We Lived Better Then

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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 11, 2020 1:40 pm

(This is an excerpt from longer article about the oligarchic 'United Russia Party)

In 1945 , the USSR ended World War II, which brought untold calamities to our planet. Millions and millions of our fellow citizens were destroyed by the Nazis, and many who remained eked out a miserable existence. Industry and agriculture in the European part of the USSR were practically destroyed. The West predicted a painful recovery for our country for many decades.

Having dealt with the war, the Soviet government adopted a plan for the 4th five-year plan (1946-1950) . Despite the enormity of the task, over the years of the first post-war five-year plan, as a result of the restoration of industrial and agricultural production, the rapid conversion of military production, the volume of industrial production increased by 73% compared to 1940 , capital investments - three times , labor productivity - by 37% and the national income produced by 64% . During the fourth five-year plan , 6,500 enterprises were commissioned , including such large and technologically complex ones as the Transcaucasian Metallurgical Plant, Ust-Kamenogorsk lead-zinc plant , Ryazan machine-tool plant . The successes of the Soviet space program in the late 50s - early 60s were also laid down in the years of the 4th five-year plan.

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Soviet power plant builders

Let's take a look at indicators that are closer and more understandable to ordinary citizens. After the famine of 1946, the government took vigorous measures to remedy the situation. As a result, in 1951 the production of meat and lard increased 1.8 times, milk - 1.65 , eggs - 3.4 , wool - 1.5 times against the 1948 level . Housing construction was actively encouraged: in the summer of 1946, a fair mortgage program was introduced with a rate of 1% (!) Per annum. But that's not all. From 1947 to 1953 , an inexplicable phenomenon from the point of view of market economists occurred in the USSR:prices decreased by 1.5-2 times annually . At the same time, the salaries of workers did not decrease. A cursory glance at the table is enough to understand: in the difficult post-war years, the Soviet government really did everything to improve the well-being of its citizens and was quite successful in this.

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Reducing prices in the USSR

It is significant that ration cards were abolished in the Soviet Union as early as 1947 year . The economy was so strong that the PAYG system could be abandoned. And in the spring of 1950 , the Soviet leadership abandoned pegging the ruble to the dollar. The gold standard for the ruble was established, corresponding to 0.222168 g of pure gold. Citizens of the USSR did not have to painfully monitor fluctuations in exchange rates; their well-being was determined by their labor, not by market chaos.

So, we have seen what can be done in a few years. Not even nine! So what did United Russia and its satellites do?

Depreciation of industrial capacity has reached 80% and continues to grow. The depreciation of the housing and communal services fund is approaching the same level , and the mortgage has long turned into a lifelong bondage. Added to it was the overhaul scam . Prices are rising, tariffs are rising , the entire economy of the country is tightly tied to the "oil needle" and the exchange rate of foreign currencies. And the government is still thinking about introducing ration cards for the poorest? By the way, the number of the poor is growing. And this despite the fact that there was no destructive war in the country. There was and is only "United Russia".

If this is the "beginning of its long political path" for this party, then what will happen next?

However, the well-being of large Russian capital is growing from year to year . This is not surprising. United Russia is a party of oligarchs.

https://www.rotfront.su/%d0%b5%d0%b4%d0 ... 82-%d0%be/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:12 pm

26-year-old figure skater Kolyada spoke about the horrors of the USSR (PHOTOS)
04/11/2021
Dedicated to the victims of education reform

Russian figure skater Mikhail Kolyada spoke about the horrors of life in the USSR . The athlete himself is now 26 years old, that is, he was born 4 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We could not pass by this chilling story.

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According to the press, Kolyada could not live in a society where "people had to have the same household items." How it looked, the skater described in paints :

“I can’t imagine if I was born, say, in the Soviet Union, I wouldn’t be able to come to terms with the fact that everyone has the same thing: white shirts, blue jackets, red ties ... This, as for me, is unacceptable. Of course, I can’t say this for sure, because I was born after that era, but judging by the stories, it was like that ”.

Apparently, Kolyada knows about life in the Soviet Union from Russian works of art.

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Soviet people as seen by Russian directors. Film "Hipster" (2008)

Our editorial team decided to help Misha Kolyada and made a small selection of photos that “everything was just like that”.

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Georgia, market, 70s. White shirts hurt the eye.

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Pitsunda, Abkhazia, 60s. The man on the right has a blue jacket disguised as a shirt. Another man hid his jacket.

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Yerevan, 1975. Artfully disguised red ties.

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Moscow, 1959.

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Moscow, 1959. One wants to run away from stereotypical jackets, ties and shirts.

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Kiev, 1952. Red ties are coming.

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Moscow, 1952.

In short, the modern saying is confirmed: the younger the blogger, the worse his life under Stalin ... We would like to advise Misha to look carefully at his clothes (probably a very prestigious brand - like the rest of "decent people"), on his phone (probably Apple iPhone - again, like everyone else) and think carefully about your individuality.

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https://www.rotfront.su/26-letnij-figur ... azal-ob-u/

Google Translator

It is impossible to imagine USAians on vacation playing chess like that. Impossible.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 22, 2021 1:52 pm

Risen from the Ruins: The Economic History of Socialism in the German Democratic Republic
Posted Apr 21, 2021 by The Tricontinental

Originally published: The Tricontinental (April 20, 2021) |

About Studies on the DDRThe German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a socialist state founded in 1949 as a democratic, antifascist reaction to the Second World War. It redistributed land, socialised the means of production, and collectivised the agricultural system. This socialist state established an egalitarian education, healthcare, and social system, and guaranteed equal rights between men and women. It cultivated friendly and close-knit economic relationships with other socialist states and supported countries fighting for their independence in Latin America, Asia, and Africa by showing international solidarity.

The establishment of a just society based on the principles of equality was the DDR’s declared objective. With public ownership of the means of production as its foundation, the country developed into a powerful and efficient industrial state that used its economic profit for the benefit of its citizens and guaranteed them a life of social security. Ultimately, the DDR was extremely successful in realising its main socio-political goal: the satisfaction of the growing material and cultural needs of its people.

But why bother re-examining the DDR’s achievements, principles, and structures thirty years after its downfall? What can we learn from the DDR’s alternative economic practices in today’s world, where the triumph of capitalism has exacerbated the problems of inequality and poverty and has resulted in more frequent crises? What did socialist democracy really look like? What contradictions arose from the everyday application of a planned economy? What lessons can we draw from the DDR’s ultimate failure?

With this series Studies on the DDR, the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (International Research Centre DDR) together with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research seek to encourage a new engagement with the history and principles of the DDR. It is our goal to re-evaluate the legacy and experiences of this socialist state. For this reason, we use the German acronym DDR, or Deutsche Demokratische Republik, (English: GDR) specifically because it often represents a positive point of reference in many parts of the world and especially for countries in the Global South.

This educational series on the socialist agenda and realities of the DDR explores aspects of everyday life, provides facts about the country’s social achievements, and examines the political and economic foundations of this socialist state. By reflecting on the lived experiences of daily life, which are generally left out of the dominant narrative due to the crushing victory of capitalism and the dominance of the market economy, we hope to make a useful contribution to the debate currently taking place within progressive movements. After all, millions of people around the world are still fighting for advancements that were once a given in this socialist system but were lost with its downfall.

This first publication in Studies on the DDR will briefly outline the formation of the DDR and its economic circumstances from the country’s inception to its end. In order to fully understand the specific DDR brand of socialism, we must highlight the historical conditions from which it emerged. The DDR was born in times of crisis in the aftermath of a devastating war as Germany–the instigator of the Second World War–was divided in two. It is imperative that we examine the DDR in its relationship to West Germany, which it opposed in the ensuing Cold War between the communist and capitalist systems.

In 1990, after the reunification of Germany, the DDR economy was dismantled. It was treated as a shock therapy prototype for the austerity measures that were soon imposed on other countries – and not just the former socialist states. At the same time, the DDR was politically, judicially, and morally delegitimised. The publications in this series are a rejection of the narrative propagated by enemies of socialism, both new and old, that the downfall of the DDR proves the inevitable failure of socialist policy and economy. By depicting the realities of life in the DDR and by affirming the experiences of DDR citizens, we hope to remind the reader that alternatives to capitalism did and do exist.

(Excerpts follow)

The DDR’s Economic Achievements
In the 1950s, the large gaps in the production chain caused by the war and reparations continued to loom over the DDR’s economy. The economic isolation of the DDR led to pragmatic choices: if there was no iron coming from the West, then it had to be mined locally, no matter how poor the quality or how expensive it was to produce. If no coal or oil was available, then they used the only thing left: brown coal. Brown coal, or lignite, was the only raw fuel that was available in the East in significant quantities. Though using it was not environmentally friendly, there was no alternative due to external circumstances. The creation of the DDR’s own iron, steel, and machine industries as a basis for its industrial development was the main focus of development in the DDR’s early years. The first Five-Year Plan therefore envisaged doubling industrial production between 1951 and 1955.

The enormous factories that were built all over the republic as a result brought young people into previously sparsely settled regions. New villages and towns were built and became home to thousands of people. In forty years, the DDR fundamentally changed the face of the formerly underdeveloped agricultural region of East Germany. With the gradual stabilisation of the East German economy and the growth of production, the country was able to attract an ever-increasing volume of investment. In the years between 1950 and 1960 alone, this volume increased more than three-fold.

<snip>

The Starting Point for the East German Economy after 1945
At the end of the war, more than a quarter of all homes in East German cities had been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by allied airstrikes. The use of infrastructure, and thus the supply of raw materials and food, was dramatically limited by the destruction of roads, railways and bridges. In addition, huge assets were taken to West Germany as company owners and senior employees of the former Nazi state fled to the Western zones in order to escape punishment or expropriation.

In violation of the decisions of the Potsdam Conference, the Western occupation zones soon stopped reparations payments to the Soviet Union, which, as the country most damaged by the war, had to withdraw these resources from its own occupation zone. Two thousand and four hundred East German companies were dismantled, including almost the entire motor vehicle industry and more than half of the electrical and iron industries, as well as the heavy machinery and construction industries, and everything was relocated to the USSR. To supply the population in its own country, the Soviet Union also took goods that had been produced in the Soviet Occupation Zone that were supposed to provide for the people of DDR. All in all, seventy percent of pre-war industrial capacity was no longer available, which meant that living standards and productivity in the East were only nearly half of what they were in the West.

In the first eight years after the war, almost a third of all East German production was prevented from contributing to the country’s own economy as a result. Additionally, inequalities in industrial capacity that had been passed down from before the war only became greater with the division of Germany. Machine production for mining as well as steel foundries and mills were located in West Germany. In fact, the entire raw materials industry, including the coal and steel industry, was located there, leaving the Soviet Occupation Zone/DDR completely cut off from all of these resources. This situation put planners in the East German economy at a disadvantage, which they sought to compensate for by increasing productivity.

Without interruption, great efforts and many privations on the part of the population were necessary to build up the economy. The DDR rebuilt its own heavy industry from the ground up, and in record time. As a result, the production of daily necessities such as clothing and food items initially took a back seat. It was not until 1958 that the country could stop rationing its food supply; these were among the hardships caused by the war.

Little by little, West Germany cut off the intra-German trade that was so important for the DDR. Even when individual companies still managed to conduct business with the DDR, West German authorities levied a variety of sanctions against them, and loans were withdrawn or special taxes were charged. However, most disruption tactics focused on sabotaging contracted delivery quotas and interrupting deliveries. These measures threw sand in the gears of intra-German trade, destroying the DDR’s only possibility for obtaining raw materials and durable equipment that their partners in Eastern Europe could not produce because of their own economic hardship. Moreover, West German companies traditionally manufactured products that were custom tailored to the needs of East Germany; only these companies were able to produce to the same standard of goods and offer duty-free deliveries of goods from nearby. There was no duty to pay because West Germany did not recognise the DDR as a state and therefore not as a foreign country either. In this way, West Germany’s exclusive mandate policy functioned as a lever of economic extortion.

With only seventeen million inhabitants, the DDR was a small country that could only compete in science and technology by partnering with experts internationally. However, the Cold War and embargo policy prevented them from participating in specialised and cooperative projects around the world. This is precisely what happened when the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), led by the United States starting in 1949, blocked the export of Western technology into the Eastern Bloc. This prevented the East from having a part in technological advances and from hiring international labour in the fields of science, research, and development. The DDR would require immense resources as well as both scientific and technological development in order to fill in the gaps that these embargo measures left in the country’s economy.

<snip>

The DDR’s Economic Achievements

In the 1950s, the large gaps in the production chain caused by the war and reparations continued to loom over the DDR’s economy. The economic isolation of the DDR led to pragmatic choices: if there was no iron coming from the West, then it had to be mined locally, no matter how poor the quality or how expensive it was to produce. If no coal or oil was available, then they used the only thing left: brown coal. Brown coal, or lignite, was the only raw fuel that was available in the East in significant quantities. Though using it was not environmentally friendly, there was no alternative due to external circumstances. The creation of the DDR’s own iron, steel, and machine industries as a basis for its industrial development was the main focus of development in the DDR’s early years. The first Five-Year Plan therefore envisaged doubling industrial production between 1951 and 1955.

The enormous factories that were built all over the republic as a result brought young people into previously sparsely settled regions. New villages and towns were built and became home to thousands of people. In forty years, the DDR fundamentally changed the face of the formerly underdeveloped agricultural region of East Germany. With the gradual stabilisation of the East German economy and the growth of production, the country was able to attract an ever-increasing volume of investment. In the years between 1950 and 1960 alone, this volume increased more than three-fold.

The DDR also had the ambitious goal of overcoming the economic and social differences between the northern and southern regions and eradicating the inconsistencies between urban and rural industrialisation. The degree of industrialisation in the south was significantly higher than in the north. In order to reconcile the disparity between urban and rural areas, the DDR developed a new agricultural system, which was characterised by land reform and the collectivisation of the means of agricultural production. The country soon began to develop and expand its energy-producing regions in traditionally agricultural areas and built large-scale industrial plants which at the time were among the most modern in Europe. It also built new power plants, including the largest lignite refining plant in Europe in 1955.

Modern production centres increasingly changed the face of regions that previously had barely been able to feed their impoverished populations. On the Baltic coast, for example, the development of the maritime and port industries accelerated and the fishing and shipbuilding industries became the driving force in the region. Large fish processing plants and suppliers for ship construction and maintenance were set up while imported goods underwent industrial processing. As port facilities steadily grew, these advances boosted trade in the region and the northern regions were able to catch up with the rest of the country.

Even though the DDR started out with unfavourable conditions and many structural disadvantages, the country achieved an average economic growth of 4.5 percent in its forty years of existence. Despite this, it still generally lagged behind West Germany. Back then, as today, the failure of the planned economy was cited by the West as the reason for this shortcoming. This perpetuates the myth that there is no alternative to the market economy. The available figures, however, force us to question this narrative; at no point in the forty years of the DDR’s existence did economic growth stagnate or decline, despite uneven starting conditions.

The country also had a considerable capacity for research and development. For every 1,000 industrial workers, twenty-three were employed in these fields, putting the DDR on par with other Western industrialised countries. Although more funds were available for research in the West, DDR research still registered 12,000 patents in 1988 – the seventh largest amount worldwide. As a result, the DDR was able to increase its industrial production by a factor of 12.3 by 1989 and quintuple its gross domestic product to 207.9 billion euros in today’s terms, making it one of the fifteen leading industrialised countries in the world at the time.

<snip>

‘Produce More, Distribute Fairly, Live Better!’

he DDR’s socialist plan was based on the Marxist view that a socially just society could only be created by using socialised means of production. Socialist ownership had three possible forms: public property owned by the whole society, cooperative joint ownership by worker collectives, and property owned by social organisations. The constitution stipulated that the operation of private business enterprises, which continued to exist to a lesser extent, must ‘satisfy social needs and serve to increase the welfare of the people’. Furthermore, ‘private business partnerships to establish economic power’ were not permitted. These constitutional principles were rigorously enforced and, by 1989, public ownership in industry and skilled trades had risen to 98 percent.

The People’s Property

1 The following resources are considered national public property of which private ownership is prohibited: mineral deposits, mines, power stations, dams, large bodies of water, natural resources found in continental shelves, industrial companies, banks, insurance institutions, state-owned goods, traffic routes, means of transport by rail, sea, and aviation, the post office, and telecommunication installations.
2The socialist planned economy guarantees that public property is used with the aim of achieving the best results for society. The socialist planned economy and socialist commercial law serve this purpose. The use and management of national public property take place fundamentally through state-owned enterprises and state institutions. The state can transfer its use and management by contract to cooperative or social organisations and associations. Such transfers must serve the interests of the general public and increase social wealth.
– Article 12 of the 1968 Constitution of the German Democratic Republic

<snip>

Socialist Ideals, Sobering Conditions, Open Questions
‘ The worst socialism is better than the best capitalism’, wrote Peter Hacks, a poet who migrated from West Germany to the DDR. ‘Socialism, that society that was toppled because it was virtuous (a fault on the world market). That society whose economy respects values other than the accumulation of capital: the rights of its citizens to life, happiness, and health; art and science; utility and the reduction of waste.’ For when socialism is involved, it is not economic growth, but ‘the growth of its people that is the actual goal of the economy’.
Contradictions in the Practice of a Planned Economy

‘If you want to set up a new and better social system, you should learn this lesson: It only works if the majority of the people benefit from it. We learned that good working and social conditions are quickly taken for granted. People succumb to the seduction of ownership and consumption if they think that another system can offer them something better. … The DDR’s social system had as its declared goal the ever-growing material and cultural satisfaction of its people. This goal was supposed to be achieved through sharply rising productivity. If it could have surpassed capitalism in production, then socialism would have been the victor. … The people were encouraged to accomplish this task in the 90s. But it was an unrealistic and misguided goal. Unrealistic because a leading capitalist country that exploits people and nature, such as West Germany, cannot be surpassed in productivity and efficiency. Misguided because, in a socialist society, mass consumption should not be life’s main purpose. This insight eluded socialist leadership in Europe, and therefore they could not impart it to their people. The people recognised that this was a false promise and were no longer willing to tolerate the illusion. They wanted to be taken seriously and took to the streets under the slogan “We are the people”’.

– Klaus Blessing, economist and department head of mechanical engineering and metallurgy in the central committee of the SED

The unlimited world of the goods of the West and its pop culture produced ever new needs, especially among the youth of the DDR, which were considered ‘unsocialist’ because of their association with capitalism. Economic plans could not keep pace with the aspirations of many citizens for Western consumption levels, which led to frustrations. These were intensified when, starting in 1974, DDR citizens who had convertible currency–for example, as gifts from relatives in West Germany or even through income from their own international activities–were able to buy Western imported goods in special stores called Intershops. On the part of the political leadership, the expectation that social policy achievements of the state would directly increase the working people’s willingness to perform, and thus increase labour productivity, was not borne out. Expenditure on subsidies ate away at economic output without stimulating production to the same extent while competition with its Western neighbours repeatedly prompted the DDR to take social measures which it could not afford.

‘Competition between social systems was no longer about life goals – it became about consumption standards. But if the battle with a world of superior cultural offerings was to be won at all – and one can ask whether this was ever really possible – then at least it would not have been based on their own consumer goods production, but on an alternative value system that focuses on the development of humankind as a whole and its culture’.

– Hans Heinz Holz, Marxist philosopher

With the aim of giving more daily visibility to the connection between individuals’ work performance and their respective economic and social standing, a process of economic modernisation began in the 1960s. A new economic system of management and planning was designed, which, through profits and bonuses, made companies more performance-oriented and at the same time more responsible. This concept, however, did not find resonance in any of the DDR’s fellow socialist countries. There was still a lack of coordination in scientific and technological development among the COMECON members.

The principle of ‘unity between economic and social policy’ formulated in the beginning of the 1970s took for granted that enough would be produced and that it would be produced efficiently. However, worsening foreign economic circumstances strained the national economy, particularly in regards to rising energy costs. Between 1970 and 1990, the price of oil rose thirteen-fold and the cost of mining brown coal doubled.

Despite this, the government stuck to its promises to provide social benefits and did not question the exceptionally high subsidies it paid for consumer prices and rents. The result was that urgently needed modernisations never happened, such as in the raw material and chemical industries. A national economic and social policy for the benefit of the population can only exist if there is a high proportion of socially owned property. In the DDR, this proportion was so high that it hindered initiatives in skilled trades, small businesses, and retail trades. One of the problems with the economy was that plans and balance sheets were always tight and often exaggerated, leaving very little margin of error for unexpected developments.

DDR citizens looked at the ‘rich’ West and began to compare it to their own standards of living. But many were loath to evaluate the purchasing power of their money according to the cost of the goods needed for daily life. In the DDR, a 5,000-Mark price tag on a new colour TV may have been a source of frustration, but the fact that two kg of bread cost only one Mark was taken for granted. Basic foodstuffs and goods for daily use were subsidised, while the prices for non-essential products were intended to cover costs and generate a profit. This connection was not obvious to large sectors of the DDR’s population. Furthermore, there was no official exchange rate between the East German Mark and the West German Mark. The DDR Mark was an exclusively domestic currency, but a comparison of relative prices of the same everyday goods in the East and West concluded that the purchasing power of the Mark in the DDR in 1990 was actually eight percent higher than the purchasing power of the Deutsche Mark (DM) in West Germany.

<snip>

The Economic Pillage of the DDR

The first socialist German state was exposed to prejudice and attempts at delegitimisation both during and after its existence. Today, Germany’s politics of remembrance paint a picture of a ‘totalitarian dictatorship’ with its ‘feeble economy’. The country’s remarkable economic performance and social indicators are denied and the widespread narrative of the takeover of a bankrupt state persists.

However, the DDR was not as ‘run-down’ as is claimed. There were some old and inefficient factories, but there were also highly productive ones. Half of all industrial equipment was less than ten years old and more than a quarter was not even five years old – remarkable figures when compared with those of other countries. There were many modern enterprises with machinery that had been partly imported from the West and partly produced by the DDR’s mechanical engineering industry or by special combine enterprises. These enterprises could have remained in operation, but when the DDR dissolved, the Trust Agency, which was put in charge of the DDR’s economy, rapidly privatised the DDR’s enterprises and eliminated East German competitors.

In order to counter the persistent myth that the DDR was bankrupt, it is worth looking at debts in West and East Germany: In 1989, the DDR’s debts to non-socialist states amounted to some twenty billion DM. After German unification, so-called ‘old debts’, which consisted of housing construction loans and internal state budget debts, were included in the calculations of the DDR’s domestic debt. This brought the DDR’s total domestic debt to eighty-six billion DM. Furthermore, in the DDR’s planned economy, companies had to pay their revenues to the state. The state transferred investment funds from these revenues back to the agricultural and industrial enterprises. These transfers, as independent economic units, were internal accounting procedures which were not booked as ‘debts’ in the overall system; they balanced each other out and therefore should not be counted as part of the debt balance. Other socialist states owed the DDR nine billion DM. In summary, the total domestic debt can therefore be estimated at around seventy-seven billion DM.

(more)

https://mronline.org/2021/04/21/123046/

The entire work is strongly suggested.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Sat May 01, 2021 1:53 pm

I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West: The Seventeenth Newsletter (2021)

APRIL 29, 2021
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A mass rally with the Free German Youth that marked the founding of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet Occupation Zone, October 1949.


Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border. On 3 March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister Miklós Németh asked the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western Europe could be opened. ‘We have a strict regime on our borders’, Gorbachev told Németh, ‘but we are also becoming more open’. Three months later, on 15 June, Gorbachev told the press in Bonn (West Germany) that the Berlin Wall ‘could disappear when the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist’. He did not list the preconditions, but he said, ‘Nothing is permanent under the Moon’. On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall was knocked down. By October 1990, the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR) was absorbed into a unified Germany dominated by West Germany.

As part of the unification, the structures of the DDR had to be demolished. Headed by the Social Democratic politician Detlev Rohwedder, the new rulers created the Treuhandanstalt (‘Trust Agency’) to privatise 8,500 public enterprises that employed over 4 million workers. ‘Privatise quickly, restructure resolutely, and shut down carefully’, Rohwedder said. But before he could do this, Rohwedder was assassinated in April 1991. He was succeeded by the economist Birgit Breuel who told the Washington Post, ‘We can try to explain ourselves to people, but they will never love us. Because whatever we do, it’s hard for people. With every one of the 8,500 enterprises, we either privatise or restructure or close them down. In every case, people lose jobs’. Hundreds of firms that had been public property (Volkseigentum) fell into private hands and millions of people lost their jobs; during this time, 70% of women lost their jobs. The stunning scale of the corruption and cronyism only came out decades later in a German parliamentary inquiry in 2009.



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Cooperative farmers handing over a flag of solidarity with the motto ‘Solidarity Hastens Victory’ written on it to the Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1972.



Not only did the public property of the DDR slip into the pockets of private capital, but the entire history of the project vanished in a haze of anti-communist rhetoric. The only word that remained to define the forty years of DDR history was stasi, the colloquial name for the Ministry for State Security. Nothing else mattered. Neither the de-Nazification of that part of Germany – which was not conducted in the West – nor the impressive gains in terms of housing, health, education, and social life occupy space in the public imagination. There is little mention of the DDR’s contribution to the anti-colonial struggle or to the socialist construction experiments from Vietnam to Tanzania. All this vanished, the earthquake of the reunification swallowing up the achievements of the DDR and leaving behind the ash heap of social despair and amnesia. Little wonder that poll after poll – whether in the 1990s or the 2000s – show that large numbers of people living in the former East Germany look back longingly for the DDR past. This Ostalgie (‘nostalgia’) for the East remains intact, reinforced by the greater unemployment and lower incomes in the eastern over the western part of Germany.

In 1998, the German parliament set up the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany, which set the terms for the national appraisal of communist history. The organisation’s mandate was to fund research on the DDR that would portray it as a criminal enterprise rather than a historical project. Fury governed the historical undertaking. The attempt to delegitimise Marxism and Communism in Germany mirrored attempts in other countries in Europe and North America that hastened to snuff out the reappearance of these left ideologies. The ferocity of efforts to rewrite history suggested that they feared its return.

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This month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (IF DDR) to produce the first of a new series, Studies on the DDR. The first study, Risen from the Ruins: The Economic History of Socialism in the German Democratic Republic, goes beneath the anti-communist sludge to unearth, in a reasonable way, the historical development of the forty-year project in the DDR. Based in Berlin, the authors of the text sifted through the archives and memories, interviewing those who helped construct socialism in Germany at different levels of society.

Peter Hacks, a poet of the DDR, said in retrospect, ‘The worst socialism is better than the best capitalism. Socialism, that society that was toppled because it was virtuous (a fault on the world market). That society whose economy respects values other than the accumulation of capital: the rights of its citizens to life, happiness, and health; art and science; utility and the reduction of waste’. For when socialism is involved, Hacks said, it is not economic growth, but ‘the growth of its people that is the actual goal of the economy’. Risen from the Ruins lays out the story of the DDR and its people from the ashes of Germany after the defeat of fascism to the economic pillage of the DDR after 1989.


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A monument to Patrice Lumumba built by Leipzig’s Free German Youth; the street was later renamed ‘Lumumba Street’ in a ceremony with Congolese students, 1961.

One of the least known parts of the DDR’s history is its internationalism, wonderfully explored in this study. Three brief extracts make the point:

1Solidarity Work. Between 1964 and 1988, sixty friendship brigades of the Free German Youth (the DDR youth mass organisation) were deployed to twenty-seven countries in order to share their knowledge, help with construction, and create training opportunities and conditions for economic self-sufficiency. A number of these projects still exist today, though some have taken on different names, such as the Carlos Marx Hospital in Managua, Nicaragua; the German-Vietnamese Friendship Hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam; and the Karl Marx Cement Factory in Cienfuegos, Cuba, to name but a few.
2Learning and Exchange Opportunities. Overall, more than 50,000 foreign students successfully completed their education at the universities and colleges of the DDR. The studies were financed by the DDR’s state budget. As a rule, there were no tuition fees, a large number of foreign students received scholarships, and accommodation was provided for them in student halls of residence. In addition to the students, many contract workers came to the DDR from allied states such as Mozambique, Vietnam, and Angola as well as from Poland and Hungary seeking job training and work in production. Right until the end, foreign workers remained a priority, with contract workers growing from 24,000 to 94,000 (1981-1989). In 1989, all foreigners in the DDR received full municipal voting rights and began to nominate candidates themselves.
3Political Support. While the West was slandering Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) as terrorists and ‘racists’ and conducting business with the apartheid regime in South Africa – even providing arms shipments – the DDR supported the ANC, provided the freedom fighters with military training, printed their publications, and cared for its wounded. After black students in the township of Soweto launched an uprising against the apartheid regime on 16 June 1976, the DDR began to commemorate international Soweto Day as a sign of solidarity with the South African people and their struggle. Solidarity was even extended to those in the belly of the beast: when Angela Davis was tried as a terrorist in the United States, a DDR correspondent presented her with flowers for Women’s Day and students led the One Million Roses for Angela Davis campaign, during which they delivered truckloads of cards with hand-painted roses to her in prison.

The memory of this solidarity no longer remains either in Germany or in South Africa. Without the material support provided by the DDR, the USSR, and Cuba, it is unlikely that national liberation in South Africa would have come when it did. Cuban military support for the national liberation fighters at the 1987 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was crucial for this defeat of the South African apartheid army, leading eventually to the collapse of the apartheid project in 1994.

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The Free German Youth, a member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, hosted the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin, 1973.

Organisations such as the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany (Berlin) and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (Washington, United States) exist not only to denigrate the communist past and to malign communism, but also to make sure that communist projects in the present carry the penalty of their caricatures. To advance a left project in our time – which is imperative – is made much more difficult if it must carry the albatross of anti-communist fabrications on its back. That is the reason why this project, led by IF DDR, is so important. It is not merely an argument about the DDR; it is also, at its core, a broader argument about the possibilities opened by experiments to create a socialist society and the material improvements they create, and have created, in the lives of the people.

Socialism does not emerge fully fledged nor perfectly formed. A socialist project inherits all the limitations of the past. It takes effort and patience to transform a country, with its rigidities and class hierarchies, into a socialist society. The DDR lasted for a mere forty years, half the life expectancy of the average German citizen. In its aftermath, the adversaries of socialism exaggerated all its problems to eclipse its achievements.

Volker Braun, an East German poet, wrote an elegy to his forgotten country in October 1989 called Das Eigentum or Property.

I’m still here: my country has gone West.
PEACE FOR THE PALACES AND WAR ON THE SHACKS.
I myself have given my country the boot.

What little virtue it possessed burns in the fire.
Winter is followed by a summer of desire.

I might as well get lost, who cares what’s next
And no one will ever again decipher my texts.

What I never possessed, from me was taken.
I will eternally long for what I didn’t partake in.

Hope appeared on the path like a trap
You grope and grab at the property I had.

When will I say mine again and mean we and ours.


Our quest here is not to reverse direction and exaggerate all the achievements while hiding the problems. The past is a resource to understand the complexities of social development so that lessons can be learnt about what went wrong and what went right. The IF DDR project, in collaboration with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, is invested in this kind of archaeology to dig amongst the bones to discover how to improve the way we humans stretch our spines and stand upright with dignity.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/17-ddr/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 26, 2021 3:09 pm

The author of this piece might be 'Native Informer of the Year'...
Thirty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin exploits nostalgia for the old regime
Opinion by Andrei Kolesnikov

Updated 4:05 AM ET, Sat December 25, 2021

Moscow (CNN)When the Soviet Union finally fell, it was in a mundane way, as if it had clocked off from a normal day's work.

On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the Soviet citizens and announced his resignation as president. A little after 7:30 p.m. that same day, the Soviet flag, waving in the wind, was lowered from the flagpole above the presidential residence in the Kremlin.

For five minutes the flagpole stood bare, as if to symbolize the transition of power. By 7:45 p.m. the Russian tricolor was hoisted on it.
The following day, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. And with that, the empire in which I'd been born and spent the first 26 years of my life came to an end. The backdrop for my family's story -- which included losses during World War II and Stalin's repressive dictatorship -- had come down.
But I must admit that when that flagpole stood naked, I felt nothing.

For me, the Soviet Union became a thing of the past after the attempted coup of August 1991. Gorbachev pulled strings, believing he was running the country, but the strings were cut. Ministers and regional leaders wrote alarmist letters to one another -- food supplies were thinning and the country was facing starvation. Russia was creating a reform government.

As a budding journalist, I was enthusiastic about the change. I worked at a newspaper, eagerly reporting every day what the reformers were doing. My older brother meanwhile became an adviser to the chief reformer and later Prime Minister, Yegor Gaidar.

But amid the difficulties of the transition, peoples' inspiration started fading over the following years and the bulk of the population discovered that capitalism did not bring immediate happiness.
Despite that, in the spring of 1993, people voted in a referendum to continue reforms, and in the autumn of that year the reformist party Vybor Rossii managed to form one of the largest factions in the new parliament. It was the last time when liberals were successful.
In 1994, less than three years after the Soviet Union collapsed, sociologists led by Yuri Levada recorded a change in attitudes. People began to say that they preferred quiet work for hire rather than their own businesses and the risks associated with them.
As more time passed, a substantial number of Russians began to feel pangs of nostalgia -- Soviet songs were sung in New Year's programs on television, post-modern Soviet-like menus became popular in restaurants.
But no one seriously thought of going back until 2000 when the new President -- Vladimir Putin -- quite literally changed their tune. Putin restored a revived version of the Soviet anthem, still used today.

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Supporters of the Russian Communist Party are seen ahead of a flower laying ceremony at Soviet leader Joseph Stalin&#39;s grave, marking the 142nd anniversary of his birth.

The President's resurrection of Soviet ghosts didn't stop there. Putin famously called the breakup of the Union the "greatest political catastrophe" of the 20th century, during an address in 2005. Two years later, he gave another speech in Munich about the humiliation of Russia by the West.
And it sounded like a plan: to "Make Russia Great Again."
The domestic audience at the time didn't take it too seriously -- the average citizen wasn't thinking about politics then, enjoying the recovery of economic growth and the high oil economy of the 2000s.
Putin's popularity gradually declined and Russia's modernization seemed inevitable. Though the short war with Georgia in 2008 did give his approval ratings a temporary boost.
In 2012, Putin faced unprecedented protests by the urban classes, and began a very sharp U-turn towards ultra-conservative policies. And one of the main components of his propaganda was the glorification of Russia's so-called victorious Soviet history.

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Russian Communist Party supporters carry portraits of Vladimir Lenin as they walk toward the mausoleum of the Soviet state founder on the 151th anniversary of his birth.

Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 was portrayed as an act of "restoring the empire." Imperial feelings were slumbering in the hearts of most Russians, and Putin played on this, reviving their pride in being part of a great power. As the Crimean effect wore off, Putin stepped on the pedal for Soviet nostalgia, presenting the Stalin era -- particularly the Great Patriotic War -- as one of victory and order.
Fast forward to 2021, and almost half (49%) of Russian respondents would prefer the Soviet political system, according to a study published in September by the independent Levada Center. The survey, which included 1,603 adult respondents across 50 regions of Russia, said it was a record figure of Soviet support for this century.

Surprisingly, there are no contrasting attitudes to the Soviet era across generations, our research from the Carnegie Moscow Center and Levada has found. The older cohorts are nostalgic for the USSR; the younger ones have developed an image of the Soviet Union as a fairytale country, a retro-utopia where everyone is equal, everyone is free, and a stern-but-just father figure rules.

People are dreaming of a fairer society, and Russians have no other models than the Soviet Union. The imaginary USSR still helps Putin in many ways -- even when his regime is losing popularity to the Soviet system.
At the last traditional December hockey tournament in Moscow, the Russian team took to the ice wearing a Soviet team uniform, and the audience often waved the Soviet flag. Three decades after the Soviet flag was officially lowered, it still looms large in Russian life.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/12/25/opinions/ ... index.html
First of all, the real 'coup' of 1991 was the betrayal of the people of the USSR by Gorby and his faction. That this writer whose familial relations put him in the liberal camp should describe it otherwise is no surprise.

To be sure, Putin will grasp any straw to maintain a viable level of popularity and nationalism always works to some degree. The glory of the Soviet Union is undeniable, he cannot help but utilize it. But to infer that he in any way encourages a return to 'the old ways' is categorically wrong. His government has spent considerable effort denying, distorting and libeling the socialist government which he betrayed. But in the service of the US State Dept convoluting the present Russian government and deeply ingrained Cold War attitudes is a winning tactic.

And it is totally insulting to the Russian people who the author must despise to state that they cannot remember their own past and are incapable of accurately comparing it to their present. The vast majority of the people of the former Soviet Union lived better then than they do now. Perhaps it's a class interest issue...
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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 27, 2022 3:41 pm

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Stamp commemorating the construction of the Brčko-Banovići railway, which was completed in only 190 days by 62,268 young men and women from all over Yugoslavia. It was opened to traffic on November 7, 1946. “75 Years of Brcko-Banovici Railway (Srpska 2021),” Virtual Stamp Club, September 22, 2021.

We make the railroad; the railroad makes us
Posted Jan 26, 2022 by Harun Šiljak

In 1947, thousands of youth brigade volunteers from around the world joined their Yugoslav comrades in the hills of Bosnia to build a railroad. As the most popular song from the construction sites put it, not only were these activists making a railroad, but the railroad made them.

Rebuilding Yugoslavia after World War II was a complex task: if five-year plans set lofty industrialization targets, their goals would have been hard to meet even if pre-war infrastructure had magically been restored. The new state also inherited a situation in which the parts of the country with the natural resources and strategic positioning granting most potential for development had been continually overlooked by past regimes.

The central republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was one such part of the country. While soon earmarked to become the center of socialist Yugoslavia’s mining, metal and defense industries, it had no railway infrastructure to support the industrial boom. Miles of railways had to be laid, and the priority for the limited mechanization and trained personnel available had to be put on rebuilding the existing network, so heavily damaged during the war.

The new government considered postponing plans to build railroads in Bosnia: passion and good intentions wouldn’t be enough. It was the leadership of the People’s Youth of Yugoslavia who resisted this decision, suggesting that young people–those who fought in the Partisans and those coming of age in peacetime–could build it. This would be an experiment in self-organization: the construction project would have a limited team of professionals doing the specialized work, but most of the workers would be young men and women with no prior experience or training, organized in loose hierarchies. While in name and spirit these brigades would live-action-roleplay the Yugoslav partisans, there would be no strict military discipline or micromanagement of these thousands of youngsters.

Could it work? The government gave them a test: a 50 mile stretch of railway from the coal mining town of Banovići to the important communication hub in Brčko. 60,000 young people from all around Yugoslavia reached the construction sites and finished the railway in six months: the country was impressed and proud. It allowed the leadership set a new goal and be bold: 150 miles of railway going through the rough terrain of central Bosnia, mountains and river canyons, connecting its capital Sarajevo, with the northern town of Šamac, via major industrial and mining towns in the valley of river Bosna. Again, the timeframe would be six months.

News of the success of the Brčko-Banovići railway spread far and wide, and the optimistic target of the new project inspired hundreds of thousands to sign up. It became a competition, a chance to repeat and surpass a previous success, and be a part of this unprecedented effort. This desire to work, create, and build themselves into the foundations of the new state was one of the reasons for young men and women of Yugoslavia (25 percent of the Šamac-Sarajevo volunteers were women) to join the youth work brigades.

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers would exceed by far the mechanization available to support them (in the end the ratio was 9:1), but that would not to be a limiting factor: the railway was never just about work.

There were plenty of other, complementing reasons: it was an opportunity to travel, meet new people, learn new skills, and, for some, to escape the family home. It was also a chance to be a part of brigades continuing the tradition of the fearless Partisans, fighters who fought and won the new socialist country. Their efforts would be recognized with the title of udarnik (shock worker), medals and trophies, mention in the workers’ newspaper. And then also come the afterhours: in the spirit of “three eights” (eight hours’ labor, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest), significant attention was given to culture, sport, and education–the cultural upbringing of the new generation. Between ten and twenty percent of the 220,000 volunteers were illiterate, and they learned one or two of the official Yugoslav scripts in the courses during that summer of 1947. Students of engineering, construction, mining, had a chance to join specialized brigades and use their existing professional skills, while learning new ones in practice. By the campfire in the evening, the volunteers would sing, dance, and meet their comrades from all around Yugoslavia.

And not only Yugoslavia: the camps along the new railway were the temporary home to 5,842 young men and women from all over the world, gathered in 56 international brigades. Some countries didn’t allow their volunteers to join the action in an organized fashion, notably USA and USSR. Some U.S. volunteers did manage to reach Yugoslavia, and they would join brigades from other countries, as would volunteers from other less represented territories. Notably, the Palestinian group was made out of Jewish and Arab volunteers alike. Politically, the international brigades were a mixed bag as well: from Czech national-socialists (not affiliated with their German namesakes) and Dutch Catholic Youth to British communists, Labour Party members and even conservatives, they all came to Yugoslavia with a vision of a new future of Europe. These visions were reiterated in messages of solidarity and reports of good work done in Yugoslavia sent by the brigades to the 1st World Festival of Youth and Students in Prague—and the effect was immediate. Once the delegates heard the words from the international workers at the railway, they decided to waste no time: two brigades made out of the young delegates went to Bosnia directly from the congress.

Omladinske radne akcije (Youth labour actions) such as the Šamac-Sarajevo railway construction were a major element of upbringing new generations in Yugoslavia—and that is how I perceived them, as a powerful, yet local mechanism with exclusively local effects, significant for Yugoslavs alone. A book that offered me a new, internationalist, potentially utopian perspective on it was the recent reprint (Rab Rab Press, Helsinki, 2020) of The Railway: An Adventure in Construction, a small volume “prepared by British Volunteers on The Youth Railway Šamac-Sarajevo, 1947“ edited by Edward P. Thompson. It is a collection of essays by the members of the British Brigade: some, like E. P. Thompson who went on to pen The Making of the English Working Class, would become celebrated intellectuals, some would become Thatcherites (Alfred Sherman) or Soviet spies (John Stonehouse). Some came to Yugoslavia from classrooms, some from the British army, and some had a Spanish internationalist experience under their belt—and enjoyed being once again in an International Brigade.

While the book primarily tells the tale of their stay in Yugoslavia to feed the curiosity of the general public and introduce a young country thousand miles away, there is another mission it takes upon. The western media coverage of the railroad building campaign was not favorable: the local youth was claimed to be forced to work on the railroad, while the foreigners were claimed to be brought to Yugoslavia with much more sinister intentions. According to the Daily Telegraph, the international brigades trained in the forests of Bosnia were being prepared for deployment in Greece, where General Markos was leading a partisan struggle.

The British Volunteers write a lot, in fact, about the Greek volunteers who were stationed right next to the British in the village of Nemila. The Greek brigade consisted of Greek refugees who had come to Yugoslavia in 1945 and who were allowed to stay, provided they did not interfere with the civil war in their homeland. While building the railroad, the British and the Greeks competed at work, in sports, in arts and music; and this, soon after the British Army had been at loggerheads with the Greek partisans. The secretary of the Greek brigade had been wounded by British soldiers in his homeladn, and all the members of the brigade wanted the British forces to leave Greece: they were vocal about it, and some British Brigade members would join in the Greek chants of “Brits out” wholeheartedly, and enjoy the loud “Harry Pollitt–Zahariades” as a response to “Tito–Stalin–Dimitrov” chants from other brigades. It took the British some time to get used to chants as means of expression, but the culture shock was resolved quickly in the intense pace of the work, recreation, and exchange of experiences, hopes and dreams of a new, post-war generation.

The essays paint a vivid picture of work at the railway—even though the British Brigade, and some other international brigades couldn’t reach the status of shock workers (750 international volunteers made it), they did their best and participated in every activity in that part of the river Bosna valley. Another vivid image is that of the camp fires, music and dancing; here the British volunteers never ceased to be amazed by the Greeks, the Albanians, the Yugoslav: next time, they say in their essays, we would have to prepare something representative of our culture.

The authors of the essays in Railway do not hide their delight at the tour of the Yugoslav seaside the government organized for the international brigaders; neither do they hide the revolutionist against the treatment Palestinian volunteers faced upon return to Palestine, or the fascist attacks on European volunteers while transiting through Trieste on their way home. They enthusiastically list the improvements the international and local brigades could make next time they go to Yugoslavia, next year–they hope. However, 1948 brought the Cominform resolution in which the pro-Stalin Communist Parties condemned Tito, and Yugoslavia was effectively blacklisted. Even in this state of blockade, some international brigades still found their way to Yugoslavia, to the construction sites of the Brotherhood and Unity Highway.

While Thompson’s account is detailed, he himself recognizes that he has “failed to give flesh and blood to the story. Perhaps this can never be done unless one goes to see and work oneself”. The emphasis there is Thompson’s, and it resonates with his understanding of Yugoslav strategy: the Yugoslavs did not regard the Railway as one more friendship jamboree. If the World Youth Festival was the drawing-office of international unity, then they intended the Railway to be the foundry. They realised that travail symbolique leads only to amitié symbolique and they had a far profounder aim in view. They believed that hard work would lead to hard-headed understanding.

It is hard not to draw parallels with the reconstruction of Yugoslavia after World War II, and the reconstruction of Yugoslav republics after the wars of the 1990s. A literal parallel is the plan to build a highway through Bosnia, next to the route of the Šamac-Sarajevo railway. Extrapolating from the current progress of this construction project, which is repeatedly hailed as the most important infrastructural endeavor of the country after the war, its completion could be expected in two decades.

The actions that started with the Šamac-Sarajevo railway continued until early 1990s, throughout the existence of socialist Yugoslav state; many a veteran of such actions would rather the railway today could similarly mobilize the enthusiastic youth. Once left to the “invisible hand” to build it, the highway remained invisible. A volunteer arriving to Bosnia after the 90s war, arriving either through a humanitarian or a missionary organization, would not be steered into a large infrastructural endeavour: it wasn’t aligned with the strategy of the organisations, nor stimulated by the local authorities. In such a setting, most of these efforts were bound to become the inevitable travail symbolique. International aid in post-war Balkans disappeared through the cracks: material aid eaten by corruption, work by volunteers uncoordinated and often misguided by a combination of political and religious motives failed to make a substantial difference, and so did the inevitable travail symbolique.

https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads ... 10x497.png

That title is so good it makes me giddy. The rest is damn good too.
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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 25, 2022 2:07 pm

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My seventy years and the departed GDR
By Victor Grossman (Posted Aug 24, 2022)

It’s a momentous day! Not for the world—for which it’s nothing special. But for me! Just seventy years ago, in nervous panic, I took off my U.S. Army jacket, shoes and sleeve insignia and stepped into the swift Danube River which, at Linz in still-occupied Austria, divided the USA Zone from the USSR Zone. Although very wet at this short sector, it was part of the long Iron Curtain. And I was swimming across it in what most Americans would consider a very wrong direction!

It was not really my free choice! In 1950 the McCarran Act ruled that all members of a long list of “Communist Front” organizations must immediately register as foreign agents. I had been in a dozen; American Youth for Democracy, the Anti-Fascist Spanish Refugee Committee, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (I gave them a dollar in solidarity), the Sam Adams School, the American Labor Party, Young Progressives and—most heinous of all, the Communist Party. The maximum penalty for not registering could be $10,000 and—PER DAY!—5 years in prison!! Neither I nor anyone else bowed to this monstrosity!

But in January 1951, during the Korean War, I was drafted—and required to sign that I was never in any of those on that long, long list. Should I risk years in prison by admitting my infamy? Or sign and, by staying mum, hope to survive two army years with no one checking up? I signed.

However, they did check up! Decades later, thanks to the FOIA, 1100 pages (!) of FBI files aboutme (at 10c/page) revealed that J. Edgar Hoover’s boys had watched me closely, as a leftist Harvard student (the names of seven informants were redacted) and as a worker in Buffalo, where I had hoped to help in saving the fighting 1930s character of the CIO unions.

In August 1952 a Pentagon letter listed seven of my memberships and ordered me to “report on Monday to HQ”. The threatened penalty for my perjury: up to 5 years, perhaps in Leavenworth. By then dozens of Communists had been indicted; many were sent to prison. I had luckily been sent not to Korea but to Bavaria, next to Austria. With no-one to advise me, I chose the Danube.

Across the river, in a surprisingly quiet landscape, in no way like an Iron Curtain, the Soviets kept me two weeks in a barred but polite lock-up, then sent me north to the German Democratic Republic, East Germany. I was lucky again; the GDR was the most successful, most untroubled of all in the “East Bloc.” For the next 38 years, as an American, raised with a broad, varied education (six public schools, Bronx Science, Dalton, Fieldston, Harvard), I watched, with left-leaning but not dogmatically limited eyes, the rise, then fall of this western outpost of socialism (or Communism, “state socialism”, “totalitarianism,” or whatever).

I found neither Utopia nor, back then or ever, the hunger, poverty and general misery the American media might have led me to expect. Even in the crucial, difficult year 1952-1953, less than eight years after the war, while shop offerings were limited, lacking variety, style, and often just that very item you were looking for, they were stocked well enough with the basics. East Germany was much smaller and in terms of industry and natural resources far poorer than West Germany. It had borne over 90% of the war reparations burden; the heavily-destroyed USSR did not drop these until 1953. The GDR lacked the huge investment possibilities of war criminal monopolies like Krupp, Siemens, Bayer or BASF, whose factories it nationalized, as well as the politically-aimed assistance of the Marshall Plan. Large numbers of its scientific, management and academic staffs, mostly pro-Nazi, had fled from the occupying Red Army and the leftist, mostly Communist administrators who came with it—and got jobs with their former bosses who were soon prospering again along the Rhine and Ruhr. This seriously weakened the economic revival, but I felt happy that the war criminals were gone.

As an ardent (and Jewish) anti-fascist, I rejoiced to find that the entire atmosphere was anti-Nazi! Unlike West Germany, the schools, universities, courts, police departments, all were cleansed of the swastika crowd, even when at first this meant new, barely-trained replacements, like my father-in-law, a pro-union carpenter, as village mayor or my two brothers-in-law as teachers. My wife trembled when she was reminded of her brutal teachers before 1945. Then, in the altered East German schools, corporal punishment was immediately forbidden.

Of course there were countless problems in a country ruled by Hitler & Co. for twelve years, where cynicism was widespread and Stalin’s cultural views and anti-Semitism exerted undue influence until his death in 1953. Luckily, the aged Communist leader Wilhelm Pieck was able to shield the GDR to a large degree in this regard. And from the start anti-Nazi leftists, often returned Jewish exiles, became leaders in the entire cultural scene; theater, music, opera, literature, journalism and film, where true masterpieces were created, often against fascism, but boycotted and hence unknown in West Germany and the USA. In the all-powerful Politburo of the ruling party Hermann Axen had barely survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald (his brother and parents did not). Albert Norden had escaped to the USA; the Nazis killed his father, a rabbi, in Theresienstadt. In the GDR, except for 3 or 4 mild word-clichés, I met no anti-Semitism in all those 38 years. Those still infected with fascist ideology were careful, except with family or buddies, to keep their mouths shut. Which was OK with me!

Step by step our living standard—of my very dear wife, who saved me from homesickness, our two sons, and myself, kept improving, like that of nearly everyone in the GDR, as it pulled itself up by its own thin bootstraps. Impressing me most as an American: no layoffs, no unemployment; there were jobs for everyone. Rents averaged less than 10% of most incomes; evictions were forbidden by law. In the early years large apartments were divided up when needed; no-one slept in the streets or went begging. Food pantries were unneeded, even the word was unknown. So was student debt. All education was free and monthly stipends covered basic costs, making all jobbing while at college unnecessary.

A monthly medical tax on wages or fees (max. 10%) covered everything: in my case, nine (free) hospital weeks with hepatitis plus four weeks at a health spa to recuperate and four more a year later in Karlsbad. My wife had three rheumatism cures, four weeks each, in the Polish and Harz mountains. All costs were covered and we also got 90% of our salaries. Prescribed drugs were fully covered, also dental care, glasses, hearing aids; I had no need of my wallet or checkbook to pay for my daily insulin shots or my ten-year active pace-maker. Nor for my wife’s two maternal leaves (six months paid, the rest, if wanted, with guaranteed job ). No charge for full child care, participation in sports, summer camps, not for contraception aid nor for free abortions after a new law was passed in 1982. So many fears were gone—so many were totally unknown!

I participated fully in the generally very normal life. First as a factory worker, an apprentice lathe operator, then a student, editor, director of a new Paul/Eslanda Robeson archive, finally as a free lance journalist, lecturer and author. I was not treated as a privileged “American,” as some assume, but my last three occupations meant that—in my series of four little two-stroke Trabant cars I really “got around”—to nearly all areas, with all age levels, in all possible milieus.

A monthly tax (max. 10%) on wages or fees covered everything: my nine hospital weeks with hepatitis, four weeks in a curative spa and four more a year later in Karlsbad, plus my wife’s four-week rheumatism spa cures in the Polish and Harz mountains, again all expenses covered plus 90% of our salaries. All prescribed drugs were covered 100%, so were dental care, glasses, hearing aids—nor did I need wallet, purse or checkbook for my daily insulin shots or my later pace-maker. A year’s maternal leave (six months paid, the rest, if wanted, with guaranteed job) could be followed by full cost-free child care, sports participation, summer camps, free contraception aid or (if neglected)—ever since the breakthrough in 1982—free abortions. So many fears were gone—in fact unknown!

This may really seem almost Utopian. Then why did some risk their lives to leave? Why was a wall built to keep them in? Why did they vote to join West Germany—and ditch the GDR? Why did it fail?

There were all too many reasons. East Germany was occupied by a country it had been taught to hate, whose soldiers had fought it hardest, were often violent in the first weeks, and were poorer and more difficult to love than prosperous, hence generous, gum-chewing GI’s, who came from a wealthy, undamaged homeland. Many but certainly not all East Germans appreciated the Soviets’ major role in defeating the Nazis and their pressure and guidance in confiscating major industry and breaking the power of those worst enemies of the world and theGermans, the Krupps, Siemens and IG Farbens, and the ousting of giant Prussian landowners, the Junkers, who so often officered Germany into mass bloodshed and disaster.

The Russians offered lots of good culture, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevski, top quality dancing, to “Peter and the Wolf” and “The Cranes Are Flying”. But these could rarely compete in mass popularity with the Beatles and Stones, Elvin Presley and suspense-laden Hollywood B-films.

Such enticements, which included some of high quality, based on an unusual American mix of Anglo-Scot, Irish, Jewish, Italian and especially Black cultures, were cleverly misused to increase political and economic influence and power in the world, especially in the East Bloc. They were paired, above all in Germany, with clever propaganda adapted from both Goebbels and that master peddler-publicist of anything from toothpaste to capitalism, Edward L. Bernays. They threaten the great old cultures of France, Italy, India, even China. While GDR leaders, in full power, did aim at noble goals, how could such elderly men, hardened by years of life-and-death struggle against Nazi murderers but usually trained with Stalinist clichés, grow flexible enough to find rapport in printed or spoken word with the average, changeable citizen? There were indeed successes—but too few and far between.

In the 1980s difficulties increased, upward trends slowed and slipped downward. The USSR, with its own problems, offered no assistance. Such problems were difficult but, in a changing world, hardly rare or insurmountable—except that here every problem was utilized in the unceasing attempts to retake East Germany, use its skilled but exploitable working class and move eastwards from there. The State Security or “Stasi,” created to oppose such doings, was crude enough to make the situation worse.

And yet the GDR had probably come closer than any country in the world to achieving that legendary goal of abolishing poverty, while sharply decreasing the frightful, growing rich-poor gap based on an obscene profit system. But it could not afford the immense assortment of goods—foods, apparel, appliances, electronics, vehicles and travel which the West offered, above all the USA and West Germany. The GDR citizenry took all its amazing social advantages for granted and dreamt of scarce bananas and unavailable VWs, of Golden Arch and Golden Gate—without realizing that these are largely available and affordable due to the poverty of children in West Africa or Brazil, of exploited pickers in Andalusian or Californian fields and orchards. Some are just now beginning to realize that those billionaire giants, after cheating so many people of color, wrecking world climate and wielding ever deadlier weapons of annihilation, may soon feel impelled to squeeze and break the comfortable middle classes in their own countries. The start is already felt by many families.

I look back at my seventy years as an ex-pat, and still consider myself a patriotic American—never for the USA of Morgan or Rockefeller but for that of John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Eugene Debs and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, DuBois, Robeson, Malcolm and Martin.

I also love and admire great Germans: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Liebknecht, the great Polish-German Rosa Luxemburg—or great writers: Lessing, Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht. And I respect and empathize with people from all lands, my brothers and sisters, from Guam to Guatemala—and Gaza.

I can only hope that new generations learn from the GDR, and not only from its blunders, nasty habits and limitations, born of its history and all too realistic fears of being overthrown.

It was finally overthrown and stands no longer as a barrier to renewed billionaire expansion—economic, political and military—to the south and east. It is still being belittled or maligned—largely out of fear that it has not yet been sufficiently erased and forgotten. Despite my sometime feelings in those years of despair, even anger at mistaken paths or missed opportunities, I still look back with a mixture of nostalgia, regret and also pride at its many hard-won achievements, in culture, in living together, in partly overcoming the cult of greed and rivalry, in unflinching GDR support for the Mandelas, the Allendes and Ho Chi Minhs, for Angela Davis, too—and not, like its ultimately stronger and victorious opponents in Bonn, for the Pinochets, Francos, racists and apartheid tyrants. I recall our achievements in avoiding war and striving for lives without fear or hatred. By and large they were good years. I am glad I lived through them.
About Victor Grossman
Victor Grossman, born in NYC, fled McCarthy-era menaces as a young draftee, landed in East Germany where he observed the rise and fall of its German Democratic Republic (GDR). He has described his own life in his autobiography Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), and analyzed the GDR and questions of capitalism and socialism in Germany and the USA, with his provocative conclusions, along with humor, irony and occasional sarcasm in all directions, in A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee (New York: Monthly Review Press). His address is wechsler_grossman [at] yahoo.de (also for a free sub to the Berlin Bulletins sent out by MR Online).
https://mronline.org/2022/08/24/my-seve ... arted-gdr/

I am unfamiliar with "Stalin's Antisemitism". However, such attitudes and homophobia were rife in 'old Russia' and cannot be made to disappear overnight, however much we strive time is an essential consideration.
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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 29, 2022 4:31 pm

Yugonostalgia
August 29, 6:45

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Yugonostalgia

In Serbia, 81% of respondents believe that the breakup of Yugoslavia was a mistake. In Bosnia, which has always been the most multicultural of the republics, this opinion is shared by 77%. Even in Slovenia, the first former Yugoslav republic to join the EU and considered by many to be the most successful country in the region, 45% of people think so. And only in Kosovo, which did not gain full independence from Yugoslavia, only 10% of those polled regret the breakup, writes The Guardian.

The results of sociological surveys demonstrate a striking unity of opinion among the inhabitants of the countries that were part of the Republic of Yugoslavia. Many residents of the Balkans - not only the elderly, but also very young - feel a desire to return to the second half of the 20th century, to Yugoslavia. The common narrative at the time was that Tito had been forcing different peoples to live together against their will for nearly half a century. However, 30 years later, many still have a deep attachment to a country that no longer exists, and regret its collapse, according to The Guardian.

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This nostalgia is especially easy to feel in May, when on the birthday of Josip Broz Tito, many people with Yugoslav flags and flowers come to his mausoleum. Most of them grew up under the old system, when the dictator's birthday was a major public holiday. Some belong to far-left political parties. But there are also teenagers among them who regret that they did not manage to be pioneers. Among them was 18-year-old Milos Tomcic, who came to the mausoleum of Tito in a pioneer tie. When asked what he considers himself by nationality, he replied: “I consider myself a Yugoslav: my mother is a Serb, my father is a Montenegrin, my grandmother is a Croatian. My relatives live all over Yugoslavia, ”the newspaper writes.

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was established in 1945 and consisted of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, as well as the autonomous province of Kosovo. Tito's government sought to unite different ethnic and religious groups under the slogans of equality and brotherhood, but after his death in 1980, nationalist sentiments intensified in the region, which in 1992 led to the disintegration of the country, and then to bloody military conflicts, writes The Guardian.

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Longing for the time of Tito in the countries of the former Yugoslavia is called "Yugonostalgia". According to Sarajevo-based political scientist Larisa Kutovich, the socialist period is highly valued, associated with economic growth and a significant improvement in living standards. Most of the former Yugoslav states experienced a severe economic downturn after gaining independence and still suffer from poor living standards. Differences between Bosnia and Serbia escalated again. Croatia and Slovenia have joined the European Union, but the process of accession of other former Yugoslav countries has slowed down and now many doubt that they will ever be able to become members, The Guardian notes.

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Despite the fact that Yugoslavia was a one-party state, it was clearly different from other countries in the bloc. Tito was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement and maintained balanced relations with the West and the USSR, and Yugoslav citizens could easily move around the world. Sociologists believe that one of the reasons for “yugonostalgia” is the loss of status: former residents of a large and important country by world standards have become citizens of small, insignificant states, concludes The Guardian.

https://russian.rt.com/inotv/2022-08-29 ... nostalgiya - zinc
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... yone-loved -each-other-rise-yugonostalgia-tito - original in English

What we have - we do not appreciate. Lost - weep.
The process is identical to "Ostalgia" in East Germany. A residual reminder of the stupidity and betrayal of the late 80s.

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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 08, 2022 5:51 pm

The experience of the Soviet Union will be in demand
November 8, 8:07

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The experience of the Soviet Union will be in demand

We often say rather banal phrases, without attaching much importance to them. One of these phrases is: “The world is changing rapidly,” and few people think how accurately this is said. Over the past two years, the world has changed so rapidly and radically that probably no one expected this.

As a child, I had no idea that for almost my entire conscious life I would have to live in the world of the harshest examples of Soviet propaganda, and even they, perhaps, were surpassed by the reality around us. As a science fiction lover, I could not even imagine that the dystopias predicted by science fiction would unfold right before our eyes - from total control over people to global climate change, from job losses as a result of automation, to the emergence of new, previously unknown diseases. And, of course, it was impossible to imagine that a military operation that unfolded on the territory of our united country in the recent past would fall on the life of our generation.

I was born and raised in the USSR - for me, the holiday of November 7 was as natural as the Motherland, parents, hometown, summer, winter, our nature. Of course, as a child, I would not have been able to clearly articulate the main provisions of Marxism or the Constitution of the USSR, but there was a wonderful, incomparable feeling of our rightness and personal involvement in something great. There was an absolutely clear feeling that our country was the best, the most important - not because of superiority, but because it brought light, liberation and progress to the whole world. They say that the Americans instill something like this in their youth, only, in my opinion, with the opposite sign. I remember what would now be called a "sense of style" - our country was huge, strong, bright, because the red color itself can revive anything,

Of course, we loved the New Year, May 1, we respected Victory Day very much, but November 7 was a very special holiday. This day has never been distinguished by warm weather, but, in my opinion, the most festive atmosphere was on it. We watched the parade and were proud of our country. The demonstrations were so crowded that I was always amazed at how many people live in our cities. “Flags are flying at the gates, blazing with flames. You see, the music goes where the trams went! And the holiday certainly continued in the families. In my opinion, he was really popular. Alas, it is even difficult for the younger generation to imagine what a real national unity it was. We had a lot of people at our house. In general, it must be said that then the holidays were celebrated in a completely different way, and people gathered often, it was customary to visit each other and,

It is very important that there was no question for us whether we were right or not. Of course we are right! We are doing everything right! Our country is the best! We bring progress and justice to the world. Now, after 30 years of capitalism (and even more, if we count 5 years of perestroika), it is obvious to me that this was the case. There were no party and leading workers in my family, but there were workers and labor intelligentsia, and perhaps we, ordinary people, did not know all the intricacies of the theory, but we felt that this country is ours, the holiday is ours, and we ourselves are part of what something big, important, great, part of a common cause that changes history. And I also remember that it took five years of continuous perestroika propaganda to at least partially muffle this feeling in the people, to eradicate it, to deprive the people of their vitality, in order to move to the next stage after 1991 - to start cutting the state and distributing its wealth. If Gorbachev had immediately, in 1985, told the people his true goals, I think he would not have lasted long in power. And I remember that our country was very calm - not even in terms of the low level of crime, although it was incredibly low in comparison with the current times. No, it was the calmness of strength and confidence. No one thought about how to become "cool", there were no endless series about "special forces", and there were no special forces, but very close were not yet old, simple and modest veterans who won the most terrible in the history of mankind war that saved modern human civilization. he would not last long in power. And I remember that our country was very calm - not even in terms of the low level of crime, although it was incredibly low in comparison with the current times. No, it was the calmness of strength and confidence. No one thought about how to become "cool", there were no endless series about "special forces", and there were no special forces, but very close were not yet old, simple and modest veterans who won the most terrible in the history of mankind war that saved modern human civilization. he would not last long in power. And I remember that our country was very calm - not even in terms of the low level of crime, although it was incredibly low in comparison with the current times. No, it was the calmness of strength and confidence. No one thought about how to become "cool", there were no endless series about "special forces", and there were no special forces, but very close were not yet old, simple and modest veterans who won the most terrible in the history of mankind war that saved modern human civilization.

I remember this great new community - the Soviet people. We really were a single Soviet people. "Neither Greek nor Jew," as an important book says. I always felt like a Russian, there were Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews in my class, there was a guy from Georgia. But, to be honest, we didn’t even know that then, because the issues of nationality did not bother us at all, and even more so, it would never have occurred to anyone to be divided according to nationalities and religions. And I absolutely do not remember that someone felt disadvantaged on a national basis. It was unity without any violence, we really felt like one people. Yes, in fact, we were. Attempts to create such a community in the history of mankind have been made many times, and even the emblem of the United States says "E pluribus unum" ("One of many"), but only in the Soviet Union was this experiment completely successful. Our opponents pronounce the word "experiment" in relation to our country with some kind of humiliation, but yes, there was an experiment, and it gave a real alternative, a new and viable path for mankind, a state that confidently responded to the most formidable challenges in the history of mankind, the country leaving behind great accomplishments.

Of all the creatures living on Earth, man is the only one who knows that he is mortal. Communist doctrine is sometimes called a new religion, as if it were an offensive word. Yes, there are some religious elements in it, but what's wrong with that? All religions of the world promise a person eternal life after death, especially if during his earthly life he worked honestly and without fail. Our country not only promised, but also gave a person eternal life - in participation in a common cause, in building a future, happy and bright, in which a particle of everyone's labor will forever remain. “I rejoice - this is my work flowing into the work of my Republic” - some modern people may not even understand why the unmercenary Mayakovsky is so happy.

With the destruction of our country, our system, not only we have lost alternatives. We, of course, were simply orphaned. But the whole world has been orphaned, now plunging into some kind of technotronic Middle Ages. I recall a quote from the Wachowski film: “After the end of the Cold War, an endless “war on terror” began. This means that the war has descended to the grassroots level, everyone is fighting against everyone, it is not clear who is with whom, how to achieve victory and what it is - victory in such a war.

Do I miss the USSR? Would I like to return it? Words are not enough to answer these questions. Let me just say that without hesitation and immediately I would give my life for my children and future generations to live the way we lived, in such a country. Our losses are boundless, sorrow is immeasurable. And every year it becomes more and more. What country have we lost! What a priceless gift we have been given! And what could our life be like if, even in 1991, the leadership would show firmness and, as the experience of our friendly countries showed, would restore constitutional order. The history of the whole world would have been completely different, how many victims could have been avoided! Why did this happen to us, to our country?! I am sure that history will provide answers to these questions.

What do I regret? Yes, literally everything. When a person close to you leaves, it cannot be said that you loved his eyes, or hands, or character. Yes, you loved all this, but he is gone all. There is no area in which I could say that what happened to our country was justified. And technical progress, which has not stood still for the past 30 years, I am sure would move even faster if the competition between the two superpowers continued. We have acquired something from technology, but who knows what we have lost? Wouldn't there already be at least two bases on the Moon - ours and the Americans, or even one joint, if the competition continued? And, of course, two responsible and self-confident countries could solve almost all world issues. In general, wherever you look, everyone lost. And especially those who were sure that they had won.

Everything turned upside down, black became white, good became evil, and evil became good. What is the value of one appeal of the "gentlemen", designed to replace the "comrades". After all, "master" is the other side of the "serf." Since you are someone's master, it means that someone is a slave. And certainly not a friend. And those who made the revolution in October 1917 did not want to be masters, but they did not allow anyone to make themselves slaves either. In The Interns, one of the Strugatskys' early, still bright red works, it is excellently said about this: “You have already achieved something, you do not want to be a slave. Now it remains to stop wanting to be a master.

But I could not consider myself a Soviet person if I were not an optimist. The Great October Socialist Revolution was an absolutely natural response to the centuries-old demand for justice. All people wanted to feel like people. Everyone, not just the rich. Even in the Western world, our revolution caused completely tectonic shifts in relation to the so-called "simple" person - the powerful of this world are now forced to respect him, because it was clearly shown that they are not so strong and what can happen if, as he said Mayakovsky, small ones will crowd into the party. The last, most recent example is Brazil, where 215 million people changed their fate in elections.

The demand for justice in the world has not gone away. And it's not just about fairness. If at the beginning of the 20th century this was still discussed speculatively, now, by the end of the second decade of the 21st century, it is quite obvious that capitalism is a dead end. All the problems it creates are tied into an increasingly tight knot, and almost none of them are solved. The expression "technotronic fascism" no longer seems to be something abstract. The world is changing rapidly and not at all in the direction that the world's great humanists and enlighteners dreamed of.

But I am absolutely sure that soon the experience of the Soviet Union will be in demand - it's just that life will force you. It will be studied, and the results will be used openly - after all, much of our experience, the same planning, for example, is already actively used, although it is often not recognized that this is the experience of our country.

I believe that the future belongs to socialism. This is no longer just a slogan, this is the experience of 30 years of life under capitalism, this is a real alternative. I am sure that our children and grandchildren will take into the future all the best of our achievements, will not repeat the mistakes of the past and will solve the problems of the present.

(c) Dmitry Agranovsky

https://www.mk.ru/amp/social/2022/11/06 ... bovan.html - zinc

Moreover, on in my opinion, the experience of the Soviet Union is in demand not sometime in the future, but already now. Especially in matters of mobilization measures.
We still have the opportunity to use the rest of the rich Soviet heritage in order to pave the way for the future. And we must take the best that was in the USSR into this future with us without fail.

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Re: We Lived Better Then

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 25, 2022 3:03 pm

Decades After Berlin Wall Fell, Cold War Victors Still Trashing East Germany
NOVEMBER 24, 2022

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East Berliners climb atop the Berlin Wall with the help of West Berliners in the early morning hours of Nov. 10, 1989. Photo: Jockel Finck AP.

Editorial note: Orinoco Tribune does not generally publish articles that are over two weeks old. However, an exception is being made in this case as the article remains as important today as it was at the time of its publication.

By John Wojcik – Nov 9, 2022

A few years ago, there were events in Germany commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the pages of the press, prominent persons—from former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker to then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the now-deceased former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev—all weighed in with their commentaries on the significance of Nov. 9, 1989, all celebrating to a greater or lesser degree the demise of the former socialist state in the east.

This year, there will again be speeches condemning the memory of that lost country. As someone who traveled frequently to the German Democratic Republic when it existed and spent years involved in the movement for friendship and solidarity with that country, I offer here some thoughts that I hope will put such celebrations in balance.

The GDR, as the old East Germany was officially known, was a lot more than the totalitarian prop that gets paraded out during anniversaries to prove the supposed superiority of capitalism over socialism. It was up against tough odds, right from the start—long before construction of the wall began in August 1961.

The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is actually a good time to review the history of the division of Germany, which is something that actually resulted from the actions of capitalist countries in the West, not because of policies originating with the Soviet Union.

World War II in Europe ended with an agreement reached and signed in Potsdam, Germany, in 1945. The Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and France were party to the deal, which involved an agreement to de-nazify Germany, demilitarize it completely, and nationalize the major industries with the intention of keeping them out of the hands of former Nazis. The country was to be only temporarily divided into four occupation zones, one each to be ruled by the United States, Britain, and France in the Western part of Germany and the Soviet Union in the eastern part of the country. The capital of Berlin, situated in the eastern section, was to be similarly divided into four occupation zones.

The occupiers were to jointly oversee the carrying out of the Potsdam Agreement, which included a call for the arrest and imprisonment of all high-level Nazi Party members in and out of the military.

The deal was actually a victory for the Soviet Union, which wanted a neutral but united and peaceful Germany to develop on European soil. The Soviet delegation in Potsdam vigorously fought proposals by the U.S. that called for the permanent division of Germany into separate industrial and agricultural states.

Step by step, the Western powers began violating the Potsdam Agreement, first by offering jobs and positions to Nazis who fled the Russian zone and poured into the U.S., French, and British zones in the West.

Next, they reneged on deals to nationalize major industries in the western part of the country, often handing them back to the ownership of powerful Nazis who had lost ownership and control of them after the war.

Then they extended Marshall Plan aid in the billions of dollars to the Western zones, still again excluding the Soviet zone.

Their next move was to develop a new currency, the German mark for the French, British, and U.S. zones, yet again excluding the east.

Finally, they united the three Western zones into a formation called the Federal Republic of Germany, again excluding the Soviet zone. Only after all of these Western moves to ditch the Potsdam Agreement and divide Germany permanently did the political parties in the Soviet zone unite to form the German Democratic Republic. From its formation in 1949, however, until the early 1960s, the GDR never closed the border around West Berlin, despite the fact that it was a city fully inside the GDR that was controlled by the capitalist Western powers.

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An aerial view of the Potsdamer Platz in central Berlin, where the Soviet, British, and American sectors met in August 1949. Germany was still a destroyed nation even four years after World War II ended. This area had become the biggest black market center for currency trading after the U.S., British, and French occupation authorities had made the separation of Germany into two states a de facto reality by unifying the currency in their three zones. | Henry Burroughs / AP

Why the wall went up

One big problem for the GDR from its beginning in 1949 was that it occupied the much weaker and war-torn eastern third of Germany. Compared with the money that was pumped into the western part of Germany by the U.S. for rebuilding, the GDR started out with almost nothing.

Its quick elimination of former Nazis from positions of power and influence added another downside, of sorts. In many walks of life, Nazis at the end of the war were the folks who had experience running industries, schools, big businesses, and almost everything else. Those Nazis not arrested in the GDR fled, as fast as they could, to the west.

A third disadvantage was the forced economic and political blockade imposed upon the GDR by both the West German government based in Bonn and the U.S. It wasn’t a wall in those early days, but rather policies in the west that kept GDR citizens out of international conferences, scientific seminars, training sessions, and sports events. There was a de-facto wall denying GDR citizens the right to participate in international life and bring home knowledge and experience.

A fourth disadvantage was that high-quality products manufactured in the GDR were forbidden to use their famous brand names (like Zeiss optical and Meissen porcelain, for example) for international sales.

A fifth disadvantage was that the Bonn government actually strong-armed U.S. trade officials into denying the GDR “most favored nation” trade status under which customs payments are no higher than those paid by the “most favored nation.” The GDR was denied this status, despite the fact that the U.S. had conferred it upon other socialist countries, including Poland and Hungary. This move made it impossible for the GDR to compete with West Germany in the U.S., the most important market in the world in those formative years of the fledgling republic and even today.

A sixth disadvantage was a steady CIA effort to entice effective political leaders out of the GDR. Allen Dulles, the CIA leader who engineered the overthrow of democratically-elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, and the Congo and engineered attempts to overthrow the government of socialist Cuba, was hard at work in the GDR, too.

Rather than assassination in the GDR, however, his agents attempted to bribe Otto Grotewohl, the leader of the Social Democrats who merged his party with the Communists in East Germany to form the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Not only did Grotewohl spurn those agents, he became the first prime minister of the GDR.

A seventh disadvantage was what the CIA continually did throughout the 1950s to lure skilled technicians, scientists, medical experts, and others out of the GDR. State Department documents now available reflect many of these efforts which, unlike the attempt with Grotewohl, were successful. These efforts, in particular, contributed to the economic gap between West Germany and the GDR.

With the Marshall Plan and all the encouragement of West German economic growth, something the GDR could not possibly keep up with, the addition of this sabotage by the CIA dealt severe blows to the GDR economy in its formative years.

An eighth disadvantage to the GDR, as opposed to West Germany, was the negative effect of the push for war underway in the United States. When the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed, President John F. Kennedy met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

The Soviet leader put pressure on Kennedy to agree to an all-German peace treaty to ease the situation in Berlin, which was full of U.S. and Soviet tanks, not separated from one another by any border wall. Khrushchev urged the pulling of all troops, Soviet and U.S., out of the city. He threatened that U.S. failure to agree would force the Soviet Union to conclude its own peace treaty with the GDR.

In the U.S., meanwhile. the war hawks were having a field day. Kennedy was calling for billions more for the Pentagon and increasing the size of the armed forces by almost one million men. Fallout shelters had been built all over the U.S., with the basements of run-down apartment buildings being enlisted as such “shelters.” American schoolchildren had already been forced under their desks weekly to prepare for a nuclear attack.


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Before the wall went up, Berlin was a major flashpoint of the Cold War, with many expecting it would be the place war would start between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Here, a U.S. tank takes position at Friedrichstrasse at the sector border in Berlin, Germany on Aug. 23, 1961, with its barrel pointing towards East Berlin. | Peter Hillebrecht / AP

In Berlin, everyone was nervous. A “now or never” fear was stoked by the media in Germany, and the number of people leaving the GDR, especially the experts and the technicians mentioned earlier, through the open border in Berlin increased. Many left simply because they felt it was “safer on the other side” or because they were afraid “something” was about to happen.

An additional, ninth, problem for the GDR was the day-to-day sabotage of the economy that was happening on top of the brain drain. One could change 10 West marks for 70 East marks in the West, openly and without fear of any consequences, and go back home to the East and clean out the shelves of the grocery stores, leaving little for GDR workers to purchase with their hard-earned East marks. The legal exchange rate was supposed to be one-for-one, but in the West, you could often get seven or more. All the better to help destroy both the economy and morale in the East.

On top of all of these disadvantages and adverse factors faced by the GDR, Berlin had become the flashpoint by 1960 where one could easily imagine the outbreak of a third world war. Again, with no closed border between East and West Berlin, Soviet and U.S. tanks were facing each other only inches apart on street corners. (Then too, don’t forget that capitalist West Berlin, filled to the brim with U.S. equipment and soldiers, was situated entirely inside the GDR with no border that would prevent tanks from the U.S. encroaching on the GDR or tanks from the Soviet Union encroaching on West Berlin.)

Being a practical politician and knowing full well the disadvantages faced by the GDR, Kennedy, who knew in advance that the wall was about to be built in the summer of 1961, at first remained quiet, avoiding any incendiary remarks.

He is reported widely to have said of the wall: “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

That common sense, however, did not stop the U.S. president from launching an enormous propaganda campaign to exploit the GDR’s closing of the border around West Berlin. It would be portrayed to the world not as the construction of a border and checkpoints around West Berlin but rather as the bottling up and containment of a whole people in the GDR yearning to be free.

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A portrait of African-American singer Paul Robeson is carried by a group of young people during a parade in East Berlin. | Eddie Worth / AP

The immediate effect of the wall after its construction, of course, was improved security for the GDR.

A secondary effect was the immediate, if only temporary, weakening of the right-wing war hawks in West Germany with the ex-Nazi-friendly Conrad Adenauer being replaced by Willy Brandt, who advocated open and peaceful relations between the two Germanies.

Those determined to defeat socialism in the East and export capitalism into it did not give up, however. For them, the new “Ostpolitik” promised economic softening up of the “Stalinists” by other means—by opening relations with them and by dangling Coca-Cola and western clothing in front of the population.

The standard of living in the GDR rose rapidly after the wall was built around West Berlin, and, ironically, cultural opportunities flourished. With artists, musicians, and moviemakers less preoccupied with the West, and with some giving up their plans of going there, they turned their attention to developing cultural outlets in the GDR. Also, cultural figures who had trouble finding jobs in the West were welcomed to come and perform in the GDR.

The art of the early years of the GDR (too often dominated by happy, smiling, and energetic workers engaging in production) began to be replaced with countless individual styles, cities and landscapes, modern art, events in Cuba, China, and elsewhere, portraits of African Americans and much more. (See p. 132 of Victor Grossman’s book A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee, from Monthly Review Publishers.)

Dramatic films from all over the world were shown in theaters. The closing of the border around West Berlin at first opened up some cultural opportunities by reducing the fear that had previously existed of political problems coming in along with performers over open borders.

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Up to a million demonstrators gathered at the Palace of the Republic, seat of the government, in East Berlin to demand democratic reform on Nov. 4, 1989, five days before the border with West Berlin was opened. The main banner reads: “Wer einmal luegt dem glaubt man nicht” (Who lies once cannot be trusted). The GDR government was introducing changes, but the country’s days were already numbered and the West began making moves to take over the GDR. | Dieter Endlicher / AP

Why the wall had to fall

In the end, however, the GDR could not overcome the many disadvantages with which it faced from the beginning, nor could it overcome the Western propaganda campaign around the Berlin Wall.

To defend its noble anti-fascist and socialist goals—many of its top leaders’ bodies still bore the numbers tattooed onto them in Nazi concentration camps—the GDR did indeed resort to very unpleasant things. A cement wall, censorship in the media, and often overly intense surveillance of its own population—none of these served as glowing recommendations of socialism.

And to be fair, the challenges the country faced were not just ones imposed upon it from the outside. Fearful, closed, and sometimes narrow minds worked together to create many internal problems.

From 1980 until 1989, I was the chair of the U.S. Committee for Friendship with the GDR. Our organization worked hard to bring cultural, educational, political, and working-class people from the GDR to the U.S. and vice-versa. We believed that there should be peace and cooperation between nations with differing social systems.

While I admit that there were wrong and sometimes terrible choices made by leading figures in the GDR, I say today with as much certainty as ever that they never resorted to racism, national chauvinism, or regional hostility. Until the dying days of their republic, they supported good relations with every single country and nationality hurt by the Nazis and with every other country and nationality in the world.

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GDR border guards watch a bulldozer tear down parts of the Berlin Wall to make space for more border crossing points between East and West, Nov. 10, 1989. | Udo Weitz / AP

It is important for people to realize that, unlike our leaders here in the U.S., the leaders of the GDR headed a country and a system that could flourish only in the context of world peace and cooperation among nations. They could not and did not profit from war.

They wrongly believed when the Berlin Wall went up that it would keep out Deutsche Bank and the Krupps and the Siemens, and that it would protect their dream of a better future. History proved otherwise. After the wall came down, capitalism was exported right back into the GDR.

And in the West, both the wall and socialism—the system it failed to protect—continue to be beaten up by the capitalist powers that be and their spokespersons in the media and academia.

Long after the wall fell, just a few years ago, the real estate industry in West Berlin drove out of office the city’s housing secretary who supported homeless people squatting in vacant apartments on the pretext that he had been an agent of the Stasi, the GDR secret service, in East Berlin. Andrej Holm was barely 19 when the wall fell. How extensive could his Stasi career have been?

It didn’t matter. The hatred of the wall which came down over three decades ago was resurrected by the real estate industry to destroy a man whose only crime was protecting homeless people in the united “free” Berlin.

In the capital of the German Democratic Republic—in the Berlin that ended when the wall came down 33 years ago—there were no homeless people.

https://orinocotribune.com/decades-afte ... t-germany/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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