Chris Doss wrote:
>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
>non-Russian CIS rue the day the USSR fell.
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.
Doug
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Yes. The USSR poured money into the Warsaw Pact states to keep nationalist sentiment down, with the result that living standards were hire in those countries (most of 'em, anyway, let's forget about Albania for the moment) than in the Soviet Union itself. It also poured cash into the non-Slavic Soviet Republics for the same reason, but I don't think living standards in Tbilisi or Tashkent were as high as in Moscow or St. Petersburg, maybe higher than in the rest of Russia.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal