Russia!!

[Scrat]

I just wanted to start a thread that I can use as a journal to share my internet wanderings and discoveries and hopefully shed some light on something so few in the west know of (or more likely) don't really care about.

Personally since the first time I went to Russia in 1996 I have become very intrigued and may have fallen in love with the land the history and the people.

I first went to Ulan Udi in Siberia in the middle of February and know why the Russians all wear animal skins in the winter. If you wear anything else you will be frozen in an hour. There is no land that I have been yet that places so many contrasts before you. Where else can you sit in your apartment and see a pack of wolves walk across the local soccar field. Where else can you see a people with no money at all, that work for nothing, keep themselves fed, their children in clothes and in school books? Where else can you find this?





Anyway, I will just post stuff here to share it. Make your own decisions, if you have any questions just ask.

I'll start with this.


http://www.exile.ru/field_guide.html

[David813]

VERY cool!! I loved the link!! I've never been to Russia but as a communist it has been close to my heart since I joined the Marxist movement in the late 80's. The USSR was a superpower, modern Russia is a 3rd world country. The bastions of the tiny rich population in Leningrad (as the Russians still refer to it) and Moscow hide the fact that even after decades of Stalinist rule, deviated significantly from communism, that the Russian CP is the 2nd largest political party in the country. Huge swaths of Russia have kept their Marxist-Leninist monuments and retain communists in local government. The treatment of it's soldiers is horrendous. You may know a more current number Scrat but up to 500 young Russian men conscripted into the military die of brutal conditions and hazing, abuse and disease PER YEAR. The worst thing to happen to this great country was surrendering the Revolution to salivating capitalist pigs overseas. Now the church there has been unleashed to divide the people even more. Skinheads murder foreign students regularly and that hate comes from Poverty and frustration with a failed dictatorship. Same thing is happening in eastern Germany where the godless commies were routed and now the eastern provinces have sunken into the worst economic conditions since WW2. Skinheads are abound. "Freeeedom" as our chimp prez pretends to cherish is not working in Russia or any of the former Soviet states. I predict civil war will turn Russia into a bloodbath very soon. The sickle & hammer represented a proud and powerful people with many luxuries and advantages they no longer have. "Sink or Swim" kills, and the people of Russia must rise up once again and reignite their Glorious Revolution.

[Scrat]

The USSR was a superpower, modern Russia is a 3rd world country.

Russia is a superpower today. Their nuclear arsenal is still largely intact and they can muster 30 million men to arms in 3 weeks time to defend the country. Russia is a second world country and in the next 10 years will be a first world nation.

The bastions of the tiny rich population in Leningrad (as the Russians still refer to it) and Moscow hide the fact that even after decades of Stalinist rule, deviated significantly from communism, that the Russian CP is the 2nd largest political party in the country.

Don't know.

Huge swaths of Russia have kept their Marxist-Leninist monuments and retain communists in local government.

You still see statues of Lenin in almost every city. Lenin is valued for his ideas of equality and it was not him that brought about the hardships, it was the monster that he lost control of. Russians like big statues like the one on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd.

The treatment of it's soldiers is horrendous. You may know a more current number Scrat but up to 500 young Russian men conscripted into the military die of brutal conditions and hazing, abuse and disease PER YEAR.

You have to accept that the Russian military is different from ours. Hand to hand combat is practiced for real. They do not use PC pugel sticks like us. They use the real thing, fists, feet and teeth. There is cases of abuse, there are cases of inexperienced soldiers getting killed by their weapons and other accidents such as soldiers falling off of moving tanks. There are cases where one soldier goes home on leave and gets a disease and gives it to a whole battalion.

I never saw a hungry soldier or a poorly clothed one while I was over there AT ANY TIME. I have talked to conscripts and they seem to do what any young 19 yr old conscript would do. Complain.

What you hear in the west is largely exaggerated and what is normal and required to THEM is strange to US. Full time soldiers there are paid good and military life is a familial thing. Some soldiers have a family history going back 100's of years. Fathers start teaching sons as young as 4 years old to be soldiers generation after generation.

I know one thing. Russian soldiers are tough, professional and I pity the fool that gets in the arena with one.

I will be back later.

[BabyRider]

Originally Posted by Scrat

I know one thing. Russian soldiers are tough, professional and I pity the fool that gets in the arena with one.

I'll see your Russian soldier and raise you any Marine, Navy Seal, Green Beret, or Ranger. And I'll give you odds.

[David813]

I guess I don't have as rosy of a future scenario as you. I read of soldiers there regularly paid in cabbages. Brutal commanders involved in the torture of transcripts. Rampant drug abuse in the ranks, soaring suicide rates and psychiatric hospitals filled with the young. Mothers working diligently to get their sons out of Russia and away from the military. Tales of unspeakable violence against civilians in Chechnya and Ingushetia, Ossetia are in press around the globe. The economy is in tatters and the birthrate is at a freefall as more Russians move out of the country than ever in modern history, even under Stalin! I love Russia and things Russian. I do not rejoice in the bad news that wells out of that once great country. The future is bleak as their armed forces of all branches work with aging obsolete equipment and rock bottom morale. The sub that went down near Murmansk not long ago was a tragedy Putin ignored. He carried on with trips and dinners as if hundreds of young (expendable in Russia) men died an agonizing death. There was no attempt at rescuing these men. A nearly impossible task but you can bet WE would have exhausted every avenue. Foreigners from the West were the 1st to reach the doomed sub and got no thanx for bringing those poor kids up. It will be decades before Russia reaches above a 3rd world existance as even tourism has plummeted according to the Russian consulate in Chicago.

[David813]

Originally Posted by BabyRider

I'll see your Russian soldier and raise you any Marine, Navy Seal, Green Beret, or Ranger. And I'll give you odds.

They can't even secure downtown Baghdad!! Got their butts kicked in Vietnam by 5 foot tall guerrillas! Got beat in Somalia, Lebanon and have only managed to keep parts of Kabul in Afghanistan secure! The US hasn't WON a military conflict since WW2. Korea was a standoff and the Gulf War resulted in....oh yeah! The sheiks of Kuwait are safe now!! Red White and Blue?? Red white and BOOO!

[David813]

I Forgot! The US did claim total victory over that Red Menace GRENADA!! An island smaller than DisneyWorld, hosting Cuban construction workers as they built a bigger airport runway! (This was one of Rotten Reagan's ploys to divert attention away from the military disaster in Lebanon just a week before.)

[K.Snyder]

Whats Russia done?They have done nothing but get slaughtered by the germans in ww2 only to be at a stale mate due to freezing wheather conditions.The only thing that saved the russians from being over runned was the fact that our fellow AMERICANS entered the war.As for us losing any other war thats a joke.Communist countries are the cockroaches of human nature.There government owns everything there people work for.They have nothing but the clothes that they wear and there ideas that there unable to express.There prisoners for life all for just being born into communism.We Americans believe in freedom and have faught for that.We live in a society where we can have hobbies and do the things we would like to do as human beings, not as heards of sheep waiting to be stripped of theyre wool.We fight so people dont come in your homes and rape your mothers and sisters and take everything you own.You sit in your heated homes and food plentifull while real AMERICANS died in ww2 just so you could have all that.You go ahead and join communism.Us real men will take care of you.Your a joke.Your a joke waiting to be hearded like sheep.

[K.Snyder]

Originally Posted by Scrat

You have to accept that the Russian military is different from ours. Hand to hand combat is practiced for real. They do not use PC pugel sticks like us. They use the real thing, fists, feet and teeth. There is cases of abuse, there are cases of inexperienced soldiers getting killed by their weapons and other accidents such as soldiers falling off of moving tanks. There are cases where one soldier goes home on leave and gets a disease and gives it to a whole battalion.

.

That just proves the level of ignorance over there.No wonder they ran when faced against the germans.Ha

[Bothwell]

I came across some of their specal forces a few years ago and they were the real deal, very very tough.

Russia for years did use it's soldiers as entirely expendible but do not make the mistake of understimating their capabilites. Against both Napoleon and Hitler they not only proved their fighting qualities but their doggedness as well. They new damn well that the winter would see both those tyrants off and they were right.

I am not sure some of the anti-russian views I have seen on here are particularly fair on the wartime population of Stalingrad. I have often thought how the less stoical citizens of say London or New York would have done in the siege conditions that those people endured.