The one-trick pony that is Russia’s economy is, in late November, reportedly in discussions with the Saudis about oil and production cutbacks.  Petrodollars from oil and natural gas sales are the only thing standing between Vladimir Putin and the typically ugly – and final – exit of a Russian leader.  Just as in the late 1980s and the early ‘90s, low prices are strangling the puny Russian economy.

Thus it has been for the last 100 years, beginning with the totalitarians masquerading as saviors of the working man.

The reign of the dead-eyed sub humans began with what would become their signature calling card – murder.  Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were dispatched as casually as one might brush away a fly.  They would be followed by millions upon millions of the revolution’s foes – real, imagined and invented.

Total disdain and disregard for the individual in a national government had never been witnessed on such a scale.  Murder, torture, starvation, pogroms, labor/reeducation camps and untold horrors were visited on a people for much of the 20^th century in the service of “freeing” workers from their masters. The “first among equals” cabal would sell the state as the defender and protector of the workers.  Dare to ask who would protect those workers from the state, the immediate future held a cell, a bullet or a rope.

The bully boys Lenin and Trotsky formed the USSR in 1922 and even came up with a song, “Workers of the world unite!” Workers were shortly involuntarily united as the Russian jackals descended on and subsumed neighboring republics – all the ‘stans, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and several others.  Welcome to the world of gulags, purges and famine, comrades!

Following World War II, the advocates of “From each according to his means to each according to his needs” swallowed Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.  Hungary made a run at freedom in 1956 after 10 years of misery.  Lasting a couple of weeks, the Soviets crushed the revolt killing some 500 in the process and imprisoning thousands.

Workers united indeed – in starvation, in intimidation and hopelessness.  A system founded on total violation of all decency and human instinct could not last.  When the failed system rotted from within and finally imploded, a dried husk of a nation was left behind, with zero innovation, athletic cheating – they recently had to give back more medals “won” at Sochi, threats to peaceful neighbors, zero morale and an economy in tatters as its legacy.  The current “strongman” in Russia – the shirtless runt – and his goons seek to recapture the “glory” of the bygone Soviet era.

And what glories they were – funereal parades dragging missiles, tanks and howitzers through the streets of Moscow to dreadful military music celebrating the agents of menace and death while the savage, bloated and besotted party leadership stood stone-faced on the reviewing stand.

From the sinister, sneering Stalin to Malenkov, Beria, Molotov (of cocktail fame), the bellicose tantrum-prone vile slob Khrushchev, and the parade of detestables — Breshnev, Chernenko, Andropov and the rest of the pot-bellied geezers, they’d stagger back to the Kremlin to their tumblers of vodka and review latest innovations in torture, coercion and oppression.  Just for comic relief they’d spend off hours plotting how to take out their competitors with lies, innuendo and treachery.

The one apparatchik assured of continued employ was the technician charged with removing party leadership from photos following their elimination.  Yes, it was tough to survive the “glories” of the workers liberation.  But Putin did survive and has applied his KGB lessons well

He’s played a weak hand with political savvy and daring, but the fact remains his resources are limited by an economy smaller than Italy’s – Russia is often ridiculed as little more than a gas station with nuclear weapons, thanks to a 2014 quip by Sen. John McCain.  That gas station has been used to good effect – threatening Europe with cutting off natural gas supplies and selling crude to rogue states around the globe.

The Bolsheviks went down when the Saudis flooded crude oil markets in the early 1990s and drove the price of a barrel of oil into the single digits.  The US shale revolution could repeat the success and shorten the Putin reign substantially, but for now the Bolshevik centennial may be celebrated by remnants of the KGB.

Others potentially joining in the fun are elite socialist dreamers in parlors and drawing rooms who envision humanity at its finest – caring, sharing, sacrificing for the greater good – essentially Denmark on steroids, but the most gentle and genteel of steroids.

How does this nightmare continue to be perpetuated?  The end-product lives and breathes today, and is venerated in some quarters.  There was no lack of tributes to the murdering Castro brothers and little outcry in the West about the atrocities visited by Pol Pot on his countrymen in Cambodia.  Only the demonic man-child running North Korea gets his due in world opinion.

Compare Bolshevism to other thugs and maniacs in recent history – there is zero tolerance for Hitler, Mussolini, neo Nazi/white supremacists, and butchers Idi Amin and Boko Haram.  Hitler owns the death of 6+ million Jews and the destruction of his beloved Deutschland.  The bedsheet crowd owns rape, torture and murder of defenseless Blacks in the U.S., and the other tinhorn military wannabes hacked a bunch of their own to death.

Yet getting a pass are the Maos and his crowd — 60+ million dead in China, the human cost of imposing Communism to “unite the workers.”  In a changing world even the Chinas, the Vietnams and the other revolutionaries are losing their zealotry.  Prosperity, it turns out, is not a bad thing.

What remains are the dogged, the theoreticians, the intelligentsia and the humorless thinkers of deep thoughts.  They remain convinced that human nature can be bent to their vision – a better world.  But time after time it’s proven that human nature and instinct will not be denied.

You can suck your thumb until the cows come home, but denying creativity, individuality and self-determination is a path to oblivion.  Unbridled taking from one and giving to another, one size fits all and uniformity of outcomes have all been tried.  Abject failure is the result across the board.  What remains of the Bolshevik version is the ugliest of bathtub rings around the human experience.

Witness the Hungarians attempt in 1956, and their success along with rest of the Eastern Bloc in 1991 – Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, etc. — it took a blink of an eye for these peoples to run off their Soviet puppet governments and secret police in opting for freedom.  There’s no looking back – even the rocky road experienced in Iraq’s try at democracy has not prevented that experiment from enduring.

The replay of low oil prices exacts a huge toll on a rotted system.  The bounty of wealth provided by natural resources is the primary building block for a diversified, vibrant economy – or – it is the building block for megalomaniacs to build self-glorifying regimes, wasting national wealth on weapons to intimidate, subjugate, even exterminate their own citizens, in the bargain destroying any resident initiative and creativity to build a sustainable society.

Today’s dreamers of the socialist/communist nirvana could ask the liberated about a return to their former existence as servants to their “worker” masters.  The accompanying sacrifice of dignity, identity and self-worth on the altar of the “common good” would call up this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “We would already have socialism, but for the socialists.”