Sarah Walsh (1960-1996?) was an American woman who, on occasion, used her considerable physical skills to supplement her income by dancing in New York’s nightclubs. Although never a sex-worker herself, this form of freelance employment brought her shoulder to shoulder with many women (and men) in the US who were forced to settle for a life of generating income through submitting to sexual exploitation. This placed her in a unique position to gain vital information about the semi-legal goings-on in the nightclub scene and the related sex industry for her other career – that of a freelance journalist. Within capitalist America – even today – it is not uncommon for young women and girls to ‘sell’ their bodies to gain money to survive in that country’s education system. As these ‘services’ are purchased primarily by White, middle-class men in the US, the situation is tolerated and laughingly interpreted as a matter of ‘personal choice’ by the girls and women involved, and not what it really is – a product of the lack of care and support for the country’s population of female-workers.
For people born and brought-up within predatory capitalist society, the abyss of highly dangerous and exploitative sex-work is always close at hand for many women (and girls). Well-off men view it as their cultural and economic right to purchase the bodies of women (and sometimes men) and use them for their own sexual gratification. Such men purchase these services with their disposable income and a transference of wealth occurs from the rich to the poor. To benefit from this transaction an individual must submit to having their body used in anyway the purchasers sees fit. As much, of this ‘industry’ is ‘unregulated’ the sex-workers possess no employment rights and virtually no system of protection. This often sees sex-work spill-over into kidnap, torture, rape murder and paedophilia, etc. Sarah Walsh witnessed all of this whilst managing to keep away from the worst excesses in her own life. During the early 1990s, Sarah Walsh witnessed a major shift in the US sex industry which saw for the first-time in US history the mass importation of frightened young women from the newly ‘capitalised’ country of Russia!
From 1917-1991 the USSR guaranteed equal rights (and fair treatment) to all women (and girls) born within Revolutionary Russia! Prostitution and sexual exploitation became crimes perpetuated only within capitalist societies that facilitated the impoverishment of large swathes of their own populations. The key to ‘equality’ within Soviet Russia was the right for ALL women to work – and for the Soviet State to provide cradle to the grave material and psychological support for every woman (and girl) as a means to over-turn centuries of patriarchy, oppression, rape, murder and general exploitation. Between 1917-1991, women (and girls) in the USSR were legally and economically protected from ALL forms of physical and psychological exploitation. Women were brought-up to be independent and valued members of an advanced and progressive Soviet society, taking their place within the development of Soviet science and the building of a better tomorrow! This all came crashing-down in 1991 with the betrayal of the USSR by Mikhail Gorbachev and the destruction of the Socialist State! Generations of empowered women who had conquered space and fought in the Soviet Red Army were suddenly told (in a brutal fashion) that as of December 25th, 1991, all these achievements would be thrown into the dustbin of history and that Russian women would have no more importance in society than the appearance of their physical body – and the sexual uses men could use these body for.
The history of the Russian mafia in the United States beggan in 1974 – some seventeen years before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In 1974 the US Congress unexpectedly passed a law favourable to political refugees from the Soviet Union. Soviet Jews were the first to leave, followed later by ethnic Germans and then Armenians, etc. Soviet immigrants settled in the southern part of Brooklyn, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. By the beginning of the 1980s, there were already about some fifty-thousand living there, with this area being called ‘Little Odessa’. This was because of the predominance of Ukrainians (many of whom were from families who sided with the invading Nazi Germans – betraying the USSR from 1941 onwards). Although given everything they needed in the USSR to develop their minds and bodies and contribute positively toward Soviet society – this ‘criminal element’ decided to betray the USSR yet again, and go and settle in the filth and squalor of the capitalist USA! Indeed, the occupants of ‘Little Odessa’ have never viewed African-Americans as ‘true’ Americans – giving vent to their natural racist tendencies.
The US authorities chose not to look to closely at the people who fled from the USSR. The US received information about certain immigrants from their own intelligence services, and occasionally were warned through the odd police record. Only later did the Americans realize that the KGB was secretly exporting criminals to America (twenty-years later, Fidel Castro would pursue the same policy). Only those with a distorted vision of the world and a natural criminal intent would choose to leave the comfort and protection of the USSR – and voluntarily immerse themselves into the filth and poverty of US street culture – but that is exactly what these people did! This is how the first modern Russian mafia was allowed to develop within the individualistic culture of the predatory capitalist culture of the US! By 1991, the criminal base was primed and ready in the US to begin the whole-sale exploitation of previously empowered and independent women in the former-USSR! As all State Welfare programmes, healthcare, employment rights and infant care were cancelled overnight by Boris Yeltsin, ordinary women were stripped of their dignity and cultural support. What they did possess, however, that is ‘their bodies’ soon became valuable commodities to the Russian mafia outfits who laid the foundation for the pornography industry that spread like a wild-fire throughout the former-Communist Bloc and Soviet Union! Out of sheer desperation to stay alive – Russian women were forced to sell their bodies to men – who in return gave them a small cut of the profits whilst they pocketed the rest!
This is surely nothing less than a US-backed Crime Against Humanity and one of the greatest reversals of fortune ever seen in the history of the world! This demonstrates just how empowered and superior the position of Russian women was prior to 1991, and just how far Russian women had to fall as a disempowered group in post-1991 Russia! This is a process that Sarah Walsh was willing to writhing about in the Village Voice – where she dared to voice the terrible reality that modern Russian women (and girls) found themselves within. It was a terrible plight involving kidnap, torture, rape and even murder if the women concerned would not submit to the fascistic conditions that awaited them in the seedy nightclubs and dance halls of New York! More than this, however, but the process of degradation began in Russia (and across Eastern Europe itself), with the sudden appearance of a pornographic industry (where none previously existed) being presented as something akin to a ‘laugh’ in the West!
It is believed that Sarah Walsh (by now married) went missing on July 61th, 1996, leaving her twelve-year son with her estranged partner – after receiving threats from the Russian (Ukrainian) Mafia residing in New York because of her journalist articles (appearing in the ‘Village Voice’) were exposing the true hell the collapse of the USSR meant for the rights of Russian women (and women across the former-Communist Bloc of Eastern Europe)! Garnishing any sense of ‘sympathy’ for these women threatened to diminish the billion-dollar sex industry in Russia and the US which was getting a lot of Russian men (but no women) exceedingly rich! The last thing the Russia Mafia wanted was the US government passing laws to ‘protect’ Russian women from this exploitation! Of course, with the removal of Sarah Walsh and her troublesome reporting, the US public soon went bak to ignoring the plight of Russian women and the US government was not required (through the pressure of social outrage) to enact any laws that would have negatively affected this trade in human-flesh! Sarah Walsh remains ‘missing’ to this day – and is believed to have been murdered by the Russian Mafia in the US.
Russian Language Articles:
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/245118
https://hmong.ru/wiki/Susan_Walsh_(missing_person)
English Language Video:
New Jersey Unsolved Missing Persons Cases That Remain Unsolved Mysteries #6
THE SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 