Removed by mod

The 2000 and 2004 elections in russia are generally considered free and fair (2004 perhaps less so, but I digress). That didn’t really have an impact later on.

I meant 1996. Wide protests, the first election in independent Russia widely put in doubt, but in the West - lots of enthusiasm that the bad thing didn’t happen and those communists didn’t win.

even their much fetishized celebration of WW2 victory is a ruse as the USSR initially sided with the Nazis to split up Europe

I disagree. (Sorry for the very long elaboration that follows, but it’s needed, I think. Stalin’s USSR wasn’t nice, but what you said is usually part of the narrative most of which is plainly not true.)

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a temporary (and very abrupt) change of policy and not what some common narratives make it seem. Soviet propaganda almost since 20s and till that short period actually portrayed Germans in some form as the main potential enemy.

Those Baltic countries USSR swallowed were typical fascist regimes, just small. Military aggression is not nice, but the narrative people from the Baltics love now, about how USSR was “worse than the Nazis” - well, very few Baltic Jews survived, I guess that makes their position consistent with reality, but doesn’t sell it very well to me.

Parts of Poland annexed were Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, and Wilno which is now part of Lithuania. And no, Polish Republic of that time wasn’t very minority-friendly. Again, not as clear-cut. There Soviet troops were really welcomed in 1939.

Even the Winter War was preceded by repeated offers of similar or bigger amount of territory given to Finland by USSR in exchange for what it asked, and what it asked was the really necessary territory to make Leningrad defensible from the Finnish side. It was not as barbaric and aggressive as the common narratives say as well. Karl Gustav Mannerheim, if you know who that is, not only supported accepting the deal, but was in favor of some concessions more than the minimum that USSR demanded. And after the war, forcing its victory, USSR took no more than that.

And Soviet Union did pay the biggest human cost of those fighting in Europe.

The fetish is disgusting, of course, and also anachronistic - there were no regular parades initially in celebration of that war ending, only those on November 7, and of course nobody was enthusiastic about an opportunity to “repeat it”. It was a hungry ruined country with disabled veterans in poverty, gangs of orphans, years of darkness and despair, one can say. The years between end of the war and Stalin’s death are not really remembered for anything other than that.

Actually for all the Cold War the USSR’s propaganda position was that it wants only peace and united humanity, and the people who want to “repeat” something are on the other side. I’d say that during the first Indochina war and even later this was, well, true.

The first step towards authoritarian is the revocation of free speach. The only people trying to control that as of present are the left. Ill start listening to what u have to say the second trump bans people speaking their minds in public or puts american citizens people in concentration camps.