"When in despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won; there have been tyrants and murderers, but…they always fall. Always."
Gandhi should have added, "except in Russia."
In that country, tyrants and mur
derers do fall, to be replaced by more tyrants and murderers. The extreme corruption and servility of the people does not help matters. Yet even this can be explained.
Since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and Lenin's command to his murdering secret police not to be concerned by bumping off "useless intellectuals" (amusingly, what was he?), Russians have been regularly "cleansed" of troublemakers. Stalin executed at least 30 million, probably more, just by issuing arrest quotas. One district police force, terrified that they wouldn't meet their quota, arrested anyone coming into their offices.
Harvest failures resulted because they'd shot everyone on the farms. Starvation ravaged the Ukraine, which has never forgotten.
Want to be a Russian businessman? Find a factory, falsify share certificates, call a shareholders' meeting, get the district police to cordon off the streets so shareholders can't attend and the company's yours!
You pay quiet money to the police, courts and town bureaucrats, like we pay VAT here.
Complain? Unlucky and you get a bullet in the head. Lucky and you get a two-year sentence in a mental institute, fully drugged up to the eyeballs. Nobody complains.
Want to be elected President in Russia? Start a war in Chechnya, let the thugs in the army rape, steal and murder then, when people retaliate, call them terrorists.
As butcher Putin – the former KGB spy – has stacked the Kremlin with his ex KGB pals, the West's politicians fear a return to the Cold War.
What else does an ex-KGB snoop know, but Soviet-style repression and cold war?
Robert ReynoldsThe full article contains 312 words and appears in Evening Courier newspaper.
