I'm not saying they will, but I am noticing some attempts to change the goal posts or the subject. What do you think the response will be like?
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To use your own terminology, you're only taking mobilized power rather than potential power. And I find it quite amusing that whenever you talk about Stalin, you sound like a hardcore Stalinist of the highest order. I would almost believe that you are Russian, given the reverence Russians now have for Stalin...
NO WAY! A successful politicians wasn't a nice guy? Dekachin is learning stuff!
So he is not a 'dictator' but just an oligarch, just like Western leaders. Only a good deal more competent and with better effects for his country. Good to know.
Sounds pretty dumb. But here you accept that if Russia counter-escalates enough, it will win, because it outclasses your corrupt puppet shithole non-country by orders of magnitude.
As far as I know, the most industrialized areas of the USSR (at least in tsarist times) were the Ukraine and the Baltic area. All areas lost very early on. How much of this was salvaged, I don't know, but only a 1/3 decline is pretty incredible. That's about the same as the decline Russia suffered under the USAID-written constitution in the 1990s.
Sure, but it's way different from having half of your country be wrecked, and in fact, wrecked to such an extent that people were starving even after the war (while Stalin was exporting food).
Not at all. Stalin is the worst mass murderer in human history. Hitler is only in 3rd place, behind both Stalin and Mao, but because modern leftists have secret sympathies for communism, they elevate Hitler to #1 and downplay the greater evils of Stalin and Mao.
Stalin was very powerful. The most powerful leader in the history of Russia. He gained that power through mass murder and extreme fear.
Modern Russia lacks both. Potential power is GDP and technological base, which Russia lacks now compared to the West. WW2 Russia had parity there and was individually economically stronger than any other country in the world except the US. Now Russia is a glorified gas station with a relatively low GDP per capita. And in mobilized power, there is obviously no comparison to Stalin's Russia, which was more fully mobilized than any nation on earth has ever been.
Putin has certainly put a max effort into rehabilitating Stalin. Even in 2016 he wasn't particularly popular in Russia, yet his polling numbers keep improving. It's a sad state of affairs for a broken people willing to give up anything to a return to imagined glory.
Putin is a dictator. Not all dictators have absolute power like Stalin did. We judge dictatorship as the power relationship versus the people, not versus their own ruling class of elites.
It is dumb, but no, you're wrong. Even if Russia went all-out, it would lose. It would lose because the people in Russia would revolt and it would collapse internally like Germany in WW1. Even if they did not happen, the weak Russian industrial base simply cannot do more than it already is, so throwing more people at Ukraine doesn't help much if you can't properly equip them. Finally, the West would simply sent Ukraine more weapons if Russia tried to escalate more.
Had Russia gone all-out from the start it probably would have won. It didn't though.