I Knew in the early 1980s that the Russians were really Wrong

Many people do not read books. Many people do not read the history in books, if they read books at all. But even in fiction we know that the Russians are awful. You do not have to read books and magazines, and current Internet articles to know that the Russians have had a twisted society for a while. Perhaps forever? I am not sure about that. They usually have had brutal poverty and brutal leaders.

When I was learning more about them in the early 1980s they had two successors to Leonid Brezhnev that were short lived, and the country, or Empire, was so messed up that they ruled and died embarrassingly and months, almost a year would go by before the Soviets would recognize that Yuri Andropov or Constantin Chernenko had died, and another would replace him.

Embarrassing, wrong. 

Russians, we understand that people die. Were they killed, is that why the mystery?

It was just bad health. They chose some old men who were not long to live. But they could not admit that they died. What country or regime does that? Incredible. Afterthoughts of a forgotten, mistaken time of the Cold War.

Then they picked a reasonable man in Mikhail Gorbachev, who undid the whole thing.

Amazing. Terrible, the monarchies then, the communist regimes last century, the fascist tyrants now.

To eventually lead to Putin, butcher of thousands. Could it lead to millions of dead?

We shall see. The new Peter the Great, indeed.