Instead of listening to their gossip, let’s lay out the facts.
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No, you can’t go back to the USSR!
No, you can’t go back to the USSR!
One of the fake stories kept alive by certain American politicians, with the help of western media, is that Vladimir Putin (who, they vacuously claim, is a dictator and a tyrant) wants to reconstitute the USSR, with the annexation of Crimea as the first step.
The USSR was officially dissolved on December 26, 1991 by declaration №142-H of the Supreme Soviet. It acknowledged the independence of the 15 Soviet republics, and in the place of the USSR created a Commonwealth of Independent States, which hasn’t amounted to much.
In the west, there was much rejoicing, and everyone assumed that in the east everyone was rejoicing as well. Well, that’s a funny thing, actually, because a union-wide referendum held on March 17, 1991, produced a stunning result: with over 80% turnout, of the 185,647,355 people who voted 113,512,812 voted to preserve the USSR. That’s 77.85%—not exactly a slim majority. Their wishes were disregarded.
Was this public sentiment temporary, borne of fear in the face of uncertainty? And if it were to persist, it would surely be a purely Russian thing, because the populations of all these other Independent States, having tasted freedom, would never consider rejoining Russia. Well, that’s another funny thing: in September of 2011, fully two decades after the referendum, Ukrainian sociologists found out that 30% of the people there wished for a return to a Soviet-style planned economy (stunningly, 17% of these were young people with no experience of life in the USSR) and only 22% wished for some sort of European-style democracy. The wish for a return to Soviet-style central planning is telling: it shows just how miserable a failure the Ukraine’s experiment with instituting a western-style market economy had become. But, again, their wishes were disregarded.
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The Grisly Truth About How World War II Was Won
The Grisly Truth About How World War II Was Won
It was churlish for western leaders to boycott this week’s Victory Parade in Moscow that commemorated the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany 70 years ago.
Historic events are facts that should not be manipulated according to the latest political fashions. Being angry at Moscow for mucking about in Ukraine does not in any way lessen the glory, admiration and thanks owed to the Russian people for their heroism during World War II.
Americans and Canadians like to believe they won the war in Europe and give insufficient recognition to the decisive Soviet role. Most Europeans would rather not think about the matter. By contrast, Russians know that it was their soldiers who really won the war. They remain angry that their military achievements are ignored by American triumphalists and myth -makers.
Not only did Stalin’s Soviet Union play the key role in crushing Nazi Germany, its huge sacrifices saved the lives of countless American, British and Canadian soldiers. Were it not for the USSR’s victory, Nazi Germany might be alive and well today.
Let’s do the numbers. The Soviet armed forces destroyed 507 German division and 100 allied Axis divisions (according to Soviet figures). These latter included the pan-European Waffen SS whose largest numbers came from Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland and a division from Spain.
Soviet military historians claim their forces destroyed 77,000 enemy planes, 48,000 enemy tanks and armored vehicles. The Red Army accounted for 75-80% of Axis casualties in World war II.
In the process, 1,710 Russian cities, 70,000 towns and villages, 31,850 factories or and 1,974 collective farms were destroyed. Add 84,000 schools, 43,000 libraries and 65,000 km of railway.
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The Great Oil Game: Resource Crisis in Russia?
Weekly pageviews of “Resource Crisis.” My blog seems to be having a remarkable success in Russia, but do the Russians understand the problem of resource depletion?
Complex structures, such as states and empires, are always prone to collapse and they usually give little or no previous warnings. The collapse of the Soviet Union, indeed, had not been predicted by anyone and it came completely unexpected. In the present crisis, instead, Western analysts seem to have fallen in the opposite mistake, predicting the rapid demise of the Russian Federation. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, the Russian economic system showed a remarkable resilience and it strongly rebounded after a bad moment, last year. (image below from Bloomberg).
So, predicting collapses is always very difficult in a world’s situation that looks more and more like a Russian Roulette (an appropriate name in this context), but played with nuclear weapons. It might well be that some states which at present look very solid could be the ones to experience a sudden and unexpected Soviet-style implosion (let me not say which ones these states could be).
Let’s go more in depth in this matter. The collapse of Russia was expected in the West mainly as the result of the recent crash of the world’s oil market. That repeated the situation of the late 1980s, when the old USSR was bankrupted by a similar effect: a rapid fall of oil prices which strongly reduced the revenues from oil exports.
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The Origin of the ‘New Cold War’
The Origin of the ‘New Cold War’
This will be history, replacing myth. So: if at the start it might seem unbelievable, I request the reader — please click onto the sources; and, as you read them, you will (if you have been getting your ‘news’ from the popular mainstream and ‘alternative’ ‘news’ sources) experience the replacement of myth by actual history. The world in our time will come directly alive via the most-reliable sources that exist; and it clearly contradicts, it disproves, the widespread myth that has been projected from the ‘news.’
To start with: the ‘new Cold War,’ against Russia, is something of a misnomer, because it differs from the original version, against the U.S.S.R., in that it’s already a hot war, which started in Ukraine as being the key proxy-state for the American Government’s chief foreign-policy aim, of defeating Russia; and it’s a war that is very bloody, and widely lied-about in both the U.S. and Europe, but that is discussed in Russia as if it were somehow the result of mere errors by Western powers, when in fact all of the Western leaders knew from the get-go that this was intended to be a lynching of Russia by Uncle Sam, and when the EU have been going along with this aim because the U.S. aristocracy supposedly have the interests of European aristocrats in mind and not only their own: it’s ‘the Western Alliance,’ after all.
But it’s not ‘the Western Alliance,’ really. It’s instead a gangland war by aristocrats on the global stage, and it’s threatening to become the hottest war that ever was.
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The Implosion of American Culture | philosophyofmetrics
The Implosion of American Culture | philosophyofmetrics.
It was widely expressed by the mainstream media of the time that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall could not have been predicted. In hindsight, the stagnation and drop in oil prices should have been the obvious signs that a dramatic change was coming. And when the USSR began to borrow from western banks, the fix was in.
Western banks is something of a misnomer, as no bank, or conglomerate of banking interests, can exist separate and independent of the larger international banking structure which has been built throughout the the 20th Century. Stagnate growth and the deflationary oil prices which began in 1986 acted as fine toothed methods of transferring wealth from the social trust within the Soviet Union, forcing banks within the USSR to borrow from western banks, which was in fact an exchange of assets amongst financial institutions.
The inevitable policy shifts towards “perestroika” were obvious and planned well in advance. The agricultural crisis within the country was designed to parallel the mass movement towards “glasnost”, or openness.
When we consider the larger mandates of the CSI, Cultural and Socioeconomic Interception, the same machinations as “perestroika” and ‘glasnost” can be observed in the social fragmentation and devolution of the American middle class. Where the Soviet Union enacted policies which instigated the CSI changes within the country, it will be Americas lack of enacting policy change which will precipitate the implosion of its culture.
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