Tuesday, July 21, 2020

"Capitalism has led Russia into a 30-year depression", says Moscow City Duma deputy

Moscow City deputy for CPRF Nikolai Zubrilin.
The Lenin State Farm (Lenin Sovkhoz), a 2,000-hectare sprawl of fields growing fruits and vegetables on the outskirts of Moscow faces the danger of closing. 

In what seems to be a coordinated attack from multiple directions, Pavel Grudinin, the Farm’s director and the Communist Party’s presidential candidate in the 2018 elections, faces potential bankruptcy as the Moscow Region Arbitration Court has ordered him to pay a fine of over one million rubles ($15 million) for supposed “illegal transfer of lands”. 

From its side, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) has strongly denounced the “organized attack” against the Lenin State Farm, calling the accusations against Grudinin as arbitrary and lawless. 

Speaking to the Moscow City Duma, the CPRF deputy Nikolai Zubrilin praised the unique character of the Lenin State Farm – as a collective similar to the ones of the Soviet era - and unleashed an attack against today’s capitalist system in Russia

After extensive reference to the collective farms in the Soviet Union, Zubrilin pointed out the devastating results that the restoration of capitalism had for the Russian people. He said:
“The life in the village and the city collapsed in the early 90s, when the perestroika flooded our country with ‘democracy’ […] But it turned out that democracy and human rights were just a rumor, while crime, drugs and corruption emerged in real time and in real form. Therefore, for 30 years, our country has been in a state of industrial depression and social distress. We experienced the zeroing of deposits in banks and the rise in prices of products and goods by 1000% in 1992, we experience “Black Tuesday” in 1994 and we survived the 1998 default, when citizens became impoverished millionaires. Further economic problems in 2008, 2012, 2018, 2020."
Zubrilin also pointed out that “due to the general decline in living standards, within the conditions of market liberalism, the country has lost 20 million people. Tens of thousands of state and collective farms, rural settlements and small towns were ruined. The health care system, the education system and the social sphere have been destroyed. Disorder and drug addiction destroys the youth and deprives them of hope for the future”. 

The Communist deputy said that government officials, who cannot deal with corruption, drug mafia, crime and cannot work for the benefit of the society, have no place in the public service.