As the Brezhnev years reached their twilight, and it was obvious that Communism would never arrive, the Party decided to rename their moribund system as Real Socialism. The idea was to convey a sense of Marxist progress, but it was taken as confirming the popular view that Soviet assets belonged to everybody and also to nobody. The Soviet Union was nevertheless governed by a structured hierarchical system with recognizable rules and an understood set of relationships with the outside world. Real Putinism, which Russia has now achieved, is more akin to the world as it was in the beginning: without …read more
Source: The American Interest
