Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site qantel.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!lll-crg!well!ptsfa!qantel!gabor From: gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642) Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: Re: The myth of Allied invasion of Russia after the revolution Message-ID: <544@qantel.UUCP> Date: Thu, 31-Oct-85 20:38:13 EST Article-I.D.: qantel.544 Posted: Thu Oct 31 20:38:13 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 12:19:27 EST References: <531@talcott.UUCP> <50400001@hpcnof.UUCP> Reply-To: gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642) Distribution: net Organization: MDS Qantel, Hayward, CA Lines: 39 In article <50400001@hpcnof.UUCP> Larry Bruns wonders if the Bolshevik revolution has been good for us after all, given that it made the USSR weak and inefficient. If it never happened, they would be just as expansionist but infinitely stronger, says the theory: > The combination of this economic power AND the expansionist tendency would > pose a far greater threat to the West than the USSR does today. If this guy's > theory holds water, then we should be GRATEFUL for the 1917 revolution. The problem with this kind of Realpolitik is that it is not real enough. Is it really in our national interest to have a politically and economically backward Russia facing us? Are we really better off because millions 'over there' live miserable and stunted lives? Posing the question in such a narrow ethno-centric fashion seems quite ugly to me; but even on these tunnel-vision terms the answer is clearly no. The unproven assumption here is that Russia would be just as expansionist under any conceivable political system. What this assumption ignores is that the expansionist policies of the past and present have been possible only because their true cost is not visible to the decisionmaking elite. Remember that the Soviet political system is run by people who operate in a vacuum with no effective feedback mechanisms. One of the disadvantages of sitting atop a hierarchical police state is that it takes decades for news of many policy disasters to filter through the system. This is the reason for the paranoid irrationality of their internal and external colonization drive which is far more menacing than your garden-variety expansionist power that could be bought off with agreements on spheres of influence, buffer states and similar well-tried 19th century techniques. Another cost to us of the 1917 revolution is that facing such a centralized, militarized and ideology-driven rival has distorted and coarsened our political system in obvious ways: it made us more centralized, militarized and ideology-driven than we would be otherwise. Overall, I think we would be far less menaced if the USSR has evolved into a country with twice its current economic strength but with a populace that could demand and get a measure of control over its political institutions. ----- Gabor Fencsik {ihnp4,dual,hplabs,intelca}!qantel!gabor