[WikiEN-l] Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 (some responses)

[Abe Sokolov]

Stan Shebs shebs at apple.com wrote:

And the bulk of the content is from - you guessed it - 172! This
is the hallmark of his style; while there are usually no gross
misrepresentations of fact, the wording is so relentlessly slanted
it would take a week to clean up, at the end of which he would just
revert it all in one fell swoop. It's completely exasperating; I
finally stopped looking at anything he touches, scrubbed it all
out of my watchlist, and regained Wikipedia-nirvana. Even so, I still worry 
that the unabashed socialist viewpoint will
hurt WP's credibility as an impartial recorder.


None of the sources are "socialist" by any stretch of the imagination. Go 
check them. All of them fall with in the mainstream of the academic 
literature, in the mainstream of Western political science and Russia 
studies, which you'll find is quite often far harder on Yeltsin than this 
article. (see, e.g., the analyses of democratization inspired by Guillermo 
O'Donnell's "delegative democracy").

All fair minded users will recognize that Stan Shebs, along with Fred 
Bauder, have been haplessly sniping at me for over a year and a half. As 
usual, not one iota's worth of evidence is offered, but Stan launches into 
the ad hominem bluster. This will be my final comment to them regarding this 
issue. This time I will not overreact to Stan's defamation. His unwarranted 
(and confused) personal attacks are a dishonor only to him, not to me.

I will discuss this, though, with a user demonstrating good faith and a 
satisfactory command of the facts. To quickly address some of the other 
charges of bias, perhaps some of the others are confusing the 10/93 crisis 
with the August 1991 coup, which was a hard-line Communist coup attempt. If 
that's the case, I suggest they do some more reading; these two incidents, 
though separated by only a couple of years, were quite distinct.

And I sincerely hope that this does get other users into the fold on recent 
Russian history. Our articles in this area are very underdeveloped and I'm 
not getting very far very fast being virtually the only one making 
substantial contributions to them.

-172

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