the Bleak & Deadly Russian Economy

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/AC/setguestcookie.cgi?section=Network&host=www%2Eguardian%2Eco%2Euk&uri=%2FArchive%2F1%2C4271%2C26937%2C00%2Ehtml&userid=4G9Dbb01

Excerpts for Educational Purposes only.

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August 3, 1999

Despair is spur to death of a potato thief driven by hunger.

With the Russian economy in dire straits, allotments are vital to survival - and the struggle to defend them from thieves is fierce.

"I did not want to kill him; I just wanted him to understand that he could not have my potatoes."

It is a sentiment understood by millions of Russians thrown back on growing their own food. Their plots are no one-season fashion accessory - for all they are concerned, organic farming comes from outer space. In the tenth year of reform, allotments are a matter of survival.

They protect them with kitchen knives, with guns, with dogs, with welded metal sheeting, with bedsteads wound with barbed wire, and with hawthorn stiffened with sharpened wooden spikes. They sit there night after night, protecting what is theirs.

people kill each other and themselves for scrap metal.

A favourite ploy of the thieves is to wait for a power cut, climb up the pylons and cut the copper high-voltage lines down with bolt cutters.

"That's fine until the electricity gets turned on," he says.

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A very sad story, I recommend reading the full article. It would seem to take considerable arrogance to think a similar situation cannot happen in USA - if nothing else the ongoing disclosures of the intl financial situation makes me pause and consider how close _we are to such a horrific situation, anything y2k beyond BITR will just make it worse.

mb

-- Mitchell Barnes (spanda@inreach.com), August 07, 1999

Answers

I haven't read the article, but the significant point is that poor Russian scientists and military officers are going to be selling off the huge stock of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, and the materials such as plutonium and anthrax bacteria that are needed to construct them.

-- Dave (dannco@hotmail.com), August 07, 1999.

Could you post a direct link? Ther isn't enough info for me to access it through the search engine.

-- Forrest Covington (theforrest@mindspring.com), August 08, 1999.

Forrest, use the search engine using < Despair is spur to death of a potato thief driven by hunger. > That brought up the article just now. Evidently the don't let you bookmark the articles directly..

-- Mitchell Barnes (spanda@inreach.com), August 08, 1999.

Just saw a newsclip saying Russia has attacked another group of "rebels" in another province near Chechnya.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), August 08, 1999.

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