I agree. Did you see Solzenitzen’s old comment on the forum yesterday?
I don’t remember it word for word, but he seemed to think these organizations existed in Russia because the people didn’t care and allowed it.
I have no idea how he thought they could stop it.
Missed the Solzhenitzyn quote but he had a good understanding of the Russian people and how the intellectual and moral life had been squeezed out of them, first by the Czars and then by the Communists.
They were worn into submission and never really figured how to get their freedom. That is why alcoholism shot through the roof. Alcohol was the refuge from Communism and their bleak existence under it.
It was mainly the literary intellectuals who spoke out, through their writings, against the system, i.e. the original “Rage Against the Machine” movement in a 20th century country.
If you have a monopoly on “force”, you win. It is only when the military turn against the regime is there a chance to overthrow a communist government as they tried to do in Hungary, 1956 and successfully in Romania in the late 1980’s.
Other Soviet bloc countries regained some semblance of freedom when the Soviet Union collapsed and its military was significantly withdrawn from the occupied countries.
Even then, Soviet military presence in Ukraine and possibly Latvia or Lithuania (one has a Soviet base), remain daggers in the heart of real freedom.