Dr Yuliya Yurchenko 🇺🇦

12 million people are estimated to have been killed by economic 'shock therapy' in Russia alone. Russia suffered the worst peacetime economic collapse of a major industrialised nation in history. The Russian economy nearly halved. The fall in Russian output was much worse than that caused by the Nazi invasion in the 1940s. Russian male life expectancy fell by 6.5 years, to 57.6 - back to its mid-1950s level. The overall fall in life expectancy was on the scale of Vietnam during all-out war in the 1960s. The suicide and homicide rates doubled. Real incomes collapsed by 40%. At the time of the Soviet collapse, one in fifty Russians lived in poverty. By the end of 1998, that surged to nearly one in every five. Full employment gave way to mass unemployment. As healthcare funding collapsed by a third and poverty surged, disease such as diphtheria, tuberculosis and syphilis rampaged. Russia was taken over by oligarchs, gangsters implicated in serious crimes who stole the country's resources. Murderous conflicts in the former Soviet territory included Chechnya, where potentially hundreds of thousands were killed. Yeltsin's contempt for democracy was underlined by his bombing of the Russian legislature - and the undemocratic farce of the 1996 election. Putin came to power after the Russian secret services almost certainly staged apartment bombings which killed hundreds. The invasion of Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Need I go on? Yes, the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the great catastrophes of our age. An alternative would have kept the USSR together (Baltic states aside) on a democratic basis, without ruinous shock therapy. Notably, a Soviet-wide referendum in March 1991 overwhelmingly voted to keep the Union together (although it was boycotted by six of the fifteen republics - in the Baltic and three small republics).

The (huge) problem with this is that it merges the question of neoliberal capitalist "shock therapy" with keeping the USSR in the sense of the Russian-dominated empire together. Owen is effectively dismissing the USSR subject peoples' fight for freedom 🧵

12 million people are estimated to have been killed by economic 'shock therapy' in Russia alone. Russia suffered the worst peacetime economic collapse of a major industrialised nation in history. The Russian economy nearly halved. The fall in Russian output was much worse than that caused by the Nazi invasion in the 1940s. Russian male life expectancy fell by 6.5 years, to 57.6 - back to its mid-1950s level. The overall fall in life expectancy was on the scale of Vietnam during all-out war in the 1960s. The suicide and homicide rates doubled. Real incomes collapsed by 40%. At the time of the Soviet collapse, one in fifty Russians lived in poverty. By the end of 1998, that surged to nearly one in every five. Full employment gave way to mass unemployment. As healthcare funding collapsed by a third and poverty surged, disease such as diphtheria, tuberculosis and syphilis rampaged. Russia was taken over by oligarchs, gangsters implicated in serious crimes who stole the country's resources. Murderous conflicts in the former Soviet territory included Chechnya, where potentially hundreds of thousands were killed. Yeltsin's contempt for democracy was underlined by his bombing of the Russian legislature - and the undemocratic farce of the 1996 election. Putin came to power after the Russian secret services almost certainly staged apartment bombings which killed hundreds. The invasion of Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Need I go on? Yes, the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the great catastrophes of our age. An alternative would have kept the USSR together (Baltic states aside) on a democratic basis, without ruinous shock therapy. Notably, a Soviet-wide referendum in March 1991 overwhelmingly voted to keep the Union together (although it was boycotted by six of the fifteen republics - in the Baltic and three small republics).

JD Vance: Stopping funding for Ukraine is one of the things I’m proudest we’ve done in this administration.

The (huge) problem with this is that it merges the question of neoliberal capitalist "shock therapy" with keeping the USSR in the sense of the Russian-dominated empire together. Owen is effectively dismissing the USSR subject peoples' fight for freedom 🧵