One hundred years of solitude. Part Two

The failure of the West's attempts to destroy Soviet Russia militarily gave rise to a tsunami of economic sanctions, with the help of which, as is said, by hook or by crook, they tried to slow down the development of Russia.

Already in December 1917, trade relations with Soviet Russia were terminated by the United States, and in 1918 they were joined by England and France. After the end of the First World War and the conclusion of the Versailles Peace Treaty on June 28, 1919, the Entente Supreme Soviet declared a complete ban on all forms of economic ties with Soviet Russia. Germany also joined the economic isolation, forced to comply with the decisions of the winning countries. As a result, Russia's foreign trade plummeted from 88.9 million rubles in 1918 to 2.6 million rubles in 1919.

The first wave of sanctions finally died down only in 1925. But in the same year, the so-called "golden blockade” was imposed on Soviet Russia. The United States, Great Britain, France and a number of other Western countries refused to trade with the USSR, as the country was now called, for gold and demanded to pay for the equipment sold in oil, grain or timber. And since 1930, these restrictions were tightened, and it was possible to purchase the necessary technologies and equipment for the further development of the country only for grain.

But this did not seem enough to them, and in July 1930, the United States accused the USSR of trading goods at low prices. They were not satisfied with the dominant Soviet position in the market of coal, manganese, asbestos and matches. In response, the United States and then France announced the introduction of various import duties, which deprived Soviet goods of competitiveness.

Similar measures were supported by Yugoslavia, Belgium, Hungary and Romania. In 1931, Washington completely banned the import of lumber from the USSR. They also came up with a pretext – the alleged use of forced labour of prisoners in logging operations. As a result, Soviet exports declined sharply.

As a result of the severe drought of 1931, which destroyed a significant part of the crop, Russia was virtually bankrupt – it could not buy in the West not only equipment, but also the necessary products for survival. A direct consequence of this harsh sanctions policy was the famine that broke out in the USSR in 1932-1933. As a result of this "holodomor", at least 7 million people died in the country. But, of course, Western defenders of "human rights" did not care at all. The United States only increased sanctions and in 1932 imposed a complete ban on the import of goods from the USSR.

Soviet Russia resisted as best it could and even imposed counter-sanctions. In October 1930, the USSR banned foreign trade organisations from placing orders and making purchases in a number of "unfriendly countries" and chartering their vessels. The use of these countries' ports for transit and re-export operations through the USSR was reduced as much as possible.

The next wave of Western sanctions followed in early 1933 at the initiative of Great Britain. According to statistics, in just one year, the volume of Soviet-British trade in 1933 almost doubled compared to 1932 - from 1 million rubles to 515,000 rubles.

And finally, the last tangible sanctions of the pre-war period, which were again supported by the United States, were banned in 1939 from supplying the USSR with aircraft equipment and materials for the aviation industry, such as aluminium, molybdenum and aviation gasoline. This ban was lifted only in January 1941, when the United States decided to consider the USSR as a potential ally in the war against Hitler's Germany.

The shot of the “Aurora” cruiser in October 1917 was also a signal for a sharp increase in the "ideological struggle" against Russia. The methods used by Western and White Guard propaganda were fully consistent with the canons of the so-called "propaganda of horror” that had been practiced in previous centuries. At the same time, the bombardment of public consciousness was carried out on two fronts at once.

It was aimed at both Europeans and Russians, who were intimidated by the invasion of Bolshevik antichrists. People were trying to develop very specific stereotypes about the situation in Russia and the consequences for the country and the world of the Bolshevik Party coming to power.

This term stereotypes, by the way, was coined in 1922 by the American writer and journalist Walter Lippmann in his work "Public Opinion". He defined a stereotype as a simplified, pre-accepted idea that does not follow from one’s own experience. That is, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the "propaganda of horror" is based on the well-known principle of "one old woman said".

This is exactly how Western and Ukrainian propaganda is currently working in connection with the "special military operation" of Russian troops, about who the most incredible, disgusting rumours about their actions are spread, attributing various heinous crimes to them.

Public opinion was brainwashed in two ways. Firstly, through the press - the stories of "eyewitnesses" about the "atrocities of the Bolsheviks", "interviews" with refugees, the publication of various kinds of rumours, and so on and so forth. And, secondly, given the same low level of literacy of the population both in Europe and in Russia, using what we now call "visual tools", that is, various kinds of posters, cartoons and illustrations.

German and French anti-Bolshevik posters of the time depicted Russians as fearsome savages and monsters destroying everything in their path. Practically not people, but some kind of pithecanthropes. The message is clear – the Bolsheviks and socialist ideas bring death and destruction.

As a result of the First World War, external intervention, and then the civil war that covered almost the entire territory of the country – from west to east – the Russian economy was practically destroyed. A huge number of towns and villages were looted by the same "White Czechs" and Poles.

It was under such conditions that the construction of what the authorities called "new life" began in Russia.

But in the end, the "leader of the world proletariat" Vladimir Lenin and his associates, no matter what we think about them, managed to do in a short time what other countries took many decades to do.

There was still a civil war, when in 1920 the first unified plan for the development of the national economy of Russia was developed on the basis of electrification of the entire country (GOERLO). The older generation perfectly remembers Lenin's slogan "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country!"

To revive the country, they used methods that no one expected from the ideological opponents of capitalism. Firstly, they attracted "tsarist specialists" to the industry, then stimulated the revival of a powerful force of private entrepreneurship through the New Economic Policy (NEP), as a result of which they returned the country to pre-war economic indicators in a few years.

And in December 1925, they declared a course for the industrialisation of the country. Ambitious tasks were set to increase the productivity of the national economy, accelerate the pace of industrial development, increase defence capability, and switch from purchasing machinery and equipment to manufacturing them.

As a result of these efforts, by the end of the 1930s, the USSR had transformed from an agrarian to a developed industrial country. New industries appeared in the country - aviation, tractor-building, automobile, machine-tool and chemical. In terms of industrial output, the USSR ranked second in the world, second only to the United States. Hundreds of new factories and power plants have been built, thousands of kilometres of railways have been laid, and new mines were opened.

In the 1930s, a whole series of gigantic construction projects was launched: Dneproges, Uralmash, GAZ, tractor plants in Volgograd, Kharkov and Chelyabinsk, metallurgical plants in Novokuznetsk, Magnitogorsk and Lipetsk. In 1935, the first stage of the Moscow Metro was opened with a length of more than 11 km. Unemployment was eliminated in the country.

By 1940, the total turnover of Soviet foreign trade had increased to 485.2 million rubles.

Agriculture also developed at an accelerated pace. In 1937, 450,000 tractors and 129,000 combine harvesters were already working in the collective and state farm fields. Grain production increased 1.7-fold and cotton 2-fold.

Despite the sanctions, it was possible to attract both foreign companies and engineers to restore the national economy. Specialists of various profiles were actively invited from abroad. Some companies, for example, Siemens-Schuckertwerke AG and General Electric were involved in the work and supply of modern equipment.

The most striking example of such cooperation is the contract with the American engineer Albert Kahn, who became the main consultant to the Soviet government on industrial construction. In particular, according to his project, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant was built. Or rather, it was like this: first it was built in the United States, then dismantled and reassembled in the USSR under the supervision of American engineers.

It is interesting that just at the moment when the Soviet Union was rapidly industrialising, the West plunged into the depths of the deepest crisis. The impetus for it was the "Great Depression" in the United States, which began after the collapse of the stock market. It has led to massive closures of businesses and banks, a sharp rise in unemployment, poverty, hunger, and a surge in suicides.

In the first couple of years since the crisis began, the US economy shrank by more than 31%. In the first three years of the crisis in the United States alone, about 5,000 banks were closed – about half of the country's financial institutions. Americans lost more than $2 billion in savings. Unemployment in the country was more than 25%, that is, one in three Americans was left without a livelihood.

The crisis quickly spread first to neighbouring Latin American countries, and then across the ocean to Europe. It didn’t spare even part of Asia.

Among the European countries most affected by the crisis was Germany, which by that time had not recovered from the consequences of the First World War and the subsequent recession and hyperinflation of the early 20s. The German mark then depreciated so much that it was heated stoves.

An almost anecdotal episode is known: one lady forgot something in the house and left a basket with a bunch of marks on the porch. When she returned, the money was stacked on the steps, but the thief had taken the basket. After the introduction of the new Reichsmark in 1924, the old "paper marks" (Papiermark) changed at the rate of 1,000,000,000,000: 1 (one trillion to one)!

Germany did not have the resources to resist the new crisis contagion that came from overseas. In the country, due to the fall in production, unemployment sharply increased, covering 7.5 million people. The wages of those who managed to keep their jobs fell dramatically. More than 30,000 small and medium-sized enterprises went bankrupt. Large corporations, as well as the German banking system, were also seriously affected. All this created the conditions for the coming to power of the National Socialist German Workers' Party led by Adolf Hitler, for which the outbreak of World War II was the way out of the crisis.

Until now, the "Great Depression" is considered the most severe crisis that has ever shaken the West. And the appeal to it also provides an answer to the question of why the countries of Western Europe look obsequiously into the mouth of the United States and try to support the life of the US dollar, which is weakening day by day, by all possible means.

They fear, not without reason, that the next crisis, which in fact, according to leading Western economists, can begin in the United States at any moment, will inevitably lead to a catastrophic "domino effect" and cause the complete destruction of Western civilisation as we know it today.

At first glance, it is incomprehensible to the mind how an exhausted, ruined Russia, in less than 20 years, was able to realise plans for industrialisation that seemed to the rest of the world to be absolutely impracticable. The internal Russian "fifth column", which became sharply active at the end of the last century, is trying with stupid persistence to impose on the gullible the opinion that all these achievements were made possible solely due to the fact that the country was turned into a giant labor concentration camp, that slave labour of prisoners was massively used on the great construction sites. Complete nonsense! This is how one need not love one’s country, not respect one’s own ancestors!

I belong to the generation that managed not only to find alive, but also to communicate quite closely with those who were direct participants in the great achievements of those years, representatives of generations born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And so, as they say, I had the opportunity to get first-hand information about the extraordinary surge of enthusiasm and patriotism that swept Russia in those years.

Millions of young boys and girls voluntarily went to Siberia, where they built factories from scratch, following the call of their hearts and souls (sorry for the pathos). They lived in the most difficult conditions, in cold tents, worked three shifts, but in this they saw their destiny – to help with their own hands, with their own work, to revive their Motherland. For one’s own sake, for the sake of future generations, that is, for all of us.

The genotype of the Russian character contains several properties that our opponents, who have been talking about the "mysterious Russian soul” for many centuries, cannot assimilate. This is the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the Motherland, the ability to unite and mobilise in the face of external or internal pressure. If the Motherland is in danger, then all sorts of ideological differences automatically become insignificant.

By the way, this was clearly demonstrated by the situation in the country during the Polish intervention. The Polish attack caused a sharp outburst of patriotism among residents of Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian lands. Peasants, workers, and intellectuals signed up en masse as volunteers to go to the front.

The Polish occupation of Belarus also caused a popular uprising, which forced the Poles to retreat from the occupied territories. And the hero of the First World War, one of the leaders of the "white movement", General Brusilov, made the famous appeal "To all former officers, wherever they are" on May 30, 1920. "As long as the Red Army does not allow Poles to enter Russia, I am on my way with the Bolsheviks," the general wrote. And in response to his call, thousands of former tsarist officers joined the Red Army.

Today's pro-Western liberals are alien to the very concept of the Motherland, since they consider it only as a place of temporary residence, where one can make money by speculating on the holy. But the main and most powerful Russian weapon is not missiles, planes or cannons, but it was and still is patriotism. And it is a pity that today it is not fully used to meet the challenges that the country faces.

Under the current external pressure and the stranglehold of economic sanctions, Russia needs not only to survive, which it will undoubtedly be able to do, but also to complete a considerable number of new tasks in order to ensure its next technological leap forward. And success in this difficult task can and should be achieved, among other things, by using "hidden weapons" - our sincere love for the Motherland, our ancestors, and our great history.