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You have a system that changed, but the corrupt officials stayed in power. They simply warped the new system to suit them better.
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Yes! Capitalism is just a tool for them! Just like every other Bourgeois cunt! By using Capitalism they are better off, while the workers are worse of! Do you see it? They are better off, the workers are worse off! Under stalinism they exploited, but under capitalism they can just go nuts! You cant blame the misery of entire generations on just corrupt officials by themselves.
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I honestly couldn't tell you. Do you think it has to do with the economic system, or a country that is completly fucked up and had been for close to 500 years?
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I could! FROM THE ARTICLE:
"A Demographic Holocaust
In the Soviet Union, the entire population-children in school, adults at work-were required to undergo annual screenings for diseases such as tuberculosis (TB). But as a Russian journalist commented in Izvestia (16 April 2002): “The universal preventative examinations that were regarded as one of the great achievements of Soviet medicine died along with Soviet medicine itself.”
The number of HIV cases in Russia last year was estimated to be between one and two million. A recent study by the World Bank projected that by 2020, up to 10 percent of Russia’s rapidly shrinking population would be infected [I apologise, I stated the wrong facts on this one]. Primarily spread in Russia via drug users’ dirty needles, a growing avenue for the spread of HIV/AIDS has since become prostitution. By 1999, 14 percent of prostitutes in Moscow were infected. The helpless age (10 to 14) of some of the prostitutes and the piggish johns who pay extra for unprotected sex guarantee its continuing rapid spread.
As much as poverty and drugs, a major factor behind the explosion of AIDS in Russia is the reactionary ideological filth pushed in place of health education. There is an explosion of HIV/AIDS in Irkutsk, a main Siberian city on the Afghan drug route. But the chairman of the province’s Committee on Youth Policy rails against the “moral degeneration” of “‘safe’ sex and sex education classes.” The Russian Orthodox church campaigns against the use of condoms; fascists march against their use to promote Russian procreation. In fact, they are promoting the extermination of the Russian people.
Most ominously, the AIDS epidemic is intersecting a TB epidemic. One medical specialist warns: “When the HIV epidemic hits the pool of latent TB infections, there’s going to be an explosion of MDR-TB [Multiple Drug Resistant TB]. TB and HIV are like gasoline and a match.” Studies now find TB in 70 percent of Russia’s homeless, 20 to 30 percent of the prison population and 40 percent of refugees from the war in Chechnya and other areas. Soviet prisons were plenty brutal, but they were not hothouses for plagues. Now each year 30,000 former prisoners with active TB and 10,000 with MDR-TB are being released into the general population with little or no medical follow-up."
"This massive economic and social immiseration has combined with the destruction of the public health system. Tuberculosis (TB), which had been effectively eradicated in the Soviet Union, has returned as a scourge of Russia’s poor. Recent estimates put the number of Russians with TB at 88 per 100,000, compared to a rate of 4 to 10 per 100,000 in West Europe and America. The number of those infected with HIV/AIDS is increasing faster in Russia and Ukraine than anywhere else in the world."
Fucked up? Don't be so simple.
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Thats been happening for a long time. It really has nothing to do with this particular conversation.
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But there was a lull in the killing for a bit!... Why was that?!
FROM THE ARTICLE:
"Chechnya and Other Nationalist Bloodbaths
We’ve talked about what the return to the capitalist profit system has brought. The other major catastrophe has been the reimposition of bourgeois nation-states across the territory of the former USSR.
Here it’s necessary to emphasize that the Bolsheviks came to power by championing the struggles of the scores of nationalities trapped in what Lenin called the tsarist “prison house of peoples.” This was an integral part of the Bolsheviks’ struggle for world socialist revolution leading to a communist society in which the rise of international productive forces brings about the dissolution of all nation-states. The Bolsheviks could not have won influence over Russia’s multinational working class, to say nothing of the urban petty bourgeoisie and rural peasant masses, without being the best champions of the just causes of the oppressed Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic, Caucasian and Central Asian peoples. This proletarian internationalism was reflected in the composition of the Bolshevik Central Committee: Lenin was a Russian, Trotsky a Jew, Dzerzhinsky a Pole, Shaumyan an Armenian, Stalin a Georgian, Stuchka a Latvian, and so on.
The nascent Kremlin bureaucracy demonstrated its first alien political impulses through the Russian-centered apparat’s chauvinist disregard for the rights of minority peoples. Lenin launched his final political struggle in late 1922-early 1923 against Stalin’s bureaucratic abuse of the Caucasian peoples. As the degeneration of the Soviet workers state deepened, the bureaucratic caste went further toward Great Russian chauvinism as a political-ideological glue for its brittle rule.
But even this was held in check by the need to preserve the USSR as a vast multinational state. In marked contrast to capitalism, the centrally planned collectivized economy made possible an allocation of resources which brought about a relative equality between the various national republics making up the USSR. This resulted in the rapid socio-economic and cultural development of the most backward peoples of the former tsarist empire (e.g., in Central Asia) and also eased historic national tensions (e.g., in the Caucasus).
The progress of the Tajik people in Soviet Central Asia, in contrast to their ethnic counterparts across the border in Afghanistan, is only the most striking example. In the Caucasus, centuries-old blood feuds among the patchwork of geographically interpenetrated peoples were for the first time abated through the struggle to root out the sheiks, Cossack atamans, landlords and mullahs, and to establish a new life based on economic modernization and rising living standards. At the same time, Soviet industrial development created a historically new pattern of ethnic interpenetration, this time of proletarian populations in industrial and mining centers across the USSR. Workers of different nationalities frequently intermarried. They and their children began to no longer think of themselves as Ukrainian or Armenian but rather as Soviet.
The forces of capitalist counterrevolution-from Russia and Ukraine to the Caucasus and Central Asia-have used nationalism (often linked to religion) as their main political-ideological battering ram. The capitalist law of the jungle dictates that each capitalist state must have one dominant nationality. All the historic ethnic patchworks which had begun to weave together into a common Soviet pattern were now torn asunder. Over a hundred armed national, ethnic and religious conflicts have erupted across the former Soviet bloc, bringing death and destruction to millions.
By far the biggest bloodbath brought on by the capitalist counterrevolution in the former USSR is in Chechnya. Yeltsin’s colonial-style invasion in 1994 was about asserting the Kremlin’s role as regional cop in the Caucasus and gaining control of the Caspian Sea oil fields. The Chechens were also to be made an example of because of their special history of heroic wars in the 19th century against the Russian tsarist conquest of the Caucasus.
The ICL forces in Russia at the time called for the military defeat of Yeltsin’s colonial-style invasion without giving any political support to the bourgeois-nationalist regimes of Dudayev, and later Maskhadov, in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. We called for the right of the Chechen people to decide their own fate, explaining the roots of the war in the capitalist counterrevolution. We also raised the urgent need to defend the peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia and all non-Slavic foreigners against racist pogroms and police persecution throughout Russia.
Yeltsin’s invasion completely destroyed Grozny. But the Russian army was still militarily defeated by the Chechen forces. In 1996, Moscow accepted an armistice which gave Chechnya de facto independence. Then, in the winter of 1999, new Russian prime minister and soon-to-be president Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya. In part this was intended to spike the plans of the various bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region, acting in concert with Western oil companies, to build new oil pipelines which would exclude Russia. The second Chechen war was also an attempt to divert popular outrage in Russia and a sense of national humiliation provoked by the U.S./NATO terror bombing of Serbia, a historic Russian ally, earlier that year. Putin ran for president by reasserting Russia’s military “power” through a renewed genocidal onslaught against Chechnya. In response the ICL called for the military defense of Chechnya’s hard-won independence against Russia.
This war is still going on, and it is a ghastly picture of the barbarism capitalism has brought to the Caucasus. Whereas in Afghanistan in 1979-89 the Soviet Red Army’s presence made possible the beginnings of a modern urban infrastructure with universities, hospitals and factories built along Soviet lines, Putin’s Russian army in Chechnya has now reduced virtually every single city and town there to rubble! Russian forces have to date killed over 100,000 Chechens, that is 10 percent of the population.
A smart reply! Dead parents? one would think so, but no!
AGAIN WITH THE ARTICLE:
"The Brutal Oppression of Youth and Women
The overall degradation of Russia’s populace is compounded by the special oppression of youth and women. A leading Russian pediatrician estimates that only 5 to 10 percent of children are healthy. Child malnutrition is now the norm, and by 1999 from 15 to 45 percent of children in the Russian Federation under the age of 15, depending on the province, were diagnosed as mentally retarded. As of last year, there were an estimated several million “orphans” in Russia-more than were left in the wake of World War II! These orphans’ parents are mostly still alive; they were abandoned. The character of Russia’s orphanages can be measured in the fact that one-third of those who grow up in them become alcoholics and 10 percent commit suicide within a year of leaving.
But only a third of Russia’s castaway children are even in orphanages. The others live in cellars, attics, abandoned houses and in larger cities by seeking shelter from the cold in sewer systems. Such youth are a modern-day reappearance on the Russian landscape of the bezprizorniky. These were the packs of wild children who emerged from the ruins of World War I and the Russian Civil War, preying in gangs on the towns and descending like wild dogs on rural villages. In 1921, the Soviet government formed a commission headed by the Bolshevik leader Feliks Dzerzhinsky to spearhead a nationwide campaign which saved several million bezprizorniky, giving them full lives as Soviet citizens. This chapter of Soviet power and the saving of the bezprizorniky remain a point of pride to this day.
Contrast this to what capitalist counterrevolution in Russia and the other former Soviet republics offers its castaway children. Petty theft by boys in Kyrgyzstan is punished by up to half a year in prison, often in solitary confinement, with no education or even parental visits. In Georgia, “repeat offender” youth can be jailed up to three years without any trial. And what does it mean for a youth to be in the general prison population? It means rape and other sexual assaults. This unspeakable barbarity is made worse by the level of AIDS among prisoners.
In 1993 Women and Revolution published an extensive article titled “From East Berlin to Tashkent: Capitalist Counterrevolution Tramples on Women.” Today I will limit myself to something new that has proliferated in the decade since that article was published, the international sex trade. From Russia alone it is estimated that 160,000 women each year are trafficked to Europe and Asia. They are drawn by ads offering work, or simply kidnapped. Once delivered, their passports are taken from them and they are terrorized into submission. The profits from this sex slavery out of Russia match even those of its drug business-about $7 billion annually. The women and girls are sold several times over, each time upping their buy-out ransom. A particularly horrific example came to light late last year when Swedish police questioned a 13-year-old Russian girl who reported being kept in a locked van as a sex slave for two years, driven by Russian pimps from one city in Europe to another."
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1) Several people will contest your point.
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More will defend it.
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2) It doesn't matter what kind of economy was implemented. If they tried another form of Marxism, the corrupt officials who never left power would have still found away to come out better in it.
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Another form of "marxism"? What do you mean? like... Juche?
camacazio put what needed to be done nice and simply. Trotsky and others have put it forward a little more in depth. Either way, it would have been nice, and it is what the ICL was striving for.