A Warning to the American Ruling Class, From the Soviets

Bryn

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Sat Sep-18-10 05:52 PM
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A Warning to the American Ruling Class, From the Soviets

Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in Red Square in August, 1991 is the defining image of the fall of the Soviet empire. Part of the Red Army had been sent to Moscow to quell the new populist government there and restore the old Communist order by a cabal of KGB and Army officers.

The problem was at least twofold: one, many of those Red Army soldiers were from Moscow themselves and naturally hesitant to kill their own people; two, many of them were veterans of the ten year long Afghan War and had been treated like shit by the same people who had sent them there in the first place. Many had not been fully paid for years.

So they joined the Second Russian Revolution. End of the ancien' regime.

There are many reasons for the collapse of the Soviet empire, but ultimately it was the system's own internal contradictions that did it in. For years, the Soviets got their hard currency from oil at inflated prices stemming from the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. When the Saudis dropped the price of oil in order to reclaim their old share of the oil market in 1985, the writing was on the wall. The Russians simply could not compete with cheap Middle Eastern oil, and at a stroke lost at least $20 billion a year in revenue.

They were overextended. Maintaining their 40 year old grip on Eastern Europe was as expensive as it was unpopular among the Eastern European populations, the Afghan War was an expensive boondoggle, Soviet production methods for its other great potential export-grain-were expensive and inefficient, and it spent so heavily on its own military-industrial complex that it had nothing left over to maintain the standard of living of its most critical people, the Russians themselves.

The Soviet PTB, so used to being invincible on their own turf, refused to make changes that might have enabled a smaller Soviet Union to survive. They were broke, but refused to do anything about it for several years. Eventually, it was maintain order at home or maintain imperial control of Eastern Europe, so they withdrew from Eastern Europe and its puppet governments there fell like dominoes.

The Russian people had been wishing for the benefits of the West at least since the Beatles introduced blue jeans and rock n' roll, and had little sympathy for their own entrenched, ruling elites. When the standard of living for the Russian equivalent of the middle class, the midlevel Communist apparatchiks, precipitously declined in the late eighties, the balloon went up. The government could not afford another war after Afghanistan, and so stood helplessly by as first the Baltic States and then Ukraine broke free. When it became apparent that their own people had had enough of them as well, they sent in the Red Army.

The Army switched sides. In the end, all of this happened in a matter of months, so quickly that the Soviet elite never really knew what hit them.

Our own system now is every bit as precarious as the Soviets' was in 1985. Our banks are broke, their assets smoke, mirrors, and illusion. Our political leaders have no new ideas and keep rehashing the old failed ones in one form or the other. The Democratic Party's new slogan, which translates to "They suck more!" is hardly inspirational. We spend hundreds of billions a year to maintain our own global Empire, but the ruling classes don't want to pay for that themselves and are only able to extract so much from the rest of us, which still won't be enough.

And they treat our combat veterans and active duty military pretty shittily.

The parallels between the Soviets of a quarter century ago and the Americans today are not exact by any means, but there are definitely parallels. I wonder if Vladimir Putin sees them? He probably does.