The earthquake that devastated the small town of Sakhalin Island, Neftegorsk, is the symbol of the far greater disaster - the capitalist counter revolution that has leveled Russia and the former Soviet republics.
Natural disaster knows no social system borders.
I saw reconstructed Tashkent built anew and more beautiful just three years later by all 15 Soviet republics. A few hours after the earthquake, both Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the CPSU and Premier Alexei Kosygin arrived in Tashkent. Immediately there was the kind of mobiIization of the forces of the USSR that recalled the all-peoples' mobilization during the Great Patriotic War. From every republic they poured into Tashkent. Construction workers from Moscow, Leningrad, all parts of the Russian Republic, from Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belorussia and Baltic Republics.