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

[Slivkin, Yevgeniy A.]

Jules, 

I was growing up in Leningrad in the late 1960's and I remember how my parents and their friends would regularly go to Estonia to get dairy products which they could not buy in Leningrad.
In the 1970's when I was a college student I would take any opportunity to cross the Estonian border to the city of Narva to buy good Estonian cigarettes and hard liquor. 
In the 1980's I spent several summers in Lithuania, in the Zarasaj region, on a farm near the village of Antazove, I remember the grocery store in the village: Russian villages would envy that store!
Should we conclude that the pattern was different: in Russia the big cities were provided at the expense of the regions, while in the Baltic republics it was the other way around?
Actually, the Baltic republics had a special status within the Soviet Union, it was "nasha zagranitsa" (our abroad). People who lived in the Soviet Asian republics should pass judgment on Stephen Cohen's comments. 

Sincerely,

Yevgeny Slivkin  

________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] on behalf of Jules Levin [ameliede at EARTHLINK.NET]
Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2010 3:09 PM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: [SEELANGS] RSSR and other republics  Was: DC 2011 Ethnicity and Film Panel

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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