Seriously? Okay, for the very literally minded, they've been our enemies for 97 years.
The part you really missed, is that the Bolsheviks made war on Russian culture for 70 years.
Seriously? Okay, for the very literally minded, they've been our enemies for 97 years."Um... we were on the same side in 1914. And in 1917, the Bolsheviks essentaially took power against Russian culture and the Russian people. That's why they had a civil war, y’know? - Mrs. Don-o
. . . and, depending on how you look at it, the US and the USSR were allies during WWII.After the German invasion of the USSR, but before Pearl Harbor, there were some who considered that the only trouble with the Russo-German war was that both sides couldn’t lose. But FDR was friendly to the USSR long before that; his first diplomatic act after taking office in ’33 was to recognize the USSR - which hadn’t been done by prior (Republican) administrations. It’s not to be forgotten in that context that the USSR allied itself with the Third Reich in dividing Poland between themselves. I’m not so sure FDR was overjoyed at that - which, after all, was the start of WWII.Of course the people of Russia had no real say in any of that, but Stalin et al certainly deserved to lose because of that, and the war he waged on the people and his own top military in the ‘30s. And in a toast "to American production, without which the war could not have been won,” Stalin admitted that without the help of the US he would have lost. Harry Hopkins was FDR’s right hand man, and he gave the Soviets whatever they asked for. Yea, unto uranium . . .
totalitarian rule is truly possible only in countries that are large enough to be able to afford depopulation.
Maybe the way to look at it is that the very idea of Russia is a megalomaniac concept at war with humanity. In order to attain its scale, it suppressed the “little platoons” which sustain civil society elsewhere - and particularly in America at its Tocquevillian best.