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      Making Sense of India’s Newfound Love for Russian Oil

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      India’s love affair with Russia began a long time ago. India won its independence from the UK in 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru, its first prime minister, was a self-declared socialist who drew inspiration from the Soviet Union. In the decades after independence, India swerved increasingly to the left. As a result, New Delhi developed extremely close relations with Moscow.

      Only after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, did New Delhi’s ties with Moscow weaken. In recent years, India has strengthened its relationship with the US. Both democracies find China a common threat. Furthermore, American investment has flowed into India while Indian students have flocked to the US. Indian politicians, movie stars and cricketers use American social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube to campaign. Therefore, India’s neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused much heartburn in Washington.

      The recent visit of Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh to the US did not go particularly well. The Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke about “monitoring some recent concerning developments in India, including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police, and prison officials.” Blinken’s comment is less about human rights abuses and more about the US disapproval of India’s Ukraine policy and its purchase of Russian oil. So, why is New Delhi risking its relations with Washington and buying Russian oil?

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      Cheap Oil Option to Counter Inflation

      The Russian invasion of Ukraine has spiked global food, fertilizer and oil prices. The average monthly Brent crude oil price in December 2021 was $74.17. In March 2022, this had risen to $117.25. For an energy importer like India, this has spelled disaster. Inflation has shot up and the Reserve Bank of India has cut projected growth rates for the country. As a result, Russia’s offer of cut-price oil has become attractive to India.

      Given high prices, India is not alone in buying cheap Russian oil. Hungarian, Bulgarian and Greek refineries continue to buy Russian oil as do many others. The Indian press reports that  New Delhi “could be buying Russia’s flagship Urals grade at discounts of as much as $35 a barrel on prices before the war.” This is a very steep discount that offsets American and Western sanctions. With a per capita GDP that was only $1927.71 in 2020 and an unemployment crisis in the country, India cannot afford to forego the option of cheap oil.

      The option of buying Russian oil is also important for another reason. India sources its oil from many countries with Russia providing a tiny fraction of its energy needs. Iraq supplies 23% of India’s oil, Saudi Arabia 18% and the United Arab Emirates 11%. In 2022, exports from the US are likely to increase and meet 8% of India’s oil needs. Crucially though, India’s purchase of Russian oil gives it more leverage against other sellers. As Jaishankar rightly pointed out, India’s “total purchases for the month would be less than what Europe does in an afternoon.” Therefore, the US fixation with Indian oil purchases from Russia seems shortsighted and misguided.

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      A History of Romance, A Marriage of Geopolitical Realities

      As has been said by many foreign policy experts, India has shared a close strategic relationship with Russia for many decades. Once India chose socialism, the then Soviet Union traded preferentially with India. Moscow also provided and continues to provide the bulk of India’s defense needs. Even today, an estimated 70% of India’s defense equipment comes from Russia. Perhaps even more importantly, Moscow has shared nuclear, missile and space technology with New Delhi, enabling India to emerge as a major power.

      In 1971, the Soviet Union and India signed an important treaty. Later that year, Moscow backed New Delhi while Washington backed Islamabad. India was a democracy that reluctantly went to war to liberate Bangladesh. In the run up to the conflict, Pakistan’s military dictatorship was conducting genocide and using rape as a weapon of war against poor Bengalis in what was then known as East Pakistan. Russia has consistently backed India on Kashmir. In contrast, the US has regularly chided India for human rights abuses in Kashmir and taken a pro-Pakistan stance.

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      Even as ties with the US have improved, relations with Russia have remained important. In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin flew to New Delhi to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After the visit, retired Indian diplomat Ashok Sajjanhar concluded that Putin’s brief India trip had “reinvigorated a time-tested partnership.” Both countries signed many agreements, paying considerable attention to trade and investment relations. Traditional areas like nuclear energy, space and defense also got attention. Here, in the words of Sajjanhar “the most important decision was to commence manufacture of more than 700,000 assault AK-203 rifles with transfer of technology under the ‘Make in India’ program.”

      Russia is also helping India indigenize its defense production of T-90 tanks and Su-30-MKI aircraft. Russia also supplies spares and helps upgrade MiG-29-K aircraft, Kamov-31, Mi-17 helicopters, MiG-29 aircraft and multiple rocket launcher BM-30 Smerch. Despite an ongoing war with Ukraine and severe sanctions, Russia is delivering the second regiment of S400 missile defense systems to India. 

      India is in a rough neighborhood with two nuclear-armed neighbors. Both Pakistan and China claim Indian territory. The specter of a two-front war is a real one for India. Therefore, good relations with Russia, its biggest defense equipment and technology supplier, are critically important. This is a key reason for New Delhi to take up Moscow’s offer of cheap oil.

      As an independent nation and a rising global power, India has to act in its strategic interest. At the moment, this is best served by buying cheap Russian oil.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The MADness of the Resurgent US Cold War With Russia

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      The war in Ukraine has placed US and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the US and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race. The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to US imperial power.

      The US and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not. 

      The Bitter Fruits of US Intervention

      Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. US sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments. 

      Meanwhile, US-backed coups in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras have sooner or later been reversed by grassroots movements to restore democratic, socialist government. The Taliban are governing Afghanistan again after a 20-year war to expel a US and NATO army of occupation, for which the sore losers are now starving millions of Afghans.     

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      But the risks and consequences of the US Cold War on Russia are of a different order. The purpose of any war is to defeat your enemy. But how can you defeat an enemy that is explicitly committed to respond to the prospect of existential defeat by destroying the whole world?

      Mutually Assured Destruction

      This is in fact part of the military doctrine of the US and Russia, who together possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. If either of them faces existential defeat, they are prepared to destroy human civilization in a nuclear holocaust that will kill Americans, Russians and neutrals alike.           

      In June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree stating, “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

      US nuclear weapons policy is no more reassuring. A decades-long campaign for a US “no first use” nuclear weapons policy still falls on deaf ears in Washington.

      The 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) promised that the US would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. But in a war with another nuclear-armed country, it said, “The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” 

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      The 2018 NPR broadened the definition of “extreme circumstances” to cover “significant non-nuclear attacks,” which it said would “include, but are not limited to, attacks on the US, allies or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on US or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment.” The critical phrase, “but are not limited to,” removes any restriction at all on a US nuclear first strike.     

      So, as the US Cold War against Russia and China heats up, the only signal that the deliberately foggy threshold for the US use of nuclear weapons has been crossed could be the first mushroom clouds exploding over Russia or China. 

      For our part in the West, Russia has explicitly warned us that it will use nuclear weapons if it believes the US or NATO are threatening the existence of the Russian state. That is a threshold that the US and NATO are already flirting with as they look for ways to increase their pressure on Russia over the war in Ukraine.

      To make matters worse, the twelve-to-one imbalance between US and Russian military spending has the effect, whether either side intends it or not, of increasing Russia’s reliance on the role of its nuclear arsenal when the chips are down in a crisis like this.

      NATO countries, led by the United States and UK, are already supplying Ukraine with up to 17 plane-loads of weapons per day, training Ukrainian forces to use them and providing valuable and deadly satellite intelligence to Ukrainian military commanders. Hawkish voices in NATO countries are pushing hard for a no-fly zone or some other way to escalate the war and take advantage of Russia’s perceived weaknesses.

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      Nuclear Risks Escalate 

      The danger that hawks in the State Department and Congress may convince President Joe Biden to escalate the US role in the war prompted the Pentagon to leak details of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) assessments of Russia’s conduct of the war to Newsweek’s William Arkin.

      Senior DIA officers told Arkin that Russia has dropped fewer bombs and missiles on Ukraine in a month than US forces dropped on Iraq in the first day of bombing in 2003, and that they see no evidence of Russia directly targeting civilians. Like US “precision” weapons, Russian weapons are probably only about 80% accurate, so hundreds of stray bombs and missiles are killing and wounding civilians and hitting civilian infrastructure, as they do just as horrifically in every US war. 

      The DIA analysts believe Russia is holding back from a more devastating war because what it really wants is not to destroy Ukrainian cities but to negotiate a diplomatic agreement to ensure a neutral, non-aligned Ukraine. 

      But the Pentagon appears to be so worried by the impact of highly effective Western and Ukrainian war propaganda that it has released secret intelligence to Newsweek to try to restore a measure of reality to the media’s portrayal of the war, before political pressure for NATO escalation leads to a nuclear war.

      Since the US and the USSR blundered into their nuclear suicide pact in the 1950s, it has come to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. As the Cold War evolved, they cooperated to reduce the risk of mutual assured destruction through arms control treaties, a hotline between Moscow and Washington, and regular contacts between US and Soviet officials. 

      But the US has now withdrawn from many of those arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms. The risk of nuclear war is as great today as it has ever been, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns year after year in its annual Doomsday Clock statement. The Bulletin has also publisheddetailed analyses of how specific technological advances in US nuclear weapons design and strategy are increasing the risk of nuclear war. 

      Peace Dividend Lost

      The world understandably breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Cold War appeared to end in the early 1990s. But within a decade, the peace dividend the world hoped for was trumped by a power dividend. US officials did not use their unipolar moment to build a more peaceful world, but to capitalize on the lack of a military peer competitor to launch an era of US and NATO military expansion and serial aggression against militarily weaker countries and their people.

      As Michael Mandelbaum, the director of East-West Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, crowed in 1990, “For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III.” Thirty years later, people in that part of the world may be forgiven for thinking that the US and its allies have in fact unleashed World War III, against them, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Yemen and across West Africa.

      Russian President Boris Yeltsin complained bitterly to President Clinton over plans for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but Russia was powerless to prevent it. Russia had already been invaded by an army of neoliberal Western economic advisers, whose “shock therapy” shrank its GDP by 65%, reduced male life expectancyfrom 65 to 58, and empowered a new class of oligarchs to loot its national resources and state-owned enterprises.

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      President Vladimir Putin restored the power of the Russian state and improved the Russian people’s living standards, but he did not at first push back against US and NATO military expansion and war-making. However, when NATO and its Arab monarchist allies overthrew the Gaddafi government in Libya and then launched an even bloodier proxy war against Russia’s ally Syria, Russia intervened militarily to prevent the overthrow of the Syrian government. 

      Russia worked with the US to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped to open negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. But the US role in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s subsequent reintegration of Crimea and its support for anti-coup separatists in Donbass put paid to further cooperation between Obama and Putin, plunging US-Russian relations into a downward spiral that has now led us to the brink of nuclear war.

      The Cold War Is Back  

      It is the epitome of official insanity that US, NATO and Russian leaders have resurrected this Cold War, which the whole world celebrated the end of, allowing plans for mass suicide and human extinction to once again masquerade as responsible defense policy. 

      While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine and for all the death and destruction of this war, this crisis did not come out of nowhere. The US and its allies must reexamine their own roles in resurrecting the Cold War that spawned this crisis, if we are ever to return to a safer world for people everywhere.

      Tragically, instead of expiring on its sell-by date in the 1990s along with the Warsaw Pact, NATO has transformed itself into an aggressive global military alliance, a fig-leaf for US imperialism, and a forum for dangerous, self-fulfilling threat analysis, to justify its continued existence, endless expansion and crimes of aggression on three continents, in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya. 

      If this insanity indeed drives us to mass extinction, it will be no consolation to the scattered and dying survivors that their leaders succeeded in destroying their enemies’ country too. They will simply curse leaders on all sides for their blindness and stupidity. The propaganda by which each side demonized the other will be only a cruel irony once its end result is seen to be the destruction of everything leaders on all sides claimed to be defending.

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      This reality is common to all sides in this resurgent Cold War. But, like the voices of peace activists in Russia today, our voices are more powerful when we hold our own leaders accountable and work to change our own country’s behavior. 

      If Americans just echo US propaganda, deny our own country’s role in provoking this crisis and turn all our ire towards President Putin and Russia, it will only serve to fuel the escalating tensions and bring on the next phase of this conflict, whatever dangerous new form that may take. 

      But if we campaign to change our country’s policies, de-escalate conflicts and find common ground with our neighbors in Ukraine, Russia, China and the rest of the world, we can cooperate and solve our serious common challenges together. 

      A top priority must be to dismantle the nuclear doomsday machine we have inadvertently collaborated to build and maintain for 70 years, along with the obsolete and dangerous NATO military alliance. We cannot let the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of the military-industrial complex keep leading us into ever more dangerous military crises until one of them spins out of control and destroys us all.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Democracy and France’s Theater of the Absurd

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      In Sunday’s first round presidential race, even though the ultimate result is to set up a repeat of the 2017 runoff between the incumbent Emmanuel Macron and the xenophobic candidate Marine Le Pen, there were two enormous surprises. The first was the utter humiliation of the two political groupings that traded turns at running the country for the past 70 years. Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the Republican party (the establishment right), ended up with 4.7% of the vote. The Socialists, heirs to the Mitterrand legacy and the last of the dominant parties to hold the office, didn’t even reach 2% (they got 1.75% of the vote), less than the communist candidate who got just over 2%.

      The second surprise was the strong showing of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a non-establishment leftist, who, it now transpires, would have overtaken Le Pen had any of the other candidates dropped out to line up behind him. It’s a moral victory of sorts for voters on the left, who have now been excluded from the final round of the two most recent presidential elections. The compensation is that, with legislative elections looming in the immediate aftermath of the April 24th presidential face-off, it will inevitably lead to some kind of intriguing regrouping or redefinition.

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      In its reporting on the election, The New York Times focused on the one issue that is of most interest to its American readers: the impact on what it calls the “Western unity” US President Joe Biden has so solidly engineered in his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Times foreign editor, Roger Cohen expresses the fear that, “in the event of an ultimate Le Pen victory” France will become “anti-NATO and more pro-Russia.” He adds that this “would cause deep concern in allied capitals, and could fracture the united trans-Atlantic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” In other words, make no mistake about it, The New York Times is rooting for Macron.

      Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Anti-NATO:

      Opposed to the ideal the United States government imagines for Europe, defining it as a continent composed of free, enlightened democracies irremediably dependent — both economically and militarily — on the benevolent leadership of a powerful American Deep State and the sincere brotherly love offered by the American military-industrial complex.

      Contextual note

      The Times may have reason to worry. While the odds still favor Macron, Le Pen could possibly duplicate Donald Trump’s incredible overcoming of the odds in 2016 when he won the US presidency, and largely for the same reasons. Macron has been a contested leader, branded by opponents on the left and right as the “president of the rich.” Hillary Clinton similarly suffered from her image of being a tool of her Wall Street donors. There comes a point in every nation’s life when the people seem ready to take a chance with what appears to reasonable people as a bad bet.

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      Perhaps that time has come for France. Its electors exercised what they call “republican discipline” against far-right politicians when Jacques Chirac defeated Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, in 2002. He harvested 82% of the vote to Le Pen’s 18%. In 2017, though Macron was still an unknown entity with no serious support from either of the major political groupings, the young man easily defeated the far-right candidate with 64% of the vote to Le Pen’s 36%.

      Prognosticating statisticians might simply follow the curve and assume that the downward slope will lead this time to a 50-50 election. They may be right. But the reason lies less in an arithmetical trend than in the growth of a largely non-partisan populist revolt directed against what is perceived to be an occult power establishment comprised of powerful industrialists, bankers, unrepresentative parties, corrupt politicians and a political class marked by an attitude of subservience to the American empire. Macron, the former Rothschild banker, has himself tried to burnish his image as a neutral, pan-European visionary who seeks to break free from the chokehold held by the power brokers of Washington DC, Arlington, Virginia and Wall Street. His attempts to negotiate with Vladimir Putin before and after the Russian invasion were undoubtedly designed to bolster that image.

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      The explanation everyone likes to give for Marine Le Pen’s success in distancing her rivals – including fellow xenophobe, Eric Zemmour – is her focus on inflation. James Carville may be applauding from afar. It is, after all “the economy, stupid.” The issue has been there throughout Macron’s term. It was the COVID lockdown and not Macron’s policies that cut short the dramatic “yellow vest” movement that was still smoldering when the pandemic struck. The French have not forgotten their own need for economic survival while living in a society in which the rich keep getting richer. Voters remember Macron’s joyous elimination of the wealth tax and the alacrity with which he announced higher gas taxes would fill the gap.

      A musician I work with regularly told me recently: “I’m not voting in the first round, but I’ll vote against Macron in the second round.” In other words, of the possible rivals in the second round – Le Pen (far right), Mélenchon (progressive left), some even predicted Valérie Pécresse (right) – he would have voted for any one of them, just to eliminate Macron. I don’t believe he’s a racist, but he is now ready to be voting for a woman who has put xenophobia at the core of her political program.

      Historical note

      If we tally up the scores of the candidates who are clearly anti-NATO — without including Macron who keeps his distance but adheres to the US alliance in the current campaign against Russia — the total climbs towards 60%. Historically, France is the only European country to have declared independence from NATO, when De Gaulle withdrew from NATO’s military structure and banished all NATO installations from the nation’s territory in 1966.

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      Roger Cohen’s and The Times’ concern may be justified, even if Macron wins the election. Even more so if the results are close. Very few commentators, even here in France, have begun trying to tease out what’s likely to emerge from June’s legislative elections. With the two traditional establishment parties on the ropes and utterly leaderless, is there any chance that a reassuringly “coherent order” dear to establishment politicians might reappear? Even if Macron wins, he never really managed to assemble a stable majority in his first term. The real questions now are these: among the defeated, who will talk to whom? And who will even grudgingly accept to defer to whose leadership? If Le Pen wins, it is unlikely she will be able to muster anything resembling a loyal majority. It is often said that “the French voters’ heart is on the left, but their vote is on the right.” With a president so far to the right, the voters won’t deliver a presidential majority in parliament, as they have so often done in the past.

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      Like the US and the UK, France’s democratic institutions have become profoundly dysfunctional. In no way does the political class even attempt to implement the “will of the people.” The globalized economy, with its arcane networks of power, had already diminished the meaning of democracy. The US is now consciously splitting in two that same globalized economy through its campaign of sanctions against Russia, possibly as a broader strategic move designed to create a degree of chaos that will ultimately embarrass its real enemy, China.

      That radical split points in one direction: militarizing even further an economy already dominated by military technology. And as we have seen, a militarized economy means an increasingly militarized society, in which surveillance, propaganda, control and enforced conformity in the name of security cancel any appeal not just to the will, but even to the needs of the people.

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      It is a real pity that Jean-Luc Mélenchon didn’t make it to the second round, if only to enrich a largely impoverished debate. Independently of any of his political orientations concerning the economy or foreign policy, the leader of his party, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), was already insisting in the previous election five years ago that the nation needed to replace with a 6th Republic an out-of-date 5th Republic created in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle. Mélenchon’s idea of a 6th Republic contained less presidential power and weaker parties, meaning better access for the people.

      A lot of water has flowed under the Pont Neuf since 1958, and neither of the candidates appears interested in reducing presidential powers. But the result of this election demonstrates clearly that both presidential power and the ability of parties to give direction to the politics of the nation have become non-existent as tools of democratic government. The results show that they have reached a point of no return. No one should be surprised to see —  at some point in time after the legislative elections —  France being rocked by a constitutional crisis on the scale of the one Pakistan lived through this past week. At which point, a 6th Republic may emerge from the ashes, Phoenix-like, but with more than a few burnt feathers.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      21 things to look forward to in 2021 – from meteor showers to the Olympics

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      From finally seeing the back of Donald Trump to being in a football stadium – the new year is full of promiseYou probably found a few things to enjoy about last year: you rediscovered your bicycle, perhaps, or your family, or even both, and learned to love trees. And don’t forget the clapping. Plus some brilliant scientists figured out how to make a safe and effective vaccine for a brand new virus in record time. Continue reading… More

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      Stephen Cohen obituary

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      The scholar of Russian history and politics Stephen Cohen, who has died aged 81 of lung cancer, challenged the orthodox western analysis of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet affairs. In his magisterial book Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives (2009), he demolished the claim that Leninism led inevitably to totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin and that the Soviet system of one-party rule and state ownership of property could never be reformed.He cited three periods when developments could have gone differently from what actually happened: in the late 1920s, when debates within the Politburo came to a head over the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed for private enterprise and ownership of land and property; in the early 60s, when Nikita Khrushchev launched key political reforms; and in 1990 and 1991, after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a mixed economy and social democratic solutions based on political pluralism in place of the Communist party’s monopoly of power.With his sense of humour, gravelly voice and iconoclastic arguments, Cohen entranced generations of students from his academic perch at Princeton University for the three decades from 1968, in which he rose to be professor of politics and Russian studies, and then at New York University (1998-2011).He wrote a column in the Nation, under the byline Sovieticus from 1982 to 1987 and in recent years hosted a weekly radio broadcast on Russian-American relations, which he feared were leading to a new cold war. He blamed Bill Clinton and policymakers in Washington for failing to include Russia in a new European order after the Soviet Union came to an end and for expanding Nato eastwards in a spirit of “we won” triumphalism. George W Bush and Barack Obama compounded the failure by siting US anti-ballistic missile systems on Russia’s borders.During the Soviet period Cohen was unusual among western specialists on Russia in having friends among dissidents as well as reformist intellectuals in the Moscow thinktanks. His book The Victims Return was based on interviews with dozens of survivors of Stalin’s labour camps about their problems in returning to freedom.Amid the new freedoms permitt- ed by Gorbachev after 1985, Cohen and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and editor of the Nation, made frequent long trips to Moscow and got to know the new Soviet leader personally. At one of the last May Day celebrations in Red Square, Gorbachev invited them both to stand beside the Lenin mausoleum to watch the parade. More