#second world - soviet bloc

[stillunusual]

Meanwhile in vatnik clownland…. According to the eloquent words of this eminent Russian historian, Poland has only existed since 1918.

However, back in the real world, this is yet another Russian lie, because Poland actually came into existence nearly a thousand years before that - in the year 966 to be precise.

Poland's name is derived from that of a West Slavic tribe - the Polanie ("people of the fields") - who settled in Central Europe in the 6th century. On 14th April 966, Mieszko I, the ruler of the Polanie, accepted Christianity through the auspices of the Roman Church and this is generally accepted by real historians as the founding event of the Polish state.

In 1025 Poland became a kingdom, which later united with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1386. Nearly two centuries later, in 1569, the Union of Lublin formally established the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a huge multi-ethnic state which was regarded as one of Europe's great powers at the time. A century later the Commonwealth began a spiral of decline which led to its eventual demise at the end of the 18th century, when it was taken apart by its neighbours - Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia.

The first attempt to resurrect a Polish state was the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 by Napoleon, which only lasted a few years before disappearing from the map again after Napoleon's defeat in the east. Uprisings in 1830 and 1863 were also brutally suppressed.

However, the Polish people never lost their sense of identity, and despite attempts to germanise and russify them, preserved and passed on their language and culture from one generation to the next until Poland finally regained its independence in 1918, with the creation of the Second Polish Republic, which established and successfully defended its borders over the next two years after victorious conflicts with Germany and Soviet Russia.

In 1939, Poland was invaded and partitioned once again - by Nazi Germany and the USSR - and remained under Soviet occupation until 1989, when communist rule was peacefully overthrown and Poland once again re-established itself as a democratic state, initiating the collapse of the Soviet bloc….

[szczekaczz]

i'm glad i decided to take this class on masculinity in ruslit because 1) i never perceived masculinity in any positive light nor thought about it deeply in general and being open to new concepts is the most important thing in life 2) the professor talks about the theory of literature in a really interesting way + i'm always hyped for comparing things from the "first" and the "second" world

[pietroleopoldo]

One of my biggest pet peeves is the fact that the term "first/third world" seems to have completely lost its original meaning. "The US are actually a third world country" I assure you that if there's a country on this planet that cannot be a third world country it's the US

[kaijuno]

In light of Fall Out Boy’s GARBAGE cover of the song. Let’s learn about the original. Notice how they’re actually in chronological order instead of just random references 😒😒😒😒

1949

Harry Truman was inaugurated as U.S. president after being elected in 1948 to his own term; previously he was sworn in following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He authorized the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively.

Doris Day enters the public spotlight with the films My Dream Is Yours and It’s a Great Feeling as well as popular songs like “It’s Magic”; divorces her second husband.

Red China: The Communist Party of China wins the Chinese Civil War, establishing the People’s Republic of China.

Johnnie Ray signs his first recording contract with Okeh Records, although he would not become popular for another two years.

South Pacific, the prize-winning musical, opens on Broadway on April 7.

Walter Winchell is an aggressive radio and newspaper journalist credited with inventing the gossip column.

Joe DiMaggio and the New York Yankees go to the World Series five times in the 1940s, winning four of them.

1950

Joe McCarthy, the US Senator, gains national attention and begins his anti-communist crusade with his Lincoln Day speech.

Richard Nixon is first elected to the United States Senate.

Studebaker, a popular car company, begins its financial downfall.

Television is becoming widespread throughout Europe and North America.

North Korea and South Korea declare war after Northern forces stream south on June 25.

Marilyn Monroe soars in popularity with five new movies, including The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, and attempts suicide after the death of friend Johnny Hyde who asked to marry her several times, but she refused respectfully. Monroe would later (1954) be married for a brief time to Joe DiMaggio (mentioned in the previous verse).

1951

The Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius, were convicted on March 29 for espionage.

H-Bomb is in the middle of its development as a nuclear weapon, announced in early 1950 and first tested in late 1952.

Sugar Ray Robinson, a champion welterweight boxer.

Panmunjom, the border village in Korea, is the location of truce talks between the parties of the Korean War.

Marlon Brando is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire.

The King and I, musical, opens on Broadway on March 29.

The Catcher in the Rye, a controversial novel by J. D. Salinger, is published.

1952

Dwight D. Eisenhower is first elected as U.S. president, winning by a landslide margin of 442 to 89 electoral votes.

The vaccine for polio is privately tested by Jonas Salk.

England’s got a new queen: Queen Elizabeth II succeeds to the throne upon the death of her father, George VI, and is crowned the next year.

Rocky Marciano defeats Jersey Joe Walcott, becoming the world Heavyweight champion.

Liberace has a popular 1950s television show for his musical entertainment.

Santayana goodbye: George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, dies on September 26.

1953

Joseph Stalin dies on March 5, yielding his position as leader of the Soviet Union.

Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov succeeds Stalin for six months following his death. Malenkov had presided over Stalin’s purges of party “enemies”, but would be spared a similar fate by Nikita Khrushchev mentioned later in verse.

Gamal Abdel Nasser acts as the true power behind the new Egyptian nation as Muhammad Naguib’s minister of the interior.

Sergei Prokofiev, the composer, dies on March 5, the same day as Stalin.

Winthrop Rockefeller and his wife Barbara are involved in a highly publicized divorce, culminating in 1954 with a record-breaking $5.5 million settlement.

Roy Campanella, an African-American baseball catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, receives the National League’s Most Valuable Player award for the second time.

Communist bloc is a group of communist nations dominated by the Soviet Union at this time. Probably a reference to the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany.

1954

Roy Cohn resigns as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and enters private practice with the fall of McCarthy. He also worked to prosecute the Rosenbergs, mentioned earlier.

Juan Perón spends his last full year as President of Argentina before a September 1955 coup.

Arturo Toscanini is at the height of his fame as a conductor, performing regularly with the NBC Symphony Orchestra on national radio.

Dacron is an early artificial fiber made from the same plastic as polyester.

Dien Bien Phu falls. A village in North Vietnam falls to Viet Minh forces under Vo Nguyen Giap, leading to the creation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam as separate states.

“Rock Around the Clock” is a hit single released by Bill Haley & His Comets in May, spurring worldwide interest in rock and roll music.

1955

Albert Einstein dies on April 18 at the age of 76.

James Dean achieves success with East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, gets nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and dies in a car accident on September 30 at the age of 24.

Brooklyn’s got a winning team: The Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series for the only time before their move to Los Angeles.

Davy Crockett is a Disney television miniseries about the legendary frontiersman of the same name. The show was a huge hit with young boys and inspired a short-lived “coonskin cap” craze.

Peter Pan is broadcast on TV live and in color from the 1954 version of the stage musical starring Mary Martin on March 7. Disney released an animated version the previous year.

Elvis Presley signs with RCA Records on November 21, beginning his pop career.

Disneyland opens on July 17, 1955 as Walt Disney’s first theme park.

1956

Brigitte Bardot appears in her first mainstream film And God Created Woman and establishes an international reputation as a French “sex kitten”.

Budapest is the capital city of Hungary and site of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Alabama is the site of the Montgomery Bus Boycott which ultimately led to the removal of the last race laws in the USA. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr figure prominently.

Nikita Khrushchev makes his famous Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s “cult of personality” on February 25.

Princess Grace Kelly releases her last film, High Society, and marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco.

Peyton Place, the best-selling novel by Grace Metalious, is published. Though mild compared to today’s prime time, it shocked the reserved values of the 1950s.

Trouble in the Suez: The Suez Crisis boils as Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal on October 29.

1957

Little Rock, Arkansas is the site of an anti-integration standoff, as Governor Orval Faubus stops the Little Rock Nine from attending Little Rock Central High School and President Dwight D. Eisenhower deploys the 101st Airborne Division to counteract him.

Boris Pasternak, the Russian author, publishes his famous novel Doctor Zhivago.

Mickey Mantle is in the middle of his career as a famous New York Yankees outfielder and American League All-Star for the sixth year in a row.

Jack Kerouac publishes his first novel in seven years, On the Road.

Sputnik becomes the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, marking the start of the space race.

Chou En-Lai, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, survives an assassination attempt on the charter airliner Kashmir Princess.

Bridge on the River Kwai is released as a film adaptation of the 1954 novel and receives seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

1958

Lebanon is engulfed in a political and religious crisis that eventually involves U.S. intervention.

Charles de Gaulle is elected first president of the French Fifth Republic following the Algerian Crisis.

California baseball begins as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants move to California and become the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. They are the first major league teams west of Kansas City.

Charles Starkweather Homicide captures the attention of Americans, in which he kills eleven people between January 25 and 29 before being caught in a massive manhunt in Douglas, Wyoming.

Children of Thalidomide: Mothers taking the drug Thalidomide had children born with congenital birth defects caused by the sleeping aid and antiemetic, which was also used at times to treat morning sickness.

1959

Buddy Holly dies in a plane crash on February 3 with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, in a day that had a devastating impact on the country and youth culture. Joel prefaces the lyric with a Holly signature vocal hiccup: “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

Ben-Hur, a film based around the New Testament starring Charlton Heston, wins eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Space Monkey: Able and Miss Baker return to Earth from space aboard the flight Jupiter AM-18.

The Mafia are the center of attention for the FBI and public attention builds to this organized crime society with a historically Sicilian-American origin.

Hula hoops reach 100 million in sales as the latest toy fad.

Fidel Castro comes to power after a revolution in Cuba and visits the United States later that year on an unofficial twelve-day tour.

Edsel is a no-go: Production of this car marque ends after only three years due to poor sales.

1960

U-2: An American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, causing the U-2 Crisis of 1960.

Syngman Rhee was rescued by the CIA after being forced to resign as leader of South Korea for allegedly fixing an election and embezzling more than US $20 million.

Payola, illegal payments for radio broadcasting of songs, was publicized due to Dick Clark’s testimony before Congress and Alan Freed’s public disgrace.

John F. Kennedy beats Richard Nixon in the November 8 general election.

Chubby Checker popularizes the dance The Twist with his cover of the song of the same name.

Psycho: An Alfred Hitchcock thriller, based on a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and adapted by Joseph Stefano, which becomes a landmark in graphic violence and cinema sensationalism. The screeching violins heard briefly in the background of the song are a trademark of the film’s soundtrack.

Belgians in the Congo: The Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) was declared independent of Belgium on June 30, with Joseph Kasavubu as President and Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister.

1961

Ernest Hemingway commits suicide on July 2 after a long battle with depression.

Adolf Eichmann, a “most wanted” Nazi war criminal, is traced to Argentina and captured by Mossad agents. He is covertly taken to Israel where he is put on trial for crimes against humanityin Germany during World War II, convicted, and hanged.

Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein, is a breakthrough best-seller with themes of sexual freedom and liberation.

Bob Dylan is signed to Columbia Records after a New York Times review by critic Robert Shelton.

Berlin is separated into West Berlin and East Berlin, and from the rest of East Germany, when the Berlin Wall is erected on August 13 to prevent citizens escaping to the West.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion fails, an attempt by United States-trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro.

1962

Lawrence of Arabia: The Academy Award-winning film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence starring Peter O’Toole premieres in America on December 16.

British Beatlemania: The Beatles, a British rock group, gain Ringo Starr as drummer and Brian Epstein as manager, and join the EMI’s Parlophone label. They soon become the world’s most famous rock band, with the word “Beatlemania” adopted by the press for their fans’ unprecedented enthusiasm. It also began the British Invasion in the United States.

Ole’ Miss: James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi

John Glenn: Flew the first American manned orbital mission termed “Friendship 7” on February 20.

Liston beats Patterson: Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight for the world heavyweight championship on September 25, ending in a first-round knockout. This match marked the first time Patterson had ever been knocked out and one of only eight losses in his 20-year professional career.

1963

Pope Paul VI: Cardinal Giovanni Montini is elected to the papacy and takes the papal name of Paul VI.

Malcolm X makes his infamous statement “The chickens have come home to roost” about the Kennedy assassination, thus causing the Nation of Islam to censor him.

British politician sex: The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, has a relationship with a showgirl, and then lies when questioned about it before the House of Commons. When the truth came out, it led to his own resignation and undermined the credibility of the Prime Minister.

JFK blown away: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on November 22 while riding in an open convertible through Dallas.

1965

Birth control: In the early 1960s, oral contraceptives, popularly known as “the pill”, first go on the market and are extremely popular. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 challenged a Connecticut law prohibiting contraceptives. In 1968, Pope Paul VI released a papal encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae which declared artificial birth control a sin.

Ho Chi Minh: A Vietnamese communist, who served as President of Vietnam from 1954–1969. March 2 Operation Rolling Thunder begins bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply line from North Vietnam to the Vietcong rebels in the south. On March 8, the first U.S. combat troops, 3,500 marines, land in South Vietnam.

1968

Richard Nixon back again: Former Vice President Nixon is elected President in 1968.

1969

Moonshot: Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing, successfully lands on the moon.

Woodstock: Famous rock and roll festival of 1969 that came to be the epitome of the counterculture movement.

1974–75

Watergate: Political scandal that began when the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC was broken into. After the break-in, word began to spread that President Richard Nixon (a Republican) may have known about the break-in, and tried to cover it up. The scandal would ultimately result in the resignation of President Nixon, and to date, this remains the only time that anyone has ever resigned the United States Presidency.

Punk rock: The Ramones form, with the Sex Pistols following in 1975, bringing in the punk era.

1976–77

(An item from 1977 comes before three items from 1976 to make the song scan.)

Menachem Begin becomes Prime Minister of Israel in 1977 and negotiates the Camp David Accords with Egypt’s president in 1978.

Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, but he first attempted to run for the position in 1976.

Palestine: a United Nations resolution that calls for an independent Palestinian state and to end the Israeli occupation.

Terror on the airline: Numerous aircraft hijackings take place, specifically, the Palestinian hijack of Air France Flight 139 and the subsequent Operation Entebbe in Uganda.

1979

Ayatollah’s in Iran: During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the West-backed and secular Shah is overthrown as the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gains power after years in exile and forces Islamic law.

Russians in Afghanistan: Following their move into Afghanistan, Soviet forces fight a ten-year war, from 1979 to 1989.

1983

Wheel of Fortune: A hit television game show which has been TV’s highest-rated syndicated program since 1983.

Sally Ride: In 1983 she becomes the first American woman in space. Ride’s quip from space “Better than an E-ticket”, harkens back to the opening of Disneyland mentioned earlier, with the E-ticket purchase needed for the best rides.

Heavy metal suicide: In the 1980s Ozzy Osbourne and the bands Judas Priest and Metallica were brought to court by parents who accused the musicians of hiding subliminal pro-suicide messages in their music.

Foreign debts: Persistent U.S. trade deficits

Homeless vets: Veterans of the Vietnam War, including many disabled ex-military, are reported to be left homeless and impoverished.

AIDS: A collection of symptoms and infections in humans resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It is first detected and recognized in the 1980s, and was on its way to becoming a pandemic.

Crack cocaine use surged in the mid-to-late 1980s.

1984

Bernie Goetz: On December 22, Goetz shot four young men who he said were threatening him on a New York City subway. Goetz was charged with attempted murder but was acquitted of the charges, though convicted of carrying an unlicensed gun.

1988

Hypodermics on the shore: Medical waste was found washed up on beaches in New Jersey after being illegally dumped at sea. Before this event, waste dumped in the oceans was an “out of sight, out of mind” affair. This has been cited as one of the crucial turning points in popular opinion on environmentalism.

1989

China’s under martial law: On May 20, China declares martial law, enabling them to use force of arms against protesting students to end the Tiananmen Square protests.

Rock-and-roller cola wars: Soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi each run marketing campaigns using rock & roll and popular music stars to reach the teenage and young adult demographic.

Short summaries of all 119 references mentioned in the song, you’re welcome.

[50cal-fullauto-astarion]

☈ your bones singing into mine ii

one - two

nikto x gen!bio-weapons engineer reader (no use of y/n) 3.4k words cw: honestly just the relationship being dysfunctional, also like warlord sugar daddy overtones, but that's just how this cookie is gonna crumble Nikto has swept you out of the darkness, and into an intact world burning full of ugly lights. He meets your every need as you work to create weapons to supply him an armory of shock and awe. He buys for you a place in Bruges, a rowhouse right on the water, and your only desire is a romantic dinner with him. He does not have it within himself to deny you.

Nikto brings you out into a world that is bright and burning, but mostly whole. He tells you that things are tied on a shoestring of balance, that any strong enough blow of breeze could tip the whole house of cards, and he has a look in his eyes that names himself typhoon. 

He is one of the most complex and deeply locked men you have ever met in your life, and you have met a great many men with secrets that could turn cities into subatomic particles in a blinding flash of a second. He wants to father a new world, a savage paradise, and, yet, he holds you in the palm of his velvet-covered iron fist as his finest treasure.

Penthouses are cleared out for you–places high in the sky, in any number of cities, so far away from the ground and the dark. He pours money into your comfort like hemorrhaging, and he cares not that his funds bleed, because he can always dump more into the wound. 

It’s a wound he wants to sustain, because he likes to see you clean, and comfortable, and sparking electricity as you work. He provides makeshift, mobile labs for you. Thousands upon thousands of dollars for computers, and programs, and security. Though he lifts you into the light, he makes you a small space of darkness, allowing you to run and return to your work.

He begins to call you Spider, or Pauk, depending on whether his English is dropping your name like a threat, or if his Russian is soft and trying to entreat you.

There is a place in Bruges, right on the water, that he pulls together for you. It is smaller than your other hideaways, cozier. Bulb-lit with warm wooden flooring and tall walls. He walks stiffly through the halls, watching for your reaction, and his shoulders relax when you turn from the window watching boats on the water to give him your cracked grin. 

“It’s out of a book,” you say, “the buildings are such bright colors. How is this real?”

“It’s always been this way here,” he tells you. He shuffles a moment, bringing his clasped hands from his back to his front, before he adds quietly, “We’re glad that you…find it acceptable here.”

Surely he is remembering the blocs he grew up on, all the colorless brutalist construction from the Soviet era. Houses for workers, starvation in the streets. You wonder if his place had heriz rugs all over the floors, to insulate sound and cushion steps and provide color. 

You press your fingertips into the cool glass, looking at him, wondering about him. You’d like to see his face, though he’s told you that it is a nightmare. You’d like to kiss him. You know he loves you, just as you love him.

“It’s perfect. I’m going to like it here,” you tell him, and your heart swells and patters when his shoulders raise a little bit, proud of himself for his pick. With his hidden face, you’ve become an expert in his body language. All his little tells become clear to you, the more time you spend with him.

He is slow with you, cautious. Not as if approaching a wild animal, he would never treat you with such base suspicion and wariness, but as if he is the animal, well-aware of exactly how powerful his bite is. He treasures you too much to damage you. 

Such brutality is held within this many-faceted man, vast and damning. He is a gentleman though, through accident or practice, and he puts that hardwork into effect with you.

It causes you to make the first move most of the time. 

“I want you to have dinner with me tonight,” you say, tapping your fingers against the glass, feeling the condensation cling to your fingerprints. 

He shakes his head. “Your value is too high for us to allow you out of the flat, Pauk,” he says gently, misunderstanding, as if reminding you. There are so many beautiful homes he has carved out for you, but you’ve never stepped foot outside of them. 

He thinks you want to, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The reality is that you are brimming with hatred at the fact it still stands. That your suffering was for nothing, and the apocalypse still lies dormant but rumbling, a stalled birth. You love your closed spaces and your blackout curtains that hide the world and your tall walls and bright lights.

“We can have something ordered and brought to you,” he continues, trying to soothe the blow that never landed.

A grunt of annoyance snaps out of your throat, hand pressing flat to the glass. “Nooo,” you draw out, turning to face him in full. “I want you all to eat here, with me. Only us, none of the guards making all that fucking noise with their heavy boots. And I want to pretend that we’re all just having a nice night. And there are no contagions or stadiums or belt-fed guns.”

In shame, his head drops a degree, arms tightening in front of him. The supple leather of his gloves creak. “Apologies, Pauk.” His head remains that one slice lower, but his eyes flicker up like a bird’s from beneath his rippy lashes. “We…” he pauses, trying to formulate the words, “we will put that together. For you. What do you want to eat?”

Your hand comes away from the glass, and you press your palms together like a prayer, holding the sides of your hands to your lips. “I want something bloody and buttery. Something good made by someone that doesn’t love me.”

A small noise like a laugh sounds behind his heavy mask, and his neck relaxes. It puts together a picture of thought: it’s a good thing we do not cook for you, then. “We will find something.”

+

Neither of you cook. It’s a sad reality. You were too built up for epidemiology and plague-practitioning to have the room or time to learn the skill, and Nikto readily admits that he’d long ago lost his sense of smell. “Nova gas,” he explained, funnily enough. “That was your grandfather’s work, yes?” It was. He and his team. You are a legacy leper-making, just like God and all of his followers.

The sun has settled fully in the city of Bruges, and the light of street lamps, the running lights of boats on the water, and fairy lights around shopfronts make the water glitter. It is warm here, with all the brick and cobblestone soaking up the yellow light, and for once you are fine with the curtains open.

Nikto has spoiled you rotten with clothing, all of it fine and soft and rich. You dress comfortably, beautifully, and wander the flat, looking over things leftover from past tenants, waiting on his return. He always leaves you with a guard when he is gone, and tonight it is a short but sturdy woman from Montenegro who does not speak. She sits on the small leather couch in the living room, reading a book with horses on the cover, rifle across her lap. You do not bother her, but you cannot wait for her to leave.

When Nikto arrives, it’s with yet another guard, this one in plainclothes, carrying two large paper bags in their arms. It’s always seemed funny to you that he just goes out in the mask, nightmare beneath it or not, and that people must have reactions in public. But, you don’t think Nikto travels anywhere that people would dare comment on it. He has lackeys for embarrassing, mundane duties. 

He takes the bags from the second guard, and dismisses the woman on the couch, letting you approach to lock the deadbolts on the back of the door when they’re out. It is your comfort and your right, he will not interfere with it.

Meeting his eyes, you grin a cracked grin at him. “Smells good. What is it? What was the restaurant called?”

He makes another laugh-noise, looking skin-close to bashful. “We do not know. We sent Dejanović to get it, he knows the city.” He peers into the bag. “He said foreign dignitaries enjoyed the place. We don’t feel like that always speaks well to quality.”

You try to take the bag into your hands, but his arm tightens. He does not like you doing menial tasks. He likes it only when you are free to tend to your work and whims. It is much preferable to him that your needs are met, and he is glad to tend to those tasks when he is with you.

“If it’s all rot and garbage, we can make zakuski instead, and wash it down with vodka,” you tell him, swaying a little, hoping the promise pleases him. “Tahumi brought me a can of caviar, and even found a mother-of-pearl spoon for it.”

His eyes grow hard at the mention of Tahumi giving you a gift. That is another thing that heckles him. He does not like others knowing about you, much less providing for you. That is his honor, and an honor he thinks it is.

Your mouth starts to curl. “Don’t eat yourself with knots,” you instruct him, but his eyes only grow harder, his posture stiffer. “I wanted it, and Tahumi saw it, and he bought it. He did it to please you, because you are so here-and-there with your underlings. Your favor can’t be curried because it doesn’t exist.”

“They are warm, walking corpses, and nothing more,” he says, stone-solid, cold. “We don’t need them for anything more than catching bullets and carrying out orders. You are not a tool to buy their way into security. There is none, and you–you’re–” 

He turns his head and breathes out hard. His body is held so tightly it paints pain on the walls behind him. His molars squeak as they grind together, trying to collect himself, but he is upset.

“Andryu,” you say, pulling his diminutives, trying to pluck the chords that will bring him back to you. You bend your body to swerve, attempting to capture his eyes. “Andryusha.”

There is a little break in the armor, a crack where you can push your fingers in, to find contact with him. There is a little light in his eyes. “We cannot allow you to be taken advantage of. Your wholeness is…” he trails off, struggling, and you provide him the territory to prowl, find his words. He turns and meets your eyes, and there is his passion. “Our last shred of warmth is you. If you are pained, or used, or discarded–it is a blow that would destroy the last human thing in us.”

And, here, your scant humanity answers his. You fold, slope, ease. You nod in agreement. “I know, Andryu, I do. But all of you know where my loyalties lie. You know I wouldn’t hesitate to find you if I felt targeted.” You want so horrendously to reach out and touch him, but you don’t. You have to allow him to initiate, otherwise he cannot handle it. “My lot is in your lot. I go where you go. Everyone else is a corpse that forgot to lie down and die.”

Using his language in ways that he understands it unlocks him to you. His gloved hand comes up, hovering just to the side of your jaw. But he doesn’t touch, he only traces the air in a line down the bone structure. 

+

He allows—or, rather, you give him no in allowing you to stand in the kitchen as he unpacks your meals to plate. It could be call an awkward affair, if either of you had the social graces to register that feeling in your minds. 

He’s taken his gloves off and swatted at your hand trying to take the paper bag for recycling, giving you a sharp look borne of the love he holds. Again, not allowed to lift a finger. 

There are faded Cyrillic characters tattooed across his knuckles, the black ink bloated and faded to blue. SOS across three fingers: either spasi, otets, syna or Suki Otnyali Svobodu. Save me, father, your son. Bitches robbed my freedom. 

He’s never told you which in specific, though he’s offered both as options. Tattoos are carved into so much of his skin, and he’s given you brief walking tours of them when he’s stripped down enough for them to appear. A warping on Russian prison tattoos, repurposed for the Spetsnaz. 

Epaulets on his shoulders—horses die from work. Devils just below those, oskals, hatred of authority. ‘I Fuck Poverty and Misfortune’ in Cyrillic, riding his Adonis belt. A lighthouse on his forearm, yearning for freedom. His skin tells his story, hard-lived, a language known to few. 

His plating skills are what cause him minor self-consciousness. He’s not an artistic man, and he has no eye for aesthetics. The blood-rare ribeyes are just placed and pushed to one side of the plate, crumbled blue cheese dumped artlessly on top. Creamed potatoes end up slopping over roasted asparagus, and he growls in his throat, frustrated. He is trying incredibly hard to make it pleasing. The more he moves it around, trying to be careful, the worse it looks. 

He wouldn’t care if it was solely for him. His frustration is because you will not be eating something pretty. In his mind, the only things you deserve are pretty and perfect. 

His hands stop fussing, resting on the edge of the counter, glaring down at the plates. “It looks like shit,” he renders his verdict. It sounds like he is considering throwing it away and ordering something else.

“Pelmeni look like shit. So does poutine. But it all tastes good, so we still eat it,” you push back. “No one eats shiny plastic or tinsel.”

He grunts again. “People eat shiny plastic and tinsel all the time, because they are fucking stupid.”

“If any of you are insinuating that any of us are fucking stupid, you’re being a fucking child.” Despite the content of your words, it is not said with heat. It is an olive branch, trying to reach him across the expanse of his dissatisfaction. You’re not sure you’ve made contact until his fingers start tapping on the counter, and he hums Krokodil Gena’s Birthday Song deep in his chest. He is calming, rectifying reality with himself. 

After a few, long moments, he picks up the plates, nodding at you, and carries them to the dining table outside the kitchen. It is situated in front of a set of big picture windows that he honestly does not like you standing near, ever, but it is for the sake of the evening. He sets your plate down, and pulls out your chair for you, before he seats himself. There are already sets of silverware and water on the table. A bottle of vodka, and two small glasses to drink from. 

You start by pouring two sips of vodka, offering him one. A toast falls out of your mouth, unthinking, and he clinks your glasses together in agreement. When you put your shot back, he hands you his glass, and you shoot that, as well. He has not removed his mask. He will not. But he overturns his glass next to yours.

It’s an odd affair, how the meal goes. Conversation picks up, on plans and your work, on the state of the world as it stands. That will run out, and you will both turn to other topics. Books, movies, cars. Oh, Nikto has such a soft spot for cars–he could talk about them from dusk until dawn. Luxury cars, supercars, performance and rally cars, working vehicles, even an astonishing breadth of consumer cars. He has opinions that stretch the globe, and you soak it up like a dry sponge. 

The oddest thing is that you eat, and he does not. He keeps his hands resting on either side of his plate, guarding it as if he was a prisoner, but he does not once touch his silverware. He won’t eat in front of anyone. He can’t, not without taking the mask off. It’s something he didn’t have to explain to you, you just understood it by studying his patterns. It’s something that made him even softer toward you. 

You finish, part of your steak left–you intend to slice it up and put it on some grilled crusty bread with piles of caramelized onions later–resting your fork and your knife on the edge of your plate. “That was good. Despite the dignitaries and dog shit. I want a copy of their menu, to tear up and eat bit by bit. I want all of you to have more dates with me, this one dripped romantic. All the seams were splitting up, and it went drop by drop by drop.”

“Date?” he queries, looking at you across the table as he reaches for your plate.

“Date.” You nod once, emphatically.

He shudders, smothering something that sounds like a sigh, averting his eyes. “We…will make sure there is a menu for you, next time,” he starts, unphased by your request. “Roses, if you like.”

You shake your head. “No use for roses, they wilt and die. Flowers all-wilted smell like the dark parts of the bunker, and my stomach eats and eats away at me because of that smell.”  You send an apologetic look across the table, thinking. “I’ll take tokens in trinkets. Whenever you bring me jewelry, I don’t take it off.”

As if in example, you pull up your sleeves, showing him the bracelets he’s brought you, left for your discovery on desktops and dressers. Next, you tug at your collar, showing him a pile of necklaces. 

His fingers twitch, looking at you helplessly. Not even he can prevent the swallow that goes down his throat, when he sees that you hoard the fine things he brings back for you.

Another long moment passes, and he is hoarse when he agrees, “Jewelry. We will bring you jewelry, then.”

In as much of a rush as you’ve ever seen him, he collects your dishes, and the bottle of vodka, storming back through the kitchen door. It doesn’t latch behind him, and you know he will be a while. It feels dirty, destructive and found and deceitful, but you sneak up to the crack, wanting to watch him.

His back is turned, his mask removed. Hair so deep in darkness it shines white under lights sticks up from his head at all angles, some of it missing from the side of his skull, along with an ear. He eats quickly, in clipped bites, gorging himself, stopping only to tip back the vodka bottle. It’s almost an ugly display, brutal necessity, and you know as well as you know the own pounding of your heart that he is uncomfortable, that he hates this. He hates to be bare.

You cannot see his face, and you would not try to see it. You want to see it someday, and that will only happen when he is ready to show you. You will not steal that freedom from him. You will not sneak looks when he is unawares. It is the same courtesy he has afforded you, and you are hellbent to pay it back in kind.

With that prickling your skin, you back away from the door, allowing him his needs. 

When he returns, sitting next to you on the couch, he is warmed-through and softened by the alcohol and food. He takes hold of your ankle, pulling it into his lap, rubbing the knob of your bone with his bare fingers. His masked head tips back, resting against the back of the couch, and he heaves a heavy sigh.

Your stomach clenches, and your heart races. There is so much love between the two of you, so impossibly massive that it cannot ever be feasibly dealt with, and that is something you are fine with when his eyes meet yours in a crinkled smile. 

Perhaps your union will kill the world as it stands, but you don’t particularly mind. His hands are warm against your bones, reaching deeper than any other human possibly could, and he looks at you as if you are his only purpose in life, even if that is not true.

“Andryusha,” you greet him quietly, turning your leg in his touch so he can have more skin.

Another small noise, pleasure, and he rubs deeper, followed by a soft, heartsick request, “Say it again, Paukya.”

[mariacallous]

While the Russian-Ukrainian War is only one symptom of broader destructive international trends, its outcome will co-determine the direction of the world’s development. 

Popular yet imprecise expressions like the “Ukraine Crisis” or the “Ukraine War” have been misleading many to believe that the Russian-Ukrainian War is a solely Eastern European issue. According to this misperception, a Ukrainian leadership that was more submissive to Russia could have avoided the unfortunate war. Supposedly, Kyiv can still stem the risks spilling over from the “war in Ukraine” to other realms and regions if it accommodates Russian aggression.

If seen from a historical and comparative perspective, the Russian-Ukrainian War looks different. It is only one of several permutations of Moscow’s post-Soviet imperialism and merely one facet of larger regressive developments since the end of the twentieth century. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is a replay or preview of pathologies familiar to Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. The alleged “Ukrainian Crisis” is neither a singular nor a local issue. It is less the trigger than a manifestation of larger destructive trends.

At the same time, the Russian-Ukrainian War is a grand battle about the future of Europe and the principle of inviolability of borders. Moreover, the war is about Ukraine’s right to exist as a regular UN member state. The conflict has genuinely global significance.

Yet, the war’s course and outcome can either accelerate, contain, or reverse broader political, social, and legal decay across the globe. Moscow’s partial victory in Ukraine would permanently unsettle international law, order, and organization and may spark armed conflicts and arms races elsewhere. A successful Ukrainian defense against Russia’s military expansion, in contrast, will generate far-reaching beneficial effects on worldwide security, democracy, and prosperity in three ways.

A Ukrainian victory would, first, lead to a stabilization of the rules-based UN order that emerged after 1945 and consolidated with the self-destruction of the Soviet Bloc and Union after 1989. It would, second, trigger a revival of international democratization, which has halted since the early twenty-first century and needs a boost to start anew. Third, the ongoing Ukrainian national defense and state-building contribute to global innovation and revitalization in various fields, from dual-use technology to public administration, fields in which Ukraine has become a forerunner.

Stabilizing International Order

The Russo-Ukrainian War is only one of several attempts by powerful states to expand their territories since the end of the Cold War. Several revisionist governments have tried or are planning to install their uninvited presence in neighboring countries. The resulting military operations have been or will be offensive, repressive, and unprovoked rather than defensive, humanitarian, and preventive. Several revisionist autocracies have engaged in, or are tempted to try, replacing international law with the principle of “might is right.”

An early post-Cold War example is Iraq’s 1990 annexation of Kuwait, which was instantaneously reversed by an international coalition in 1991. Another example is Serbia’s revanchist assaults on other former Yugoslav republics once ruled from Belgrade. During this period, Russia began creating so-called “republics” in Moldova (i.e., Transnistria) and Georgia (i.e., Abkhazia and “South Ossetia”). At the same time, Moscow ruthlessly suppressed the emergence of an independent Chechen republic on its own territory.

Only recently has the Kremlin turned its attention to Ukraine. In 2014, Moscow created the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk and illegally annexed Crimea to the Russian Federation. Eight years later, Russia also illegally incorporated Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions into its official territory.

The international community’s reaction to Russia’s border revisions has remained half-hearted, unlike its responses to the Iraqi and Serbian attempts of the 1990s. The West’s timidity only provoked further Russian adventurism. Moscow now demands Kyiv’s voluntary cessation of all parts of the four Ukrainian mainland regions that Russia annexed in 2022. This includes, oddly, even some parts of Ukraine’s territory that Russian troops never managed to capture. The Kremlin’s final aim is still the eradication of Ukraine as a sovereign state.

At the same time, Beijing is bending established rules of conduct in the South and East China Seas and stepping up its preparations to incorporate the Republic of China in Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China by force. Venezuela has announced territorial claims on neighboring Guyana. Other revisionist politicians across the globe may be harboring similar plans.

Moscow’s official incorporation of Ukrainian lands is unique since Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which was created to prevent such conquests. Russia’s behavior is also peculiar in view of its status as an official nuclear-weapon state and depositary government under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Nevertheless, Moscow is trying to reduce or even destroy an official UN member and non-nuclear weapon state, thereby undermining the entire logic of the non-proliferation regime and its special prerogatives for the five permanent UN Security Council members whom the NPT allows to have nuclear weapons.

At the same time, the Russian assault on Ukraine is not entirely exceptional, neither geographically nor temporally. It is only one of several recent symptoms of more generic Russian neo-imperialism. It is also just one aspect of larger expansionist and revanchist tendencies across the globe.

A Ukrainian victory against Russia would not be a merely local incident but an event of far broader significance, notwithstanding. It can become an important factor in preventing or reversing international border revisionism and territorial irredentism. Conversely, Ukraine’s defeat or an unjust Russo-Ukrainian peace would strengthen colonialist adventurism across the globe. Ukraine’s fight for independence is, for world affairs, both a manifestation of broader problems and an instrument of their solution.   

A Revival of International Democratization

Russia’s assault on Ukraine challenges principles such as peaceful conflict resolution, national sovereignty, and the inviolability of borders. It also represents another negative global political trend of the early twenty-first century, namely the decline of democracy and the resurgence of autocracy. This regressive trend manifests itself through the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.

A major internal determinant of the Russian assault on Ukraine is that Putin’s various wars have, since 1999, been sources of his undemocratic rule’s popularity, integrity, and legitimacy. Sometimes overlooked in analyses of Russian public support for authoritarianism, the occupation, subjugation, and repression of peoples like the Chechens, Georgians, and Ukrainians finds broad support among ordinary Russians. Their backing of victorious military interventions—especially on the territory of the former Tsarist and Soviet empires—is a major political resource and social basis of Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime.

Regressive tendencies, to be sure, were already observable in Yeltsin’s semi-democratic Russia of the 1990s—for instance, in Moldova and Chechnya. Yet, under Putin as prime minister (1999–2000, 2008–12) and president (2000–2008, 2012– ), the viciousness of Russian revanchist military operations in and outside Russia has rapidly grown. This radicalization is a function not only of escalating Russian irredentism per se but also an effect of fundamental changes in Russia’s political regime. Moscow’s increasing foreign aggressiveness parallels the growth of domestic repression after Putin’s take-over of Russia’s government in August 1999.

The two major early spikes of Kremlin aggressiveness towards the West and Ukraine followed, not by accident, Ukrainian events in 2004 and 2014. They had much to do with the victories of those years’ liberal-democratic Orange Revolution and Euromaidan Revolution. Ukraine’s domestic development questions Russia’s imperial pretensions, as it leads the largest former colony out of Moscow’s orbit. The democratizing Ukrainian polity is also a conceptual countermodel to authoritarianism in the post-communist world. Its very existence challenges the legitimacy of the post-Soviet autocracies in Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia.  

Ukraine’s fight for independence is thus not only a defense of international law and order but also a battle for the cause of worldwide democracy. The contest between pro- and anti-democratic forces is global and has been sharpening already before, in parallel to, and independently from, the Russo-Ukrainian War. At the same time, the confrontation between Russian autocracy and Ukrainian democracy is a particularly epic one.

If Ukraine is victorious, the international alliance of democracies will win, and the axis of autocracies around Russia will lose. In this scenario, not only will other democracies become more secure, self-confident, and energized, but also it is likely that more democracies will appear—above all, in the post-communist world from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Diffusion, spillover, or domino effects could also trigger new or re-democratizations elsewhere.

Conversely, a Russian victory will embolden autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups throughout the world. In such a scenario, democratic rule and open societies would become stigmatized as feeble, ineffective, or even doomed. The recent worldwide decline of democracy will be less likely to reverse and may continue further or accelerate. While the “Ukraine Crisis” is not the cause of democracy’s current problems, its successful resolution would revitalize worldwide democratization.

Transferable Innovations

A third, so far, underappreciated aspect of Kyiv’s contribution to global progress is the growing number of new and partly revolutionary Ukrainian cognitive, institutional, and technological advances that can be applied elsewhere. Already before the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022, Kyiv initiated some domestic reforms that could also be relevant for the modernization of other transition countries. After the victory of the Euromaidan uprising or Revolution of Dignity in February 2014, Ukraine started to restructure its state-society relations fundamentally.

This included the creation of several new anti-corruption institutions, namely a specialized court and procuracy, as well as a corruption prevention agency and investigation bureau. The novelty of these institutions is that they are all exclusively devoted to the preclusion, disclosure, and prosecution of bribery. In April 2014, Ukraine started a far-reaching decentralization of its public administration system that led to the country’s thorough municipalization. The reform transferred significant powers, rights, finances, and responsibilities from the regional and national levels to local self-governmental organs of amalgamated communities that have now become major loci of power in Ukraine.

The Euromaidan Revolution also led to a restructuring of relations between governmental and non-governmental organizations. Early independent Ukraine, like other post-Soviet countries, suffered from alienation between civil servants and civic activists. After the Revolution of Dignity, this gap began to close. For instance, Kyiv’s famous “Reanimation Package of Reforms” is a coalition of independent think tanks, research institutes, and non-governmental organizations that has been preparing critical new reform legislation for the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), Ukraine’s unicameral national parliament.

Also, in 2014, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia signed EU Association Agreements of a new and, so far, unique type. The three bilateral mammoth pacts go far beyond older foreign cooperation treaties of the Union and include so-called Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas between the EU and the three countries. Since 2014, the Association Agreements have been gradually integrating the Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Georgian economies into the European economy.

These and other regulatory innovations have wider normative meaning and larger political potential. They provide reform templates, institutional models, and historical lessons for other current and future countries undergoing democratic transitions. Ukraine’s experiences can be useful for various nations shifting from a traditional to a liberal order, from patronal to plural politics, from a closed to an open society, from oligarchy to polyarchy, from centralized to decentralized rule, and from mere cooperation to deeper association with the EU.

While Ukraine’s post-revolutionary developments are, above all, relevant for transition countries, its war-related experiences and innovations are also of interest to other states—not least the members and allies of NATO. Such diffusion concerns both Ukrainian accumulated knowledge of hybrid threats and how to meet them, as well as Ukraine’s rapid technological and tactical modernization of its military and security forces fighting Russian forces on the battlefield and in the rear. Since 2014, Ukraine has become—far more so than any other country on earth—a target of Moscow’s multivariate attacks with irregular and regular forces in the media and cyber spaces, within domestic and international politics, as well as on its infrastructure, economy, and cultural, religious, educational, and academic institutions.

Since February 24, 2022, Ukraine has engaged in a dramatic fight for survival against a nominally far superior aggressor country. Ukraine’s government, army, and society had to adapt quickly, flexibly, and thoroughly to this existential challenge. This included the swift introduction of new types and applications of weaponry, such as a variety of unmanned flying, swimming, and driving vehicles, as well as their operation with the help of artificial intelligence. In a wide variety of military and dual-use technology, Ukraine had to innovate rapidly and effectively so as to withstand the lethal Russian assault.

In numerous further fields such as electricity generation and preservation, electronic communication, war-time transportation, information verification, emergency medicine, large-scale demining, post-traumatic psychotherapy, and veteran reintegration, to name but a few areas, the Ukrainian government and society have, and will have to react speedily and resolutely. While Ukraine often relies on foreign experience, equipment, and training, it is constantly developing its own novel kit, approaches, and mechanisms that could potentially be useful elsewhere. This new Ukrainian knowledge and experience will come in especially handy for countries that may be confronted with similar challenges in the near or distant future.

It All Depends on Kyiv

The escalation of the so-called “Ukraine Crisis” in 2022 has been only one expression of earlier and independently accumulating international tension. At the same time, the Russian-Ukrainian War is no trivial manifestation of these larger trends and no peripheral topic in world affairs. A Russian victory over Ukraine would have grave implications for the post-Soviet region and beyond. Conversely, a Ukrainian success in its defense against Russia’s genocidal assault and the achievement of a just peace will have stabilizing and innovating effects far beyond Eastern Europe.

Apart from being a revanchist war of a former imperial center against its one-time colony, Russia’s assault on Ukrainian democracy is driven by Russian domestic politics. It is a result of Russia’s re-autocratization since 1999, which, in turn, follows more significant regressive trends in the state of global democracy. Ukraine has been less of a trigger than a major victim of recent destructive international tendencies.

At the same time, Ukraine’s fight can make crucial contributions to counteracting the global spread of revanchism. It can reignite worldwide democratization and help speed along political transitions in other nations. A Ukrainian victory and recovery may save not only Ukraine but also its neighbors from Russian imperialism. Ukraine’s fight also contributes to solving numerous larger problems of the world today.

[reddest-flower]

In 1917, the Soviets revealed the secret treaties of the imperialist powers. When he released these documents, Leon Trotsky – the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs – noted, ‘Secret diplomacy is a necessary weapon in the hands of the propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to make the latter serve its interests. Imperialism, with its worldwide plans of annexation, its rapacious alliances and machinations, has developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest degree’. The Soviet record against colonialism was clear, even as the Comintern struggled to produce a firm line in this or that country. There was no instance where the Soviets considered colonial rule to be worthwhile. The same with fascism, which the Soviets saw as anathema to humankind. Soviet aid to Republican Spain was one test and the other was the immense sacrifice of the USSR in the fight against fascism in World War II.

In 1931, the Spanish Left won the elections and inaugurated the Second Spanish Republic. An even more radical Popular Front government came to power in 1936. Only two countries, Mexico and the USSR – the two peasant republics that had been formed by revolutions – backed the Spanish Republic. Progressive policies to undercut landlords, the aristocrats and the capitalists set the Republic against the ruling bloc. That bloc would rapidly find solace in the fascist movement as well as in the army of General Francisco Franco that left Spanish colonized Morocco for the mainland. From North Africa, the fascists came into the Iberian Peninsula with the intent of overthrowing the Republic by force. A war ensued, which was – with the fascist Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 – an early frontline of the fascist assault. The Soviets backed the Republic, as did Communist parties from around the world. Communists came to the aid of the Republic from the United States to the Philippines, from India to Ireland. The International Brigades, supported by the USSR, provided a bulwark against the onrush of the fascist armies, which were backed not only by the fascist powers (Italy and Germany) but also by the imperialist bloc (Britain and France). Fissures between the anarchists and the communists fractured the unities necessary in the fight against fascism, surely, but there it is undeniable that without logistical help – Operation X – from the Soviets the Republic would have been crushed immediately and not lasted until 1939.

When the Republic fell in March 1939, the imperialist and fascist blocs seemed fused. When Franco marched into Madrid, the British Ambassador went to greet him. When Nehru, who had been to the Republican front-lines and was fully behind the Republic, heard of this, he shuddered. This imperialist and fascist alliance was against humanity. Franco would remain in power until his death in 1975. He remained heralded by the ‘democratic’ countries of Europe.

The USSR, through the summer of 1939, faced the imminent threat of invasion by the fascist and imperialist powers. Such an invasion had taken place right after 1917. In the war in Spain, it became clear that Soviet armaments that went there through Operation X were not of the same quality as those produced by the Germans and the Italians. The Soviets sent 772 airmen in heavy Tupolev SB bombers, which turned out to be far slower and more vulnerable than the German Messerschmitt Bf 109. The Soviet army staff feared that an invasion by the Nazis and the imperialist bloc, after the fall of Spain, would be catastrophic for the USSR. The Nazis had already seized Austria in the Anschluss of 1938 and had threatened Lithuania with conquest in March 1939. The Italians had seized Albania in April 1939 and the two fascist powers – Italy and Germany – signed a decisive Pact of Steel in May 1939. Britain’s appeasement of the fascist bloc at the Munich meeting in 1938 suggested collusion between the imperialist and the fascist bloc. This was the context of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, where the Soviets hoped to get some time to build up their capacity before an inevitable Nazi attack. Surely there should have been no compromise with fascism. But this was in the realm of realpolitik – a way to salvage time before the war that was to come. Indeed, in September 1939, the USSR opened nine factories to build aircraft and seven factories to build aircraft engines. The Red Army grew from 1 million (Spring of 1938) to 5 million (June 1941).

But Stalin had other ideas as well. On March 10, 1939, when the Spanish Republic was ready to fall, he said that the USSR should allow the ‘warmongers to sink deeply into the mire of warfare, to quietly urge them on’. If Germany and Britain went to war, then it would ‘weaken and exhaust’ both allowing the USSR ‘with fresh forces’ to enter the fray eventually ‘in the interest of peace to dictate terms to the weakened belligerents’. This would not happen. France was easily defeated by the Nazis and Britain could not find the way to bring troops to the European mainland. The war came to the USSR without the imperialists being weakened. The Nazis attacked the USSR as expected. The Soviets fought valiantly against the Nazis, losing over 26 million Soviet citizens in the long war that eventually destroyed the Nazi war machine.

It was the Soviet Union that saved the world from Nazism. It was Soviet armies that liberated most of the Nazi concentration camps, and it was the Soviet armies that entered Berlin and ended the war. General Dwight Eisenhower, the leading American soldier in the European sector, recalled his journey into the Eastern front after the end of the war, ‘When we flew into Russia in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men and been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.’

Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2019

[solar-plant-princess]

I’ve been so normal about Fionna and Cake. And I recently saw a theory about where Simon is actually from. The theory goes that he’s clearly not “white white”, he has a Russian last name, and brings up Jewish foods with some regularity. So it was theorized that he’s Central Asian.

And I agree with this and would just like to add some details about his wider pre-apocalypse origin. I believe he’s probably ethnically Uzbek just based on his more olive skin tone and that being the country with the highest Jewish population in Central Asia.

So if I had to make some large leaps, to me it seems he could have been born to a mixed family of (maybe) Uzbeks and (likely Russian Ashkenazi) Jews. As they would have lived under what we can assume was the Soviet Union given we see various military vehicles with red stars on them in flashbacks. We can assume he or his family probably moved somewhere else in the Soviet Bloc to pursue higher education or better opportunities generally. Which is why he ends up in roughly where Ooo begins which is implied to be Central Europe, specifically Germany given that he interacted with the mother gum and Bonnie speaks fluent German as a second language in every dub except the German version (where she speaks Turkish iirc, which isn’t anything direct, but would be a funny coincidence that Simon is seemingly Turkic).

So piecing some things together it seems like he’s mixed race from Central Asia, and then at some point moved out west. And seemingly from Cheers being like the only show he remembers and has fond memories of, as well as a total lack of any family being mentioned, he escaped into West Germany to pursue his academic career which required a lot of travel looking for the most fucked up cursed artifacts at some point. Also all of his artifacts being of a truly magical nature as he believes probably wouldn’t have been received well at all in the State Atheist USSR, whereas in the west it’s still looked down on but not something the government would like actively clamp down on unlike in the USSR.

Which also explains why in his memories there is largely western architecture despite his Russian last name. And since we know what caused things to go wrong is the “Mushroom War” which was obviously a nuclear war which explains all the wrecked military vehicles where he was surviving. As a nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have seen a huge amount of extreme fighting in Germany as both sides had intended to push through Central Europe in case of war.

This is all basically empty conjecture, but to me at least the pieces fit together and build up a more well rounded origin for Simon. It could also explain a little bit about why he survived beyond the crown. He likely spent a lot of his youth moving around to escape poverty, and had to be resourceful during that time. On top of escaping across one of the most guarded borders in history, it is no small feat.

It at least makes a bit more sense to me of how a brown man, with a Russian last name, who brings up Jewish food, ended up in what seems to be West Germany, and had a career as a niche archeologist looking for actual legit magic artifacts around the world.

[apas-95]

Please bear in mind that I'm not disagreeing with you or anything like that, in fact I appreciate your views on Russia-Ukraine and this is why I just want to ask this. So, to simplify, you believe that the conflict is of two imperial powers, NATO vs Putin's Russia. Okay. What I struggle to understand is this, and um I myself am from Kazakhstan, so I guess bear that in mind. So if Russia is seeking new colonies (Crimea as the source of oil, famously), why wouldn't they rather colonize Kazakhstan? We are richer than Ukraine, our oil reserves are greater, we can mount no defense like Ukraine and obviously would not receive any help from NATO. In fact during January events we explicitly asked them to help us, their army entered, and then left (even though many claimed they would overturn our government). Idk how much you know about our country, so you might claim that Russia already has us as their colony, but I know for a fact that the most of oil reserves belong to Italian, German and American companies. Our president (Tokayev) while might seem like Putin's puppet, even during this war has gone against Putin - remained neutral about the conflict (like Belarus we technically could help), and also accepted the greatest number of refugees from Russia who refused to join the war (in my country many have argued that he's done more than the West to truly stop the conflict with this act). There are 14 Post-Soviet Republics, if not us, why not colonize any other country except the one that gets help from the States? (Armenia famously got their help during the whole Azerbaijan invasion) Also - you might say that Ukraine bc of their crimes against Russians gave a better reason, then we, too, have anti-Russia's movements that technically could provide a reason. Again, I'm not pro-Putin, obv, and mb this isn't important in the context, mb I shouldn't include such a narrow point of view, just, if you have anything to say about that, I would love to hear it, thanks!

I would say that there are a few main points that should be got across.

First: taking it as given that the Russian Federation is an imperialist country, in the Marxist sense of the term, we would have to conclude that it's a much weaker imperialist country than the USA.

From the start of the Russian Federation, it was a very impoverished country, one that survived mainly by selling off its natural resources and cannibalising the industrial base it took from the USSR. However, imperialism relies more on the wealth of the capitalist class than the country as a whole, and there was a lot of Soviet wealth and expertise to cannibalise. In Marxist terms, the key feature of imperialism is the export of capital, rather than resources or commodities, becoming the key part of the economy. The bourgeoisie of the Russian Federation has been able to build up enough capital to begin making this possible.

As it stands now, in the cases of CSTO countries, while the RF is often not even the largest investor, it is still a substantial investor, when looking at Foreign Direct Investment figures. Kazakhstan specifically has far more European investment (in part because of its resources compared to other countries), but it's undeniable that the RF is an influence - that we could describe the CSTO as, broadly, the RF's sphere of influence. While the US's sphere of influence is basically the entire world; and the EU's sphere of influence is all of Europe, most of Eurasia, and most of Africa; the Russian Federation would have a comparatively much smaller sphere of influence with a lot of overlap.

The second thing is: the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine is not, principally, an attempt at simple economic expansion, but motivated primarily by competition with the US imperialist bloc.

You are right - if the RF was looking to just invade and directly take control of whatever country it wished, it wouldn't choose Ukraine, it would choose somewhere closer to home. However, direct colonisation isn't how modern imperialism operates. Financial control with the threat of military action is far easier to maintain, once you've built up the capital. Being an imperialist country is exactly what makes 'primitive accumulation' through seizing territory no longer necessary. The reason the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine in 2022, and began military action against the country in 2014, is specifically because the prior neutral government was overthrown in a US-backed coup which installed a right-wing, nationalist government, which was explicitly hostile to Russia.

This isn't fueled by a simple, moral justification of 'well they hate Russians, so we should invade them' - it's a political move based on the fact that this new government was explicitly allied with the USA. From the USA's side, it was a move specifically to split the EU and RF blocs. The EU was becoming less interested in the alliance with the USA, and more interested with closer ties with the Russian Federation - the USA provoking a war both weakens the RF, as well as demonstrates its military dominance to the EU. Had the Kazakh government instead called for NATO to assist it, the Russian response may have been different. Imperialism is fine with nominal independence - it wants influence, not direct control - but when that influence is threatened, when a country takes a hard, military stance against it, then it acts violently.

So, again, I'd say the character of this conflict is inter-imperialist competition, instigated mainly by the US imperialist bloc, in order to weaken ties between the RF and EU imperialist blocs. The war is fought between the capitalists of each nation over which group of them gets market access to which territories, and the working people gain nothing either way. The workers, once united under a socialist state, now kill each other, so that the oligarchs that keep them poor can get richer. Neither side of this conflict fights for the workers.

Hope this helps explain my position! Also, for what it's worth, I lived in Kazakhstan for a time as a child, in Almaty.

[zendoe]

The stage of super-imperialism resulted in barely mitigated disaster for the entire socialist world. After the counterrevolutions of 1989, the proletariat in socialist states faced a hard choice: either give up state power or endure a period of tremendous hardship. Ruling communist parties in Cambodia, Mongolia, Angola, and much of the Eastern Bloc abandoned Marxism-Leninism. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) gave up their independence. A few others—in China, Laos, and Vietnam—weathered the storm by submitting to integration with the global capitalist economy, giving up many of the gains of the revolution and allowing a degree of exploitation by foreign and domestic capitalists as the price of retaining political authority. The DPRK and Cuba, who alone refused either course, suffered the most. Deprived of their largest trading partner and source of development aid, they experienced famine and economic crisis throughout the 1990s as the economic siege of their countries reached a level of total encirclement. In much of the former socialist bloc, Marxist groups were banned and Marxists were persecuted and sometimes executed or massacred by the new comprador elites. […]

In Mao Zedong’s lectures on protracted war, he identified three distinct stages of conflict:

The first stage covers the period of the enemy’s strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemy’s strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive. The third stage will be the period of our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy’s strategic retreat.

As of this writing, with the exception of the CPN-M, not one self-appellated Maoist insurgency has reached even the second stage since the fall of the Soviet Union. It cannot be said that any such surviving organization does not have the will to fight. When viewed in the context of the current stage of imperialism, their lack of progress is instead quite explicable: they must make do without an external supply of needed resources. […]

Overall, religion has replaced Marxism as the most vital anti-imperialist ideology, which sometimes obscures the class struggle to the advantage of the petit bourgeoisie and to the detriment of the proletariat, as it has within Iran, even as it provides the proletariat with the most practical avenue for resistance. Revolutionary Shi’ism forms the basis of both Ansarallah and Hezbollah, and the PFLP’s current orientation in the struggle for Palestinian liberation is as a subordinate partner to Hamas—which given the current balance of anti-imperialist forces, is the only path available to it. […]

Even where these ideologies are a progressive force against neocolonialism and the weight of the super-empire, they are not sufficient to liberate the working class. Materially, they are closest to the popular front model—i.e., based on class collaboration with the petit and national bourgeoisie, and subject to all the instability, contradiction, and class antagonism such an alliance entails. Proceeding to the next highest stage in Marxist terms—proletarian control of the state—requires a global unification of resistance that in the past was provided only by an already-existing bloc of proletarian states ready to support others in revolution.

In fact, without a vital socialist bloc—i.e. a return to the Cold War stage—even the creation of new anti-imperialist states of a bourgeois character has become extraordinarily more difficult. Between 1989 and 2022, Nkrumah’s dream of a united Africa drifted further from realization than it had been during his lifetime. Neocolonialism was restored in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia and Libya one way or another; ethno-religious conflict exacerbated by comprador governments and imperialist finance split Sudan and has recently threatened to split Ethiopia. The trend has been toward division and not unity, and until a sufficient counterbalance or disruption to the super-empire’s mechanisms of control exists, the reversal of this trend is unlikely.

Why the World Needs China by Kyle Ferrana

[usafphantom2]

The beginning of Area 51 is directly related to the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. After World War II, the Soviet Union lowered the Iron Curtain around itself and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, creating a near-intelligence blackout to the rest of the world. When the Soviets backed North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in June 1950, it became increasingly clear that the Kremlin would aggressively expand its influence. America worried about the USSR’s technology, intentions, and ability to launch a surprise attack—only a decade removed from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

A small part of the Lockheed corporation was called the Skunk Works. The requirement for absolute secrecy meant that in the year ahead, the Skunk Works team was assured a high degree of autonomy from the rest of the Lockheed corporation. Most competing companies tried to emulate the Skunk Works and had their small exclusive part of their company. In time, the expression, “he’s a real Skunk,” was considered a compliment

Kelly Johnson was the head of the Skunk Works. He was the designer creator of the U-2, the A-12, the YF 12, the M-12, and the SR -71 in 1955. He tasked Tony LeVier, his chief test pilot, to find a place far away from the public to test the U-2.

Tony LeVier used the company's Beach Bonanza airplane to fly Kelly, Richard Bissell, and Ozzie Ritland to an old World War II airfield just north of the test range where nuclear weapons had been dropped. It only took 30 seconds for everyone to know this was it! Isolated desert near a large lake bed. Kelly Johnson ironically called it “Paradise Ranch” because it wasn’t paradise! Later, it was shortened to the Ranch. When I was a little girl, I would hear my Dad and his friends talk about the Ranch. I would listen because I was a fan of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, thinking they might drop a hint of where they lived.

For all the myths and legends, what’s true is that Area 51 is very real—and still very active. There may not be aliens or a moon-landing movie set beyond those fences, but something is happening, and only a select few are privy to what’s happening further down that closely monitored wind-swept Nevada road.

Linda Sheffield

Source: Paul Crickmore‘s book Beyond the Secret Missions, the missing chapters.

Popular mechanic journal.

@Habubrats71 via X

[barkingbonzo]

VERNE TOSSEY

You've Bet Your Life, book cover, 1957

Verne Tossey was born in 1920 and grew up during the 1950s and was influenced by the artistic atmosphere of the time. Abstract Expressionism, a form of painting that explored notions of spirituality and the sublime, dominated the 1950s. A number of artists concentrated on the formal properties of painting, and action painting was influenced by the political freedom of the United States, in opposition to the strict limitations of the Soviet bloc. New York City became the focus for modernism on an international scale during the Post-War period. Many artists had travelled to the city during the Second World War, fleeing in exile from Europe. This led to a substantial pooling of talent and ideas. Influential Europeans such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers and Hans Hoffmann provided inspiration for American artists whilst in New York and influenced cultural growth in the United States for many decades to come. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Frank Kline, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Adolph Gottlieb were predominant artists of this period. The male dominated environment has been subsequently revised to recognize the contributions of female artists such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois, amongst others.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bill Bramhall

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 12, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 12, 2024

Today’s big story continues to be Trump’s statement that he “would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if those countries are, in his words, “delinquent.” Both Democrats and Republicans have stood firm behind NATO since Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952 to put down the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, and won.

National security specialist Tom Nichols of The Atlantic expressed starkly just what this means: “The leader of one of America’s two major political parties has just signaled to the Kremlin that if elected, he would not only refuse to defend Europe, but he would gladly support Vladimir Putin during World War III and even encourage him to do as he pleases to America’s allies.” Former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark called Trump’s comments “treasonous.”

To be clear, Trump’s beef with NATO has nothing to do with money. Trump has always misrepresented NATO as a sort of protection racket, but as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN put it today: “NATO is not an alliance based on dues: it is the largest military bloc in history, formed to face down the Soviet threat, based on the collective defense that an attack on one is an attack on all—a principle enshrined in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty.”

On April 4, 1949, the United States and eleven other nations in North America and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration. It established a military alliance that guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead. 

Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan. 

In 2006, NATO members agreed to commit at least 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP, a measure of national production) to their own defense spending in order to make sure that NATO remained ready for combat. The economic crash of 2007–2008 meant a number of governments did not meet this commitment, and in 2014, allies pledged to do so. Although most still do not invest 2% of their GDP in their militaries, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 motivated countries to speed up that investment.

On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, “If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.” In the years since 1949, his observation seems to have proven correct. NATO now has 31 member nations.

Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack, but also as a deterrent, and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the U.S., including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and said he would take the U.S. out of it in a second term, alarming Congress enough that last year it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or a congressional law.

But as Russia specialist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic last month, even though Trump might have trouble actually tossing out a long-standing treaty that has safeguarded national security for 75 years, the realization that the U.S. is abandoning its commitment to collective defense would make the treaty itself worthless. Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholtz called the attack on NATO’s mutual defense guarantee “irresponsible and dangerous,” and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines our security.”

Applebaum noted on social media that “Trump's rant…will persuade Russia to keep fighting in Ukraine and, in time, to attack a NATO country too.” She urged people not to “let [Florida senator Marco] Rubio, [South Carolina senator Lindsey] Graham or anyone try to downplay or alter the meaning of what Trump did: He invited Russia to invade NATO. It was not a joke and it will certainly not be understood that way in Moscow.”

She wrote last month that the loss of the U.S. as an ally would force European countries to “cozy up to Russia,” with its authoritarian system, while Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) suggested that many Asian countries would turn to China as a matter of self-preservation. Countries already attacking democracy “would have a compelling new argument in favor of autocratic methods and tactics.” Trade agreements would wither, and the U.S. economy would falter and shrink.

Former governor of South Carolina and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, whose husband is in the military and is currently deployed overseas, noted: “He just put every military member at risk and every one of our allies at risk just by saying something at a rally.” Conservative political commentator and former Bulwark editor in chief Charlie Sykes noted that Trump is “signaling weakness,… appeasement,…  surrender…. One of the consistent things about Donald Trump has been his willingness to bow his knee to Vladimir Putin. To ask for favors from Vladimir Putin…. This comes amid his campaign to basically kneecap the aid to Ukraine right now. People ought to take this very, very seriously because it feels as if we are sleepwalking into a global catastrophe…. ” 

President Joe Biden asked Congress to pass a supplemental national security bill back in October of last year to provide additional funding for Ukraine and Israel, as well as for the Indo-Pacific. MAGA Republicans insisted they would not pass such a measure unless it contained border security protections, but when Senate negotiators actually produced such protections earlier this month, Trump opposed the measure and Republicans promptly killed it. 

There remains a bipartisan majority in favor of aid to Ukraine, and the Senate appears on the verge of passing a $95 billion funding package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. In part, this appears to be an attempt by Republican senators to demonstrate their independence from Trump, who has made his opposition to the measure clear and, according to Katherine Tulluy-McManus and Ursula Perano of Politico, spent the weekend telling senators not to pass it. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, previously a Ukraine supporter, tonight released a statement saying he will vote no on the measure.

Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News recorded how Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) weighed in on the issue during debate today: “This is not a stalemate. This guy [Putin] is on life support… He will not survive if NATO gets stronger.” If the bill does not pass, Tillis said, “You will see the alliance that is supporting Ukraine crumble.” For his part, Tillis wanted no part of that future: “I am not going to be on that page in history.” 

If the Senate passes the bill, it will go to the House, where MAGA Republicans who oppose Ukraine funding have so far managed to keep the measure from being taken up. Although it appears likely there is a majority in favor of the bill, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tonight preemptively rejected the measure, saying that it is nonstarter because it does not address border security.  

Tonight, Trump signaled his complete takeover of the Republican Party. He released a statement confirming that, having pressured Ronna McDaniel to resign as head of the Republican National Committee, he is backing as co-chairs fervent loyalists Michael Whatley, who loudly supported Trump’s claims of fraud after the 2020 presidential election, and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wife of Trump’s second son, Eric. Lara has never held a leadership position in the party. Trump also wants senior advisor to the Trump campaign Chris LaCivita to become the chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee.

This evening, Trump’s lawyers took the question of whether he is immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election to the Supreme Court. Trump has asked the court to stay last week’s ruling of the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals that he is not immune. A stay would delay the case even further than the two months it already has been delayed by his litigation of the immunity issue. Trump’s approach has always been to stall the cases against him for as long as possible. If the justices deny his request, the case will go back to the trial court and Trump could stand trial.  

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[nismunc-ipc]

BREAKING NEWS: Germany’s Peace Treaty, Yes or No? 

by Khor Sue Ann of The New York Times

CRISIS [USSR BLOC]: Amidst intense deliberations over Germany’s peace treaty, Zhukov asserts that the agreement could be viable under strict conditions, especially after World War I. 

A majority of the Delegates are on the fence to accept the peace treaty, while Voronov leans towards a resolute ‘no’. Voronov is suspicious of Germany’s motives, particularly following Finland’s alignment. The delegates propose strategies to ensure that Germany wouldn’t have another upper hand, especially on military limitation. Kaganovich brings up that Germany should give back reparations, seconded by Malenkov. 

In a pivotal moment, Stalin mentions that despite there being worries about Germany’s potential betrayal, “We cannot throw this opportunity out the window.” As the room goes silent, the fate of the peace treaty hangs in the balance, raising doubts about its eventual endorsement by the Soviet Union.

[stillunusual]

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War, and all its tragic consequences, almost immediately after the pact was signed on 23rd August 1939. It was presented to the world as a simple non-aggression treaty, but was really a plan to carve up Europe between Germany and the USSR - involving the mutual invasion and partition of Poland, a free hand for Hitler to attack Western Europe and for Stalin to annex the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and to attack Finland. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was also the first step in a continuum of collaboration between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that lasted for the next two years, until Hitler broke the pact by launching Operation Barbarossa. Although the German invasion of the USSR initially went well, the Soviets eventually prevailed (with a lot of help from the capitalist west) and drove the Germans all the way back to Berlin. But the Soviets also insisted on holding on to the countries of central and eastern Europe they had occupied along the way - subjecting them to 10 years of Stalinist terror and trapping them behind the iron curtain against their will for half a century. These were wasted years that left every country in the Soviet bloc bankrupt, destitute and decades behind the countries of western Europe by the time they were finally able to overthrow communist rule at the end of the 1980s, after which the USSR also collapsed and ceased to exist - and the legacy of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that had started it all finally came to an end….

[mariacallous]

LISBON—Maria Brites took one more carnation in her hands from a table covered in them. She carefully set the flower in a glass box. Brites, an accomplished 76-year-old art teacher, has made dozens of these graceful souvenirs for Portugal’s museums to preserve the memory of the so-called “Carnation Revolution” which changed her own and her country’s life. It was April in Lisbon and outside, tourists teemed through the streets in the capital of a liberal democracy ranked among the freest nations in the world. Joined by her two adult daughters, Maria began to sing “Grândola, Vila Morena.” Fifty years ago, the fascist regime installed by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar banned other songs by its author, Zeca Afonso, for his opposition to the dictatorial regime. On April 25, 1974, conspirators played “Gradola Vila Morena” on the radio at 12:20 a.m. The song’s powerful melody and lyrics signaled the beginning of the revolution.

“Land of brotherhood,” the lyrics exclaim, “the people are the ones who rule within you, oh city!”

Exactly half a century later, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese gathered in Lisbon to chant “No to fascism.” Banners strung throughout the city featured happy people hugging with the caption, “Europe is for you.” According to the Migrant Integration Policy Index, Portugal has the second-most favorable citizenship regime in the European Union, in terms of naturalization rates.

Over this period, Portugal has not just shed its dictatorial past, it has become a leader of multilateral democracy. Think of the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon, which helped to manage the bloc after it enlarged from 15 to 27 states, as well as Portuguese native António Guterres ascending to secretary-general of the United Nations in 2017. This spring, an absolute majority of Portuguese—81 percent—told pollsters that they were proud of the way that Portugal became a democracy. This process involved not just ending its dictatorship at home, but also liberating its remaining colonies in Africa.

When I visit Portugal and observe this pride in action, my mind inevitably goes to post-Soviet countries that failed to keep their liberal democracies and rolled back to dictatorial regimes in the decades after the fall of USSR. During my 24 years of covering news in the region, I interviewed many people in Russia, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia who told me they felt nostalgic for a strong leader like Joseph Stalin. It seemed to me as if they were suffering from the loss of historical memory. Russia targets leaders of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group Memorial that worked hard to preserve painful memories, documenting hundreds of thousands of KGB cases and gulag victims, including the names of 44,000 people executed on personal order of Stalin. But the Portuguese do not hide their history, nor do they miss Salazar. Why? As millions of Ukrainians suffer from a war spurred on by Russia’s imperial ideology, I wanted to find out.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war in 2022, more than 60,000 Ukrainians have found refuge in Portugal. To the amazement of many of them, banners and billboards celebrating the country’s anniversary still feature communist hammers and sickles. Some slogans by the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), including “Mais forca!” are confronting to people from the former Soviet Union. The symbolism carries a valence that is hard to reconcile for them, and the associated iconography cuts against the message of freedom. In occupied Ukraine, these symbols signal the return of the authoritarian era, but in Portugal, communists helped end it.

The PCP was founded in 1921 as a legal party, but in 1926 it was forced underground by the far-right Estado Novo regime. Salazar came to power in 1932 and continued severe repression of anarchists and communists. Lisbon’s former prison, Museu do Aljube, lists the names and photographs of Portuguese opposition members imprisoned, tortured, or executed by the regime in the 1930s. The underground did not stop its struggle for over four decades of Europe’s longest dictatorship, though, and the working class and communist underground played a decisive role in preparing for April 25.

Portuguese communists, whom Moscow denied paying, were widely celebrated for the Carnation Revolution’s victory. Their involvement meant as soon as the people of Portugal embraced freedom from the dictatorship, they had to choose a side in the ongoing Cold War. The same year of the revolution, 1974, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited Fidel Castro in Cuba. Brezhnev was pushing European governments, the United States, and Canada to sign a document about security in Europe, recognizing the Soviet military victory in World War II, the acceptance of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and forced incorporation of Baltic states.

Fortunately for Portugal, the United States played a cautious role in Portuguese internal affairs, while the Soviet Union accepted the choice Portuguese people ultimately made to embrace the democratic path. “By the fall of 1974, communists tried to take over the power but our people made a different choice—we chose democracy,” Brites said.

Portugal signed the Helsinki Accords, along with nearly all other European governments, Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union in Helsinki on Aug. 1, 1975, confirming the acceptance of post-1945 borders. Later pro-Soviet regimes took power in Portuguese former colonies in Africa, including Angola. After the revolution, Portugal gave independence to Angola, a colony for nearly 500 years (and a source of slaves for Brazil), withdrawing its military forces by November 1975.

On a recent afternoon, I talked about liberal values with immigration lawyer Gilda Pereira, who grew up in Angola where her family enjoyed a wealthy and successful life before the revolution. Portugal’s presence in Angola began with the arrival of the explorer Diogo Cão in 1482, and although Portugal officially changed Angola’s status from a colony to an oversea province in 1951, its landlords continued to use forced labor at local plantations.

I expected somebody who grew up affluent in a former colony might be less in favor of the changes in Portugal but Pereira’s face was illuminated with a big smile when she talked about the revolution and how it transformed her country. The founder of a successful law firm in Lisbon who employs more than a dozen women lawyers, Pereira said she felt “zero nostalgia” for the dictatorship and loved Portugal’s active civil society and its passion for freedom. Portuguese human rights defenders are respected, she said, and investigative journalists are acclaimed.

“I am glad we let Angola and other colonies free, I am happy we have the rule of law, that we are true democrats,” she told me. Under Salazar, Pereira explained, she and her team of women would lack basic human rights. Progress continues, and this year, Portugal has risen to 17th in the Global Gender Gap Index ranking of equality, up from last year’s 32nd place.

Local freelance reporter Claudia Maques Santos explains Portugal’s choice this way: “I think it has to do with memory and sense of freedom.” For many Portuguese, recalling the era of authoritarian rule is far more painful than it is aggrandizing. Maria Brites echoed this, telling me she was “utterly unhappy” under Salazar and his successor in the provincial town where she taught art and raised her daughters. The dictatorship forbade divorce, and hers was a miserable marriage: “Every month he picked up my salary at school,” she said of her husband, “as all men were allowed to do that to women. We had no rights.”

On the morning of April 25, 1974, Brites’s father called to tell her that the revolution had happened, and she rushed to Lisbon to see it for herself, even though, she said, her husband tried to stop her with threats. Arriving in Lisbon, she felt what she described as “complete happiness, freedom to say what you felt like.”

Improbably for a democratic revolution, Portugal’s transition began with a coup, as military officers who opposed the regime rose up against it, in no small part because of the country’s imperial adventures abroad. Under Salazar, Portugal was paying an immense human cost fighting to maintain its African colonies. Over lunch in April, Col. Aprigio Ramalho, one of the officers who led the revolution, told me that the trips he made to Mozambique and Angola under the dictatorship were part of what galvanized his action. Portugal had waged war in Africa for 13 years, and thousands of Portuguese men had died there. “The failing African wars were the turning point for the revolution,” the colonel told me. The analogy to Ukraine was not lost on him: “Russian military men should read their oath well. We did. We were sworn to defend the people, or Portugal, our country, but not the dictatorship.”

Isabel Graca, a history professor at Almada Senior University, told me, “We made the choice to be free: No woman under Salazar could travel abroad without her husband’s permission. … As a student, I ran away from the police many times. We were banned from gathering in groups of more than three people. Punishment was severe.”

For women in particular, the civil liberties they could not have under dictatorship were far more critical than the distant territories that fascist Portugal claimed to control. This is exactly the situation citizens face in today’s Russia, where millions of people suffer from poverty, domestic violence, corruption, and a poor health system and where none of Putin’s imperialistic ideas and promises to build the “new world order” together with China and Hungary can distract from daily miseries.

Once again Portugal has chosen a side in a cold war. More than 70 percent of Portuguese have a negative view of Russia’s influence in global affairs, according to a German Marshal Fund report, and roughly 80 percent want to offer Ukraine NATO and European Union membership. Even PCP—which was the sole political party avoiding condemnation of Russia for starting the full-scale invasion in 2022—has chosen democratic values, not dictatorship. In its latest platform, the party advocates for Portugal to enjoy “a regime of freedom where the people decide their own future.”

Pedro Magalhaes, a senior researcher at Portugal’s Institute of Social Sciences, told me that Portugal has little reason to worry about the role of communists in its political life. On the contrary, he said, “Communists have been reliable democratic actors, involved in revising the constitution, controlling law-abiding unions, and having representatives in parliament.”

This year, Portugal’s far-right party Chega won 48 seats in the parliament. They have been accused of racism: In 2020, the party’s founder, André Ventura, was fined for discriminating of Roma community. That same year, he wrote on social media that Black lawmaker Joacine Katar Moreira should go back “to her own country.” But local democrats are not worried. “Chega is being left alone at the parliament, no one makes alliances with them, neither left- nor right-wing parties,” Marques Santos told me.

Nearly half of Portugal’s population earn less than 1,000 euros a month, many complain about their country quietly becoming an immigration hub, majority want a reduction of emigration. But in spite of the social issues, Portugal continues to resist to the extreme far-right agenda. June poll showed Chega getting 12 percent of support, which was a drop from 18 percent it received in the election.

“Portuguese people have a genuine love for freedom,” Magalhaes said.