The General Russia Thread

Add Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho to that list. Also... the ANC (as well as other resistance groups) accepted funding and weapons from the USSR (because they desperately needed them) — this came with propaganda strings attached.

Zimbabwe also had a propaganda war going on inside it. And, would you credit it... Madagascar got hit (it has interesting metals on top of being the biggest aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean... if you can get your aircraft on it).

edited 15th Apr '18 6:11:11 PM by Euodiachloris

To be fair to the various Communist panics there were Communist infiltrators and they were funded by the Soviet Union, their only problem was taking it to irrational degrees and hurting innocent people.

edited 15th Apr '18 6:10:18 PM by Fourthspartan56

Also Cuba going off on its own without USSR support because Castro appeared to genuinely hate apartheid.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43781351

There's an investigation going on with the death of an investigative journalist.

Funny how journalists that write against the Kremlin line seem to be so accident-prone.

I'm having conflicted feelings about this. As far as I understand, what this guy was writing about is a de-facto military secret, but because of Wagner Group's nebulous legal status there was no way to persecute him officially.

Ah yes, investigative journalism in Russia.

You might as well paint a target on your back instead of the reporter/journalist tag.

That would be an exaggeration, but there are certainly some people one is better off not writing against, Kadyrov first and foremost. I guess Wagner PMC could be on the list now, too, if this was indeed a murder.

As of last year Russia was in the top ten most dangerous countries for journalists, right in between Afghanistan and Mexico.

Not that I ppresume to be competent on the matter, but that does sound exaggerated. May I ask for a link to the rating in question?

I'm gonna look for death rankings, they're a little harder to find and can be iffy depending on cause of death. You can see here on this list though that Russia ranks 148 out of 179 on the press freedom index, which factors in violence against journalists as well as state influence over the media and general intimidation and coercion. That's one of the worst scores outside of straight-up dictatorships. [1]

That's also just the press, we all know that political opponents and critics of Putin don't fare too well either. Boris Nemtsov would be the prime example here, shot to death outside the Kremlin and the investigation stalled by Putin himself.

Any self respecting country wouldn't have this many journalist dropping dead over investigating the rot of their government.

The list is fairly long. Surely, the Chechen conflict was responsible for the deaths but currently, whistle blowers, expats and journalist investigating government corruption, Syrian Mercenary groups and the War in Ukraine are dropping dead, so that list is going to get a bit longer.

Thanks for the information. I will study this.

I have a question about Josef Stalin, and I figure this thread is the first port of call for it since we don't have a thread on him or on the second World War (it's a civilian rather than strictly military question): What would he have done if Moscow had fallen in 1941 to the Wehrmacht, during Operation Typhoon?

I know that capturing Moscow would most likely not have militarily decided the war (even if all the Fronts defending the city had been wiped out in the process, it seems like Stavka had already ten or so reserve armies ready farther east to continue resisting) and the German prospects would be little better than in the real world ... but in the real world, politicians often sue for peace when they perceive a situation as hopeless and a lot of people did perceive the Soviet situation as hopeless ahead of the battle for Moscow.

Nazi Germany had no intention of letting Russia as a nation or as a race survive the war. They would have kept fighting.

They had to.

Yeah, Garcon has it. The Nazis considered Russia part of their Lebensraum, and planned on occupying it and exterminating everyone living there. The only real option was to keep fighting.

The thing to remember about Nazi Germany is that the Holocaust was not some secret objective or a side project of theirs.

It was the ultimate driving force behind their expansionism and their military buildup. Everything lead back to perpetuating it in some way. It was their whole reason for existing as a nation.

The only reason they invaded eastern europe in the first place was to get to it's massive Jewish population.

Er, I was asking about Stalin. I know what Hitler's intentions are and if memory serves there was an explicit order to not accept a surrender of Moscow (such an order definitively existed for Leningrad).

I think Stalin would have fought all the to the Pacific, if he had to. He was a paranoid nutter and knew what the stakes (at least for him, and probably for the Soviet population to some extent) were.

Though there is the question of what he’d do physically, Soviet leadership would have to set up somwhere if Moscow fell.

They already had. It was the advantage of a command economy - Stalin had shifted a vast amount of Russia’s production capacity behind the Urals. He was in that fight for the long haul.

I know that the factories had moved, but had he personally?

Say a big hello to the backup capital of the Soviet Union.

Considering that he was already the paranoid control freak on certain regular day-to-day internal political matters, it's certainly plausible that he had a relocation/escape plan in order to continue the fight elsewhere. Either in order to get to Samara or to get to some point behind the Urals (or even further to the east). He probably frantically thought of all the possibilities.

edited 20th Apr '18 3:25:26 AM by Quag15

Stalin had not personally moved from Moscow, apparently for morale reasons. The rest of the government had been moved, though.