[BringBackMyHUAC]

==That probably goes double for Eastern Europe.

There are millions of pure, unadulterated, non-collaborationist victims of Communist oppression in Russia and Eastern Europe. That is where the leaders of "post"-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe would be drawn from if Communism really "collapsed".

[struwwelpeter]

I think anyone who has lived or worked in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union would find it hard to believe that the commies can put that Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I was just on a Russian National Bolshevik Party site where they were protesting Putin's repression of their 'great ideology'.

Of course, it doesn't have to be communism-socialism-bolshevism to upset our applecart, or kill millions of Elbonians. Imperial Russia was pretty good at that, though nowhere as efficient as the commies.

The underground Russian poet Guberman has a neat philosophy on Russia:

[GSlob]

Lay off Havel. A commie would have attempted a Milosevic-style bloodbath, not a "velvet divorce".
Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and Balts are simply returning to the Western Civ [and Ukraine is trying to come there]. After decades [3.5 centuries for Ukraine] of sitting up to one's ears in "communality" or "Russity" shit [see my earlier FRmail for the terms] the smell is not that easy to wash off - it could be expected to linger. The state apparatus of a contemporary state is a large one, and to completely purge it from the commies would have required mass importation of Western civil servants, for almost everybody who is both socially active and above certain age would have one's roots in the old apparatus. There were only so many (or so few) anti-communist dissidents, like Havel - not enough to staff a state.