The almighty algorithm recommended this video to me, and it is really good:
Describing Russia as a pseudo-feudal society with components of a Mafia-esque hierarchy is very interesting and very apt, in my opinion.
And unlike many other people who opine on Russia online, this one cannot be easily dismissed because she is Russian herself.
It’s so very very sad, and from my limited understanding of Russian history while the names of the levels have changed it is the same structure the society has had for centuries. It is difficult to see how that can ever be changed.
@1 Jazzlet: The US and EU had a chance when the USSR fell. Rather then work on a long term solution or fix any underlying problems they just made some quick reforms and sold the government businesses to the people who had money. This resulted in selling a lot of businesses to the same oligarchs that had run them previously because the corrupt oligarchs were the only ones with money.
There was a fear that if chaos was allowed to continue then people might vote the communists back into power and not enough understanding that corruption was the real problem. The official name given to the government didn’t matter much if the same group of corrupt oligarchs ran things.
Russia can and will change, if and only if an engaged middle class is built, and there is socially accepted upward mobility. Putin was a huge step backward. The US made an unfortunate choice when it decided to back Yeltsin, thinking he could be turned into a useful puppet. The CIA’s failures surrounding the collapse of the USSR and the reconstruction of Russia are responsible for a lot of the disaster. (Also responsible for the early stages of the Ukraine disaster)
I am perhaps an optimist in that I do not believe there is anything like a national character. The way a population learns to be is more a result of the political system they are formed in, but in the case of places like Russia and Afghanistan, there are solid centuries of rule by gangster, which is self-perpetuating entry-level politics. As the US saw in Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, you cannot just swan in and blast the biggest boss in the neighborhood, then tell people to establish a model democracy. It’s not just that they don’t know how, but an alternative power structure than bosshood needs to be established and kept in place for at least 2 generations. That takes an attention span and understanding of politics that the US simply is incapable of bringing. (Consider how long and how many tries it took for France, after multiple revolutions, to establish something like a republic -- they needed to demolish and rebuild the entire economy, and de-imperialize).
The Russians I have known are charming and hard-working, friendly people. They do the best they can with what they have, so we shouldn’t expect a great elevation story, like we see in China, until their entire economy is rearranged in a non-gangster mode. (China killed millions in the cultural revolution doing that. We were naive to think that the Russians would just start -- I don’t know -- acting like Germans or Swedes once the boots of the bosses were off their necks. The first reaction is “OK now that the boss is gone, who is the new boss?” not “how do I form a political party and peel labor out from under control of the state?”)
@Marcus, I think there is such a thing as national character, only it is of course not biologically determined. It is a cultural construct and thus it can, and does, change over time. But it does have a big drag so I think your estimate of two generations is about right for said change to take place.
Interestingly, CZ did not follow the same path as Russia, despite taking significant steps on it in the beginning (badly performed privatization that led to many oligarchs buying state assets on the cheap and ordinary people getting shafted). One of the reasons for this was, IMO, that Czechs did have a functioning democracy prior to WW2 and even 40 years of communist government that was puppeteered by Moscau did not erase its memory. Another reason was that CZ is not and never was an economy based on the extraction of mineral wealth.
I watch some US political commentators on YouTube because they make good coverage of the Ukraininan war. And from what I see, I think that Americans in general learned the wrong lesson from the Cold War. That is, they learned that “socialism/communism = bad”, which is not true.
What they should have learned is “totalitarianism/authoritarianism & corruption = bad”. And because they learned the wrong lesson from history, they do their best to repeat its mistakes with the Orange Turd.
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Edit: added word “coruption” which fell out in first writing.
It seems pretty clear to me that US people, by and large, learned to conflate socialism/communism with totalitarianism/authoritarianism (which was and is generally seen as self-evidently bad), rather than any economic system. This association was underlined in domestic propaganda to support both capitalism and US imperialism (the latter was sold to counter Soviet Russian imperialism). But since this association provided a potent propaganda tool for the right, the was and is a longstanding vigorous effort to brand anything vaguely leftist as socialism/communism. Thus, in the increasingly detached US rightwing community, people have trained themselves to understand “socialism/communism” as vaguely synonymous with whatever the Democratic party supports, as well as synonymous with totalitarianism/authoritarianism.
As for corruption, I think everyone generally sees it as bad, not the least in countries where corruption is rampant. The standard populist tactic for corrupt criminals running for office in corrupt countries seems to be promising to stop corruption.
At the time of 2016 US presidential election, I noticed that Trump was being branded as “not a politician”, and that was apparently seen as positive by many voters. It only makes sense if I infer that career politicians are, by and large, seen as epitomes of corruption, or something to that effect. A “businessman” would then seem like a positive characterization in comparison with “politician”.
When the first Trump admin got going, I was duly impressed by the corruption, as well as incompetence. I half expected this experience would serve as a rather heavy-handed lesson for the US voters, if not necessarily not one to get all the correct points through. Cynically, I sort of expected the US people (or most relevantly GOP voters) would learn to associate “businessman” with extreme corruption, and then probably resort to voting a fascist ex-cop/ex-military type for the next GOP president.
Now, here we have Trump with his enduring appeal to GOP voters, and a fascist ex-military thug serving as his Secretary of Defense thus far. Still too early to see what happens after Trump, and whether Hegseth continues to fall upward.
I wonder if that’s how Republican politicians and media heads see the world too? You owe loyalty to the people who made you rich, and no loyalty to your country or working class,, who are scarcely humans.
Did any USA news service notice the school shooting in Sweden?