- Joined
- Dec 16, 2011
- Messages
- 73,975
- Reaction score
- 32,320
- Location
- Florida
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
Stalin also revered Lenin and sorry but the behaviors of the occupiers in Donbas is most certainly neo-stalinism.A monument to Lenin has nothing to do with Stalinism.
It’s like saying a statue of Thomas Jefferson celebrates the Confederacy.
Talk about ‘hybrid’ regime obscures Putin’s creation of a ‘neo-Stalinist state,’ Pavlova says
In addition to restoring the Stalinist method of rule, “the Putin regime has successfully consolidated the population of the country around the supreme power,” by playing on memories of the Great Fatherland War and promoting the notion that Russia today is a besieged fortress surrounded by enemies.
As a result of these Putin “achievements,” “Russians even in the 21st century remain an archaic and paternalistic people, completely depending and relying on the central powers” and retaining their “traditional anti-democratic and anti-Western Russian and Soviet values, which have come to form a great-power ideology or Russian fundamentalism.”
That system of values includes the notion shared by the powers and the population that “the Russian people is the bearer of a special morality and a special feeling of justice, that the West can never be “a model for societal development,” that Russia must be an empire, and that they and their country have “a special historical mission.”
Neo-Stalinism
A 13.5 metre-tall statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin still dominates the main square in Donetsk, the capital of the eponymous breakaway region in southeastern Ukraine.And the constitution adopted by Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, has been restored by the Moscow-backed separatist leaders of Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk after they broke away from the central government in 2014.
This constitution prescribes the death penalty for a number of crimes, making the separatist “People’s Republics” – and authoritarian Belarus nearby – Europe’s only homes to capital punishment.
After almost eight years of existence, the “republics” are understood to have evolved into totalitarian, North Korea-like statelets.
It is near impossible for foreigners to enter the areas. Ukrainians can only visit if they have relatives in Donetsk and Luhansk, and would have to cross into Russia first, which takes about 30 hours and costs $100 – a journey that also involves bribing officials at times. Residents need a Soviet-era residency registration.
In the statelets, secret police and “loyal” residents monitor every word, phone call and text message.
Dissidents or businessmen who refuse to “donate” their assets to the “needs of the People’s Republic” have been thrown in “cellars”, or dozens of makeshift concentration camps, without trial.
“It looks like the 1930s in the Soviet Union, a classic gulag,” Stanislav Aseyev, a publicist who was kidnapped in 2017 in Donetsk and was sentenced by a separatist “court” to 15 years in jail for “espionage”, told Al Jazeera.
For almost two years, he was incarcerated and tortured in these “cellars” until separatists swapped him and dozens of other prisoners in 2017.
Thousands of others were tortured and abused in the “cellars”, according to rights groups and witnesses. The grave human rights abuses make Donetsk and Luhansk far worse than today’s Russia, an international human rights advocate said.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/22/what-are-donetsk-and-luhansk-ukraines-separatist-statelets