LETTERS: CAPTIALISM IS A BUST IN FORMER SOVIET UNION

To the editor:

The smugness which impels U.S. editorial writers, such as the one who write the July 10 editorials, "Russian elections," to diss the former Soviet Union for the purpose of hastening its change from a superpower to a third-rate nation is simply breathtaking. While I am not expecting a newspapers that is part and parcel of the Big Business milieu to endorse an economic system in which the power of Big Business over the lives of the rest of us would be eliminated, it would still be refreshing to see you admit in print, as one day you will, that capitalism in the former Soviet Union is a big flop. It is better to have (than not to have) free health care, inexpensive housing, inexpensive higher education, transport, full employment, widespread access to cultural and sports events -- things which the Soviet people had but were befooled into losing. One would be hard-pressed to find any aspect of Russian life that has not deteriorated horribly for all but a few Russians since the era of communism has passed.

Your editorial bristles with a grave assumption of superiority about capitalism vis-a-vis socialism. The assumption is certainly there, but the superiority is not. The Soviet people have been led down the garden path. The danger for Yeltsin is that, increasingly, they know it.

I perceive the function of editorials like this as the intentional deluding of U.S. workers with the dream of someday playing polo with their fellow CEOs, if only they can assist capitalism's true beneficiaries in preserving capitalism until their ships come in. It is by drugging them with such usually unattainable dreams that this country's actual owners succeed so admirably in keeping its working class in line.

The good life which the middle and upper classes enjoy in the United States, with is abundance of imported goodies -- made by overseas factories owned by U.S. firms, to be sure -- has its price. The price is that we, as taxpayers through our government, prop up dictatorships which in turn drown in blood any attempts by workers in those sweatshop havens to gain improvements in their pay or their working conditions. The price is that we, as workers, stand by helplessly as our jobs are transferred to whatever country can force its workers to work for near-subsistence pay. No, our good life is not the result of entrepreneurial pluck, but rather the result of a willingness to squeeze those who cannot fight back.

As to "brilliant leader" Ronald Reagan's characterization of the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire," I would merely say that the former Soviet Union is considerably less evil nowadays to its organized and unorganized criminals, ti its quick-buck (quick-ruble?) artists, to its drug dealers, to its pornographers, to its prostitutes -- in short, to the sorts of people who decent neighborhoods try to send elsewhere. Also, the Soviet people now have the freedom to be without jobs and homes -- freedoms which they have not had since the 1930s. If Yeltsin has his way, the former superpower which he has served so well will have, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, the understated elegance of the worst neighborhood in Calcutta. Good job, Boris. Capitalism at its best.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.