[PEN-L:33701] RE: Re: Majority of Russians Prefer Soviet Union

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33700] Re: Majority of Russians Prefer Soviet Union

Sabri writes:
>When I was a graduate student, majority of graduate students in
my math department were either from China or from Eastern Europe
and there were many from the former USSR as well. And I had never
heard anything positive from any of those friends about their
experiences in China or former USSR, irrespective of the stratum
they came from. The situation may be different now, as my
graduate student days ended in the early 1990s but later, I
mingled together with many Russian Jews until about last year.
Indeed, almost all of my recent "business partners" were Russian
Jews, like Yevgeny, Sasha and Dimitry, and none of them were
counter-revolutionaries in any sense of the word. They just did
not care and after all the mandatory courses on Marx that they
had to take as kids, they find the topic "funny" to say the
least. Indeed, one of them, Dimitry, admired Ayn Rand and viewed
me as a weird one but I don't feel angry at him. <

My impression is that back before the fall of the USSR, there were a lot of people who were disgusted with the malfunctioning system and distrusting of the official party line sent down by the Soviet bureaucrats (even when the propaganda was accurate, as with reports on US racism and unemployment). The latter element encouraged them to believe US/capitalist propaganda, such as Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, and hoped for a "normal" economy. Little did they know that the system could malfunction even more...

Strangely, in the period of the Cold War, there was almost a mirror-image of this in the "West." There are a lot who react to the malfunctioning system and distrust the official party line sent down by the government and press. Some found themselves idealizing the USSR or China or ...

Jim