Reply #33: people forget why the 'Soviet Union' even came to exist! [View All]

out of the horrible chaos of 1914-18 war (a war inspired by aristocratic avarice) the dream of a society ruled by the working people with the 'needs of the many' trumping the 'priviledges of the few' somehow got going in russia....the dream of course went off the rails almost immediately, with the bolsheviks murdering the russian royal family, widespread civil war, famine then the death of lenin, and trotsky (who might have saved the dream) acting sorta like john kerry has (trotsky went on vacation at a critical time just as stalin consolidated power etc)....the dream hardly survived stalin's murderous rule (1/3 of the russian intelligensia, or university graduate class, died under stalin's rule, plus uncounted millions of ordinary people)....even then, the soviet union, a society that suffered like few in history, developed nuclear weapons by 1949 and sent men into space before the US did....if you want to get an idea of what the USSR was, listen to the soviet (which means 'workers') national anthem, it must be the most tragically beautiful piece of music ever....