Posted on 01/28/2023 10:56:26 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
My good friend professor Yuri Maltsev died this week and I’ve spent these mourning days recalling our conversations. He was a leading economist in the old Soviet Union, as the top advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief economist. He defected in 1989 before the Soviet Union fell apart. We became fast friends just after he landed in DC, and we spent a year or more together collaborating on many projects.
He was a font of amazing stories about how things really worked in the Soviet Union. Contrary to what US economists were claiming until the very end, it was not a rich country with mighty industrial achievements. It was a poor country where nothing worked. There were no replacement parts for most machines including tractors. He doubted that there would ever be a nuclear exchange simply because most Soviet workers knew that the bombs were all for show. If they ever dared press the button, they would most likely blow themselves up.
As the systems of command and control in those states fell apart (Russia, East Germany, Romania, Poland, Czechia, and so on), Yuri was in a position to advise the reforms. To his sadness and contrary to his advice, even though the parties and leaderships collapsed, there was almost no attempt to reform the health-care sectors of these countries. They left them all in place while focusing on things like heavy industry and technology sectors (and here banditry took over).
Yuri saw this as tragic because, to his mind, the corruption of health care in the Soviet Union was central to the disastrous quality of life that the people experienced there. Though doctors were everywhere and minted daily, people who were sick could hardly get effective treatment at all. Most of the best therapeutics were homegrown...
(Excerpt) Read more at brownstone.org ...
Good read, thanks for posting it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Warned us too, but few listened and he was censored. “CARTHAGE (Russia) MUST BE DESTROYED!” - Cato (Uncle Sammy)
Very sad. Yuri was a great guy to talk to and to listen too. I’m shocked.
ping
Is this why the elites are so cavalier about the prospect of nuclear war with Russia?
Have they always known that Russia was incapable of incinerating us?
Were they lying to us for all those decades so that we would pour trillions into the military-industrial complex?
And now that they want to force Russia into the globohomo empire, have they thrown the old lie down the memory hole?
Just asking…
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Wokism must be condemned and ridiculed
“He doubted that there would ever be a nuclear exchange simply because most Soviet workers knew that the bombs were all for show. If they ever dared press the button, they would most likely blow themselves up.”
Sputnik
Yuri Gagarin
“It was a poor country where nothing worked.”
The Vietnam War was won with Soviet weapons.
The Vietnam war was won until Walter Cronkite decided it wasn’t. The Tet Offensive was the last hurrah, and Walter went full Commie.
The U.S. and Soviet space programs in the late Cold War era were a good example. Our space shuttle program was a disastrous failure by most measures. The Soviets started their own program and quickly gave up on it. To this day, their old capsules are still the best way to put men in space for the International Space Station (for example).
“The Vietnam War was won with Soviet weapons.”
No, the Vietnam War was lost by Lyndon Johnson *spit* and the Democrats *not enough saliva* in Congress.
Vietnam was lost because the government of the South favored the Catholic minority over the Buddhist majority, can’t win ‘hearts and minds’ like that.
But where did the “hearts and minds” doctrine come from?
Precipitously withdrawing support was as disastrous there as it was in Afghanistan.
A true warning sign is that women in medical schools are in the majority.
America didn't lose.
We left.
In 15 years, the USA never lost a combat engagement involving more than one platoon, and only a couple of those.
That has been true for decades.
Even more telling...
Close to 30% of USA clinical doctors and dentists are foreign born.
By law, licensed foreign physicians and dentists receive an automatic Green Card, with no quotas.
The Vietnam War was won with Soviet propaganda.
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