--- Kenneth Campbell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Just this eve, I was spending some time talking about history with a friend. She brought out a book with a variety of graphs. The most salient one, in this regard (thread), was the shift of population from "agricultural workers" to "industrial workers." The graph only measure 100 years, starting from 1860.
The curves that the UK and US generated with meagre slopes in that time frame. Those units had made that "relocation" much earlier. Japan's curve started around the 1880s. The USSR was around 1930. (There were others, like Turkey, with similar steep relocation curves.) I mentioned to her, in talking about that, that the one thing that I found the most knee-jerk and unreflective about the right is that they make unsophisticated comparisons, usually assuming from some mythical "ground zero" that the US and Russia started on a level playing field and only socialism crippled Russia. Ken. --- Yeah. Look at communal apartments, which were always adduced in anti-Soviet propaganda as evidence of the evils of the latter system. In fact, communal apartments were a response to massive and rapid urbanization. People have to live somewhere. When England industrialized, what happened to the people who flooded into the cities -- they lived in workhouses? Anyway I think both sides of this debate are missing the point of the Soviet experience (limiting the discussion to the USSR). Soviet Union policy was really not about "socialism." The Soviet Union was about modernizing an agrarian country in lickety-split time. It succeeded. _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com
