Ron Collins
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

I watched a Russian dramatic series on Youtube titled in English “Trouble in Store”, the thesis of which was essentially that in the latter days of the Brezhnev era, the Soviet state was beginning its final phases of self-destruction, not because Ronald Reagan was blowing a lot of hot air at them, but because the Party elite were systematically enriching themselves personally, with a large-scale organized crime scheme among them which amounted to their speculating on government-marketed caviar and any other sort of higher-end foodstuffs or imported spirits they could get their hands on.

The story is set in a “gastronom”, or basically a government grocery store, but a special type of one that was reserved only for the Party or its most-favored allies (that would be wealthy corporate executives, which the Soviet system never did away with nor ever had intended to, communism having always been merely capitalism by other means).

The manager of the store was basically caught in the scheme of people far more powerful than himself, having allowed himself long since to become entrapped in it. His job and that of his senior staff was essentially to scour the landscape looking for the freshest produce, the most expensive and exclusive imported alcoholic beverages, the best meats and seafoods and baked goods etc, in order not to place them on the market for the general public but rather to hoard them and use them as currency in an elaborate system of bribes and kickbacks among the most powerful. Anyone who did not receive what they were expecting could easily denounce him and anyone on his staff to the authorities, and they would then become the scapegoats of a scheme which in fact was being administered at the highest levels, right up to Brezhnev’s daughter who was portrayed in absentia as the architect of the whole scam.

This was not by any means the only indications I have run across, that the Soviet state collapsed for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with Reaganesque bloviations on the world stage, a claim made too continually and in absolute ignorance by that turncoat charlatan union boss’s undying fan club among today’s wishful-thinking ersatz-conservatives.

The Soviet state, by all indications, collapsed on itself and at its own hands for no other reason than the Party elite and the high end of its corporate leadership simply stealing and speculating on whatever goods they could get their hands on, subsequently crippling the domestic economy and as much as engineering the near-starvation of the ordinary population, who had no such means at their disposal to feed themselves in a system that penalized them for having so much as a personal garden plot.

The best way to ensure the absolute worst behavior on the part of the most wealthy and powerful, is to implement a socialist system of wealth-distribution. In no sense does such a system create any leveling of availabilities for goods, services and least of all opportunities for personal betterment. What it does instead, is create and empower an untouchable elite at the very top of the (literal) food chain, who can do pretty much whatever they want with no one to stop them.

Thus has socialism always performed, and thus will it always in the future. There really is no other reason for anyone to create and join any political movement toward increased socialism, than their ensuring themselves personally that once it is up and running, they will then become its primary beneficiaries owing to endless corruption in plain sight and with absolute impunity. Socialism is essentially the most streamlined form of pure acquisitive personal greed ever devised, as anyone with a lick of adult common sense can perceive at a glance.

    Ron Collins

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    Facts don’t care about your faction