artem247

For example, “the West” could be quite pleased if Russia invades Ukraine, but at a large cost. Basically turning Ukraine into new Vietnam or Afghanistan. This “concern” does not help Ukraine in any way, it already had a cost on economy - falling national currency and so on.

The blocking of ‘some’ of TV channels happened last year. Election to parliament happened almost three years ago, where actually one of the opposition parties won in a landslide.

Exile happened in 2014, due to closeness to Yanukovitch, for a portion of politicians. That was rather voluntary for them, mainly related to their stance on Crimea and so on. New “pro-Russian” figures came on the scene.

There are still pro—Russian political parties in parliament , which have media support (they are backed by powerful oligarchs) The richest man of Ukraine was the backer of Yanukovich, he hasn’t lost his influence or assets.

There is still internet, for example those blocked channels are very active on Youtube.

There is plenty of data that show suppport for those parties through out the years and it is pretty consistent with what I say - since 2014 it is around 10 - 15 % due to a number of reasons.

On the ground situation is very different than on RT or alike.

So following your logic every country has a right to exert influence over it’s neighbors using military power. The are pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine, yet their support is low, around 10% and falling, so no hope of achieving Russia-oriented Ukraine via political means. The presence of West in Ukraine is overstated. Yes, Ukraine follows pro-Western foreign policy, what else could be done? Ukrainian electorate is wary of Russia, there are no other players here except West.

-banned ethnic Russians from position of power???

This is so laughable for anyone from Ukraine. President of Ukraine is a Russian-speaking Jew. There is no checking whether you are Ukrainian or Russian in Ukraine, most of the people are from mixed marriages between Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and so on. There are plenty of russian-speaking people, who are from east and south of the country in both parliament and Cabinet of Ministers.

Previous president is on trial for treason - why it’s a bad thing in itself? The guy was a war hawk, actually. It’s actually president, not prime minister, you don’t even understand how government work in Ukraine

There were no points about “minority rights” in ceasefire agreement.

Are you just some British dude, who likes Russia Today? Or Polish, due to the very niche story about transit?

You are arguing that war in Ukraine is fine, because Ukrainians are bad people, amazing. Really hope to meet you someday.

-banned ethnic Russians from position of power???

This is so laughable for anyone from Ukraine. President of Ukraine is a Russian-speaking Jew. There is no checking whether you are Ukrainian or Russian in Ukraine, most of the people are from mixed marriages between Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and so on. There are plenty of russian-speaking people, who are from east and south of the country in both parliament and Cabinet of Ministers.

Previous president is on trial for treason - why it’s a bad thing in itself? The guy was a war hawk, actually. It’s actually president, not prime minister, you don’t even understand how government work in Ukraine

There were no points about “minority rights” in ceasefire agreement.

Are you just some British dude, who likes Russia Today? Or Polish, due to the very niche story about transit?

You are arguing that war in Ukraine is fine, because Ukrainians are bad people, amazing. Really hope to meet you someday.

Well, first of all Roadside Picnic was actually published by the state. Then, the state funded a rather expensive Tarkovsky movie, inspired by the book ("Stalker"). I think I even had this book at parent's apartment. Plenty of Strugatsky's brothers novels were actually published by the state publishing houses. I think they ran into some problems with their more satirical pieces ("Tale of Troika" comes to mind, for example).

Your description of artists' life is pretty simplistic and one-sided. There were some people who did propaganda posters, but there were many things that existed outside the political domain, from book illustrations, to paintings with less ideological overtones, to working in theater. There was also Soviet cinema and animation, which would hardly be seen as only a propaganda vehicle, there was a lot of very nuanced works, which raised important questions. A lot of good stuff was shelved, or circulated underground of course.

Was Tarkovsky, for example, cozy with the regime?

There were also a plenty of 'underground' artists, who had a day job of being a book illustrator, and did some stuff on the side, which they only would show to the close circle.

>> young people were assigned jobs on finishing schooling

Could you provide evidence for this?

>> Stores had cigs, vodka, butter and milk and tubers (awesome!!)

Where do you get it from? Of course it depended on time and place, but you can buy a lot of stuff in Kyiv (for example) in 70's and 80's. Some things were 'deficit', but they were more of a luxury items. Also the quality was rather good, due to not having cost cutting.

>> a few scientists might have a summer dacha Dachas were not exactly a sign of the elite. Cars, on the other hand...

>> science town in nowheresville These things existed for some sort of top-secret military research, there were plenty of R&D labs in big cities for a more mundane subjects.

You just have an axe to bury with communism, don't you?

>> (during Brezhnev's time, GDP went into guns and away from butter).

Is there any empirical evidence supporting this? There were many improvements in the life typical citizen in the 1964-1982 era, a lot of better housing(which means more people were able to leave villages for cities, which had infinitely better infrastructure), in my city countless facilities were built in that era.

>> The kids were different, they began to have access to cartoons and other cultural experiences from the West

The cartoons mentioned in the article are Soviet cartoons. Access to Western 'cultural experiences' was more or less present from roughly death of Stalin to start of Perestroika. French films were frequently shown. I think after 1988 or so Western entertainment production flooded the Soviet Union.

>> and began to question why they had to make do with so little That's an interesting take. For example, 'kids' in SU had access to free healthcare and higher education, and a better quality high schools, which the West didn't provide to it's citizens. And the WW2 devastated USSR and there was no Marshall plan. And, for example, Imperial Russia had GDP far below US at 1913 (So these countries were much poorer then the West to begin with)

In any event, why should people feel happy about living under an oppressive system -a system which stunted their potential? I don't think 'oppressive' system is something that has a clear meaning. There were restrictions on travel, on starting and owning the businesses, and political life was structured differently from representative democracy. For some people it was fine, for some it wasn't. As is the current marriage between capitalism and representative democracy.

>> Their "police" were soviet milicija, so in a way they lived under occupation to booot.

Baltic countries were indeed under occupation. They were integrated into Soviet union by military force, compared to other republics, which 'joined' the SU as a result of civil war. That explains that fervent Baltic anti-communism, because socialism was always something brought from abroad, from Russia, something basically not needed.

"milicija" is just a term for police, so that has no relation to occupation.

I would say it is more about disillusionment with capitalism and democracy after the collapse of Soviet Union. In Ukraine for a decade after collapse the left-wing parties, such as Communists, Socialists, Agrarian party were very popular. I know a lot of people, who are in their 50's and 60's and older, who now see a lot of good in Soviet structure, yet in the late 80's almost everyone was either negative towards SU or apolitical

>> and establish a new government with literal -not metaphorical, actual- neo-nazis in power.

Typical Russian lie. After the Yanukovich fled, there was a provisional government made up from people who were ALREADY in the Ukrainian parliament, which would serve only as an interim power until the elections, that were planned just in two months. Yet people of Donbass and Crimea never got to participate in said elections, due to annexation of Crimea and seizure of power in Donbass region. All of that led to war, millions of broken lives, thousands of deaths, just because of some fabricated TV fantasy. Because there is "Russian" population. You are defending military adventurism which reduced Donetsk, the city of major importance in Ukraine, to some lawless pseudo-soviet parody.

And again, US does not have business of being in Ukraine, neither does Russia. Do you really think that this stuff in Donbass really helped anyone? Where do you think it is better to live, in Russian-speaking Ukrainian Kharkov or in 'independent' Donetsk.

Okay, have you ever been to Ukraine? What does it mean - looted to the bone? Why do you think Ukraine is that much different to Russia?

Ukraine GDP is improving from 2016 till now, even with pandemic. Some industries, like software and agriculture are growing at a great rate. Yet, some guy who watches Russian TV is painting absurd picture

Again, you don't know how external debt works, debt had nothing to do with collapse of Soviet Union, learn the history of your own country. Even then, Ukraine has lower debt to GDP ratio then Japan, Italy, Greece, United States, Canada, Spain, France, Belgium, United Kingdom, Israel...

Something that Russians tell themselves every day - how everything is very bad in Ukraine, how it is going down. Sure.

Oh, you observe the 'drame', with your all-seeing eye, fucking cockroach.

The part of Poland that was annexed during WW2 had 3 major ethnic groups there - Polish people, Ukrainians and Jews. Most of the Jews got executed during the war, Polish were sent back to Poland by Stalin.

Yet culturally Western Ukraine has much less ties with Russia, due to not being a part of Russian empire.

Again and again, I read this 'ethnic' treatment of conflict in Ukraine. That is not true, for example Kyiv is majority (even today) Russian-speaking, yet it always supported pro-West politicians in elections.

"Ukraine is a semi-failed state with an ongoing civil war(and was for decades)" It is a pure lie, there was no conflict in 1991-2014. What's a semi-failed state? How do you define it?

"how Ukraine can pull itself from the current hole it dug in" What do you mean by digging a hole?

As someone who had a clinical depression after a psychotic episode, which lasted a couple of years, I would say — it's complicated.

I've actually maintained a pretty healthy schedule, with regular swimming, intense hatha-yoga (more like gymnastics), spend a fair amount of time with people. At some point I've also became a workaholic.

How I felt — pretty horrible, all those nice things (unhealthy attitude to work is not nice, of course) barely helped to maintain a thin veneer of my social persona. Basically, most of the people who interacted with me would not know that I'm depressed. I think there are a lot of people like that, just outer shells.

I did not get medical help either in the form of therapy or drugs.

In the hindsight, I think that depression could have been helped at least a bit by going to the good therapist. I had some issues with rage a couple years later, and going to psychoanalyst really helped me a lot. Oh, you know what also helped a lot? It may sound stupid, but at some point I've started going to piano lessons and it really was beneficial somehow.

The economic reasons of collapse of Soviet Union are very popular in the West, yet to say that 1990 was the worst time for SU in purely economic terms is not true. Soviet Union was in a disastrous state in 1920's, in late 1940's after the war, yet it didn't collapse.

The collapse of Soviet Union was simply a dissolution of union treaty between soviet republics, that happened primarily as a result of a struggle for power between Union-level government (Gorbachev) and republican-level (Eltsin of Russia, Kravchuk of Ukraine, etc). After failed coup in August of 1991 Gorbachev effectively lost his support and the fate of SU was sealed.

Again, economic crisis in the 90's in many of the post-soviet states was much stronger yet none of them 'collapsed'. Regime changes often have political reasons, where economy plays a useful backdrop.

In that case that would have worked for Russia/Ukraine. That's not what happened.

SU produced a lot of airplanes, both military and for civil use. If that's not an example of complicated industry, I don't know what is then.

And with 'modern' capitalism in Ukraine Antonov aircraft factory is as good as dead.

Slight correction. Soviet Academy of Sciences is not an educational institution, nor it is limited to those who were born in Moscow.

A lot of university students in Moscow, Kyiv, St. Petersburg or any bigger Soviet city weren't actually born there. If you were from another city the university will give you dorm room if you pass the entry exams.

In case of Pajitnov luck is more about getting a job at Academy of Sciences, but probably it has something to do with his talents.

Ehh, starving in 1964? Maybe not living extra lavish, but hardly starving.

Speaking from ex-SU side, not sure about shows, but some 'science' related magazines had cult following. Copies of 'Eureka' were a great read in my childhood. It was a yearly book-length magazine about new technologies.

Some covers from it here — http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/E/%27%27Evrika%27%27/_%27%27Evri...

I'm currently learning Flutter, I think it is not exactly 'low-code', but pretty close to what you already know, and I like it a lot so far.

I would say that Russian Empire and USSR were similar in the methods of achieving their goals — a lot of rigid hierarchical structures, top-down management, a certain level of brutality. But the goals were very different.

That's very unfair. The education was free for all, there was significant investment in education, 90% of schools in my rather ancient city were built during Soviet time, not before, not after. Same for university campuses and hospitals. That systemic investment into education along with state-wide industrialisation eventually paid-off. There were wide-spread programs how for example factory worker can get a higher education while still being able to provide for his family.

Invest in a small elite and let the rest starve was more of a motto of Russian Empire, where most of people couldn't read, yet there were some technological achievements nevertheless.

>> - the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?

Ehh, maybe there is something I'm not picking up, but there's plenty of bad things happened to people (and are happening right now) that were not justified by any 'disgusting behavior'. Ethnic cleansing for example - something that happened in my country, I do not think that people who lived somewhere for hundreds of years and killed due to some lofty ideas about the 'nation' really deserved that treatment.

I don't think that major Ukrainian cities of let's say post-Stalin era were in worse shape then comparable Russian cities of the same time. You had more 'deficit' goods in Moscow sure, I don't know if Kyiv was lacking anything else to be honest.

Rural/urban gap was very real though but with each decade more and more people were able to live in the cities due to extensive housing program.

Around 1990-1991 there was a popular sentiment in Ukraine that we are feeding the whole Union etc, something similar was in Russia (that they subsidize other republics), the reality was a bit of a mixed bag

I'm not an expert but I do not think that commercial viability was really something they were interested in. Again, flight inside USSR were pretty common, and there was a demand for those flights, but only at heavily subsidized prices. So the idea probably to have this token supersonic jet as more of a demonstration of capabilities of Soviet technology, operating at a loss. Also, technological parity. I think it is more of a execution failure rather than idea.

BTW, country dachas was not exactly a marker of a bureaucrat class. More precisely I believe there were two classes of dachas - small summer homes for common people and 'nomenklatura' dachas for people with personal drivers.

Ukraine fits the bill, you can rent a nice apartment in downtown part of town, internet is cheap and fast, food costs something like 3 times less then US, cities are walkable, you don't really need a car. Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk for a more cozy atmosphere or Kyiv if you really want to live in a big city.

Climate is on the other hand, winters could be cold and summers unpleasantly hot so in that regard Balkans could be better.

You shouldn't accuse anyone of lies if you fail to understand how genetics work. Recessive alleles are not "in danger", their number would not decrease over time if there is no bias. That's basics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle

Also anti-miscegenation laws is not a universal thing, but rather a specific facet of an Enlightenment-era Western culture, along with slavery.