Michael Coons: Communism promises plenty but delivers scarcity

By MICHAEL COONS

Sept. 13, 1016 – Alexander Dolitsky came to America in 1978, and his column, published in The Alaska Story on Saturday,  is spot on, especially regarding the Soviet Union.

Back in 1972, I took the Orient Express from Munich, Germany, to Istanbul, Turkey. I had been forewarned to obtain a travel visa for Bulgaria, which I did.

Leaving Austria for Yugoslavia was pretty easy; I showed my passport, and that was it. Around midnight, the train stopped, and I woke up to see the muzzles of two machine guns through my window.

Then 10 border guards, who looked like the Gestapo — it felt as if I had gone back in time — boarded my car. Five of them individually checked my passport, the beds, my luggage, the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. I assumed they were looking for contraband.

As a young airman, all I could do was stand there with my passport and think that if I were pulled off the train, my parents would never know what had happened to me.

Then, when we reached the Greek border, the same thing happened, only this time, the guards  were looking for people trying to flee the communist bloc.

That was the first of three times I witnessed the oppression of the Marxist, socialist, and communist system. Alexander Dolitsky lived it every day until he got out. That would be an interesting story in and of itself.

My second experience witnessing the results of Marxism, socialism, and communism came from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. I worked as a paramedic in Russia’s oil industry, specifically in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Nogliki on Sakhalin Island, and then in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Russian Far East.

Komsomolsk was named for the Komsomol, the Soviet Union’s Communist youth organization, and the city was built in part with forced labor under Stalin. That’s slavery by a less alarming name.

During that time, I was able to interact with the Russian people and visit their schools and hospitals. What follows is what I saw and heard from those Russians, as well as how socialism and communism actually functioned. I won’t say those systems “worked,” since that might be construed as a positive. They were anything but.

I was told that during the Soviet era, people had plenty of rubles but few products to buy. Those were the days of long lines for food — if any was available. There were no real markets unless you were part of the Politburo.

Russia redenominated its currency in 1998, removing three zeros so that one “new” ruble was equal to 1,000 “old” rubles. Later that year, the ruble crashed, sharply reducing its value.

For us expatriates, this meant we went from being “rich” in the eyes of the Russians to being very rich. Because we were in the oil business, and because many Russians associated “businessmen” with the Mafia, we were considered “Mafia.”

Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Russians had access to more products — mostly cheap Chinese knockoffs — but very few rubles. The 1998 financial crash made conditions even worse.

In places such as Kansas, government-run grocery stores have struggled or collapsed.

Now, as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushes government-run grocery stores and an increase in the minimum wage to $30 an hour, the predictable result will be plenty of cash but little to buy.

Michael Coons is a US Air Force veteran and longtime Alaskan. He served as president Alaska Chapter Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) and served on the Alaska Commission on Aging.

Alexander Dolitsky: Echoes of Soviet conformity and modern American leftism