If you were born after 1985 you have no remembered reality to measure
against this false vision, just as you have no way to situate those
charming Soviet musical comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, idyllic
portrayals of an idealised Russophone socialism, brightly coloured and
fun, propaganda now in a way they weren’t when they were made. This is
the context that has made it possible for Vladimir Putin and his
government to sell Russia’s opportunistic invasion of Ukraine to his own
people and to Ukrainian neo-Soviets: the idea that it undoes what
should never have been done, an artificial division of Russian-speaking
Eurasia by fascists/the West/America/rabid Ukrainian nationalists – in
neo-Soviet discourse, avatars of a single anti-Russian monster.
One problem is that the people most likely to think that the USSR breakup was a
harm rather than a benefit are those who actually experienced the USSR.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
http://digitaljournal.com/news/world/more-former-usa-residents-think-breakup-a-harm-than-a-benefit/article/364441
There is a lot of interesting stuff in the article but after reading the
opening paragraph, it is clear that this is meant as anti-Russian bit of
propaganda with plenty of detailed factoids.
Cheers, k hanly
On Tuesday, March 11, 2014 7:14:33 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:
Putin’s Counter-Revolution
James Meek reports from Ukraine
Corruption is everywhere, high and low, in Ukraine as in Russia.
Yanukovich’s son Olexandr, a dentist by training, quickly became one of
the richest men in the country after his father became president. Just
before the regime fell Olexandr Yanukovich’s companies were winning half
of all state contracts. Dima told me about a friend who worked as a
customs officer. His official salary was 250 euros; bribes took it up to
3000. Perhaps he was exaggerating. But people boasting about the size of
the bribes they receive when they’re working for the state doesn’t bode
well. In Donetsk I heard about the coal scam. Ukraine pours millions
into subsidising deep-mined Donbass coal. It is subsidised by weight and
so rogue strip-miners carve open-cast coal cheaply out of unlicensed
sites, add that coal to a load of expensive coal, and collect a
deep-mine subsidy for the lot. A miner’s daughter told how her father
had been injured at work and needed an operation on his arm. The
operation should have been free, but before the surgeon carried it out,
he strongly suggested the girl’s father demonstrate blagodarnost –
gratitude – in advance, to the tune of ten thousand Ukrainian hryvnia,
about a thousand US dollars.
Alexei Inozemtsev, a student in his sixth and final year at KNMU, told
me the trouble was that patients understood that doctors were so poorly
paid – $170 a month is typical – they couldn’t live without taking
backhanders. And because the politicians and senior bureaucrats who have
the power to change the system assume that doctors, teachers, police,
judges and so on are on the take, they feel no urgency about finding
ways to pay them decently. Ukraine’s population has shrunk by more than
a tenth since independence, yet it’s easier for governments to pay civil
servants starvation wages and let them get by on bribes than pay them
properly by cutting their numbers, or increasing taxes on the rich, or
both. The quality of medical education, Inozemtsev said, was high, and a
student would not be allowed to graduate without adequate practical
training. But many teachers in the first three years – the theoretical
part of the course – were corrupt. You could pay them to have work that
was merely adequate marked up to ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Some KNMU
students have their tuition paid by the state; others, like Inozemtsev,
pay fees. ‘I already pay to study,’ he said. ‘Why should I pay extra so
as not to study?’
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/03/07/james-meek/putins-counter-revolution
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