Yes, the relative abundance produced by capitalism would have overcome the USSR/Russia even absent Yeltsin's visit. Everywhere communism has been tried, it's failed, and the most assertive efforts have led to the death of tens of millions.
Oh yes, since Post Civil War and Pre WW2 Soviet Union was an amazingly productive economy without multiple famines and definitely didn't shoot over a million of their own citizens without a good reason.
The cost of that though. My grandmother and her sister were two survivors out of five children. The rest of the kids died of hunger and sickness during random migrations between villages in 1930s. Her father lost everything he had because soviets decided it’s theirs now, so the whole family had to move someplace else to find a new home. Not everyone had made it.
The growth was staggering because they stole grain and farmland from their citizens, exported it to buy machinery because the USSR couldn't manufacture themselves, which was also wasted since they didn't have the ability to keep the machines maintained properly.
So yeah, turns out you can do things if you starve your people to death. (See North Korea)
They industrialized fast enough to defeat the Nazis who otherwise would probably have exterminated them. The urgency and the threat they faced if they didnt industrialize quickly enough was real and existential.
And yes, in order to do so they caused millions of Ukrainians to starve by exporting all of the food they grew.
Exactly like Britain did to my ancestors in Ireland for profit.
It probably doesn't make sense to attribute it to communism, because Russia is doing the same damn throw human life into a meat grinder approach in the modern day despite no longer being nominally communist. But that poor outcome is definitely attributable to something in the neighborhood of communism, namely the more general totalitarianism, which communism was most certainly a gateway to.
Having said that, I'm not terribly keen on the nominally capitalist nominally democratic "inverted" totalitarianism that's on the rise. But given that more potent forms of totalitarianism are resurgent and eager to fill any power vacuums, I guess it's the best path we've got for now. I can just hope that the newer generations have developed enough memetic resistance to make the whole Facebook (nee Fox News) hysterical-nonsensical mob thing a passing fad.
>It probably doesn't make sense to attribute it to communism, because Russia is doing the same damn throw human life into a meat grinder approach in the modern day despite no longer being nominally communist.
Yeah, this is 100% about Russian borders, which are long, exposed, expensive to defend and present an existential threat on a (historically) fairly regular basis.
America's geography is pretty much the polar opposite, so it's hard to empathize.
Yet, contrast USA with Mexico (not communist). Geography is no match for governance. The USSR failed because their system of government, like every other communist state, produced abject poverty.
I would think that since the borders are expensive to defend, that would lead to trying to be more efficient with human life and other limited resources, rather than less.
Furthermore, talking about the defense of Russian borders is kind of ridiculous in the context of the current attack on Ukraine, where Russia is trying to expand its borders which would otherwise remain stationary. It only makes sense if you interpret "borders" as referring to some larger area outside the actual country but which they nevertheless feel entitled to.
>Furthermore, talking about the defense of Russian borders is kind of ridiculous in the context of the current attack on Ukraine, where Russia is trying to expand its borders which would otherwise just remain stationary.
It's expanding at the points where the Nazi advance almost succeeded in breaking the USSR, where Russia has its only warm water ports and where, long term, NATO, the alliance that destroyed Libya on a whim, was planning to set up military bases with offensive capabilities.
It's still about the vulnerability of its borders.
You're no longer talking about defense, but rather trying to justify an offensive war. Those lines on the map are Schelling points that had enabled a great deal of peace. And frankly they were much more defensible through their legitimacy with other nations, than whatever geographic obstacles are hoped to be obtained.
>they were much more defensible through their legitimacy
Right, just like the legitimacy of Libyan, Iraqi and Afghan borders conferred all the protection they needed.
Putin was the one who tried to explain to America that it would be better if everybody respected each other's sovereignty in 2003 but in 2003 we decided that this principle can go fuck itself.
If the threat model is to protect against an overt military invasion by the US, geographical features aren't going to matter much either.
Furthermore, national borders do seem to matter very much to many people. Europeans widely condemned the Iraq war, because they saw through its false pretenses. And the borders we're talking about are shared with Europeans.
But regardless, the countries the US has invaded still have intact borders! The US didn't annex part of Iraq to create a new US territory or carve off a chunk to give to Saudi Arabia. Rather it changed out the government wholesale while leaving the nominal country intact. Despite its shortcomings, this is a paradigm that helps these disputes converge over time. "Iraq" is now just a part of the US economic empire, regardless of the immoral actions leading to that. It's not right in the sense that it rewards the aggression, but it is right in the sense that it provides more civilian stability.
If Putin were still just playing the covert/political influence game, most people wouldn't be concerned. He did that, and lost hard. He then tried the surgical strike to change out the government, and lost hard. Since he's a loser by current conventions, he flipped the table and descended into WWII-style razing of civilian infrastructure, exterminating the population, and conquering land area. Then he throws out the justification that other countries might engage in the same, even though nobody has. That is what is grossly unacceptable, and needs to be stamped down hard if we want our era of relative peace to continue.
(Also, given that Putin speaks to play a situation rather than promote consistent ideals, what he's happened to say isn't really relevant)
>If the threat model is to protect against an overt military invasion by the US, geographical features aren't going to matter much either.
The US made the mistake of thinking that geographical features didn't pose them a problem in Afghanistan.
Then they realized how incredibly frail their supply chains could be when geography wasnt in their favor.
That mistake cost trillions.
>But regardless, the countries the US has invaded still have intact borders!
This is the most absurd excuse for American imperialism I think I've ever heard.
>Then he throws out the justification that other countries might engage in the same, even though nobody has.
So, Libya happened. America wants Russia to end up like Libya. Russia doesnt want to end up like Libya, so they invaded Ukraine.
>That is what is grossly unacceptable, and needs to be stamped down hard if we want our era of relative peace to continue.
I mean, if you excuse the wanton destruction of Libya by saying "hey at its a failed state but it has intact borders!" then you were basically begging for Ukraine to be invaded.
Sure, geography matters when your country has so little development that retreating to the mountains is a successful strategy. But that doesn't really say much about a developed country that would suffer significant losses by retreating to natural cover.
> This is the most absurd excuse for American imperialism I think I've ever heard.
I'm not excusing American imperialism. I am against American imperialism - note how I readily described Iraq as becoming part of the US empire, as opposed to the usual rejection of the idea that the US is an empire. However I am against Russian imperialism as well, and this situation is rooted in Russian imperialism.
> So, America wants Russia to end up like Libya. Russia doesnt want to end up like Libya.
Once again you're trying to justify offensive conquest by invoking the necessity of defense. If Russia was/is going to "end up like Libya", this has only been made more likely by Russia invading its neighbor.
It more than matters. It dictates the very shape of humanity.
>But that doesn't really say much about a developed country
It matters as much to developed countries as it does to non developed. Switzerland didn't get wealthy by being easy to invade.
>However I am against Russian imperialism as well, and this situation is rooted in Russian imperialism.
Realistically treating Russian defense concerns as a sheer irrelevance is helping to perpetuate this war.
We can be aggressive imperialists or we can stay out of their neighborhood but we can't be both and not provoke a reaction. You can condemn Russian imperialism all you like but if you threaten the bear it will still claw your eyes out.
>Once again you're trying to justify offensive conquest by invoking the necessity of defense. If Russia was/is going to "end up like Libya", this has only been made more likely by Russia invading its neighbor.
The scary part is that this just isnt true. Control over Sevastopol and the land bridge to crimea puts them in a much better defensive position than before.
Destroying western Ukraine ("demilitarising") as a viable functioning state also renders it much less useful to the west, both as a partner and as a means of threatening Russia, turning it into an expensive and dangerous liability.
> Switzerland didn't get wealthy by being easy to invade.
Yeah, back before modern missiles, satellites, fighter jets, and drones. Back when the physical storage of gold was economically significant. Back before technological infrastructure started creating outsized productivity. In the modern day, what actually creates and protects Switzerland's way of life is their economic and political connections to their neighbors.
> We can be aggressive imperialists
Repeat after me: Ukraine wanting to join the US economic empire is not aggression. Ukraine wanting to join NATO to protect themselves from Russia is not aggression. Now write it on the blackboard 100 times.
> if you threaten the bear it will still claw your eyes out
More like when the bear occasionally comes out of the woods and wanders into yards, it will be tolerated. When the bear starts routinely posing a danger to humans, the bear will be shot.
> Destroying western Ukraine ("demilitarising") as a viable functioning state also renders it much less useful to the west
I agree this has become their open goal. Russia failed at stealing it, so they'll try to destroy it and kill everyone living there. Ultimately the more Russia destroys, the larger Ukraine's IMF loans and other foreign indebtedness will be. That indeed disgusts me, but not as much as genocide.
Not endorsing the article, I think it's worth thinking beyond just the economic frame and also factoring in community resilience and such. There's arguments such as from writers like Orlov: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer)
Farmer markets were a separate thing, and that's where you'd find fresh produce (and quality meat), if you could afford it. Looked something like this in late 80s:
The text says "kotlety" which are basically meatballs:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutlet#Cuisines_of_Russia,_Ukr.... But I don't understand what I'm looking at either. Maybe it's the ground meat mix that you shape the cutlets yourself before frying? But what is the bread-looking half on the left side?
It is buckwheat, known to Russians as “Grechka”. It is quite nice, goes well with meat or even mixed with milk.
The white substance is most likely fat.
Haha I forgot we called it grechka. Technically grechnevaya kasha, but colloquially called either grechka or kasha; my grandpa was obsessed with it lol, so we just always called it “ne vkusnaya kasha” aka “not tasty porridge” lol
If I recall correctly, part of Yeltsin’s entourage demanded to see the man in charge of the bread department, hoping to learn about how it was kept so well stocked.
This post is over half a decade old, I wonder what percent of American budgets are spent on groceries in 2023? More or less than 8%?
There is more to this story. Freakonomics did an episode about the Cold War "Farms Race".
I dunno about Yeltsin and the Houston store, but I do know this:
I went on a student tour of the USSR as a college student in 1991, arranged through my University (U of Alabama). I was getting a minor in Russian language, and it seemed like a fun trip. It actually got MORE fun because in the run-up to the trip (in spring, 91) there was some dissent in the USSR and many parents wouldn't let their kids go. In order to create a large enough trip, the University opened registration up to university-area retirees, so we ended up with a cohort of probably 30 folks. Half of us were under 25, and the other half over 65. It was the first time I'd ever really hung out with older people who weren't relatives, and that's really something we don't do enough of. Listen, if you have a chance to drink with WWII Hellcat pilots, do it.
Anyway.
Back then, you took certain American commodities with you to trade -- Levi's, Marlboros, etc. We met a pair of enterprising young black marketeers -- our age -- in Moscow, and hit off so well with them that they met us in (what was then) Leningrad for our last port of call. It was very cool, trying to converse in broken Russian and English, and generally being over the moon to have "friends" from the other side of the Cold War that defined both our countries up to then.
It went so well with Andrei and Volodya that, somehow, they finagled visas, and the next fall came to Tuscaloosa to visit us. Andrei immediately took up with my girlfriend's pal, but Volodya was shyer and stayed with Cassie and I for several weeks. And during that time -- and this would've been fall 91 into winter 92 -- obviously we did some shopping.
I remember vividly taking Volodya to the local supermarket, where we bought the sorts of cheap things students buy. Except obviously our budgets as upper-middle-class college kids allowed us things absurdly beyond the reach of anybody Volodya knew in Moscow -- like fresh fruit and vegetables in January. He was stunned, and we were kind of shamed by the plenty we had access to.
Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.
"Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
I don't pretend for a moment the US was then, or is now, some kind of paradise. We fail our poor in material and constant ways. But those moments in the Bruno's with Volodya are something I'll never forget.
Damn, that was a good read. Thanks for sharing. It's rare to reevaluate ourselves and to see ourselves in a new light, and it sounds like you got a solid, grounded experience that has since anchored your perspective towards one of appreciation for what you/we have. Pretty cool gift.
The older I get the more astounded I am that our friendship with Andrei and Volodya happened at all, and the more regret I have that none of us retained any way to contact each other later. It was 1991. I was the only one of us to have an email address at the time.
The difference is that there was a dozen of scientific institutes and that was it. I.e. there was no Internet connectivity in my city (12th by population in Russia at the time) until 1994.
Oddly, one of the sites I did actually correspond with online at the time was a university in Moscow. I had a job working for a grant in cross-cultural communication that used a sort of online model UN simulation with teams spread all over. It was pretty neat.
It depends. In ideal conditions it wouldnt, but there's all sorts of ways that a large country like the USA (or its corporations) can keep a smaller country (and/or its poorer citizens) in poverty while trading with them, to their own advantage. e.g. Banana Replublics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic), third world debt in the 80s/90s, poor people being pushed into growing cash crops instead of food ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/behind-africas-famin...)
So, yes. I think it might just happen that buying banana from somewhere keeps them poor. These are so well known cases that I somewhat suspect you asked the question as a softball.
Then they don’t get masacred to force others to labour on the banana plantations, and their democraticaly elected leaders don’t get overthrown by the CIA.
Maybe they find other ways to thrive, maybe not. Banan is not the only thing they could grow, and growing things is not the only way to make an economy work.
This is not an abstract economy problem from a econ 101 textbook. History cannot be rolled like that back and “what-if” is not a question we can answer.
What we know is that violence has been commited with the direct goal of securing said banana supply.
> It's like, if you complained about the lack of consumer products in Cuba, how could you discuss that without bringing up the sanctions the US has placed on them for decades?
Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world. Easy to blame everything on the embargo, harder to take a long hard look at the systemic corruption, incompetence, generalized theft and human rights violations plaguing the country.
> Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world.
Is that the case? I don't know a lot about how the blocade works but Wikipedia says "the United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba" and "US-based companies, and companies that do business with the US, which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of US sanctions."
Just looking at Cuba-EU trade (so more for the second category):
> Cuba’s main export goods are agricultural products, beverages, tobacco and mineral fuels, for which there is no preferential trade regime.
> The main export goods from the EU to Cuba are food, chemicals products, plastics, basic metals and their manufactures, machinery, household appliances and transport equipment.
Yes, absolutely. Cuba not only trades with the EU, but also regularly with Canada, another major US ally and does so without legal or political consequences for either Cuba or Canada. The embargo was a shameful disaster of U.S political policy in how it was applied, but also in its PR damage, because it let a grossly corrupt, authoritarian regime spend several decades justifying its nearly every failure on this one U.S political measure with the help of useful idiot supporters in the U.S and elsewhere. The embargo never stopped Cuba from being much better off. It's own rigid, backwards ideology and self serving leaders did.
This is incorrect. Cuba is under secondary sanctions by the US. Any entity that trades with Cuba is liable under US Federal law to get it's assets seized. Granted it doesn't happen as often as it used to, but it's still the law on the books.
Since most countries ask for US dollars in order to trade and that these have to be held by US entities, you're basically guaranteed to have assets that can be seized.
US dollars don't have to be held by US entities. There are US dollars held on balance sheets around the world by non-US entities. During the cold war, the Soviet Union held USD in non-US accounts.
Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
US dollars can only be held in proper by US entities. All US dollars are either actually held by a bank, which has a US entity responsible for those US dollars, or as an IOU for another US entity. Despite them being on the balance sheet of a non-US entity, they are ultimately in custody of some entity under US law, unless we're talking about literal cash.
> Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
Countries do ask for US dollars in order to trade. You can notionally trade in another currency, but the value of this currency is related to the number of US dollars it can buy, and eventually that is what ends up happening. Some countries will set up currency swap mechanisms in order to allow for trade without relying on the dollar, but these are few and far between. It is generally not possible to do such trade without at some level going through the US dollar. This is a natural consequences of the fact that the US dollar is the only dominant reserve currency, meaning that it is by far the currency with the largest trade surplus. The structural reasons for this trade surplus, which I won't get into, are the reason why international trade ends up with the US dollar. For these reasons, the threat if being banned from using the US dollar, if your assets aren't seized, is sufficient to greatly dissuade trade.
Cuba is not the only example of this. American secondary sanctions on Iran led to the cancellation of contracts between European companies and Iranian companies en masse, and were cited as the reason why it happened.
> The parent comment stands up. The embargo is not a reasonable explanation for the poor circumstances of the Cubans.
Cuba has a GDP per capita of 9500$ USD nominal (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...) - which is above the average for Latin America and the Cardibbean. We can look at Iran for an example of a country under an identical sanctions regime, which suffered a 50% fall in GDP. The thesis that most of its economic problems come from the sanctions regime seems strong, as the closest analog suffered a halving of GDP and because it is nonetheless economically a strong performer for the region.
If you look at a microscopic level, the lack of access to specific products is a common theme in Cuban economic problems, and this is certainly attributable to the sanctions regime.
> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.
> "Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
In multiple communist countries in Eastern Europe, bananas were special because they only came ~once a year from Cuba. Anyone having access to them outside that time and/or getting more than a few would fit the profiles he described.
By contrast, some people in Eastern Europe had fancy ski huts available to them. You or I might have asked the same questions if you'd gone skiing with them in the 80s only to find out that his father is a draftsman. "Don't all of you have ski houses?"
For worker class in Russia, it is super common to own (as opposed to rent) your own apartment and also own a country house ("dacha").
You may be otherwise piss-poor, wage wise.
The supermarkets has improved greatly though - not quite the USA level, but on par with Western Europe or sometimes slightly better (more chains, easier to eat healthy)
Today, sure. In USSR, no apartment was privately owned, though. You were assigned one "according to your needs" - e.g. when I was a kid, my extended family of 5 (me, my parents, and my mom's parents) had a two-bedroom apartment of 48.5 m^2 total, 27.2 m^2 of which was the two bedrooms. To give an idea of the size, here's the floor layout of that exact series of apartment buildings:
(Note that there are multiple apartments shown here - every "3K", "2K", or "1K" corresponds to one apartment with that many bedrooms. The "fraction" after that shows the total area and the combined bedroom area of each apartment in m^2.)
I think the best way to describe that arrangement was a "no-cost rent". You only had to pay utilities, and you couldn't have it taken away from you arbitrarily. But e.g. selling it or even renting it out would be impossible (legally; the black market existed regardless), nor could it be inherited.
There was a thing called building cooperatives which gave out the rights to gift or sell the apartment after the mortgage was paid. The private ownership on real estate was legalized in 1990 through that system.
Yes, although you still had to have a "need to improve living conditions", as measured in square meters currently allotted per family member, to get an apartment that way.
There was also the "build it to live in it" condominium programs that opened more opportunities specifically to those just starting their adult lives, who would otherwise qualify at most for a room in a communal apartment, and couldn't possibly afford a downpayment on that mortgage (15-20 monthly salaries). But those came late - many weren't even completed by 1991 - and they had considerable pushback from many local authorities, partly on the basis that such luxury was "undeserved" and unfair to older people who were in the line for regular apartments, and partly because some of their member-elected governance councils were starting to get political ambitions and push for more local self-administration in the 80s.
This was late USSR, all the way up to its dissolution and privatization of housing in 1991. I was a small kid at the time, but I don't recall the standard being different depending on age.
The allotment of living space (counted as bedroom area per person) varied depending on the city, and sometimes there was a difference between the nominal and the actual number. In Moscow and Leningrad the designated minimum was around 7 m^2 per person, but in practice applying for a new apartment would be unlikely to succeed if you had more than 5 m^2. In some of the provinces, it could go as low as 3 m^2 per person.
And keep in mind that this is the minimum that entitled you to apply for a new apartment. Which means that you'd be put in a line to wait your turn to actually get one when one is available, say, 10 years later.
“lifting out of poverty” is defined in terms of consumption.
A family living on a farm and providing most of their own needs, living sustainably for generations, is by most definitions “living in poverty” because they consume very little.
Now if you strip that family of their land and force them to work in factories their consumption goes way up since they no longer are able to support themselves.
That family has now been “lifted out of poverty”.
But yes, you are correct, no system has made people more depended on exploitation then Capitialism.
You realize “consumption” includes things like medical care, nutritious food, quality education, better housing? It actually makes up a very large part of consumption in developed nations.
You’re idealizing the crushing poverty of sustenance farming.
Have you ever been to a developing country? Talked to the families who choose to abandon their farming and work in a factory so their kids can get proper healthcare, better schooling and living in a house without a toilet that feeds into the river?
Plenty of them could continue to work as farmers and choose not too. Who are you to claim their choice is wrong?
I’m guessing you’ve lived a comfy life and take all of these things for granted and then sneer at those who want the same.
The poorest countries account for the least amount of trade globally. They don't have factories, but I imagine you would contrive that owning next to nothing and teetering on the edge of extreme poverty is preferable to working in a factory. That type of work is what created the 4 Asian Tigers, seems ridiculous to knock it.
Lifting out of poverty is also defined in terms of "not starving to death because the winter was too long or cold", "not losing a half a years labor and food because a tornado hit your field", "not having to do manual labor 12 hours a day" and yes "access to material wealth" like indoor plumbing, labor saving devices like washing machines, and the ability to send your children to be educated instead of needing them as additional physical labor when they're old enough. Access to modern medical care and medications. I know some people enjoy farming, and enjoy the rough life. Me personally I'm glad that I don't have to plan months in advance to heat my house for the winter, can obtain literally any food I can imagine within 30 minutes and obtain enough food to feed a family for a month with little more than 40 hours of labor and a 1 hour shipping trip.
I would point out that under capitalism there have been famines even when there has been plenty of surplus food. A lack of famine either acute nor chronic is surely not a defining characteristic of capitalism.
You don't need a famine to starve to death when you're a subsistence farmer, you just need your local area to suffer an unexpected weather event. Too much winter, too much heat, too much rain, too many storms, too many insects. Take your pick of natural disaster. When you and your entire country are subsistence farmers, there's not exactly a lot of surplus or distribution networks to get you replacement food when your local area suffers.
I don’t know… my grandparents were literally sharecroppers and my grandmother said it was ducking miserable. When she was a child most people lost children to disease and still in 1920, sometimes to hunger. But the economy changed and improved and they eventually owned an air conditioned home and two cars. She said the improvement in her life from childhood until I was born were almost unimaginable.
Prey tell, how do you live? How would you in practice have your children and other family members live? If you're even moderately well off, very little if nothing stops you from seeking exactly the life you idealize in your comment. Resources for learning all its hard tricks and labors abound (largely due to the very same capitalist-fed internet of commodified information sharing that you disdain). But by all means, decide for hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers that their lives of toil were preferable to the things generations of them strove for despite "having to" consume more.
That's actually not what it shows. It shows that the free market focused development model which was popular across the entire rest of the world did not, in aggregate, reduce abject poverty.
> It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.
What even is the difference between such heavy state capitalism and socialism? Socialist economies existed with various level of market involvement and economic freedom, see Lenin's NEP - was the USSR initially a champion of free market reform?
You are mixing up democracy and capitalism. All democracies happens to be capitalist today since people quickly vote away communist leaders when they can, but that doesn't mean that democracy and capitalism are the same thing. China can be capitalist without democratic elections, I'd argue that is where they are today and where they have been since the "Chinese miracle" started.
China is capitalist, they just aren't democratic. They kept the authoritarian regime with sham elections from their communism days but changed everything else into capitalist systems, they are as capitalist as a typical western country today.
Authoritarian regime, control of society, control of economy are basically the definition of fascism. For obvious reasons the only clear difference with canon is the lack of anti-communism.
By the way, elections in China are only at very local levels. Most of what we do elections for in western countries are indirect elections there. The Congress is not directly elected by people.
>Communism, or any other system, can’t make that same claim.
I don't really think communism is a viable economic system, because of, you know, people. However, a couple of points should be made:
- Communism has always had to deal with enmity of world's richest and most influential nations (USA and UK in particular). Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere, whether they like it or not (kind of like some religions). Could this have been otherwise? I don't know.
- Between 1922 and 1962, USSR's economy grew at an average of about 9% real per annum, despite having to deal with the massive trauma of World War 2. Also, income inequality decreased. Population went from ~140 million in poverty to ~240 million living, um, not in poverty.
So... it is not quite as simple as you make it out to be.
China was friendly with the USSR only briefly, like in the 1950s. It was desperately poor at the time, and received a lot of aid from the USSR.
I don't know what other friendlies you mean. USSR installed communist/socialist governments in the countries it liberated from German occupation after WW2, but those relationships were... complicated.
> Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere
Communist countries wanted to export communism, maybe for all the good and bad reasons democratic countries want to export democracy. However there were plenty of people in the west that wanted their country to become communist, especially up to the 80s. So the enmity against all the communist world was also a matter of internal affairs, to contain internal opposition.
On reflection, whether communism holds extra appeal in poor countries, or whether it was an accident of history that *rich* capitalist countries faced off against poor communist countries, communism's chances were kind of hamstrung by this enmity. The playing field was uneven.
So which system is truly better at lifting people out of poverty, all other things being equal, remains uncertain.
Bananas are a photogenic edge case, not a staple food. Far more representative of America's food-wealth are grains and meat -- which it produces in enormous amounts, and exports to the rest of the world. That doesn't happen by exploiting other countries, because no other countries are involved; it happens because of technology, because of mechanized agriculture and high-yield seeds and synthetic fertilizer and many other under-appreciated pillars of the modern world. And those technologies have been spreading through the world, lifting people out of poverty in vast numbers.
I won't ask you to show appreciation for heroes like Haber and Bosch and Borlaug and all the rest, but they have my thanks.
I can only go "???" to this. America has only gotten more "opulent" since the 90s. The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we've seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.
> The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we’ve seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.
Actually, that happened in not since the 1990s, and we were discussing issues like this on our computers then, too. I know, I was there.
But the opulence of the 1990s wasn’t because it was the height of technology, or average earnings, it was in large part driven by fashion and attitudes and their effect on lifestyle and the marketplace, driven in part by the lingering visible-status-oriented attitudes of the 1980s, in part by the perception of geopolitical and economic invincibility (both the–at that point–longest economic expansion in the modern period plus the fall of the Soviet Union, lopsided military engagements like Panama and the First Gulf War, etc.)
Greater aggregate and even median wealth looks and feels different in the shadow of the Great Recession and the Afghan and Iraq Wars.
How do you explain the success of the capitalist zones in China relative to the rest of the country with this worldview that the benefits of capitalism must come from exploiting others?
certainly in a marxist analysis wage-laboring banana pickers are being exploited because they're alienated from the fruits of their labor (which are in this case literal fruits)
nevertheless, 01992 was a long time after democracy was restored in honduras in 01981 and the civil war began in guatemala in 01960, and bananas are still cheap today, including here in argentina, so evidently cheap bananas don't require the particular much more severe kind of exploitation the term 'banana republic' was invented to describe
Banana republics are exploitative in literally every definition of exploitation, because there was literal military violence involved. And even nowadays, Marxist analysis is far from the only framework in which workers in the global south are exploited. In fact almost any theory of exploitation except for the most radical libertarian/neoliberal would see an element of exploitation.
It turns out that since 1980 there has been economic growth, making the production and shipping of various commodities more affordable.
If banana republics weren't necessary to keep bananas affordable and profitable they would never have existed in the first place.
you are reasoning from the implied functionalist premise that forms of domination exist because they are necessary
this is a false premise
forms of domination exist not because they are necessary but because they are achievable—because those who support them are better organized and resourced than those who oppose them
those of us here in the 'global south' are generally not a fan of the term, lumping together as it does botswana, myanmar, the philippines, and argentina under a single rubric; it reflects a cartoonishly shallow analysis of the real social relations in the world system
I grew up with a guy that had a similar experience escorting Russian people in Florida? Alabama? Somewhere in the south where we hid defectors until everything was straight. He was driving some guy around who thought it was a guided tour to Potemkin villages, so he pulled out a map and said pick a place.
They drove to whatever that town was and he said, pick a store. After a couple of hours, I think his mind was blown.
This was a fairly rural, poor part of the state. Later they went to Atlanta and the guy was gaga over... everything.
There was a Russian group that made a stop at Cumberland Mall in suburban Atlanta. On that particular day, there was a shooting in the food court, so they got much more of the American experience than they expected. No one in their group was harmed but I'm sure it made an impression.
Cuban rulers would rather its citizens starve than implement democracy. They have fake elections to trick their people, each seat has only one candidate selected by the communist party so it is all a sham.
-> “Cuban rulers would rather its citizens starve than implement democracy.”
cuban here. please dont pretend america care about democracy. america have interests. when they need new regime they suppress democracy as needed or push for democracy. main idea to get some regime subservient to american economic interest.
why america has so many migrants at border but america do nothing or even talk about what crisis happening in central or south america country? instead they fighting proxy war in ukraine. why? more lucrative and profit opportunity in ukraine. south america not have resources or proxy war opportunity.
and given state of American government..race issues..economic issue..growing gap..unaffordable housing..America last country to dictate how other country should run.
i not favor cuban government, but your post bullshit. you idea that you know more about cuba like you on some pedestal.watch as you infrastructure crumble you homeless and drug population rise
I'm from Sweden, not USA. I think there are many problems with USA, but it isn't capitalism at least, I'd say the major problem is that their democracy doesn't properly represent the will of the people. Sweden isn't perfect, but I don't see many countries that does a better job, and Sweden is very capitalist, we voted about going towards communist but people didn't want to. Instead we have a strong capitalism, but with relatively high taxes and high government benefits, but other than that governments doesn't meddle much with companies, so freedom to do business is very high.
If Cuba was a democracy then I would disagree with the sanctions, but I don't think it is wrong to pressure a government into giving proper voting rights to its people. If Cuba actually implemented democracy and USA still sanctioned them then that would be bad, but that isn't the situation we are in.
The issue with Sweden is that it taxes work, not wealth.
You easily hit the 56% rate on income tax and even the poorest workers pay 25% VAT, meanwhile wealthy landowners and shareholders pay no inheritance tax and minimal capital gains and property tax.
So it impedes social mobility and encourages hard workers to move abroad - this has been made much worse with the refugee crisis too, as they're practically discouraged to work hard. And now look at the healthcare crisis, etc. as wages are a pittance compared to the USA, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, etc.
Taxing work instead of wealth greatly encourages Swedes to start companies. I think that is a big reason why we have so many successful start-ups from Sweden. Sweden discourages the corporate climbers, it is a very bad way to make money here, I don't think that is bad in itself, it means that smart people will try to do something outside of existing companies, either by moving abroad or by starting a company.
But I am not stupid, I too moved to Switzerland to work since it netted me many times more money per hour worked. That is why I said that Sweden isn't perfect, I'm not sure what the perfect system is, but Sweden is still pretty good.
Capital gains tax in Sweden is 30% and property tax is around 0.75% IIRC. I don't think they are that low - they're higher than most of Europe in fact.
And VAT is a double-edged sword... It's the only tax that essentially nobody can avoid, and thus the only tax that also applies to people who are already wealthy and could otherwise live their life without paying any tax.
This is true, but with a catch. Other companies and individuals in other countries can trade with Cuba... provided they can keep their operation separate with the operation that interacts with us customers/companies. And even if they manage to do so, they still are at risk to be flagged or to cause their costumers to be flagged as non compliant by the us banking systems. So to burden this risk to trade with a small and poor island might not be as attractive even to people not directly subject to the US embargo.
> The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States has informed the US Government that such activities violate international law and has requested that the US take immediate steps to exempt food and medicine from the embargo.
> In approving the FY2001 agriculture appropriations act, Congress codified the lifting of unilateral sanctions on commercial sales of food, agricultural commodities, medicine, and medical products to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Sudan, and extended this policy to apply to Cuba (Title IX of H.R. 5426, as enacted by P.L. 106-387; Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000, or TSRA). Other provisions place financing and licensing conditions on sales to these countries. Those that apply to Cuba, though, are permanent and more restrictive. TSRA also gives Congress the authority in the future to veto a President’s proposal to impose a sanction on the sale of agricultural or medical products.
There's also the reverse. Cuba is a strange place to see.. with shops selling 10 items total (spread on a wall), when they can afford to open. The pace of economy dictates life, it's so weird when it's so slow.
My dad moved to the US in 99 (he grew up in a town of about 50k people at the time). He said he was shocked people would stop for him when crossing the street, and he was amazed he could by a 1/2 gallon of ice cream for a couple bucks. Previously, he might have had ice cream once a year. He was also impressed and made happy by the abundance of meat and milk.
Funnily he was quite disappointed at the fruit situation coming from a tropical country, but that was more about freshness than quantity.
There's also the issue that people from tropical countries are used to a variety of fruit we simply don't have. There are various things that are either rare in the US or completely absent because they can't survive being shipped. Even subtropical--my wife loves dragon fruit but is unwilling to pay through the nose for the very inferior stuff in the market here.
While I do not have a taste for tropical fruit there are the bananas we encountered in Africa that ruined me. Since encountering those I have pretty much zero interest in US bananas, what we had there can't be bought in the US because they don't ship well.
Do you mean the importance of not having entire industries bombed to craters? The "leftist clowns" in Europe today get most of their products from Europe, and they seem pretty content about it. Speaking for myself,the variety of cheeses in western Europe is flabbergasting.
Russia's poor are still not very well taken care of under capitalism. Witness all the Russian soldiers in Ukraine being impressed with washing machines and stealing them.
Please don’t take everything you read on the internet at face value. Every decently sized city there has at least one DNS, Eldorado and MVideo electronics chain:
Cities all over the country as small as 50k have these stores and their competitors where you can buy fresh Mexican avocados and sparkling new Korean appliances.
Or, if you don’t want to go in store you can buy any item under the sun on Wildberries, Ozon and have it delivered to your front door.
The fact that inventory in stores, or delivery apps exist does not help when a lot of people in rural Russia can't afford it, as one of the sibling comments points out.
I've also heard (from Russians) that water access in rural Russia is poor.
I visited Russia in 2013 and 2014, and there were a lot of gritty places, but availability of modern retail shops, goods, etc. was basically the same as places in Europe at that time. My kid travelled there last summer and said the sanctions are having an impact, but a lot of it is on the order of, for example, McDonald's changing the sign outside to some knockoff brand and sourcing their ground beef and packaging from somewhere else.
To use a washing machine you need access to running water, sewage and electricity. The first two of those are still not available in large parts of the country.
And large portions of the population still cannot afford one.
The intersection of those two frequently ends up in the army, as that is the only social mobility they know.
Similar story in Fall of '92. I was a freshman in college and this dude, Nikolai, down the hall in the dorm was one of two guys from Vladivostok on a program. Most of us in the hall bonded very quickly including Nikolai. One day, a smaller group among us were talking and somehow the topic of his cologne came up. It smelled literally like ammonia.
We wanted to give him something else, but how do you do that without being offensive? One guy had a plan. When Nikolai was showering in the hall showers, this guy went in and stole Nikolai's cologne and tossed it. The next day, he was puzzled as to who stole his cologne. We said, "it's alright, we'll get you a replacement" and took him to the mall to one of those booths with knockoff designer perfume and cologne.
The guy was just in awe of the whole place. Eyes wide open, looking at every store. At the cologne place, first sample he smelled, he lit up, smiled, and said, "Yes, this is much better than my old cologne."
The guy that tossed his old one paid like the $20 for the bottle.
Later, it turned out the guy got his girlfriend pregnant on the night he left for the US, and had to go back to marry her after the semester. Such a bummer. Hope he's doing well with a nice family because he was such a friendly and fun guy.
In 1995 I had the pleasure to be part of a State Department sponsored "cultural exchange" with our then new friends in the Russian Federation.
Basically it amounted to myself and about a dozen others, organized into a small chamber orchestra going to Russia for a summer, and in exchange a group of Russians formed into folk/pop entertainment group visiting and staying with us for a while during the school year.
I can't say that 1995 in post-USSR Ekaterinburg was incredibly different than 1991's pre-Russia Sverdlovsk. There were a few bits of free market showing up, but the general economic situation there was pretty dire. Even for me, who grew up in a very rural area and quite poor, felt like I came from nearly unimaginable wealth.
A couple years later the State Department and Russia repeated the exchange and I had a chance to show my host mother around the local shopping malls and such. The "change" from communism had already happened, the Russians by then were by and large waiting for America to arrive.
It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime, and it has given me lots of both wanderlust and perspective that I've carried with me for the rest of my life. I was very happy to see the improvement in standard of living in many parts of Russia over the years, but I'm very sad to see what they're wasting it on at the moment in Ukraine.
I played violin. We played a mix of classical music and pop film scores. A local composer in one of the areas we visited composed a song for our group that we also played a few times.
The Russians played half late 80s early 90s synth pop and half Russian folk music complete with wardrobe changes. They were really cool.
I don't recall making it to an electronics store at the time. But I do remember talking a lot about the state of consumer tech. Most of what we talked about or showed them in our homes was familiar even if they didn't have this or that device at home. My host family for example had a color TV, a Dendy NES clone, and a boom box that my host brother endlessly played Metallica mix tapes on. I saw a few desktop computers in passing, but have no idea what they were. They shared a single phone with the entire apartment building. It sat outside and was red. I think it looks almost exactly like the phones in Half Life Alyx.
The Internet was very nascent at the time and they all seemed nonplussed by the BBS scene.
> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas.
My friend's high school physics teacher had many memorable lines, one of them being:
"Bananas! I saw my first banana when I was already in college!"
My father hosted a few Americans in (back then) communist Poland. To them it was like time travel to some bizarro world bygone era. They really wanted to drive his car, which was also a "classic" tech and design wise.
Anyway all this spilled over to the 90s, making the weirdest things to be considered premium goods, like Vans shoes, vacation in Malta/Greece or McDonald's.
Eventually this all ended and I remember the exact moment I realized it: I saw a somewhat overweight teenager in a mall holding a pizza slice.
Every part of this sight would be out of place in the mid 90s, not to mention the previous system.
Yeah. I realized that it's a near certainty that all the retirees I traveled with 32 years ago are now dead, especially the Hellcat pilot. He was I think 75 at the time.
Sitting in a hotel bar in Kiev with him, drinking vodka, and listening to tales of the Pacific theater -- mostly just antics with his buddies, but some flight stories -- was pretty amazing. I wish I had kept a journal back then, because I've mostly forgotten any specific anecdotes.
I've lived in the US my entire life, so I don't really know much else - but I am and always have been blown away by fresh fruit in January (the whole year!). Sometimes I turn over a fresh apple or pear in my hands and the sticker has "product of Chile" or some other South American country - blows me away every time I stop and think about it....
1986, my (China born) girlfriend-now-wife was over the moon to discover she could have as much milk as she wanted. In her experience it was reserved for kids and not something available to adults.
What gets me is how pivotal information is. Back in the days your reality was defined by a few, and as a social species.. we follow suit. Today it's not.. China tries to censor reality but even they fail to an extent.
It's naive to imagine Yeltsin's mind was really changed by a spontaneous visit. He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like? The premiere of a superpower just randomly decided to visit a grocery store?
No.
Yeltsin was contemplating reforms and changes and wanted to collect a political tool he could later user if needed. He knew exactly how this visit would go, and it was intended so he could use it as rhetorical device to illustrate the necessity of reforms.
Who knows. At least according to (then Germany's chancellor) Helmut Schmidt, at an official visit of Brezhnev where he had invited him to his private home in Hamburg, Brezhnev was flabbergasted that the German chancellor could live in an average home, next to normal people, without walls and hundreds of soldiers separating them.
We have the same story in Norway. Apparently Nikita Khrusjtsjov visited then prime minister Einar Gerhardsen in his small and modest housing association apartment in 1964 and subsequently demanded to know where Gerhardsen REALLY lived, cause he couldn't imagine the prime minister living in a normal apartment in a normal apartment building. But he did and lived in the same apartment until his death in 1987.
It might be a matter of Soviet diplomacy to act surprised.
Is the story with Gerhardsen relayed by him / officials? Schmidt told it himself, so at least it's not something somebody made up and everybody repeated it because it's such a nice story, unless he himself made it up. He wasn't the type, but who knows.
I don’t think the official narrative implies he was naive.
A senior person in an authoritarian system like that could be surrounded by “yes men” who would repeat the official Soviet lines that perhaps American supermarkets weren’t all that much different from soviet ones, or only available to the super rich, etc
Perhaps they also received legitimate reports as well. An unplanned impromptu trip would be a good way to see which reports were the most accurate.
Sorry I don't mean that Yeltsin was naive, but that it's naive for us in the present day (and the author) to believe that but for a random whim Yeltsin would have believed anything different.
". . . has been brought to a state of such poverty" from the article also contradicts that the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty.
> [...] the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty.
It is much easier to display numbers showing that you "lifted poor population out of poverty", when most of that poor population either got genocided or sent off to gulags or simply died off due to the aforementioned poverty. Not even mentioning the classic number massage.
Before someone tries to go full-on "you are just an american shill", I grew up in Russia during 90s, and my parents+grandparents grew up in the USSR. One of them had to cover up his jewish ethnicity his entire life, I only found out about it many years later, after his passing. Let me just say, he wasn't doing that cover-up for some personal reasons at all.
When it comes to the Soviet Union, the closer you are to the source material, the worse it looks.
In Soviet Communist states visits, public displays and greetings were so tightly choreographed and planned that there is a very slim chance that anything like this is coincidental. When Nikita Khrushchev visited Mao in '59 the protocol was specified down to the handshake with the intent on the Chinese side to signify the low status of the relation given the Soviet-Sino split.
Symbolism and performance was everything in Soviet politics, and even in Soviet life. American presidents might casually go and walk into some store on camera but this is not how Communist poltiicians thought.
Pointing to one highly choreographed high profile incident is not convincing evidence that it was normative. This was not much of a PR stunt. It was at least on paper an unplanned visit. I don't believe he used it as persuasive evidence. Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing, he appears to have had a genuine emotional reaction.
> bout a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia.
>Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing
I believe that about most politician's autobiographies, not just Soviet ones. I wouldn't be surprised if the autobiography was written with the explicit intent to sell better in the US, Prince Harry style.
Soviet guy comes to the land of plenty, has a almost religious experience in a supermarket and shakes off his misbegotten Soviet ways, that's a Disney story lol. Of course he knew what was going on in the US and his own country long before.
It can be both. You can know intellectually that the Americans have a higher standard of living than Russians, and still be surprised by what that really means, at a practical level, for ordinary people.
Right, and also why would he care so much about grocery stores in America when he's in Russia and reviewing military and diplomatic intel about the US? "They have grocery stores that have more items than our stores" - boring. "A US diplomat was arrested and released in Latin America for something he did while drunk" - interesting.
Everything is fundamentally driven by the economy, so having even a glimpse of that economy in practice (eg: a supermarket) is essential to drawing a more accurate picture of the wider military and geopolitics.
If your foe can demand bananas any day of the year for pennies while you can't, you lost that war before it even started.
>”He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like?”
Take this all with a grain of salt because this is just what I remember from reading stories online of people who used to live in the USSR, but the average person realized the West had more material prosperity but they were under the impression the upper class folks were the only ones with real access to it. They believed the common worker still had to deal with limited selection and shortages, much like they did.
Additionally, with whatever glimpses they saw of western consumerism they were told that the abundance was intentionally staged, like a Potemkin village. This was not uncommon for the USSR to do when dignitaries or journalists came to visit. So it made sense that the West would do this too.
I have to imagine that as a Soviet citizen and dignitary he assumed everything he saw on his trip was staged or choreographed in some way. They intentionally made an unplanned stop to try and confront this. Perhaps he and his entourage already knew he was going to find a well stocked supermarket, but I can’t help but think cognitive dissonance kept him from really accepting it until he saw it firsthand.
In 1989, I was a child growing up on the streets of a small town in Siberia. During those years, I believed everyone in America was prosperous - the 'common worker' didn't exist, and it was wealth all the way down. My family was not connected, and we were firmly middle class (in the "all animals are equal" way). The Soviet propaganda machine was compelling before my time, but by the 90s, common folks in the USSR were not under any delusion that life in the US was equally bad.
My grandfather was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and lived there as a child through the Nazi siege. In the 40's and 50's in the USSR he and his friends saw through the propaganda and knew that things in the US were much better.
But you know what's strange? He lives in NJ now, he's been there for the last 25 years. He watches Russian state TV and also CNN and thinks he gets both perspectives. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he defended Russia, and spit out all the lines about the "nazi leadership" of Ukraine. "Bucha was faked," all that. I think he realized that he was in the minority and toned it down, but this definitely made an impression on me. It's not that certain people are immune to propaganda and some aren't. Anybody can fall into it.
Well, one year long invadion should give you a hint. Detaining people for calling it war instead of "special operation" is another one. Calling other neighbours "fake/artificial" countries is another bad sign that Russia's intentions are not good.
People were not detained in the USA for using the wrong nomenclature to describe the Iraq invasion, and yet that was also an unspeakably cruel, venal war of cynical aggression knowingly perpetrated on laughably false pretenses. To this day roughly half of Americans think it was the right move - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/19/iraq-war-co...
So I don't think factors like that are so good at separating "good" invasions from "bad" ones.
The thing is, there's vanishingly few "good invasions".
Even fewer when you're intent on annexing territory and capturing resources and large numbers of people.
The logic error you've committed above: Stifling dissent about the war with authoritarian measures may not be a necessary condition for an invasion to be bad, but it still can be a hint that the invasion is bad.
Rejecting the territorial integrity of the country invaded, similarly, can be a pretty good hint.
>"Even fewer when you're intent on annexing territory and capturing resources and large numbers of people."
As ugly as it sounds I would actually prefer that the US had annexed countries it had invaded. This way it would at least be responsible and people would leave in more decent place than before. Instead they came in, murdered and otherwise fucked people and then left without much remorse and repercussion.
When McCarthy did it, it didn't show how strong McCarthy was; it showed how weak he was. When Putin does it, it doesn't show how strong Putin is, either.
To see Putin as a weak evildoer is falling for US propaganda.
The truth is more nuanced. Strong powers take advantage of weak powers and the US is no exception. We do it by expanding NATO territory. There are also arguments to be made that the US pushed Putin into the war. As it is a strategic move to have russia use up its arms fighting a neighbor rather than the US. The war also greatly increased US natgas exports to Europe.
It's pretty immoral / weak to for the world's superpower to push neighboring countries into war for these reasons.
1. NATO expansion isn't driven by US imperialism. We aren't conquering countries and forcing them to join; they are asking to join - and not because we're tying a big aid package to NATO membership. They're joining because they're worried about Russian imperialism.
2. You say it's accepting propaganda to see Putin as weak. But you see him as being pushed into war by the US. That's not something that happens to someone who is strong.
3. "As it is a strategic move to have russia use up its arms fighting a neighbor rather than the US."
Absolutely. More: It's to NATO's advantage to have Russia use up its arms fighting a non-NATO-member.
Sure, Putin is not a good leader for Russia, he's power-hungry and does not seem to have the best interests of the Russian people in mind. However by those same metrics you should consider US leadership as also being a weak evildoer.
Is it good or evil to push other countries into war knowing that thousands will die?
Is it good or evil to profit off the resulting energy crisis?
Is it even smart to risk a global nuclear war to destroy outdated arms and decades old tanks?
Is it good or evil to trigger economic collapse via sanctions causing starvation both inside the country and to export nations? Don't we consider Mao and Stalin some of the most evil people that ever lived for doing the same? Starvation is a terrible way to die yet it isn't even seen as collateral damage.
Putin will die anyway in the next couple decades. It made no sense to poke the bear and trigger all this. It ultimately just strengthens China and increases the amount of global suffering.
Dan Carlin has a great 'Poking the Bear' episode that goes into detail on the many ways in which the US provoked Russia/Putin. Of course Putin was the primary cause of the war but it is foolish to believe that the US is blameless.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a gotcha. Are you assuming that everyone opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine think the USA invasion of Iraq was good? I think in both cases it's very easy to identify which side is in the wrong, and it's the one invading another country.
Well, I think mislabeling as a “one year long invasion” what is a decade long war with Ukraine intentionally shelling urban centers in violation of a negotiated peace speaks to having been taken in by propaganda.
Not sure if this is a troll or a bot but I'll take the question seriously and answer it seriously. After all, this did occur to me at the time.
What convinced me that I'm not falling for Western propaganda? What it came down to was the following argument, and it has to be an argument and not a soundbite because in order to get beneath the propaganda we have to go deep.
- Many of Russia's claims against Ukraine are either true or have real elements of truth to them. Yes the founder of Azov is an avowed nationalist*. Yes, there have been laws passed in Ukraine that required greater use of Ukrainian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#201.... Yes, the parliament of Ukraine considered giving Hero status to Stepan Bandera, who is a controversial figure because (among other things) he did work with the Nazis in WWII. Yes, there was fighting in Donbas, and while I don't know about Ukraine intentionally shelling civilians, I can imagine that at least there were civilians killed as a result of Ukrainian fire in that area since 2014.
- None of these arguments rise to the level of necessitating military intervention.
- Russia did not take steps to de-escalate the conflict. There were so many things Russia could have done if it was genuinely interested in peace and friendly relations with a sovereign Ukraine. If you're worried about persecution of Russians in Ukraine, make it easy for them to get to Russia. If you're concerned about fighting, use your status as a UNSC member to call for a peacekeeping mission. Russia did none of these things.
I could go on, but the main argument is that when you look past the emotionally charged arguments, the substance and the necessity of military action just aren't there. Bandera's quite a character, but put his history aside for a moment and ask yourself what's his relevance to the current conflict: Yushchenko awarded him hero status in 2010. Yanukovich cancelled this a couple months later. In 2019 Ukraine's parliament took up the issue and decided against giving him an award. And Russia wants to send in soldiers for that? Because they considered him for an award and rejected the idea?
* He (Andriy Biletsky) is quoted as having said something about "lead the white races .. against Semite-led untermenschen" but the Guardian article that makes the claim provides no citation.*
> while I don't know about Ukraine intentionally shelling civilians, I can imagine that at least there were civilians killed as a result of Ukrainian fire in that area since 2014
Ukraine has intentionally shelled urban centers for a decade — and you think Russia is wrong to protect ethnic Russians from that?
> Russia did not take steps to de-escalate the conflict. There were so many things Russia could have done if it was genuinely interested in peace and friendly relations with a sovereign Ukraine.
Do you mean like asking France and Germany to negotiate a peace that protects the people of Donbas while remaining part of Ukraine?
Russia did that in 2014 — and it was cynically exploited to arm Ukraine for this conflict by NATO, who refused to protect the people in Donbas from Ukrainian shelling.
What should Russia have done to protect the ethnic Russians in Donbas — having tried to negotiate a peace only for Ukraine to shell their cities for another decade?
> I could go on, but the main argument is that when you look past the emotionally charged arguments
You’re the one making emotional strawmen about Banderites rather than focusing on the stated Russian objective of protecting Donbas after a decade of diplomacy failed.
Is that because you learned about the Russian “position” from NATO propaganda rather than directly from RT?
This is the Russian position, according to RT:
> Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
So to protect the people of Donbas, Russia fires missiles at Kiev, Kherson, Odessa, Lvov? To protect those people it launches an invasion and calls on the Ukrainian army to overthrow its government? To protect those people it annexes Kherson?
To protect those people it tries to decimate the energy infrastructure of Ukraine so that people will freeze in the winter and beg their government to stop fighting?
Do you honestly believe that Putin actually has the best interests of the people of Donbas at heart? Do you really think that's what this is about? When Russian journalists get murdered he shows no compassion. He doesn't give a fuck about the people of Donbas, he doesn't even give a fuck about his own people.
> So to protect the people of Donbas, Russia fires missiles at Kiev, Kherson, Odessa, Lvov?
> To protect those people it tries to decimate the energy infrastructure of Ukraine so that people will freeze in the winter and beg their government to stop fighting?
This is the brutality of war — and why Russia tried to make the Minsk agreements work.
> Do you honestly believe that Putin actually has the best interests of the people of Donbas at heart? Do you really think that's what this is about?
Yes — I believe that a substantial reason for this is what happened in Donbas. Russians are angry at Putin for being weak and allowing this violence against ethnic Russians.
I certainly believe that this is more about protecting Donbas and Russia than the past decade of events has been good faith by NATO — Russia’s story makes sense, while NATO is openly lying by pretending this was an unprovoked attack.
- - - - -
You didn’t answer:
What specifically should Russia have done when a decade of diplomacy failed?
> Yes — I believe that a substantial reason for this is what happened in Donbas. Russians are angry at Putin for being weak and allowing this violence against ethnic Russians.
There was no violence to speak of. In all of 2021, only 25 civilians died, lowest annual figure since the war in Ukraine began in 2014. These deaths were mainly due to land mines in regions illegally occupied by Russia. To build support for the new invasion, Russian state media has blown these deaths out of proportion for years, depicting the situation as if people were living under constant artillery attacks and hiding in basements year after year.
> What specifically should Russia have done when a decade of diplomacy failed?
Cut funding and arming of the so-called "separatists" and remove Russian tanks, guns and military personnel from Ukraine. Politically, if they want a stable neighbour with exemplary human rights record, then they should encourage the integration of Ukraine into NATO, OECD and the EU. All countries in the region that have integrated with western organizations have seen dramatic improvements in all areas of human development.
You're 100% wrong here. This is not the brutality of war but the brutality of Russia. If the main goal is to protect the ethnic Russians of Donbas, why fire missiles at Lvov? Why try to send tanks into Kiev? Why capture Kherson? You know why? Because protecting Donbas is not the goal! It was a paper-thin excuse for some non-sense power politics and territorial expansion.
I already answered what Russia should have done. Russia claims "diplomacy has failed" and it's so paper thin. Even the US went before the UN in the case of Iraq. Russia did not go to the UN in this case. Their news programs (which I watch) will tell you they did, and their ambassador probably put forth some slapdash resolution, but did they take it seriously? No. Did they raise legitimate concerns and act like a partner interested in resolving a problem, as opposed to someone looking to escalate a problem into an excuse? No. They accuse Zelensky of being a drug-addicted fascist. Have you seen him? Have you seen Putin? Did you not see the anger and hatred in Putin's face on Feb 24? I did. I was shocked by it. I'd never seen his face so contorted. And this wasn't some propaganda show that took a clip out of context, I watched his whole speech on Russia's channel one.
I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point. Don't you have better things to do? I do, and I'm going to go see to them. Good day, sir.
> Did they raise legitimate concerns and act like a partner interested in resolving a problem, as opposed to someone looking to escalate a problem into an excuse?
They spent a decade trying to work with countries like France and Germany to enact the Minsk accords — which those countries promised to guarantee.
Did those NATO countries act like a partner interested in resolving a problem? — did they even do what they’d promised in that treaty?
> Have you seen him? Have you seen Putin? Did you not see the anger and hatred in Putin's face on Feb 24?
Yes — Putin’s speeches have been thoughtful and considered, explaining their reasons. Especially compared to the vapid virtue signaling from Ukraine and NATO.
> I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point.
This is a bad faith ad hominem because you’re uncomfortable answering the questions of someone who disagrees with you.
That’s a sign you don’t have good support for your beliefs — notice how you’re bothered but I’m not?
The crimes in Bucha were corroborated by not only the testimony of the residents there, but also the security cameras left in homes and businesses and even satellite photography. The Russians left corpses laying out in the streets for weeks as they occupied the town.
I do know that US media has lied or propagandized numerous aspects of this war — from the origins to the current status.
My question was that broader one:
How do you know this isn’t like Iraq (where the media lied about reasons) or Afghanistan (where the media lied about status, until the sudden collapse)?
> both sides have presented evidence of war crimes
Both sides always do. One side, in this case, has international validation. If you’re ignoring evidence and going off headlines, of course you’ll have a shallower view.
Considering Iraq invasion and how it was "presented" at the time everything is possible but it's hard to me to understand how can someone trust an authoritan regime lead by someone like Putin. I think some people are just pissed off and try to find something against the system that treated them "unfairy"
Not sure if this provides any insight to you, but FWIW my grandfather is not pissed off. He's one of the most easy-going, happy-go-lucky people I know. He doesn't really care a whole lot about the conflict, those are just his conclusions from what he's seen. And he has interests in life outside of what's covered on news programs, he just likes to keep up with the news, as do most normal people.
As to how anyone can trust the regime, if the only information you consume is what's curated by the regime, and if interesting-but-crtical views are not pushed forward, your thinking will be skewed. This is human nature.
I was born in 1961, was a child growing up on the streets of a small town in Siberia just like yourself but I guess I am an older version by what looks to be 10-15 years. The town was satellite science type called Akademgorodok. We were middle class "equals" just as you described but that was in 70s. In the 80s as far as I can remember neither myself nor my friends believed any of that Soviet Propaganda. Our parents were mostly scientists and some (very few yet) had visited the West and we had pretty good ideas what's in the stores over there ;)
> but the average person realized the West had more material prosperity but they were under the impression the upper class folks were the only ones with real access to it
This propaganda technique is called reverse cargo cult. They don't try to directly refute the facts on the ground. They just claim that clever people realize it's all an illusion. It's devastatingly effective. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a sneer. https://hanshowe.org/2017/02/04/trump-and-the-reverse-cargo-...
"In a regular cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw, hoping for the same outcome. They don’t know the difference between a straw airstrip and a real one, they just want the cargo.
In a reverse cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw. But there’s a twist:
When they build the straw airstrip, it isn’t because they are hoping for the same outcome. They know the difference, and know that because their airstrip is made of straw, it certainly won’t yield any cargo, but it serves another purpose. They don’t lie to the rubes and tell them that an airstrip made of straw will bring them cargo. That’s an easy lie to dismantle. Instead, what they do is make it clear that the airstrip is made of straw, and doesn’t work, but then tell you that the other guy’s airstrip doesn’t work either. They tell you that no airstrips yield cargo. The whole idea of cargo is a lie, and those fools, with their fancy airstrip made out of wood, concrete, and metal is just as wasteful and silly as one made of straw.
1980s Soviets knew that their government was lying to them about the strength and power of their society, the Communist Party couldn’t hide all of the dysfunctions people saw on a daily basis. This didn’t stop the Soviet leadership from lying. Instead, they just accused the West of being equally deceptive. “Sure, things might be bad here, but they are just as bad in America, and in America people are actually foolish enough to believe in the lie! Not like you, clever people. You get it. You know it is a lie."
I see parallels to this now all the time - in conspiracy believers, and people from the Midwest who take it as common knowledge that life in California is a complete hellscape right now, because their preferred media sources tell them so every day.
Aka "everybody does it". People paid to go to pro-Putin demonstrations don't believe that people who go (maybe... used to go) to contra-Putin demonstrations were not paid. That's where I first heard about it.
It's also the defense many people use to comfort/lie to themselves when the politician they support is caught lying/being a scumbag: "Aaah, politicians, they're all the same!".
Their intelligence officers must have known. They lived here as diplomats and free access to just travel around. Maybe people like Yeltsin didn't believe them or the KGB was afraid to tell people, but they should have known.
There is a soviet joke. Two workers in France discuss, one really wants to move to the soviet union, the paradise for workers, the land of plenty. The other is more hesitant, he also heard stories of famine and repression. All capitalist propaganda, says the first one, and I made up my mind, I am going. Well, says the other one, I might join you, but first you go, and you tell me how it is, and if it is what you say it is, I go too. But if it is what those capitalists say it is, you might not be free to write your mind so let's devise a code: if you can write freely, write in black ink, if you are coerced, use red ink, and I will know I shouldn't come.
A month later, he receives a letter, in black ink, saying "the soviet union is fantastic, workers are really cared for here, we have freedom, food, prosperity, everyone is happy. The only inconvenience is that I really cannot find any red ink anywhere".
In the 1970s, one of my professors was assigned to be guide/translator for a group of visiting Soviet social scientists in Los Angeles. He asked them what they wanted to see and they insisted on a tour of Watts, so they could see the "real America" behind the Potemkin villages. So they all got into a schoolbus and went over to Watts. The Soviets wouldn't believe that they were really seeing Watts, because this neighborhood singled-out in Soviet propaganda as a pit of misery actually seemed to show a better quality of life than what they had at home. So, they insisted on getting off the bus to ask random people on the street what area they were really in.
I was curious about what “Bolshevism” specifically meant in that context. Maybe it is the centrally planned part of Soviet communism as opposed to social democracy within an undirected private economy?
Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
My college++ GF's father worked at as a CxO of an international company, spoke Russian, traveled there multiple times, and had a lot of friends & acquaintances in the diplomatic services.
In the early 1980s, he told us about one of his diplomatic friends hosting some Russian dignitaries for a few weeks. Their consistent attitude about everything was "of course, we have this also in Russia", along with the general assumption that everything was either staged or in a 'walled garden' for the rich and/or powerful. Then, late in the trip, she accompanied them on a shopping trip to one of the new-ish (at the time) large-format supermarkets. The visitor was literally in tears, surrounded by the acres of plenty. It didn't matter whether it was just for the rich or not — it was so far beyond her experience that she couldn't hold it together.
Similarly, another incident pointed out by a Russian expert [0]: when communist authorities in (IIRC) Bulgaria tried to show "Car Wash" redubbed as a racial morality play about capitalism and all anyone noticed that even the poorest people in LA had so many cars that we had machines to wash them.
They may have a lot of good information, but it is not exhaustive. And remember, everyone examines the information they receive through the lens of their own experience and their own ego. Those growing up behind the Iron Curtain both had never experienced any kind of luxury that was not walled off only for the ruling class, and also had a desire to defend their own pride in their homeland. So, they wouldn't necessarily understand the importance or utter ubiquity of something like large supermarkets before seeing it in person and in live context.
I think that Yeltsin had his own experience of shopping (or otherwise getting stuff shipped) from a "special distribution center" which he knew was unavailable to 99.8% of population yet had way worse selection of goods than the random USA supermarket. It was whatever stuff they could buy in Finland, basically.
He had a family. Personal experiences are hard to beat. He also started his career in Yekaterinburg, from some mid-range position, so he was not that detached from the life of common folk. He just saw a very different kind of life which does not translate to knowing things in theory.
They are just guys who happened to find themselves there
Maybe he did get the intelligence reports but he needed to go and see for himself in order to internalize them as opposed to just absentmindedly skim through them
This sounds apocryphal. I don't doubt Yeltsin was impressed by his visit to the supermarket, but by 1989 the writing was more than on the wall for the demise of the USSR. I imagine it'd be more accurate to say that Yeltsin was excited by the prospects of a transformed economy, seeing the prosperity of the U.S. firsthand, rather than his visit being any kind of tipping point in the Soviet Union's downfall.
Who even cares? It’s Boris Yeltsin, famous good guy and Russian patriot who definitely had a positive income on Russia. Only Cold War-pilled Westerners would think that this would sound like a good story.
He wrote "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."
There was joke in the Soviet Union "if you see a line, get in it."
It didn't matter if the line was for toilet paper and you had enough. You'd get some extra toilet paper and barter with someone who had extra laundry detergent and not enough TP.
This was common Soviet experience.
It's somewhat surprising to me that Yeltsin, who was obviously high up in the party apparatus, was surprised at the plenty of the US, but nevertheless my point is that the story is not apocryphal.
Was it a trigger for the collapse of the Soviet Union? Honestly, probably. One among many.
I think my comment may have been confusing. The "Soviet experience" was well understood in 1989 (see the clip of the 1984 movie I posted). Only weeks away from Yeltsin's jaunt to the supermarket was the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a true harbinger of the demise of the USSR. Had Yeltsin visited a dreary American DMV, rather than a bountiful supermarket, nothing would have changed.
From what I saw on video, I bet he was. He might have travelled earlier to other Socialist block countries and saw lots of socialist facade stores there, but a visit to a place for simple folk in the US was much more impressive.
(This is why when I travel, I go not to the center, but to the fringes of the cities, to see how the common people live.)
And I'm sure this contributed to his ideas of how the country should be like.
I have no doubt this happened, but my gut says the US govt set this up to help him make the transition look like a principled decision rather than an outright loss. I'm sure the CIA was more than happy to help him with PR side of things.
Adam Curtis’ most recent work, Traumazone, aims to capture some of the feeling of what it was like to go through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the “capitalism” that followed. I found it very powerful and helped me empathise better with those citizens and leaders. Watching Gorbechev and Yeltsin struggle and try their best to navigate the disaster. It’s quite different from his previous works. He doesn’t narrate. I personally think it’s a masterpiece in alternative documentary making.
The author seems to believe that Yeltsin was a moron who thought that the most advanced capitalist country in history would possibly be comparable to a country that belonged to the Tsar less than one hundred years prior.
Your comment glosses over so many complex dynamics of how the USSR failed and mismanaged its way into how it was in the late 80's vs. the U.S (and many other major countries) that it's absurd. Of course Yeltsin understood that his own country had dealt with many problems that the U.S had never had to face, but this didn't blind him to the fact that they could have done much better after so many decades of propaganda, and failed to do so because of many self-created problems. The smack to the face that was the supermarket showed him just how far his huge country had fallen behind. It was not stupidity in "failing to compare plausibly" that affected him, it was seeing that even fundamental aspects of well-being were inexcusably failing in the USSR.
Your comment is very blind to this basic fact, and excuses atrocious mismanagement with platitudes about tsars.
Germany and Japan, as well as China, were absolute wastelands of ruin and destitution after the second world war, and had suffered decades of terribly backwards previous leadership, yet they made good on enormous well-being changes in much less time than the USSR had to do the same by the time of Yeltsin's supermarket visit.
> Your comment glosses over so many complex dynamics of how the USSR failed and mismanaged its way into how it was in the late 80's vs. the U.S (and many other major countries) that it's absurd.
My comment glosses over. Compared to an anecdote about how a supermarket visit “Brought Down the Soviet Union”? This is the thing that you leaped to respond to? You are dripping with hypocrisy.
That low-quality article deserves no more rebuttal than the sentences that I spared on it.
It's not just the anecdote, it's everything that it implies, based on decades of history books, literature, many other anecdotes (some excellent ones right here in this thread). A cheap comment that dismisses complex things in its criticism of a complex thing isn't any less facile for pretending to be lightly stated.
I'm not sure why it is a shorthand. A wide range of countries have monarchy, such as Belguim or Sweden. There are also a lot of piss-poor non-monarchies.
Overall you sound like a person of socialist education who never evaluated their upbringing critically.
The collapse of the USSR wasn't caused by economics or arms races - see how regimes like Cuba, North Korea still survive. Low oil prices helped, but it could have happened during a boom, too. The 80s were not the worst economic or humanitarian crisis the USSR has faced, not even close.
The Soviet Union collapsed because the Party lost control of the country and the tensions and outright conflicts that previously prevented any challenge to its power tore up the country. It was conflicts between the nationalities, competition between bureaucrats of different levels over resources, the young Komsomol chiefs against the old gerontocrats, Moscow against the Russian regions, the Soviet Army against the KGB, the religious against the state atheism, innumerable other conflicts, with probably the ethnic/national conflicts having the most intensity. The USSR found out it couldn't control its own population and that is why it retreated from Eastern European countries as well.
The party lost control because of glasnost and perestroika which unleashed all the contradictions and conflict at once, which further caused chaos. It is no accident that the Communist party got itself banned in both Russia and Ukraine. In comparison China didn't try glasnost and did incremental and initially isolated economic reforms, with agriculture still being restricted to family farms to this day.
The USA didn't win the Cold War or cause the USSRs collapse, most of the time the policy was containment or even reapproachment, not rollback.
The only way they could have kept control of the country was to descend closer to 'hermit kingdom' like North Korea, had the economy produced even at 2/3rds of what the US did on a per capita basis, the Union would still exist as is.
We (the US) were able to trigger an arms race at a time when the Union was least able to afford it, and overwhelm what central planning could deal with.
The biography of Viktor Belenko [0], a Soviet Mig-25 pilot who defected to America by way of Japan in 1976, has a story about him being shown around the US by some government handlers and disbelieving the grocery store he was taken to, until being shown several more like it. He thought at first that the grocery store was staged, or an unusual example and not the norm.
This is a much better article. It rings truer to the spirit of OP's post, whose timeline I think is too advanced to be believable; by '89 the tide had already turned.
It appears that the situation in Russia is much improved and Boris would likely feel the transition he initiated brought them close to parity in terms of availability and variety:
I have some extended family from Eastern European countries. It's just so unfortunate what happened. The road to hell, paved with good intentions. They're normal people stuck picking up the pieces of a failed regime. Even with some things being adjusted, it might take weeks to comfortably afford what a typical SDE could afford in an hour here.
No idea how people in the west romanticize it or say it was a good thing. I've even seen hostility directed towards Eastern Europeans living in the west (almost exclusively from radical college kids) joking about how they got what they deserved or anyone that ran from the USSR was a greedy business person and that the stories are made up.
not much different from food stores in the US during the 40s. Maybe blandness is a worthwhile trade off it is means less obesity and other ill of modern diets.
There were very few markets that looked like that, most of them heavily concentrated in the two biggest cities of Moscow and Leningrad. There were plenty of towns where even in the mid-to-late 90's people would have been surprised to see a market like this.
My dad had to drive 65 miles (by public transportation only with multiple stops) to get into one of these stores. You weren't allowed to buy over certain amount of groceries unless you have permission slip ("kartochka"). Permission slip specifies the number of children you have. And even with "kartochka" it wasn't that too much food you could buy anyway.
Also, as a child growing up mostly in outskirts of Moscow region (oblast), I don't remember even visiting one of these stores. I was about 20 y.o. (now 40) when I first saw a supermarket similar to this one in the town 65 miles from Moscow where I grew up.
Also, it doesn't mean everything was that bad, or we haven't had enough food on the table. Most of the food was unprocessed and simple, and the most was from farmers. For example, there was no to little cheese, but there was meat, and milk, and veggies. I have to admit that a large number of meat (especially chicken) was a humanitarian assistance (notorious "nozhki Busha" - Bush's chicken legs).
By the time Yeltsin visited that grocery store, Gorbachev had been working for decades to put himself into a position of power so that he could carefully shift the USSR to a liberal Democratic government with a market economy. The fact that he actually got himself into position to execute this plan is mind blowing. I don’t think I have ever read a book which so radically reshapes how I view a piece of history.
Here's another thing to blow your mind: Gorbachev was the only Russian leader in history that resigned himself quietly, and then lived his life as a normal person.
In all of Russian history.
You could argue that Medvedev did, too, but this increasingly deranged puppet is sort of back in politics now.
Now russians have everything they wish and more yet behave like barbarians. Some cultures never change and they wish the same for everyone in their neighbourhood. Perhaps karma and sanctions will revert that country to the state they deserve.
Ah, the glory days of America. Yesterday, the local market was out of eggs and bananas. There were long lines at too few staffed checkouts. There's a homeless encampment in the mall's parking area. This is in Silicon Valley.
The only solace I find as Americans crumble into poverty and wage slavery is that there is no real better alternative in the world today. The entire world’s glory days are behind it, every place is getting shitty. Everything is expensive and few people are thriving. The future looks joyless and barely survivable.
To me the explanation for why everything got shitty all at once is obvious: the global pandemic “synchronized” all nations and produced hardship everywhere simultaneously. Fragile systems in every country were strained.
By any possible metric people in the world today live better than in any point in history. Sure, last two years created a minor setback, but it will be forgotten in the next few years, when there will be another "everything is good and will grow forever" period in the cycle.
Some people have bought into the captalism "always bad" trope regurgitated over and over in r/antiwork on reddit. I just tune out when I hear "wage slavery"
Sounds like a combination of (a) panic-buying of commodities that people heard were in short supply, similar to the Great Toilet Paper Incident, and (b) local government that doesn't do anything about homeless encampments in mall parking lots. Over in my part of America, and as far as I can tell most parts of America, things go on as usual but with higher prices for some foods.
The first part of the article I can relate to, but how it tied to the conclusion and this: “the average Russian spends about 50% of their income on food.” — is utter nonsense.
Here is on the napkin calculation of grocery basket to salary from retail and service sources[0] for central region:
I am from somewhat medium class but not poor background and I know very few people who earn that much, is that advertised as average monthly salary? Maybe they need to check the median? (The first link wouldn't load for me.)
Edit: fwiw friend about to receive a degree in economy says 62000 is basically a bullshit number for a single person, and if they are talking families well 5600 is also (it may be enough for one person to survive without eating out but not a family). Does not compute.
You can browse https://stats.hh.ru by yourself, sure salary differs by region and occupation, but it is even much higher for educated or just hard-working people, especially in tech. How is it bullshit, exactly ? (Only way I can think if you compare really low wage gov clerk with high tech worker and then average (50000 + 250000) / 2 = 150000 but it is not the case)
You chose the worst place to get your numbers. Try browsing avito and see if any of the 10000 rub/month flats in city center are available. The numbers are there only to attract you.
But for the record none of the .ru links you gave work for me currently. Does hh even host a representative amount of jobs for cleaning staff, shop salesperson, cooks and other jobs many regular people have? How many people don't have the chance to work for good clean money and get by with gigs or grey salaries? Consider that, double monthly food expense and it may be not 50 percent but not too far. It may be hard to grasp if you happen to be in a muscovite software engineer bubble.
How is publicly traded job marketplace company (hh.ru) is the worst place to source salary numbers ? Here is another superjob.ru, yeah Avito you mentioned[0],
Somehow, you argue without even bothering to access websites in question. Are you trolling ?
Not sure if you got my point that numbers on these platforms are a scam, it's pretty well known that they are unrealistic and posted to attract attention (aside from select few like Yandex maybe). You keep picking bad biased sources, and you have yet to clarify how to feed a family on 5600 per month
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadWe gave it a go, it doesn’t work.
So yeah, turns out you can do things if you starve your people to death. (See North Korea)
And yes, in order to do so they caused millions of Ukrainians to starve by exporting all of the food they grew.
Exactly like Britain did to my ancestors in Ireland for profit.
Having said that, I'm not terribly keen on the nominally capitalist nominally democratic "inverted" totalitarianism that's on the rise. But given that more potent forms of totalitarianism are resurgent and eager to fill any power vacuums, I guess it's the best path we've got for now. I can just hope that the newer generations have developed enough memetic resistance to make the whole Facebook (nee Fox News) hysterical-nonsensical mob thing a passing fad.
Yeah, this is 100% about Russian borders, which are long, exposed, expensive to defend and present an existential threat on a (historically) fairly regular basis.
America's geography is pretty much the polar opposite, so it's hard to empathize.
Furthermore, talking about the defense of Russian borders is kind of ridiculous in the context of the current attack on Ukraine, where Russia is trying to expand its borders which would otherwise remain stationary. It only makes sense if you interpret "borders" as referring to some larger area outside the actual country but which they nevertheless feel entitled to.
It's expanding at the points where the Nazi advance almost succeeded in breaking the USSR, where Russia has its only warm water ports and where, long term, NATO, the alliance that destroyed Libya on a whim, was planning to set up military bases with offensive capabilities.
It's still about the vulnerability of its borders.
Right, just like the legitimacy of Libyan, Iraqi and Afghan borders conferred all the protection they needed.
Putin was the one who tried to explain to America that it would be better if everybody respected each other's sovereignty in 2003 but in 2003 we decided that this principle can go fuck itself.
Furthermore, national borders do seem to matter very much to many people. Europeans widely condemned the Iraq war, because they saw through its false pretenses. And the borders we're talking about are shared with Europeans.
But regardless, the countries the US has invaded still have intact borders! The US didn't annex part of Iraq to create a new US territory or carve off a chunk to give to Saudi Arabia. Rather it changed out the government wholesale while leaving the nominal country intact. Despite its shortcomings, this is a paradigm that helps these disputes converge over time. "Iraq" is now just a part of the US economic empire, regardless of the immoral actions leading to that. It's not right in the sense that it rewards the aggression, but it is right in the sense that it provides more civilian stability.
If Putin were still just playing the covert/political influence game, most people wouldn't be concerned. He did that, and lost hard. He then tried the surgical strike to change out the government, and lost hard. Since he's a loser by current conventions, he flipped the table and descended into WWII-style razing of civilian infrastructure, exterminating the population, and conquering land area. Then he throws out the justification that other countries might engage in the same, even though nobody has. That is what is grossly unacceptable, and needs to be stamped down hard if we want our era of relative peace to continue.
(Also, given that Putin speaks to play a situation rather than promote consistent ideals, what he's happened to say isn't really relevant)
The US made the mistake of thinking that geographical features didn't pose them a problem in Afghanistan.
Then they realized how incredibly frail their supply chains could be when geography wasnt in their favor.
That mistake cost trillions.
>But regardless, the countries the US has invaded still have intact borders!
This is the most absurd excuse for American imperialism I think I've ever heard.
>Then he throws out the justification that other countries might engage in the same, even though nobody has.
So, Libya happened. America wants Russia to end up like Libya. Russia doesnt want to end up like Libya, so they invaded Ukraine.
>That is what is grossly unacceptable, and needs to be stamped down hard if we want our era of relative peace to continue.
I mean, if you excuse the wanton destruction of Libya by saying "hey at its a failed state but it has intact borders!" then you were basically begging for Ukraine to be invaded.
> This is the most absurd excuse for American imperialism I think I've ever heard.
I'm not excusing American imperialism. I am against American imperialism - note how I readily described Iraq as becoming part of the US empire, as opposed to the usual rejection of the idea that the US is an empire. However I am against Russian imperialism as well, and this situation is rooted in Russian imperialism.
> So, America wants Russia to end up like Libya. Russia doesnt want to end up like Libya.
Once again you're trying to justify offensive conquest by invoking the necessity of defense. If Russia was/is going to "end up like Libya", this has only been made more likely by Russia invading its neighbor.
It more than matters. It dictates the very shape of humanity.
>But that doesn't really say much about a developed country
It matters as much to developed countries as it does to non developed. Switzerland didn't get wealthy by being easy to invade.
>However I am against Russian imperialism as well, and this situation is rooted in Russian imperialism.
Realistically treating Russian defense concerns as a sheer irrelevance is helping to perpetuate this war.
We can be aggressive imperialists or we can stay out of their neighborhood but we can't be both and not provoke a reaction. You can condemn Russian imperialism all you like but if you threaten the bear it will still claw your eyes out.
>Once again you're trying to justify offensive conquest by invoking the necessity of defense. If Russia was/is going to "end up like Libya", this has only been made more likely by Russia invading its neighbor.
The scary part is that this just isnt true. Control over Sevastopol and the land bridge to crimea puts them in a much better defensive position than before.
Destroying western Ukraine ("demilitarising") as a viable functioning state also renders it much less useful to the west, both as a partner and as a means of threatening Russia, turning it into an expensive and dangerous liability.
Yeah, back before modern missiles, satellites, fighter jets, and drones. Back when the physical storage of gold was economically significant. Back before technological infrastructure started creating outsized productivity. In the modern day, what actually creates and protects Switzerland's way of life is their economic and political connections to their neighbors.
> We can be aggressive imperialists
Repeat after me: Ukraine wanting to join the US economic empire is not aggression. Ukraine wanting to join NATO to protect themselves from Russia is not aggression. Now write it on the blackboard 100 times.
> if you threaten the bear it will still claw your eyes out
More like when the bear occasionally comes out of the woods and wanders into yards, it will be tolerated. When the bear starts routinely posing a danger to humans, the bear will be shot.
> Destroying western Ukraine ("demilitarising") as a viable functioning state also renders it much less useful to the west
I agree this has become their open goal. Russia failed at stealing it, so they'll try to destroy it and kill everyone living there. Ultimately the more Russia destroys, the larger Ukraine's IMF loans and other foreign indebtedness will be. That indeed disgusts me, but not as much as genocide.
Not endorsing the article, I think it's worth thinking beyond just the economic frame and also factoring in community resilience and such. There's arguments such as from writers like Orlov: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer)
At least they were spacious! And the small trolleys were kind: you didn't have to feel bad that yours was empty.
Even developing contries' markets usually are groaning with produce. What a condemnation of the communist experiement!
https://imgur.com/a/DAepLEJ
Did these farmers' markets operate during the communist era? Late, I presume?
https://youtu.be/t8LtQhIQ2AE?t=345
The left side is likely the cutlets themselves (the little brown outlines) surrounded by some (cold) white sauce that once heated turns more liquid.
What's up with the comments in the article, though? 1 real comment, 41 spam. Is that a Blogger thing?
https://cdn.hpm.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/21152245/Paul-...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-the-supermarket-helped-...
I went on a student tour of the USSR as a college student in 1991, arranged through my University (U of Alabama). I was getting a minor in Russian language, and it seemed like a fun trip. It actually got MORE fun because in the run-up to the trip (in spring, 91) there was some dissent in the USSR and many parents wouldn't let their kids go. In order to create a large enough trip, the University opened registration up to university-area retirees, so we ended up with a cohort of probably 30 folks. Half of us were under 25, and the other half over 65. It was the first time I'd ever really hung out with older people who weren't relatives, and that's really something we don't do enough of. Listen, if you have a chance to drink with WWII Hellcat pilots, do it.
Anyway.
Back then, you took certain American commodities with you to trade -- Levi's, Marlboros, etc. We met a pair of enterprising young black marketeers -- our age -- in Moscow, and hit off so well with them that they met us in (what was then) Leningrad for our last port of call. It was very cool, trying to converse in broken Russian and English, and generally being over the moon to have "friends" from the other side of the Cold War that defined both our countries up to then.
It went so well with Andrei and Volodya that, somehow, they finagled visas, and the next fall came to Tuscaloosa to visit us. Andrei immediately took up with my girlfriend's pal, but Volodya was shyer and stayed with Cassie and I for several weeks. And during that time -- and this would've been fall 91 into winter 92 -- obviously we did some shopping.
I remember vividly taking Volodya to the local supermarket, where we bought the sorts of cheap things students buy. Except obviously our budgets as upper-middle-class college kids allowed us things absurdly beyond the reach of anybody Volodya knew in Moscow -- like fresh fruit and vegetables in January. He was stunned, and we were kind of shamed by the plenty we had access to.
Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.
"Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
I don't pretend for a moment the US was then, or is now, some kind of paradise. We fail our poor in material and constant ways. But those moments in the Bruno's with Volodya are something I'll never forget.
The older I get the more astounded I am that our friendship with Andrei and Volodya happened at all, and the more regret I have that none of us retained any way to contact each other later. It was 1991. I was the only one of us to have an email address at the time.
In SA our office DSL in 2010 had a cap of 500MB a month.
To be fair, it's not clear whether it would have had any impact by the late 20th century.
Here is one about striking workers masacred: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre
Or there is this Guatemalan coup d’état which was lobbied for by United Fruit Company: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27éta...
So, yes. I think it might just happen that buying banana from somewhere keeps them poor. These are so well known cases that I somewhat suspect you asked the question as a softball.
What would happen if there was no market for those bananas?
Maybe they find other ways to thrive, maybe not. Banan is not the only thing they could grow, and growing things is not the only way to make an economy work.
This is not an abstract economy problem from a econ 101 textbook. History cannot be rolled like that back and “what-if” is not a question we can answer.
What we know is that violence has been commited with the direct goal of securing said banana supply.
Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world. Easy to blame everything on the embargo, harder to take a long hard look at the systemic corruption, incompetence, generalized theft and human rights violations plaguing the country.
Is that the case? I don't know a lot about how the blocade works but Wikipedia says "the United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba" and "US-based companies, and companies that do business with the US, which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of US sanctions."
> Cuba’s main export goods are agricultural products, beverages, tobacco and mineral fuels, for which there is no preferential trade regime.
> The main export goods from the EU to Cuba are food, chemicals products, plastics, basic metals and their manufactures, machinery, household appliances and transport equipment.
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/cuba/european-union-and-cuba_en?s...
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/exports/cuba
Since most countries ask for US dollars in order to trade and that these have to be held by US entities, you're basically guaranteed to have assets that can be seized.
Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
> Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
Countries do ask for US dollars in order to trade. You can notionally trade in another currency, but the value of this currency is related to the number of US dollars it can buy, and eventually that is what ends up happening. Some countries will set up currency swap mechanisms in order to allow for trade without relying on the dollar, but these are few and far between. It is generally not possible to do such trade without at some level going through the US dollar. This is a natural consequences of the fact that the US dollar is the only dominant reserve currency, meaning that it is by far the currency with the largest trade surplus. The structural reasons for this trade surplus, which I won't get into, are the reason why international trade ends up with the US dollar. For these reasons, the threat if being banned from using the US dollar, if your assets aren't seized, is sufficient to greatly dissuade trade.
Cuba is not the only example of this. American secondary sanctions on Iran led to the cancellation of contracts between European companies and Iranian companies en masse, and were cited as the reason why it happened.
> The parent comment stands up. The embargo is not a reasonable explanation for the poor circumstances of the Cubans.
Cuba has a GDP per capita of 9500$ USD nominal (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...) - which is above the average for Latin America and the Cardibbean. We can look at Iran for an example of a country under an identical sanctions regime, which suffered a 50% fall in GDP. The thesis that most of its economic problems come from the sanctions regime seems strong, as the closest analog suffered a halving of GDP and because it is nonetheless economically a strong performer for the region.
If you look at a microscopic level, the lack of access to specific products is a common theme in Cuban economic problems, and this is certainly attributable to the sanctions regime.
You must be a lot of fun at parties.
> "Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
In multiple communist countries in Eastern Europe, bananas were special because they only came ~once a year from Cuba. Anyone having access to them outside that time and/or getting more than a few would fit the profiles he described.
By contrast, some people in Eastern Europe had fancy ski huts available to them. You or I might have asked the same questions if you'd gone skiing with them in the 80s only to find out that his father is a draftsman. "Don't all of you have ski houses?"
You may be otherwise piss-poor, wage wise.
The supermarkets has improved greatly though - not quite the USA level, but on par with Western Europe or sometimes slightly better (more chains, easier to eat healthy)
https://i.imgur.com/ImxdsUG.jpeg
(Note that there are multiple apartments shown here - every "3K", "2K", or "1K" corresponds to one apartment with that many bedrooms. The "fraction" after that shows the total area and the combined bedroom area of each apartment in m^2.)
I think the best way to describe that arrangement was a "no-cost rent". You only had to pay utilities, and you couldn't have it taken away from you arbitrarily. But e.g. selling it or even renting it out would be impossible (legally; the black market existed regardless), nor could it be inherited.
There was also the "build it to live in it" condominium programs that opened more opportunities specifically to those just starting their adult lives, who would otherwise qualify at most for a room in a communal apartment, and couldn't possibly afford a downpayment on that mortgage (15-20 monthly salaries). But those came late - many weren't even completed by 1991 - and they had considerable pushback from many local authorities, partly on the basis that such luxury was "undeserved" and unfair to older people who were in the line for regular apartments, and partly because some of their member-elected governance councils were starting to get political ambitions and push for more local self-administration in the 80s.
That was similar in a lot of post-war Europe, e.g. for my grandparents in the UK.
The Americans have always lived in abundance and luxury in comparison.
The allotment of living space (counted as bedroom area per person) varied depending on the city, and sometimes there was a difference between the nominal and the actual number. In Moscow and Leningrad the designated minimum was around 7 m^2 per person, but in practice applying for a new apartment would be unlikely to succeed if you had more than 5 m^2. In some of the provinces, it could go as low as 3 m^2 per person.
And keep in mind that this is the minimum that entitled you to apply for a new apartment. Which means that you'd be put in a line to wait your turn to actually get one when one is available, say, 10 years later.
A very clear memory for her is her Grandfather waiting 6 hours in line to get a banana because she said she wanted one, when she was about 4 or 5.
It's so weird to see the same sentiments echoed, yet makes sense given the above.
Ending hunger is impressive.
And then I told Andrei and Volodya about Banana Republics.
Of course Capitalism looks fantastic from the exploiters’ perspective.
Today more than ever it should be clear that the opulence of America in the 90s is completely unsustainable on a global scale.
That way of live has always been reserved for a global minority, one many of us may find ourselves excluded from in our lifetimes.
It isn't clear at all. The material conditions of the 90s has and will be surpassed at higher efficiency using smaller energy budgets.
Communism, or any other system, can’t make that same claim.
Unless you have an alternative, your claims of exploration will fall on deaf ears.
A family living on a farm and providing most of their own needs, living sustainably for generations, is by most definitions “living in poverty” because they consume very little.
Now if you strip that family of their land and force them to work in factories their consumption goes way up since they no longer are able to support themselves.
That family has now been “lifted out of poverty”.
But yes, you are correct, no system has made people more depended on exploitation then Capitialism.
You’re idealizing the crushing poverty of sustenance farming.
Have you ever been to a developing country? Talked to the families who choose to abandon their farming and work in a factory so their kids can get proper healthcare, better schooling and living in a house without a toilet that feeds into the river?
Plenty of them could continue to work as farmers and choose not too. Who are you to claim their choice is wrong?
I’m guessing you’ve lived a comfy life and take all of these things for granted and then sneer at those who want the same.
You're romanticizing primitivism.
It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.
> It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.
What even is the difference between such heavy state capitalism and socialism? Socialist economies existed with various level of market involvement and economic freedom, see Lenin's NEP - was the USSR initially a champion of free market reform?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism
By the way, elections in China are only at very local levels. Most of what we do elections for in western countries are indirect elections there. The Congress is not directly elected by people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China
However you might want to check the 1929 elections in fascist Italy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Italian_general_election
I don't really think communism is a viable economic system, because of, you know, people. However, a couple of points should be made:
- Communism has always had to deal with enmity of world's richest and most influential nations (USA and UK in particular). Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere, whether they like it or not (kind of like some religions). Could this have been otherwise? I don't know.
- Between 1922 and 1962, USSR's economy grew at an average of about 9% real per annum, despite having to deal with the massive trauma of World War 2. Also, income inequality decreased. Population went from ~140 million in poverty to ~240 million living, um, not in poverty.
So... it is not quite as simple as you make it out to be.
Growing from a bad start and where you can copy a more developed nation makes this easier.
https://bearkunin.medium.com/soviet-union-facts-and-fictions...
True. But you know what really makes economic growth easier? Foreign aid. Also trade.
The USSR otoh had to deal with sanctions.
https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Embargoes-and-S...
I don't know what other friendlies you mean. USSR installed communist/socialist governments in the countries it liberated from German occupation after WW2, but those relationships were... complicated.
Communist countries wanted to export communism, maybe for all the good and bad reasons democratic countries want to export democracy. However there were plenty of people in the west that wanted their country to become communist, especially up to the 80s. So the enmity against all the communist world was also a matter of internal affairs, to contain internal opposition.
On reflection, whether communism holds extra appeal in poor countries, or whether it was an accident of history that *rich* capitalist countries faced off against poor communist countries, communism's chances were kind of hamstrung by this enmity. The playing field was uneven.
So which system is truly better at lifting people out of poverty, all other things being equal, remains uncertain.
I won't ask you to show appreciation for heroes like Haber and Bosch and Borlaug and all the rest, but they have my thanks.
I can only go "???" to this. America has only gotten more "opulent" since the 90s. The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we've seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.
Actually, that happened in not since the 1990s, and we were discussing issues like this on our computers then, too. I know, I was there.
But the opulence of the 1990s wasn’t because it was the height of technology, or average earnings, it was in large part driven by fashion and attitudes and their effect on lifestyle and the marketplace, driven in part by the lingering visible-status-oriented attitudes of the 1980s, in part by the perception of geopolitical and economic invincibility (both the–at that point–longest economic expansion in the modern period plus the fall of the Soviet Union, lopsided military engagements like Panama and the First Gulf War, etc.)
Greater aggregate and even median wealth looks and feels different in the shadow of the Great Recession and the Afghan and Iraq Wars.
nevertheless, 01992 was a long time after democracy was restored in honduras in 01981 and the civil war began in guatemala in 01960, and bananas are still cheap today, including here in argentina, so evidently cheap bananas don't require the particular much more severe kind of exploitation the term 'banana republic' was invented to describe
It turns out that since 1980 there has been economic growth, making the production and shipping of various commodities more affordable.
If banana republics weren't necessary to keep bananas affordable and profitable they would never have existed in the first place.
this is a false premise
forms of domination exist not because they are necessary but because they are achievable—because those who support them are better organized and resourced than those who oppose them
those of us here in the 'global south' are generally not a fan of the term, lumping together as it does botswana, myanmar, the philippines, and argentina under a single rubric; it reflects a cartoonishly shallow analysis of the real social relations in the world system
They drove to whatever that town was and he said, pick a store. After a couple of hours, I think his mind was blown.
This was a fairly rural, poor part of the state. Later they went to Atlanta and the guy was gaga over... everything.
Supermarket - https://youtu.be/aBA41QgIty8
Costco - https://youtu.be/UhzQCeKlFDo
Texas Roadhouse - https://youtu.be/xRtitCJv4cc
Home Depot - https://youtu.be/TLsscvpsH8E
We have so much, we take it for granted.
The USA's stated goal is regime change. It’s willing to make life worse for Cubans to achieve that goal.
cuban here. please dont pretend america care about democracy. america have interests. when they need new regime they suppress democracy as needed or push for democracy. main idea to get some regime subservient to american economic interest.
why america has so many migrants at border but america do nothing or even talk about what crisis happening in central or south america country? instead they fighting proxy war in ukraine. why? more lucrative and profit opportunity in ukraine. south america not have resources or proxy war opportunity.
and given state of American government..race issues..economic issue..growing gap..unaffordable housing..America last country to dictate how other country should run.
i not favor cuban government, but your post bullshit. you idea that you know more about cuba like you on some pedestal.watch as you infrastructure crumble you homeless and drug population rise
If Cuba was a democracy then I would disagree with the sanctions, but I don't think it is wrong to pressure a government into giving proper voting rights to its people. If Cuba actually implemented democracy and USA still sanctioned them then that would be bad, but that isn't the situation we are in.
You easily hit the 56% rate on income tax and even the poorest workers pay 25% VAT, meanwhile wealthy landowners and shareholders pay no inheritance tax and minimal capital gains and property tax.
So it impedes social mobility and encourages hard workers to move abroad - this has been made much worse with the refugee crisis too, as they're practically discouraged to work hard. And now look at the healthcare crisis, etc. as wages are a pittance compared to the USA, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, etc.
But I am not stupid, I too moved to Switzerland to work since it netted me many times more money per hour worked. That is why I said that Sweden isn't perfect, I'm not sure what the perfect system is, but Sweden is still pretty good.
And VAT is a double-edged sword... It's the only tax that essentially nobody can avoid, and thus the only tax that also applies to people who are already wealthy and could otherwise live their life without paying any tax.
So, communism, at least according to US conservative perspective.
The US is no more responsible for the abused citizens of Cuba than the abused citizens of North Korea.
> The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States has informed the US Government that such activities violate international law and has requested that the US take immediate steps to exempt food and medicine from the embargo.
Exempting Food and Agriculture Products from U.S. Economic Sanctions: Status and Implementation - https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33499.html
> In approving the FY2001 agriculture appropriations act, Congress codified the lifting of unilateral sanctions on commercial sales of food, agricultural commodities, medicine, and medical products to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Sudan, and extended this policy to apply to Cuba (Title IX of H.R. 5426, as enacted by P.L. 106-387; Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000, or TSRA). Other provisions place financing and licensing conditions on sales to these countries. Those that apply to Cuba, though, are permanent and more restrictive. TSRA also gives Congress the authority in the future to veto a President’s proposal to impose a sanction on the sale of agricultural or medical products.
Funnily he was quite disappointed at the fruit situation coming from a tropical country, but that was more about freshness than quantity.
While I do not have a taste for tropical fruit there are the bananas we encountered in Africa that ruined me. Since encountering those I have pretty much zero interest in US bananas, what we had there can't be bought in the US because they don't ship well.
It saddens me that the leftist clowns of today have forgotten the importance of material wealth.
https://youtu.be/XzNDGN6r1bw
Magnit (grocery chain) in Krasnodar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnit
Cities all over the country as small as 50k have these stores and their competitors where you can buy fresh Mexican avocados and sparkling new Korean appliances.
Or, if you don’t want to go in store you can buy any item under the sun on Wildberries, Ozon and have it delivered to your front door.
I've also heard (from Russians) that water access in rural Russia is poor.
I've been to grocery stores in Moscow, btw.
Russia is huge, yes - there are some very isolated places with poor people and without some utilities.
There’s also a lot of weekend (part time) dacha summer houses that don’t have full utility hookups.
And large portions of the population still cannot afford one.
The intersection of those two frequently ends up in the army, as that is the only social mobility they know.
We wanted to give him something else, but how do you do that without being offensive? One guy had a plan. When Nikolai was showering in the hall showers, this guy went in and stole Nikolai's cologne and tossed it. The next day, he was puzzled as to who stole his cologne. We said, "it's alright, we'll get you a replacement" and took him to the mall to one of those booths with knockoff designer perfume and cologne.
The guy was just in awe of the whole place. Eyes wide open, looking at every store. At the cologne place, first sample he smelled, he lit up, smiled, and said, "Yes, this is much better than my old cologne."
The guy that tossed his old one paid like the $20 for the bottle.
Later, it turned out the guy got his girlfriend pregnant on the night he left for the US, and had to go back to marry her after the semester. Such a bummer. Hope he's doing well with a nice family because he was such a friendly and fun guy.
Basically it amounted to myself and about a dozen others, organized into a small chamber orchestra going to Russia for a summer, and in exchange a group of Russians formed into folk/pop entertainment group visiting and staying with us for a while during the school year.
I can't say that 1995 in post-USSR Ekaterinburg was incredibly different than 1991's pre-Russia Sverdlovsk. There were a few bits of free market showing up, but the general economic situation there was pretty dire. Even for me, who grew up in a very rural area and quite poor, felt like I came from nearly unimaginable wealth.
A couple years later the State Department and Russia repeated the exchange and I had a chance to show my host mother around the local shopping malls and such. The "change" from communism had already happened, the Russians by then were by and large waiting for America to arrive.
It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime, and it has given me lots of both wanderlust and perspective that I've carried with me for the rest of my life. I was very happy to see the improvement in standard of living in many parts of Russia over the years, but I'm very sad to see what they're wasting it on at the moment in Ukraine.
The Russians played half late 80s early 90s synth pop and half Russian folk music complete with wardrobe changes. They were really cool.
The Internet was very nascent at the time and they all seemed nonplussed by the BBS scene.
My friend's high school physics teacher had many memorable lines, one of them being:
"Bananas! I saw my first banana when I was already in college!"
My father hosted a few Americans in (back then) communist Poland. To them it was like time travel to some bizarro world bygone era. They really wanted to drive his car, which was also a "classic" tech and design wise.
Anyway all this spilled over to the 90s, making the weirdest things to be considered premium goods, like Vans shoes, vacation in Malta/Greece or McDonald's.
Eventually this all ended and I remember the exact moment I realized it: I saw a somewhat overweight teenager in a mall holding a pizza slice.
Every part of this sight would be out of place in the mid 90s, not to mention the previous system.
I would love to, but at this point they might all be dead… :(
Sitting in a hotel bar in Kiev with him, drinking vodka, and listening to tales of the Pacific theater -- mostly just antics with his buddies, but some flight stories -- was pretty amazing. I wish I had kept a journal back then, because I've mostly forgotten any specific anecdotes.
No.
Yeltsin was contemplating reforms and changes and wanted to collect a political tool he could later user if needed. He knew exactly how this visit would go, and it was intended so he could use it as rhetorical device to illustrate the necessity of reforms.
Is the story with Gerhardsen relayed by him / officials? Schmidt told it himself, so at least it's not something somebody made up and everybody repeated it because it's such a nice story, unless he himself made it up. He wasn't the type, but who knows.
A senior person in an authoritarian system like that could be surrounded by “yes men” who would repeat the official Soviet lines that perhaps American supermarkets weren’t all that much different from soviet ones, or only available to the super rich, etc
Perhaps they also received legitimate reports as well. An unplanned impromptu trip would be a good way to see which reports were the most accurate.
It is much easier to display numbers showing that you "lifted poor population out of poverty", when most of that poor population either got genocided or sent off to gulags or simply died off due to the aforementioned poverty. Not even mentioning the classic number massage.
Before someone tries to go full-on "you are just an american shill", I grew up in Russia during 90s, and my parents+grandparents grew up in the USSR. One of them had to cover up his jewish ethnicity his entire life, I only found out about it many years later, after his passing. Let me just say, he wasn't doing that cover-up for some personal reasons at all.
When it comes to the Soviet Union, the closer you are to the source material, the worse it looks.
Symbolism and performance was everything in Soviet politics, and even in Soviet life. American presidents might casually go and walk into some store on camera but this is not how Communist poltiicians thought.
Pointing to one highly choreographed high profile incident is not convincing evidence that it was normative. This was not much of a PR stunt. It was at least on paper an unplanned visit. I don't believe he used it as persuasive evidence. Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing, he appears to have had a genuine emotional reaction.
> bout a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia.
I believe that about most politician's autobiographies, not just Soviet ones. I wouldn't be surprised if the autobiography was written with the explicit intent to sell better in the US, Prince Harry style.
Soviet guy comes to the land of plenty, has a almost religious experience in a supermarket and shakes off his misbegotten Soviet ways, that's a Disney story lol. Of course he knew what was going on in the US and his own country long before.
I think this attribute far too much intelligence to those in power. Like the people that claim Trump was doing 5D chess =.
I generally believe all governments are lead by functional idiots and the human race survives in spite of their efforts to destroy us.
If your foe can demand bananas any day of the year for pennies while you can't, you lost that war before it even started.
Take this all with a grain of salt because this is just what I remember from reading stories online of people who used to live in the USSR, but the average person realized the West had more material prosperity but they were under the impression the upper class folks were the only ones with real access to it. They believed the common worker still had to deal with limited selection and shortages, much like they did.
Additionally, with whatever glimpses they saw of western consumerism they were told that the abundance was intentionally staged, like a Potemkin village. This was not uncommon for the USSR to do when dignitaries or journalists came to visit. So it made sense that the West would do this too.
I have to imagine that as a Soviet citizen and dignitary he assumed everything he saw on his trip was staged or choreographed in some way. They intentionally made an unplanned stop to try and confront this. Perhaps he and his entourage already knew he was going to find a well stocked supermarket, but I can’t help but think cognitive dissonance kept him from really accepting it until he saw it firsthand.
But you know what's strange? He lives in NJ now, he's been there for the last 25 years. He watches Russian state TV and also CNN and thinks he gets both perspectives. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he defended Russia, and spit out all the lines about the "nazi leadership" of Ukraine. "Bucha was faked," all that. I think he realized that he was in the minority and toned it down, but this definitely made an impression on me. It's not that certain people are immune to propaganda and some aren't. Anybody can fall into it.
So I don't think factors like that are so good at separating "good" invasions from "bad" ones.
Even fewer when you're intent on annexing territory and capturing resources and large numbers of people.
The logic error you've committed above: Stifling dissent about the war with authoritarian measures may not be a necessary condition for an invasion to be bad, but it still can be a hint that the invasion is bad.
Rejecting the territorial integrity of the country invaded, similarly, can be a pretty good hint.
As ugly as it sounds I would actually prefer that the US had annexed countries it had invaded. This way it would at least be responsible and people would leave in more decent place than before. Instead they came in, murdered and otherwise fucked people and then left without much remorse and repercussion.
When McCarthy did it, it didn't show how strong McCarthy was; it showed how weak he was. When Putin does it, it doesn't show how strong Putin is, either.
The truth is more nuanced. Strong powers take advantage of weak powers and the US is no exception. We do it by expanding NATO territory. There are also arguments to be made that the US pushed Putin into the war. As it is a strategic move to have russia use up its arms fighting a neighbor rather than the US. The war also greatly increased US natgas exports to Europe.
It's pretty immoral / weak to for the world's superpower to push neighboring countries into war for these reasons.
2. You say it's accepting propaganda to see Putin as weak. But you see him as being pushed into war by the US. That's not something that happens to someone who is strong.
3. "As it is a strategic move to have russia use up its arms fighting a neighbor rather than the US."
Absolutely. More: It's to NATO's advantage to have Russia use up its arms fighting a non-NATO-member.
Is it good or evil to push other countries into war knowing that thousands will die?
Is it good or evil to profit off the resulting energy crisis?
Is it even smart to risk a global nuclear war to destroy outdated arms and decades old tanks?
Is it good or evil to trigger economic collapse via sanctions causing starvation both inside the country and to export nations? Don't we consider Mao and Stalin some of the most evil people that ever lived for doing the same? Starvation is a terrible way to die yet it isn't even seen as collateral damage.
Putin will die anyway in the next couple decades. It made no sense to poke the bear and trigger all this. It ultimately just strengthens China and increases the amount of global suffering.
All your moralizing is completely missing the point, because you are assigning cause to the wrong agents.
We interfered with Ukraine elections: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-ukraine-hypocrisy
Dan Carlin has a great 'Poking the Bear' episode that goes into detail on the many ways in which the US provoked Russia/Putin. Of course Putin was the primary cause of the war but it is foolish to believe that the US is blameless.
What convinced me that I'm not falling for Western propaganda? What it came down to was the following argument, and it has to be an argument and not a soundbite because in order to get beneath the propaganda we have to go deep.
- Many of Russia's claims against Ukraine are either true or have real elements of truth to them. Yes the founder of Azov is an avowed nationalist*. Yes, there have been laws passed in Ukraine that required greater use of Ukrainian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#201.... Yes, the parliament of Ukraine considered giving Hero status to Stepan Bandera, who is a controversial figure because (among other things) he did work with the Nazis in WWII. Yes, there was fighting in Donbas, and while I don't know about Ukraine intentionally shelling civilians, I can imagine that at least there were civilians killed as a result of Ukrainian fire in that area since 2014.
- None of these arguments rise to the level of necessitating military intervention.
- Russia did not take steps to de-escalate the conflict. There were so many things Russia could have done if it was genuinely interested in peace and friendly relations with a sovereign Ukraine. If you're worried about persecution of Russians in Ukraine, make it easy for them to get to Russia. If you're concerned about fighting, use your status as a UNSC member to call for a peacekeeping mission. Russia did none of these things.
I could go on, but the main argument is that when you look past the emotionally charged arguments, the substance and the necessity of military action just aren't there. Bandera's quite a character, but put his history aside for a moment and ask yourself what's his relevance to the current conflict: Yushchenko awarded him hero status in 2010. Yanukovich cancelled this a couple months later. In 2019 Ukraine's parliament took up the issue and decided against giving him an award. And Russia wants to send in soldiers for that? Because they considered him for an award and rejected the idea?
* He (Andriy Biletsky) is quoted as having said something about "lead the white races .. against Semite-led untermenschen" but the Guardian article that makes the claim provides no citation.*
Ukraine has intentionally shelled urban centers for a decade — and you think Russia is wrong to protect ethnic Russians from that?
> Russia did not take steps to de-escalate the conflict. There were so many things Russia could have done if it was genuinely interested in peace and friendly relations with a sovereign Ukraine.
Do you mean like asking France and Germany to negotiate a peace that protects the people of Donbas while remaining part of Ukraine?
Russia did that in 2014 — and it was cynically exploited to arm Ukraine for this conflict by NATO, who refused to protect the people in Donbas from Ukrainian shelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjwSNiCSpnw
What should Russia have done to protect the ethnic Russians in Donbas — having tried to negotiate a peace only for Ukraine to shell their cities for another decade?
> I could go on, but the main argument is that when you look past the emotionally charged arguments
You’re the one making emotional strawmen about Banderites rather than focusing on the stated Russian objective of protecting Donbas after a decade of diplomacy failed.
Is that because you learned about the Russian “position” from NATO propaganda rather than directly from RT?
This is the Russian position, according to RT:
> Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
https://www.rt.com/news/569954-ukraine-us-nato-biden/
To protect those people it tries to decimate the energy infrastructure of Ukraine so that people will freeze in the winter and beg their government to stop fighting?
Do you honestly believe that Putin actually has the best interests of the people of Donbas at heart? Do you really think that's what this is about? When Russian journalists get murdered he shows no compassion. He doesn't give a fuck about the people of Donbas, he doesn't even give a fuck about his own people.
> To protect those people it tries to decimate the energy infrastructure of Ukraine so that people will freeze in the winter and beg their government to stop fighting?
This is the brutality of war — and why Russia tried to make the Minsk agreements work.
> Do you honestly believe that Putin actually has the best interests of the people of Donbas at heart? Do you really think that's what this is about?
Yes — I believe that a substantial reason for this is what happened in Donbas. Russians are angry at Putin for being weak and allowing this violence against ethnic Russians.
I certainly believe that this is more about protecting Donbas and Russia than the past decade of events has been good faith by NATO — Russia’s story makes sense, while NATO is openly lying by pretending this was an unprovoked attack.
- - - - -
You didn’t answer:
What specifically should Russia have done when a decade of diplomacy failed?
There was no violence to speak of. In all of 2021, only 25 civilians died, lowest annual figure since the war in Ukraine began in 2014. These deaths were mainly due to land mines in regions illegally occupied by Russia. To build support for the new invasion, Russian state media has blown these deaths out of proportion for years, depicting the situation as if people were living under constant artillery attacks and hiding in basements year after year.
> What specifically should Russia have done when a decade of diplomacy failed?
Cut funding and arming of the so-called "separatists" and remove Russian tanks, guns and military personnel from Ukraine. Politically, if they want a stable neighbour with exemplary human rights record, then they should encourage the integration of Ukraine into NATO, OECD and the EU. All countries in the region that have integrated with western organizations have seen dramatic improvements in all areas of human development.
You're 100% wrong here. This is not the brutality of war but the brutality of Russia. If the main goal is to protect the ethnic Russians of Donbas, why fire missiles at Lvov? Why try to send tanks into Kiev? Why capture Kherson? You know why? Because protecting Donbas is not the goal! It was a paper-thin excuse for some non-sense power politics and territorial expansion.
I already answered what Russia should have done. Russia claims "diplomacy has failed" and it's so paper thin. Even the US went before the UN in the case of Iraq. Russia did not go to the UN in this case. Their news programs (which I watch) will tell you they did, and their ambassador probably put forth some slapdash resolution, but did they take it seriously? No. Did they raise legitimate concerns and act like a partner interested in resolving a problem, as opposed to someone looking to escalate a problem into an excuse? No. They accuse Zelensky of being a drug-addicted fascist. Have you seen him? Have you seen Putin? Did you not see the anger and hatred in Putin's face on Feb 24? I did. I was shocked by it. I'd never seen his face so contorted. And this wasn't some propaganda show that took a clip out of context, I watched his whole speech on Russia's channel one.
I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point. Don't you have better things to do? I do, and I'm going to go see to them. Good day, sir.
…and then invaded unilaterally, anyway. In violation of UN laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War
> You're 100% wrong here. This is not the brutality of war but the brutality of Russia.
Look up what the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan. We literally droned people trying to save people we’d droned in so-called “double taps”.
We standardized that practice: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26296941
> Did they raise legitimate concerns and act like a partner interested in resolving a problem, as opposed to someone looking to escalate a problem into an excuse?
They spent a decade trying to work with countries like France and Germany to enact the Minsk accords — which those countries promised to guarantee.
Did those NATO countries act like a partner interested in resolving a problem? — did they even do what they’d promised in that treaty?
> Have you seen him? Have you seen Putin? Did you not see the anger and hatred in Putin's face on Feb 24?
Yes — Putin’s speeches have been thoughtful and considered, explaining their reasons. Especially compared to the vapid virtue signaling from Ukraine and NATO.
> I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point.
This is a bad faith ad hominem because you’re uncomfortable answering the questions of someone who disagrees with you.
That’s a sign you don’t have good support for your beliefs — notice how you’re bothered but I’m not?
https://youtu.be/8ek5jt8Ru3o
I do know that US media has lied or propagandized numerous aspects of this war — from the origins to the current status.
My question was that broader one:
How do you know this isn’t like Iraq (where the media lied about reasons) or Afghanistan (where the media lied about status, until the sudden collapse)?
Maybe start with international accounts of war crimes?
Both sides have presented evidence of war crimes and I already believe that soldiers do brutal things in conflicts.
Both sides always do. One side, in this case, has international validation. If you’re ignoring evidence and going off headlines, of course you’ll have a shallower view.
As to how anyone can trust the regime, if the only information you consume is what's curated by the regime, and if interesting-but-crtical views are not pushed forward, your thinking will be skewed. This is human nature.
I think this exchange between Lex Fridman and a girl who fled from North Korea is very interesting: https://youtu.be/usDqSEKDVsA?t=562
This propaganda technique is called reverse cargo cult. They don't try to directly refute the facts on the ground. They just claim that clever people realize it's all an illusion. It's devastatingly effective. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a sneer. https://hanshowe.org/2017/02/04/trump-and-the-reverse-cargo-...
"In a regular cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw, hoping for the same outcome. They don’t know the difference between a straw airstrip and a real one, they just want the cargo.
In a reverse cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw. But there’s a twist:
When they build the straw airstrip, it isn’t because they are hoping for the same outcome. They know the difference, and know that because their airstrip is made of straw, it certainly won’t yield any cargo, but it serves another purpose. They don’t lie to the rubes and tell them that an airstrip made of straw will bring them cargo. That’s an easy lie to dismantle. Instead, what they do is make it clear that the airstrip is made of straw, and doesn’t work, but then tell you that the other guy’s airstrip doesn’t work either. They tell you that no airstrips yield cargo. The whole idea of cargo is a lie, and those fools, with their fancy airstrip made out of wood, concrete, and metal is just as wasteful and silly as one made of straw.
1980s Soviets knew that their government was lying to them about the strength and power of their society, the Communist Party couldn’t hide all of the dysfunctions people saw on a daily basis. This didn’t stop the Soviet leadership from lying. Instead, they just accused the West of being equally deceptive. “Sure, things might be bad here, but they are just as bad in America, and in America people are actually foolish enough to believe in the lie! Not like you, clever people. You get it. You know it is a lie."
I see parallels to this now all the time - in conspiracy believers, and people from the Midwest who take it as common knowledge that life in California is a complete hellscape right now, because their preferred media sources tell them so every day.
It really exposes the motivation for otherwise mystifying behavior!
A month later, he receives a letter, in black ink, saying "the soviet union is fantastic, workers are really cared for here, we have freedom, food, prosperity, everyone is happy. The only inconvenience is that I really cannot find any red ink anywhere".
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=khrushchev+corn
But anyway the article hints at what you are saying.
An aide to Yeltsin later reported that in that visit to the grocery store in Houston “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.
So perhaps he was already thinking that way, and an improptu visit to a supermarket would be of great interest to him.
Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevism
My college++ GF's father worked at as a CxO of an international company, spoke Russian, traveled there multiple times, and had a lot of friends & acquaintances in the diplomatic services.
In the early 1980s, he told us about one of his diplomatic friends hosting some Russian dignitaries for a few weeks. Their consistent attitude about everything was "of course, we have this also in Russia", along with the general assumption that everything was either staged or in a 'walled garden' for the rich and/or powerful. Then, late in the trip, she accompanied them on a shopping trip to one of the new-ish (at the time) large-format supermarkets. The visitor was literally in tears, surrounded by the acres of plenty. It didn't matter whether it was just for the rich or not — it was so far beyond her experience that she couldn't hold it together.
Similarly, another incident pointed out by a Russian expert [0]: when communist authorities in (IIRC) Bulgaria tried to show "Car Wash" redubbed as a racial morality play about capitalism and all anyone noticed that even the poorest people in LA had so many cars that we had machines to wash them.
They may have a lot of good information, but it is not exhaustive. And remember, everyone examines the information they receive through the lens of their own experience and their own ego. Those growing up behind the Iron Curtain both had never experienced any kind of luxury that was not walled off only for the ruling class, and also had a desire to defend their own pride in their homeland. So, they wouldn't necessarily understand the importance or utter ubiquity of something like large supermarkets before seeing it in person and in live context.
[0] https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1611418480183492613
He had a family. Personal experiences are hard to beat. He also started his career in Yekaterinburg, from some mid-range position, so he was not that detached from the life of common folk. He just saw a very different kind of life which does not translate to knowing things in theory.
They are just guys who happened to find themselves there
Maybe he did get the intelligence reports but he needed to go and see for himself in order to internalize them as opposed to just absentmindedly skim through them
Anyway, Robin Williams predicted it all five years before Yeltsin's trip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHIcmoY3_lE
> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism
> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits.
From that paragraph it sounds like "pundits" are the ones saying it shattered his view of communism, not the autobiography itself.
(Edit: to be fair, that sentence is a really awkward attribution sandwich, so I can see how it might have confused.)
Pundits aren't super far out over their skis.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kh3dw/ive_h...
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
It didn't matter if the line was for toilet paper and you had enough. You'd get some extra toilet paper and barter with someone who had extra laundry detergent and not enough TP.
This was common Soviet experience.
It's somewhat surprising to me that Yeltsin, who was obviously high up in the party apparatus, was surprised at the plenty of the US, but nevertheless my point is that the story is not apocryphal.
Was it a trigger for the collapse of the Soviet Union? Honestly, probably. One among many.
(This is why when I travel, I go not to the center, but to the fringes of the cities, to see how the common people live.)
And I'm sure this contributed to his ideas of how the country should be like.
https://archive.org/details/0038_Americas_Distribution_of_We...
I have no doubt this happened, but my gut says the US govt set this up to help him make the transition look like a principled decision rather than an outright loss. I'm sure the CIA was more than happy to help him with PR side of things.
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/traumazone-2022/
Well, maybe he was an idiot.
Your comment is very blind to this basic fact, and excuses atrocious mismanagement with platitudes about tsars.
Germany and Japan, as well as China, were absolute wastelands of ruin and destitution after the second world war, and had suffered decades of terribly backwards previous leadership, yet they made good on enormous well-being changes in much less time than the USSR had to do the same by the time of Yeltsin's supermarket visit.
My comment glosses over. Compared to an anecdote about how a supermarket visit “Brought Down the Soviet Union”? This is the thing that you leaped to respond to? You are dripping with hypocrisy.
That low-quality article deserves no more rebuttal than the sentences that I spared on it.
You seem to greatly downplay the historic Russia.
Overall you sound like a person of socialist education who never evaluated their upbringing critically.
The Soviet Union collapsed because the Party lost control of the country and the tensions and outright conflicts that previously prevented any challenge to its power tore up the country. It was conflicts between the nationalities, competition between bureaucrats of different levels over resources, the young Komsomol chiefs against the old gerontocrats, Moscow against the Russian regions, the Soviet Army against the KGB, the religious against the state atheism, innumerable other conflicts, with probably the ethnic/national conflicts having the most intensity. The USSR found out it couldn't control its own population and that is why it retreated from Eastern European countries as well.
The party lost control because of glasnost and perestroika which unleashed all the contradictions and conflict at once, which further caused chaos. It is no accident that the Communist party got itself banned in both Russia and Ukraine. In comparison China didn't try glasnost and did incremental and initially isolated economic reforms, with agriculture still being restricted to family farms to this day.
The USA didn't win the Cold War or cause the USSRs collapse, most of the time the policy was containment or even reapproachment, not rollback.
We (the US) were able to trigger an arms race at a time when the Union was least able to afford it, and overwhelm what central planning could deal with.
[0] Mig Pilot by John Barron
https://www.tvo.org/article/in-1983-gorbachev-took-a-stroll-...
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-ma...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DBFaucddw
No idea how people in the west romanticize it or say it was a good thing. I've even seen hostility directed towards Eastern Europeans living in the west (almost exclusively from radical college kids) joking about how they got what they deserved or anyone that ran from the USSR was a greedy business person and that the stories are made up.
We're talking about people that risked their lives to escape a system. Not your political opponents on twitter.
here is what it looked like
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0c/56/2d/0c562d975c99e89786ec...
not much different from food stores in the US during the 40s. Maybe blandness is a worthwhile trade off it is means less obesity and other ill of modern diets.
Also, as a child growing up mostly in outskirts of Moscow region (oblast), I don't remember even visiting one of these stores. I was about 20 y.o. (now 40) when I first saw a supermarket similar to this one in the town 65 miles from Moscow where I grew up.
Also, it doesn't mean everything was that bad, or we haven't had enough food on the table. Most of the food was unprocessed and simple, and the most was from farmers. For example, there was no to little cheese, but there was meat, and milk, and veggies. I have to admit that a large number of meat (especially chicken) was a humanitarian assistance (notorious "nozhki Busha" - Bush's chicken legs).
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393647013
By the time Yeltsin visited that grocery store, Gorbachev had been working for decades to put himself into a position of power so that he could carefully shift the USSR to a liberal Democratic government with a market economy. The fact that he actually got himself into position to execute this plan is mind blowing. I don’t think I have ever read a book which so radically reshapes how I view a piece of history.
In all of Russian history.
You could argue that Medvedev did, too, but this increasingly deranged puppet is sort of back in politics now.
To me the explanation for why everything got shitty all at once is obvious: the global pandemic “synchronized” all nations and produced hardship everywhere simultaneously. Fragile systems in every country were strained.
Today, unless you pay private insurance, you can wait 13 years ( not a typo, you wait a teenager ) for hip surgery.
Sweden today. One of the richest “socialist” countries on the planet.
Here is on the napkin calculation of grocery basket to salary from retail and service sources[0] for central region:
5600 ₽ * 100 / 62000 ₽ => 9,0323 %
[0] MOEX:FIVE https://www.x5.ru/ru/PublishingImages/Pages/Media/News/Index...
[1] MOEX:HHR https://stats.hh.ru/central_federal_district
And here is the 2022 state of supermarkets in Russia:
[2] Typical near apartment supermarket, only of this retail chain there is, 18300 of these in country https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTy04V1bTDs
[3] Hypermarket https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kG9yfCwG_s
Edit: fwiw friend about to receive a degree in economy says 62000 is basically a bullshit number for a single person, and if they are talking families well 5600 is also (it may be enough for one person to survive without eating out but not a family). Does not compute.
But for the record none of the .ru links you gave work for me currently. Does hh even host a representative amount of jobs for cleaning staff, shop salesperson, cooks and other jobs many regular people have? How many people don't have the chance to work for good clean money and get by with gigs or grey salaries? Consider that, double monthly food expense and it may be not 50 percent but not too far. It may be hard to grasp if you happen to be in a muscovite software engineer bubble.
Somehow, you argue without even bothering to access websites in question. Are you trolling ?
[0] https://www.avito.ru/all/vakansii/polnyy_den-ASgCAQICAUCQCxS...