Brezhnev Pips Lenin as Russia’s Favourite 20th Century Ruler

THIS is what the people want… any questions?

_____________________________

In an opinion poll released on Wednesday, Russians viewed Leonid Brezhnev as the most positive of all Soviet and Russian leaders in the 20th century, but Vladimir Lenin and Iosif Stalin were close behind. 56 percent of respondents in the Levada Centre survey viewed Brezhnev (who ruled the USSR in 1964-82) positively. Often mocked in jokes for his increasingly-visible senility at the end of his life, people still respect Brezhnev for maintaining stability and increasing living standards among millions of ordinary Soviet citizens during his time in office as General Secretary of the Communist Party. 55 percent of respondents saw Lenin, (who led the Bolsheviks into power in 1917) positively. Stalin, whose almost-three-decade rule saw many of his fellow countrymen perish in GULag labour camps, was judged to have been a positive influence by 50 percent of respondents. Just 21 percent of respondents viewed Perestroika-era leader Mikhail Gorbachyov’s rule positively, whilst only 22 percent were positive about Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president. 48 percent of respondents saw Tsar Nikolai Aleksandrovich, deposed and executed by the Bolsheviks, as a positive influence. Levada carried out the poll on 19-22 April, with 1,600 respondents from all over Russia.

22 May 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130522/181291682/Brezhnev-Pips-Lenin-as-Russias-Favorite-20th-Century-Ruler.html

Editor’s Note:

This confirms something that I’ve suspected for quite some time. Amongst ordinary folk, there’s much regard for both Tsarist and Communist rulers, as they see them as respectful of the common people. Neither Yeltsin nor Gorbachyov got positive reviews, as the people see them as bum-kissers of the pseudo-intellectual pro-Westerners who hold ordinary Russians in contempt and of greedy Free Market buccaneers who raped the working class. Let’s keep it simple… the people who voted for Lyonyo, voted for Koba, Ilyich, and Good Tsar Nikolai, too. They didn’t vote for Gorbachyov and Yeltsin. The people want a Red Tsar… not the Free Market… not the oligarchs… not the pro-Westerners… not the White Liberal Phonies of February (remember, had not Kerensky imprisoned the tsar, he might have survived… the righties are silent about that)… not the Nazi collaborators who fled to the West (and who sold themselves into the service of Western intel agencies against the Orthosphere). That pisses off the likes of Victor Potapov (which led to his vile, revolting, and hypocritical tantrum on the ROCOR official website… after all, he’s a well-known Langley operative). Will he leave the canonical Church if Russia continues to move leftward? Do stay tuned… this show ain’t over yet, kids…

BMD

St Mary Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Surrey BC: “An Island Amongst Sinners”

______________________________

A half-dozen years ago, bullets flew into the walls of St Mary Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Surrey BC (part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District). That should tell you all that you need to know about the crime, drugs, homelessness, and squalor that surround the church’s gold-coloured dome in Whalley. Rev Mykhaylo Pozdyk said, “We’re like an island amongst sinners. The picture isn’t good, but we’re proud to be here to be God’s witness”. Although he said that dying in the church would be a “great honour”, it was fortunate that no one was around at the time of the drug-­related shooting spree.

The church is on 135A Street, in a two-block section that’s generally-considered Surrey’s worst stretch of pavement. When Ukrainian immigrants chose the spot for the church 50 years ago, the town centre was thriving. Today, the building’s white walls and blue-painted trim stand apart from nearby vacant lots and rundown buildings. Fr Mykhaylo said that the street people in the neighbourhood are friendly for the most part, but thefts occur and church property is sometimes destroyed, noting, “People ask for money but they usually don’t want food”.

As difficult as life is for the disadvantaged in downtown Whalley, Pozdyk saw much worse under Soviet rule in the Ukraine, where he lived until moving to Canada in 1996. He said, “Here we have more respect and value for people. Canada’s a rich country with many government programmes to help them”. He went on to say that churches were shut down for several generations in his homeland and KGB agents lurked in every village and organisation, observing, “Communists denied God’s existence”. Pozdyk was secretly married in a church in 1987 at the beginning of Mikhail Gorbachyov’s period of thaw. Ukrainian people flocked to the churches when the doors opened after independence in 1991.

He stated that the churches there aren’t as well attended now because people chase after the same material goals as they do in the West, saying, “As soon as you sign a mortgage, you’re a slave to the mortgage. You have no time for God”. Although Pozdyk has bought a house here, and smiles about it, he remains faithful to his spiritual duties, telling us, “We’re temporary in this world… pilgrims. Freedom you can only find in God. We ­glorify God for everything we have in this life. We say ‘thank you’ for the forgiveness of our sins. I’m still a sinner and I’m trying my best to grow ­spiritually”.

IN A NUTSHELL

What’s your congregation’s religion?

Our congregation is part of One Holy Orthodox-Catholic and Apostolic Church.

What would you put in a tweet? 

We’re blessed to worship in this beautiful little church that’s on the City of Surrey Heritage Register. We welcome everyone, and we’ll treat you as best as we can.

How many people attend services?

40 to 70

What’s traditional?

Our worship is Liturgical, Eucharistic, and Jesus-centred.

What’s modern?

Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

What’s the most beautiful thing about your church?

Praising God and worshipping Him in spirit and truth together with all the people who come here and have hope that all their names will be written in the Book of Life.

Give us your sense of what’s happening in the area around the church.

Hard-working people who were busy with supporting their families built this church between 1950 and 1955. At the same time, they worked hard to build a new place of worship. At that time, it was a good area. Now, the church finds itself on one of the poorest streets in town.

26 April 2013

Kent Spencer

The Province

http://www.theprovince.com/life/Mary+Ukrainian+Orthodox+Church+Surrey+island+among+sinners/8302639/story.html

Speaking Ill of the Dead

******

******

______________________________

Following the death of Margaret Thatcher… Britain’s first and, so far, only female Prime Minister… many in Russia are still struggling to understand the polarised reaction to her death back home. On Facebook, Russian playwright Yuri Klavdiyev praised Thatcher’s achievements, writing, “Rest in peace, Comrade Thatcher. You did for your country a thousand times more than [members of the Russian Occupy movement] have done for theirs”. Yet, whilst tributes poured in from landmark figures across the world, in Britain, the song Ding, Dong! The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz controversially reached no. 2 on this week’s BBC Radio 1 music chart. On the day of Thatcher’s passing, the Daily Telegraph announced that, given the volume of abusive messages it had received, it was blocking all comments on any Thatcher-related article. That was besides the street parties and other impromptu celebrations.

By her own admission, Thatcher had inherited a country rendered ungovernable by the influence of the trades union movement. Her solution was stark. Thatcher chose to pick a fight with their most powerful and, in doing so, break the will of the movement as a whole. The resulting 1984-85 conflict between the government and the miners’ unions at times bordered on civil war, with British police forces accused of acting more as militia than as law enforcement. That the government won is a matter of historical record. More subjective is the question of cost. Last week, former miner Darren Vaines told the BBC, “The cut went so deep, people have never been able to forget about it”.

When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher’s monetarist government was on a collision course with a young generation radicalised by the extreme politics of the late 1970s. As the government lurched to the right, the educated liberal opposition would step to the left. Joe Strummer, poster boy of the New Left, wanted to illustrate The Clash’s Cost of Living EP with a picture of Margaret Thatcher’s face and a swastika. Alexei Sayle, firebrand of the early alternative comedy scene, joked, “In the old days, people used to be named after what they made. Carter if they made carts, Cooper if they made barrels, Thatcher if they made people sick”.

Many seized upon the Falklands War, which almost certainly saved Thatcher from an early resignation as her popularity waned, as an example of her political opportunism. To howls of popular protest, Thatcher also resisted sanctions against South Africa, branding the African National Congress a “typical terrorist organisation” and inviting apartheid-era President P W Botha on a state visit in 1984. Elsewhere, Thatcher proposed that the deposed Khmer Rouge retain their UN seat for Cambodia. Even after her removal from power, she continued to infuriate the left, calling for the release of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

Last Tuesday, former Irish Republican Army chief of staff Martin McGuinness felt obliged to urge Republican households to stop celebrating the death of the IRA’s former “Number One Target”. Republican resentment of Thatcher grew throughout the 1980s, after her refusal to consider the political status of prisoners at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison resulted in the deaths, by hunger strike, of Parliament member Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners.

Mass unemployment, climbing since the global recession of the early ’80s, snapped at Thatcher’s heels as she led the way toward her vision of a deregulated economy. Joblessness in Britain reached record highs not seen since the Great Depression. Dramatic cuts in government spending on arts, healthcare, education, and welfare, plus the deliberate sacrifice of many of Britain’s manually-intensive staple industries on the altar of modernity, further alienated an already-disenfranchised poor. All of this, coupled with the internal machinations of Thatcher’s own Conservative Party, would force Thatcher from office in 1990 amidst yet more riots (this time against her government’s poll tax).

For Russians struggling to understand the response to Thatcher at home, it may be useful to recall the polarising reactions to her Cold War contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachyov. Thatcher’s role in the end of the Cold War is debatable. Paul Dukes, professor emeritus at the University of Aberdeen, said, “Her role in bringing the Cold War to an end was probably not as significant as she and her admirers asserted. At least, the individual contributions of Gorbachyov and Reagan were far greater”. Yet, both Gorbachyov and Thatcher, though lauded internationally, engender, at best, mixed reactions on home soil. Gorbachyov, with his surname a global byword for postwar tolerance, only polled 0.5 percent in the first round of the 1996 presidential election. In a 2011 opinion poll, 47 percent of Russians claimed “not to care about him at all”. A significant 20 percent, reported “active hostility” to the former Communist General Secretary. As Gorbachyov leads the eulogies to Thatcher, he may be watching the dramatic reactions to her death unfold in Britain with one eye fixed firmly on his own legacy.

15 April 2013

Simon Speakman

Moscow News

http://themoscownews.com/international/20130415/191442888/Speaking-ill-of-the-dead.html

9 April 2013. Maggie the Hag Passes… An Era Passes, As Well (With Reflections on the New Era Coming)… Thank God!

______________________________

This was a colloquy with a Cabinet member… I’m in regular type; they’re in italics:

Ding, dong, the witch is dead… Maggie Thatcher croaked. It’s the End of the Neoliberal “End of History” Era…

She was a truly wicked being. I hope you do a good exposé of the hag! 

She was the worst of the Unholy Trinity. Gorby was only a Western brown-noser, and Slobberin’ Ronnie was only a figurehead for unelectable oligarchs… but Maggie was a True Believer. She’s the authoress of the present wicked age that we live in.

I can’t stand any of them, but especially not Gorbachyov. You’d be one of the few people here that know how much all the former Soviet peoples despise him and Yeltsin.

Gorby’s lower than Yeltsin was. Yet, Gorby’s a nonentity… waste no time on him. Interesting things I’m hearing… one of my friends at the Centre says that VVP might put in a “Red monarchy” (her words). That is, a communist government, a strong Church, a strong army, with a tsar as a constitutional figurehead (à la Scandinavia)… after all, VVP’s pushing 60, and he’s the sort to look to the future (he knows that he has ten years left as leader, at best). That’d give Russia a four-point system (not the three-point one it’s had since Pyotr Veliki (including the USSR)), which would be more stable and capable of weathering crises.

Zyuganov has mentioned a “Red Tsar” several times. His job would be to defend the Revolution from enemies and treason. It solves the problem of (real) democratic elections vs a strong and stable leader.

****** 

I wrote this to another Cabinet member:

Is Putin thinking of instituting a constitutional monarchy? After all, the only real organised political force in Russia is the KPRF (United Russia is only an ephemeral bloc; it’s a coterie collected temporarily around a personality). It’d institute a four-point (State-Army-Church-Sovereign) system instead of the traditional three-point (Party or Church-Army-State) system, which is inherently more stable. If so, it means that VVP’s looking to the future (he’s 60 this year, after all… probably, like all of us, he’s feeling his mortality). I’ll guarantee you this… VVP would NEVER put the fatso Maria Vladimirovna and her pack of drooling jackals on the throne (they’re all pro-Western lickspittles, in any case). It wouldn’t be beyond him to put Michael of Kent on the throne (he’d be MUCH more biddable than Maria is, and he’s much more telegenic, to boot).

******

I saw this on the net:

I’ll be brief:

BURN IN HELL, THATCHER!

Back to work…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcXi-VYy_Yw&feature=youtu.be

******

The passing of Mag the Hag was the end of an era… just as her entrance in the late ‘70s was the beginning of the present neoliberal fool’s paradise. However, her intellectual heirs won’t go quietly… but they WILL go, that’s for certain.

BMD

Maggie Thatcher Dies at 87

She Vanquished the Miners

Martin Rowson

2009

______________________________

On Monday, Lord Bell, Mrs Thatcher’s spokesman, announced that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died at the age of 87 following a stroke, saying, “It’s with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother, Baroness Thatcher, died peacefully following a stroke this morning”. British Prime Minister David Cameron called her a “great Briton”, whilst the Queen expressed her sadness. US President Barack Obama issued a statement, “The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend”.

Thatcher was Britain’s first female prime minister, a post she held from 1979 until 1990, when a Conservative Party coup forced her out, following rioting in Trafalgar Square over her unpopular poll tax. Perhaps the most controversial figure in modern British politics, a grocer’s daughter, Thatcher was a committed believer in the free market and an opponent of the culture of a welfare state… or the “nanny state”, as she called it. In 1987, she said, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families”.

She took Britain to war in 1982, after Argentina took back the Malvinas Islands, located just off the coast of Argentina. “Rejoice! Rejoice!” she cried after British Marines took a key island, the triumph carrying her to an easy victory in the 1983 national election. Thatcher also famously took on Britain’s once-powerful trades unions, labelling striking miners the “enemy within” during their 1984-85 walkout. Her eventual defeat of the miners’ union changed Britain’s political landscape and made her a hated figure on the left.

A firm ally of US President Ronald Reagan during the Cold War, nevertheless, Thatcher hailed future Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachyov during a 1984 meeting in Britain. Three months later, Gorbachyov became the leader of the USSR. On Monday, Gorbachyov said in a statement, “Margaret Thatcher was a great politician and a striking person”.

Thatcher was nicknamed the “Iron Lady” for her perceived toughness, a moniker that was then picked up by her supporters and critics at home. She also survived an IRA attack on the Brighton hotel she was staying at ahead of a Conservative Party conference. Thatcher’s time in power transformed Britain both politically and culturally, seeing the rise of what critics labelled the “me” culture. Former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler of Brockwell, who served as Thatcher’s principal private secretary from 1982 to 1985, told RIA-Novosti that Margaret Thatcher was “above all a conviction politician. She had her own principles, whatever trial she faced, be it in the Falklands {i.e., the Malvinas: editor}, the miners’ strike, or the Cold War. She believed in freedom and justice under the law … these were such clear principles that she always knew what direction to take”. Her funeral, with full military honours, will be at London‘s St Paul’s Cathedral.

8 April 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://en.ria.ru/world/20130408/180513538/UK-Ex-PM-Thatcher-Dies-at-87.html

Editor’s Note:

Margaret Thatcher, along with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachyov were amongst the most evil people of the Twentieth Century. They enabled the massively-corrupt and greedy “New World Order” that plundered the world in the nineties and aughts. Their legacy is thousands of shattered lives… but that didn’t matter to them… they were just little people… they weren’t “productive”… they weren’t “successful”… they weren’t “focused on goals and objectives”. The Unholy Trinity brought us the Economic Meltdown of ’07 by dismantling government regulation or by destroying a non-capitalist society. Truly, there’s little to choose between Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachyov. All three were anti-Christian destroyers. Again, take note of Mrs Thatcher’s quote:

“There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families”.

That’s utterly repulsive and disgusting. It says that we needn’t take a care for our society or environment, for it isn’t our concern. We need only enrich our families, or ourselves, and to hell with the consequences to society, for “there’s no such thing as society”. That remark reveals the inner character of Mrs Thatcher. Scary, isn’t it? Remember, evil doesn’t wear red tights, carry a pitchfork, or have horns and hooves. It doesn’t raise its voice, it dresses neatly, it’s polite, it “goes along to get along”, and, above all, “Greed is GOOD”.

I hope that Maggie repented of her godless actions, but I fear that she didn’t. Crank world, isn’t it?

BMD 

United Russia to Gorbachyov: We Lost Our Country Due to the Previous Perestroika

______________________________

The leadership of United Russia doesn’t share the opinion of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachyov about the need to resume perestroika. On Sunday, Sergei Neverov, secretary of the General Council of United Russia told the press commenting on Gorbachyov’s Saturday statement, “Mikhail Gorbachyov already initiated one perestroika. As a result, we lost the country”. He also disagreed with Gorbachyov’s evaluation of current Russian policy, saying, “It’s precisely this policy that helped us to preserve the state, tackle the problem of poverty, and stop criminal elements from coming to power… the consequences for Russia of the policy pursued by Gorbachyov”. He said that the majority of the population supports the actions of the government and president, noting, “This is the best proof of the correctness of the chosen policy”. Gorbachyov thinks that Russia should restart perestroika, saying in an open lecture in Moscow on Saturday, “We reached a stage when perestroika was interrupted. Increasingly, politics became play-acting. We need a new system of governing the country. We need real elections, not pretend elections. Health protection, education, and science arouse great concern”.

31 March 2013

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_03_31/United-Russia-to-Gorbachev-we-lost-country-after-previous-perestroika/