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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (540057)	10/16/2025 2:13:49 PM
From: Ron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540985

NPR had a story yesterday about 'The Terror' under Stalin, and how he moved it into nearly all sectors of society. Also, the cult of personality which Khrushchev helped construct when Stalin was dead. The true toll of victims of Soviet government will probably never be known. No wonder they drink a lot.

To: Sam who wrote (540057)	10/16/2025 3:12:51 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	2 Recommendations Recommended By Tom Daly Wharf Rat Respond to of 540985

The reasons why Russia remains a paranoid dictatorship today, with the US MAGA rapidly trying to emulate Russia, is not wholly determined by their past - but their histories are informative. Western Europe: England and most of Europe gradually saw the Black Death from 1385 create labor shortages and rising compensation for workers, which was initially met with laws requiring freemen to work for the old rates - which was unenforceable. This led to peasant revolts, notably in 1381, and the slow elimination of slavery and serfdom over roughly a 200 year period. Queen Elizabeth I freed the last remaining serfs in 1574. In some ways in England this was preceded by the Magna Carta in 1215 which established limitation of the power of the Crown for wealthier and more powerful citizens. The Black Death also affected the areas controlled by the Russ Vikings, but this never led to freeing the Slavs. This is one significant difference between Eastern and Western Europe. In spite of the French Revolution in 1789 and those in other Western European regions, in 1838 Alex deToqueville still noted significantly enhanced freedoms and social mobility for non-native Americans when compared with the citizens of France or England who were still more significantly controlled by the established old families and their order. The US created a new social order for people which fed back to Western Europe, ignoring of course the fact that this new social order did not extend freedom to slaves or native Americans. . Specific Eastern European history: Eastern Europe had a similar system of serfdom to England and Western Europe with most inhabitants indentured to local chieftains, who frequently fought with each other over territory. The Russ Vikings who had already established trade routes from Scandinavia to Constantinople, with their headquarters fort in Kiev. The Russ Vikings were also willing to work as highly paid mercenaries to the local warlords. Over a very short period of time, the Russ Vikings questioned why they were working security for quarrelsome competing warlords when they could establish a more peaceful environment for trade by eliminating the warlords and taking over their fiefdoms and their serfs. The Russ Vikings called these serfs they inherited the Slavs - people from many different genetic backgrounds who all had the same social job status of being a slave or a serf. One key aspect of Viking slavery was that Slavs could not be sold off of the land which owned them. Slavs were a fixture of the real estate and they transferred with the change of land title to each new owner. The Russ Vikings now fought disputes over territory and power over a larger scale, just as they did in the West as the Vikings in France, by then called Normans, invaded England and Ireland and took control from the Harold Godwinson the Viking Lord of Wessex in 1066. The US did not abolish slavery until the 1861 Civil War ended in 1865. The specter of the US Civil War was a major psychological factor in Czar Alexander II reforming Serfdom in 1861. Alexander II: Enacted the Emancipation Reform of 1861, which formally abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire. He freed approximately 23 million Slavs, giving them rights like the ability to marry without permission, own land, and to travel without the land owners permission. But these emancipation reforms were flawed, and the freed serfs often faced new restrictions. The Slavs were still tied to their local village communes, which were responsible for collecting taxes, and were often prevented from leaving to seek work elsewhere. This replaced bondage to landlords with a new form of bondage to the commune. While most former slaves in the US became sharecropper tenant farmers to their former masters, their freedom to leave and migrate to a different part of the US or the world gave them significantly greater freedom than that enjoyed by the "freed Slavs" in 1861. With the Bolshevik Revolution upending the old system in 1917 through 1924, Slavs enjoying a chaotic freedom for a brief eight or ten years before the system quickly moved backward. Many of the old order descendants of the Russ Vikings fled to the West with some remaining behind with the Slavs. With the death of Lenin in 1924, power was consolidated by the alcoholic son of a shoemaker from Georgia, Josef Jughashvili, who called himself Mr Steel (Mr Stalin) the classic strong authoritarian leader. With violence Stalin placed Slavs and all residents of Russia under a new collective production farm system between 1927 and 1933, creating similar manufacturing collectives in the cities. Even worse, Stalin used mass indiscriminate arrests to recreate a New system of Slavery to do the forced slave work to industrialize Russia and the fear to maintain social order under chaotic conditions. The more independent minded Ukrainian farmers were starved out, killing millions. When this horrific system finally collapsed in 1990, former KGB agents and military men, called "Siloviki" in Russia borrowing the name for athletic strong-men, became the new warlords who took over the assets of the former society as Oligarchs - with Putin, the skankiest of them all, taking over the leadership. In many real ways lasting change has never come to Russian society. Why many Americans find the horrors of Russia appealing is a mystery to me.