It's official - Russia enters Crimea

mittman said:

There was a brouhaha a while back where a St. Petersburg Orthodox priest got in some hot water using a similar image with Stalin and a certain saint.

Edit: found it: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/...n-draws-st-petersburg-churchs-ire/372766.html

I think those things are still scattered around Russia from when everyone was trying to get on his good side. it appears that there were only two: good side and dead side. There are obviously still some who revere him as a great leader.

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My Soviet politics teacher at Alabama (Barbara Chotiner) told us that everyone in Russia tried to be neither too good at his job or too bad at his job. Too good, and you may attract a following and thus be a threat to Comrade Iosef. Too bad, and you hurt the war effort. The Soviet Aviation Minister went to work in the Kremlin one day in 1943 and, with no warning, the NKVD took him out into the courtyard of the Kremlin and shot him.

TIDE-HSV said:

Stalin was a devout atheist. He was also not Russian...

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That is what is ironic. Stalin was an atheist. But he was pragmatic enough* that he probably would appreciate the irony of an orthodox priest blessing a Russian bomb using an icon of his image.


* When the Germans invaded in 1941, Stalin disappeared for a week. It appears he had a nervous breakdown. When he did re-emerge, his radio appeal was not "Soviet proletariat, let us fight the bourgeois invader" it was "Russian people, let us fight the Germans." A true Marxist would not have appealed to nationality, he would have appealed to class conflict. Stalin was a pragmatist. A ruthless, murdering pragmatist, but a pragmatist.

TIDE-HSV said:

Stalin was a devout atheist. He was also not Russian...

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True, but he did study to be an Orthodox priest.

TIDE-HSV said:

A psychopathic pragmatist, but, yes, a pragmatist. The Georgians were very proud of him then IDK about now...

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I believe there is a pretty strong minority that are to varying extents.

Russia is going to review whether or not it was legal for the Soviet Union to recognize the Baltic states as independent nearly 25 years ago, according to a report by Interfax.

A "source familiar with the situation" told Interfax on Tuesday that the Russian Prosecutor General's office began checking the legality of the recognition of the independence of the Baltics.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were Soviet republics until the dissolution of the USSR back in 1991.

The report comes one week after the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 — back when Nikita Khrushchev was in power — was declared unconstitutional.

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-reviewing-legality-baltic-states-200136322.html

Gee, wonder what they'll decide?

formersoldier71 said:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-reviewing-legality-baltic-states-200136322.html

Gee, wonder what they'll decide?

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Yup, saw that. Very sobering.

mittman said:

Yup, saw that. Very sobering.

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The source stated that the investigation was launched following requests from two parliamentary deputies, adding that there would be no legal consequences if the recognition of the three Baltic states was to be found illegal.

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Zhirinovsky is still in the Duma, I believe.


And these tanks will have no legal consequence on the independence of Poland...

TIDE-HSV said:

A psychopathic pragmatist, but, yes, a pragmatist. The Georgians were very proud of him then IDK about now...

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they still are. i got a stalin refrigerator magnet on my last trip there in 2013. there were tons of stalin tchotchkes all over the place.

92tide said:

they still are. i got a stalin refrigerator magnet on my last trip there in 2013. there were tons of stalin tchotchkes all over the place.

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Have you checked the Stalin refrigerator magnet for any interior wiring?

Tidewater said:

Have you checked the Stalin refrigerator magnet for any interior wiring?

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i need to. my daughter broke it a few months back.

i always pick up refrigerator magnets on my trips and send them to my brother. i was in the market with my georgian friends and mentioned that i needed to grab a tbilisi magnet for my brother, and one of the guys disappeared and came back with a bag full of magnets, one of which was the stalin one.

92tide said:

i need to. my daughter broke it a few months back.

i always pick up refrigerator magnets on my trips and send them to my brother. i was in the market with my georgian friends and mentioned that i needed to grab a tbilisi magnet for my brother, and one of the guys disappeared and came back with a bag full of magnets, one of which was the stalin one.

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I recall one of my Russian language teachers in college telling me about her memories of the day they announced Comrade Iosef had died. She literally was not sure the sun would come up the next morning. They had been taught that everything good came from Stalin. Everything. She was a little girl and was terrified that the world would end once Stalin was gone.

This is kind of funny.
Here is a recent photo of a separatist LPR or DPR "soldier" in Ukraine, standing in front of a T-72 tank. Note, this is not a T-72B (the tank made only by Russia and given to LPR/DPR separatists). In fact, it is not even a T-72A (the gun sight for the T-72A is not there). This is a straight up T-72, made before 1980. The Ukrainians have never manufactured this tank. They produce T-64s.

The problem is, the T-72 was supposed to have been destroyed pursuant to the OSCE's conventional weapons reduction convention. So good news, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Your deception to disprove the allegation that this is a Russian tank in Ukraine turns out to prove that Russia has been cheating on the OSCE disarmament agreement.

Tidewater said:

The problem is, the T-72 was supposed to have been destroyed pursuant to the OSCE's conventional weapons reduction convention. So good news, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Your deception to disprove the allegation that this is a Russian tank in Ukraine turns out to prove that Russia has been cheating on the OSCE disarmament agreement.

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Naw man, it belongs to a collector.

Duplicate

Here's a scary take:
Putin knows time is working against him and he has limited time.

The allotted period of the current Russian policy time is equal to President Obama's term of office - until January 20, 2017. It's not even that Obama is good or bad as a president. The problem is that Obama came to office to stop the wars started by the previous administration, not to start new ones. For this reason, President Obama will be the last person in the United States ready to go to war with Russia over Ukraine and Iran over Iran's nuclear program. Putin, like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is well aware of this. The next president of the United States, regardless of whether he or she is a Republican or a Democrat, and will take a tougher position in relation to Russia, and on Iran.

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A moral lightweight in the office POTUS is an irresistible attractive nuisance to those with bad intentions.

Here's a current assessment of Russia's situation:

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/01/19/russias_impossible_choices_111667.html

The reasons for this decision (I doubt that a deputy finance minister would have made an unauthorized statement on a subject so delicate) is of course oil prices. Russia is in the extraordinarily difficult position of having based its economic well-being on the price of a commodity it cannot control. At current prices, with some varieties of oil having fallen below $30 a barrel, the Russian national budget is "more than strained," as Storchak put it. Loans to foreign governments are simply one of the many things that will have to be cut.

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Therefore, do not assume that Russian economic weakness, while serious, precludes weapons development. The question of Ukraine is still central to Russian national security. The Ukrainians are taking advantage of the moment by cutting off supplies to Crimea. The Russians discovered during the Ukraine crisis that they were not able to launch a full scale offensive. They then went into a military development mode that we estimated would last two years. After that they would revisit the Ukrainian situation. Given the Russians' overriding interest in Ukraine, I suspect that military development is one thing that they will not cut.
However, this is what broke the Soviet Union. First it was a massive defense budget designed to keep up with American innovation. This strained the economy enormously. Then the decline of oil prices broke the economy and collapsed the Soviet Union. It could not survive both. In this case, oil prices have declined dramatically, but Russia's military development is nothing like it was in the 1980s. Still, the Russians have far more than loans to consider. They need to consider whether they can afford a military program designed to force a new outcome in Ukraine. If not, they need to consider whether they can afford to have Ukraine as a pro-Western force whose borders are less than 250 miles from Volgograd, the city formerly called Stalingrad. In either case they are facing impossible choices that they cannot ignore and yet cannot really make.

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Tide1986 said:

Here's a current assessment of Russia's situation:

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/01/19/russias_impossible_choices_111667.html
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Here is what I believe will happen.
When the stress mounts, one of the Russian oligarchs (or a cabal of them) will tell Vladimir Vladimirovich it s time to go, or, failing that, they will oust him one way or another.
Being an old KGB man, I do not expect him to go quietly.