[bravo whiskey]

Russia never recovered from the Russian civil war. Teaching a class on it now.

[SteveO87]

Have you used Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in any of your classes?
That itself is enough to disprove the rewriting of history.

[Cronos]

The thing is that the various Soviet systems were just perfections of what the Tsars from the 1700s and 1800s did -- secret police, gulags, etc.

Arguably you can go back to Ivan the terrible or even the Mongol invasion of the Rus to see that things ever since then have been pretty much the same