From The Guardian

I feel sorry for them, as I am sure you do, too. I mean, there they are, swarming all over the former Soviet Union, expending great efforts to teach the people there the ways of capitalism and it seems the people are not grateful.

I am talking about the US and EU-trained 'aid workers' who are trying to 'help' the people of the various former Soviet Republics to set up small businesses and establish cottage industries as a remedy for the economic disaster that came with the overthrow of socialism.

The European parts of the former USSR are overrun with (mainly US) evangelical Christians. For their part, the former Soviet Central Asian republics are inundated with Islamic proselytisers.

Islamic or Christian, however, they are equally determined to help the victims of 'Godless Communism.' Pumped up with propaganda about capitalism being the necessary concomitant of freedom and democracy, they must be peeved indeed to discover that the people in the former USSR do not fit their stereotyped ideas of what 'victims of Communism' should be like.

The Far Eastern Economic Review recently ran a very revealing article on this subject, as it applies in Khorog, a mountain town of 25,000 people in Tajikistan near the Afghan border.

The writer of the article, one John Bonaccolta, tries his best to give a positive spin to the present situation there, but he cannot disguise the fact that what he’s describing is pretty dire.

However, he is clearly so committed to the idea that any form of capitalism, no matter how bad, must be preferable to socialism, that he seems oblivious to the fact that his article is full of inadvertent admissions of how much better things were under the Soviet system.

He tells us that, 'thanks to the centralised Soviet education system,' over 99 percent of the population is literate. Of course, he prefaces this with the daft comment 'no doubt the Soviets were more concerned with creating a subservient local population than with fuelling local culture.'

Yeah, that’s how you keep people subservient: teach ‘em to read and write so they can have access to information and ideas!

Without noticing the contradiction, Bonaccolta then tells us that 'the legacy of Soviet education is striking — in this part of Badakhshan in the Pamir mountains, almost everyone, it seems, is an artist, a writer or a musician,'

It would be difficult, in any case, for them to be much else. Bonaccolta notes that after the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, financial support for the sciences in Tajikistan fell to one twenty-fifth of what it had been.

He also quotes a European Commission aid worker: 'I don’t know of any colonial power that brought such cultural opportunity to the far corners of its empire, to the smallest villages.' Perhaps that is because the Soviet Union was not in fact a 'colonial Empire.'

Bonaccolta quotes a local artist, Yorali: 'Life was very good here during Soviet times. Now the only people who live above subsistence [level] work for aid organisations or traffic drugs, and that’s only about ten percent of the population'.

Religious people in this region tend to be Shia Ismaili Muslims, whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan. Most aid workers in the region seem to work for the Aga Khan Development Network which is trying to win back for Islam the ground it lost in Soviet times.by 'coming to the rescue' now.

As a local university student tells Bonaccolta: 'Without the Aga Khan we would all be dead. There would be nothing to eat'. But our journalist has to admit that the Aga Khan’s pockets are not very deep when compared with 'the old Soviet machine'.

Nothing daunted, the helpful Aga has set up the Mountain Societies Development Support Program (MSDSP) to, typically, show the locals how to earn a living in the new circumstances.

One of the MSDSP’s workers, with the suspiciously non-Islamic name of Sarah Robinson, complains that 'teaching such cultured, highly educated people that they need to work to live is a challenge'.

This remark, incidentally, gives a very interesting spin on what life must have been like in Soviet times: apparently, under socialism, you did not have to work in order to live.

In dealing with the Soviet era, Bonaccolta typically refers to Tajikistan as 'this distant corner of Moscow’s empire.' He cannot hide his dismay, however, at the way the inhabitants of this 'distant corner' are today appalled by the type of jobs the MSDSP is trying to persuade them are the way of the future.

People trained as doctors, engineers and artists are understandably not impressed by suggestions that in the capitalist future they can drive a cab or try to scratch a living by tilling Tajikistan’s wretched soil (only five percent of the country’s land is actually arable)!

Sarah Robinson bemoans the locals’ unwillingness to embrace opening a business: 'They view commerce as dirty.' This too is probably a Soviet hangover!

Bonaccolta concludes his study of people in one part of the former Soviet Union 'struggling to cope with life in the real world' by quoting one of those whose present work is demeaning to him. He is Hazim, an architect 'reduced to driving jeeps for the few visitors to the area.'

Referring to Soviet times, Hazim says: 'At least then we could study in Moscow or St Petersburg [Leningrad]. We could wake up in the morning and just go — none of these borders and checkpoints.

'And we always had enough to eat.'