Lessons from Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Nation via ClubOrlov.com ^ | Dimitry Orlov

[RJR_fan]

ping

[semantic]

Kabar, don't know if you've seen this article or have read any of Orlov's previous essays.

You seem able to maintain faith in some kind of mythical Americans who will unite once and for all to right the ship of state. But what happens when the very ones you are depending upon have already decided to withdraw their support?

Please pay particular attention to the tone of the FR comments. At some point, those who know the score have to make a decision whether to continue attempting to arrest a hopelessly corrupt system from terminal decline, or just let it go and begin focusing on re-building afterward.

[dragnet2]

The U.S. will collapse, when the U.S. government figures out the private sector is broke, and can no longer support tens of hundreds of thousands of government employees and their lottery style retirement benefits...

It's coming. Bet the rent.

[semantic]

You don't need to wait until 2012. In fact, you don't even need to wait much longer than a few more months. When the new House votes to raise the debt ceiling level, and either implicitly or explicitly gives the green light to Ben print with blind abandon, it's all over except for the crying.

By the way, Karl Denninger is estimating that the budget deficit will come in this year not at $1.5T, but $2T. Not that it really matters; I mean, it's all vapor at this point.

[ml/nj]

Interesting article from a USSR refugee. My experience is that such people can teach us a lot. This is a long article so I've pulled some quotes which I think are insightful, and a couple which are not. I've added a few comments in italics.

As long as people think that there’s something in it for them, they will cooperate. As soon as they decide that there is nothing in it for them, they will cease to cooperate and the system starts to crumble, cave in on itself.

The reason I started talking about this is because I was, frankly, very worried about the United States because I saw the United States as not nearly as well prepared for collapse as the Soviet Union. You see, the Russian people never had a great deal of faith in their government or in the system, so they grew and gathered a lot of their own food.

In the case of the Russians it turned out that money was borderline irrelevant for a lot of things that people needed to survive. That’s what allowed them to survive. That’s not the case here, and its time to get very worried about that.

The five stages of collapse

Here I think he misses what I fear. What I fear is that they stop delivering food to the Shop-Rite.

I think what’s going to happen is the dissolution of the United States as a political and economic entity. It will more or less fade from the world scene in the same way that the Soviet Union faded from the world scene. Parts of it will later be reborn as something that we might have a lot more trouble imagining because there isn’t something called Russia that part of the Soviet Union. There isn’t something similar to that in the United States. It’s really a bunch of territories, very disjointed territories held together by Washington. So if Washington fails then it’s not clear what is going to hold these territories together.

The American “corporatocracy” is very much into just in time delivery and everything is network based and that makes it extremely fragile and I don’t see that pattern holding.

Now the reason we have agriculture is because we’ve had ten thousand years of stable climate, which seems to have ended.

I think the idea that we, in the short time we are given on earth, can observe climate change is absurd. Yeah it's colder here in NJ this winter. We have more snow. But stuff will be growing again in May, just like always, for us anyway.

We don’t get to decide how many people survive all we get to do is you know, try to survive, and find ways to do it.

We don’t need scientists to tell us that. I’ve been living in New England for decades now and I’m used to the ocean being cold. So if in the middle of the summer I jump in the ocean and its body temperature you don’t have to be a scientist to tell me that something is going very strangely here. You know, it’s really quite obvious. People who are a little bit more in tune with the elements, people who have spent a lot of time outdoors, you can talk to them. Very few of them will tell you that, oh this is nothing out of the ordinary, this is the usual thing. So we’re in for a great deal of climate upheaval.

More climate insanity. I just cannot imagine that if you jump into the ocean in Maine, that it's like jumping into the Dead Sea (which is really bath-water warm in the summer). I'm not there so I don't really know. But the water temperatures in Maine depend much more upon ocean currents than the local climate.

"Climate change" did not bring down the Soviet Union.

ML/NJ

[sergeantdave]

This idiot doesn’t have a clue. Trying to compare the experience of Russia’s collapse and overlaying that to what will happen to America is absurd. The character of the Russian people, beaten down by decades of totalitarianism and dependence, is completely different from the character of the American people.

America could completely collapse tomorrow. The next day you’d see trading begin, followed by nascent local governmental organizations, community self-defense and the start of millions of small businesses filling needs.

And there’s no reason on earth that existing states couldn’t fill many of those primary steps to rebuild. Calling a states’ convention 6 months after a federal government collapse to establish a constitutional government would be a logical possibility.

Even after the South collapsed after the Civil War, the area was on the road to recovery by 1872.

Americans ain’t Russians. Period.

[kabar]

At some point, those who know the score have to make a decision whether to continue attempting to arrest a hopelessly corrupt system from terminal decline, or just let it go and begin focusing on re-building afterward.

I choose the latter. I have been personally involved in the Tea Party and am part of a grassroots organization that lobbies on the Hill and in Richmond on the issue of immigration. It is purely voluntary and uncompensated despite the many hours I work on these issues. Our only hope is an informed and engaged citizenry. A collapse of the system creates its own dynamic and should be avoided at all costs.

[BobL]

““with public transportation and with public housing””

Nice catch - I saw that too, but it didn’t quite register. Especially “public housing”, what the hell does that have to do with anything...especially given that we have more empty houses today than we have any idea what to do with.

[Mamzelle]

I wish he’d put that bit about drowning in the tundra at the beginning, because he lost all cred for me at that point.

[PeterPrinciple]

America could completely collapse tomorrow. The next day you’d see trading begin, followed by nascent local governmental organizations, community self-defense and the start of millions of small businesses filling needs.

---

Mongolia was the 2nd nation to go communist after Russia, 80 years of communism. The above is exactly what I saw. Met a guy starting a credit union and asked him how he knew how to do that. He said he had one under communism but now had to start over again. They were rediscovering their heritage. Very proud of Genghis Khan. All the signs were in English because we were there with money. Two years earlier the signs had been Chinese. They were very proud of their heritage and had hope, but there was a lot of change.

People are people all over. Life goes on.

Thanks for your comment, made me remember that.

[Clinging Bitterly]

btrl

[Jack Black]

Do you know the Russians very well. They seem to have recovered pretty quickly to me. They are one of the fastest growning economies in the world, have become a huge oil exporter, have been growing their gold reserves, overcame an inflationary period. Moscow is now a shopping destination and has some of the most expensive hotels in the world.

The Russians seem a lot like the Americans in that they got up, dusted themselves off and immediaately started dealing with the new condistions. I note that they are still something approaching a regional power, if not a full superpower.

Somewhere like Zimbabwe would be the counter-example you are looking for, where society has just collapsed, and stayed collapsed for a very long period of time.

[Bigun]

Late to the party for sure but I'm going to say that, from the beginning, the ONLY thing that propped the Soviet Union up was The United States of America!

[Bigun]

Late to the party for sure but I'm going to say that, from the beginning, the ONLY thing that propped the Soviet Union up was The United States of America!

[ETL]

there are many who said that the soviet collapse was planned by the Politboro as early as Stalin’s death, and the fact that Putin and other thugs run the ex soviet states are evidence of this. By collapsing, the Russians were able to cause their greatest enemy to weaken.

The Russian bear isn't dead. It's just been in hibernation.

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a bizarre 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html

[Jack Black]

Fascinating stuff. Are you familiar with the Golitsyn controversy? It split the US Counter-intelligence community into waring factions in the 1960s.

Here is the Wikipedia summary of it, from the Golitsyn bio:

Golitsyn and NosenkoIn

1964, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer working out of Geneva, Switzerland, insisted that he needed to defect to the USA, as his role as a double-agent had been discovered, prompting his recall to Moscow.[10] Nosenko was allowed to defect, although his credibility was immediately in question because the CIA was unable to verify a KGB recall order. Nosenko made two extremely controversial claims: that Golitsyn was not a double-agent but a KGB plant; and that he had information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by way of the KGB's history with Lee Harvey Oswald in the time Oswald lived in the Soviet Union.

Regarding the first claim, Golitsyn had said from the beginning that the KGB would try to plant defectors in an effort to discredit him. Regarding the second claim, Nosenko told his debriefers that he had been personally responsible for handling Oswald's case and that the KGB had judged Oswald unfit for their services due to mental instability and had not even attempted to debrief Oswald about his work on the U-2 spy planes during his service in the United States Marine Corps. Under great duress, Nosenko failed two highly questionable lie detector tests but passed a third test monitored by several Agency departments.[11]

Judging the claim of not interrogating Oswald about the U-2 improbable given Oswald's familiarity with the U-2 program and faced with further challenges to Nosenko's credibility (he was thought to have falsely claimed to be a lieutenant colonel, a higher rank than it was thought he held), Angleton did not object when David Murphy, then head of the Soviet Russia Division, ordered him held in solitary confinement for approximately three-and-a-half years. This solitary confinement included 16 months in a tiny attic with no windows or furniture, heat or air conditioning. Human contact was completely banned. He was given a shower once a week and had no television, reading material, radio, exercise, or toothbrush. Interrogations were frequent and intensive. He spent an additional brutal four months in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot concrete bunker in Camp Perry. He was told that this condition would continue for 25 years unless he confessed to being a Soviet spy.[12]

James Angleton came to public attention in the United States when the Church Commission (formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities), following up on the Warren Commission, probed the CIA for information about the Kennedy assassination. The Nosenko episode does not appear to have shaken Angleton's faith in Golitsyn, although Helms and J. Edgar Hoover took the contrary position. Hoover's objections are said to have been so vehement as to curtail severely counterintelligence cooperation between the FBI and CIA for the remainder of Hoover's service as the FBI's director. Nosenko was found to be a legitimate defector, a lieutenant colonel and became a consultant to the CIA.[3]

Golitsyn told Angleton that there was still a high ranking mole in the CIA. Angleton believed him and went on a vicious mole hunt, the ended the careers of most of the Soviet section, but he never found the mole.

Those who believe that Golitsyn was a fake think that the mole hunt was one of the principle objects of the defection: to cause the CIA to destroy itself hunting for a "notional mole" that could never be found.

Others accept Golitsyn at face value, and feel that Angleton failed to find the mole, but he was there non the less.

Some say Angleton felt that he'd found the mole when DCI Richard Colby fired him. (IE: it was Colby).

That seems paranoid. Until you recall the strange manner of his death. He drowned while canoeing on the river in front of his house. Here's a good article about his death: "Who murdered the CIA chief"

It does tend to indicate that there was a bit more to Colby than just a career political middle-manager who made it to the DCI position.

[ETL]

Thanks. Sounds a ‘bit’ too complex for the moment. I’ll take another look at it when I have more time.