Experimental Blog # 198

Quotations and comments on "Silverland - A Winter Journey beyond the Urals" by Dervla Murphy

Here is one quotation from a very interesting summary, of about 4 pages, of the history of Belarus:
"A year later{1922} eastern Belarus became a Soviet Socialist Republic < > During the 1930s collectivized farms, artificial famines, heavy industries and Stalinist purges arrived; no one knows how many mass slaughterings took place. In the Kurapaty Forest, near Minsk, the bodies of more than 100,000 men and women were exhumed in 1988."

Joseph Stalin is mentioned on at least 17 pages in this book; and Vladimir Putin is written about on at least 27 pages.
The author clearly does not like the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and she mentions it on at least 10 pages.

"What Soviet citizens did enjoy was freedom from worry about jobs, housing. heating, education, health care, pensions. Although the implacable pursuit and punishment of dissidents continued after 1956, the mass of the population could then lead a notably less stressful life than their forefathers.."

"Thus the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury begat an unrestrained oligarchy eager to stamp on those seedlings of democracy - visible in corners of the Kremlin - which the West claimed to be nurturing."
Even more convincing, the author quotes the World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz, "For the majority of those living in the former Soviet Union, economic life under capitalism has been even worse than the old Communists had said it would be ...By siding so firmly so long with those at the helm when huge inequality was created through the corrupt privatization process, the USA, IMF and the international community have indelibly associated themselves with policies that, at best, promoted the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the average Russian.""

"In 2005 a reviewer < > diagnosed me as 'a typical old Irish Leftie [who] cannot disguise her sneaking regard for the Soviet Union'. Not quite a bull's-eye but Mr Thompson didn't quite miss the target."

"Stalin therefore expended human lives, instead of capital, on his gigantic development projects. At its zenith the gulag system, begun in 1930, controlled twenty-one million prisoners and was administered by 800,000 officials. < > During the Great Terror{1937-38} more than a million were executed and seven or eight million sent to camps. < > In contrast, between 1876 and 1904 the czar's regime imposed the death penalty on 486 criminals and terrorists, an annual average of seventeen."

Dervla Murphy is ideological about the world in the extreme, but she has virtually amazing physical and mental strength. She has traveled, very often by bicycle, all over the world; and she made this journey at about 71 years of age! And, besides that, during the winter!

 It seems a little bit surprising, however, that in spite of her apparently life-long interest in virtually everything left-wing, including the Soviet Union, that she has never bothered to study Russian. However, because of her age, she was born in 1931, she might be entitled to an allowance.