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FOR VIPERS AND BLOODSUCKERS

Excerpted from Chapter 7 of Blackshirts and Reds, entitled "The Free-Market Paradise Goes East (II)"

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was preparing for its fatal plunge into the free-market para-dise, Bruce Gelb, head of the United States Information Agency, told a reporter that the Soviets would benefit economically from U.S. business education because "the vipers, the bloodsuckers, the middlemen-that's what needs to be rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. That's what makes our kind of country click!" (Washington Post, 6/11/90)

Today, the former communist countries and China are clicking away with vipers and bloodsuckers. Thousands of luxury cars have appeared on the streets of Moscow and Prague. Rents and real estate prices have skyrocketed. Numerous stock exchanges have sprung up in China and Eastern Europe, sixteen in the former USSR alone. And a new class of investors, speculators, and racketeers are wallowing in wealth. The professed goal is no longer to provide a better life for all citizens but to maximize the opportunities for individuals to accumulate personal fortunes.

More opulence for the few creates more poverty for the many. As one young female journalist in Russia put it: "Everytime someone gets richer, I get poorer" (New York Times, 10/15/95). In Russia, the living standard of the average family has fallen almost by half since the market "reforms" took hold (New York Times, 6/16/96). A report from Hungary makes the same point: "While the 'new rich' live in villas with a Mercedes parked in a garage, the number of poor people has been growing" (New York Times, 2/27/90).

As socialist Vietnam opens itself to foreign investment and the free market, "gaps between rich and poor . . . have widened rapidly" and "the quality of education and health care for the poor has deteriorated" (New York Times, 4/8/96). Prosperity has come "only to a privileged few in Vietnam," leading to "an emerging class structure that is at odds with the country's professed egalitarian ideals" (AP report, 10/28/96).

In the emerging free-market paradise of Russia and Eastern Europe, price deregulation produced not competitive prices but prices set by private monopolies, adding to the galloping inflation. Beggars, pimps, dope pushers, and other hustlers ply their trades as never before. And there has been a dramatic rise in unemployment, homelessness, air and water pollution, prostitution, spousal abuse, child abuse, and just about every other social ill.1

In countries like Russia and Hungary, as widely reported in the U.S. press, the suicide rate has climbed by 50 percent in a few years. Reductions in fuel service, brought about by rising prices and unpaid bills, have led to a growing number of deaths or serious illnesses among the poor and the elderly during the long winters.

In Russia, doctors and nurses in public clinics are now grossly underpaid. Free health clinics are closing. More than ever, hospitals suffer from unsanitary conditions and shortages of disposable syringes, needles, vaccines, and modern equipment. Many hospitals now have no hot water, some no water at all.2 The deterioration of immunization programs and health standards has allowed polio to make a serious comeback, along with tuberculosis, cholera, diptheria, dysentery, and sexually transmitted diseases. Drug addiction has risen sharply. "Russia's hospitals are struggling to treat increasing numbers of addicts with decreasing levels of funding" (CNN news report, 2/2/92).

There has been a decline in nutritional levels and a sharp increase in stress and illness. Yet the number of visits to doctors has dropped by half because fees are so costly in the newly privatized health care systems. As a result, many illnesses go undetected and untreated until they become critical. Russian military officials describe the health of conscripts as "catastrophic." Within the armed forces suicides have risen dramatically and deaths from drug overdoses have climbed 80 percent in recent years. (Toronto Star, 11/5/95).

The overthrow of communism brought a rising infant mortality and soaring death rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia's birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born. The death rate rose nearly 20 percent for East German women in their late thirties, and nearly 30 percent for men of the same age (New York Times, 4/6/94).

With the end of subsidized rents, estimates of homelessness in Moscow alone run as high as 300,000. The loss of resident permits deprives the homeless of medical care and other state benefits, such as they are. Dressed in rags and victimized by both mobsters and government militia, thousands of indigents die of cold and hunger on the streets of various cities. In Romania, thousands of homeless children live in sewers and train stations, sniffing glue to numb their hunger, begging and falling prey to various predators (National Public Radio news, 7/21/96).
In Mongolia, hundreds of homeless children live in the sewers of Ulaanbaatar. Before 1990, Mongolia was a prosperous nation that had benefited from Soviet and East European financial assistance and technical aid. Its new industrial centers produced leather goods, woolen products, textiles, cement, meat, grain, and timber. "The communist era dramatically improved the quality of life of the people . . . achieving commendable levels of social development through state-sponsored social welfare measures," but free-market privatization and deindustrialization has brought unemployment, mass poverty, and widespread malnutrition to Mongolia.3


1 Vladimir Bilenkin, "Russian Workers Under the Yeltsin Regime: Notes on a Class in Defeat," Monthly Review, 11/96, 1-12.
2 See Eleanor Randolph, Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
3 K.L. Abeywickrama, "The Marketization of Mongolia," Monthly Review, 3/96, 25-33, and reports cited therein.
Copyright © 1996 Vida Communications and Michael Parenti. All rights reserved.

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