It is beginning to dawn on the new rulers of Russia that the advice they have been receiving from transnational companies, Western politicians, businessmen, and "economics experts” is worse than useless. The dogmas and shibboleths that have been unsuccessful for Western capitalism will not succeed in the far less favourable conditions now prevailing in Russia.
Yeltsin and his consorts were swept into power on a wave of discontent following the grey years of Brezhnev and the hollow promises of Gorbachev. A new era was predicted by adopting the “Free Market" economy of Western capitalism. Those responsible for spreading this illusion will inevitably reap a bitter harvest.
A major factor in the decline of the Soviet Union was the ever-escalating arms race with the United States and the NATO powers. The amount of social labour necessary to achieve parity in means of murder left very little to produce better means of life. However when the means of life are scarce, such as in times of war, there is a tendency for black markets to arise. There was a flourishing black market in the Soviet Union for many years, run by criminal gangs in consort with corrupt officials. Goods produced for sale in the shops ended up in the hands of the racketeers, for the benefit of the criminal few and the detriment of the many.
When the Cold War was at its height the Soviet Union was able to recruit agents from the ranks of starry-eyed young intellectuals who accepted the myth that Communism rather than State Capitalism was being built there. The Western powers having no comparable source of naive idealists to exploit, had to rely on criminals and people they could bribe or blackmail into serving their ends.
In addition to bribing corrupt officials the CIA has a long chequered (well documented) history of using criminal organisations; in Cuba, Latin America, and the Far East, not to speak of the Mafia within the United States itself. There are numerous books and television documentaries which have exposed such dealings, so it is no surprise to find they successfully used similar tactics within the USSR and the Warsaw pact countries.
Mafias
The winter of 1990-91 saw increasing hardship, with a “free market" supposedly on its way food disappeared from shop shelves. An Italian TV crew filmed twenty heavily loaded trucks leaving Moscow's wholesale produce market, not one of which unloaded at a retail outlet The food existed but not in the shops. The dearth was artificially created to augment prices on the black market. Police were finding dumps of animal carcasses covered with earth all over the countryside.
The next winter saw $13 billions-worth of food disappear only some of which was sold by black marketeers. Trainloads from Western Europe were shunted into sidings in Moscow and left to rot, others ended up at obscure destinations in Siberia and other remote places. One-hundred-and-twenty tons of frozen meat from Britain was sidelined and labelled "infected with mad cow disease". The strangling of the country’s food supply was a colossal operation to force up prices and expand the range of the black market operators. It demonstrates the size and power of the Russian Mafias.
But when Boris Yeltsin complained to the West about “the Mafia that controls our markets and sabotages our industries" it was ignored and passed over as more babbling from boozy Boris. However, when Yeltsin made this statement there were twenty criminal gangs operating in Moscow, most of them at each others' throats, and people in any kind of business from restaurants to news-stands had to pay protection even if the gang supplied their goods.
In the four years since the demise of state capitalism in the Soviet Union, the country has been stripped of billions of dollars-worth of raw materials, which were exported by illegal means: titanium, timber, strontium, uranium, plutonium, petroleum, and more. The fall in the value of the rouble allowed whole industries, office blocks, department stores, hotels, shops, fleets of buses and trucks to be bought for a song. Military hardware, much of it state-of-the-art, has fallen into the hands of ruthless gangsters. No-one can be sure of the nuclear arsenal, especially since 2,000 tons of gold were spirited out of the Bank vaults in 1991.
Russia is now the main conduit for smuggling drugs into Europe, and the profits of the drug trade are being laundered through Russian banks. The rape of the Soviet Union, which was once the second most powerful country in the world, is almost complete. Its industries, public utilities, transport and real estate, are being systematically stripped of their assets. Criminal gangs control the major cities, often warring among themselves. Attorney-General Stepankov stated there were 18,000 murders in 1992 and there were 14,800 in the first six months of 1993 (Claire Sterling, Crime Without Frontiers, 1994, p. 235). Bankers and policemen are increasingly being gunned down. In the Far East Vladivostok has been taken over by a consortium of the Russian mafias, Chinese triads, and the Japanese Yakuza.
The capital amassed by the crime cartels is now available to be invested in stock markets, money markets and legitimate businesses around the world. In the five years since 1990 the mafias have become major players in the capitalist world. The grief, pain, anguish, and misery that is the lot of the workers of the world is deeper and more widespread than ever. Marx's prediction of the increasing misery of the working class is vindicated with each passing year which brings more war more uncertainty, unemployment, more crises and ecological disasters, more terror, more crime. Capitalism causes chaos.
JORIC
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