Wojtek Sokolowski
Chris:
>
> What a difference an article makes! "Krupneishii"
> means "very, superlatively great," not "the greatest,"
> which would be "samyi krupnii."
>
It can also mean "one of the greatest" in this context, I believe (my Russian is a bit rusty, to say the least).
But nuances aside, it was indeed one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century. It was a disaster for numerous indigenous peoples of central Asia and the far east, who depended on Soviet subsidies. It was also a disaster for many African countries and Cuba that depended on Soviet assistances - for selfish reasons, to be sure, but assistance nonetheless. It was a disaster for Yugoslavia and Iraq, which became easy target of the US "theatrical micromilitarism" (as Emanuel Todd aptly dubs it).
So it was indeed a disaster, especially when you abandon the US-centric perspective. While we are at that, it was also a disaster for the US liberals and left who were crushed by the US corporate right wing juggernaut once it felt "safe from the Soviet threat." Methinks the US lefties and pwogies should go on a pilgrimage to Moscow to thank bat'ushka Stalin for the brief interlude of civil rights and political civility they enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s, as the US ruling class felt compelled to put their house temporarily in order to stave off the "Soviet threat."
Wojtek
^^^^^^
CB: Ditto what Wojtek says. I was gonna say the fall of the SU was the _second_ greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century after WWII. Not to mention that the biggest victim of the WWII catastrophe _was_ the SU ( and maybe China).
The Capitalists-Nazis' holocaustic war on the SU , clearly the biggest war and slaughter in the history of the human race, was a main cause of the fall of the SU.( http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob62.html :19 million civilian dead ; 27 million military casualties )
Funny how all the analyses of the fall of the SU fail to emphasize the impact of the Capitalist-Nazi war destroying not only so many lives ,i.e. workers , the main economic resource, but a gargantuan amount of technology and physical wealth. Oh, big surprise that they didn't have as many "consumer goods" as the U.S. after that. Imagine what the U.S. economy would have been and would be like if it had suffered the world historic destruction that the SU did.
Bourgeois economists commit a despicable lie of omission when they
measure the competiton between socialism and capitalism, and yet fail to mention that capitalism cheated by almost physically annihilating its competitor.
We can say that the Nazi Capitalists inflicted a mortal wound on the SU fifty years before its fall.
Then after that, capitalism compounded the destruction by starting and continually escalating the nuclear arms race, forcing the SU to divert major resources to the military. Imagine if the US had suffered the Nazi war that the SU did, and then, after all that, came under the threat of a nuclear attack. You have just lost 30 million dead to capitalist warmongers, and now another capitalist nation has atomic weapons , which they refuse to abolish.
The biggest lie of the 20th Century is the coverup of capitalist world historic barbarity, savagery , whatever.