Why are there leftwingers and rightwingers who both support Putin?

The Nazis coopted the success of populist workers’ movements and used any language available to propagandize. They had no coherent or original ideas for a political platform.

And then they murdered them when they had power firmly in their hands. Same as Putin would to the stupid tankies. Like how the ISIS would use the Western Converts to drive the suicide bomb trucks.

Well except the contemporary far left massively opposed them, to the point of them being arch nemeses. Like I’m sure they snagged up some socialists with that move but it wasn’t really the same situation.

Thought they had that socialist bit because of the Strasserists.

The Nazi flag was red for a reason.

Eh there's also a strain of people on the anti capitalist left who see Uncle Sam as the big bad and therefore, anyone who opposes US hegemony are the "Good Guys"™️.

They're wrong and falling prey to some pretty obvious logical fallacies but they definitely exist.

How does it register with him keeping the open door with the Central Asian Republics and Caucasus?

If you remove all forms of politics, he doesn't really have much of a defined ideology, and what he promotes goes with the wind and seems to center only as a populist

The best I can tell, Putin actually outright refuses to appeal to nationalists and will only use third parties like Dugin to try rally the socs into the nat field when his popularity is to low to do it himself. Everyone also knows what happens to them when they've outlived their use and how little value national pride actually means to the olicharchy

He's only far right if you go off the European idea that leftism is inheritally incapable of creating an authortian state. If you go off the old American idea that communism is inheritally unsustainable and that it will inheritally always create a state of absolute power and absoute power will always corrupt, he's no different then communist Stalin as his entire national industry is state controlled and his entire welfare system is fully socialized

The spectrum itself is nonsense and implies that there’s some more ‘reasonable’ stance in the ‘center’ (as if the center isn’t also an inadequate expression of rational thought).

As bad as Putin is, much of that is from Ukraine’s changing borders. The west was Polish and Austro-Hungarian, so there’s way more Catholicism in the west of Ukraine. Eastern Orthodoxy is much stronger in the parts of the country that border or were part of the Russian Empire.

"Tired of genocidal maniacs? Have a genocidal maniac! Job done!" "But you didn't solve anything." "Perish in the gulag."

If anything Stalinism actively hindered the fight against fascism. He assisted Germany in a quicker conquest of Poland, which was a large reason France and Britain didn't intervene as much as they could have. He purged tons of his competent officers before the war allowing the army to become insanely incompetent and corrupt, and he held so much onto his plans and vision that he was utterly blindsided by the German invasion in 1941. Even once the war began his initial response was to do nothing for the first critical few days and then just throw units at the front with no rhyme or reason to their positions, allowing them to be constantly encircled. If anything it was only when Stalin began to let his Generals that knew what they were doing do their job that the war turned around.

Look, the Soviets did play a huge and respectable role in stopping the Nazis, that can't be denied. But they also helped them at first and didn't figure things out until way late than they should have.

Yeah they didn’t do it without the support of the US.

You do realize the Soviet Union was basically completely bailed out by lend-lease from the US? Like America was basically the Soviet Union’s pocket medic if we’re using a Team Fortress 2 analogy.

The invasion of Poland has a very real possibility of turning into a total grind fest pyrrhic victory that breaks the Heer as an offensive force in a timeline where Poland doesn't have to orient a significant amount of its defensive works and troops eastward. If the USSR were anything other than another imperialist nightmare hungry to reclaim territory it sees as rightfully its own, it wouldn't have been a threat to Poland, and the Poles with the ability to orient all their armed forces to the German and East Prussian borders would have bled the Germans white even in victory.

So no, it turns out, actually, it's very good at making the fascism problem worse.

Stalin slaughtered the nascent LGBTQ organizations and scientists because it was more important to be "strong for mother Russia" than it was to have a functional government. Stalin allowed pseudoscience and quackery to run rampant throughout the USSR because it was more important to be anti-Western than it was to be intelligent and educated. This directly helped to contribute to further famine and instability, making Russia weaker as a whole, when Germany inevitably came knocking.

Incidentally, this is why you don't allow reactionary, uneducated peasants take over the government. Putting Stalin in charge was the worst thing that could have happened to the USSR. Though Lenin holds significant blame for not having a line of succession, even a spiritual one, despite him knowing he was cancer-ridden and could die at any moment.

Finally, Trotsky would be known today as a Democratic Socialist, who absolutely could have lead the USSR into an early version of the Nordic countries, had he not been forced into exile.

Stalinism was every bit as bad as Naziism. The body counts, the brutality, the ideological purges. Same guy in two different coats. The only reason history reads any different is that the Nazis lost.

Atrocious take

That's what I was thinking, as an anarchist I don't call tanky's leftist. They're just fascist with red paint

With these "lefties" it's the political equivalent of substituting nostalgia for having ideology.

"Remember when the USSR was leading the world in creating a socialist paradise? Well when Putin brings that back, the communist/socialist paradise will be back."

Anyone with a clear view of the world recognizes that it's not true anymore and Russia is just an imperialist project at this point.

Like all nostalgia, it's all an illusion. Even during the Cold War, lefties (real lefties, not dumbass kids with red USSR flags on their dorm room walls) were questioning whether the USSR was a socialist or communist state or just an imperialist project with unlimited money for interventions in Afghanistan or Angola. France, West Germany, and Norway were better examples of a workers' paradise than the USSR.

Scratch a tankie, a fascist bleeds.

They are two sides of the same coin. They'd rather side with actual fascists than they would with other leftists or liberals.

Pick pretty much any republican politician.

The problem is the very same people who "use the Ukraine is corrupt" issue as an excuse not to help Ukraine are very supportive of an even more corrupt country (Russia). They don't oppose corruption, they just love Russia.

But yes Ukraine is indeed corrupt, which is why I favour Ukrainian membership within the EU. The EU has made it clear that one of the conditions of EU membership is to try and decrease corruption. EU membership would massively help Ukraine in reducing corruption. It won't eradicate it fully though, as of course countries like Italy and Hungary are EU members, both nations are notorious for corruption themselves.

The irony of that one for me is that he is just the west’s branch manager, installed after the weakness of the 90s to keep a firm hand on Russia’s nukes and the oil flowing. Ppl knew since 2000 or 2002 that he organized the false flags attacks that served as a pretext for the second Chechen war. The west only got sick of his bad behavior after 2014. This whole conflict is him just trying to leverage a better deal for Russia in its role as Europe’s gas station. 

Meanwhile Putin is a liberal multiculturalist who does everything the American right accuses Obama and Biden of doing. He has been replacing ethnic Russians with central asian  immigrants at a faster clip than demographic change is happening in the west.  He tolerates plenty of cosmopolitan decadence and europeanness in St. Petersburg and Moscow in exchange for the consent of the professional-managerial class.  If the right were applying their own viewpoint coherently they’d determine that this is a globohomo civil war and they should be rooting for Putin to lose and be replaced by a right-wing nationalist like Girkin.