matthews@harvard.ARPA (Jim Matthews) (04/21/85)
> (Brief note: Readers may notice that Jim consistently says Russia where > I consistently say USSR or Soviet. Perhaps Jim believes the Bolsheviks > were another form of Russian Czarism; I don't. Stalin, for instance, was a > Georgian, Khrushchev a Ukrainian. A peasant in the Caucasus makes more > today than a Russian peasant; Estonia, not Russia, is the most prosperous > republic; universities have long had affirmative action programs which > give special preference to non-Russians; etc., etc.) I say Russia in the same way that we refer to the Russian Empire, which was multi-national and multi-ethnic in the same way the Soviet Union is. I don't have the figures, but I believe the income figures you mention were just as true under the czars. The stereotype of rich Georgians predates Communism. As for the ethnicity of Soviet leaders, it has been more varied than that of the Czars. But if you get right down to it, the czars were of Norman origin, not Slav. They intermarried with Poles and Western Europeans (tsarevich Alexis's famed hemophilia came from Queen Victoria). In the 18th century the court language was French, not Russian. As for the Soviets having more enlightened policies toward national minorities, it simply isn't true. Stalin sent entire ethnic groups into exile in Siberia or the Gulag. Today there are conscious efforts to increase the birthrate of Great Russians, in order to maintain that group's population majority. Discrimination against non-Russians is rampant. It seems that many anti-Communists object to calling the Soviet Union "Russia" because it's a slander on Russia, and others object because they think it's a slander on the Soviet Union. I ascribe to the thesis of Richard Pipes (Russia under the Old Regime), which is that Russia's current political system finds its roots in the system of the czars. There are innovations, most of them for the worse, but the link is there. > > Tony Wuersch > {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw Jim Matthews matthews@harvard