[pjc50]

> how much of the cold war, particularly after Stalin's death, was a massive US propaganda creation.

I think we can do a sort of differential analysis of the propaganda by looking at the coverage of events then and now. Back then, the USSR was repressing dissidents and engaging in proxy wars with the US; and became the universal bugbear, reviled in film and popular culture.

Nowadays, Russia is repressing dissidents and engaging in proxy wars with the US, including shooting down a civilian airliner; but the propaganda intensity is much lower. Is that because Russia is nominally capitalist and run by oligarchs who park their money in the West?

[dogma1138]

Both the east and the west have supported dictators and "crushed dissidents", and if you do a headcount the results are likely to surprise you.

As for your comment about MH317, I guess we all forgot about Iran Air Flight 655 where a US AEGIS guided missile destroyer which was arguably back then (and even now to some extent) the best radar system in the world shot down an Iranian civilian flight while violating Iranian territorial waters at the time. MH317 was a pretty bad and tragic incident but frankly IA 655 was arguably worse.

[digi_owl]

Russia was a the big buddy and teddy-bear of US and EU during the Yeltsin years, while the oligarch were grabbing everything and anything they could of the soviet industrial capacity for their own enrichment.

Then comes Putin, clamps down on said oligarchs, and all of a sudden we are right back at cold war rhetoric.

As for repressing dissidents, lets have a look at the number of civil wars and whatsnot that was instigated by USA around the "free" world during the same timeframe.