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Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

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Idowu Koyenikan

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“More often than not the "successful entrepreneurs" of the time were officials of the Communist Party or members of the Young Communist League, and this seemed to confirm the popular suspicion that there was corruption and that the source of their wealth was not so much enterprise and initiative as power and access to resources. On top of that, for the seventy years of its existence the Soviet Union had been inculcating contempt for wheeler-dealers and anyone else in pursuit of private profit. Someone working in commerce in those times could live reasonably well, but it was more prestigious to be a cosmonaut, in the military, or a professor. Then, suddenly cosmonauts were nobodies, just ordinary mortals who got rewarded for their pains with a three-room apartment and a black Volga car, and professors could barely make ends meet. At the same time, some obscure cooperative owner, and just about anyone selling something in the market-was a lord of the universe and had more money than any Hero of Labor ever received. It turned out that being poor was much more bearable when everybody else was, but it was intolerable once you could see your neighbor was far richer. We often hear talk about the envy Russian or Soviet people felt toward the first entrepreneurs, and that is what made the late 1980s such a hateful time. I believe, however, it was all caused by the inequality of opportunities. If Gorbachev could have made it easy for everyone to become an entrepreneur, if millions of people had taken that up, rather than just tens of thousands of the smartest, or wiliest, or those who found themselves well positioned, then everything could have been different. Instead, the setting up of cooperatives, and later of the first businesses, was made monstrously complicated and was totally under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy. If you wanted to start a business, you had to pay bribes or have contacts, or at least have the kind of charisma that could bring walls tumbling down. For long years this established the image of businesspeople as shifty, devious individuals who had got in on the act by less than legal means. In the army, the police, and the KGB, resentment at this decline in the status of officers was particularly acute. Something was going to have to change.”

Free MarketCollapse Of Soviet Union
Book:Patriot: A Memoir
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“On August 21, the Soviet defense minister, Dmitry Yazov, gave the order for troops to be withdrawn from Moscow. The State Committee for the State of Emergency had lost, and along with it, the U.S.S.R. had, too. On returning from his dacha in Crimea, Gorbachev evidently expected to be greeted by rejoicing crowds as a liberated hero. People were happy to see him back, but only as further evidence that the putsch committee had been defeated. Gorbachev's expectation of consolidating his authority on a surge of support came to nothing. All the admiration and support was for Yeltsin and a new government, the people who had taken risks and acted resolutely. This was strengthened when testimony was produced suggesting that Gorbachev might have had a part in preparing the conspiracy, or at least knew of it in advance and, in his usual way, decided not to take sides either with the Soviet conservatives or with the Russian reformers but to wait and see who came out on top. Indecision is a cardinal sin in an era of change. In an instant, Gorbachev lost everything. Once again, as happens during revolutions, something mind-blowing had occurred. On Monday he was, if not the most popular of leaders, the universally acknowledged president of a vast nation, with power over the world's largest army and over the industry and agricultural enterprises of a territory covering one-sixth of the world's land area-and the power to start a nuclear war. Come Thursday, he was nobody. He still retained a personal limousine, his secretaries, and a special telephone, only now no one was calling him. Whatever might be documented in seemingly unchallengeable statutes protected by a constitution and an army of lawyers, the center of power had shifted to Yeltsin, transferred in some intangible manner. Nobody really understands exactly how it happened, but neither was anyone in any doubt that the transfer of power had taken place. On December 8, 1991, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics, and Ukraine pulled of a spectacular ruse. Their leaders, Stanislav Shushkevich, Boris Yeltsin, and Leonid Kravchuk, met in a forest in Belarus, where they declared that, since their three republics had been the founders of the U.S.S.R., they had the right to dissolve it, which they would proceed to do. In its place they established the Union of Independent States. From their point of view, the trick made good sense: the presidents of the republics wanted to put Gorbachev and all his officials out of contention and to seize unfettered power for themselves. That is what was behind their action, and to implement it they needed formally to put an end to the indestructible U.S.S.R. Nowadays, people go on about what a mistake that action-the Belovezha Accords-was. One of those publicly lamenting it is Vladimir Putin. With great intensity and passion, he claims the accords was "a major geopolitical disaster." Well, it didn't seem like that to me at the time (and I'm not claiming to be a repository of objective truth, just relaying what my feelings were). It was just one more item on the television news-well, perhaps an item that rated a bit more discussion that usual, but there was no sense of portentousness. If those who gathered in the woods executed a crafty and, to be honest, rather deceitful and devious legalistic maneuver, they were only confirming something that was already obvious, namely that the U.S.S.R. no longer existed as a real country.”

Collapse Of Soviet Union
Book:Patriot: A Memoir
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“The oligarchs are not philosophers; they pay people to be philosophers for them, and so the regnant ideology of the terminal phase of the American Empire is a mish-mash of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Foucault, as stitched together by Hollywood directors like Guillermo del Toro, (whose name translates into English as “of the bull”) and Bryan Singer for mass consumption. What they share is Nietzsche’s penchant for the transvaluation of all values (die Umwertung aller Werte) which entails role reversal as well.”

PhilosophyPoliticsPolitical PhilosophyReactionaryOligarchs
Author:E. Michael Jones
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“Mikhaïl avait été le chef des Jeunes communistes à la faculté d’ingénierie. N’allez pas imaginer un apparatchik du Parti. Dans la dernière phase, le Komsomol n’attirait que les garçons les plus cyniques et ambitieux, ceux qui étaient prêts à tout et ceux qui voulaient de l’argent. À la fin des années quatre-vingt, le seul type d’entreprise autorisé en Union soviétique était la coopérative d’étudiants et ce fut la business school du capitalisme russe. C’est là que s’est formée la majorité des oligarques.”

RussiaOligarchs
Book:Le Mage du Kremlin
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“Ksenia était ma déesse, capricieuse et vindicative, je vivais dans la terreur de ses changements d’humeur et je n’aurais jamais imaginé qu’un sac en crocodile et une suite au Crillon puissent être suffisants pour garantir sa bienveillance. Chaque jour, je déposais à ses pieds les perles que j’extrayais de mes douloureuses élucubrations poétiques, sans voir qu’un bracelet de diamants aurait produit des effets bien plus durables. Il est étrange de constater combien notre cerveau fait d’efforts parfois pour nous cacher la vérité. Nous avons sous les yeux tous les indices et pourtant notre esprit se refuse à assembler les pièces.”

LoveRussiaOligarchs
Book:Le Mage du Kremlin
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