Russian anti-Semitism

ChrisD(RJ) chrisd at russiajournal.com
Fri Apr 19 06:10:16 PDT 2002


James Heartfield wrote: But wasn't the problem that the economic order under the old USSR was simply incapable of producing a national division of labour, and accelerated these fragmentary trends? I can't quite believe that the break-up was just a subjective error. All of the unpleasant ethnic conflicts are merely expressions of that underlying fault, it would seem to me. (I think Trotsky said a long time ago that socialism in one country would lead to the disaggregation of the Communist International along national lines, and this is merely the working out of that trend.) -------------------- Justin would be the one to ask on this.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "national division of labour," but the USSR was an extremely highly integrated economic space, with economic activity coordinated between mutually-integrated and -dependent republics. Which is one reason, maybe the main one, that productivity plumetted so fast in the non-Russian republics (not counting the Baltics): Russia stopped shipping them the materials they needed for their industries. In the USSR, you would, say, mine the materials to make machine parts in republic a, ship them to republic b for assembly, and then move them to republic c to combine them into a consumer product like a car. When it disintegrated, that network was lost and everything very quickly fell apart.

Breaking up the Union wasn't a "subjective error" from the viewpoint of the elite that did it -- they wanted to increase their own local, absolute power at the expense of the power of the country as a whole. Sheverdnadze had to be an obedient bureaucrat in the Soviet Union; in Georgia, he's God. It brings me great pleasure that Shushkevich, who met in secret with Yeltsin and his Ukrainian counterpart to dismantle the Union, now receives an ordinary Belarusian pension of $2 a month. And he has the nerve to whine about it.

Yeah, I know, the Union was bad and a lot of, for instance, Ukrainians and Georgians have been dicked around by Russians in the past and so have gripes, but ANYTHING would have been better than breaking it up. It was suicidal for countries like Armenia. You just have to look at a map to see the obviousness of this -- Russia has huge tracts of oil and gas, diamonds, gigantic fields of timber, nickel, aluminum and platinum mines (which it gave to the other republics for free). Georgia has NOTHING. All Ukraine has is good soil. Kazakhstan can probably go its own way -- they have a lot of oil and gas -- if they don't mind becoming completely subordinated to China.

It's primarily for this reason that I think that, over time, you will see gradual political integration in the post-Soviet space. Russia is the engine of the whole region.

Chris Doss The Russia Journal



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