in reply to Hakki's
>>Any non-Russian citizen of former Comecon countries or former Soviet
>>republics will agree that the USSR was imperialist, and will probably spit
>>or swear when doing so :)
Doug asks (rhetorically):
>Wasn't the flow of resources in the old USSR just the opposite what
>you'd expect from an imperialist power? Didn't Russia subsidize the
>Central Asian republics? And as for what we used to call the captive
>nations of Eastern Europe - most had incomes higher than the Russian
>average, right? Also not capitalist-style imperialism.
>
Indeed, and in the Baltic states, Russian migrants made up the lower strata, while Latvians etc were relatively privileged.
That said, being part of the Soviet sphere of influence marked out a fate quite bad enough for EE, Central Asian and Baltic peoples: that of having their economy as destructively wasteful as the Soviet Union's. I'm not convinced that the odd dam or underground system compensates for the economic backwardness that most soviet sphere societies suffered.
-- James Heartfield