Communism VS Democracy?

Ah! The great story of the defeat of Communism by Democracy, huh? Never happened. Couldn't possibly have happened.

1) Communism is an economic system based on the common ownership of all property by all of the people. Democracy is a political system where the people govern. What happened is that the capitalist economies (USA, Europe etc) outlasted and overwhelmed the weak Russian (USSR) economy. No! Bad Reader! (If you are, as MR B suspects, thinking, "Oh, so Capitalism defeated Communism, right?")

2) Russia etal did not have a communist economy. The economy was controlled by the national government. It was, technically, socialism with state ownership of everything. The people did not own anything and had no real control over either agricultural or industrial operations despite some pretenses of local control. There was no Communism there for Capitalism to defeat.

3) The actual political system of Russia was an oligarchy with membership controlled by dictators (e.g. Stalin) or internal groups represented by semi-figureheads such as Nikita Khrushchev. The original power wielders were the Bolshevik faction headed by Vladimir Lenin which won the power struggle after the 1917 Russian revolution. So did Democracy defeat Oligarchy/Dictatorship? More bad news here. The USA is not a democracy in the strictest sense. When Ben Franklin was asked, after the Constitutional Convention, what kind of government the delegates had given the people, he replied, "a Republic." The USA is a Constitutional Republic.

Let's hear it for the defeat of the Oligarchy by the Constitutional Republic!???

MR B would prefer to see this as something Darwinian. What happened was the survival of the fittest (economy).

P.S.: Anyone notice that the Russian economy is recovering (in a socialistic capitalism sort of way) under a new Dictatorship?