Window on Eurasia: Oil Price Collapse Should Lead Russians to Recall and Act on Stalin’s 1931 Warning, Orenburg Blogger Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 29 – The continuing decline in oil prices, a political move by the West against Moscow, should cause Russians to recall Stalin’s warning in 1931 that “we are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries and must catch up within ten years. Either we will do that or they will crush us,” according to an Orenburg blogger.

 

            Russians must recognize that the world has changed, that they must pursue a strategy of mass mobilization, and that they must replace the current elite with one that understands that need and will do what it takes to prevent disaster, Yevgeny Super on the Odnako.org portal (odnako.org/blogs/inache-nas-somnut-etu-elitu-nado-zamenit-mobilizacionnoy/).

 

            Too many people, including prominently Development Minister Aleksey Ulyukayev, think that Russia can escape its current dilemma by liberalization, but such an approach will fail, not only leaving Russia more dependent on the international economic system it cannot control but also depriving Russians of the sense of responsibility for their own fate.

 

            Ulyukayev, Super says, reflects this approach and fears any talk of mobilization “like fire” because it would involve forcing people to “fulfill common tasks,” rather than allow them to continue to avoid “personal responsibility” by pointing to the “’hand of the market’” or the decline in the price of oil.

 

            Russians instead should remember the “historic” words Stalin uttered on February 4, 1931, and launch a similar mobilization program to rebuild and expand Russia’s industrial base.

Such an effort, Super suggests, would allow the country to withstand any foreign challenges just as Stalin’s allowed the USSR to hold out “against the united force of Europe in the Great Fatherland War.”

 

            Indeed, he writes, “what is needed is an immediate mobilization without which there will not be industrialization. A labor, moral and political mobilization. But in the first instance a mobilization of the elite itself because otherwise the people will not have faith and any plans and appeals of the bosses will go down the drain. Together with the country.”

 

            The current elite as typified by Ulyukayev isn’t capable and therefore “it must go” and go one hopes “peacefully and voluntarily.” But to save Russia, go it must.