it’s like “the best of russian propaganda narratives all in one place half the price double the length”. It’s a story easy to believe for those not in the know but it has little to do with actual events. This goose is up for gavage.

The reality was that the president Yanukovych (the one who eventually fled) broke away from the so-called Donetsk clan which he represented since the 90s and started hostile takeover of the entire economy including properties of oligarchs from different regional groups. He was assisted by russians who promised him a deal similar to the one they have with Lukaschenko in exchange of several tradeoffs that involved among other things russian military presence in Crimea, economically detrimental natural gas prices and gradual disarmement and dissolution of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. It was a Faustian bargain of sorts if you think about it.

So he started to consolidate power inch by inch until he started to leave out people who brought him to power back in the 90s and elevated him to prime minister during early 2000s, and then helped him rebuild his influence during the mid-to-late 2000s in favor of his new russian friends who sold him a bill of goods. So he initiated a change of Constitution to give himself more power and get shit done. At the same time he attempted to deal with European Union to broker favorable trade deals to appease the parliament and parliamentary opposition but mainly to fuel his family’s business entities.

At some point in late 2013 russians saw through the scheme and threatened a military coup (as military and national security services were filled with their assets and agents of influence) that lead to Yanukovych doing 180 towards russia but it caused massive protests across the country that were initially ignored by the government altogether. Those protests had USAID NGO presence but it was ineffective clownshow with little substance mostly done for cameras. They weren’t involved in decision making of anything and their presence remained media-centric throughout the latter stages of the protest.

The initial wave started to simmer down by late November but due to police violently attacking students at the Independence Square in the middle of the night it snowballed into a giant protest later known as Euromaidan.

The united parliamentary opposition backed by disgruntled business elites (future president Petro Poroschenko was one of them actually) leveraged the protests and provided it with infrastructure and resourcesall while trying to reason with Yanukovych behind closed doors who by then was still somewhat in control of police and military but russians insisted on more violent response to quell the protests and potentially kickstart a civil war that would be a nice opportunity for them to swoop in and take over amidst chaos.

While Yanukovych, business elites and the parliamentary opposition negotiated - it was a stalemate on the streets that lasted until January 16 when the parliament majority voted the Dictatorship Laws that outlawed any form of civil disobedience. That caused another escalation of protests and massive surge in police violence - the infamous wall of fire at Hruschevsky Street happened right after that. This led to another attempt to find compromise among business elites, parliamentary opposition and the president - for a while it seemed like an agreement was reached only for the aforementioned violent response taking place February 18-20. That was supposed to be a start of civil war but further escalation was avoided when the Agreement on the Settlement of the Political Crisis was finally signed after a bloody fiery siege of Independence Square. The agreement intended to restore previous version of Constitution switching from Presidentially-parliamental republic back to parliamentary-presidential republic and doing Presidential elections to clear the air.

However, Yanukovych fled immediately after that more or less exposing himself as decommissioned russian asset. He left the parliament to pick up the pieces and maintain the continuity of governance. Head of parliament became acting President, the new elections were scheduled for late May and the new Cabinet of Ministers was elected to clean up the mess in the meantime.

Yanukovych didn’t have to flee - he just brokered a deal to make Maidan go away and he could weather the election cycle but this agreement turned out to be a diversion for russian Plan B - also known as russian Spring that kicked off a week later with strange things happening in Crimea. russians needed to spark a civil war to destabilize the situation, discredit the government and ease their way in by pretending to restore order. A day later Yanukovych did a press conference during which he asked russia for military intervention because “things got out of hand” even though he just signed a solution to all his problems and could’ve walked relatively scott free. But he did what he was told to - and he did that while crushing a pencil in his hands under obvious duress. Dude decided to outplay the devil, lost everything and became his bitch.

Meanwhile in Crimea - unmarked russian military started the takeover on Feb 27th that culminated with the takeover of the Crimean parliament building and mock referendum later in March that had very timid reaction from the international community. And then a wave of state institution takeovers attempts across Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odessa by armed people who claimed to be separatists but later were identified as russian nationals. This situation kicked off what was initially called the Anti-Terrorist Operation in Donbas. Kharkiv takeover ended with police storming the building and arresting the perpetrators, Odessa takeover ended in horrible tragedy when the Trade Union House burned down in early May 2014.

The military skirmishes in Donbas started to escalate further during June while international community was deeply concerned and worried. The dominant narrative back then was that this whole thing was deeply ambiguous and it is unclear who to blame. Except every single decision maker on the “separatist” side was oddly from russia with direct connection to the military or secret service but who cares about that. Then in July russians shot down MH17 and then finally led to some reaction and kicked off the first round of sanctions against russia. Then the Ilovaisk siege happened the aftermath of which led to what eventually became Minsk Protocol which was a russian attempt to appease international community and avoid harsher economic sanctions and possible military help to Ukraine and also dig in on Donbas and continue their charade.

There’s more but that’s the gist of it.

it is more complicated because this conversation leaves out a ton of historical context in favor of oversimplified definitions.

Anyone you disagree with is a Tankie.

I might be offended by that, if I thought you were educated enough to know what a tankie was.

Cry about it liberal

And when the Crimean annexation by Russia took place, where was the referendum to allow NATO troops? Or does the government suddenly get the unilateral decision-making power when it comes to NATO?

Because there’s nothing to say about it other than that it was bad

Yes, there is plenty to say, actually. You could, for example, stop pretending that you actually do care about the well-being of Ukrainian people, since you apparently have no mention of the millions of deaths from destruction of public healthcare, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, suicide, shitty diet and outright hunger that took place after 1991 and kept happening as Ukraine became the poorest country in Europe. You could admit that you only care about Ukrainians suffering now because the war happens to be against the geopolitical enemy of your country.

If you gave one flying fuck about the well-being of Ukrainians, you’d be supporting communism and the Soviet Union right now, since its disintegration led to the worst humanitarian crisis the country has seen since the Nazis invaded it, and to an ever-ongoing disintegration of public services which led to millions more premature deaths than the illegal Russian invasion. You would be complaining about Russian capitalism which is the one that invaded Ukraine, and you’d understand that there was no such war during Soviet times. It is precisely capitalism that brought all of this to Ukraine, and if you cared genuinely about Ukrainians and wished the best for them instead of using them as a pawn for your media-induced hatred of Russia, you’d wish for the USSR never to have fallen.

You’ve shown us in other comments that you’ve done no reading on the topic to the point that you don’t even bother to understand the difference between income and wealth, and you make up on-the-spot assumptions from your ill-informed, poorly-read, west-propagandized version of the topic. The problem isn’t that you do this, the problem is that you do this while claiming to be a leftist/anarchist. I’ll tell you something: if you, as a leftist/anarchist, share 90% of your opinion about a geopolitical enemy of the USA with the CIA, you’re doing something wrong.

Such as the Soviet Union. In fact, the term “tankie” was first coined to describe people who supported the Soviet Union sending tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution

Not to be pedantic or anything, but wasn’t the etymology of the word “tankie” vindicated recently when it was released by Trump that the leader of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters ended up being funded by CIA?

Regarding your point of Stalin controlling the Soviet Union and dictating whatever happened with the means of production, I actually have stuff to add: union membership was highest in the USSR than it’s ever been anywhere to that point of history, with unions taking care of a lot of stuff such as guaranteeing workers access to housing and healthcare, organizing vacation, ensuring workplace safety, and obviously representing the will of workers: in every factory there was a factory newspaper where workers could submit their complaints or comments on the work organizing, and unions had the power to change the workplace director. As for sources of this, you can have a look at Pat Sloan’s “Soviet Democracy”, a book written by an Englishman who left the UK to go to the USSR in the Stalin era and lived there for about a decade; also Mick Costello’s “Worker Participation in the Soviet Union”, a book written after a series of interviews to workers all over the USSR by the author, published 1977 so a very different era, tells a lot about this. I think most of the misconception that “workers had no say in production” comes mostly from western anticommunist propaganda and isn’t substantiated by any serious evidence. If you have any works contradicting what I’ve said above, I’d be glad to look into it.

Lastly, regarding your point of “Soviet Union being the end state of Capitalism and the enslavement of the working class to the owner class”: who was said owner class?

Source for the graph above, hopefully you know Meduza well enough to know that it’s not very much aligned with socialism. Wealth inequality has never been lower in any Soviet Union territories as it was during the Soviet Union, not before, not after. In fact, wealth inequality was remarkably low compared to most capitalist countries (again as you see in the graph), and the highest salaries belonged actually not to politicians as you could expect, but to highly trained intellectuals such as University professors or military researchers (my sources for this are Albert Szymanski’s “Is the Red Flag Flying” and Robert C. Allen’s "Farm to Factory: a Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution). If there were an “owning class vs. working class” dynamic, wouldn’t we expect high wealth disparity between workers and “owners”, whoever they were? Why, if workers had no say over 70 years in industrial and economic production, was wealth inequality consistently at historic minima and not growing as is the case in proven class-societies such as capitalism (Russia post-1990 per the graph) or feudalism (Russia pre-1929ish per the graph)?

Not supporting the “dictatorship of the proletariat” types, but the reason tankies support Russia isn’t because they think modern Russia is Communist. It’s because Russia is fighting Ukraine, which they see as a proxy war against the United States and its puppets in NATO.

In the authoritarian Communist worldview, the United States is the vanguard of capitalism and the most dangerous threat to global communism. That’s why they think Communist nations need authoritarian governments and powerful militaries: to protect themselves from the United States and its client states.

So tankies support anyone fighting the United States or its allies, no matter who they are or how bad their governments are. Because they think anything that weakens the United States is good for the world.

Democrats and Conservatives. Anyone who sides with capitalism, supports state sanctioned violence by the police along with genocide and thinks that human rights are something to be debated over with shit like “up to the states to decide” or whatever is a fascist.

Interesting guess, definitely not something a person with a working brain would discuss in detail through unsecure channels

Russia isn’t committing genocide, fucking duh

This take right here is why people turn against leftist politics… homie is telling you to participate in democracy as well as other forms of organization and resistance, and you’re all “fuck that I’m not gonna do nothin”

Like this is a dumb hill to die on, and you’re polarizing people that could be your allies

Elections are one front in the class war. Leftist keep ignoring it and wonder why they get nothing.

One post implied voting blue was voting for fascism, implying you shouldn’t for the dems in the US. My point is that this is shortsighted and harmful. People should vote for the dems unless a third party is a viable alternative, they should also build up third parties to make them viable options, and they should also join political orgs and unionize, and do direct action.

Ofc more than voting is needed, but the republicans are causing more harm than the dems would have by miles and contributing to more voter apathy is not the answer.

Could you clarify?

The claim was that electoral democracy was a misdirection, my point is that all the effort to manipulate it demonstrates that it is the seat of power, and the oligarchs have merely occupied it.

I would definitely lump those people in with the “liberals who do nothing except vote” crowd

Since they’re defined by not voting, they aren’t. They are, materially speaking, equivalent to anti-electoralists. The liberals are at least voting for plausible harm reduction.

Phrased like that it sounds super sinister 👀
or maybe just dramatic?

don’t subscribe to the clown two party regime

Ignoring the issue by letting the objectively worse choice win without even having a plan on reform is clowny.