November 4th, 2025

We began my socialism class with the Kursk submarine disaster, which my professor stated was an event that may have contributed to what Putin would become.

This nuclear submarine was built between 1990-94, and we cannot blame Putin for what happened because it was built during the collapse. It was not well maintained and was very rusty. The crew was not prepared for the training exercise in August 2000. One of the torpedoes that was on board caught fire and exploded and a majority of the crew died. 23 of the survivors were not saved. The government tried to keep it a secret at first due to the embarrassment. Ten days after, Putin met with the families in their hometown, declaring a period of mourning despite the sub not being recovered.

My professor then read Putin’s talk. There are people dead, not all of them, and there are always tragedies at sea. A lady questioned him why foreign aid was not accepted, not her asked if they have divers and Putin responded that they did not have shit in this country. He was unprepared for this confrontation and would never go into an unknown meeting ever again. Berizovsky criticized Putin, and Putin took it as an affront to the army and navy. Putin would demand or shares in the TV company but Berizovsky said no, so Putin said “bye.” Berizovsky would leave Russia and his TV Station would be seized. The two oligarchs who vouched for “quiet and modest” Putin are now gone.

We spent the last half of the class watching the cult classic *Brother.*she told us to pay attention to the camera movements. The music in the film came from the most popular rock group at the time and the lead singer stars in the film as himself. The main hero is very questionable, she told u to ask ourselves why people in the 2000s love him so much? St. Petersburg is the setting and Peter the Great is juxtaposed against the regular main guy. The influence of this film on history is apparently enormous. As we were watching she told us to take note that when the main guy, Danila, is questioned about his military service he never specifies where he served. His mother believes that Danila’s older brother, a successful man, will be able to help but she doesn’t know that her eldest son is a gangster.

I got curious about the main actor so I looked him up, only to find out he died incredibly young. Turns out he passed due to a horrible ice/mud accident while filming a movie. He was only 30 years old.

I wrote doesn’t this quote from the movie in my notes: “What’s good for a Russia is death for a German.” It just stood out to me, does anyone know what it means?

Anyway, that was my class. Next one will have us watch the rest of the movie and then do a discussion about it. It will be quite short (it’s only two pages of notes).