Shocked Pikachu face
Vladimir Putin happened to turn 71 last October 7, the day Hamas assaulted Israel. The Russian president took the rampage as a birthday present
This is the first sentence. So deeply unserious i don’t even wat to read the rest.
the day Hamas assaulted Israel
someday soon a liberal will try this sort of line on me in person and I will unleash a torrent of invective about the righteousness of people who grew up in a literal concentration camp resisting Israeli genocide that is so spicy their face will melt off
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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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
