Russia DOES have too many secrets for its own good. Russia has good reason to respect its difficult past, BUT NOT at the expense of her future.

An “invasion mentality” only works in wartime and 65 years out from the end of WWII is a long time. When a person decides to take medicine, when they are sick, we call that healthy but when they can’t quit the medicine afterwards we usually call that an addiction.

Every species of animal either makes the right adjustments for a changing environment or they perish.

We live in an incredibly fast moving age of transparency which is fundamental for the construction of any meaningful relationships or commerce. Russia’s old secret police mentality needs to die out fast because the paranoid are now in-charge and creating their own self-fulfilling prophecies by making enemies out of foreigners and citizens alike who try to bring in the necessary new ideas and techniques that the country needs to survive. The natural tendency of the Russian mentality is to immediately scorn these proven ideas no matter how successful they are in the rest of the world.

For example, a friend of mine tried to import some professional cinema and video gear into the country and had to get clearance from both, customs and the KGB / FSB for “security reasons” in order to do this when in fact this was just a way to force him to pay huge bribes to them.

According to the World Bank Russia is number 12 in GDP in the world which is really sad for a country with such huge intellectual talent and natural resources. Japan a tiny country with no natural resources and roughly the same population scores No 2. Frankly this is embarrassing beyond belief for Russia. Small countries like Japan, Italy, Spain and even France are literally kicking Russia’s backside economically on the world stage for all to see.

What “secrets” can Russia possibly wish to protect when it produces no internationally competitive or recognizable consumer or business products. No mobile phones, no computers or notebooks, no acceptable cars, no home appliances, no furniture, no engineering equipment, and the list go on and on. This “secrecy” mentality is a bad joke especially when the only thing floating the Russian economy is crude oil and gas.

“Secrecy” in Russia for the most part is a very bad and false ego trip.

Russia’s greatest treasure is not the “secrecy”. It’s your incredible women who are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my travels. Understand that the false “secrecy” that permeates Russian society is doing great damage to the welfare of all Russian people especially their women.

Russian women deserve much more then what they are getting in life. Changing this “secrecy” mentality at the political, economic and various cultural levels would make a significant difference in helping Russia rise above its current situation.

The current average wage in Russia is between $150 to $300 dollars per month. I don’t believe that increasing this will turn Russian women into feminists. Feminism in USA and our country was not so much a result of an expanding economy as it was a well planned and executed social engineering campaign designed to destroy relations between men and women and weaken American and British families.

Russia must shift some of that suspicion and paranoia away from the things that will make its economy grow and start targeting any of the global elites like George Soros who have a long reputation for sowing social chaos.

Russia must understand who are its real enemies and definitely can drop its secrecy, expand its economy and bring better lives to its people but still hold on to its precious cultural identity, especially its women.

It is no secret:
The biggest problem in Russia is, and will continue to be, corruption. It is endemic throughout every walk of life. It is accepted by the people as "how things work".
Unless and until the people wake up and stop accepting "how things work" nothing will ever change.
THAT is the tragedy of Russia today.

The problem regarding the endemic corruption in every walk of life is that it has become the norm, people have been brainwashed and accept things, as they are, after so many years of the communists in power and nothing will change for many decades to come, if not a half century and when we point out to them various bad habbits eg bad service..... their answer is: "this is Russia", meaning what you expect(?), as they don't know better!

Looking back to my own country, Greece, we inherited the same corruptive system and behaviour from the Ottoman occupation and after nearly 200 years of freedom still it's prevalent nearly in every walk of life, so I see no much changes in the Russian life style soon.

Russia for the past 90 years has been under the same regime which has run the country. As you know the KGB and now FSB has been the controlling force behind the USSR and apart from a brief spell under Gorbachev and Yeltsin they regained power under Putin who has centralised everything and the power is in the hands of the same people.

I remember reading somewhere, sometime ago, when the KGB was closed some years ago, the reporters were shown into the KGB building. In one large room in that building was a list of 10 million Russians that had been shot by the KGB. These people were simply listed as "Enemies of the State." None were given a trial of any kind. The person at the local KGB office simply said, "Shoot this guy," and he was shot. It wasn't even a hearing. Someone tattled on his neighbor for any one of a hundred things and the local KGB shot him. The idea of course, was to make the society a better place, but it didn't work that way.

Looking the wider picture, even today, the same thing continue and that is what made the Russian to be so secretive and also accept stoically the excesses of their Government.

The difficult part with that is, that in Lena's view the West is just as corrupt but on a higher level.

In Ukraine/Russia its easier to bribe the cop on the street and nigh impossible on higher levels if you are not 'inner circle' .

In the West it is fairly impossible to bribe the low workers, but if you know how its easy to corrupt the judges / legal system.

This is an old article, posted earlier on the FSU forum and I am reposting here, again, because of its relevance as I think it's very interesting to read!

Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier. Around the edges of the mortuary chamber, garlands from the media that attacked her while she was alive stood thick alongside wreaths from her children and friends, the satisfied leaf to leaf with the bereaved. Filing past them and out into the cemetery beyond, virtually no one spoke. Some were in tears. People dispersed in the drizzle as quietly as they came.

The authorities had gone to some lengths to divert Anna Politkovskaya’s funeral from the obvious venue of the Vagankovskoe, where Sakharov is buried, to a dreary precinct on the outskirts that few Muscovites can locate on a map. But how necessary was the precaution?

The number of mourners who got to the Troekurovskoe was not large, perhaps a thousand or so, and the mood of the occasion was more sadness than anger. A middle-aged woman, bringing groceries home from the supermarket, shot at point-blank range in an elevator, Politkovskaya was killed for her courage in reporting the continuing butchery in Chechnya.

An attempt to poison her had narrowly failed two years earlier. She had another article in press on the atrocities of the Kadyrov clan that now runs the country for the Kremlin, as she was eliminated. She lived and died a fighter. But of any powerful protest at her death, it is difficult to speak. She was buried with resignation, not fury or revolt.

In Ukraine, the discovery of the decapitated body of a journalist who had investigated official corruption, Georgi Gongadze, was sufficient outrage to shake the regime, which was brought down soon afterwards. Politkovskaya was a figure of another magnitude. A better historical comparison might be with the murder of Matteotti by Mussolini in 1924. In Russian circumstances, her moral stature as an opponent of arbitrary power was scarcely less than that of the Socialist deputy. But there the resemblance ends. The Matteotti Affair caused an outcry that nearly toppled Mussolini. Politkovskaya was killed with scarcely a ripple in public opinion. Her death, the official media explained, was either an unfathomable mystery, or the work of enemies of the government vainly attempting to discredit it. The president remarked she was a nobody whose death was the only news value in her life.

It is tempting, but would be a mistake, to see in that casual dismissal no more than the ordinary arrogance of power. All governments deny their crimes, and most are understanding of each other’s lies about them. Bush and Blair, with still more blood on their hands – in all probability, that of over half a million Iraqis – observe these precepts as automatically as Putin.

But there is a difference that sets Putin apart from his fellow rulers in the G8, indeed from virtually any government in the world. On the evidence of comparative opinion polls, he is the most popular national leader alive today. Since he came to power six years ago, he has enjoyed the continuous support of over 70 per cent of his people, a record no other contemporary politician begins to approach. For comparison, Chirac now has an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent.

Such eminence may seem perverse, but it is not unintelligible. Putin’s authority derives, in the first place, from the contrast with the ruler who made him. From a Western standpoint, Yeltsin’s regime was by no means a failure. By ramming through a more sweeping privatisation of industry than any carried out in Eastern Europe, and maintaining a façade of competitive elections, it laid the foundations of a Russian capitalism for the new century. However sodden or buffoonish Yeltsin’s personal conduct, these were solid achievements that secured him unstinting support from the United States, where Clinton, stewing in indignities of his own, was the appropriate leader for mentoring him. As Strobe Talbott characteristically put it, ‘Clinton and Yeltsin bonded. Big time.’ In the eyes of most Russians, on the other hand, Yeltsin’s administration set loose a wave of corruption and criminality; stumbled chaotically from one political crisis to another; presided over an unprecedented decline in living standards and collapse of life expectancy; humiliated the country by obeisance to foreign powers; destroyed the currency and ended in bankruptcy. By 1998, according to official statistics, GDP had fallen over a decade by some 45 per cent; the mortality rate had increased by 50 per cent; government revenues had nearly halved; the crime rate had doubled. It is no surprise that as this misrule drew to a close, Yeltsin’s support among the population was in single figures.

READ MORE:

By Perry Anderson 25 January 2007 Russia’s Managed Democracy

By John Laughland, a British eurosceptic conservative journalist, academic and author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy.
Who Killed Anna Politkovskaya?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/laughland2.html

"Klebnikov wrote a brilliant book about Boris Berezovsky – one of the most informative books about Russia’s ‘transition’ in the 1990s, in which he accused Berezovsky of murder and of being hand in glove with Chechen drug lords and gangsters – and he published a series of interviews with one of the Chechen separatist leaders, which he undiplomatically entitled ‘Conversations with a barbarian’. He was rewarded for his efforts with a bullet in the head. When he died, there were no paeans of praise for his bravery or courage in the Western press, even though he was an American, for Klebnikov had devoted his life to arguing that the West’s policy in Russia is based on an alliance with very serious criminals, and that the ‘businessmen’ whom the West champions as freedom fighters – Berezovsky has political asylum in Britain – are in fact a bunch of ruthless murderers."

By Thierry Meyssan, a controversial French journalist and political activist.
Russia: a "Godfather" against the Kremlin
Boris Berezovski, the smuggler
http://www.voltairenet.org/article30030.html

Politkovskaya had several meetings with Berezovsky.

We have a joke in Russia: "What is difference between Russian women feminists and Western women Feminists? Western women Feminists fight for the right to be paid equal to men for equal work, while Russian women Feminists fight for the right to spend all the money that their men earn.



You should update you knowledge on Women's suffrage and The feminist movement (also known as Women's Liberation).

Regarding suffrage: the Soviet Government was enough smart to give all the rights to the Soviet women right away, so to say "to shut their up", but the women's wage was much lower than men's wage in every field, though they performed equal work even laying asphalt, pipes and of course railroad ties.

Mr. Buck: "Vote For Me 'Because I Do Not Wear High Heels'!" I bet there are plenty of "dreamers" who would love to drive women back in the Victorian era, just give them a chance.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky: "Woman should sit at home, cry, darn socks and cook"

Ah, Kinder, Küche, Kirche!!!

I came across some old article that confirmed a lingering suspicion I’ve always had about Feminist, Cultural Marxism and Communism.
I’ve often thought that Feminism and Communism were just two heads on the same monster since they both aggressively pushed “forced equality”.

But paradoxically I could never figure out how Russian Women with their backgrounds so deeply rooted in the Soviet tradition and history still managed to keep their feminine identities and traditional nature so completely intact.

Well it turns out that the USSR had their own disastrous experiment with Feminism early on in Soviet History and they knew better.

Check out this piece by Dominic Lawson from the UK Independent.

In the early years of the Soviet Union, there was a genuine attempt, best described in Ferdinand Mount’s The Subversive Family, to apply Marxist thinking on the family. Lunacharski, the Commissar of Education, declared that “Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children … the terms ‘my parents’, ‘our children’ will gradually fall out of usage, being replaced by such conceptions as ‘old people’, ‘children’ and ‘infants.’

This, claimed Lunacharski, would enable the transition to “that broad public society which will replace the domestic hearth, yes, that stagnant family unit which separates itself off from society. A genuine Communist would avoid such a permanent pairing marriage and would seek to satisfy his needs by a freedom of mutual relations … so that you can’t tell who is related to whom and how closely. That is social construction.”

The consequences of this policy were exactly as they have been in the “social construction” we now see in parts of our own inner cities: social chaos, abandoned children and a rapid rise in venereal diseases.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union soon began to abandon the Marxist approach to family life. New laws were introduced to compel divorced parents, not the state, to contribute towards the maintenance of their children. Divorce itself was made more difficult and expensive.

Trotsky, who had been in the forefront of the anti-family experiment, became a scapegoat in this as in other matters. Now he was denounced as “an enemy of the people, who with his followers covered the family in the USSR with filth, spreading the counter-revolutionary ‘theory’ of the dying out of the family, or disorderly sexual cohabitation, in order to discredit the Soviet land.”

Starting to make the connection here?

The USSR basically realized that Feminism could be used as an excellent weapon to destabilize their enemies in the West and especially with the United States.

Communism always defined itself as a global revolution which had the long term goal of spreading tyranny into the US and the rest of the world.

It first tried to do this by pitching “Class Struggle” but when this approach failed to make any serious inroads they took a different tact instead.

They simply morphed “Class Struggle” into “Gender Struggle” and promoted it as “Women’s Rights” and Feminism.

The Communist were certainly no dummies when it came to handling Feminism with kid gloves that were hazmat compliant.

Feminism was truly toxic and dangerous stuff to their own society.

So during the Cold War the Evil Empire repackaged Feminism like raspberry ice cream made with Chinese milk and serotonin inhibitors and then exported it to the West.

The rest shall we say is history as Oprah, Rossie O’Donnell and Jenny Craig became the new torch bearers of American womanhood.

Check out this valuable article from Henry Makow

“Rape is an expression of … male supremacy … the age-old economic, political and cultural exploitation of women by men.”

Does this sound like a modern radical feminist?

Guess again. It is from a 1948 American Communist Party pamphlet entitled “Woman Against Myth”by Mary Inman.

In a recent book, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation, (2002) feminist historian Kate Weigand states: “ideas, activists and traditions that emanated from the Communist movement of the forties and fifties continued to shape the direction of the new women’s movement of the 1960s and later.”

In fact, Weigand, a lecturer at Smith College, shows that modern feminism is a direct outgrowth of American Communism.

There is nothing that feminists said or did in the 1960’s-1980’s that wasn’t prefigured in the CPUSA of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Many second-wave feminist leaders were “red diaper babies,” the children of Communists.

Communists pioneered the political and cultural analysis of woman’s oppression. They originated women’s studies, and advocated public daycare, birth control, abortion and even children’s rights.

They forged key feminist concepts such as “the personal is the political” and techniques such as “consciousness raising.” In the late 1940’s, CPUSA leaders realized that the labor movement was becoming increasingly hostile to Communism.

They began to focus on women and African Americans. They hoped “male supremacy” would “bring more women into the organization and into the fight against the domestic policies of the Cold War.” (80) Communist women who made up 40% of the party wanted more freedom to attend party meetings.

After the publication of “Women Against Myth” in 1948, the CPUSA initiated a process of “re-educating” men that we recognize only too well today. For example, in the party newspaper “The Daily Worker” a photo caption of a man with a young child read, “Families are stronger and happier if the father knows how to fix the cereal, tie the bibs and take care of the youngsters.” (127)

The Party ordered men who didn’t take the woman question seriously to complete “control tasks involving study on the woman question.” In 1954 the Los Angeles branch disciplined men for “hogging discussion at club meetings, bypassing women comrades in leadership and making sex jokes degrading to women.” (94)

A film Salt of the Earth, which critic Pauline Kael called “Communist propaganda”, portrayed women taking a decisive role in their husbands’ labor strike. “Against her husband’s wishes, Esperanza became a leader in the strike and for the first time forged a role for herself outside of her household… [her] political successes persuaded Ramon to accept a new model of family life.” (132) Portrayals of strong assertive successful women became as common in the Communist press and schools, as they are in the mass media today.

Communist women formalized a sophisticated Marxist analysis of the “woman question.” The books In Women’s Defense (1940) by Mary Inman, Century of Struggle (1954) by Eleanor Flexner and The Unfinished Revolution (1962) by Eve Merriam recorded women’s oppression and decried sexism in mass culture and language.

For example, Mary Inman argued that “manufactured femininity” and “overemphasis on beauty” keeps women in subjection (33). The founder of modern feminism, Betty Frieden relied on these texts when she wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963).

These women all hid the fact that they were long-time Communist activists. In the 1960, their daughters had everything they needed, including the example of subterfuge, to start the Women’s Liberation Movement. Feminism’s roots in Marxist Communism explain a great deal about this curious but dangerous movement. It explains:

Why the ” woman’s movement” hates femininity and imposes a political-economic concept like “equality” on a personal, biological and mystical relationship.

Why the “women’s movement” also embraces equality of race and class.
Why they want revolution (”transformation”) and have a messianic vision of a gender-less utopia.

Why they believe human nature is infinitely malleable and can be shaped by indoctrination and coercion.

Why they engage in endless, mind-numbing theorizing, doctrinal disputes and factionalism.

Why truth for them is a “social construct” defined by whomever has power, and appearances are more important than reality.

Why they reject God, nature and scientific evidence in favour of their political agenda.

Why they refuse to debate, don’t believe in free speech, and suppress dissenting views.

Why they behave like a quasi-religious cult, or like the Red Guard.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that feminism is Communism by another name. Having failed to peddle class war, Communism promoted gender conflict instead. The “diversity” and “multicultural” movements represent feminism’s attempt to forge “allegiances” by empowering gays and “people of color.”

Thus, the original CPUSA trio of “race, gender and class” is very much intact but class conflict was never a big seller. The term “politically correct” originated in the Russian Communist Party in the 1920’s. It usage in America today illustrates the extent society has been subverted. Feminist activists are mostly Communist dupes.

The Communist goal is to destroy Western Civilization, which is dedicated to genuine diversity (pluralism), individual liberty and equal opportunity (but not equal outcomes). We have seen this destruction in the dismantling of the liberal arts curriculum and tradition of free speech and inquiry at our universities.

We have seen this virus spread to government, business, the media and the military. This could only happen because the financial elite in fact sponsors Communism. “Political correctness” has dulled and regimented our cultural life.

Recently here in Winnipeg, Betty Granger, a conservative school trustee referred to house price increases due to “the Asian invasion.” Granger was pilloried mercilessly in the press. People sent hate letters and dumped garbage on her lawn. At a School Board meeting, the Chairman acknowledged that she is not a racist. He acknowledged that Asians have married into her family. Nonetheless, Granger was censured because, and I quote, “appearances are more important than reality.”

This slippage from the mooring of objective truth is the hallmark of Communism. The atmosphere at the meeting was charged. Mild mannered Canadians, all champions of “tolerance” they behaved like wild dogs ready to tear apart an wounded rabbit.

Betty Granger repented and voted in favour of her own censure. These rituals of denunciation and contrition, typical of Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, are becoming commonplace in America. They are like showtrials designed to frighten everyone into conforming.

We have “diversity officers” and “human rights commissions” and “sensitivity training” to uphold feminist shibboleths. They talk about “discrimination” but they freely discriminate against white heterosexual men and feminine women.

They use the charge of “sexual harassment” to fetter male-female relations and purge their opponents. In 1980, three women in Leningrad produced 10 typewritten copies of a feminist magazine called Almanac. The KGB shut down the magazine and deported the women to West Germany. In the USSR, feminism has largely been for export.

According to Professor Weigand, her “book provides evidence to support the belief that at least some Communists regarded the subversion of the gender system [in America] as an integral part of the larger fight to overturn capitalism.”

In conclusion, the feminist pursuit of “equal rights” is a mask for an invidious Communist agenda. The Communist MO has always been deception, infiltration and subversion.

The goal is the destruction of western civilization and creation of a new world order run by monopoly capital. Kate Weigand’s Red Feminism demonstrates that the Communist agenda is alive and well and living under an assumed name.

Meanwhile back in Russia…

The natural and traditional values of Russian Ladies were allowed to flourish.

Mother Russia quickly went back to being her proud, nurturing and beautiful self again.

And Googgling up “Russian Women” returns 8 million adoring sites. ;)

Yes, it does



And who knows maybe they also have their profiles on dating websites looking for a foreign husband who dreams about the natural and traditional values of Russian Ladies

8 million adoring sites You counted them I bet even a child would not be so bold to make such statement. OK, whatever 8 millions or 10 millions, and of course all the women on those website cherish their traditional values flashing their flesh



Feminism in the USSR? You must be kidding.
Such problems as domestic abuse, rape, teen pregnancy, problems of single mothers and etc existed and gender inequality in the work place in the USSR but the government preferred not to talk about it so much. There was not any Crisis center for women. If a woman addressed her complaints to the militia a usual militia response were "It is your own family business". She should be beaten very severely or killed. Many women even were ashamed to talk about domestic abuse and rape.
In 1979 a group of Leningrad feminists women-dissidents decided to self-publish an almanac "Women of Russia" uncovering all the problems of women in the USSR, the almanac was arrested by KGB. Magazine for women "Maria" existed only 1 year and also was eliminated by the Soviet Government.

Nowadays
http://womensenews.org/story/beijing10- ... e-domestic
Every fourth family in Russia experiences some form of domestic violence, with 82 percent of such crimes being committed by husbands, according to government statistics. Each year, about 14,000 women die at the hands of their husbands or intimate partners. In the United States, by comparison, this number stands at about 1,200, according to the 2001 Bureau of Justice Statistics Report. Russia's population is 144 million; the U.S. population is 293 million.
In a 2003 Ministry of the Interior report that polled victims of domestic violence, 76 percent of the women said they had suffered from abuse for a long time before reporting it to the police or making it public in some other way. The report lists some of the common reasons given by the women: "Didn't believe that the law enforcement would help," "Was afraid of revenge," "Was afraid of losing housing, had nowhere to go," "Was afraid of public scorn," "Didn't want to leave the kids without a father."

Luckyspin,there is different kind of feminist organizations, and the radical feminism is not popular even in US, and no need to brash them with the same brash. But I will give a big credit to Western women for their activity and fight for women rights not only in their own country but all over the World. There are still many nations in the World where women are prisoners in their own homes and families, where they are nothing but babymakers and simply a meat for sale. (But for someone it is just a traditional values)