PowerSwitch

Pani Kova wrote:Greer finds it helpful to look at Russia's recent journey - from superpower status through collapse, contraction, stabilization, and recovery - as one example of where the rest of us may be headed. "Despite economic collapse, urban populations did not turn into starving mobs roving the landscape. Instead, as existing supply chains broke down, local entrepreneurs jerry-rigged new ones, and the backyard gardens of the Soviet era went into overdrive to keep most Russians fed". The changes that will follow the decline of world petroleum production are likely to be sweeping and global, Greer concludes, but from the perspective of those who live through them these changes are much more likely to take gradual and local forms. "This will make them harder to notice, but paradoxically easier to meet".
http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4014

The budget of the Russian Federation, circa 2000, was approximately that of New York City; police outside Moscow went years without paychecks, emergency medical care was unavailable without cash payment, and lawlessness ruled. I saw this in Russia and spoke to many Russians, most of whom had been forced to be criminals to survive. Honest members of the Duma were machine-gunned down in broad daylight in Moscow. Every member of the Moscow Businessmen’s forum (a reform group) was murdered, one using a biological weapon from the Soviet bioweapons arsenal. Banks were taken over by armed bands that literally burst into boardrooms and forced officials to sign over their banks at gunpoint. I was told in confidence by homicide police while visiting an extremely dangerous Russian city that 30% of the population was believed to have untreated syphilis and at least 25% of the city had died in the previous 7 years from homicide, suicide and starvation; but these were state secrets and anyone revealing them risked life in a prison system where a 5 year sentence had come to mean a 50% chance of survival. Death of schoolteachers, university personnel and other responsible people from starvation had become routine. Ordinary people lived in constant fear of being murdered anywhere, anytime. Girls on their way home from junior high school were raped regularly. I knew a mother who moved heaven and earth to get her daughter out. Russian orphans were bought by the thousands and shipped to Europe to be prostitutes.

At least one million had died from homicide, suicide and starvation in the reverberations of shock treatment on an unprepared population. This number is a simple extrapolation from the figures I obtained in one Russian city that had a population of 800,000 circa 1990 and logged 200,000 such deaths. It must be understood that starvation occurred with food in view in stores, because people had no money and food from aid organizations was stolen to sell on the black market. I was told of children who after serious frostbite in winter because of lack of heat in their homes ate the dead flesh of their hands and arms by a friend of a policewoman in Russia. Russia was a debtor nation, literally laughed at and dismissed by the West. The situation was beyond any tears that could ever be shed from now to eternity.

RenewableCandy wrote:I can't believe, for instance, that 1/4 of a city was wiped out by homicede, suicide and starvation in 7 years (unless of course someone here knows better).

Neily at the peak wrote:I have just finished this book. I have to say it seems to me to be the most realistic but ultimately positive book I have read in a while. He talks about the de-industrial age being inevitable but that it won't happen overnight. We will go through a period of catabolic collapse possibly lasting up to two to three hundred years. I "enjoyed" it a lot I just wish that I could remember more of what I read.

Neil