анонимный вопрос
A similar question was asked of me three years ago, and at that time I wrote a whole essay on the subject titled “Why Altai Succeeded.” Now, without overthinking it, I am simply publishing it with minimal edits.
Why Altai Succeeded
The Gorno-Altai Autonomous Region is a small, sparsely populated peripheral territory of Southern Siberia on the border with Mongolia. There are no railways, almost no industry; there are mineral resources, but they are expensive to export due to a lack of infrastructure. It is inhabited predominantly by livestock breeders who are united into kolkhozes purely formally. It possesses significant tourism potential, which was practically unused by the socialist planned economy.
In the summer of 1990, talk of sovereignty began in the autonomous region. The leadership planned to demand a status upgrade to an autonomous republic, but instead, announcements began to appear—first in Gorno-Altaysk and Mayma, a few days later in all other district centers, and then everywhere. They hung on poles, on the doors of shops, post offices, and savings banks, or were simply pasted onto gates. The first print run was produced at the regional newspaper’s printing house, and thereafter it became a grassroots effort: some used typewriters, some wrote by hand. The text was as follows:
Comrades!
The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Comrade N.S. Khrushchev, promised Soviet citizens the construction of communism by 1980. Unfortunately, he was removed from office by a handful of party officials who preferred to develop the socialist system instead of building communism. But the laws of dialectical materialism cannot be cheated! And so, ten years after the promised deadline, Altai has finally built communism.
According to the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin, the state is an instrument of class oppression. A communist society is classless; therefore, the state on the territory of Altai has henceforth naturally ceased to exist.
The Communist Party, which served as the vanguard of the builders of communism, no longer persists as a structure separate from the rest of the people upon the achievement of communism. The task of the Communist Party is accomplished!
The basic principle of communism is: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Therefore, the inhabitants of communist Altai shall henceforth freely exchange any goods and services, valuing them only and exclusively according to their own needs. The amount of labor invested, which served as the socialist measure of a commodity’s value, is now disregarded. Concepts of added value, price zones, central planning, and the like are henceforth considered obsolete and possessing only historical value.
Since states that use money as a measure of value still exist in the rest of the world, the inhabitants of Altai may also freely use the currencies of any states in their settlements according to their own needs, alongside any other values.
In their relations with one another, the inhabitants of Altai shall henceforth be guided by only two principles: mutual respect and communist consciousness. The first means that in their actions, residents take into account the interests of their neighbors and other involved parties, cementing their decisions with agreements. The second means that residents consider not only immediate needs but also care about what they will leave behind for their grateful descendants.
All conflicts are settled amicably by the residents involved in the conflict, according to the principles of mutual respect and communist consciousness. They may also turn to any other persons or organizations for judgment, pledging to carry out the decision rendered by them.
All property remaining to the inhabitants of Altai from the times of the socialist system, both personal and state-owned, continues to remain under the management of the same persons who managed it under socialism. Mechanisms for changing the managing persons are developed by the residents independently for each specific case, based on the principles of mutual respect and communist consciousness.
In relations with citizens of other states, the inhabitants of Altai are guided by the same principles as in their relations with each other. Any person is free to come to Altai for recreation, for settlement, or to engage in various activities. As long as they observe our principles, they are our welcome guest.
The inhabitants of Altai consider wars to be a remnant of a bleak past; therefore, they respect the borders of states and have no intention of seizing their territory by force. When traveling outside Altai, the inhabitants of Altai are guided not only by the principles of mutual respect and communist consciousness but also comply with the other requirements of those states.
The inhabitants of Altai will not tolerate attempts to turn history backward; therefore, they will oppose any attempts to revive a class society and a state on the territory of Altai. A sign of a class society is the distinction of any groups for whom different rules apply than for others. Signs of a state are: the forced seizure of valuables, the coercion of people to work, the restriction of freedom of action, and other violent actions carried out otherwise than as compensation for specific calculated damage.
It is clear that the stated principles differed greatly from the trends of recent years, and scholars of Marx’s works might find many of the introduced definitions quite debatable. But, first, the main, well-known communist principles were explicitly stated in this manifesto. Second, anyone who had read science fiction could easily recognize the bright communist future in these principles, and nothing else. But the most important psychological factor was that the manifesto declared victory. While the rest of the USSR was contemplating admitting defeat in the competition with capitalism, and reading “Dunno on the Moon”—where it was assumed that man is a wolf to man—as a visual aid for building a new order, the majority in Altai understood perfectly well what kind of system they had established and how to behave within it.
According to the manifesto, all functionaries of the national economy fully retained their positions; only party workers were left completely without roles. Attempts to assert their rights led to them being reminded: “You bitches removed Khrushchev!”. And, frankly speaking, the CPSU aktiv was not that large in a territory with a population of fewer than two hundred thousand. In any case, some party workers left for Russia; no one placed obstacles in their way.
Russia took a pause; the union leadership found itself in a predicament. Had this been a matter of militant nationalism, with the oppression of Russians and other excesses, they might have considered deploying troops. But to forcibly return those who had already moved to a new stage of development back to socialism? That would mean the collapse of the entire ideology. Keeping such a thing secret would have been impossible; glasnost had long been triumphantly sweeping across the USSR. It ended with Gorbachev officially announcing in October 1990 that an experiment on the transition to communism within a single region had begun on the territory of the Gorno-Altai Autonomous Region.
Already the following year, as everything in the USSR began to shake and the first foreign investors arrived in Altai—several hotel chains and one agro-industrial holding—a mass exodus of Soviet cooperators, currency traders, and other sufficiently wealthy citizens to Altai began. They discovered that both they, their money, and their initiative were welcome here.
At first, Soviet rubles were mainly used in Altai, then they predominantly switched to the US dollar and the Swiss franc. No one saw the need to conduct their own currency policy.
The few asphalted roads did not have time to fall into complete neglect during the transition period. Road services initially scraped by on small orders for asphalt paving inside villages or repairing bridges over mountain rivers, but gradually larger investors stepped in, and orders became overwhelming. In 1991, road workers set up a post at the entrance from Russia and began charging transport traveling to Mongolia. This was enough to maintain the Chuysky Trakt in a satisfactory condition. Gradually, a sufficient number of services emerged, each grabbing various road sections for maintenance and profit. Over time, the fee-collection mechanisms evolved toward greater user convenience—as is customary, in accordance with the principles of communist consciousness and mutual respect. Also, strangely enough, the total absence of any bodies designed to establish traffic rules and monitor their compliance did not particularly affect the accident rate.
Small aviation continued to operate between district centers, as well as to Biysk and Barnaul. By the time small aviation in Russia began to wither away, the Japanese had already started building an international airport in Gorno-Altaysk.
Private clinics first began to appear at hotels and sanatoriums; over time, solvent demand emerged in district centers as well. The rescue service began moonlighting by transporting patients from remote villages to district hospitals. In some cases, these were one-off orders, in others, subscription service agreements with residents, and in some, insurance companies managed to hustle in.
The level of education naturally dipped at first. Former school teachers worked with individual students on specific subjects, spending the rest of their time in their own gardens. Gradually, it became clearer what kind of specialists the communist economy needed, and the process began; in some places, it remained at the level of tutoring, while in Gorno-Altaysk and Ulagan, one secondary school each opened. Mainly, teachers gathered mixed-age groups and gave an intensive course of one or two subjects over a couple of months. The academic load remained laughable compared to the Soviet past, so children were more involved in household chores and found a full source of income quite early. On the other hand, it became common to voluntarily study specific areas of knowledge at a more mature age, when a person knew exactly what they needed and was ready to pay for it.
In the early nineties, excesses occurred when gangs from Russia arrived in jeeps, stealing cars, household appliances, and money. These issues were resolved in different ways. One could obtain contacts for a rival gang and lead them to the gang returning with the loot. One could organize armed resistance, as there were no restrictions on carrying weapons in Altai. One could provide leads to the Russian cops. In Mayma, which naturally suffered from raids more than others, a private security organization existed for a time—it was founded by Biysk gangsters who had been pushed out of the station market by competitors. Gradually, the opinion formed in the criminal circles of the Altai Krai that it was “beneath them” to act lawlessly toward the communists. They went there for cultured recreation, and sometimes for arbitration—the communist consciousness of their southern neighbors could be trusted.
In ninety-eight, Belokurikha joined communist (the de facto anarcho-capitalist system thus retained its original ideologized name de jure) Altai. In the RF, there was a default, a carousel of changing prime ministers, salary delays—while Altai investors offered good money in hard currency for the state property in the purchased Belokurikha. In the early two-thousands, the RF unilaterally carried out the demarcation of the border, established customs checkpoints and other strange attributes that states love so much. In 2014, Zhirinovsky suggested considering that Belokurikha and Northern Kazakhstan, along with Novorossiya, are ancestral Russian lands, but Zyuganov pulled him back, telling him not to dare sharpen his teeth on communists, and that in general, we could actually learn something from our southern neighbors rather than intruding upon them with our volunteers.
In 2006, there was an attempt to officially register the state of the Communist Republic of Altai—with the goal of joining the UN, WTO, and providing offshore services. However, the next day, the applicant’s entire fence was plastered with the communist manifesto, and he, after sober reflection, decided that things were fine as they were. He did not attempt to prove to his neighbors that his idea implied neither taxation nor other signs of a state mentioned in the manifesto, and he dropped his initiative. This communist inflexibility of the Altai people meant that no international company could keep its headquarters in Altai, as it was required to have a state registration, but this did not hinder real operational activity.
For trips around the world, the inhabitants of Altai initially used primarily Russian passports, which they obtained in Russian Biysk, but after the 2008 Georgian war, citizenship of the Baltic states and Israel became fashionable, and from 2010, Mongolia introduced a simplified procedure for the inhabitants of Altai, thereby fully satisfying the market demand.
Altai became a refuge for Edward Snowden, but this was not his most successful idea. NSA representatives, not hiding themselves particularly, flew to Gorno-Altaysk and captured the fugitive sysadmin, after which they departed for the RF and then to Washington. The Altai people did not obstruct the detention, but, first, they began to refuse US dollars en masse, gradually switching to Swiss francs for cash and bitcoins for cashless settlements, and second, in 2014, a veterans’ club opened near Onguday—something like a base for free mercenaries from all over the world—and when in 2017 the Russian FSB tried to capture Arkady Babchenko, who had fled to Altai, its employees were met with a rather unkind reception. However, it was managed without casualties or international scandals.
In 2020, the Manifiesto Comunista spread to Cuba, but that is a completely different story…
