By Hoyt Tuggle
BUFORD, Ga. | Jim Cofer’s recent article in GwinnettForum (April 29) on the Russian national mentality was “right on.”
Tuggle
In 1995, Marie and I visited St. Petersburg. This was four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the purchase of government assets by friends of Boris Yeltsin, and others, for pennies on the dollar (rubles) and financed by the government in any case.
This “purchase” of government assets included government owned housing, usually in the form of apartment buildings. Most were similar: one square block in size and usually seven stories tall. No elevators. No A/C.
The new owners of these apartments raised the rents to market prices. With high double-digit inflation, what had been a ratio of one ruble to one dollar became 5000 rubles to one dollar. The pensions of the old did not increase. So the monthly pension that previously would cover one month’s rent, groceries, clothing needs, and a small amount left over for discretionary spending would only cover 3-5 days of rent.
Pensioners were forced to move in with their children, move to rural areas to live with relatives, or go homeless. The pensioners I talked with were happier under communism and, understandably, wished for its return. Many of those apartment buildings were boarded up, in some cases with pensioners illegally living in them without utilities.
Russia was certainly a third world country with nuclear weapons. Grocery stores had mostly empty shelves, old women were sweeping streets, everything was deteriorating, and all the cash money was going to Moscow. The trains and buses were World War II vintage, like I had ridden on going to school in the late 1940s.
As Mr. Cofer stated, their missile systems and nuclear weapons were first rate, but they had consumed far too much of their resources. Resources were far less that they began to acquire later, when they had gas and oil deals with western Europe, particularly Germany.
My overall impression was that, aside from their missile and nuclear capacity, the United States government had vastly overrated everything else about Russia’s capabilities. I wondered if this had been intentional to get our acquiescence to our own ever increasing military expenditures.
Military expenditures eventually bankrupted the Soviet Union. They never had the conventional war capability that we thought they had. Afghanistan, and now Ukraine, have certainly shown that to be true.
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