Russia and Ukraine

[arewethereyet]

Putin's "Russia" is different than Soviet "Russia".
Soviet Russia had different tactics than Putin's Russia.

Soviet Russia was an imperialist superpower, while Putin's Russia is a member of a bigger alliance that includes "China-North Korea-Iran,...(other countries we don't yet know).

Soviet Russia fought for the USSR only, but Putin's Russia fights for the bigger alliance I just mentioned.


No, the U.S "retreated" just like Vietnam and lost Billions, we mentioned that in an old post.
Back to Putin's Russia.

I don’t agree with that. I was born in 1981. I visited Bulgaria in the time of the socialist dictator Todor Jivkov (1919-1998). I saw people with Turkish origin queuing in front of our embassy to get a visa to Turkey. I saw the very same people moving back to Bulgaria after the end of communism when Bulgaria became a part of the EU in 2007.
 
What your generation doesn’t know is the issue of true communism. So yes, Stalin was a dictator and a mass murderer. But there is an element that makes him different from Putin (or even Mussolini). Stalin was a believer in what we call “Proletariat dictatorship”. So live was not very easy in Bulgaria in the end of the 80’s. But people had more money than they could afford. In east Germany for instance people were queuing for something. When you asked them what they were waiting for, they would tell you that “if all these people are waiting there has to be something at the end of the queue”.
 

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Here’s a picture of the first McDonald’s restaurant that opened in Moscow in 1991:


 
+ in socialist countries you had free electricity, healthcare, education, working hours were something like 30 hours a week. Of course it was totally hypocritical in the bottom. But we in West (people from the left-wing of the political spectrum) we still believed in the Soviet Utopia etc.
 
The reason why Gorbatchev ended it all was that he saw that hypocrisy and decided it was time to end it once and for all (see: Final scene of Rocky IV: with Rocky Balboa saying “We can all change”).
 
On Afghanistan: In North-Western Syria female Kurdish fighters I able to push these sons of ….s back. I could push them back with some other people + some basic weapons. They are barbarians who can only terrorize unarmed local populations. The US decided (and I don’t agree with that decision) to pull back because the entire effort was very demanding in terms of finances. It was nothing like Vietnam where they were facing a real army that was backed by a very patriotic population. It wasn’t even like the Soviet pullout out of Afghanistan which was also a mainly patriotic type of war at the time.
 
And I don’t know more on that. There are probably other people in this forum with better explanations
On the void Status of Countries like North Korea:

Kim Jong Un banned suicide and called it an "act of treason against socialism," 

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What exactly does when you were born have to do with any of this?  And how do you know what Winter's age is?  And WTF does it matter?

I have a child who was born in 1981, as well as one earlier than that and one later.  That means I am definitely not part your self-proclaimed oh-so-important generation.

Slow you roll a bit Scooter.  You don't know the people here as well as you think you do.