“The Tsar was basically Russian bourgeoisie trash... no argument, but to think Putin doesn’t stand for hardline communism is shortsighted.”
If Putin was a Communist, don’t you think he would have mentioned it by now? After all, he’s basically been in power for 21 years.
After all a basic tenet of Communism is the push to advance the ideology on the rest of the world because it’s so ‘wonderful and fair to the masses’, and that is hard to do if you never get around to mentioning it.
And all you have to do is look at the map of Russia under Tsar Nicky, there was something called “Congress Poland”, and they had all of Ukraine.