Economically, communism in Russia died with the Soviet Union. Putin leads a criminal oligarchy that concentrates all the country's wealth near him and his clique, like a modern czar.
Putin returned the church to a prominent position, is extremely conservative.
Look at his political friends: Orban, Wilders, Farage, Trump, Le Pen. All very right wing.
He's among the leaders of the current extreme right wing wave in the world, not in any way leftist.
You don't answer ... what exactly is wrong with stating that Putin is an incredibly successful communist? He started out as a violent enforcer of communism, card carrying enforcer of of the Communist party, and climbed the ladder, and has been incredibly successful doing so. He's a murderous asshole of course, but how does that change what he managed to do. There are few people who can present a better claim to being communists, don't you think?
You're also right, of course, that he's extreme right. So are other successful communists. Chavez was never anything but the leader of criminal gangs, as is Maduro. Khamenei in Iran is also extreme right of course, not even that different (his power also mostly comes from control over criminal gangs, and obviously the members of his gangs are about as muslim as bikini-clad pigs having a barbecue on a beach). There's other kinds, like UN's Guterrez or Jose Manuel Barosso, much less successful than Putin, but another violent enforcer of communism, now non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International. But again, is there even a single socialist in your entire country that can make a better claim to being a communist than him?
Makes you wonder how loyal current well known leftists are to leftism. Greta Thunberg, to stay on the Gaza issue, has made millions of dollars on her "green-left" activism. About 10 times the absolute maximum she could have earned as a politician (ie. 10 times what the prime minister of Sweden makes). And of course Nicolas Maduro is a billionaire. Putin, if you wanted to quantify it, can probably claim to be the world's first trillionnaire. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they also have somewhat less complete faith in communism.
I tried to read this, but it's just gibberish. I cannot figure out what you are trying to say. Obviously Putin leads the international right-wing movement. This is well known. I have to assume you have some deep emotional commitment to being contrarian. You are attempting to jump through a lot of mental hoops to transform Putin into a Communist. You will, I hope, understand that most of us don't want to twist ourselves into a mental and emotional pretzel to end up with your deeply contrarian position. "Leftwing" and "rightwing" are always situational terms that depend, in any era, on a prevailing consensus, therefore there is no point trying to twist the meaning of the words, except in cases where you can point to a specific contradiction between the conventional label and some actual policy, and even then, most of the contradictions should taken as wry ironies, as we all know the old adage, "Politics makes strange bedfellows."
I just don't see why any of your comment is relevant to the situation today, after Putin has been in power for 25 years. If something has a pro-Putin bias nowadays, that's a right wing bias, because he's clearly part of the right wing.
I don't think he was ever a communist. Soviet Russia was a single party state, so people with ambitions had to join it.
I don't know much about Maduro or Thunberg and don't see why they're relevant.
I don't understand. He was a card-carrying member of the communist party who committed (a lot of) violence on behalf of communism/socialism. If THAT doesn't make someone a communist, then what does?
And if anyone who does things wrong is not a leftist, then of course that must extend to everyone, including of course non-leftists. Do Trump's actions also have zero bearing on the GOP then? Did Hitler unfairly give racists a bad name?
> I don't know much about Maduro or Thunberg and don't see why they're relevant.
Obviously because they're leftist icons, and because communist news defends them despite, especially for Maduro, some rather serious shortcomings.
Putin returned the church to a prominent position, is extremely conservative.
Look at his political friends: Orban, Wilders, Farage, Trump, Le Pen. All very right wing.
He's among the leaders of the current extreme right wing wave in the world, not in any way leftist.