Yes, even today workers in profitable industries (oil, gas) are left unpaid months at a time. But it also means that the proceeds for the sale of oil and gas are simply stolen by the billion-dollar bushel load and kept abroad. But since the govt itself is criminal, this obviously cannot be stopped. For eg, 10 years ago Viktor Chernomyrdin was a 500-rouble a month civil servant. Now he owns (reputedly) 4% of Gazprom, which puts him in the Rockefeller league. Obviously, he stole it. They steal the capital from the companies they privatise, and then they steal the revenue stream + profit of THEIR OWN companies and secrete the plundered billions in their numbered Swiss accounts -- which is why their banks have gone bankrupt -- been sucked clean by their own owners.
>That factories were dismantled.
Yes, dismantled.
> That skilled workers were paid substantial premiums to leave and have
> exited the Soviet Union. It seems to me being ignorant of the true
> nature of whats going on that this simply amounts to a boycott
> of Russian Business by Foreign Capital.
Boycott? No, all this plunder happened only with and because of western govenrmental, secret service and business + banking connivance. Foreign capital[ists] have been crawling all over the fSU: they didn't invest because they didn't ened much more than armed guards and wheelbarrows, to enrich themselves beyond most people's wildest dreams of avarice. Why build factories when you can be thnaked by the host govt for robbing the nation, and then when Congo-style chaos steps in, you can sit on the sidelines and moralise?
>If Foreigners sell
> a firm to a Russian or another foreigner for a song and the business
> is not operated then presumably it could be expropriated. Are
> we threatening to send the troups in to protect our investments.
>
> We know that the Russia has or had the tecnical expertise to build
> an Industrial Machine. Stalin managed to do this at great personal
> cost in Russian Lives.. While in the case of Cuba its much clearer why a
> capital
> flight is extremely harmful, in a large relatively well trained country
> like
> the Soviet Union this is less obvious. Is the basic problem that Russia
> is food short or has an inefficient agricultural system and has to use Raw
> Materials or manufacutrues to finance feeding its population.
Russia today has NO commercial agriculture to speak of: it's been wiped out by subsidised EU imports and unrestricted dumping, permitted and even encouraged by the Russian criminal, quisling govt in order to further weaken Russia and reduce any chance of future independnece or resurrection.
All this happened because the West wanted it to happen: western policy was driven above all by fear of communism reviving and did everything possible to make the collapse of the USSR as systemic, material and total as possible. The West did everything it could to encourage the embezzlers, and is still encouraging them now. And since embezzlers like Chernomyrdin could hardly believe their luck and never expected the good times to last, they had every incentive to help the destruction along, thus weakening terminally the Russian state and covering their own misdeeds in a universal and seemingly ineluctable criminality. Anne Williamson is one of the best writers on this.
> I'm confused
>
> In particular, why is the Russia having more of a hard time
> than say Chechoslovakia or Poland or is this a fabrication of
> the press.
The same kinds of criminality were present in all the former Warsaw Pact states -- enterprise directors becoming owners and thus stealing the patrimony of the privatised state etc: but the crucial differences were that (a) the west took a different view, since it wanted to strengthen not weaken Poland etc, and (b) these countries were smaller, closer to European markets and benefited ab initio from German capital, as Russia did not.
It is said that the difference is that Central Europe has a historical memory of precommunist commercial law and practice, whereas Russia doesn't. This is a lie, and it is enough to read any 19C Russian novel to see that Russia from top to bottom, from aristos to provincial gentry, to every peasant women keeping chickes, was as commercialised and obsessed with money-making as anywhere else.
We shall see, in any case, how long term the Polish, Hungarian etc 'miracles' are.
Mark