Mark admonishes Tom thus:
> Odd how many Russians yearn to be back in that 'police state': no doubt
>they are
>to blame for moral weakness in not enjoying the bracing atmosphere of
>post-lapsarian
>Russia. Or perhaps it is time for some of us to begin to come to terms at
>last with
>our anti-sovietism. The American Left is still infected with Macarthyism,
>in fact,
>but there is no longer so much excuse for ignorance about the Soviet
>experience.
One need not be an uncritical Maslow apologist to appreciate starving people (of whom I believe there are now millions in CIS), beset by nasty local wars, ignored by salary clerks, depressed by a sense of lost significance, confronted without notice by a bewildering social order that presumes and enforces wholly new ways of seeing and behaving (which Russians are academically and culturally inclined and equipped to critique, as most of us are not) etc etc are very likely to get wistful for days of relative plenty and absolute certainty.
I'm not offering a defence of capitalism here, but I too suffer from anti-sovietism. I'm of the impression most wanted out, else the Wall would not have been built and it would not have fallen. The fact that they had wholly inadequate and fantastic impressions of the alternative doesn't change my argument.
An entrenched aparat hurts and takes just like a bourgeoisie hurts and takes - only the former, as Tom says, is not constrained by the sort of quasi-democratic gestures the latter is forced to make to validate itself (although admittedly the time may come when the irksome business of self-validation by way of formal rights is no longer considered either affordable or necesary).
I suspect we're all much better off being socialist dissidents under capitalism than were Soviet dissidents under an aparat that demonstrably killed millions of its own.
I really hope we don't limit our options to these two sad scenarios, anyway.
Cheers, Rob.