[reformedliberal]

Just a quibble, but Belarus is run by a hard-line Stalinoid and is probably a major player in arms proliferation. Remember the rumors that the Russians got Saddam out to Belarus last year? It is a police state.

[GSlob]

"Just a quibble, but Belarus is run by a hard-line Stalinoid..." You are right; and so has been Russia since the time there was Russia. Police state harshness might vary, but underlying principle [all-powerful society, or (later) state] remains the same. Look at contemporary treatment of inconvenient subjects in Russia (Khodorkovsky, those uncovering environmental practices of military - what are their names?- and so on...).
On a deeper level (shifting from Samuel Huntington's to Alexander Zinoviev's thesis) one could argue that this is an inalienable feature of communist way of life (to avoid terminological confusion, in this understanding communism did not start with Marx in 19 century, but in Stone Age about 40000 years ago) -
and so Russia together with its satellite and present-day splinter countries has always been a communist society and cannot be anything else, since it would not know how and has not developed a necessary prerequisite of meaningful civil society.