Eastern European Student Play Mafia Rules at 2010 ELLS...
Lincoln Douglas/Value
Resolved: A government's legitimacy is determined more by its respect for popular sovereignty than individual rights.
Rose Wilder Lane on Russia, Communism, and Property Rights
• Give
Me Liberty by Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Only God can know Russia
Excerpt from Give Me Liberty:
"In 1919 I was a communist. My Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered now; some are bourgeois, some are dead, some are in China and Russia ...
"By so narrow a margin I was not a member of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, I was at heart a communist.
Many regard the collectivist State, as I did, as an extension of democracy. In this view the picture is one of progressive steps to freedom. ...
"When the Capitalist is gone, who will manage production? The State. And what is the State? The State will be the mass of toiling workers.
It was at this point that the first doubt pierced my Communist faith.
"I was in Transcaucasian Russia at the time, drinking tea with cherry preserves in it and trying to hold a lump of sugar between my teeth while I did so. It’s difficult. ...
"The village was communist, of course; it has always been communist. The sole source of wealth was land, and it had never occurred to these villagers that land could be privately owned.
"These plains of Russian Georgia are a great deal like those of Illinois. The Russians came into them as pioneers about the same time that Americans were moving into Illinois. They came in the same way, on foot, goading the oxen that pulled the slow wagons over roadless prairies. Industrious, thrifty, good-natured and eminently sensible people, the Russians moved in groups, settled in villages, cultivated the good land in common, and prospered.
"In Illinois, every settler paid for his land. There was no free land for Americans until 1862. Here in Russia, the land was free. Each village cultivated as much as it needed. Within the village, each family tilled an allotted acreage. When in the course of natural events, the size of the families altered so that the division of land was unsatisfactory, all the villagers assembled in town-meeting and wrangled out a new division. This happened every ten years or so, depending on births, marriages, and deaths. ...
"The Bolsheviks had then been nearly four years in power and the village taxes had not been increased, nor any more young men taken for the army than during the Czar’s regime. These villages depended hardly at all upon Tiflis, the nearest city, but even Tiflis was at the moment reviving under NEP, Lenin’s New Economic Policy of a temporary breathing spell for capitalism.
"My host reminded me by the force with which he said that he did not like the new government. I could hardly believe that a lifelong communist, with the proofs of successful communism thick about us, was opposed to a communist government. He repeated that he did not like it. “No! No!”
"His complaint was government interference with village affairs. He protested against the growing bureaucracy that was taking more and more men from productive work. He predicted chaos and suffering from the centralizing of economic power in Moscow. These were not words, but that was what he meant.
"This, I said to myself, is the opposition of the peasant mind to new ideas, too large for him to grasp. Here is my small opportunity to spread a little light. I could understand simple Russian, but I could not speak it well, and through my interpreter I explained in primer words the parallel between the village land, as a source of wealth, and all sources of wealth. I drew for him a picture of Great Russia, to its remotest corner enjoying the equality, the peace and the justly divided prosperity of his village. He shook his head sadly.
"'It is too big - he said - too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.'
"A westerner among Russians often suddenly feels that they are all slightly mad. At other times, their mysticism seems plain common sense. It is quite true that many heads do not make one great head; actually, they make a session of Congress: What, then, I asked myself dizzily, is The State? The Communist State? Does it exist? Can it exist?"
Jon Utley was two years old in Moscow when his father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, a Russian trade official, was sent to a labor camp by the Soviet secret police. His mother, Freda Utley, escaped with Jon to England and then to America.
In 2004 and 2006, Utley, a well-known journalist, embarked upon a search to learn of his father's fate. This documentary traces Utley's journey through former labor camps and cities in northern Russia and his final uncovering of the horrible truth at the dreaded camp city of Vorkuta within the Artic Circle.
Directed by John J. Michalczyk, Return to the Gulag is a small but revealing window into Russia's turbulent 1930s.
“The Communist takeovers in the Eastern and Central Europe during the World War II led to mass arrests of non-Communist politicians and people identified as class-enemies. Many of them were sentenced to forced labor camps. In 1952 the International League for the Rights of Man was able to document the existence of more than 400 forced labor camps in Central and Eastern Europe.”
[From Forced Labor Camps: an on-line exhibition; Open Society Archives, “Introduction” For more information, see: www.osa.ceu.hu/gulag/index.html]
Economic Thinking workshops on the Russia homeschool topic. Schedule here...
• Globalization at he Crossroads, with Hernando de Soto, streaming online at IdeaChannel.tv. Documentary addresses institutional problems that slow prosperity and stability in the developing world, including former USSR.
What reforms would bring stability and prosperity to regions within Russia's neighbors who people and institutions suffered similarly through decades of communism? Globalization at the Crossroads, a documentary available for streaming here give a helpful overview.
"It was the Mongol invasion that enslaved Russia. Helped by the khans, Moscow gradually rose to supremacy over all the other principalities, trod them one by one under her feet, gained power by the aid of Tartar swords and spears or through sheer dread of the Tartar name, and when the Golden Horde was at length overthrown the Grand Prince took the place of the Great Khan and ruled with the same absolute sway. It was the absolutism of Asia imported into Europe. Step by step the princes of Moscow had copied the system of the khan. This work was finished by Ivan the Great, at once the [66] deliverer and the enslaver of Russia, who freed that country from the yoke of the khan, but laid upon it a heavier burden of servility and shame.
Under the khan there had been insurrection. Under the czar there was subjection. The latter state was worse than the former. The subjection continues still, but the spirit of insurrection is again rising. The time is coming in which the rule of that successor of the Tartar khan, miscalled the czar, will end, and the people take into their own hands the control of their bodies and souls.
There were republics in Russia even in Ivan's day, free cities which, though governed by princes, maintained the republican institutions of the past. Chief among these was Novgorod, that Novgorod the Great which invited Rurik into Russia and under him became the germ of the vast Russian empire. A free city then, a free city it continued. Rurik and his descendants ruled by sufferance. Yaroslaf confirmed the free institutions which Rurik had respected. For centuries this great commercial city continued prosperous and free, becoming in time a member of the powerful Hanseatic League. Only for the invasion of the Mongols, Novgorod instead of Moscow might have become the prototype of modern Russia, and a republic instead of a despotism have been established in that mighty land. The sword of the Tartar cast into the scales overweighted the balance. It gave Moscow the supremacy, and liberty fell.
Ivan the Great, in his determined effort to subject all Russia to his autocratic sway, saw before him three republican communities, the free cities of Nov- [67] gorod, Viatka, and Pskof, and took steps to sweep these last remnants of ancient freedom from his path. Novgorod, as much the most important of these, especially demands our attention. With its fall Russian liberty fell to the earth.
At that time Novgorod was one of the richest and most powerful cities of the earth. It was an ally rather than a subject of Moscow, and all the north of Russia was under its sway and contributed to its wealth. But luxury had sapped its strength, and it held its liberties more by purchase than by courage. Some of these liberties had already been lost, seized by the grand prince. The proud burghers chafed under this invasion of their time-honored privileges, and in 1471, inspired by the seeming timidity of Ivan, they determined to regain them.
[Bold is my emphasis. From: Historical Tales—The Romance of Reality, Vol. VIII., Russian, by Prof. Charles Morris, Los Angeles, California: The Angelus University, Published 1908. Original copyright, 1893
Link to online segment here, Note: I said in the interview that I was optimistic about Romania's and Moldova's future and that many who had left the country had gained job skills and experience. These Romanians send ideas as well as money back to friends and relatives, and many have or will return. But the edited first comments have me saying just that people leaving the country were entrepreneurs...
Reason magazine article and interview here. Excerpt: most of humanity's wealth isn't made of physical stuff. It is intangible. In their extraordinary but vastly underappreciated report, Where Is The Wealth Of Nations?: Measuring Capital for the 21st Century, Hamilton's team found that "human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."Full article here. Full 2006 World Bank 188 page book, Where is the Wealth of Nations, is here in pdf.
We the Living
Italian film of Ayn Rand's novel of events in Russia after the Bolsheviks.
An American Rhapsody
Based on the true story of family escaping communist Hungary and struggling to adjust to life in the U.S.
I Am David
Young boy escapes from Bulgarian Gulag in the 1950s, evading first communist guards and later police in the west with policy of forced repatriation.
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Gregory Rehmke, Program Director
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