I don’t have any knowledge of which countries will become communist (either again or for the first time) in the future.
Well it’s not technically communist anymore, but Russia is undemocratic, authoritarian, clamps down on Freedom of the Press and shoots honest journalists like Anna Politkovskaya as if it was just another day. What Putin has done in Russia is supplanted Communism with what he likes to call a managed democracy, but it isn’t. The Cheka is the standard old term for the violent Soviet Secret Police. Anne Applebaum has argued that Russia now is basically a Chekist or (in the words of others) a Russian Fascist State. This Chekist state is supported by Putin’s cronies in the lucrative gas business in Russia (Gazprom), and by an ideology that emphasizes all of Russia’s Imperial Greatness, and the ROC. It’s a poisonous stew of nationalistic messianism (Nicolas Berdayev noted this about Russia), imperialism, dictatorialism at the top, a whitewashing of communist crimes, and the Russian Orthodox Church for religious buttressing.
There are many similarities between the Tsarist Regime, the Russian Communist regime, and today’s Chekist regime, a point Harvard Professor Richard Pipes always stressed ascribing the Russian craving for a brutal, strong hand to the legacy of Tsarist Patrimonialism where subjects had no rights.
And Russia, even with its population being decimated to alcoholism, its inhumane army where recruits get brutally hazed, some dieing, before being sent off to fight wars with Chechnya or Georgia, in spite of all this, Putin, instead of launching humanitarian help for the poor Russian people pulls stunts like this.
nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/05patrol.html?_r=2
or
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8188532.stm
Russia has even brought back the old Stalinist anthem as its National Anthem which absolutely outraged all the numerous political prisoners who suffered under communism. Russia is not a democracy, like in the Soviet Union the press is not only not free, all T.V. stations get something called “temnyky”, instructions on how to put only positive spins on Putin. Its a controlled press just as in the Soviet Union. Anyone who dares to remember the sufferings under Communism in books like Orlando Figes has, has his works banned.
You wish to protest, Freedom of Assembly, in Russia? It will not be allowed usually, just as in the Soviet Union. Russia’s xenophobic Putin-formed youth groups (called Nashi, or OURs as opposed to theirs, the rest of the world) are allowed to protest and cast all insult in front of Western Embassies in Moscow. Once, pro-democracy protesters show up, like the Chess Player Gary Kasparov, they are arrested. So no freedom of assembly for all intents and purposes.
I also point to the fact that Putin in 2002 made it the year of Secret Police in Russia and actually had stamps to commemorate the occasion: a stamp was even issued to honour the head of the brutal K.G.B. in Ukraine at the time of the Great Famine where some 5-7 millions of Ukrainians died in 1932-33 in the Soviet Union. Now can you imagine modern Germany placing stamps honouring the Gestapo or SS with stamps of Himmler or Eichmann? This is the equivalent, yet Putin sees nothing wrong with it.
In any event, this thread started off as dealing strictly with the Russian Patriarch Kirill visiting Ukraine but thankfully he has returned to Moscow.
If we go on to talk about Russian internal politics, I do not know: is it not better to start a new thread: as in “Is Russia becoming an undemocratic, imperial, authoritarian power?”. I would not know which section to post that under, perhaps Secular News, I don’t know.
God Bless All!
