[bert]

It sucks to be Russia and Putin.

The end of the communist era brought chaos and destruction. Foreign aid and investment poured in and was stolen. There was no progress. Men became alcoholics and women became workers who aborted their children. The Soviet empire dissolved. The realization that Russia was backward and incompetent in the modern world was covered over by a thin veneer of clothes and imitation of the west.

It took longer in China. The government was never actually overthrown although there was great change. China and the Chinese people given a degree of freedom responded by going to work. They took the foreign investment and magnified it into a fantastically growing economic miracle. While the young took on the trappings of the rest of the world, they applied themselves to progress.

The result....... China is, Russia isn’t

[ETL]

It sucks to be Russia and Putin. The end of the communist era brought chaos and destruction.

KGB Putin thinks the "COLLAPSE" of the mass-murdering communist Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century"

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
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[ETL]

t sucks to be Russia and Putin. The end of the communist era brought chaos and destruction.

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a [] 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html
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FReeper khelus provided the following links for reading/downloading both books in their entirety (free):

New Lies for Old:
http://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes

The Perestroika Deception:
http://curezone.com/upload/Members/ChazTheMeatHe/Books/Golitsyn_The_Perestroika_Deception_The_World_s_Slide_Towards_the_Secon.pdf
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CHINA

"the new leaders pledged to adhere to 'Marx, Lenin, Mao' thought .. for 'a long time to come'"

China: Communist Party goes modern (Asia Times)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/DK16Ad02.html

[ETL]

It sucks to be Russia and Putin. The end of the communist era brought chaos and destruction.

At least 20 MILLION dead *under* Soviet Union communism.