Michael Pugliese
BTW I just trolled through some of the discussion. Pretty friggin' weird. Yeltsin was a "comprador fascist"? Russia was in danger of becoming a "Congo of the north?" This part was particularly strange:
The people of the ex-SU know this anyway, by now. That is one of the reasons they have become so fatalistic: because people understand that the attempt to create an enclave of socialism ('socialism in one country') FAILED and therefore they are dependent now of world history: in that sense, Gorby was right when he talked all the time (in the 1980s) about Russia returning to the 'normal process of world history' etc.
Most people in Russia think that "the attempt to create an enclave of socialism ('socialism in one country')" SUCCEEDED. Whether they assess the experience positively or negatively is another story, but everybody in my experience is in agreement that really-existing socialism was socialism.
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