Submitted by “Former Soviet Union is a term that often makes people think of a somehow original concept of freedom and democracy. You can observe some heritage looking at the facts of today’s Belarus and Turkmenistan. Anyway, even there, people always have had the will to express their ideas and opinions. Think, for instance, of the samizdat, or of the dissidents. How could native geeks and computer scientists/engineers miss the opportunity to contribute to the free software movement as another expression of freedom and democracy? In this article, hopefully the first of a short series, I will try to outline the rise and growth of free software in the former USSR by interviewing some of the key individuals.”
This was a great read. There’s a lot of great talent up North. Good to see that the acceptance of the Free Software tools have been implemented over there. Coming from the U.S. it seems our culture likes to stereotypically call these people “nerds” whilst in the former USSR these types of people are called “men”.
Great article once again.
It’s always good to know more about the work of rather non famous people on free software world. Sometimes is a rather boring just to stay with interviews with already estabilished personalities like Torvalds ou Stallman… I will like to see more articles like that! (and i think i’m not the only one =P)
Sorry, but they are not “geeks”, just corporate workers that use FSF sometime. I see ALT Linux or ASPLinux like leeches that just repack orther distros with huge delay. My country is under full MS control. The reason is extreme cheap warez that you can by in any CD shop (~2$/CD or 3$-7$/DVD) near legally (no kidding). There is only place for OSS is ISP’s that tend to use FreeBSD (russian urban legends that it is king-of-the-hill unbreakable ). Only hardcore headless fans as I am use Linux at home, and I must say that 3D issues (last ATI proprietary driver “gift” ) seems to force even me to jump to Vista this fall. No friends that use linux, nobody you can ask any question around, tons of flash bright yummy boxes of fresh games by 2$ per CD … that is today real picture.
Edited 2006-03-11 19:39
Excuse me, but ALTLinux are no leeches. Gone are times where they were just a fork of Mandrake. ALTLinux is a distro in its own rights with some interesting features (say, the Alterator configuration engine). I don’t use it though. As a desktop it’s rather bleak UI- and consistence-wise compared to say Ubuntu, though media codecs and libdvdcss installed by default can be a big plus. They just lack the desire to make a decent desktop OS.
So you’re saying in Russia, all software is theft??
Not all but the majority – at least where home users are concerned.
>>”Former Soviet Union is a term that often makes people think of a somehow original concept of freedom and democracy.”
Huh?? What planet are you living on? Maybe the Third Reich makes you think of brotherhood and alpine meadows.
The USSR had nothing to do with freedom and democracy and everything to do with pogroms, paranoia, repression and mass death.
Cool down, moron. Tell me about, where I must search of all that “pogroms, paranoia, repression and mass death” so I live 37 years in lot of diffrent cities (from Khabarovsk to Tver) and never see any of “pogroms, paranoia, repression and mass death” except maybe last 10 years of pro-american government that increase cementery squares ? May be communists develop secret weapon and put it in my eyes ? Please, if you dare to talk something that you never see youself be ready somebody correct you.
Ironically, I mod up parent – it is so insulting so i miss button.
Edited 2006-03-11 19:55
The USSR was a totalitarian state that undermined almost every single personal liberty. Ever heard of the Holodomor? Well this was a direct product of your lovely Soviet state. Nothing except the party line was tolerated, what else is this but repression?
You talk about paranoia not being part of the USSR? Paranoia is still a huge part of modern Russia, let alone the USSR. Is a country, in which every foreigner has to be ‘registered’ by a local official, not paranoid? What right does the government have to register every single person (let alone foreigners) by their place of residence?
Let’s talk about repression. Russia has no independent mass media. Radio ‘Echo of Moscow’ is the single media outlet where people actually debate things. All Russian TV channel uphold the official government line. There are constant attacks on the leaders of Ukraine and Georgia just because they decided to work with the West, not with Russia. Who are you to decide how citizens of other nations decide their future? The whole of Russian media is many ways starting to replicate the USSR propaganda system, why do we have large theatrical programs with children in pseudo-Soviet costumes during 23 February? It’s as if you are back in the USSR. The Russian government even created a committee to work with Rock musicians so that they maintain the ‘party line.’ The people cannot even elect their own governors; they are all ‘elected’ by Putin. No independent trade Unions exist, they are tied up to the governments party (United Russia).
No pogroms in the USSR? Dude, more people died from Stalin’s regime, than from the Germans. Does that tell you anything? And pogroms are still a common part of everyday Russia; un an unofficial level the government promotes xenophobia and constantly ignores race related crimes. The chief of Moscow police was even quoted as saying “There are no skinheads in this town!”
I am sorry about being off-topic, but I cannot stand Russian nationalism and this fake pride about the USSR and modern day Russia. We should all be proud that Gorbachev destroyed this evil creation called the USSR.
The USSR had nothing to do with freedom and democracy and everything to do with pogroms, paranoia, repression and mass death.
Read carefully. FORMER Soviet Union.
“Former” Soviet Union. I think you should read a little more carefully before posting. The former Soviet states are doing amazingly well. And don’t be too harsh on Soviet Russia either, unless you are prepared to do a world-wide body count with regards US actions or (even more depressing) Western European actions in the last century. No one is perfect. Some are less perfect than others (*cough* Stalin *cough*). But yelling at each other is not going to help.
Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was over there. Moscow, Kiev and various other smaller cities. The most depressing thing I ever saw was, as an American coming out of a hotel (or just being identified as an American), hordes of young children would come up to you asking for hard currency (USD) in exchange for gum or whatever small trinkets they had. It was like a 3rd world nation with poverty-stricken kids.
Furthermore, the SU currency was so worthless that there was essentially nothing to buy, not in the grocery stores, the department stores anywhere. The only way you could get anything of quality (from clothing to food to computers) was in a hard-currency store, which didn’t accept the Ruble. People living in the cities that I saw were eating and living no better than most of the poverty in America at the time.
I think it’s pretty fair to say that the Soviet-style government was a complete and utter failure. My most recent visit about 2 years ago confirmed this. Now, people in Moscow are bright, cheery and live much closer to an American or other Western European standard of living.
I think it’s pretty fair to say that the Soviet-style government was a complete and utter failure. My most recent visit about 2 years ago confirmed this. Now, people in Moscow are bright, cheery and live much closer to an American or other Western European standard of living.
There’s more to this.
There were a lot of good things in the communist countries too. Free healthcare. Free education. Free daycare for kids. A general sense of helping eachother out.
I can know, I go to the former DDR basically every year, and have many friends over there, with whom I had very detailed and ‘difficult’ discussions about this subject. These people, who grew up during the communist regime, are torn between their former self, and the new self imposed upon themselves by the fall of the communist block. They carry two conflicting ideoligies within them, and they sometimes suffer from depression and other mental problems because of this.
The ‘western style’ of living did not make people in the DDR much happier. They have no jobs. They receive lower wages then people in west Germany. They suddenly cannot afford healthcare, education, daycare.
You should not see this issue in black and white. Yes, the people there have gained a lot after Die Wende. However, they lost so much too.
Note: I hope, for once, we can keep this discussion civil. Any comments on this subject which are considered offensive or condencending will be removed without further notice.
Edited 2006-03-11 23:11
Surely the simplest judgment on East Germany is the one made by the people themselves. If the Wall had not been built and manned with machine gun towers and lights and barbed wire, they would all have walked out. There would have been an almost empty country, peopled ony by the Politburo and the security forces and their spies. This is why the Wall was built in the first place.
One sympathises with people, whether East or West, who have difficulty with the culture of what used to be West Germany, but its not because the culture of East Germany was better. East Germany was just Nazism with different rulers and different parades. When the Ossies feel nostalgia for it, what the rest of us should do is shiver. What its saying is, they have not yet fully come to terms with their history.
Anyone who is nostalgic for Lenin, Trotsky and the early days of the Soviet Union should read Figes, A People’s Tragedy, and also Volkogonov’s books on Lenin and Stalin. The purges started under Lenin. They were intrinsic to the great scheme from the start. If you doubt the purges and massacres, read Robert Conquest.
A similar point may be made about the former SU to that made about Germany. The massacres and purges killed around 20-30 million people in a very labour intensive way. You cannot do this without the involvement of an awful lot of the survivors. There is such a thing as collective guilt, because there is such a thing as collective involvement. An analysis of how exactly it was done would probably reveal the same as Goldhagen’s analysis of the killings of civilians on the East Front – it will have been done by ordinary people, a cross section of the population, who sent pictures home to their factories and families of the great work they were doing.
Now, will great advances in free software come out of such soil? I wouldn’t bet on it. This was a country which licensed typewriters and copiers and stuffed dissidents full of drugs in mental hospitals. Not a regime that did this – a country that did it. Think about it.
question is, was it the communist system that drove the value of the ruble thru the floor or was it the fact that no western money trader in their “right” mind would touch it from some fear or other?
it would be interesting to see a nation do the soviet without trade embargos and military arms races with one or more western nations. oh, and make sure you have a person on top that can only sit there at the mercy of the people he claim to be a member of…
oh wait, its somewhat what we have in most european nations more or less
How absurd the conversation is getting here.
question is, was it the communist system that drove the value of the ruble thru the floor or was it the fact that no western money trader in their “right” mind would touch it from some fear or other?
For a large part of the history of the Soviet Union, it was illegal for comrades to possess foreign currency. Russia was a closed society, and the Communist leadership believed preached self-sufficiency. (Much as they would in China and Cuba.) Possessing foreign currency was one of the many, many things that could land you in prison, or even in a forced labor camp.
Religious people were systematically excluded from normal life, even until the collapse of the Communist regime. My wife, who is Russian, considered herself Christian, but did not dare get baptized until the 90s because it could have dire consequences on her father’s career — and until last year, he was an avowed atheist.
Sure, health care was free, but it wasn’t very good. Dental procedures were typically carried out without anesthetic, and my wife tells me stories of her hospital stays that turn my stomach.
Someone spoke of a free education. A “free education” where one is forbidden to read certain books, or discuss certain ideas, is no education at all; it is indoctrination. Soviet science was under the thumb of what the political leadership considered important; as a result, it fell woefully behind technologically. (If you talk to a nationalist Russian, however, he will insist that Russians invented airplanes, computers, etc. centuries ago, and Westerners simply stole the idea.)
Many Russians look back nostalgically on the days of the Soviet Union for three reasons. First, as others have noted, there was a strong material safety net; a Russian could count on being taken care of. Even if it wasn’t very good care by Western standards, it always seemed to get a little better. Since Russians were not allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union except in very special circumstances, and were not allowed to read or watch anything that had not been approved by the state, they had little idea of how far behind they really were. Gorbachev’s program of glasnost (“openness”) had the effect of shattering the illusion for a decade or so — which is why many Russians insist that Gorbachev was in the pay of the CIA to destroy the Soviet Union.
Second, Russians grew up hearing very little about drugs, organized crime, pornography, etc. These days, they see such things all the time. My wife has encountered drug addicts lying stupefied in the stairwell, needles strewn about on the playground, and a curfew imposed in her district to put an end to gang warfare. Such things began did not exist in her youth, but began during the 1980s with high schoolers whom she refers to as “gangsters”. During the 1990s organized criminals made international headlines as they waged open warfare even in cities such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. No one in his right mind would consider this progress, regardless of the material “benefits”.
Third, and this is most important — Russians know that they don’t have a real democracy. They don’t feel that they can choose their leaders. The government is routinely terrified in elections that it won’t make the 60% turnout required by the constitution, so it pressures teachers to visit every home and encourage people to vote. (They are not paid for this.)
By and large, the nomenklatura remain in power today; they just don’t call themselves Communists anymore. (The president of her republic, for example was the head of the SSR’s Communist party during the 1980s — and his children control the major industries.) The reforms of the late 80s and 90s appear to have been nothing more than an opportunity for the leadership to engage in organized theft on an unbelievable scale. “We were all suposed to be equal,” Russians have told me; “where then did these people get all this money? They could only have been criminals.” Russians still have to bribe officials to get things done; when my wife was a teacher, she told me how discouraging it was to witness other teachers take bribes for grades.
Russia is a beautiful country, and I love my family; they are kind, generous people. The problem with Russia is the government, which from tsarist times has been rife with corruption, open bribery, and officials who consider the law to be at their service, rather than themselves at the service of the law. If it was only during Stalin’s time that they had an honest, working government — because everyone was too terrified to do what was wrong. Given that assumption, you’d look back nostalgically, too, and smile at the song “ya rozhden b sssr”. I can disagree, but they just look at me as a naïve fellow and smile.
yes, the individual person may have been forbidden from holding outside currency. but what about nation to nation trades? ok, so self-suficient was the mantra, sometimes i think it needs to return. atleast for the basic needs.
lack of anastetics, why? because they could not afford it or because they didnt know better? im guessing its the former.
as for education and the rest, its basicly a real life example of a old philosofical thought-experiment. if a person is imprisoned from birth, will he think of himself as a prisoner?
i keep wondering if the attempts failed because of outside influences, bad foundations or a issue of “who watches the watchers”. most likely its all three to variying degrees.
ok, so a pure communist system is doomed to fail. but one may allso ask if not pure capitalism is basicly feudalism based around money rather then bloodlines.
in essence, both systems have a point-of-failure. only by balancing democracy and the idea of freedom of speech on top of any of them can one balance it out. its like putting in a gyroscope if you will. if the underlying foundation shifts, the gyroscope detects and adjusts.
only problem then is, who corrects the gyroscope? but if one spend to much time thinking about that, one is likely to build oneself a well-armed bunker sooner or later…
The problem with the Soviet system can be traced back to Stalin and his forced collectivisation of agriculture which was pushed under the false notion that you could ‘teach plants’ to grown in the winter (it never worked, but the scientist who had Stalins ear insisted it would eventually work – never mind the millions who died in the process), and the forced nationalisation of ALL industry.
Up until Stalin took to power, under Lenin and the New Economic Policy, it was a single party state, but at the same time, only the ‘great heights of capitalism’ were owed by government – steel, railways, electricity etc. etc. Small to medium private enterprise was allowed to develop and flourish – during that time, economic growth and wealth came to Russia; the repressive social policies (banning homosexuals) were not in place; so all in all, it was a ‘social democracy’ – had Trosky taken over, I’m sure he would have continued with the same programme – Lenin, unlike Stalin, realised and read what Marx wrote in reference to communism, the gradual migration from Feudalism to capitalism then socialism then eventually to communism – it was mean to be a gradual transition from one system to another as technology and society progressed.
Now, I don’t agree at communism or socialism at all; the very idea of giving large bundles of cash to the government is the equivilant of handing over control of your own life to some snooty politician who thinks that they have the right to impose their ‘progressive’ or (in the case with Bush and his religious nutty cronies) ‘traditional’ values onto the likes of me.
Me, I’m an individual, let me keep my income and I’LL decide what I consider important considerations in my life – not some out of touch politician.
Edited 2006-03-12 01:05
it was a ‘social democracy’ – had Trosky taken over, I’m sure he would have continued with the same programme – Lenin, unlike Stalin, realised and read what Marx wrote in reference to communism, the gradual migration from Feudalism to capitalism then socialism then eventually to communism
Trotsky would have been as bad as Stalin if not worse. During the Trade Union debate in the early period of Bolshevik power Trotsky (then Commissar of War) held a position even worse than that of Lenin. He proposed that the Trade Unions should be be subordinated to the state to act as effectively a paramilitary comand of the workers to promote the state control of production while Lenin proposed that they carry out the same role as in capitalist society in defending workers’ rights. The left-communists represented by Shlyapnikov and supported by Kollontai alone argued for the trade unions to become organizations of workers’s control. Lenin and Trotsky’s suppression of the Kronstadt revolt and Makhno’s anarchist army in the Ukraine further emphasised the dictatorial nature of Bolshevik control.
Early on many communists in Europe had realised that the Bolsheviks were instituting a form of state capitalism in the Soviet Union. The Amsterdam based Western European section of the Comintern was expelled from it for holding this view. Lenin vituperatively attacked its leaders in his work “Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder”. After the split between Stalin and Trotsky even some of Trotsky’s closest supporters, such as his former secretary the Russian-American Raya Dunyevskaya, realized that his belief in the Soviet Union being a distorted workers’ state was false and that in Russia there was an extremely repressive form of state capitalism.
Historicaly the Soviet Union was a repressive form of state capitalism aimed at maximizing the exploition of the workers in order to achieve a rapid industrialization of a backward country.