Jesus, Putin. I get that you're a Communist and all, but I can't stand watching you look at the Soviet Union through those rose-tinted glasses. I think your arguments would hold a lot more credibility if you stopped pretending that Communist countries were/are Heaven on Earth.

Your arguments are generally well constructed and well supported, but then you flat out ignore this sort of thing. It's just so, so inconsistent.

Feel free to ignore this comment, it's just that this sort of dogmatism is a serious pet peeve of mine.

@ Vaibhav

Why are you scared of China? They cannot project power well. Their air force and navy is an absolute joke.

They don't have to actually walk into Auckland to be a threat to New Zealand. Even the threat of the threat of force can be enough for other nations to accept the Chinese diktats. Even the slightest sort of alteration in the balance of naval power or army strength is enough for states to rethink their postures and hypothetical responses to what a very strong and very undemocratic China might want to do to them or their neighbors. This would involve economic and diplomatic channels in addition to physical intimidation.

youradhere, Putin33 is a True Believer in the communist idea. He's a throwback to an era which ended de facto in 1989 and in any honest person's heart in 1968. The guy won't even deign to condemn or even criticize North Korea, that's how deep he is. The only good thing about his ideas are that virtually no one else on Earth shares them.

What does this have to do with the 'communist idea'? I was defending flat tax Russia and pointing out that the US does a lot to aggravate relations between major powers. The Communists are the opposition and leaders of the Other Russia movement who routinely denounce Putin. Invictus wants to ignore Yeltsin's responsibility for creating the current political arrangement in Russia, and even defended the shelling of the parliament and killing of 200 anti-Yeltsin protesters. Tiananmen Square resulted in the same amount of deaths but China got a decade or so of sanctions because of it, and in the latter protest a number of police/soldiers were lynched or burned alive. But Yeltsin's butchery is ok because the protesters were communists instead of people waving around paper machete Statues of Liberty.

Invictus's non-stop lecturing about human rights rang hollow ages ago.

Sure, Yeltsin was an ass. But the 200 people he killed doesn't measure up to the numbers that died in Soviet Labor Camps, for example. It's one thing to criticize Yeltsin, another to ignore the flaws of the system that preceded his presidency.

@Ulyses, I would like to know where you got the 3 years from. Cause according to CINC scores, China has been the world power since 2007...

We are all aware that Stalin's Soviet Union was not communism, yes? The labor camps were not a result of Communism and was not advocated by Yeltsin's opposition. Yeltsin was a Russian Nationalist, while people who opposed him still believed in the Soviet Union. Those 200 hundred dead should not be justified. Anyways back to China, I doubt China is perfect and neither is the US, but I think we can all agree that global stability is important for the future.

Then what was Stalin's Soviet Union? It might not have been purely Marxist, but it looks rather Communist to me...

By "died", I assume you mean executed. We know exactly how many people were executed in the labor camps.

From 1921-1929 - > 23,391
From 1930-1936 - > 40,137
From 1937-1938 - > 681,692
From 1939-1953 - > 54,235 (23,278 of which occurred in 1942)

[A. I. Kokurin / N. V. Petrov (Ed.): GULAG (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej): 1918–1960]

Most Gulags were closed in the 1950s. So what you're talking about wasn't even relevant for over 3 decades.

Furthermore, we weren't even talking about the USSR, we were talking about the fact that Putin was being blamed for Russia becoming "authoritarian".

You're attacking me for things I didn't even say in this thread.

Don't get into a hairsplitting contest on left wing terminology. It's basically a No True Scotsman fallacy.

Putin33, I never said Yeltsin was right to kill those people or even that he was a perfect leader. All I said was that it was understandable that he be harsh on his political opponents threatening the new, ostensibly democratic Russia. This was, after all, only a few years after the August Putsch and the communists in the legislature were the exact same people who were running the Soviet Union.

And all THAT was part of the larger point that Russia had a chance at democracy before Putin was president, but now that has gone. I never said that Yeltsin was perfect, only that Russia had a shot at real reform before Putin calcified power around him and his cronies. It was uphill during the 1990s, impossible now. But being so ideologically beholden to lefty politics you can't even see that distinction.

1. I'm not attacking you. I am pointing out one element of your writing that I find undermines your arguments as a whole. That includes what I've seen outside of this thread.

2. True, the Gulags were closed thirty years before the Yeltsin era, but the system that produced them was still going strong. In my opinion, that makes them very much relavent to a discussion of post-Soviet politics.

3. I am under the impression that Soviet rule/influence led to an atmosphere of distrust and oppression. Perhaps I'm biased, since most of my knowledge comes from East Germany, but nothing I've read suggested the environment in the Soviet Union was very different. I suspect that that, at least, changed under Yeltsin. I think the jury's still out as to how it is under Vladimir.

The Communists weren't "threatening" the new "democratic" Russia, they were opposing Yeltsin's neoliberal schemes of privatization in which the entire wealth of the country was handed over to Yeltsin's oligarch friends at garage sale prices. The CPRF was a completely new political formation that was not identical to the CPSU. Yeltsin banned the CPSU in 1991, yet another example of his commitment to 'democracy' I'm sure. The leaders of the coup were not the same people in parliament in 1993, because the coup leaders were in prison until 1994. You also forget to mention Yeltsin's rigging of the 1996 elections, in which he almost certainly would have lost to the Communists. But I guess all of that is "understandable" so long as you're sufficiently anti-communist, right?

But the nuances of 1990s Russian politics escape you because you're committed to this anti-communist bluster in which Putin is somehow equated with "lefty politics".

"But the nuances of 1990s Russian politics escape you because you're committed to this anti-communist bluster in which Putin is somehow equated with "lefty politics"."

Now that's a personal attack. Ad hominem. I also think those undermine your arguments because they make you seem like a douchebag. People will only see the personal attack instead of the argument preceding it, even if the argument was perfectly sound.

Most of the rest was correct, as far as I know, and I agree that there's little that can be said to justify it (I don't know about the 1996 election). Like I said earlier, Yeltsin was an ass. That doesn't make Putin a hero and it most certainly does not make the Soviet Union any better. I'm curious as to how the legacy of the Putin era will pan out; I find him rather authoritarian but his oligarch-busting, even if some of it is done for the wrong reasons, may prove to be more important than his personality in hindsight.

Typical.

Yourad, it was a response to a couple of ad hominem attacks by Invictus. But you're right, I should just ignore his attacks.

People forget how much of a basketcase Russia was before Putin came to power. The fact is nothing Putin has done remotely comes close to the kind of authoritarianism Yeltsin did. The difference though is under Putin Russia has become an effective state, while Yeltsin was an autocrat who was presiding over a failed state.

I hesitate to call Yeltsin an autocrat just because he seems like a blundering drunk. I just can't bring myself to see anything sinister about the man.

Vladimir has most definitely made the Russian state more effective. What I worry about is his reluctance to relinquish power. An authoritarian ruler, no matter how good he is for the country in the short run, cannot be good news in the long term. Those are my two cents, anyways. Off to bed, then.

Dont forget Stalin engineered the Ukrainian Famine which killed more people than the Holocaust.

SMH

SMH? That's what we call the Sydney Morning Herald. What do you mean Putin?
(are you referring to the Ukrainian Famine? An event, if I recall correctly, you are doubtful about)

Sorry that's internet shorthand for "smack my head". The Holocaust comment is too ridiculous to bother responding to.

lol not the Holodomor again...

No, smh is internet shorthand for "shaking my head". I would know, I'm actually of the generation that spawned it.

Lol@old people trying to use internet shorthands.

For reference: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=smh

Sure. I don't care.

SMH

Putin I vaguely remember I still owe you some links or something from that go-round ;>_>

"I tried to use internet shorthand as a response, and don't know what it means, someone pointed out that I'm wrong, quick be aloof!"

looool

Is it just me, or does every thread eventually turn into Putin33 versus everyone else?

Even if the Chinese PLA outclasses the US Army the way this guy says it does (note: it doesn't) it wouldn't matter since the USN is more powerful than the navies of the rest of the world combined and the USAF if far and away the strongest airforce. As of 2008 the US had something like 4% of the world's population yet did roughly 50% of the total military spending of any government. You sped that kind of money and then get outclassed by some country with one-third the GDP and four times the population.

@ Gunfighter - Yeah, that seems to happen a lot.