Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union

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Ages of Enlightenment
		Frontispiece
		Prologue
	Chapter I	Voltaire and the Encyclopedists
	Chapter II	The Hegelians
	Chapter III	Heaven on Earth
	Chapter IV	Empire of the Czars
	Chapter V	Llano Estacado
	Chapter VI	Dawn of the New Age
	Chapter VII	Man of Steel
	Chapter VIII	Wolves are Closing In
	Chapter IX	Roman à clef
	Chapter X	Shifting Alliances
	Chapter XI	Cold War
	Chapter XII	Lost Empire
	Chapter XIII	Apre le Deluge
	Chapter XIV	Paper Centerfolds
		Postscript

Disintegration of the Soviet Union was the
greatest geopolitical catastrophe
of the 20^th century.

Premier Vladimir Putin

By the Ages of Enlightenment we mean epochs when, within the Western civilization, the Judeo-Christian belief was not predominant, i.e., the times of the Roman Empire before its decline and the Enlightenment Age commenced with the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789.

At the center of our discussion is the 1789 - 1989 Age of Enlightenment. The major philosopher presaging this epoch was Voltaire (1694 -1778) who opposed the intolerance of monotheistic religions sanctioning torture and burning of their opponents, often together with their books. The apostle of just, secular society was Karl Marx (1818-1883), who envisioned a new social order which for about 70 years was able to deny power to people who use the combination of economic power, religion, and information monopoly to create cruel, vulgar, and arrogant societies where the oligarchs rule. In this Orwellian world prisons are crowded, people are mesmerized by the media, and the gulf between the rich and the poor is getting wider and wider.

These societies, bent on destruction of other cultures, are creating a world subjugated to ideology based on religion and greed, reflecting the self-centered and internally consistent partiality of the ruling elites. This self-serving ideology reintroduced torture, abnegated on treaties limiting the use of nuclear weapons, and in some countries succeeded in banning books and firing and sometimes jailing scholars and intellectuals who dare to challenge their 'mainstream' ideology. Paul Wolfowitz asserts that

With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us.
And we've got five, maybe 10, years before the next superpower emerges to challenge us ...
We could have a little more time, but no one really knows."

The decline of the enlightened epoch commenced 200 years after the French Revolution of 1789, around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This event was succeeded by the unilateral withdrawal of the armies of the Soviet Union from the Eastern Europe, not reciprocated by the withdrawal of the army of the United States from the West Germany.

Soon afterwards the Soviet Union was partitioned and treaties affirming cooperation and nuclear disarmament between the Soviet Union and the United States were abnegated. The common wealth of the citizens of the Soviet Union was usurped and transferred abroad. Countries of the Eastern Europe transmuted into satellites of the United States and Russia was surrounded by the NATO armies. The United States constitution was subverted and the relative peace of the post- WWII with its nuclear balance ended. This book contains the phenomenological and quantitative analysis of some of these events that happened as the consequences of the reintroduction of capitalism and religion to the countries of the former Soviet Union and its allies.

During its existence and to even greater degree after its fall, the Soviet Union was demonized by the propaganda which bears the main attributes of hate-mongering of religious groups.

- The cognitive systems of its proponents are closed and not accessible to rational discussion.

Dissonant arguments are not permitted in the mainstream media, books containing dissonant facts are removed from libraries, and pressure is exerted on Internet hosts and search engines providers to remove or marginalize articles containing such facts or arguments.

When the Soviet archives opened, the archival research pertaining to number of people incarcerated during the existence of the Soviet Union was ignored by the mainstream media, however, was published in the French academic journal l'Histoire (September 1993). The graph below compares the number of people in Soviet jails and 'gulags' during the Premier Stalin administration (years listed on the left of the first column) and in the jails and prisons of the United States of America (years listed on the right of the first column) during the administrations of Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and the Bush presidential dynasty.

One can compare these numbers with the "estimates" of victims of "Stalin's purges" which frequently range between 20 and 60 millions of people.

Similar discrepancies between fact and fiction also exist with respect to the length of incarceration. The "information" propagated by the mainstream media implies that to be a convict in the Soviet Union involved endless years in prison. However, before 1937, the maximum possible prison term was 10 years. In 1939, 95.9% of prison terms was up to 5 years, 4% from 5 to10 years and 0.1% over 10 years. In subsequent years the length of incarceration increased to 56.8% serving up to 5 years, 42,2% between 5 and10 years and 1% over 10 years.