A very good case could be made that Russia was never really Communist. It just used Communism as a subterfuge to create a totalitarian regime run by the lucky few.
The Tzars used Russian Orthodoxy much the same way as the Soviets used Communist Orthodoxy.
That Putin has gone back to using Russian Orthodoxy as a mask for his totalitarian ambitions is no surprise given that very few people believe in the Communist dream.
Most liberals believe is some form of highly regulated and taxed market economy. Of course if the only "news" you get is from FR threads then you won't have found this out. You'll most likely believe in the nonsense that Gramsci's ghost still walks among us or that all of the liberals meet in secret to figure out exactly how fast they can move us toward a communist future without the mass of people figuring it out.
O the horrors!
It’s only the hard leftists that claim that none of the monoliths of the Second World were “truly communist”.
And if Putin is “not communist”, then the only alternative is fascist.
These -- like the form of Christianity that existed before the Reformation -- are all enemies of liberty.
I call the people named in my post "commies" because: it rankles them, for the sake of easy identification, and because the appellation is still pejorative -- at least in the benighted darkness of Free Republic, where you think you're shining some great illumination. [Protip: a post that ends with "O The horrors!" is pretentious and silly.]
The only difference between the communism of Stalin and the totalitarianism of the Czars is that Bolsheviks imagined the novel angle of exporting the religion of state terror via Marxist mumbojumbo. [Not very different from any other organized religion in that regard, nor in the desire to completely control the minds, sinew, and money of its duped followers.]
That would be a very bad case, not a very good case. And it's the case that communists all over the world continually try to make -- that you can't blame communism for what Stalin did.
But as Solzhenitsyn proved so eloquently in his writings and speeches is that Stalin took communism to its exact logical conclusion.
Communism in and of itself leads to mass murder body counts that dwarfed Hitler. Stalin + Mao caused many times more deaths than Hitler did. (Stalin killed 7 million in a single famine in a single confined region, Ukraine. Mao slaughtered 50 million Chinese.)
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending Hitler and I'm not calling you a communist, I'm just saying beware of any argument that absolves communism of the deaths that it inevitably leads to.
I work with a Russian ex-military officer who always says "That was Stalinism, not Communism" and because I have to work with him I don't argue the point. But he is wrong. Just like the communists on the local college campus are wrong when they say "communism is great, it just hasn't really been tried yet".
Bull. It's been tried. Over and over again. And in every case: mass murder. In the case of Cambodia, mass murder on a scale (percentage-wise) that dwarfs even Stalin and Mao.
Don't absolve communism, please. Communism is the prime evil on the planet. Going just by pure body-counts, even more evil than Islam.