Are Americans Prepared For
A Soviet Style Collapse
Dmitry Orlov – Interviewed By
Barry at DR Escapes
December 23, 2014 "ICH"
- "DREscapes"
- If the social and financial
structure around you collapsed tomorrow, as
it did for many people during the fall of
the Soviet Union, are you prepared
to survive and even prosper? In my
latest interview with best selling author
Dmitry Orlov we discuss
lifestyle and how your
lifestyle decisions may dramatically impact
how your family will fare if times get
tough. Dmitry left Russia with his family
in 1976 and settled in the Boston area to
pursue an education in computer science
and linguistics. Along the way Dmitry
realized he was trapped in the traditional
American pursuit of a career. He was
working day and night to make money to pay
for the car and city condo and all the
trappings of success. He needed the car and
condo and all the trappings of business to
keep making money. The same vicious cycle
most Americans face every day. Well Dmitry
gave it all up for a life on a sailboat full
of travel and freedom.
In our interview, I passed
along some of your questions as well as my
own to get Dmitry’s perspectives. As you
probably know if you follow Dmitry or the
ClubOrlov blog, Dmitry brings an interesting
perspective to the whole lifestyle and
survival dialog. In this interview, Dmitry
shares his thoughts on why he believes that
Russian citizens were far better prepared
for a collapse than the typical American
citizen. His logic is sound and it
definitely makes you question…. “what would
my family do in a collapse, faced with”:
- No lights
- No running water
- No flushing toilets
- No trash removal
- No gas at the gas
pumps
- No government
services
- No public
transportation
Strangely enough, quite
inadvertently, the Russian citizens may have
been far better off to handle such a
collapse, and here is why…..
In this first part of our
two part interview with Dmitry, we learn
more about his experience growing up in
privilege in Russia and follow his journey
out of Russia to Boston. Some of the topics
Dmitry touches on in this part of the
interview include:
- Benefits of a travel
perspective
- Failures in Soviet
central planning
- Evolving to
a barter economy
- Role of small family
farms
- Advantage of
generalists over specialists
- Transition from a
“job” to life on a boat
In the second part of
this interview we pass along a few more of
your questions in order to dig a little
deeper into Dmitry’s opinions about the
current status of America and why Dmitry is
convinced that what Russia suffered in the
Soviet collapse was a soft crash and what
America is headed for can only be a
catastrophic hard collapse.
In this part of the
interview, Dmitry poses a realistic scenario
and challenges us to think about how we
would handle a collapse.
As I interviewed Dmitry,
I couldn’t help but draw parallels with my
lifestyle down here on the north coast of
the Dominican Republic. Many of the things
that Dmitry pointed out about the conditions
that supported the bounce back by the
Russian citizens seem to apply here.
On the north coast we
enjoy:
- Abundant food grown
on small family farms or taken from the
sea
- Virtually unlimited
fresh water not dependent on extensive
government infrastructure
- A resilient
population unaccustomed and not
dependent on many of life’s high-tech
luxuries
- An economy that can
easily fall back on barter in the face
of a currency collapse
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2011–2014
