Today, Russia's GDP remains almost 30 percent below what it was in 1990. At 4 percent growth per annum, it will take Russia's economy another decade to get back where it was when communism collapsed. By the late 1990s, national income in the ex-USSR had fallen by more than 50 percent (compare that with the 27 percent drop in output during the great American depression), investment by 80 percent, real wages by 50 percent, and dairy herds by 75 percent. Indeed, the degradation of agriculture is in some respects worse even than during Stalin's collectivisation of the countryside during the 1930s. The numbers living below the poverty line in the former Soviet republics has risen from 14m in 1989 (2 percent of population) to 147m in 1998 (over 40 percent of the population), even before that year's financial crash.
The market experiment has produced more orphans than Russia's 20 million plus war time casualties, while epidemics of cholera and typhus (eradicated under Stalin) have re-emerged, millions of children suffer from malnutrition and adult life expectancy has dramatically plunged. To this must also be added an explosion of crime, ethnic violence and unemployment.
The debate on the legacy of the October Revolution is not just historical, because it is used to argue that socialism doesn't work and is impossible.
Let's examine the countries that are still Socialist in 2005: China, Cuba and Vietnam. Far from 'not working' Socialism has brought tremendous improvements in the lives of people. Compare on the basis of the 2003 UN report socialist China and capitalist India for example. In India, more than 200 million people suffer from hunger and more than 400 million have to live on less than one dollar a day. If India provided the same health care as China, every year 1.5 million children could be saved. Proportional to population, China spends three times as much as India on health care.
India has an illiteracy rate of 35 per cent compared to China's rate of 16 percent. The average Chinese can expect to live until 71, the average Indian 64. India's infant mortality rate is twice that of China. The London Guardian recently carried (27 May 2004) an extraordinary article entitled: "Chinese Lesson in How to Put Food in the Mouths of Millions: World Applause for Beijing's Record Achievement in Creating and Spreading Wealth". Since 1978, Socialist China has accounted for three quarters of all the people in the world lifted out of abject poverty. According to the World Bank, the number of Chinese people subsisting on a dollar or less a day (the World Bank's definition of poverty) has dropped from 49 percent of the population (490 million in 1981) to 6.9 percent (88 million in 2002).
Average life expectancy has increased from 35 years in 1949 to 71.4 years today. From 1978 to today, the country's GDP has increased more than eightfold (from 362.4 billion dollars to 11.9 trillion dollars) and it is expected to double again in the next ten years. For more information, visit the following UN link: http://www.unchina.org/about_china/html/poverty.shtml.
In Cuba, there is one medical doctor for 170 people. In the rest of Latin America, the proportion is of one doctor for 613 people. Cuba spends per inhabitant twice as much on health care and education than the rest of Latin America. In those countries, the ten percent richest people earn 46 times what the poorest ten percent earn. In Cuba, the proportion is five times. A quarter of Latin Americans have to survive on 2 dollars a day or less. In Cuba, less than two percent do.
Vietnam is one of the world's poorest countries, which half a century ago was still in the middle of colonialism and feudalism. It had to go through 40 years of wars and massive destructions. The US army, in its own words, bombed the country "back to the stone age". However, in 25 years of socialist construction, it was able to achieve more than many countries in terms of social and economic development. The World Bank begins its report on poverty in Vietnam by stating that "the achievements of Vietnam in terms of diminishing poverty are one of the greatest success in the history of economic development". (Vietnam Development Report 2004
Economic growth over the last few years averaged 7 percent, and the country aims to become an industrialized nation by 2020! (Do not forget that a country like Belgium, for example, took about two hundred years to evolve from an agricultural to industrial economy.)
According to the 2003 UN Report on Human Development, in 2001 Vietnam has a net level of secondary school attendance of 62 percent and an adult literacy rate of 92.7 percent. There were 52 doctors for each 100,000 inhabitants and 99 percent of one year children were completely vaccinated against tuberculosis. Compare this with Indonesia, a far richer 'New Industrialised Country': net secondary school attendance is 48 percent, adult literacy rate is 87.3 percent; the ration of doctors is 16 to 100,000 and the percentage of children vaccinated against tuberculosis is 65 percent. That Vietnam, a country so poor in natural resources, so over populated and destroyed by decades of wars of aggression, can offer its population services superior to those of Indonesia testifies to the enormous liberating potential of Socialism. That's why at the end of 2004 (15 years after the collapse of the Berlin wall), you still have protracted people's wars for national liberation and socialism going on in Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, India, Turkey, Colombia, and the Congo.