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A spectre is haunting Putin. Three of them actually: the Spectres of Communism Past, Present, and Future
In all seriousness, if there’s a list of the nations next up to turn socialist, Russia would be near the top.
You think so? Hasn’t their geopolitical position put them in a place of stability? I mean I wish tho 😭
I think the precedence of socialism there is a very big leftward force multiplier. Their path is fundamentally different from other countries who might become socialist, so it will be interesting to see how it pans out. Hopefully their closeness with China will continue.
Stalin hearing about 1991:
Putin’s internal monologue:“Just look down, don’t make eye contact, don’t make this awkward”
What else can a bug do when witnessing the likeness of a titan?
Putin had many faults but he says the important thing about the communists here
As for historical memory, the memory of WWII, you know, of course, that I am ready to talk about this with arguments in hand. We have many complaints about the country’s leadership between 1917 and 1990, which is obvious. However, placing the Nazis and the Communists before WWII on the same level and dividing responsibility between them equally is absolutely unacceptable. It is a lie.
I am saying this not only because I am Russian and, currently, the head of the Russian state, which is the legal successor of the Soviet Union. I am saying this now, in part or at least in part, as a researcher. I have read the documents, which I retrieved from the archives. We are publishing them now in increasingly large amounts.
Trust me, when I read them, the picture in my mind started changing. You can think about Stalin differently, blaming him for the prison camps, persecution campaigns and the like. But I have seen his instructions on documents. The Soviet government was genuinely doing its best to prevent WWII, even if for different reasons. Some people would say that the country was not ready for the war, which is why they tried to prevent it. But they did try to prevent it. They fought for the preservation of Czechoslovakia, providing arguments to protect its sovereignty. I have read, I have really read – this is not a secret, and we are declassifying these archives now – about France’s reaction to those events, including regarding the meeting of the leading politicians with Hitler in Munich in 1938.
When you read this, when you see it, you understand that attempts can indeed be made to distort these facts. But you can at least read these documents. I can understand the current Polish leadership’s attitude to the 1939 events, but when you tell them: Just take a look at what happened slightly before that, when Poland joined Germany in the division of Czechoslovakia. You lit the fuse, you pulled the cork, the genie came out, and you cannot put it back into the bottle.”
I also read the archival documents which we received after the Red Army entered Europe: we have German and also Polish and French documents, we have them. They directly discussed the division of Czechoslovakia and the time for the invasion. And then to blame it on the Soviet Union? This simply does not correspond to reality and facts.
Simply put, who attacked who? Did the Soviet Union attack Germany? No, it did not. Yes, there were secret agreements between Germany and the Soviet Union. Incidentally, I would like to note that the Soviet troops entered Brest when the German troops had been already deployed there; the Germans simply moved back a little and the Red Army moved in. Do you see?
There is no point adding a political dimension here. Let us act calmly at the expert level, read the documents and sort things out. Nobody is accusing the Polish leadership. But we will not allow anyone to accuse Russia or the Soviet Union of what they did not do.
And lastly, I would like to say that there are some perfectly obvious things. Firstly, it was Germany that attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and not vice versa, and secondly, let us not forget who stormed Berlin. Was it the Americans, the British or the French? No, it was the Red Army. Have you forgotten this? It is easy to recall, for it is an obvious fact.
As many as 1.1 million of our people died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone. How many casualties can Britain claim? 400,000. And the United States, less that 500,000. A total of 75 percent, and probably even 80 percent of the German military potential was destroyed by the Soviet army. Are you a little rusty on this?
No, you are not rusty at all. These events are being used to deal with the current internal political matters in an opportunistic manner. This is wrong, because nothing good will come of manipulating history. At the very least, this does not promote mutual understanding, which we need so badly now.
This is leagues better than the Western narrative.
That said, there are still so many missed opportunities to drive the point home. Such as, pointing out that all the Allies had connections with the Nazis too, much more cozy connections at that.
It’s hard to believe he just casually was poking around Sovietepedia and discovered unknown things about Czechoslovakia that shifted his perception. But it’s equally weird to imagine why he would be disingenous with this.
I like a lot about Putin but he’s someone I find impossible to fully trust.
Well he is better than the Yankees and it’s western vassals that’s what the war showed us. Just imagine Russia supplying Mexico with drones to bomb US capitol.
I think it’s possible he was reviewing documents for potential release or even was looking because he found recent revisionism irritating and he found the sheer absurdity all the more striking based on information he observed therein.
I neither like nor trust Putin generally, but he frequently tells the truth about his enemies because that is enough to condemn them*
*aside from the “The West is sending homosexual ideology here to make Russia weak” type stuff, obviously that is bullshit and should be called out.
He looks like he’s about to vomit
he can’t have me shoot he can’t have me shoot he can’t have me shoot
stalin’s statue: menacing stare of dissapointment
putin: oops…
I did it again. I played with your heart. Got lost in the capitalist game. Oh Stalin Stalin
I don’t understand, what is going on 😩
He is just passing by… Lol
nsh
Putin has done a lot of good, Russia under his leadership may have fundamentally altered world history for the better by choosing to risk their neck and invade Ukraine. Someone had to stand up to the Americans in an immediately tangible and assertive way; Chinese assertion is civil and slow.
That being said, he has plenty to criticize, namely his anticommunism and queerphobia. It’s hard to rationalize away that all as 5D chess, even if I think Putin is an extremely strategic man who has helped both his people and the entire world.
As long as we all agree he is a net good for the world and that Russia was absolutely in the right to invade Ukraine–and not otherwise fall in line with American lies about the Russians–there is no reason good faith ML comrades shouldn’t have room to criticize him a bit.
Nobody is asking you to say “I agree with every single word this man has said” but maybe, just for a moment, reflect on what “criticizing Putin” even means on an English language internet platform dominated by US/EU labor aristocracy and who it benefits generally in the context of the imperialism. This is from a new book by Marxist economist Dr Ali Kadri. You can find it for free online if you know where to look. I don’t always understand everything he says but this is quite relevant. (I had to read it multiple times to understand😅)
“The waste or, sub-categorically, the many years lost from potential longevity are, by extension, a structural genocide carried out by capital in command of history. The quantitative impact of the historically wired genocide may be gauged as a result of imperialistically imposed famine policies (Avramidis 2006). Its impact through underfunded health can also be assessed by extending Sutcliffe’s (2006) measures of unnecessary deaths. The numbers of the victims crushed by the weight of [capital] is in the millions every year. Still, this capital, of which one speaks, is a social class that cannot be sliced like a salami sausage in order to apportion moral condemnation to its various slivers. No class-independent ethical value-comparative judgment can be made about the parts while skipping the decisiveness of the whole. …
What is often intended when the curtailment of civil liberties in a small dependent nation is flaunted by the mainstream media as unethical or contra human rights often develops into an excuse for the sacking of the smaller nation. However, whatever restrictions Libya imposed on political freedoms were in response to an impending assault by the US sixth fleet, or the US sponsored Islamists inside its territory, yet these restrictions were considered as valid reasons for its destruction by NATO in 2011. In hindsight, the fact that the western working class supports such obvious lies does not stem from ignorance, it is rather a personification of a capital-class position. Even in utilitarian ethics, brakes upon Libyan civil liberties by the Qaddafi government were a more humane working-class standpoint than the destruction that followed and the contribution of the collapse of Libya to the power of imperialism. In any case, ethics based on statistics are a calculus of crime. Similarly, it is theoretically salami-like to speak of this or that sub-imperialism as central capital’s undelegated power. History identifying with capital is not a salad whose constituent forces are to be discerned by some probabilistic exercise. …
By means of statistical extrapolation as well, percentage shares of wealth concentration would logically and, albeit absurdly, turn anyone into a sub-imperialist. Any sizeable state in a given region becomes sub-imperialist. It all depends on the class bent in the mode of abstraction, the dynamic laws that relate the abstract state of a concept to its concrete state, and the accounting system with which it is quantified. Contrariwise, capital incarnate in an imperialism, which commands history, is a totality. Since it is hierarchically structured in dominance, its lower suzerainties’ exercise of power is made possible, though not necessarily certain, by the clout of US imperialism. It is specifically the crushing weight of this clout, the weapons of NATO backed by its propaganda apparatuses, which is not qualified as a weapon by Western Marxism; thence, the room that is available for academics to nuance an argument and discuss what the other side in the developing world is doing wrong while it is being butchered by the very dominant thought currents housing nuanced debates. Understanding the historical moment, the assessment of the actual balance of forces, has not been a strong point of Western Marxism (slightly rephrasing of Krupskaya’s in the Lessons of October [1925]). The substance of the power of the ruling class or US-led imperialism is its capacity for ideological production, refortified by its strategic positioning and aggressions across the globe. Dominant thought is the differing currents that gravitate toward the reason of the commodity as self-expanding value.
Putting structure to thought, the global stratum invested in dollars increases its wealth as the US-led class collateralises its dollar debts/ credits with imperialist aggression/control, which is also its ability to recruit labour in bondage conditions and to further waste the future labour of the developing world. The masses act via the agency of the social class and its corresponding state of consciousness. Social humans think for themselves but draw from a dominant ideology whose strength varies with class rule, before embarking on a course of action, whence the uncertainty in historical uncertainty. In parallel, the control of capital over the means of production establishes the objectivity of history. Determinably, historical events, objective and uncertain, lie beyond the reach of probability’s guesswork. Yet this history cloned as capital, the product of organised social agency actualised in cultural and institutional practices, has its own dynamic or laws of development. The law of value, and its ascension into the AGLCA, is the principal mediatory frame by which global society reproduces. Such law allocates resources primarily by the practice of imperialist wars of encroachment. And, as argued so far, imperialist wars are a wage system in themselves and act as back-stoppers of the broader wage system."
Ch 3; The Accumulation of Waste- A political economy of systemic destruction; Dr. Ali Kadri
I feel 3rd world left love Putin, whether it’s Evo Morales, Maduro, Ortega, Kim Jong Un, South Africa, Algeria etc which is completely reverse in the global North left. That’s why there is a greater divide between global south and north and it’s leftist components too.
Nicholas Maduro President of the Bolivian Republic of Venezuela
“From Venezuela, all our support for President Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s brother,”
President of Cuba Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez: Thank you very much, dear President Putin. … We appreciate all efforts of the Russian Federation and your role in orienting the world towards multi-polarity, in encouraging it to move in this direction. In this sense, you have a very strong leadership role. I would also like to exchange views on this.
… I was very interested in your speech on the reunification of a group of regions with Russia. You made a very meticulous, clear-cut analysis of the events since the Soviet Union’s disintegration, denouncing the role that the imperialist powers tried to play. You made a very thorough analysis of what is happening in the world. You made it clear that the world should come to its senses and described those who are imposing their rules on us. You explained why they impose these rules on us and why they violate them later.
I think this is very structured thinking and analysis, and it is worth sharing with the world. I was happy to listen to this speech. We have identical approaches and views on global issues."
Daniel Ortega Saavedra, Nicaraguan President
We salute the great Russian people, you, your government, and the families of all Russia, in these moments of great challenges… to you, comrade President Vladimir Putin, our affection, in revolutionary brotherhood.
Kim Jong Un president of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
“Russia has risen for a sacred fight to protect its national sovereignty and safety against hegemonic forces,” Kim said ahead of negotiations on Wednesday. “We will always stand together [with Russia] against imperialism.”
Xi Jinping President of the Peoples Republic of China
Xi, for his part, praised Putin, saying: “Under your strong leadership, Russia has made great strides in its prosperous development.”
Beijing and Moscow are friendly neighbors and reliable partners, Xi Jinping said upon his arrival in the Russian capital on a state visit.
“It gives me great pleasure to once again set foot on the soil of Russia, our friendly neighbor, and pay a state visit to the Russian Federation at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin,” the Chinese leader said.
“On behalf of the Chinese government and people, I wish to extend warm greetings and best wishes to the Russian government and people,” he added. “China and Russia are friendly neighbors and reliable partners connected by shared mountains and rivers,” Xi Jinping stressed.
“Ten years ago, I paid my first state visit to Russia as Chinese President, and together with President Putin, opened a new chapter in the all-round development of China-Russia relations,” the president said.
Do they really love him though? My sense was mainly that this was an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” type of situation. Russia’s breakaway from western economies is an opportunity for countries in the global south. As such it makes sense that the left in those countries would aim to foster positive relations with Putin and the Russian government. That’s regardless of what they privately think about the guy.
Weird meme.
It looks like Putin’s just paying his respects in the photo
lmao no way
