Communism is Soviet Power + Electrification of the Whole Country
VLADIMIR LENIN, REPORT ON THE WORK OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE’S COMMISSARS. DECEMBER 22, 1920
The work of decommunizing Ukraine may have begun:
Zelensky confirms power outages
Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa
Normally, wars start this way, i.e. the US would have done this on February 24th. Russia tried the "let's try not to kill Ukrainian soldiers" thing in Feb/March and has done the "let's avoid collateral damage at the expense of military success" thing for half a year now.
Reading pro-Russia Twitter is such a mind-f**k. I’d bet RWA is correct that Putin’s, “this is what “de-communization” looks like,” quip refers to the fact that the entirety of Ukraine’s water and electric infrastructure was built by the USSR. So as Mark and RWA put it, de-communization is just a joke for de-industrialization. But many pro-Russian accounts are tankies that were born towards the end of, or after, the Cold War, live on Twitter, and they took it as an embrace of socialism.
But if you read Putin’s speeches throughout his Presidency and Premiership, they contain the most anti-communist, anti-Soviet speeches of any world leader since Reagan left office. He blames the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Stalin in particular for breaking up the continuity of the Russian nation and empire, and dividing it by nationality, and he has a particular hardon for Kruschev for arbitrarily granting Donbas and Crimea to Ukraine. That was in his causus belli speech for the current war—“then Kruschev for some reason…”
On the other hand, like boomers in the USA, he considers victory in WWII and the industrialization and technological achievements of the 1930’s-1950’s to be great things worthy of emulation, so he often has to awkwardly praise Stalin. Hence why the tankies think he’s a crypto-communist. Ironically, just as Putin has become an all purpose boogie man to the globalist left and establishment parties, he’s become a ready cipher to champion the causes of disaffected trad right and hard socialist left groups—most of whom just need to put down the phone/tablet and spend some time walking outside or in the gym. {He said typing on an iPhone while inside}.
The only thing that’s clear to me from following this war is that these words and phrases don’t mean the same things to me and other westerners who did not live through that history. Is anyone else getting that takeaway?
I have never actually seen hubris is physical form...but it drips off Ursula like the slime in Ghostbusters.