RSSR and other republics Was: DC 2011 Ethnicity and Film Panel

[Jules Levin]

On 12/30/2010 2:13 PM, Slivkin, Yevgeniy A. wrote:
>> But on the other hand,  as Stephen Cohen indicates in his “Soviet 
>> Fates and Lost Alternatives”, even scholars who are proponents of the 
>> view that ”USSR fell apart because it was an empire "concede that the 
>> Soviet Union was “a peculiar kind of empire” and “differed in several 
>> important ways” from traditional ones. “For all the political 
>> repression over the years, there was not, for example, a pattern of 
>> economic exploitation of the other republics by the Russian center. 
>> Instead, the backward ones were considerably modernized under the 
>> Soviet system, arguably to the economic detriment of Russia”.
>>
>>
>
>
I'm not an economist, but I was a Fulbright lecturer in Vilnius in 1981, 
from February till June.
By April there was no cheese for sale in the grocery stores in Vilnius, 
but during a week long Passover break
in Moscow in April, we passed a deli with a window display filled with 
Lithuanian cheeses.  We laughed at this
open demonstration of what everyone believed had happened to the cheese.
By the way, in the 30's Lithuania was the Denmark of Eastern Europe, 
exporting dairy products all around.  No one thinks the USSR improved 
the economy.
Jules Levin
Los Angeles

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