Your conflation of Tito's Yugoslavia with the DDR is unfortunate and inaccurate. Tito managed to unify and integrate what had been a rather cumbersome and artificial multi-ethnic state, partly due to his internationalist ideology, and established economically a semi-successful development state, in which workers had significant rights and input in management. And certainly the overall political atmosphere in Yugoslavia was much freer than in any Soviet bloc state. It, of course, all came apart a decade after his death when IMF "shock therapy" was imposed on the country,-(there was a balance of payment crisis and inflation reached 1200%),- which destroyed the self-management system, resulted in mass industrial unemployment and shattered the legitimacy of the government, leaving a power vacuum in which ethno-centric extremists opportunistically emerged. It seems like an instance of the very sort of inverted and fallacious historical "reasoning" that you are otherwise criticizing.
Correction: About 10% of Syrians are (were) Christians. But they aren't all Eastern Orthodox, and thus direct co-religionists of Russian Orthodox Christians. Some would be Oriental Orthodox, some might recognize the Pope under Eastern Rite provisions, others might recognize the Patriarch of Constantinople, a few might be Protestant converts, etc.
Your conflation of Tito's Yugoslavia with the DDR is unfortunate and inaccurate. Tito managed to unify and integrate what had been a rather cumbersome and artificial multi-ethnic state, partly due to his internationalist ideology, and established economically a semi-successful development state, in which workers had significant rights and input in management. And certainly the overall political atmosphere in Yugoslavia was much freer than in any Soviet bloc state. It, of course, all came apart a decade after his death when IMF "shock therapy" was imposed on the country,-(there was a balance of payment crisis and inflation reached 1200%),- which destroyed the self-management system, resulted in mass industrial unemployment and shattered the legitimacy of the government, leaving a power vacuum in which ethno-centric extremists opportunistically emerged. It seems like an instance of the very sort of inverted and fallacious historical "reasoning" that you are otherwise criticizing.
Correction: About 10% of Syrians are (were) Christians. But they aren't all Eastern Orthodox, and thus direct co-religionists of Russian Orthodox Christians. Some would be Oriental Orthodox, some might recognize the Pope under Eastern Rite provisions, others might recognize the Patriarch of Constantinople, a few might be Protestant converts, etc.