Another Browser link, this time to a fascinating interview with Stephen Lucas, a heavyweight expert on Soviet Law.

This is well worth reading since it casts some light on an area largely neglected in Western analysis of Communism, namely the way the Soviet regime tried to give legal effect to its ideological dogmas.

For example, the catastrophic collectivisation of agriculture:

… law was used as a pretext for going to the countryside and expropriating grain, how it was used as an engine for change from peasant subsistence farming to mass collectivisation.

In March 1929 the notorious article 107 of the criminal code in 1929 was widely applied to those hoarding grain. You got three years’ “deprivation of freedom” for the crime of deliberately increasing prices by “buying up grain” or by “not putting it on the market” (ie, delivering it to the government) and you were also subject to “full or partial confiscation of your property”.

And yet everybody was hoarding grain because the state was seizing as much as possible for the towns, there was nothing otherwise to eat and you feared for your next harvest or supply of grain…

Not so sure about this:

The demise of the Soviet Union was the demise of a country underpinned by a concept, an ideology, an alternative vision – socialism. It was an evangelical empire posing questions about how best to manage an economy, the extent to which the state provides social welfare, the scope of human rights and the importance of the arts and science.

That said, it was also an empire with a darker side. But since 1991 it seems like we have lost something when it comes to politics – lost the enthusiasm to debate about the bigger questions and to worry about whether there is a better alternative –  ideology seems to be missing. The mere existence of the Soviet Union almost seemed to provide a counter ideological force that helped us to question and frame the nature of how we in the West choose to live.

The great hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, ‘the man who stopped the motor of the earth’. The bold idea is that when the greatest creative minds of society go on strike, the system inexorably breaks down.

Pretty fanciful?

No. In fact the Soviet Union came up with a better way to run this experiment on our behalf. It murdered tens of thousands of its great minds and stopped the rest from being truly creative.

And, yes, after some seventy years of this madness in 2001 the spluttering Soviet motor finally simply seized up, and the whole system keeled over.

Laws and all.

No great loss – apart from all those millions of its victims.