Russian Duplicity

Sickening Conduct

Germany has confirmed that Alexei Navalny has been poisoned by a Soviet-era "nerve agent."  Navalny, of course, is (or was) one of Vlad's strongest critics. 

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the same type of Soviet-era nerve agent that British authorities identified in a 2018 attack on a former Russian spy, the German government said Wednesday.

The findings – which experts say point strongly to Russian state involvement – are likely to increase tensions between Russia and the West. German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the poisoning on Navalny attempted murder and said it was meant to silence one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics.  [Stuff, September 3, 2020]

It's well past time that the law-abiding international community ruled that Vlad's post-Soviet Russia is in actual fact a rogue state.  It will be interesting to see just how far Angela Merkel will take the issue.  Since Germany has signed up to import Russian natural gas on a grand scale our expectations of something meaningful in the way of sanctions against Vlad remain low. 

We expect that Angela will take a couple of disprins and it will be "business as usual" before lunchtime. 

Spiralling Into the Abyss

Living The Lie

The Worst Part About Fake ‘Anti-Racism’ Is That It Forces Us To Live Lies

America under the sway of the Black Lives Matter movement is reminding me of life in the Soviet Union: One's entire existence is premised on something believed to be untrue.

Katya Sedgwick
The Federalist

The worst thing about socialism is not empty grocery stores or even the Gulags. The worst thing is harder to represent visually or to pinpoint, but it’s inescapable, and its damage extends for generations. The worst thing about socialism is what being forced to live a lie does to one’s psyche. Save for the few true believers whose numbers dwindle as time passes, virtually everyone experiences this mental toll.

By “living a lie,” I don’t mean minor shows of pleasantry or even bowing to social pressures. I mean having one’s entire existence premised on something widely, by an unspoken agreement, believed to be untrue.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but the pillar of the State.” Solzhenitsyn recognized that the violence of the state depends upon the cowardly culture of lies, on ordinary people trying to stake out space to live while complying with the dictates of the regime.

I Was Made to Live a Lie in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, that meant in everyday life that preschool-age kids were forced to recite verses praising the Bolshevik Revolution and that their parents were diverted from work to march in parades. Political meetings convened at schools and workspaces on a regular basis. Sometimes commissars vanished from pictures. Day after day, television delivered news of record harvests or some exciting technological innovation, but these events always took place somewhere far away and didn’t involve anyone we knew.

One didn’t have to dig very deep to discover that under the smooth veneer of uniformity was a vast, stormy sea of despair and resentment.

Something's Not Right

Goodbye — Sort of — to Germany?

Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online


Why should America anchor Germany's defense? It cuts deals with Russia, has never met its NATO commitment, and is the most anti-American nation in Europe.

President Trump recently ordered a 12,000-troop reduction in American military personnel stationed in Germany. That leaves about 24,000 American soldiers still in the country.  A little more than half of the troops being withdrawn will return home. The rest will be redeployed to other NATO member nations, such as Belgium, Italy, and perhaps Baltic and Eastern European countries.

German chancellor Angela Merkel is said to be furious. She claims that the redeployments will “weaken the [NATO] alliance.” German commercial interests chimed in that the troop withdrawals will hurt their decades-old businesses serving U.S. bases.  Perhaps, but Merkel surely cannot be surprised. Six years ago, all NATO members pledged to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Yet only eight of 29 so far have kept their word.

Germany spends only about 1.4 percent of its GDP on defense. As NATO’s largest, wealthiest, and most powerful European member, it sets the example for the rest of alliance.  Merkel’s reneging on her 2014 pledge helps explain why less wealthy and influential NATO members also see no reason to meet their obligations.

Germany surely knows that 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the World War II, and the 29th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall — the symbolic end of the Cold War.  Will there be any point in the future when Europe is confident enough to be a full defense partner with the U.S. rather than an eight-decade client?

NATO, of course, still provides a common European defense, but only by habitually relying inordinately on U.S. military contributions.

Vlad's Tyrannical Corruption Likely Up On Stage Again

Russian Opposition Leader Alexei Navalny Allegedly Poisoned

John Hayward
Breitbart News

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been frequently arrested and legally harassed for his unrelenting criticism of President Vladimir Putin, became seriously ill while flying from Siberia to moscow on Thursday and was placed on a ventilator. Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh claimed he has been poisoned.

“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed into the tea. It was the only thing that he drank in the morning. Doctors say the toxin was absorbed faster through the hot liquid,” Yarmysh said via Twitter.  The Associated Press quoted Yarmysh, who was on the plane with Navalny, saying he began to sweat profusely and asked her to keep talking to him so he could “focus on the sound of a voice.” She said he passed out while using the restroom and has not regained consciousness since.

“Looks like Putin is doing really badly – was handed some data on protest sentiment growing explosively – if he made the decision to poison Navalny,” Navalny ally Vladimir Milov said when news of his condition broke.

CNN described video footage taken aboard the plane that appeared to show 44-year-old Navalny groaning in distress, and later showed him being transported to an ambulance in a wheelchair. The plane made an emergency landing in Siberia, and Navalny is currently a patient in the acute poisoning unit of a hospital in Omsk.

The head physician of the hospital told reporters Navalny is on a ventilator and in serious condition, but stable. He said poisoning “is considered as one of the possible reasons for the deterioration of his state,” but added there could be “a number of conditions that started acutely and led to the same clinical reactions.”

According to Yarmysh, the hospital prevented Navalny’s wife Yulia from visiting him because she didn’t bring her marriage certificate and he did not consent to see her. Yarmysh sounded deeply skeptical of this explanation.

“They’re not letting her in because ‘the patient has not agreed to a visitor.’ They’re literally saying that,” she snorted. If nothing else, it seems odd to expect a comatose patient to give his consent for a visitor.  Yarmysh was also deeply skeptical of state media reports that the police think it is “not unlikely” that Navalny had an allergic reaction to something he consumed, rather than being poisoned.  “Of course. It’s just the tea was bad. This is what the state propaganda is going to do now — yell that there was no deliberate poisoning, he [did something] accidentally, he [did something] himself,” she said sarcastically on Twitter, with edits from the Associated Press. . . .

The New York Times recalled Moscow’s lamentable history of poisoning dissidents, most famously including former intelligence agents Sergei Skripal, who was attacked in the United Kingdom along with his daughter in 2018, and Alexander Litvinenko, who suffered a very messy assassination in London in 2006 that apparently involved slipping radioactive polonium into his tea.

Litivenko’s widow Marina, who now lives in Sicily, told the Associated Press it was “obvious” Navalny would “not be stopped” from exposing corruption and criticizing Putin, so “maybe they decided to do a new tactic not to stop him just with an arrest but to stop him with poison.”

In addition to mounting periodic political challenges to Putin, Navalny established an anti-corruption foundation that published highly critical reports on the Russian elite, famously including Dmitry Medvedev, who has been both prime minister and president.

Navalny’s foundation was shuttered last month after a lawsuit from Kremlin-linked businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, commonly nicknamed “Putin’s Chef” for his role in organizing state dinners. Prigozhin filed a $1.2 million suit against Navanly’s foundation for allegedly defaming one of his catering companies. Russian courts have a pronounced tendency to side with the plaintiffs in such lawsuits against Navalny. Navalny said he could never pay the penalties Prigozhin and others were seeking, so he dissolved the foundation, then vowed to recreate it under a new name and continue investigating corruption.

Fading Country

Russia: A Bleak Perspective

. . . Putin's Russia is not the Soviet Union.  The Cold War really is over.  We are not in a bipolar global order, rivalled by a tyrannical Soviet empire.  Modern Russia is a fading country.  Its first-rate weaponry, armed forces, and intelligence agencies scarcely obscure its third-rate economy, declining population, pervasive societal dysfunction (high levels of drunkenness, disease, and unemployment), and lowering life expectancy.

Behind the facade of democratic elections and constitutional restraints, Russia has less a principled system of government than a marriage or rulers, oligarchs, and organized crime.  To endure, Vladimir Putin's regime must terrorize the Russian people.  [Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, (New York: Encounter Books, 2019), p.2.]

Putin Moves to Perpetual Control

Deck Chairs on Putin's Titanic 

What are we to make of Vlad the Impaler's re-arrangement of the deck chairs on his own personal Titanic?  It is hard to get beyond the initial cynical chortling over an aging fool trying to push back Father Time.

The failure of Vlad's authoritarian rule over Russia is made evident because he clearly cannot let go.  His most recent moves underscore this yet again.  The entire Russian Government has been made to resign.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev made a startling announcement on Wednesday that he and his entire government will resign to get out of President Vladimir Putin’s way as Putin rewrites the Russian constitution.  Putin seeks to add provisions that would allow him to remain in power indefinitely, although he might still have to forfeit the title of “president.”  [John Hayward, Breitbart]

So, what game is Putin playing?

Rivers of Duplicity

Russian Security Agencies Targeting Christians

Punitive Restrictions Under New “Anti-extremism” Law

Barnabas Fund

Russian security agencies are using sweeping surveillance powers of the “Yarovaya Law”, introduced in 2016, to impose harsh restrictions on evangelical Christian groups in the name of tackling vaguely defined “extremist” activities.

The punitive law, which imposes tough fines and even potential expulsion from Russia, places heightened restrictions on religious groups including requiring an official permit to meet outside officially registered religious buildings. This, in effect, outlaws prayer and other meetings held in Christians’ homes as well as criminalising house churches.




Russian President Vladimir Putin [Image credit: kremlin.ru]

The controversial provisions of the law give security agencies access to private communications held by telecom companies including ‘phone conversations and text messages. Concerns have been raised that email and other electronic communications inviting interested individuals to church services could also be banned.

The restrictions of the "Yarovaya Law" clearly target Protestant Christian groups and activities. However, Russian Orthodox leaders have also raised alarms in the past three years over the draconian law.

Russian Persecution of Christians

Right To Worship In Private Homes

Christian brings landmark case in Russia

Barnabas Fund


A Christian woman brought a landmark case in the Russian Constitutional Court in St Petersburg on 8 October when she challenged a fine of 10,000 rubles (£122; $155; €140) imposed by the authorities for allowing her house to be used by her Protestant church for worship services.

Olga Glamozdinova said the decision violated her right to freedom of conscience and religious confession, as well as her right to freely own and dispose of her property.  The decision of the Russian Constitutional Court in St Petersburg will determine where Protestant churches can meet for worship in the future.

Olga’s lawyer, Vladimir Riakhovsky, said he could show to the court at least a dozen similar cases, where land designation had been used to restrict the rights of Protestant Christians. If her case is successful, the ruling will have significant implications for religious freedom in Russia.

Riakhovsky said Olga’s case exposed a “legal ambiguity” that was being used to stifle freedom of conscience and religious associations. “The right of a religious organisation to conduct worship services in residential buildings is explicitly provided by the Federal Law,” he said.

In January 2017, Olga allowed her fellow church members to meet in the house she owns in the village of Veselyi, Rostov Oblast, once a week for a four-hour worship service. She also registered the church at the house, which is built on land designated for “private farming”. Nine months later, in September 2017, district officials fined her for “use of the land for unintended purposes”, a decision later upheld in two court hearings.

Vlad the Impaler's Machinations Fall Apart

Skripal 'Hitman' Unmasked as GRU Colonel 

Awarded Russia's highest military honour by Vladimir Putin

Hayley Dixon, Robert Mendick
Daily Telegraph UK  
NZ Herald

One of the trained assassins wanted for poisoning Sergei Skripal is a decorated colonel in Russian military intelligence given the country's highest award by Vladimir Putin.  The real identity of one of the wanted men in the nerve agent attack - named by counter-terrorism police as Ruslan Boshirov - can be disclosed as Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga.

The 39-year-old, who has served in wars in Chechnya and Ukraine, was made a Hero of the Russian Federation by decree of the President in 2014 in a ceremony shrouded in secrecy.


This combination photo made available by the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday September 5, 2018, shows Alexander Petrov, left, and Ruslan Boshirov, who has been identified as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga.

The disclosure, uncovered by investigative journalist organisation Bellingcat in conjunction with the Telegraph, exposes as lies Mr Putin's claims that the Skripals' would-be killers were innocent "civilians".

Pull The Other One . . .

What's With Winston and Russia?

In New Zealand we have a senior politician--the Deputy Prime Minister in fact--who seems to have a deep attachment to Russia.  No-one is quite sure why the attachment exists, but in his role as Foreign Minister, Winston Peters endeavours to put a positive gloss on anything and everything the Russian state does.  It is puzzling.

When Russia was publicly accused of using two professional spies from its secretive GRU to attempt to assassinate two Russians in the UK, Peters played it down.  As the evidence mounted he reluctantly "got on board" with the rest of the human race and agreed that it was a bad look for Russia.  This was one horse Peters ought never to have backed.

The two GRU agents had since returned to Russia and gone to ground.  But when the formal accusations and indictments came forth from the UK, the hapless duo were paraded on Russian state TV for an interview in which they claimed they had merely been tourists in the UK.

The Daily Mail has shot holes in their clumsy story.

The Coming Dark Ages?

Can Russia Remain a Great Power?

Is its demographic predicament too large to overcome?

Marcus Roberts
Mercatornet


In the Second World War the people of the Soviet Union suffered enormously. By official counts (estimates) the number of Soviets who died was about 27 million people – an eighth of the pre-war population. Such a catastrophe continues to have effects through the decades. Fewer people after the war had fewer children, as these children grew up, they had fewer children and so on. Demographers call it a “wave” of population troughs and crests that undulate through the subsequent generations; its effects are still being felt in the successor states to the Soviet Union.

After Russia’s population stabilised at about 144 million people for about ten years (and was then boosted by the addition of over 2 million Crimeans – remember that?), it is once again shrinking as more Russians die than are born. Last year there was a decline in the number of Russian births by 11 percent. This decline in the number of births is set to continue: by 2032 the number of women in prime childbearing age is expected to decline by 28 percent from today’s figures, meaning that there will be fewer babies being born in the years ahead. Unless something drastic happens, the United Nations is expecting the Russian population to decline by 17 percent to 119 million by 2050.   

This state of demographic affairs is of concern to the newly re-elected Russian president, Vladimir Putin. As Bloomberg reports, Putin said that:

“‘Preserving the nation of Russia and the wellbeing of our citizens is the essence of everything,’ he said in his state of the nation address last month as a chart detailing the statistical “war echoes” loomed on a screen overhead. ‘Falling behind is the main threat. That’s our enemy.’”

In this speech to Parliament, Putin laid out a number of demographic and economic goals for his fourth term. These included propelling Russia into the top five economies. But he is battling some immense demographic headwinds.

The Gangster State

The Urki  Eventually Take Control


In 1956 the Soviet Union's tanks rolled into Hungary.  It was the beginning of the end for Western communism (although hard to perceive so early on).  What the invasion, the shootings, and the executions demonstrated for all to see was that Communism in the Soviet Union could continue to stumble onwards only through the power which grows out of the barrel of a gun.  The Eastern European communist states kept the faith because of the gun barrels pressed firmly to their temples.

It was a radical moment of self-realization.  Then came the unseemly spectacle of Khrushchev banging his removed shoe on the bench at the UN General Assembly.  His erratic misdirections and re-directions continued with the missile crisis in Cuba in 1963.  Supreme dictators were putting on a poor show.

Back home, statist socialism was also wearing thin.

. . . Khrushchev's more ambitious reforms failed to produce the promised food surpluses (another reason why his colleagues were to dump him in October 1964)  The cultivation of hitherto "virgin" lands in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia was especially disastrous: half a million tons of topsoil washed away each year from land that was wholly unsuited to forced grain planting, and what harvest there was frequently arrived infested with weeds.  In a tragic-comic blend of centralized planning and local corruption, Communist bosses in Kyrgyzstan urged collective farmers to meet official farm delivery quotas by buying up supplies in local shops.  There were food riots in provincial cities . . . . By January 1964, following the disastrous 1963 harvest, the USSR was reduced to importing grain from the West.  [Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2010), p.423. Emphasis, ours.]

It's at this point that we need to make the point once more that wherever statist socialism has been applied the only growth industries have been rampant corruption and crime.  What Venezuela is going through today is normal for statist socialism wherever it has been applied. 

But, ironically, in some parts of the USSR, food production was prospering splendidly:

When "Narratives" Become Official "Truth"

Chutzpah and Hypocrisy on Steroids

One of the most egregious cons of the present time in the United States is the con Democrats are trying to foist on the historical record.  The proposition being pushed is that President Trump and his administration have been all cosied up to the Russians.  This is bad, bad, bad.

Ah, but the truth can be a stubborn and difficult opponent when you are trying to weave a web of deceit.  It turns out that the Obama regime, controlled by ideologies of globalism and internationalism, cosied up to the Russians frequently.  Now, in a move which shows just how far deceit, lies, and falsehoods control Barack Obama and his Democrat Party, Trump is now accused of that self-same cosying up to Russia, whilst they soundly and roundly condemn him for it.

Rebecca Heinrichs, writing at The Federalist, gives five instances of Obama trying to embrace Putin and Russia in his globalist dreams.  Now, with chutzpah which is hard to credit, Obama and the Democrats are publicly accusing Trump and his administration (falsely, it would seem) for doing what they consistently worked at for eight years--cosying up to Russia. Fortunately, the Potemkin plot alleging Trump's collusion with Russia is becoming more ephemeral with each passing day.

The Face of Tyranny

Never Stop Applauding

The Spirit of Slavery and the Madness of The Tyrant

Blogger Patterico has posted that he has commenced reading Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. This just happens to coincide with our reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History.  Since we have written a couple of posts about the Gulag based on excerpts from Applebaum's excellent, thoroughly approachable history, it's relevant to add in Patterico's quotation from Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece.

Patterico quotes Solzhenitsyn as follows:

Here is one vignette from those years as it actually occurred. A district Party conference was underway in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop?

Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Kara-Murza

Cry The Beloved Country

[We have characterized Vladimir Putin as a step child of Vlad the Impaler.  Some readers may wonder why we would connect Putin with such a former Russian tyrant.  Hyperbole?  Well, yes.  We concede there is an element of truth to the charge.  But the following piece suggests that the comparison may well be much more apt than might first appear.  Ed]

Boris Nemtsov’s Legacy Haunts Putin’s Russia

A new documentary on the liberal opposition figure shines a light on his achievements.

By Nat Brown
National Review Online


Amidst the hundreds of Russia-related headlines saturating the current U.S. media landscape, it was almost inevitable that a small but significant one of them would go almost unnoticed. On May 13, the U.S. Senate came one step closer to renaming the Washington, D.C., street on which the Russian embassy is located after one of the Kremlin’s most vocal critics: the late Boris Nemtsov.

Nemtsov, who once served as Boris Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister and was one of the most important liberal political figures in 1990s Russia, ended his life a steadfast opponent of Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian regime. On February 27, 2015, he was shot to death by a car full of assassins while walking home across a Moscow bridge mere yards away from the Kremlin.

Nemtsov’s life and work is the subject of a new documentary written and directed by Vladimir Kara-Murza, himself a well-known Kremlin critic and former adviser to Nemtsov who worked closely with him in various human-rights- and democracy-promotion efforts. With a running time of just over an hour, the film does an excellent job of deftly laying out Nemtsov’s many achievements, both as one of the principal figures of the Yeltsin era, and later as a key figure in the liberal opposition to the Putin government.

Russian Orthodox Unfaithfulness

A Betrayal of the Church of the Lord

The Russian Orthodox Church has undermined its spiritual (therefore, true) power.  The Russian Government has recently put the Jehovah Witness cult under the ban.

The Russian Supreme Court upheld on Thursday a decision by the nation’s Ministry of Justice to liquidate the center for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia and to close 395 Local Religious Organizations belonging to the group.  According to a press statement by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the high court’s ruling will go into effect immediately. NPR reports the religious group’s property will now belong to the Russian government.  There are roughly 170,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia.

Russia has labeled the group “extremist” on multiple occasions, and NPR says an Interfax report recorded Svetlana Borisova, an attorney for the Justice Ministry, claiming the Jehovah’s Witnesses “pose a threat to the rights of citizens, public order and public security.”  [TheBlaze]

Rubbish.  Worse still is the mistaken position of the Russian Orthodox Church.

We Stand With Vlad On This One

New Zealand's Hypocrisy Has a Nasty Smell

Imagine a situation where New Zealand took the view that orphan Maori children could be adopted only by Maori families.  Oh, that's right.  It pretty much has been the reality for over ten years.  No problems.  Sounds about right.

Now change the circumstance.  Imagine a foreign government stipulating that orphans adopted out of that country into New Zealand had to be placed with stable heterosexual families, with a normal mother and father, rather than a homosexual "couple" or trans-sexual social arrangement.  Nah.  No go.  Why?  What's going on?

Russia banned single Kiwis and same sex couples from adopting Russian children when New Zealand legalised gay marriage. Moscow is refusing to budge on the ban.  And it is insisting that Russian officials have a say in future care placements within New Zealand if the adoption doesn't work out.  The move is another heart-breaking disappointment to a handful of Kiwi families who have been waiting since 2006 for officials to break a diplomatic impasse.

We have no doubt the "diplomatic impasse" is New Zealand's fault.  We are acting in a grossly hypocritical manner.  Racist adoption restrictions appear hunky-dory-OK when it comes to Maori children.  But ethical strictures on adoption are not, when it comes to Russian orphans.

Post-Communist Russia

A Second Darkness

Few folk in the West know just how relentlessly the Soviet regime persecuted the Orthodox Church, in the attempt to obliterate Christianity off the face of the Russias.  It's worth remembering:

Lenin seemed to have taken in earnest Voltaire's jocular remark that the era of human happiness would begin when the last king was strangled in the entrails of the last priest.  And so Lenin and Stalin destroyed or diverted to the use of the Soviet state over 90 percent of Russia's 96,000 churches and killed over 90 percent of its 112,000 Russian priests.  The rest were thoroughly infiltrated by the Cheka and its follower, the KGB, and were forbidden to proselytize or even to preach.

And indeed, this remnant church did its best to function as a transmission belt for the regime, persecuting priests who took their jobs seriously.  The Bible and religious literature were banned.  Meetings for religious purposes or religious conversations were cause for one-way trips to Siberia.

. . . . the extent to which the regime succeeded in destroying the spiritual bases of family, faith, property and law is less interesting than the reasons why it did not succeed even more.  The short answer seems to be that the campaign quickly drove millions of Russians to nihilism and that nihilism is unendurable for very long.  Visitors to the Soviet Union in the era of glasnost encountered a cynicism so deep and widespread, misanthropy so bitter, that even the most ardent communists had become frightened of it.

. . . . The constant flow of priests beaten and jailed for trying to do their job and the very existence of churches that were obviously muzzled reminded the masses that there was an alternative to the regime's morality, more attractive because forbidden.  The regime said the Church was corrupt.  But the masses knew that the regime was.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 93f.]

Fast forward to modern times.

The New Soviet Man . . . And Woman

A Barren Land

The Soviet Union produced a perpetually blighted land.  The aching hurt of that once proud people remains stronger than ever.  The nefarious fruit of totalitarian Marxism continues to poison that nation. 

One of the main targets of the Communist regime was the family.  That is one particular devastation that lingers on to this day.  One of the most succinct accounts of Soviet family breakdown has been written by Angelo Codevilla.

By the 1930's the Soviet's desire to break down the family quickly gave way to more pressing ones, like industrialization.  The Party went all-out (almost) to increase births.  Like other Soviet producers mothers were awarded medals designating ever-higher ranking, depending on the numbers of children they turned out.  And parents who produced children got preferential treatment for new apartments.  But the regime did not in the least relax the  pressure on mothers to work, nor did it let fathers exercise any authority over their families.  It was Stalin, after all, who built the cult of the boy who had reported on his parents to the secret police.  The Soviet state might encourage men and women to copulate.  But men and women would prosper or hang separately according to the whims of the Party.  Men and women together might produce children  But children would belong to the state.

From Russia, Without Love

Much of a Muchness

All totalitarian regimes can best be characterized as being in a state of war against their own people.  To be sure, totalitarian regimes do not always begin that way.  They commence with a great hope, or a grand principle only to find that governing is complex, and the more intrusive rules, regulations, laws, and edicts become, the more complex it turns out to be.  

In this regard we often think of Tolkien's conception of the Ruling Ring--

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and the darkness bind them

We reflect further on how Frodo offered the Ring to Galadriel, saying, "You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel.  I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it.  It is too great a matter for me."  Galadriel admitted that she had long yearned to have such power.

And now at last it comes.  You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen.  And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!  Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain!  Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning!  Stronger than the foundations of the earth.  All shall love me and despair!

When Hugo Chavez took control (was set up as a kind of king--the caudillo) over Venezuela.  He was widely loved.  Within half a generation that country is now reduced to despair.  The pattern always plays out.  A false saviour, set to put things right, morphs into a tyrant crushing the lifeblood out of subjects.  The regime ends up being at war against its people.

Angelo Codevilla provides the following description of the Soviet Union--which was not aberrant, but typical of all such.