Ask any passerby on the streets about Russia, and the response is predictable. It was a great nation, most powerful in the world at par with USA, but now much reduced in size, and shrunken in terms of power and prestige. This is the usual response. Yet, is this completely true? Has Russia slid from being the world’s most glorious power to now being a mere trifling? Let us examine this theory.
At the time of the ‘greatness’ of USSR, all the ‘republics’ within the Soviet were to have their own SSRs, thus the nation was an amalgamation of all these ‘local’ units. But while Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan and all the other ‘republics’ have their own authority, Russia was denied an SSR. There was only one reason for this, and that was to deny another rival body to the supreme communist party. Russia contained 90 per cent of the land area of the Union and 72 per cent of the population. A local Russian body could easily oppose the centre. And most of these policies were framed at the time of Stalin’s Comradeship, clearly explains this fear, as he himself was a Georgian. The Russian people constantly faced discrimination of a sort in their own country. Crimea was Russian till as long as recorded history exists, yet it was ‘given’ over to Ukraine in order to appease the Ukrainians, now proud possessors of a naturally very prosperous piece of land. Russians also lost the land of their forefathers in the Steppes, as the Kazakhs were distributed highly fertile cotton growing soil, while the original tillers were packed off as slave labour in Siberia. Many were even transported to the Baltics or elsewhere as part of a ‘melting pot’ strategy. And to crown all this, the Russian Orthodox Church, the lifeline of the Motherland was stripped down naked, people forbidden to worship their gods. Yes, Russia may have been at the head of a powerful empire, yet the people may not have been colonizers.
We now come to the present scenario. Siberia produces oil, Oligarchs travel the world’s capitals as some of the richest men on earth, Russian ‘beauties’ are now amongst the luminaries of the fashion world and what’s more, Russians are even good at Lawn Tennis, a traditionally upper class sport. Under Putin’s leadership, the country is showing signs of an economic improvement from the doom and gloom of the nineties. St. Petersburg, barring the Cyrillic script on the sideways, actually appears a modern version of Detroit. And all this somehow makes the situation a bit scary.
Russia is a wounded nation. Misguided young people may want to change their nation’s destiny, and want to reclaim the imagined glory the nation possessed barely 20 years back. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. Now I shall not go so far as to suggest such cataclysmic a consequence for the whole world, yet Russia’s recent military manouvres near the western border and its claim to the North Pole, suggests a growing self-belief. The self-belief may not always have the best desired results.
The world requires Russian oil. And Russia requires the foreign wealth to keep pouring in. And the nation’s future is still in the hands of the people themselves. Russia may end up once again churning out deadly weapons as its primary focus. Or she could prove to be a glorious chapter in the history of free enterprise.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
To remove or not to?
The word ‘socialist’ is these days creating a massive ruckus in public. People all over the country are debating the validity of the inclusion of this S word in our Preamble, and thus its significant presence in our constitution. Powerful politicians and ‘liberal’ journalists are clamouring for the word to be dropped from the great document altogether. However, now that we are in this position, let’s just explore the meaning of the word ‘socialism’.
Does this word only mean an economic principle in which the means of production are owned by the public? Did Karl Marx himself have this narrow definition of this rather old word? Thus, is a socialist also necessarily a communist? Can a capitalist never work for the society and be termed a socialist entrepreneur?
To me, the word has utopian connotations. A socialist state is one where every individual strives for his/her own betterment at the same time benefiting society around. A capitalist owning vast swathes of personal wealth thus qualifies as a socialist if he/she invests in products deemed procurable by people while the workers too enjoy at least reasonable working conditions with some amount of personal social security. Our country is now experiencing growth as never known before, surely soon to touch the remarkable double digit growth figure. The dream socialist state which Nehru envisaged never came to fulfillment. Instead, Manmohan Singh’s dream economy based on individual enterprise is apparently working better. But this to me does not render the word socialist as anything dangerous, to be confined to the dustbin.
To an extent, the apathy of today’s policy makers and the free press can be understood. Communism was perhaps the biggest lie of the 20th century. Human beings were denied basic liberty and instead of enabling the labourer to rise, it expected all people to behave as labourers. We all know about the Gulag camps in Siberia, the forced hunger deaths of the 3 million Kulaks in Ukraine, the liquidation of all the Russian church personnel in Russia and indeed a lot more. Yet, organized communism definitely served one good purpose. The former capitalist nations could no longer remain as ‘capitalist’ if you like as before. They had to modify in fear of a labour uprising on Leninist lines. Thus, the working classes in America and Western Europe experienced reforms as never before. The labour class was now coerced into a coalition ironically to protect the interests of the largely well established liberal economies.
Thus, let us not totally abandon the word socialism from our lexicon. Our industrial growth and Forex reserves might be at an all time, the rupee might well be gaining ground, but this does not qualify us as anti-social. One would like to believe that the rise of India is not exclusive of any group in the country and benefits everybody. In that case, we might as well still swear by our preamble, and continue to include the word ‘socialist’ along with the so far less controversial ‘sovereign’.
Does this word only mean an economic principle in which the means of production are owned by the public? Did Karl Marx himself have this narrow definition of this rather old word? Thus, is a socialist also necessarily a communist? Can a capitalist never work for the society and be termed a socialist entrepreneur?
To me, the word has utopian connotations. A socialist state is one where every individual strives for his/her own betterment at the same time benefiting society around. A capitalist owning vast swathes of personal wealth thus qualifies as a socialist if he/she invests in products deemed procurable by people while the workers too enjoy at least reasonable working conditions with some amount of personal social security. Our country is now experiencing growth as never known before, surely soon to touch the remarkable double digit growth figure. The dream socialist state which Nehru envisaged never came to fulfillment. Instead, Manmohan Singh’s dream economy based on individual enterprise is apparently working better. But this to me does not render the word socialist as anything dangerous, to be confined to the dustbin.
To an extent, the apathy of today’s policy makers and the free press can be understood. Communism was perhaps the biggest lie of the 20th century. Human beings were denied basic liberty and instead of enabling the labourer to rise, it expected all people to behave as labourers. We all know about the Gulag camps in Siberia, the forced hunger deaths of the 3 million Kulaks in Ukraine, the liquidation of all the Russian church personnel in Russia and indeed a lot more. Yet, organized communism definitely served one good purpose. The former capitalist nations could no longer remain as ‘capitalist’ if you like as before. They had to modify in fear of a labour uprising on Leninist lines. Thus, the working classes in America and Western Europe experienced reforms as never before. The labour class was now coerced into a coalition ironically to protect the interests of the largely well established liberal economies.
Thus, let us not totally abandon the word socialism from our lexicon. Our industrial growth and Forex reserves might be at an all time, the rupee might well be gaining ground, but this does not qualify us as anti-social. One would like to believe that the rise of India is not exclusive of any group in the country and benefits everybody. In that case, we might as well still swear by our preamble, and continue to include the word ‘socialist’ along with the so far less controversial ‘sovereign’.
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