The Gangster State

The Urki  Eventually Take Control


In 1956 the Soviet Union's tanks rolled into Hungary.  It was the beginning of the end for Western communism (although hard to perceive so early on).  What the invasion, the shootings, and the executions demonstrated for all to see was that Communism in the Soviet Union could continue to stumble onwards only through the power which grows out of the barrel of a gun.  The Eastern European communist states kept the faith because of the gun barrels pressed firmly to their temples.

It was a radical moment of self-realization.  Then came the unseemly spectacle of Khrushchev banging his removed shoe on the bench at the UN General Assembly.  His erratic misdirections and re-directions continued with the missile crisis in Cuba in 1963.  Supreme dictators were putting on a poor show.

Back home, statist socialism was also wearing thin.

. . . Khrushchev's more ambitious reforms failed to produce the promised food surpluses (another reason why his colleagues were to dump him in October 1964)  The cultivation of hitherto "virgin" lands in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia was especially disastrous: half a million tons of topsoil washed away each year from land that was wholly unsuited to forced grain planting, and what harvest there was frequently arrived infested with weeds.  In a tragic-comic blend of centralized planning and local corruption, Communist bosses in Kyrgyzstan urged collective farmers to meet official farm delivery quotas by buying up supplies in local shops.  There were food riots in provincial cities . . . . By January 1964, following the disastrous 1963 harvest, the USSR was reduced to importing grain from the West.  [Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2010), p.423. Emphasis, ours.]

It's at this point that we need to make the point once more that wherever statist socialism has been applied the only growth industries have been rampant corruption and crime.  What Venezuela is going through today is normal for statist socialism wherever it has been applied. 

But, ironically, in some parts of the USSR, food production was prospering splendidly:

At the same time, the private micro-farms that Khrushchev had sporadically encouraged were almost embarrassingly successful: by the early sixties, the 3 percent of cultivated soil in private hands was yielding over a third of the Soviet Union's agricultural output.  By 1965, two thirds of the potatoes consumed in the USSR and three quarters of the eggs came from private farmers.  In the Soviet Union as in Poland or Hungary, "Socialism" depended for its survival upon the illicit "capitalist" economy within, to whose existence it turned a blind eye.  [Ibid.]

Khrushchev was dumped by the Politburo soon after.  But then began the Long March of Russia into a mafia-like state--which has proved to be the end game for a country controlled by former KGB colonels.

During the realm of the Gulags, Communism's finest contribution to humanity, control and discipline over the political prisoners was maintained by the urki, the genuine criminals.  This was intentional.  The Soviet State and the Soviet mafia were symbiotically linked.

In Putin's Russia this remains the reality still.  Statist socialism eventually evolves into a mafioso gangster state.