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[Odler]

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From the vantage point where I start writing these words (on a Czech Airways flight bound from Saint Petersburg to Prague), I think the countrymen of Lenin and Trotsky came out great winners of the Cold War.

They, of course, were unsuccessful in their prospect of expanding the failed doctrine of collectivization and of dictatorship of the masses, but they achieved their goal of creating a superpower out of ragtag of fiefs tyrannized by the power of the Tsars and of the Orthodox Church.

For centuries, and mainly from 1712 to 1917, the people of Russia were a backward collection of illiterate peasants (80% of the population) and workers run and exploited by emperors whose lavish and ostentatious lifestyle clashed painfully with their misery. The people of Russia lived, semi-slaves, on lands that did not belong to them, with their very existence at the mercy of whimsical and cruel masters.

The Bolsheviks, later called Communists, came in as the Robin Hoods of the masses. Disciples of Karl Marx, they sincerely believed that after the 18th century people?s revolutions in England, America, and France, time had come for the world proletariat to take the lead and complete a natural momentum of displacement of wealth from the very few, to the majority and the very poor.

In Russia, and later of in the Soviet Union (a federation of 15 republics annexed by Russia), private property was banned. All goods, services, properties became assets of the federal government that is to part them equitably among the people. Engineers and doctors earned as much as their maintenance staff and clerks. Every member of these societies had free access to health care, housing, and education. Disparity became illegal.

For 70 years, the Soviets heavily invested in education and industrialization. They transformed a medieval agricultural society into a nuclear superpower, an empire where everyone could read and eat to satiety. Russia today is a social and political miracle when compared to the country the Tsars were reigning on. A miracle achieved in three generations!

But the Communists were curtailed in their goal of exporting the revolution. Traditionally capitalist countries reacted efficiently by dramatically strengthening their social nets. They too enacted free health care, free education, and cheap housing. It is not by chance that Scandinavian countries, closer to the borders of the USSR, were (are) the most liberal in instituting the concept of entitlement and social democracy.

In the U.S, to prevent the social revolution, FDR passed the Social Security Act of 1935. Later, Kennedy, then Johnson, afraid of losing Africa to the Soviet propaganda that America was a racist country, chose the camp of the Civil Right Movements. They ended they official politic of racial segregation.

In the 80s, people of Russia, who got everything for nothing, begot laziness and stagnation. The Soviet society plagued by corruption had to deal with humans who were no longer hungry. The hard-working strata started asking for more than their needs, they had wants. They no longer needed trousers, they wanted designer jeans.

Gorbachev in 1985, realizing that the Soviet goal was reached nationally, and will never be reached internationally opted, via perestroika and glasnost, to join the concert of capitalist nations.

He refused to move militarily against disbanding nations of the Warsaw Pact, such as East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the people of which revolted against communism. He stood still in front of a dissolving Union, and let the Soviet Union died. The giant was no longer of need.

Today, Russia is in the midst of a second revolution. The military superpower, the former brandon of the power to the masses, has primed its selection among the economic elite. Russia, with a per capita GDP 10% of ours, is ready for the leap. It has the population, the sciences, the natural resources, and the will for it.

Once the basic needs were met, dropping communism became a necessary step in Russia?s journey toward affluence. Western politics and Reagan?s call in Berlin: ?Gorbachev, bring down this wall??, on June 12, 1987, had nothing to do with the wall coming down two years later. Historically, it was due.

Please, visit: http://www.jeanlouie.com/

(The Traveller, Thursday, June 24, 2003)