A Warning to the American Ruling Class, From the Soviets

Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in Red Square in August, 1991 is the defining image of the fall of the Soviet empire. Part of the Red Army had been sent to Moscow to quell the new populist government there and restore the old Communist order by a cabal of KGB and Army officers.

The problem was at least twofold: one, many of those Red Army soldiers were from Moscow themselves and naturally hesitant to kill their own people; two, many of them were veterans of the ten year long Afghan War and had been treated like shit by the same people who had sent them there in the first place. Many had not been fully paid for years.

So they joined the Second Russian Revolution. End of the ancien' regime.

There are many reasons for the collapse of the Soviet empire, but ultimately it was the system's own internal contradictions that did it in. For years, the Soviets got their hard currency from oil at inflated prices stemming from the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. When the Saudis dropped the price of oil in order to reclaim their old share of the oil market in 1985, the writing was on the wall. The Russians simply could not compete with cheap Middle Eastern oil, and at a stroke lost at least $20 billion a year in revenue.

They were overextended. Maintaining their 40 year old grip on Eastern Europe was as expensive as it was unpopular among the Eastern European populations, the Afghan War was an expensive boondoggle, Soviet production methods for its other great potential export-grain-were expensive and inefficient, and it spent so heavily on its own military-industrial complex that it had nothing left over to maintain the standard of living of its most critical people, the Russians themselves.

The Soviet PTB, so used to being invincible on their own turf, refused to make changes that might have enabled a smaller Soviet Union to survive. They were broke, but refused to do anything about it for several years. Eventually, it was maintain order at home or maintain imperial control of Eastern Europe, so they withdrew from Eastern Europe and its puppet governments there fell like dominoes.

The Russian people had been wishing for the benefits of the West at least since the Beatles introduced blue jeans and rock n' roll, and had little sympathy for their own entrenched, ruling elites. When the standard of living for the Russian equivalent of the middle class, the midlevel Communist apparatchiks, precipitously declined in the late eighties, the balloon went up. The government could not afford another war after Afghanistan, and so stood helplessly by as first the Baltic States and then Ukraine broke free. When it became apparent that their own people had had enough of them as well, they sent in the Red Army.

The Army switched sides. In the end, all of this happened in a matter of months, so quickly that the Soviet elite never really knew what hit them.

Our own system now is every bit as precarious as the Soviets' was in 1985. Our banks are broke, their assets smoke, mirrors, and illusion. Our political leaders have no new ideas and keep rehashing the old failed ones in one form or the other. The Democratic Party's new slogan, which translates to "They suck more!" is hardly inspirational. We spend hundreds of billions a year to maintain our own global Empire, but the ruling classes don't want to pay for that themselves and are only able to extract so much from the rest of us, which still won't be enough.

And they treat our combat veterans and active duty military pretty shittily.

The parallels between the Soviets of a quarter century ago and the Americans today are not exact by any means, but there are definitely parallels. I wonder if Vladimir Putin sees them? He probably does.

and RW types that rule the US now?

"The Shock Doctrine" covers it pretty well, how all of the people's assets were privatized for a few pennies on the dollar. They stand to pocket even more when they send us down the tubes. Unless of course their calculataions indicate that that they can reap more profits from full-on nuclear confrontation. In that case they will surely kill us all. I have no doubt about it at all.

and not be fooled by the political games going on to keep us distracted.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the government was able to provide free housing to most citizens. Ours will certainly fight to preserve the banks' stranglehold on our housing market.

I lived through those events. And can tell you the whole reform was conceived, planned
and executed by the named "elite" itself for nothing else but its own benefit. The most
important motivation behind that decision was the envy the Soviet elite felt towards
their Western colleagues, who enjoyed incomparably greater benefits and standards of living
then even the highest Communist Party apparatchiks. Now those former apparatchiks turned
themselves into the new Russian (and also Ukrainian, Moldovan, Kazakh etc.) oligarchy
and can enjoy the same access to private jets and French Riviera mansions as their
formerly envied Western counterparts. The regular Russians? Not so much.

So I asked him if I could post it. He gave me his permission, but not to use his name.

It's good to know there's someone who actually lived through it. I like to hear both sides to get the truth/correction. I am concerned about what is happening here in USA .... corporate is too big. We seem to be under the Ruling Class people.

The Soviet bureaucracy plotted their own demise? Do you have anything for me to read?

parasitism. In this respect the Soviet bureaucracy was nothing in comparison with
the current US ruling class, not even in comparison with current Russian ruling
class, which is well on its way towards US-like standards of bloodsucking and
parasitism. The Soviet reform was certainly not anything ordinary people in the
USSR strived for, and it took a great effort of Communist propaganda machine
under Gorbachev to convince most of them to get onboard with their "perestroyka"
enterprise.

There was serious corruption, but their were cultural and internal barriers to the kind of financial mania that we have here.

People didn't like, but expected that party leaders got "perks", but they also were percieved to "give back" to the people. They never could have gotten away with hoarding resources in the way that they do now. They would have been taken down.

when the ruble was officially worth $1.29, and then using those hard currencies to buy up 40 or 50 times as many rubles after the great ruble devaluation

I have immediate relatives and live amongst the Russian community. Gorbochev to this day hides part of the mystery, he has said as much.

Like in the US, what happens in front of us often does not show all the events that are occuring beneath the surface. I believe that it indeed was GREED coupled with ignorance that felled the USSR. The USSR had been pelted with propaganda. They knew all about the "lifestyles of the rich and famous", but had little information about the inequities in the US. Even after the fall it has only been in recent years that most Russians have not believed that everyone in the US is wealthy.

From Gorbachev's later comments, and the "mystery meetings" alluded to in Crimea, I suspect that the fall was not an internal event, but was orchestrated by external players who essentially bought off the political elite and convinced them that they would be rich like their western counterparts, and that the entire country would also be much better off in the process.

Has anyone else noticed that the particular form of capitalism that Russia has ended with was not as we have it, but essentially a libertarian state? A more natural transition should have led to a much more moderated system more akin to Europe? But surprise! They ended up with almost precisely what the IMF and the World Republican Organization (yes there is one) have wanted to see propagated in the world.

which aren't being addressed. Corporate Fascism is our undoing. It's always about those in power wanting more power at the expense of everyone else.

And there's something to be said about getting soft and spoiled as consumers. The American people have been lulled into a dream state. It'll be the last bubble to break. The Dream bubble.

:yourock:

SPLAT! People will feel like they've been kicked in the groin.

DOH!

dead on.

class, but a lesson for the working class.

Lesson for the ruling class—rule this shittily and you will lose your shit.

Lesson for the working class—the ruling class doesn't rule in the best interests of the state at large, but rather in their own best interests... when their incompetence/self-absorption gets to be too much- it's time to take their shit.

Get rid of one group of elites, and another group will step in to take their place. But not before bloodshed and many lives ruined. Most of them working class.

while you have the chance. If you get enough of it then you'll be part of the new ruling class... and if you don't get enough—well, you'll still have more shit than you did before the revolution.

A lesson I'd say many Iraqis learned from the Soviet example... judging by how quickly the museums and arms depots were looted once the Americans overthrew Hussein. Who knows how many savvy looters are now in parliament?

Heh... "But not before bloodshed and many lives ruined. Most of them working class."—? Methinks someone misunderstands the "ruination" threshold of the working class. With less and less to lose, "many lives ruined" is a sentiment more often projected upon the working class by the self-absorbed middle classes than anything that the working classes themselves "can lay fingers upon".

competing cannibal capitalists in other parts of the world who will move in and strip the remaining assets off of the bone. What's left when they are done won't be a pretty sight.

Or else, we'll go the Putin strongman route, and in effect become a full-on fascist country with a big enough military to keep competing global factions at bay and the domestic opposition cowering in terror.

Either way, not an attractive prospect.

:kick:

The USSR was an Empire in decline and over extended. We are an empire in decline and over extended. Realize this is not something too popular with many folks in the US who cannot conceive of a post american world... I can and I know it is coming in my lifetime, perhaps even in the next ten years. The conditions are there. It will be sudden, and it will change the nature of the US, worst case the US will not survive it as a nation.

That said Gorbachev realized what was going on, and opened the nation through the effort called Glassnost (sp), the opening. By the time Yeltsin came to power it had been a few years.

Also another critical difference. Those Russian troops were mostly draftees, who were not paid for months, if not in a few cases, over a year. Our troops are volunteers, and while we treat them as if they were disposable (at least by some in the power elites) they are still much better treated. They are regularly paid, and believe it or not the GI Bill works.

And this is just scratching the surface of your post.

Did you watch the interviews Gorbachev gave last year? He pretty clearly alluded to third party involvement. The USSR did not "simply" collapse. It was orchestrated between the political elite and some yet unknown parties.

What really did them in, from my understanding, was the propaganda from the west. It convinced the people that the rest of the modern world was wealthy beyond immagination, and it also convinced many of the party elite of that as well.

Russians were always aware of the imperfections in their system. But how could the system survive, when the people all believed that capitalism actually achieved in America what they had strived for many years for? Equality and wealth for everyone? The USSR promised it, but the US actually *HAD* it (or so they were led to believe).

The failure of the USSR occurred before Gorbachev. I think it has more to do with loss of purpose and belief in the system. That lead up to the conditions that allowed cynical interests to plunder the country, send it into chaos, and eventually bring in the ultimate elitist economy, a libertarian state.

Russian state to it's knees, that third aspect... is... the Internet.

When you have a few modems and a few fax machines it is like chipping at walls. But once you reach a critical mass information starts to flow even more freely. And it supplemented all the informal sources, including the secret reading of things like The Gulag Archipelago.

Yes it was orchestrated... and the other choice was... to go to war with the West. That was the fear, that the Russians would have chosen war in Europe to unify the people under the flag one last time. It works, but even if they managed to win what do they do with all the new territory.

And we are on a similar path here... and it won't be pretty.

In the 70s and 80s the KGB was not quite as effective, nor as active as our media portrayed. Something *like* perestroyka had been occurring for years before.

We have a lot of misunderstandings and stereotypes of what life was like there.

I don't think the internet was a factor though. It wasn't even in use by the general population here in the US yet, and it definitely was not in Russia.

regardless, we are on the same path, and it will not be pretty. Empires can retrench in non violent ways, or in violent ways. Russia mostly was non-violent, after it bled itself white at Afghanistan... (Afghanistan will get another notch soon, as a factor)... or it can resist every step of the way... see Spain.

We actually have more similarities with Spain, but that is another story... at the economic basis.

When they achieve that goal you can kiss the Constitution and the Bill of Rights goodbye.

In the North American Union there will only be the haves and have nots.

The cold hard fact is that the bastards in charge do not give a damn about the majority of people in this country.

Social Security is on the chopping block because it is one of the last things that isn't nailed down that those bastards can steal.

We ain't see nothin yet!