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Thursday, December 20, 2018

66% of Russians regret the Soviet Union's dissolution - Capitalism has utterly failed

Twenty-seven years since the victory of the counterrevolution in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, seems that the capitalist "heaven" in Russia has been proved nothing more than an illusion. 

Where is the supposed "paradise" of free-market capitalism that the counterrevolutionaries of Gorbachev and Yeltsin- alongside their imperialist allies- were promising to the people of Russia? Apparently it was a blatant lie.

The deeply antipeople, antiworker policies of the bourgeois governments, from Boris Yeltsin to the current administration of Vladimir Putin, leads more and more Russians to consider what they lost after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Huge social achievements have been abolished, the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, monopolies and billionaire oligarchs - not the workers - are the real bosses of the country, the income for the working class families shrinks year by year. Capitalism has shown its real, repulsive, barbaric face to the working people of Russia. 

Today, a record number of Russians seem to regret the dissolution of the Soviet Union. More specifically, two out of three Russians (66%) regret the fall of the Soviet Union, the highest level in the last decade, according to a new poll from independent pollster the Levada Center, Vedomosti reported on December 19.

Previously in 2017 a still hefty 58% of Russians regretted the fall of the USSR, and in the preceding decade the number did not rise above 61%. The highest level ever recorded was in 2000 when three quarters of Russians (75%) said the collapse of the Soviet Union was a bad thing. 

Some 60% of respondents in the latest poll believe that the collapse could have been avoided, which is also at a 13-year high. The majority of those who are nostalgic for the USSR are people over 55 years old, although in the past two years these sentiments have grown among young people aged 18-24 as well.

According to the poll, the main reasons Russians give for their regret is the collapse of the single economic system (52%), the loss of a sense of belonging to a great power (36%) and the growth of mutual distrust and bitterness (31%).

1600 people from 136 towns and villages in Russia took part in the survey, which was carried out by Levada-Center between November 22 and 28.