Russia and Ukraine

[Leonardo17]

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.

   If you are a baby-boomer than you must have understood what I meant in this post. I assumed that this Winterhold should be a millennial or a generation-Z if you prefer.
 
   So I wanted to emphasize the deep difference between the Russian Federation and what we called The Communist Block. I did refer to my own experience just to underline that I saw what was happening at the time in these countries rather than just having some theoretical knowledge on the issue.

   In more simple terms: Gorbatchev was nothing like Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation is nothing like the Soviet Union. The second was a superpower. It represented an ideology. A different world-view with an alternative approach to how society should work. It was allowed to use word like “imperialists”, “capitalists”, “Decadent West” etc. toward the West because it was truly based on an alternative system that Karl Marx called The Proletariat Dictatorship.

   Now Putin is using the same terminology toward the Collective West and I am the one who is asking “What do you mean by that?”. Russia is a society with the greatest unequalities in the world. It’s not a Model anymore. It’s not a socialist state. It’s economy is a market economy. So what exactly is happening here? What does it have that the West doesn’t have?

   And I believe this to be a very important issue. I don’t like to see these populists having some fairy tale arguments like this. So I’m the one who is pointing at the king and is saying “the king is naked” if you like.