[ivan_gammel]

Haven't heard of anything like that. Looks like it is some American pop culture definition that reduces the history of Europe to a few very broadly defined buckets to reduce the intellectual workload. It is often called ignorance. Do you think it makes sense to continue saying it is a valid use?

[Koshkin]

> Haven't heard of anything like that.

(Speaking of ignorance.) The parent knows what they're talking about. "The people's democracies" was indeed the term that was customarily used within the Soviet block to include countries that did not belong to said block but otherwise lived under similar regimes.

[ivan_gammel]

I have not heard of equivalence between „Soviet“ and „People’s democracy“ before. In fact those terms are mutually exclusive. Either your country has multi-party system, at least formally, or it is a Soviet republic.

[Koshkin]

Not to disagree, but that’s what they were using.

[thriftwy]

"People's democracy" is actually the regime when there's a single ruling party system but it calls itself democratic because it is comprised of, you know, the people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_democracy_(Marxism–...

As opposed to regular plain old democracy.

[ivan_gammel]

It is literally in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article:

People's democracy is a theoretical concept within Marxism–Leninism and a form of government which developed after World War II and allows in theory for a multi-class and multi-party democracy on the pathway to socialism.

[Koshkin]

Incidentally,

The German Democratic Republic had a plural multi-party system. The largest by members and parliament seats were the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), followed by Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD).

(The was also National-Democratic Party [1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_G...

[thriftwy]

Well, yeah, but it's the same way on the other side of the Curtain: Such as, France had its own nuclear weapons and was in complicated relationship with NATO, but it gets totally conflated into the Western bloc with no reservations. Same with neutral Sweden and even Finland.

So I don't see any point to nitpick.

[ivan_gammel]

I don’t know really how things are in the new members of EU, but Russia is indeed a twin of USA in everything, including the ignorance and isolation of political discourse. It doesn’t mean that because Russia has it, it is a good thing.