Chris Doss>...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...
From Workers Vanguard October 12th issue. Reprinting, "Afghanistan and the Left: The Russian Question Point Blank, " in Spartacist, #29, Summer 1980. "The difference between Soviet Central Asia and Afghanistan is to be measured not in decades but, in centuries. While Afghanistan is over 90% illiterate neighboring Soviet Uzbekistan probably has a higher literacy rate than Jimmy Carter's Georgia. The average life expectancy in Uzbekistan is 70 compared to 40 in Afghanistan. A major reason for this that in Uzbekistan there is a one doctor for every 380 people and in Afghanistan there is one doctor for every 20,000! All social and economic comparisons show the same thing..."
More in a book by the late Al Szymanski, "The Soviet Union: Is It Imperialist?, " if memory serves, published by Praeger.(A friend of Al's, sociologist, Ted Goertzel, writes about Al's M-L'ism [Philadelphia Workers Org. Comm.] in his book from Prometheus Press, "Turncoats and Renegades.") Michael Pugliese