Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that the Soviet Union's decision to send tanks into Hungary and Czechoslovakia to crush mass protests during the Cold War was a mistake. "It was a mistake," Putin said when asked about perceptions of Russia as a colonial power due to Moscow's decision to send tanks into Budapest in 1956 and into Prague in 1968. "It is not right to do anything in foreign policy that harms the interests of other peoples," said Putin, who in 2022 sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two.
Belarus, just for starters. They're also very friendly with Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. They've got friends in Hungary and they're continuing to court factions in Poland and Romania and Italy and Greece.
Oh man. You'd get a weekend at reeducation camp for that one. The West had an ideology.
The USSR had scientific communism, through which they tested the material consequences of their policies and revised them in pursuit of a better world. They had accumulated experience which lead them to enact evidence-based policies for materialist reasons. They weren't operating on a political faith-based initiative.
Cuba and Vietnam were anti-colonial revolutions that just so happened to align with the USSR as a counterweight to Western efforts to reimpose colonial control. But they had distinctly different material conditions and goals. Cubans and Vietnamese residents weren't looking to operate as forward bases for Soviet soldiers. They wanted real autonomy and an opportunity to pursue their own social projects independent of the Russian politburo.
One reason Vietnam and China came to blows stemmed from conflicts in materialist thinking.
But - again - I can't stress how much this wasn't just ideology. They weren't enacting policy dogmatically or for some higher spiritual purpose. They were looking for autonomy and viewed the USSR as a crutch to get them back on their feet after centuries of oppression.
At some point, much like how China and Russia had their Sino-Soviet split and China and North Korea still have stilted relations, they were going to depart from one another. The USSR's collapse forced the issue sooner than expected. But the material interests of these distant places were always in some degree of contradiction. The New Russia was simply more contrary than the old Soviet bloc.
Belarus sure. I don't know about the rest though.
What I meant by capitalist countries not having solidarity is that U.S. is more than willing to fuck over its own allies (like its doing with Germany now) and has done it many times in the past.
'To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal' -Kissinger
I mostly agree with the rest. Of course, USSR wasn't purely motivated by ideology. But Putin saying Soviet Union had no 'friends' is very silly. There is a reason why so many global south countries view Russia (and USSR) positively.
I mean, silly on its face. What did he think the "Union" part of the USSR meant? It wasn't just Russians For Russia. You had the entire Warsaw Pact working towards a common goal.
I can see arguments that the Hungarian Revolution was the first in a long line of phony propaganda-inspired color revolutions. I can also see it as a real weakness in the early Soviet social model. The act of sending in tanks to suppress the revolt was a consequence of that failure, not the cause of it. One could say the same of Tienanmen. By the time the tanks arrived, the state had already failed.