"Russophobia" and "Russophilia" :)

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Originally Posted by Alex_krsk

Ukrainian so called government is just doing what they are told by the US.
Political (and may be phisical) life of those "ministers", "prime ministers" and "presidents" fully depends on their success in defeating and depopulating Donbass (after they lost Crimea).
Washington doesnt need western ukraine, the US want to get south east resources and to cut russia off europe.
That reminds me of iraq WMD.
Lying, denying obvous reality is old tactics.
But this time it looks more like histerics.
Either they have some secret tricky plan or it's just an agony.
Let's wait and see

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I think you're right. I was shocked that my country was letting Kiev use military force against it's own citizens on so many levels. I mean, if they would let that happen in Ukraine then what would stop them from doing that here in our country?
And since all the violations that Kiev is committing are being approved by our country, then our country must be as messed up as Kiev.
But it does add up that the west would want southeast Ukraine since that's where the bulk of the Ukrainian economy is. But Monsanto could be interested in western Ukraine for it's GMO's.
I think the only people who won't get profits from this are the Ukrainian people.

In other news, the Russian team is playing against South Korea today in Brazil. It's their first match and South Korea is scared, lol. They probably still remember the match in Dubai last year. The group H opener starts at 17:00 here so that's 02:00 am in Moscow. Should be a really exciting match!

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Originally Posted by Alex_krsk

First i think you confuse EU commissons and european national electoral systems.

Second, even european national legislature is not as democratic as it appears in mass media (which mostly form the opinions). I personally had to deal with austrian law and it appeared to be much more stupid and undemocratic than "totalitarian" USSR law.

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I am not confusing them - the EU is based on democratic principles more so than most other places.

If you cannot agree that Austria is a more democratic place than what the USSR was; than basically our views on the world are just very different. Also consider that having laws is one thing, but the consistant and fair application thereof makes a big difference too. I cannot recall Austria making a mockery of law by arbitrarily relocating people to remote areas where the party at power sees fit (eg Karaganda).

I would believe you that Austria has some stupid laws too - and maybe less than perfect; however in Austria your rights as an individual are less trampled on than just about every country outside Europe (save maybe a very few)

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Originally Posted by eisenherz

I am not confusing them - the EU is based on democratic principles more so than most other places.

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Iassume you know the way eurpian "comissions" are being formed. You might consider it democratic why not.

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If you cannot agree that Austria is a more democratic place than what the USSR was;

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i didn't say that

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than basically our views on the world are just very different. Also consider that having laws is one thing, but the consistant and fair application thereof makes a big difference too. I cannot recall Austria making a mockery of law by arbitrarily relocating people to remote areas where the party at power sees fit (eg Karaganda).

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what does it have to do with law? things you are talking about were under stalin's rgime. May be i should recall Austria-Hungary either?

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I would believe you that Austria has some stupid laws too - and maybe less than perfect; however in Austria your rights as an individual are less trampled on than just about every country outside Europe (save maybe a very few)

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That was all about rights of individual.
last year in january i went to austria to ski. I rented a car and was going to stick my dash cam on frontwindow like i used to do before. The rent compoany guy noticed that and told me that now it's illegal to have a dash cam. I wasn't surprised but when i arrived i tried to find out wats going on.
Here's waht i found out.
I don't have any links and references here by me but you can easily find it if you know some german (my german is very poor so it's gonna take long) so i'm typing from my memory.
There's such comission in Austrian government called "data protection comission".
That commission (i wander what memebers of that commisiion were on) spawned a law (i wander how some "commision" can make a law at all) that bans any dash cams in a private cars. (10 000 euro fine for first violation and 25 000 for second and folowing). Not only it bans dash cams but any video recording devices (including cell phones).
But it is allowed to use dash cams in vehicles of state run companies and services. To me that means that a private person can be video recorded from withing any state owned vehicle (without any judge's decision) while the same is not allowed for that private person. Which means that the state is higher that a private person while in a "democratic" society it should be the other way around. (reminds me NK)
Another funny thing is that it's not prohibited to video record when you are not in the car. When you are in car you can't take picturesbut if you got out you can record as much as you want.

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Originally Posted by eisenherz

I cannot recall Austria making a mockery of law by arbitrarily relocating people to remote areas where the party at power sees fit (eg Karaganda).

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No, they didn't, because while this was happening in Russia, the Austrians were busy waving swastika flags and assisting their brudervolk with sending people to Treblinka and Auschwitz instead. No disrespect against the Austrians, and I am sure there were many who would have preferred not to, or re-write history a bit, but it's what happened.

Yes, the USSR/Stalin relocated people, during the war; it was probably completely misguided, but at least they didn't kill people on purpose. And the USSR stopped that when the war was over, and only a small minority of the population was affected.

Nobody here is old enough to remember those days. I don't want to sound like I'm defending that, because I'm not, but it was different times. When anyone here speaks of the USSR, they speak about the 1960s-80s

Of course they had a functioning justice system; there were regular criminals there, like everywhere else. Thieves, smugglers, black marketeers, violent people, hooligans etc. And probably also people who were wrongly accused of a crime and needed a fair trial to be acquitted. My understanding is that such a system existed in the USSR, at least from the 1950s onwards, and that only a fraction of criminal cases in the USSR had the slightest to do with politics.

I know that English speaking countries tend to believe that only trial by jury is fair, but most continental European countries don't use that system, and leave it to judges after hearing counsels of both sides. As far as I know, the USSR had non-jury trials in which the prosecutor and legal counsel of the defendant presented the case in front of a judge and citizen observers. Personally I think a professional judge, if he is reasonably unbiased is more likely to judge fairly, than a jury.

As to what happened during the second world war: All the countries involved did horrible things during the war, didn't they...? Enough said. Plus, the extreme actions of Stalin, and his personality cult were condemned by his successors, and it was not repeated again.

As for after the Russian revolution: The revolution took place almost 100 years ago, in a much harsher era. We can't judge their actions then, by today's standards, even though I agree that the bolsheviks were brutal and didn't have a great deal of respect for lives of their perceived enemies... In the rest of Europe, we had illiterate children working 12 hour shifts in factories, and peasants who weren't allowed to leave the estates of their land owners. So it's relative....

Also; this was right after the most brutal war the world had ever seen; First world war with the gruesome deaths in the trenches, mustard gas and all that. Many, many more people died in that war, than in the Russian revolution. One of the first things the USSR did after it was founded, was to withdraw from this practically meaningless war, which achieved nothing other than set the scene for the second world war.

I think the big difference, and what you are getting at, is that in countries like the USSR, the difference were that judges had to be communist party members and loyal to the state. Modern China probably has the same setup. So they would perhaps go along with some ideologically motivated judgments on rare occasions when something like that came up. I think such cases were very much exceptions. But that's why they appeared to use the criminal system against people who won't conform with the ideology or went against the state.

BTW the US government didn't hesitate to relocate most of japanese from the coast when WWII began

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Originally Posted by eisenherz

in my opinion - despite some shortcomings - the level of democracy in most European countries is still head and shoulders above most other places around the world.

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Yes, the countries are. But I am referring to the EU itself. It's run by the comission which is not democratic.

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Originally Posted by Hanna

When anyone here speaks of the USSR, they speak about the 1960s-80s

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http://boro.da33.ru/upload/users/1/7...ro.da33.ru.jpg

:)

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Originally Posted by Alex_krsk

BTW the US government didn't hesitate to relocate most of japanese from the coast when WWII began

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Да, но всё-таки извинились: From Wrong To Right: A U.S. Apology For Japanese Internment : Code Switch : NPR

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Originally Posted by Lampada

Да, но всё-таки извинились: From Wrong To Right: A U.S. Apology For Japanese Internment : Code Switch : NPR

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а ктто утверждал обратное?

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Originally Posted by Alex_krsk

а ктто утверждал обратное?

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И как-то компенсировали всех доживших. Ты вроде параллели проводишь.

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Originally Posted by Lampada

И как-то компенсировали всех доживших. Ты вроде параллели проводишь.

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I apologize for being that dumb. Но моё скудоумие не в состоянии дотянуться вашего глубокомыслия.

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Originally Posted by Hanna

No, they didn't, because while this ywas happening in Russia, the Austrians were busy waving swastika flags and assisting their brudervolk with sending people to Treblinka and Auschwitz instead. No disrespect against the Austrians, and I am sure there were many who would have preferred not to, or re-write history a bit, but it's what happened.

Yes, the USSR/Stalin relocated people, during the war; it was probably completely misguided, but at least they didn't kill people on purpose. And the USSR stopped that when the war was over, and only a small minority. ....

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hanna, i know you are very knowledgable and i respect you for that. but it appears to me your opinion on the ussr was largely formed post 1970. yes the austrians did those things during the war, but you are very very wrong with your assertion that stalin did this during the war only and did not kill people on purpose. i do not want to write books to you but maybe familiarise yourself with the times and doings of jeschow and lawrentij beria. think about the countless people that went through the underdground cells of lubjanka and butyrka. read about the people disappearing without any fair trial in countless working prison camps - from way before the war to way after the war. let me give you some examples: karaganda for example dolinka from 1931 tp 1959, workuta from 1938 to after 1960, kolyma until 1987. if after all of that you still think people were not being killed without a fair justice system in huge numbers way before and after the war and you think austria is just as bad, well then we just completely disagree.

I am vaguely familiar with what you bring up, eisenhertz, and I know that Stalin ran a very harsh regime in the 1930s, and was brutal against those he thought were his enemies, or enemies of the state.

And you are right that I judge the USSR from the era that I am familiar with.
I visited the USSR a few times in the 1980s, in my childhood, I watched kiddies programs from there growing up, and artsy Soviet films in my teens.
Balanced by the odd US film with Soviet villians, or bestseller with some gruesome story about people who were wronged by the USSR. I always figured the truth was somewhere in between. But after 1990 - the US version has been accepted by many as the truth. I.e. everybody there was a tragic victim.

Like everyone else in the 1990s I watched the news when all the dirt on the USSR was dug up; bones of people along the roads in East Siberia; retarded and handicapped children tied to their beds in in state asylums, poverty bringing out the worst in people etc. I certainly grasped pretty fast that there was a very dark and ugly side to the USSR, and that what I had seen on holidays and TV was far from the whole picture. Very disillusioning.

HOWEVER I don't think most other people in recent times had horrific experiences either. My own relatives lived in Tallinn and later Leningrad. They had plenty of opportunity to leave the country ("defect") had they wanted to, but they had made it clear that they were not interested. While I don't think they felt that they lived in an ideal country, they thought at the time, that it was good enough, and they had a comfortable life. None of this victimisation I read about later, that happened to some Baltic people happened to anyone in that family.

Plus, plenty of people here have told about their happy childhoods growing up in the USSR, and I think that is the majority. I have no reason to distrust them - I'm sure they would say so, if their experience of life in the USSR was really bad. There are also people here, who left back in those days - they haven't really brought up any major grievance either. I guess the grass just seemed greener in North America, or Israel or wherever they went to.

But seriously, I don't see the point in dwelling obsessively on the past. For example some Brits can't hear the word Germany or Germans without starting to obsess about various aspects of the War. It's tiresome, rude and pointless. Everybody in Germany knows it all too well, so what's the point? I feel the same way about the harsh aspects of Stalin's regime, about the US having discriminated against blacks, and slavery, the many faults of the British empire.

Finally --- it's the older relatives of the Russians, who had to put up with Stalin, right? So let THEM judge him, if they want. Stalin did nothing to me or anyone in my family. I have no reason to dwell on him any more than historical faults of any other country.

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think about the countless people that went through the underdground cells of lubjanka and butyrka. read about the people disappearing without any fair trial in countless working prison camps - from way before the war to way after the war.

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No, you wrong, the exact number of the victims of Stalin repressions is very precisely counted. Strangely enough but the bolsheviks were good accountants. There is a dossier for every disappeared victim. There is a small problem - this number is not big enough to satisfy modern West anti-soviet (read "anti-Russia") propaganda.
You can read about it here: Легенда о количестве жертв сталинских репрессий (Владимир Иванов 57) / Проза.ру - национальный сервер современной прозы

@ Serge
counted they may be - i give you that.
but accounted for -many are not (esp where half-foreigners) were imvolved

@ hanna; you are right.... no need to dwell om the past too much , got carried away a little.... better to look forward

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Originally Posted by SergeMak

No, you wrong, the exact number of the victims of Stalin repressions is very precisely counted. Strangely enough but the bolsheviks were good accountants. There is a dossier for every disappeared victim. There is a small problem - this number is not big enough to satisfy modern West anti-soviet (read "anti-Russia") propaganda.
You can read about it here: Легенда о количестве жертв сталинских репрессий (Владимир Иванов 57) / Проза.ру - национальный сервер современной прозы

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So what IS the figure, and is it contested? I honestly have NO idea.

The article was a bit hard to follow, I thought.

Another aspect to this, is that the USSR really strongly rejected Stalin's personality cult and his brutal tactics almost immediately after he died.

It's clear that a lot of higher up people were scared of his regime, and as soon as he was off the scene, they rejected him, and discouraged personality cults in other communist countries.

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So what IS the figure, and is it contested? I honestly have NO idea.

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I don't know what the "true" figure is, but for JUST the Ukrainian S.S.R. victims during the first "Five-Year-Plan" (1928-1933), I've seen estimated death tolls ranging from 5 million (a number admitted by later Soviet historians) to 20 million (a number claimed by some Ukrainian nationalists living outside the USSR).

Different political biases aren't the only source of the disagreement. It's likely that millions of "unaccounted for" Ukrainians were geographically displaced by the "Первая пятилетка", but many did not die as a direct result of the Plan -- instead, they may have perished years later during the Nazi invasion (not as a result of being murdered by their own government).

Also, there were two serious droughts in Ukraine during this five-year period, which suggests that many would have died from famine anyway even if the Five-Year-Plan had not existed -- yet it's almost certainly the case that the Plan needlessly increased the total number of famine deaths. But what percentage of the deaths from starvation should be blamed on Stalin's policies, and what percentage were due to the "unavoidable natural disaster" of the two droughts? (In other words, if a famine occurs under conditions of a centrally-planned economy, should we conclude that the famine itself was "planned"?)

P.S. Of course, there are similar uncertainties when trying to estimate the total number of Chinese who died under Mao, or the "real" number of African victims during the centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. (We don't know the total number who died IN AFRICA while being transported to the slave ships, for example.)

Exactly - Stalin was ruthless, but the war situation made him worse than he otherwise would have been. As for the that whole starvation-in-Ukraine episode; it was one of the many things that I came to the light in the 90s, wasn't it? We will never know about the "what if" speculation. I find it hard to believe that somebody would have triggered starvation on purpose. Most people simply wouldn't want to be that cruel, plus there is no realistic motivation.

Almost all European countries have a horrible famine at some point in their history over the last couple of centuries. Ukraine's was quite recent, that's all. Of course, if Ukrainians really believe that they were being starved deliberately, it's not hard to understand that they have an axe to grind.

Also, unless if I'm not mistaken, it was under Stalin that the Soviet Union was so super productive that the USA flipped over and choked on its coffee...

They got worried that communism could be a serious contender to capitalism in terms of productivity and innovation (so far, that doesn't seem to be the case, unless people are high on revolutionary fever, have good leaders and there is some very strong motivation to work hard...)

Not to mention the victory over Nazism which happened while Stalin lead the country. So there WAS a positive side to his leadership.

Stalin almost won "most popular Russian" in that competition a few years ago - despite technically not being Russian. Clearly there are people in Russia who admire some aspects of his leadership.

I totally leave it to the people of the ex USSR countries to judge him, or not. It's got nothing to do with me.

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They got worried that communism could be a serious contender to capitalism in terms of productivity and innovation (so far, that doesn't seem to be the case, unless people are high on revolutionary fever, have good leaders and there is some very strong motivation to work hard...)

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I know one such country, but the problem is, their level of innovation is still stuck in the 1950s xD

The problem of every commie regime is, that it's in fact a two-layer system --- developed capitalism for the "dear leaders", and slavery for everyone else. Such a system will always suck at every aspect.