Robin Hood wrote:STUDBut it was not a 100% Ukraine responsibility... that is just propaganda.
That is fact! It cannot be otherwise. The plant was in Ukraine, owned by the Ukraine Govt. and operated by Ukrainians. The accident was caused by mal-practice by Ukrainian engineers/operators, you have said that yourself ...... not ‘Head Office’ personnel from Moscow. So the accident was a 100% Ukraine responsibility but the subsequent cover-up was, as I explained, IMO was a joint responsibility. The accusation that it was “.......all about Russia!” was foolish and just plain wrong!The later collapse of the USSR and emergence of so many countries as individual nation states, eg the Balitic States, Georgia, Ukraine, etc., out of the wreck was what pissed Putin off and why there is so much trouble in Ukraine, including the Russian Invasion of Crimea, as well as in parts of Georgia. He is trying to rebuild the Soviet Empire.
I respect that you have your view but I can’t agree with you .... but I will explain why and that will take more than just a one liner or a precis version leaving out details.
I too have links to the old communist USSR system as my wife is Polish and lived the regime until she left Poland in1970 as a 25 year old before the collapse of the old USSR. Each State in the USSR had, through the communist party system, a great deal of control over the nationals that lived there. When the system collapsed and Yeltsin took over, it was the Party Elite in all those States that raped and pillaged their countries, grabbing all they could before things changed ..... that happened in Poland as well. Many of the party Elite who had been a privileged class, then threw their Party cards in the bin and suddenly morphed into good freedom loving capitalists ........ and took advantage of their dwindling power and stole everything they could.
In my wife’s days in Poland the average Pole was skinny and undernourished and every day was a struggle to survive. She walked to school for over an hour each way. The Elite went to privileged schools for Party Elite and were driven there by one of the parents.
An example of abuse of privilege: It took my wife three years to get out of Poland legally. She could have made it earlier if she had paid bribes to the local Communist Party big wig or one of his aids ..... or let him have his way with her. She could not afford the bribe and refused to comply with the latter (No MeToo in those days!). So each application she made was just thrown away ..... until she went to work for a European Company in Poland. They had the contacts to make Mr.Big do what he was supposed to do and give her both a passport and a visa to leave the country. She left and didn’t return for some 20 years and by that time with a UK Passport!
Both higher education and adequate medicine was something only the Elite had access to, for the rest it was the local very basic State school or a Govt. Health Centre with as much stock as the people’s markets! My wife even had her appendix removed in her 20’s, without a general anaesthetic because they didn’t have any, it was a local injection, a stick between the teeth and she was tied down for the operation.
Not so the Elite! There were shops that were only open to the Party Elite full of imported goods, food, clothes and electrical goods that the ordinary citizen could only dream of. My wife never eat a banana or an orange, Mars Bar or even a cream cake until she came to the UK. The shops that served the population had vast racks of empty shelves where ordinary food items should have been. But there was plenty of cheap Vodka!
If you were able to get meat it was duck/goose/chicken/rabbit or pork ..... and you didn’t buy it ..... you bred it in your garden if you lived as she did, in a small town, where they had land but could only provide enough for their own use. Large farms had the produce taken, loaded onto trains and sent to Russia and the large cities in Poland where it went first to the shops that served the Elite and what was left was sold to the ordinary people. To get in the queue to the point you got your ration, a system controlled by the local Party Boss, you could start queuing at 4am, stand for a couple of hours in the cold and often by the time you got to your turn there was nothing left. No such restrictions for the Elite.
The Party Elite were frequently grossly overweight, it was a sign of high office, and were never subjected to the deprivations of the average citizens. Those citizens that had been the subject of this abuse of power started to turn on them and settle old scores as the Party power base collapsed and in Poland SOLIDARITY became the symbol ...... the rest is history!
The same process happened in Russia and Yeltsin just let his friends and relatives and the Party Elite take what they wanted and the economy was stripped of much of its wealth, including its industrial wealth, that being sold off to mainly western corporations. Much of the wealth ending up in London, Frankfurt, Paris and Washington.
When Putin got into power he clamped down on the party Elite and their abuse of privilege that was derived from their Party Membership Status and made them pay back a lot of what was stolen. I have no doubt many of those that thought they would get away with their plunder found out to their cost that Putin would track them down and they would pay the ultimate price. Of course there were also those that did get away with it ..... I supposed you could say they were the Privileged of the new ‘free market system’? Anyone who lives in Cyprus knows how the Privilege system works.
From what you have said about your late Father-in-Law and the circles he moved in, he was most probably an Elite member of The Communist Party and would have been a beneficiary of the privileges that high party membership bestowed on both them and their families. (Before you leap down my throat, I am not in anyway suggesting he was anything other than the honest and respectable person you described, but many were not very nice people.) Therefore when this system of Party privilege was taken down the people that previously benefitted, obviously became vehement Putin hater’s ........... I understand that feeling as I would also resent losing something that contributed so much to my privileged lifestyle.
But that resentment and hatred has nothing to do with the way Putin has run the Country since and that is evident when you start looking at all the improvements to income, pensions, lifestyle, health, education, literacy and life expectancy etc. that he has achieved in his time in office. But changes take time and there have been some areas that have been slow to recover, not helped by the US sanctions either, but even that effect is rapidly declining.
The content of your above statement?
• If you look into the events, Russia did NOT invade Crimea! The story does not stand up to any investigation. After the Coup in Ukraine, the people of Crimea exercised their UN defined right to self determination and duly voted for independence and then for annexation by Russia for protection.
• The nine day war with Georgia was clearly identified as being started by Georgia attacking Sth.Ossetia by both the UN and the EU Commissions that investigated the event. Russia was acting as a Peacekeeping force between the two and lost quite a few military peacekeepers in the attack. Of course, Russia knew what was likely to happen and responded immediately with a rapid and devastating retaliation against Georgian forces.
• Putin has absolutely no wish to rebuild the Soviet Union. Putin did not stay in Georgia when he thrashed them .... within hours he withdrew the Russian Forces and if he wanted Ukraine, he could be in Kiev within 48hrs. I cannot think of a single incident of Russia maintaining forces or an illegal presence in another country since the Russian Federation came into being.
The facts that dispute your perception and indicate your comments as being primarily Propaganda based, is all available on-line but it takes tenacity to sort out fact from fiction and it gets more difficult every day as Internet algorithm censorship tightens its grip on the freedom of access to information. It is not worth the effort to just to rouse a response of TLDR!
We both have views, opposing views, but don’t let us fall out over it?
Without wishing to in any way challenge your wife’s experiences, all of which I utterly accept, the one flaw is that while dominated by the USSR and a part of eg Comecon and the Warsaw Pact, Poland, apart from bits stolen by the USSR in 1939, was not a part of the USSR. That distinguishes it from Ukraine, which was an integral part of the USSR.
The engineer in charge of the test was a Russian, not Ukranian, Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov, Who was born in 1931 in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russian SFSR (in the then Soviet Union).
You May also wish to consider why all the significant post incident decisions and announcements were made by the Kremlin in Moscow and not Kiev. That was because command and control in the USSR was centred on Moscow.
I can assure you my father in law was no elite member of the communist party, he had a modest three room apartment in the NW Moscow and was essentially an academic. A professor teaching business studies. He had to join the queue for a car like everyone else, and my mother in law still had to join the queues in the shops, no real privileges. He made it on merit, but in his field in government (and I repeat he was not a senior civil servant, senior civil servants reported to him as he was in government answerable only to the minister) he was in overall charge of all in the USSR, including Ukraine.
That was how it worked in the USSR, it all ran from Moscow with only a minimum of independence for the SFSR in the USSR. Even the Russian SFSR was subsidiary, and that is why I do not describe this a down to Russia or Ukraine, but to a Soviet failing. Indeed I understand the experiment should have been, but was not, presented for approval to the 'The Ministry of Power Engineering and Electrification and the State Atomic Power Inspection, which were Soviet bodies head quartered in Moscow.
There are reliable reports that Russian Special forces entered The Crimea and seized key facilities before the referendum.
