’s now turn to our next guest speaker, Alexander Gessen, who has known Ms. Bonner for 30 years or even more.
Alexander Gessen: I knew her for more than 35 years, I couldn’t say that I saw her on a regular basis, but I met her many, many times during these years. The first time I met her was in 1985 when she came to the United States for medical treatment. I was friends with her daughter, that is how I met her. Tatiana, her daughter, asked me to drive her from the airport, so we met her at the gate, and we walked very slowly and we carried a chair, because she needed to sit down every few moments. And then quite quickly she had surgery, and it was really amazing how energetic she became very, very quickly after the surgery. The main thing was that with the people she liked, she was just amazingly friendly and outgoing, and she could be really sharp and unfriendly with people she didn’t like. She had to fight them. She could change just like that in a second, depending on the situation.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: Did she make some kind of stark contrast with her husband? I mean Dr. Sakharov used to be so soft-spoken and reserved, and Ms. Bonner was outspoken.
Alexander Gessen: That’s true. I had the honor to meet Andrei Dmitrievich a few times, but I didn’t know him too well. But yes, they were very different. He was very polite, very quiet, very friendly. A funny thing about him I just remembered – I had this photo camera which was really new, it was an autofocus camera, and he saw that, and he took it from me, and it looked like he wanted to take it apart to understand how it works. It was really amazing. He was very interested in everything.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: As far as I understand, Ms. Bonner was the type who was looking for the truth everywhere, so what did she think about, first of all, about perestroika, what did she say about other problems worldwide, was she as active?
Alexander Gessen:I don’t remember all the things she was interested and involved in, but one of them was Israel, she had a very strong opinion on that. She wouldn’t hesitate to air her opinions on anything and she had quite a few of them on many things. She was an avid reader, she loved poetry.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: One thing that struck me in some newspaper account was that even in the United States, in her apartment in Boston, she had her TV set to news from Moscow, news from Russia.
Alexander Gessen: Even though she lived here and spent her last years here, her thoughts were in Russia.
Ekaterina Kudashkina: But her family is in Boston?
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