Slop.

A lot of people these days hear "communism" and think of Bernie Sanders pushing Medicare for all and dealing with the 1%, but communism in Eastern Europe in the postwar period was something entirely different. It was starvation, the secret police, paranoia, cruelty, and Kafkaesque living. The collapse of a government, even a badly run, frightening government, means increasing chaos.

Kafkaesque lol. Yeah, and everything was in black and white, and the sun never shone.

Putin is the leader of another former communist state, one much more powerful and that is still known in 2018 for poisoning former citizens it decides it doesn't like.

The Skripal affair has been debunked; the story never even made sense.

He is known for cracking down on his critics using the power of the state and jailing his political opponents.

Why would Putin, a head of state with a 70%+ approval rating according to polls conducted by Western NGOs, need to jail a political opponent like Navalny who had 1% approval? Maybe it had more to do with the fact that he was literally caught on video being paid millions of dollars by MI6 to start a color revolution in Russia.

Before the USSR fell apart, he was in the KGB for 16 years.

He's proof that although terrifying communist regimes may fall, the people who personify evil inside those regimes live on and can continue to operate with nearly unchecked power.

Putin is living proof that people live past the age of 39!

He does not control the whole Duma any more than Trump, Starmer, or Macron control their legislative bodies, numbnuts. One of the reasons that Putin intervened in the Ukraine civil war in 2022 was because he was receiving too much criticism for being soft on NATO. I'm so tired of this stereotype that every US rival is controlled by a supervillain with unlimited supernatural power.