--- "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: it's clear that the USSR subsidized its satellites, but that doesn't make it any less of an empire, since the USSR didn't grant its "allies" independence until the USSR itself was falling apart. All it says is that you can't generalize from US-dominated capitalist imperialism to apply abstract theories to the USSR-dominated empire, just as you can't generalize from the classical Roman empire to apply abstract theories to the US- or USSR-dominated empires. (Similarly, just because the USSR was a class society doesn't mean that we can generalize from our understanding of capitalsm to apply abstract theories to it.)
jd --- Russians lived more poorly than people in any other of the republics or in the Eastern Bloc (except maybe Albania?). Moscow may have been a possible exception. It's one of the reasons why Russia junked them. Ironically, those losses of subsidies have resulted in the wealthiest of the republics -- like Georgia and Moldova -- into the poorest. Russians now live better than people anywhere else in the fSU, except maybe the Baltics, which is why you have so much illegal immigration from them into Russia. There are lots of Soviet jokes depicting Castro as sucking at Brezhnev's teat. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
