Most Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about MIM

This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Socialist Soviet Union better off in 1955 than capitalist Russia of 1999

[The following is a discussion in
alt.politics.communism and talk.politics.china.]

SSS@home.com wrote:

> > > Toma Grubb wrote: > >

> > The former USSR is a pretty good indication Communism doesn't work,
It > > collapsed from corruption from with in and appears the was a lot of
> > capitalism among its citizens that brought about its down fall.

> > yes, USSR doesn't work, but is today's Russia working? is Russia
> working better than USSR?

mim3@mim.org replies: Frog-in-the-well, you are right about that. Socialism replaced capitalism and doubled the life expectancy in both China and the Soviet Union. Now that we have full fledged open free market capitalism in the former-Soviet Union, the life expectancy has gone down. Virulent anti-communist Richard Pipes admits it is now 56 for Russian males. See, http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/98/0108/icworld.asp

[Postscript: Since this article was written, the above website disappeared. However, you can still find the article here: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2007.html Rumor has it that Richard Pipes was so aggressively anti-Soviet that that was the reason he got kicked out of the Reagan administration.]

The UN explained that progress in life expectancy in Russia ended in the 1960-65 statistics.

Source:
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss97c3.htm#A

The UN also said:
"But after 1990 the health situation deteriorated sharply. The crude death rate rose between 1985-1990 and 1990-1995 from 11.0 per 1,000 to 12.6 per 1,000 in Eastern Europe (including the Russian Federation and Ukraine). For the entire period 1989-1993 the total increase in deaths over the 1989 figure was estimated to be 1.4 million."

Source:
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss97c3.htm#A

See also, http://www.undp.org/hdro/oc22a.htm#sect3 for more recent figures showing 2 million dead.

See also military intelligence:
http://www.nato.int/docu/colloq/1995/95-10.htm

In this day of technological progress, to get an idea of how bad 56 years for men is, I dusted off some old non-communist books, one by right-wing sociologist Alex Inkeles. In 1955-56, the last year available before Khruschev denounced Stalin and took power to restore capitalism, the life expectancy of men was 63. That was the same level in the United States of 1941. Even better was the situation of wimmin at 69 years life expectancy, which is what it was in the USA ten years earlier.

Source: John F. Kantner, "Basic Demographic Comparisons Between the USSR and the United States," (1959)...paper submitted to the Subcommittee on Economic Statistics of the Joint Economic Committee, Eighty-sixth Congress, First Session, Washington, DC. in Alex Inkeles & Kent Geiger, eds. Soviet Society: A Book of Readings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 19.

People arguing for capitalism are no better than accomplices to mass murder.