People with Aspergers under Communist regimes.

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There is no system of disorder yet devised that can stop Germans from working.



I have friend who grew up in Budapest, he cried when I showed him photographs from North Korea because it reminded him too much of his childhood.

An interesting article. I get the impression that Russia is very much behind the curve when it comes to understanding ASD. If this is the case then is it a legacy from the way minds were shaped during the communist era or is it that the public and the medical profession are preoccupied with issues they consider to be more serious? The article is about more traditional autism rather than high functioning AS so it isn't completely representative of the entire ASD. What was life like under communism for people with high functioning AS who excelled in mathematics, science, and engineering? Were they highly valued for the space programme or did they end up in the gulag?

"After 18 the diagnosis changes, no more autism"

Is it safe to say that ASD is regarded as a childhood condition that one grows out of in Russia?

"Instead, autistic people usually have to cope with the medico-centric approach to illness in Russia. In the West 10% of autism is treated with medication; in Russia it's virtually 100%"

Hasn't the information reached Russia that medications are useless and ineffective against ASD or is the medico-centric approach a legacy of the communist past? Are parents responsible for why nearly 100% of cases are treated with medication? I am aware that in some third world countries people are only happy when they visit a doctor if he prescribes a medication which results in placebos being commonly prescribed for conditions that can't be treated with medications.

"For so many years we were a society moving towards a higher ideal…socialism, communism and so on. Everyone is involved in this progress onwards and upwards, so when a family has a child that is different, it clearly can't be the fault of the society intent on higher things"

The western political and economic system has some degree of feedback from the public to the political and corporate elites which has lead to the understanding of ASD and provision of specific services. Was the communist system designed without a feedback mechanism to enable this to happen so that anybody who did not fit in with the system was regarded as a failure or a traitor? I have mentioned before about Americans being stuck in old ways but was communism a system that excluded the potential to effectively handle future discoveries?

One needs to consider that most of the Communist countries were destitute before their revolutions. If they were developing capitalist countries, not only is it not likely they would be better, I think they would have been even worse places to live. The former Communist bloc today in many cases suffers more poverty and lower life expectancy than they did in 1990 when the system was being dismantled.

Please, don't ever take up a career in Comparative Politics.... The field might not survive your logical prowess.

He's right though.

thats the point i made in the now deleted thread about racism in London. These people who criticise the Soviet Union are fast to forget that the Soviets inherited an economically stagnant and socially divided s**thole of a country, pounded by years of a senseless war and turned it into the world's second largest superpower even in spite of western sanctions, aggression from the nazis and from counter revolutionaries from within the country. Even now, it arguable that Russia has greatly deteriorated and lost prestige on the global stage since the collapse of the USSR. During Soviet days they didn't have such an epidemic of organised criminality, poverty, drug problems and deteriorating average life expectancy.

Can you say to me with a straight face that Russia would have prospered under the Tsar?

There was also a survey polling that 57 percent of people living on what used to be East Germany want the DDR back.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 34122.html

Russia is what it is because of the Soviet Union and its revolution. They have less people now than Bangladesh because when the opportunity to get out presented itself, those who could, did. They are reaping a legacy of discarding their people, where abortions far outstripped live births, after a war that killed millions and a government that killed millions more. Eventually the Gods of the Copybook Headings have their day and Russia may well have committed national suicide as a practical entity in the Revolution. The best comparative examples we have are South Korea and West Germany, which have both fared significantly better than their communist counterparts. Places in the former Soviet Union that have not embraced reform, like Belarus are the worst places to live in Europe. It was not a choice between Tsar or Communism, they had a republic once, they could have chosen as South Korea did, to struggle intelligently against oppression and then flower into the first world, but they didn't. They had that choice again and failed to chose wisely again. Russia is a land of missed opportunity.

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm

If you meant my describing of east german experiences, I mentioned in the end, that the experiences of communism of my romanian relatives, were far worse, then the experiences east german aspies wrote about in german autism forums or that were mentioned by my coworkers from germany. But because of me not speaking romania, I cannot tell explicit Aspies experiences of that. The stuff of the bread line is one of the things that seems to be as example a huge difference between east germany and romania. While my german coworkers get annoyed by general prejudices about communism like that, so according to them basic food was available and they "only" had to wait in lines for more exclusive goods like fruits from Cuba and such stuff, in romania the bread lines often didnt get to become that long, because often enough there was so less delivered (out of corruption reasons), that after a certain time, the shop was closed, and people sent home, because of nothing more available. My grandaunt from romania, that managed to be allowed to visit her family when I was a small kid, started to cry, when she went with my mom to a small-town supermarket (Not the huge things you have nowadays, it was maybe about 50-70 m2.) While basic medical care in east germany was no problem, according to my east-german coworkers, whenever my family visited our romanian relatives in the camping car, there were packages that were for the guys of the border, filled with cigarettes, alcohol and coffee. They got these as gifts, so they wouldnt f**k around with the rest that was in the camping bus. Other packages of cigarettes, alcohol and coffee were supposed for our romanian relatives, so that they could pay as example doctors. If you didnt do a payment or gift for a doctor, you could wait for months to meet them. My romanian family, that were in comparison to my family or our france relatives horrible poor, were according to romanian standards rich, because of them having a small farm, and so being able to not depend totally on governmental food supply.

So as said, the experiences of my romanion relatives are horror to those, I heard of east-german people. They had far less troubles with every day life, but far more with the surveillance and spies, that seemed to have been everywhere. I only described them in general as horror, and didnt write details, because I cannot tell detailled Aspie-experiences of Romania. I know, that in general, they treated people horrible in official buildings for disabled, so some families tried to avoid by all means that there relatives ended there. But many families simply didnt have the ressources to keep disabled relatives with them. Specially disabled children were often given into orphanage, because of most families already having very much children, because of the communistic Caucescu regime, whyever denying contraception to many people.

Exactly. A land of missed opportunity is the best term to describe Russia. It's a country that has a questionable future but it also seems to have forgotten (the best?) part of its past. Russians today have lost much of the knowledge in science and technology that was generated during the communist era. The understanding of space race engineering from just a few decades ago is now like the understanding of Egyptian Hieroglyphics before Champollion deciphered them.

Is Russia today better or worse for people with AS than the communist Soviet Union was?

True. No form of true "communism" has ever existed. Those who imposed it created top-down power craved political machines that basically imprisoned or murdered anyone who didn't go along with the program. I don't think that was the management style intended by those who thought up the scheme.

you only need to look at Russia's current persecution of gays to look at how Putin's government views 'people of difference'.

Its worth knowing that one of the governments supporters, the anti communist Tsarist cossacks (Russia's equivalent of the minutemen) are some nasty individuals with fascistic tendencies that are sympathetic to the new wave of neo nazi-ism spreading through Russia at the moment. I don't necessarilly believe that modern Russia was a necessary consequence of the Soviet Union. One of the major precursors was Gorbechav's softline policies (glasnost and perestroika) that opened the floodgates for the market liberalisation of the Soviet Union. He is still despised as a traitor by members of the communist party.

As for Caucescu, he was a special kind of nutcase. Even the rest of the Warsaw Pact pretty much shunned Romania and it became a island of its own tendency. In the later years, he actually modelled Romania on North Korea rather than the rest of the Soviet-allied nations.

Well I think its difficult to say. The way Russia is today is due to the legacy of the Soviet Union. They might have preached equality but it was one of the most unequal societies on the planet. There was always an element of the new man in the propaganda, one that I find at odds with the concept of a person who functions differently. The Soviet Union, for a long time had an attitude that was quite hostile towards disabled people. When asked if they would be taking part in the first Paralympic Games, the Soviet Representative stated "There are no invalids in the USSR!". Modern Russia has no ideological block on disabled people but it also does not make much of an effort to take care of us. So I say the evidence goes both ways.