SiD Wrote:You cant see difference betwenn USSR and todays Russia. While country and whole world changed, some people are exploiting past to give some wight to thier accusations.
Evil is evil, no matter how old it is. Russia inherited some evil from the past. The heritage of Bolshevism is alive. Evil of the present uses the same formula as Bolsheviks used – “the end justifies means”.
The declared ultimate end of communists was the creation of the world wide communism. Although the West referred to communism as some practice, communists in the USSR did not call their system communism – they called it socialism. Their communism was utopia. In the name of this utopia, they used the most horrible practice which they justified as necessary means for their utopian goal. Their ideology neglected the present, it rejected the past, and it was promising some paradise on the Earth in the far future.
The ideology of communism was the grand deception itself. In order to make it look more plausible, communists had always to fill in the gaps between their theory and real life by various lies. The system required a lot of lies, and it stimulated recruitment of growing number of liars into the administrative/executive ranks.
The Soviet system provided for the creation of the special ruling liars elite. They were creating partial goals as supposed necessary steps on the way to the declared ultimate end, but these partial goals were subject to the compromise between the official theory and the needs that those in power saw in reality.
By witnessing so many lies around, the liars themselves would come to realize that the declared ultimate goal had been fake/unrealistic, and their actual goals had to be different. To achieve their real goals, they used the same formula - “the end justifies means”.
The selection rules for those to be opted for promotion within the ruling liars’ network had mostly to ensure on various hierarchical levels the strict control over the behavioural adaptation of persons from the special nomenclatura lists and their compliance with multi-hypocritical system. The special patterns of corruptive behaviour and mentality were promoted by the system.
It became a commonplace in the USSR that people’s words, deeds, and thoughts were all
contradicting each other. Of course, the system would have not survived so many years without any norms of ethics or morality, but these were permanently in conflict with reality. Some spheres of life might have been less regulated but people, in general, were never free from arbitrary rule. The rule of law was an alien conception; the written law, including the Soviet constitution, never was the real law.
The communist policy aimed at creating quite homogenous society but an experiment with creating the new species of homo sovieticus failed. Yet the process of sovietisation did take place and it left some remarkable consequences for the present.
In the soviet period, within the society of aborted masses of homo sovieticus there was the special breed of strong adherents of the rule that “the end justifies means”. This type of humans could be called homo putinicus. It has spread out fast in Russia in the recent years. Homo putinicus claim they are homo rutenicus. However we should see a distinction between them.
The massive internalization of the rule that “the end justify means” during the Soviet and post-Soviet period in Russia is the evil that cannot evaporate in a moment. Homo putinicus will not disappear quickly.
When I hear claims that Russia is “different” it reminds me an alcoholic who swears he is a new man. You may trust him – until his next drink. It is hard for alcoholic to change. Declaration of change is not a change yet.