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RWA NEWS: Tsar's Days & Fiery Nights

🕑 Added 2025-07-22 18:39:33 +0000 UTC

Comments

Andrew Martiniuc

Fedor never looked scarier

Agit Papadakis

First off I want to thank you guys for the invaluable expertise you share on Russia with us foreigners. I'd like to ask you about a dark area in the narrative of the Soviet collapse. That strange French guy who makes good predictions for the wrong reasons ascribed it to deteriorating demographics. Yanks OTOH tried to take credit by claiming they forced the Soviets to spend themselves in a hole by tying to compete with their Star Wars boondoggle. I tend to think it was 90% for internal reasons, such as the failure of agriculture that has its roots in Lenin calling anyone who possessed bag of grain a kulak, the seizure of power by the Donetsk (Khrushchev) and Dnipropetrovsk (Brezhnev) mafias, the rapid erosion of Communist ideology by Brezhnev's disco/video Komsomols, and finally by plain and simple treason at the very top. On that last point, could you give me your take on Alexander Kolpakidi's thesis that Andropov and Kryuchkov were both traitors, that Andropov had a list of 2200 CIA spies at the top levels of the party and did nothing about it, that Kryuchkov personally assisted Yeltsin and Gorbachev's dissolution of the CPSU and the USSR, and what if any impact these revelations have had in Russia? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC04cMInmrk