Shocked Pikachu face
And yet, amid the breakdown that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union but lasted well beyond 1991, Putin consolidated a new autocracy. This fusion of fragility and path dependence derives from many factors that are not easily rewired: geography, a national-imperial identity, an ingrained strategic culture.
“Caused by many, many factors, but NOT Yeltsin’s coup and the Neoliberal ravaging of the country that followed. Definitely not!”
Kotkin is one of the very few liberal historians who doesn’t completely regurgitate batshit insane takes about the Soviet Union from the Cold War era (For instance he acknowledges that Lenin’s testament was a hoax).
However, his takes on politics are so utterly naïve that one might think he’s some kind of Harvard MBA failson rather than an actual historian. I remember during a conversation a couple of years ago where he basically states that America will win the new Cold War because they have the capability of “self correction” that China does not. Because choosing between two demented racists in an election is apparently “self correction”. This article is more of the same. The Russia-Chinese vassal theory is literally believed by no one and is ludicrous when you consider that America literally controls Europe’s foreign policy. Everything else sounds like it came from redditors in early 2022.
Crock-pot-kin may be a cut above the usual dogshit that calls themselves sovietologists but he still sucks. His first book on Stalin during the Civil war section had him worshiping the ground where the antisemitic Whites stepped and regailed the reader with tales of the Reds excesses and crimes done in the name of winning the Civil war then very quietly in a single sentence at the end of pages of this mention meekly that the whites also did it too.
While he might be more honest about history, he’s still a dishonest bourgeois historian.
Also, I find it funny how he completely absolves America’s role in all of this. This piece is written as if us Russians are all Asiatic hordes that want to destroy the West because they have shiny new technology that our Slavic brainpans are to primitive to create.
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he acknowledges that Lenin’s testament was a hoax
Can you elaborate on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXutg47BwEU
I gotchu bud
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I get what he’s trying to do, but “Russia as North Korea” is so deeply stupid.
North Korea is the way that it is, due to it being a nation forcibly chopped in half, at constant risk of invasion, and lacks access to important natural resources that only exist in the South. Russia doesn’t have those problems, being the largest country by land mass
The way every sentence drips in salt 🤤 it’s like a salt lick of bad takes.
Edit: probably my fav:
“On February 16, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service announced the sudden death of the opposition activist Alexei Navalny, aged 47, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle, from which he had continued to reach his millions of followers with instructions on how to protest Putin’s plebiscite.”
