The Russian tsars had had absolute power similar to the pharaohs.  The aristocracy (boyars) were haughty and brutal, and the educated ones spoke French.  The illiterate peasants and muzhiks (serfs till 1861) lived in poverty and squalor.

Fyodor Dostoevsky spoke German and French.  My favorite book of his is The Idiot, with its incredible insights into the mediocre and incompetent imperial apparatchik's psyche.  Reminds me strongly of the current arrogant and incompetent cabal of clintonistas and obamabots in the corrupt regime of Pepe Chicom Bidon. (That's a little play on words in French).

Here is an excerpt from another of Dostoevsky's insightful novels: "Everything here is doomed and destined to perish.  Russia as it is today has no future."  That's from the gloomy novel Demons (or Posessed), published in 1873, which predicted the horrors of Bolshevism and communism, still with us today.

The mega-butchers Stalin and Mao were planning the communist global takeover since the end of WWII.  Stalin planned an invasion into the E.U. in the early 1950s.  Luckily for us, a stroke in March 1953 changed history.  God's finger, or karma?

The Eastern Bloc countries were forced to build heavy industry for that purpose.  After all, Czechoslovakia suplied Hitler's Blitzkrieg machine with modern arms after the Munich betrayal by Chamberlain and Daladier — coward appeasers.  The Czechs were supposed to be invading France in the early 1950s as a part of the Warsaw bloc.  The Soviets and Chicoms were involved in Korea against us as well as in Vietnam later.  Let us also remember the Hitler-Stalin pact.  Hitler attacked the USSR, but Stalin had these plans, too.  Adolf was a quicker-draw traitor.

Here is what my bourgeois grandma told me as a boy about WWII.  "The Nazis were brutal but, for the most part, clean and polite.  They didn't steal or rape women.  Obeying the German law was enough to stay out of trouble; disobeying got one shot.  On the other hand, the Red Army men were filthy, drunk, brutal, raping women age 10–90 en masse, and stealing everything in sight by the ton."  It is a historic fact that Russian soldiers raped a great number of women in Germany on their march to Berlin.  The same is happening now in the Ukraine.  Dostoevsky's demons are still present.

The Russian people today still miss the iron fist of Stalin and believe the Kremlin agitprop regarding "denazification" of Ukraine.  They still are strongly anti-Semitic — the demons never left.  The tiny and benighted middle class want their ugly IKEA furniture and cheap vodka.  For Putin and his henchmen and oligarchs, admitting a mistake is equal to defeat and humiliation.  It will never happen.  The remote chance of resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict would be a treaty securing the latter neutrality.  No NATO admission, ever.

At fault are also the U.S. and E.U. "elites" and pundits ignoring struggling Russia after Yeltsin and Putin's aggression since 2004: Crimea.

Regardless, there should be absolutely no American or NATO boots on the Ukrainian steppe.  Our neocons are crazy.  That would unleash the WWIII nuclear holocaust Stalin was dreaming about 75 years ago.

Image via Public Domain Pictures.