|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
|| [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Chris Doss
||
|| Just a small comment on this bit by Hakki:
||
|| 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 :)
||
|| This is true as far as the Baltics go, but a lot of people in the
Just the Baltics? How about Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, ex-Yugo, ex-Czech, etc. How about the Kazakhs who still can't stop growing two heads from the radiation at Semipalatinsk, or the Uzbeks who've had their Aral sea destroyed and get their electricity cut off by Putin who wants their oil? The Ukranians may be so desperate now that they caved but they have an ancestral hatred of the Russian occupier who outlawed their language. Of course, it's natural people miss the old days seeing the shit they're in now but it's not because they're crazy about the Russians.
---- Agreed. For some reason I didn't read the Comecon bit. Of course those guys are scared shitless of the Russians, except for Yugoslavia. As far as the FSU goes, in the 1991 vote as to whether or not to preserve the USSR, 75% of Soviet citizens voted yes. I don't know how that breaks down statistically into what countries and/or ethnicities were voting yea or voting nay, but it certainly looks like most people in the USSR, only about half of whom are Russian, were in favor of staying in it.
Ukrainian practically IS Russian.
In Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, Tajikistan, etc. there is widespread anti-Russian feeling but there is also widespread recognition that the USSR modernised them, to the extent that they are modernised. I mean, they were agrarian tribespeople before the USSR (not to be dissing agrarian tribespeople or anything). And everybody knows that their economic viability lies in being close to Russia -- compare conditions in Tatarstan, which did not secede from Russia, and Georgia, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan, etc. Tatarstan's no paradise but it's a hell of a lot better than the competition.
This has very little to do with the current topic, but the only country in the FSU where total economic collapse did not take place is none other than Belarus, the one country that did not participate in shock therapy.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal