Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) in Ancient CHINA

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

COPYRIGHT: "Naiody Arii i Afriki". Izdatctstvo "Naska" Dhavnaya sedaktsiya vostochnoy literatury.

The Capitalist Development Experience in Central Asia Reviewed

M. M. Muker NARODY AZII I WRIKI in

January No. 4, Jul-Aug 80 pp 18-26

written by M.A. Olimov under the rubric "Socialism in the Orient: A Standard of Non-Capitalist Development"

The institutions of traditional society in Central Asia that retained a certain allegiance among the masses have a good camouflage forged during the time of stagnation. Adylov, for example, tried to ground the legality of his "rule" through purely feudal methods, i.e. traced his genealogy back to Tamerlane. The strongly rooted leveling facilitated the preservation of communes of a feudal type. This was not a consequence of the barracks socialism that was propagated by the first utopian socialists Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier and incarnated in our country by the revolutionaries infected with "the infantile disease of leftism" alone. The leveling of barracks socialism is genetically close to feudal leveling and thus easily entered the mass consciousness.

The question of socialist orientation and the noncapitalist path of development is evoking heated disputes in Oriental studies of late. Debates that were held on this problem at the Oriental Studies Institute and Africa Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences and a number of articles published in the pages of the journal NARODY AZII I AFRIKI, AZIYA I AFRIKA SEG, ODNYA and MIROVAYA EKONOMIKA I MEZHDUNARODNYYE OTNOSHENIYA' confirm the undoubted topicality and undeveloped nature of these problems.

The enormous quantity of new materials that are finally accessible to researchers and the opportunity to express oneself openly and honestly and to discuss in the press topics that were closed before have plicated a need to review many of the views on the most difficult problems of the developing countries that have chosen the noncapitalist path of development.

it cannot fail to be seen that the building of socialism in the majority of the socialist oriented nations was and is being conducted under strong influence from the experience of the USSR, which was propagated by our theoreticians as the base model for the building of socialism and was perceived to be the standard. The model of development of the Central Asian republics and Kazakhstan, which did not undergo the stage of capitalism, was taken as the foundation. Mountains of literature were written in which the non-capitalist development path of the Central Asian republics was supposedly analyzed and recommended as a prototype for the young Third World countries. All of these works, however, suffered from common shortcomings: an enormous

distance from reality, a silence regarding real problems and difficulties and an idealization of the process of building socialism in national regions that had earlier been backward. When distortions of the principles of socialism that were monstrous in scope began to be encountered in the republics of the Soviet Orient, they forced many social scientists and party workers into a dead end, severing the complex and equivocal nature of real socialism and ways of building it. All of this dictates the persistent necessity of studying and interpreting the experience of the non-capitalist path of development of the Central Asian republics and Kazakhstan. The need for such research is caused, on the one hand, by the development needs of the republics themselves—since without an objective analysis of the situation, it is impossible to move forward or to correct the multitude of errors and omissions that have now become tangled in a tight knot of almost insoluble problems—and, on the other hand, it is essential for a deepening of our notions of contemporary socialist orientation, since our former ideas, founded on an uncritical approach toward Soviet experience have not been confirmed by life.

It must be acknowledged that the problems facing the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan today are largely similar to the difficulties that the developing countries in the foreign Orient are experiencing (as relates partly to the countries that have chosen the capitalist development path as well).

Our academics had tried to convince us that the development path of the Oriental republics of the USSR differs radically from the evolution of the socialist-oriented countries of the Orient. Acute conflicts of a national, economic, political and cultural nature have been detected today, however, that are a consequence of the profound processes that we have successfully closed our eyes to over this whole time. Some economists have dated to acknowledge that Tajikistan, for example, is a developing republic with problems that are common to the Third World. They include a high birth rate, i.e. a population explosion, and the problem of a surplus of labor resources that is associated with it, as well as the adaptation of a traditional society founded on the feudal-type rural commune to modern times and the entry of traditional Grudal social structures into a modern infrastructure. These issues have been raised in the course of debates that have taken place in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenia and have been reflected in the pages of the republic press.

The majority of researchers engaged with these problems are coming to the conclusion that the circle of dangers flying in wait for socialist revolution and the building of a new society is determined principally by the "straightening out" of the historical path, the negative effects of the overall lack of development in the pre-socialist period and the "birthmarks of feudalism." While accepting this point of view in general, I would like to direct the reader's attention to one of its key elements