>At 09:53 AM 9/23/99 -0400, Doug Henwood quoted:
>>Financial Times - September 23 1999
>>
>>EASTERN EUROPE: Grim picture of women's lives
>
-- snip --
>>
>>After 1989, women suffered, notably with the weakening of the
>>communist child care networks. At the same time, rising crime has hit
>>everyone while new-found freedoms have created other problems, such
>>as a rapid increase in smoking and alcohol consumption among young
>>women.
and Wojtek commented:
>Bullshit. It is the price. The good ol'commies kept the price of booze
>high relative to other goodies to regulate consumption. After the
>'reform,' prices of other goodies went up through the roof to equal those
>in Western Europe, but the price of booze did not quite keep up with that
>trend - so now it is relatively lower in relation to other goodies.
>
>
to regulate consumption, and as a key tax vehicle. part of the incompetent (if not culpable) gorbachev perestroika was a failure to anticipate the fiscal consequences of the 1987-88 campaign against vodka consumption. a cigarette shortage also suddenly appeared at critical moments in 1990-1991. the new regime was able to provide unlimited cheap vodka, abundant cigarettes, and lots of soros and death.
in fall 1995 comrades in minsk (belarus) told me that in neighboring russia the ratio wojtek refers to was that where pre-1991 one bottle of vodka was priced as equivalent to forty loaves of bread, at that time it was one bottle of vodka to two loaves of bread. i don't think this has much changed since.
it was their opinion that this was a conscious and an essential element in the "reform". immobilizing working class opposition through in effect wholesale poisoning. i don't know if this was an explicit element in the yeltsin impeachment count for mass murder of the russian people that got majority support in the duma last april (but not the 2/3rds required by the yeltsin constitution and therefore reported simply as "defeated").
as a result of this pricing policy vodka was also pouring uncontrollably, they said, over the border into belarus. and as we saw a week later, thence over the border into poland.
we (my niece anita, our friend marta, myself) stayed in brest-litovsk at the belarus - poland border, and finding the times of the moscow- warsaw express trains inconvenient, decided to take a late afternoon local train ("electrichka") from brest to warsaw. at the polish control point anita and marta went out to have a smoke, the customs guys came through and without exception *all* our fellow travellers opened their sacks of vodka bottles and put a bottle into the customs guys' bag. when they got to me i tried to explain that i had no vodka to give them. problyem. anita and marta came back, there was much discussion & they sent for the officer, who took our passports and after a long pause asked in english "why are you travelling business class?"
john mage