Comments on: Bring Back “Traktoristy” (“The Tractor Drivers”)

By: thibaud

thibaud — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:21:04 +0000

Putin’s right to be nervous. He can barely govern his own country, whose stability rests almost entirely on oil at >$40 bbl.

Putin is a puppet. His government has finally shown that it can collect (some) taxes, but it cannot or will not pay pensions, pass intelligent laws, enforce those laws, defend its borders, rein in the siberian regional fiefdoms or put down mickey-mouse bandit insurrections such as that run by the Chechen gangsters.

Mark my word, if the price of oil were to fall significantly– and who knows, it may happen within the next 2-3 years– Putin would be chucked overboard by his FSB minders faster than you can say Ivan Ivanovich. This is a Potemkin government, hiding its fundamental incompetence behind a threadbare curtain of bluster and bravado that fools no one in Russia.

By: kpom

kpom — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 22:22:04 +0000

By the way, Lyubov Orlova was indeed great as a comic actress.

Stalin liked her (and the film production company she worked with) so much that the only person excuted during the Stalinist terror from the company was the cameraman! (A very low score for the Soviet intelligensia in 1937.)

By: kpom

kpom — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 22:18:31 +0000

> Is Kyrgystan the one where its dictator changed the calendar and named one of the months after himself and committed other such acts of extreme egoism?

Nope – Turkmenistan has the Turkmenbashi! North Korea lives in the Middle East!

By: maria horvath

maria horvath — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 21:42:02 +0000

I sometimes (okay, quite often) get confused about all the “-stan” republics of the former Soviet Union.

Is Kyrgystan the one where its dictator changed the calendar and named one of the months after himself and committed other such acts of extreme egoism?

By: Buddy Larsen

Buddy Larsen — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 20:29:50 +0000

yeh…Laura made the guy…and he admits it.

By: Carol_Herman

Carol_Herman — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:26:03 +0000

Tell me if we can see his underwear? And, is it red? Or white?

Putin is trying so hard to be seen as human, that his wife gets to write the script. Where they are never alone. Such bullshit.

Kyrgyzstan, getting interesting, however. Can you imagine this stinky-stan having terrified civilians rising up against the maniac/despot in control? They’re mostly muslims, ya know. With a scattering of failed State Department ex-pats, to make the stew interesting.

Plus, the whole nature of the stinky-stans was to provide a border around russia to keep the russians from pushing “out.”

Where would they go? Ah. Once the Czar wanted to gobble gobble Turkey. He liked the Ottoman rugs.

Can wars really be won without firing any shots?

And, what about China?

So many dogs in the night. (And, one lone cowboy in the White House. Bush, ya know, is as tall as Gary Cooper.)

And, talking about wives, isn’t Laura beautiful? Beauty without blondness. Isn’t America is a great country of diversity, or what?