by Victoria Nikiforova
[RIA] December marks one hundred years since the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There are no nationwide celebrations on this occasion yet. Although, in fact, this is the anniversary of a fantastic victory.
One hundred years ago our country became the most free, democratic and progressive state on the planet. The set of rights and opportunities for an ordinary citizen of the USSR was simply unthinkable for the people of that time.
Millions of people, both men and women, starting from the age of 18, have received the opportunity to elect and be elected to power. In Western countries in those years, this right was strictly limited to all kinds of property, age and other qualifications.
Women in our country have received the right to higher education and equal wages with men. In Great Britain , the stronghold of democracy, so to speak, women were allowed to study at Oxford and Cambridge only half a century later.
Citizens of the USSR received the right to work and its decent pay - and these were not just words: for seventy years, Soviet people did not know what unemployment was, except that they showed it in the International Panorama.
Let's not forget that an unrealistically generous social package relied on the salary: ballots, paid holidays, free medicine, free housing, transport and communal expenses minimized at the expense of the state. Plus all sorts of vouchers, tickets to the theater, gifts from the trade union committee and other pleasant little things. Today, not every top manager can boast of such a package.Education became absolutely free, and everything for children was arranged with special chic. Luxurious palaces, given over to the houses of the pioneers, were a symbol of Soviet power.
Nothing of the kind, even in a hint, existed at that time in the most advanced countries of the world.
Moreover, nowhere was there such a powerful grassroots democracy that existed in the USSR. The Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies ensured the widest possible representation in power not of representatives of elites and business clans, but of real working people.
Western countries, out of fright, broke off diplomatic relations with the young Soviet state. God forbid, the local elites thought, and our people will want the same for themselves. But gradually, willy-nilly, these achievements had to be adopted. The social policy of the USSR became the gold standard for the entire civilized world for decades.
Somehow, under the pressure of protesting workers, under the threat of revolutions, ballot papers and paid holidays began to appear in other countries. Gradually, but not earlier than in the 1970s, Europe , not in everything, but pulled itself up to our level of social security and observance of the rights of citizens. Not forgetting to constantly nag us about "human rights."
In the US, our achievement in the form of paid maternity leave has not yet been repeated. And what about the palaces of the pioneers? Bulletins? Free healthcare? No, we haven't.
However, this is all, as Marx would say, a superstructure. What about our base? In the late 1980s, a meme about the inefficiency of socialist management began to be actively introduced into the public consciousness. But this, to put it mildly, is not true.
Dry statistics tells us that the USSR economy grew at a rate exceeding ten percent per year for thirty years in a row. There is not a single country in the modern world that even comes close to this achievement. Moreover, the Soviet Union did all this, being under the heaviest sanctions, having survived more than one war, wasting a lot of forces and resources to win the Second World War.
They will say that this is the effect of a low start. But the tsarist government was stumbling on this start for decades, unable to start the process. The Soviet government succeeded very quickly.
Recently, Alexander Galushka, the author of the remarkable book "The Crystal of Growth. Toward the Russian Economic Miracle" (co-authored with Artur Niyazmetov and Maxim Okulov) , was nominated for the Knowledge Society Prize . She describes in detail how the idea of a planned economy arose, which became the foundation of the Soviet economic miracle.
For the first time, calculations showing that the planning of economic processes on a national scale increases the efficiency of the economy by an order of magnitude were presented by German scientists.
However, at the end of the 19th century, there was no one to implement this idea. The rusted mechanisms of European monarchies could not be rebuilt in a new way. And in the countries of wild capitalism like England or the USA, not just the economy - all life was imprisoned in the eternal war of all against all. They did not understand the very idea of how it is possible to try to build a state on the basis of justice.
The Bolsheviks tried. They succeeded. Hundreds of cities were built on our land, and not just so-so residential areas, but so that there would certainly be a House of Culture, and a library, and a drama theater, and a clinic, and kindergartens, and schools, and developed public transport - in a word, a complete set of progressive metropolis.
This should be followed by a ritual lament on the topic “Yes, but at what cost? which claimed millions of lives, from 1929 to 1955 the population of the USSR increased by 46 million, the average life expectancy - by 26 years.
The sad truth is that as soon as the USSR collapsed, it was then that such troubles began with demographics that we are still dealing with them. "Holy 90s" killed an order of magnitude more human lives than the notorious GULAG.
Yes, in the 1920s we survived the Civil War, and the second act of this tragedy was the political purges of the 30s. However, this is the price for any revolution, and other peoples paid much worse. This does not prevent them from being proud of their revolutions and drawing inspiration from them centuries later.
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The bloody massacre of the Great French Revolution charged the country with creative energy for generations to come. The revolutionary slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" still adorns all administrative buildings in France . And the national anthem of the country was "La Marseillaise" with its "Tremble, tyrants."
In the same way, the pragmatic Chinese managed to use Comrade Mao as a growth driver. "Seventy percent of achievements, thirty percent of mistakes," they summed up his activities and ended the discussion with that. Monuments to Comrade Mao adorn the purely capitalist landscapes of Chinese cities and by no means prevent them from flourishing and getting rich.
The example of the USSR looks especially inspiring today. Despite the packages of sanctions (yes, they were rolled out to us even then), despite the rabid anti-Soviet propaganda - it could argue in intensity with today's Russophobia - the country mastered more and more new industries, modernized the agricultural industry, built the military-industrial complex, traded, prospered.
Since the beginning of the 1930s, the Soviet government has regularly reduced prices for various categories of goods - and generously, sometimes by tens of percent. The famous Stalinist price cuts in 1947-1953 became the apotheosis. At the same time, salaries grew, the ruble strengthened, its dependence on foreign currencies weakened.
When we are amazed at the feat of our ancestors in the Great Patriotic War, we should not forget that they fought not just for their land, they also fought for their rights, for their freedoms, for their well-being. All this was too precious to hand over to the enemy.
The rapid growth of the Soviet economy did not proceed by itself. In the atmosphere of a social experiment, people became liberated, believed in themselves and achieved the impossible. Moscow was the mecca of the world avant-garde. Films by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko are still shown in all film schools in the world. Mayakovsky and Pasternak created modern poetry. Prokofiev and Shostakovich - contemporary music. The entire world theater came out of Vsevolod Meyerhold 's overcoat.
Our grandparents did not know the expression "social elevator". They have been running a powerful social escalator for decades. Any peasant could stand on it at a young age and, in the natural course of things, grow up to be a philosopher, general, professor, head physician, minister. Yes, what is there - and they grew up to the head of the state. The country was ruled by people from the bottom. They knew firsthand what poverty, hunger, war are. And they anxiously thought about us, about future generations.
An amazing fact, but today on the fields of the NMD our army uses equipment and shells produced under Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. They are simple, cheap, they are not demolished, they are prepared for years to come. It was customary to laugh at Leonid Ilyich. Over the production of tens of thousands of tanks too: why are they? And the Secretary General, who himself went through the Great Patriotic War from start to finish, took care of us, of his descendants - how will we cope with the NATO bloc ? We are coping well, Leonid Ilyich, thank you.
The centenary of the USSR is our, one might say, family holiday. Our grandparents built an absolutely amazing and unique country for us. Built with their own hands - in the truest sense of the word. They gave us a rich inheritance.
We live in the cities built by them, in the civilization they built for centuries. For those who like to sneer at the "scoop", I would advise you to turn off the electricity - it was carried out by the damned Bolsheviks, decrees on this topic were signed personally by Lenin and - scary to say - Stalin. It is also worth turning off the water in the bathroom, because it was the Bolsheviks who came up with the idea of building houses for working people with modern amenities that were exclusive at that time and giving away apartments in them for free.
And don't forget to turn off the central heating: the "cursed scoop" also messed it up. I'm not talking about the subway, public transport, the education system, healthcare, sports. This legacy saved us in the 90s and has been a powerful springboard for our growth in recent years.
In spiritual terms, Soviet civilization revealed the best that was in the Russian world: its primordial kindness, modesty, love for people. The Soviet people did not hear about tolerance, we really had a friendship of peoples. This fundamental humanism allowed us not to slide into a civil war in the 90s in the manner of long-suffering Yugoslavia . He also ensured a completely unprecedented democracy and multicolored opinions in today's Russia. Unlike other countries, our freedom of speech has not yet been trampled down by censorship.
And the USSR also provided us with the notorious "soft power" for a century ahead. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is still a world-class superstar. The ideals of socialism remain a dream for billions of people in various countries. Today, this intangible legacy of the USSR could greatly help us on the world stage. This is something that we can really oppose to rabid Russophobia.
A year ago, President Putin noted that the capitalist model of development had exhausted itself. Today, this idea is even more relevant, because the outgoing capitalism has grabbed our throats and is trying to drag us to its grave. We are all in the near future waiting for the global economic crisis, the world's "perfect storm". You have to prepare for it. Well, we are the heirs of a unique experiment in building socialism. The centenary of the USSR is a good reason to think about it.