LeninWalksTheWorld

Probably was Aldrich Aims, he's is one of the best known American double agents and passed a bunch of lie detectors. He did it for money though so he's not as cool as the Cambridge Five in my opinion.

Kendall Myers is his wife Gwendolyn were very based however. They worked for the state department and passed secrets to the Cuban government for 30 years out of ideological loyalty.

According to a "law enforcement official", they were "true believers" in the Cuban system.[11] The United States federal affidavit quoted a diary entry by Kendall Myers as saying, "I can see nothing of value that has been lost by the revolution. The revolution has released enormous potential and liberated the Cuban spirit",[11] and referred to Fidel Castro as "one of the great political leaders of our time."[13] Other entries quoted reference a comparison of health care in the United States and healthcare in Cuba, and "complacency about the poor" in the United States.[11]

Unfortunately they caught him and he is now locked up at ADX Florence supermax facility, where they put all the terrorists.

It allowed them to intercept ships to check if they were slave trading. While they were inspecting the ship, the British officers could use the pretext to find other things wrong, ie smuggling, piracy, desertion, ect. Then they could seize your property or arrest you in some cases. Sort of like how American cops can use a busted taillight to pull you over, then arrest you if he find drugs during that.

The navy did also free a significant number of slaves this way too so it wasn't just an abuse of power, but it also signaled to everyone that Britain was the dominant naval power in Europe now.

While this was not the sole reason, it should be noted that English anti-slavery laws gave their navy a pretext to board and search vessels for "inspections". With the UK quickly becoming the world's dominant naval power, this gave them lots of power over foreign shipping and trade, especially in the Atlantic.

I'd agree generally. One of the most difficult obstacles for global communists to overcome in the last century is that Stalin tied the project of building communism (globally) with the national interests of the USSR. A lot of communists obviously didn't feel very comfortable with letting internationalism take a back seat to just always supporting Moscow and let the capitalists do the whole "reds are traitors who want to sell out their nation" propaganda a lot more effectively. The Sino-Soviet Split is another example of this, where Russian national interests won out over international solidarity.

Though about Bukharin, I can't say for sure how things would have turned out if he and the Right Opposition came out on top in the power struggle. I really like Bukharin personality, he seems like a good guy, smart too. Things like collectivization would have been more "relaxed" under him than Stalin definitely, and he probably would have been able to just bribe the peasant kulaks into cooperating rather than going full class liquidation on them like Stalin. I bet Bukharin economy would have likely been really impressive if it was allowed time and space to develop since he seemed to understand in a Marxist sense that Russia didn't get the benefit of prior capitalist accumulation and could do more to address that than just brute forcing the problem with massive, labor-intensive projects like Stalin did (with terrible health and safety regulations as well)

The major issue is that you still have the fuckin Nazi invasion happening in the 1940s, and without Stalin's aggressive campaign of industrialization it's possible a Bukharinist USSR just gets rolled over and genocided if that slower paced industrialization campaign means a weaker war economy. Things got pretty close a few times even with a hard ass like Stalin in charge. Plus to be fair in that global situation, stoking nationalism against foreign invaders does make sense even if it's not strictly communist.

That's one of the modern arguments modern Russians like to use to defend Stalin at least. They say "Bukharin would have dragged out collectivization until the 1950s, so we would have lost the Great Patriotic War and all died." But whose to say WW2 even goes the same way with Bukharin running things. It's possible Bukharin's more "lenient" leadership could have convinced the west to actually negotiate collective security agreement against Nazi Germany in good faith. Then the Nazis could be stopped at Sudetenland if something like the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty was taken seriously.

historical possibilities of that period of time are really fascinating

I agree, think stuff like the Leningrad Affair was incredibly stupid on Stalin's part. Like bruh you're gonna die soon anyway maybe don't purge thousands of your most popular cadres? Those guys would have been useful a few decades down the road.

Party should have thanked Stalin for his service throughout the 30s and 40s and then forcibly retired him post war in favor of Malenkov. Instead they let his brain melt which gave the Khrushchevites an opportunity to trash his entire legacy for a little temporary popular support, all while compromising the greater ideological project.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all though, and sticking with Stalin till death for stability's sake probably looked like the best option at the time after the most destructive war in human history

Soviet Storm: WW2 in the east is pretty cool

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwGzY25TNHPC_SsXFcIH-ba0nWuNbHOM6

These guys also make great weekly videos about WW2, "in real time"

https://youtu.be/TRvzqDzgmPQ

At what point are we going step back as a society and realize this shit is pathetic? I'm sure our rivals don't need to use softcore porn to meet their recruiting targets. This is some real imperial decay shit right here.

US military has been failing to hit it's recruitment targets for years now. Mostly because American young people are too fat/insane/depressed/addicted to drugs to pass the basic physical and mental requirements, and not because of based reasons. It's like only 20% of that age range is potentially healthy enough to serve which is kind of insane. Hope we won't need to fight a big war soon lol

Maybe they think they can trick horny teenagers into getting into shape and joining the military if they believe there is some hot gurl waiting for them. I doubt it.

I’ll go ahead and say it was worse in Stalin’s Russia

wow so brave. It was worse to live in a unindustrialized backwater that was recovering from invasion and civil war than it is to live 100 years later in a modern western service economy where your every want is catered to. Thank you liberalism for your insightful conclusions.

what we consider the foundations of modern liberalism (multiculturalism acceptance of gender and sexual minorities), is seen in Eastern Europe (specifically Russia/former USSR) as a controversial "western import". It's like the culture war in America, there are two different general cultural factions: westernizers and slavophiles. The disastrous economic changes the "westernizer" liberals brought to some parts of eastern Europe really soured their reputation. The Soviet Union and nostalgia for it are firmly culturally linked to the slavophiles, which are also consistently socially conservative on other issues (they are strongly tied to the Orthodox Church). In other eastern European countries like Poland the Catholic Church is still very dominant politically.

So I guess the answer to your question is that a lot of eastern Europeans are homophobic and racist because they think these ideas are just more western attempts to destroy their culture. People who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union tend to be anti-western for obvious reasons, and unfortunately cultural conditioning pushes them towards these backwards views.

part of that is that the whole faction is half-baked because it was rushed to release. Legion got the most cut from it, multiple towns beyond the Colorado were scrapped. And siding with the legion locks you out of a lot of other quests, so why bother?

Gorbachev wasn't a full liberal he was a reformist and basically wanted social democracy. The liberal opposition that he at first championed with glastnost quickly outflanked him while the Soviet conservatives also hated him. His naivete and ineptitude destroyed the country by allowing liberal and nationalist forces (Yeltsin and his cronies) to tear the union apart from under his unsteady feet. The August coup was an attempt by the conservatives to force Gorbachev to fucking do something to save the country (several states had already declared independence at this point), but he couldn't even be assed to take a side so the conservative had to try to throw together a new government overnight.

So he's less of a sell out (that fits Yeltsin better) and more of a person who was just completely incapable of recognizing the situation and was overcome by more decisive forces.