Big

This is the article I have been looking for. It has many interesting details about Karelin and it was written back in 1991.

Just be careful. It is written in a very pro-Western way. A good example is this sentence:

There has been talk that Karelin, like Sergei Beloglazov, the six-time world champion and two-time Olympic champion bantamweight who now coaches at Lehigh, will one day leave the U.S.S.R., never to return.


As we all know, Beloglasov is now back in Russia and went back soon after oil money became available. If it were only about communism, Beloglasov would come back in 1992 not two years ago.

Enjoy!

http://www.majorwager.com/forums/mes...ong-story.html

Tight-Waist

It doesnt sound like Karelin shares your fondness for the Soviet System Big.


Karelin reads, he says, "to know about people," particularly the Soviet people. Tolstoy, he says, "is not relevant to Soviet life today," so he doesn't read him much. Solzhenitsyn, whose novels are filled with brutal critiques of Soviet human rights atrocities, is more to his liking.

"Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is an interesting book," says Karelin. "The only problem I had with it is that a lot inside me was ruined by trusting in the society where I live. After reading this, I had nothing left. I wondered, Are there no white spots in our history, only black? My whole country is in perpetual funeral."

That homeland is not a happy place these days. The word Gorbachev has used is razval, which means disintegration, collapse. It is, as Bulgakov wrote of 1918 Russia, "A time and a place of suffocating uncertainty." Until a year ago, Karelin's mother was a Communist Party member. Her son forced her to resign.

"I don't believe in socialism as is," he says. "I can't. I believe in myself and the people around me. I'm surprised the Soviet people are as optimistic as they are, after what they've been through. When I return there from the U.S. or Europe, it's very depressing, but it's also inspiring to see these people who are resilient despite the constant pressure of life. The situation gets worse and worse and worse and they don't break. They endure. I want to help these people. I don't think about a political career yet, but perhaps I'll grow into that."

Big

Again, the article is Western biased. It is very complex. The article is written in 1991 during Gorbachev's Perestroika where it was almost mandatory to bash the government.

Big

For example, it says Karelin forced his mother to resign from the Communist Party. By 1991 the Communist Party held very little power in Soviet Union. Gorbachev ordered the Party to be separate from the main government.