This post expands on a comment I made a week ago at Isegoria’s, about the Russian system as reconstructed by Putin. I said that Putin has consolidated his control of Russia to such an extent that he need not bother anymore about political opponents. Last year, he permitted Navalny to run for mayor in Moscow because there was no danger of his winning. He can tolerate the existence of journalists such as Latynina, because their audience is very narrow and unimportant in the Russian scheme of things. No real opposition is permitted on air TV, and now cable TV operators got the idea and took the last opposition channel off their distribution lists. Putin didn’t even have to order it, it could have just happened because the cable operators don’t want any trouble.
All nice and dandy, so where’s the catch? Some NRs prefer to think there is no catch, that Putin is the best leader Russia had for a century, and that under his gentle rod Russia has been rising off its knees on a cushion of hydrocarbons. However, I think this is an illusion, and Sochi games provide a very nice illustration to this. Consider first that the Sochi Olympics were nothing if not a huge prestige project for Russia and (more importantly) for Putin personally. He wanted to show off the new, risen Russia, prosperous and respected by foreign nations, both to those foreign nations and to his own people. Obama’s and Merkel’s decision not to attend the opening ceremony must have hurt plenty. Anyway, there is no way Putin would have wanted to look bad in the eyes of the foreign media (his own media, of course, being no problem). Otherwise what would have been the point of rounding up stray dogs, hiring volunteers etc. Naturally, he could not yield on the gay question, because that would have been seen as weak, but he could count on the West swallowing this with minimal protest, like the ridiculous rainbow Google doodle. But my point is that he would have avoided any potential problems if he could.
And problems there were. Even ignoring the Olympic ring malfunction (which was covered up on Russian ‘live’ TV by splicing in a rehearsal video), what can any reasonable person make of the Sochi toilets? Of the not-quite-completed media and sports hotels? Of construction garbage hidden by untidy fences and fresh pavement already crumbling due to the patented post-Soviet technology of putting asphalt on raw ground? I ask, is this the Olympic Games of an effective ruler?
I mean, who and how can install a fucking squat toilet upside down?
Obviously, this is a big bucket of fail. Putin could not manage his cronies and contractors enough to ensure that Olympic roads and hotels are constructed on schedule and up to snuff. Putin has consolidated his control of Russia, but he did it by constructing (or rather reconstructing) a system of governance which is useless for anything except extraction of revenue. If it does anything productive or generally useful, it is to keep up appearances or by oversight. It turns all projects and initiatives into villas in UAE, Lamborghinis and Swiss bank accounts like a pig turns everything into turds.
This example shows that, contra Moldbug, mere financial incentives are not enough for effective governance. Putin and his people have financial incentives all right, they use them plenty; capital outflow is measured in tens of billions of dollars per year. Would the revenues be bigger if the country was well-governed? You bet they would. But he doesn’t do it. Something stands in the way. And that something is himself and his people, and in a more diffuse way, many of the Russians themselves — Putin and his people aren’t foreign or alien. In econo-speak, since the marginal utility of wealth slopes downward, at a certain point other considerations take over. And these considerations are, I think, fairly simple: the bummers know they cannot rule a well-governed Russia.
Candide III 
Yes, I’ve been planning for a while to write a post on the Joseon Dynasty. Long-lived, secure, monarchical, traditionalist Confucian; also a basketcase of poor agriculture, barter and slavery.
The idea that all the problem of democracy is a lack of security of the ruling class is bull.
Come to think of it, the same could be said about the Romanovs from the beginning of the XVII till the end of the XIX century. Not five centuries like Joseon, but two and a half centuries is still quite a lot.
Well they did build the biggest land empire ever so give them that.
I will, although it is easier to build an empire when your opponents are hunter-gatherers and herders with no firearms.
The squat might be flipped just to make clear that it isn’t connected yet. You could set it aside instead, but there may be a hazardously large depression or hole in the subfloor.
The fact remains, the point of having gotten it and prepped the floor is to connect it and use it.
AnomalyUK suggests Moscow has a hard time diversifying the economy without leaking power to West elites. Not sure how relevant that is here.
As for discolored water coming out of the tap, I’ve seen it more than a few times in a fairly affluent US town. Granted I was surprised. It’s been years though, probably because boomer retirees have made the place more affluent yet ; the electricity hardly ever goes down anymore either. More recently I saw an uncovered utility port in the street, right where you would cross – I was beyond surprised, never seen the like. Too small to fall into, but you could break a leg. It might be negligence but crackheads enjoying the commodities boom seems as likely. Then again I have seen some deep utility excavations, between street and sidewalk, which I thought were rather inadequately cordoned off.
Still looks like a stationary bandit to me. You didn’t think rule by stationary bandits was going to be all sunshine and rainbows did you? Of course Russia is still being looted, but the looting is down to a more sustainable level and the situation in Russia looks marginal, but survivable, with some improvement in output, although they are, of course, mostly stolen by ellites.
Contrast with the situation in America. Fun, but not sustainable or survivable. California, the jewel of the continent already lost, rest of the country to follow in a startlingly short amount of time.
You can learn to live with bandit rule and learn to navigate corruption. But once you’ve been exterminated, it’s over.
I do think that one-liner ‘explanations’ — it’s a stationary bandit! corruption! demotism! — won’t get us very far.
Improved output of what? Hydrocarbons? Gazprom is folding already because of shale gas. As for the level of looting, it may have gone down but the principal reason is that most of the lootable capital has been already looted. Now that only extraction rents remain to be looted, the situation has certainly become more sustainable. As for survivability, Russians are very good at survival and they are unlikely to be displaced from their North-East because no other men want to live there. They are dying out, though, back to pre-industrial densities. Please see my previous post.
I don’t mean to minimize American problems, though. I am just pointing out that looking up to Russia as a possible model is not reasonable.
Offtopic-
Inspired by our discussion about Cossacks, I’ve been reading Tihiy Don. It is fiction, of course, but acclaimed as a great work, and there is a lot of discussion about whether Sholohov wrote it or another Cossack killed by the Reds in the 1920s.
It pretty much jibes with Babel’s Konarmiya. The Cossacks come across as a sort of Northern Zulu nation. Every man is a warrior, stealing your neighbor’s wife or a bit of gang rape is all in good fun, or at least objectionable only to the degree that it might cause problems in the future. There is no real objective morality to speak of. Various voodoo-like superstitions are common.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I would guess that, just like hanging out with Pashtuns in Afghanistan is fun, hanging out with the Cossacks would have been great, if you could overlook the gangrapes and so on. But hardly anything to look up to.
And of course, they considered the Ukrainians total losers, peasants, not worthy of respect. If you recall, the Khmelnitsky rebellion, aside from wiping out the Polish upper and middle class and killing a vast amount of Jews, also brought in their Tatar allies, who would take a village, kill the infants and run the adults off into Crimea, to be sold as slaves. The Cossacks didn’t find this problematic, because, again, fuck the Ukrainians. Well, you don’t expect a warrior society to think of peasants as anything more than two-legged sheep. At the end of it, they brought in the Russians, a new master aristocracy to sell out to. The surviving peasants were no better off than they’d started. Contrast with Makhno, who led a guerilla army of peasant anarchists, and held his own for a long time. Can you imagine Makhno allying himself with slavers and allowing them to run off tens of thousands of peasants?
When reading Tihiy Don, you have to realize that it is not just a great literary work, but also very high-grade Soviet propaganda (whether or not it was intentionally written as such does not matter). If this were not the case, Tihiy Don would not have been (a) acclaimed by Gorki and other official pillars of Soviet literature, (b) printed, staged and filmed across the USSR throughout 1930’s, (c) awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941. Take any political and national stuff in it with an armored train of salt, or better ignore it altogether.
They actually did find this problematic. Their agreements often included conditions barring the Tartars from taking Ukrainian slaves (they got war prisoners). In some cases, Khmelnitsky even put his regiments along the Tartars’ homeward route to prevent this. However, he often had to close his eyes to their depredations, needing their cavalry and not having sufficient strength to either compel them to follow the agreements, or to make an enemy of them, while the Tartars could and did successfully play Poles and Ukrainians one against the other. In at least one case, the Poles permitted the Tartars to take slaves as far as the Vistula in exchange for the Tartars deserting Khmelnitsky.
Stupid question. You might as well wonder why Khmelnitsky did not use machine guns. First, there weren’t any slavers for Makhno to ally himself with any more, nor markets to run off slaves to. Second, Makhno’s army being composed of peasants (or ex-conscript soldiers who were also mainly peasants) he had to stand by the peasants or he would have found himself without an army. In contrast, in Khmelnitsy’s time, the very idea of freeing peasants was considered contrary to nature by all sides, and the Cossacks formed a separate estate, like Polish szlachta. Serfdom was not limited to Ukrainian peasants. Polish peasants were in much the same, and Russian peasants arguably in even worse position. It wasn’t a good time to be a peasant in Eastern Europe. Once the flames of revolution spread, the peasant issue became a constant thorn in Khmelnitsky’s and his successors’ side, but they were not equipped to take it out. Still, during Khmelnitsky’s and subsequent wars many peasants cossackified or became pospolyty (free peasants), although still more died under Polish, Russian, Tartar and Cossack swords, many times more than the Jewish casualties by the way. Whole tracts of land were depopulated by war, epidemics, hunger and flight to empty territories then nominally belonging to Russia.
>When reading Tihiy Don, you have to realize that it is not just a great literary work, but also very high-grade Soviet propaganda…Take any political and national stuff in it with an armored train of salt, or better ignore it altogether.
This particular detail was not really a political or national one-it was just a fact of life, a minor detail. The Cossack love for recreational gangrape and looting is portrayed in exactly the same way in Babel’s Konarmiya as it is in Tihiy Don and in the records of the Jewish community of Khmelnitsky’s time. Given this, I assume there was something to it.
>However, he often had to close his eyes to their depredations
Khmelnitsky was, in other words, for the Cossacks, not for the Ukrainians (to the degree that there were Ukrainians at the time,) first and foremost.
>First, there weren’t any slavers for Makhno to ally himself with any more, nor markets to run off slaves to.
Trudarmiya, slave legion, same difference. Had there been Tatar slavers, Makhno would have fought them.
>Second, Makhno’s army being composed of peasants (or ex-conscript soldiers who were also mainly peasants) he had to stand by the peasants or he would have found himself without an army.
Correct-he was an actual Ukrainian fighting for the actual Ukrainian people.
>In contrast, in Khmelnitsy’s time, the very idea of freeing peasants was considered contrary to nature by all sides, and the Cossacks formed a separate estate, like Polish szlachta.
What I said.Human livestock.
>Still, during Khmelnitsky’s and subsequent wars many peasants cossackified or became pospolyty (free peasants), although still more died under Polish, Russian, Tartar and Cossack swords, many times more than the Jewish casualties by the way.
There are two differences: nobody went after the peasants out of the desire to wipe them out, and there were a lot more peasants to start with.
>Whole tracts of land were depopulated by war, epidemics, hunger and flight to empty territories then nominally belonging to Russia.
Which is all the more reason that Khmelnitsky is a Ukrainian national hero. What else could be more heroic to a nation of peasants than the leader of a mercenary tribal conglomerate turning on his masters, fighting a bloody and protracted war of which those peasants bore the cost, then ultimately selling his conglomerate and the remaining peasants to a new master?
>A century later, in 1775, things had progressed so far that Catherine II could destroy their oldest and last military outpost on the lower Dnieper, and in 1783-5 liquidate the remnants of their administration, enserf Ukrainian peasants, dissolve the Cossack estate and absorb senior Cossack officers into Russian dvoryanstvo.
Right. When you have a bunch of Pashtun tribes working for you, who turned on their masters to come serve you, the responsible and smart thing to do is to co-opt their elites and try to domesticate the rest, so they don’t betray you and rebel. If, after 200 years of domestication efforts, the Cossacks had kept their taste for gangrape and looting and their contempt for the Ukrainians proper, you can imagine what they were like in Khmelnitsky’s day. Again-Pashtuns are cool, when they’re your friends, but it’s better to make sure they can’t change their mind.
Pfui. A war general’s first duty is to fight the war. If his options are (a) lose and be destroyed together with your people and (b) close your eyes to collateral damage and keep your side in the fight, the choice is obvious. The same goes for anybody holding supreme command — for example, a captain of a sinking ship who orders the bulkheads closed even though there are still people and sailors on the other side. Yes, this kind of dilemma is by no means easy and the person confronting it will never be the same again no matter what he chooses.
Listen, B, what do you want? You want me to agree that Jewish pogroms were bad? No problem, I agree. You want me to agree that a lot of horrible stuff happens during a war? Sure, it does. But if you want me to subscribe to some kind of Jewish social-democratic vision of history such as what shines out from your comments, go soak your head. If you and your kind love peasants so much, why farm taxes out of them and manage szlachta’s slave-labor plantations for them? Not enough work making shoes?
>A war general’s first duty is to fight the war.
He started the war because he didn’t feel his Polish patrons were giving him enough patronage. Of course, once you betray your patrons and kill/loot their middle class representatives, you’d better be willing to go all the way.
>Listen, B, what do you want?
To find the truth.
>But if you want me to subscribe to some kind of Jewish social-democratic vision of history such as what shines out from your comments, go soak your head.
“Social-democratic”? If you only knew…
>If you and your kind love peasants so much, why farm taxes out of them and manage szlachta’s slave-labor plantations for them? Not enough work making shoes?
What kind of neoreactionary are you? You don’t think slavery is a good thing sometimes? Obviously, when you have the smart managing the dumb, both are better off. Given that the peasants were serfs for the Poles and then serfs for the Russians and then kolkhozniks for the Soviets, it’s obvious that they were not huddled masses yearning to break free. Were they better off before Khmelnitsky’s rebellion? Well, given that the rebellion got a bunch of them killed and enslaved by Tatars, and at the end they became Russian serfs, the answer is obvious.
I don’t love peasants. I love the truth. And the truth is that Khmelnitsky deserves to be a Ukrainian folk hero even less than Lincoln and King deserve to be black folk heroes.
If you want to find the truth, as you say, you might want to find out why Khmelnitsky “started the war”, instead of spouting nonsense about insufficient patronage. You might want to find out when did Ukrainian peasants become Russian serfs (1783-1796). You might want to find out about peasant uprisings (e.g. 1787) instead of asserting it’s obvious that they were not huddled masses yearning to break free. Also you might want to find out exactly how Ukrainian peasants, and Russian peasants for that matter, became Soviet kolkhozniki.
I can’t know, but I see. You insist that Khmelnitsky is unfit to be a Ukrainian folk hero ostensibly on the grounds that he didn’t improve the lot of peasants, that they remained serfs. Then in the same breath you write that slavery is a good thing sometimes and that peasants are better off when smarter people are managing them. What ought I to think? My working hypothesis is that you are unwilling for Khmelnitsky to be considered anybody’s hero simply because he massacred Jews. If that is the case, you should get it off your chest and state it that way, instead of accusing me of insufficient neoreactionaryism.
He started the war because he was having a quarrel with a local Polish noble. Great reason to kill vast legions of people, impoverish your country and hand it over to the Russians.
>You might want to find out when did Ukrainian peasants become Russian serfs (1783-1796).
This thing says that serfdom never stopped: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CS%5CE%5CSerfdom.htm
>You might want to find out about peasant uprisings (e.g. 1787) instead of asserting it’s obvious that they were not huddled masses yearning to break free.
I’m supposed to be on the side of the peasants in a jacquerie? What next, cheering Adio, Africa?
>Also you might want to find out exactly how Ukrainian peasants, and Russian peasants for that matter, became Soviet kolkhozniki.
I know very well how they became kolkhozniki.
> Then in the same breath you write that slavery is a good thing sometimes and that peasants are better off when smarter people are managing them.
Well, yeah (assuming there’s a way to use intelligence/work ethic to gain freedom.)
>My working hypothesis is that you are unwilling for Khmelnitsky to be considered anybody’s hero simply because he massacred Jews.
Also this. But in general, I am against guys who rise up against their colonial overlords and despoil/massacre the middle class.
Well, I suppose having your estate raided and your infant son beaten to death counts as a neighborly quarrel, especially when the state insists that you swallow it.
The source you quote on serfdom undermines your statements here, for instance about huddled masses yearning for freedom: The peasantry participated in the war on a mass scale. It also says that The obligations imposed on the serfs rose steeply in cases where a tenant, not the landowner, managed the estate. It doesn’t say who the tenants/managers were, but we know who.
I notice you don’t quote my previous sentence:
Here’s you insisting on it, ten comments up, in toto:
Now you just say
So which is it? Also, I remind you of the three Jewish uprisings against their Roman colonial overlords, when it was Jews who were the peasants and Greeks and Phoenicians the market-dominant minorities. I will expect you to condemn Simon Bar Giora and Bar Kokhba.
>Well, I suppose having your estate raided and your infant son beaten to death counts as a neighborly quarrel, especially when the state insists that you swallow it.
Compare to the outcome of the war for some large fraction of the Ukrainian population
>Now you just say
I am against guys who rise up against their colonial overlords and despoil/massacre the middle class.
So which is it?
Well, it is true that Makhno was, by a reactionary standard, a villain. But look at the situation-the empire had collapsed into warring factions of bad and worse. Makhno was, from the perspective of the people, the least bad. He did miscalculate by allying himself with the Reds, and attacking the Whites’ supply lines, which in the long run led to the enslavement of the Ukrainians by the Reds. But I think that his behavior and goals were, overall, moral, and that it was a tragedy that he lost.
>Also, I remind you of the three Jewish uprisings against their Roman colonial overlords, when it was Jews who were the peasants and Greeks and Phoenicians the market-dominant minorities. I will expect you to condemn Simon Bar Giora and Bar Kokhba.
Good point. The Talmud does not look at these men as heroes. Bar Kokhba threw away his advantage through arrogance.Bar Giora is not mentioned, but according to Josephus, was extraordinarily cruel.
From a broader perspective, it is difficult to say whether the rebellions were right-the persecutions that triggered them were aimed at destroying Jewish national existence in the areas involved. A very hard question.
Aha, apparently it is a very hard question! Keep that in mind. Now Polish and Russian policy in Ukraine was also aimed at destroying Ukrainian national existence, the only partial exception being the period of korenizacija in 1920’s Soviet Ukraine. Do you question this?
Khmelnitsky’s experience with Polish nobles was very far from unique, to say nothing of rank-and-file Cossacks’ experience with Polish szlachta and peasants’ experience with their estate managers. Were this not the case, he would have found himself isolated, rather than the leader of a rebellion, an army and eventually a country, if a short-lived one. There were also many prior rebellions of different scale, every 15-20 years it seems.
> I’ve been reading Tihiy Don. It is fiction, of course, but acclaimed as a great work,
>The Cossacks come across as a sort of Northern Zulu nation. Every man is a warrior, stealing your neighbor’s wife or a bit of gang rape is all in good fun,
So you cite a work of fiction to prove that Cossacks are gang rapists.
How very politically correct.
Can every ethnic group be slandered on the basis of works of fiction, or just the ethnic groups that you want to slander?
Also, I forgot to mention in my reply above, mid-XVII century Cossacks have very little in common with early XX century ones. The old Cossacks were gradually broken down by Russia when it got the upper hand on them after they wasted their strength in the internecine struggles of the “Ruin” period. A century later, in 1775, things had progressed so far that Catherine II could destroy their oldest and last military outpost on the lower Dnieper, and in 1783-5 liquidate the remnants of their administration, enserf Ukrainian peasants, dissolve the Cossack estate and absorb senior Cossack officers into Russian dvoryanstvo.
Donny, you’re out of your element.
Tihiy Don was written by a Cossack, who was on the side of the White Army.
The relevant parts accord with Konarmiya, a collection of the stories of Isaac Babel, a Jew who was embedded with the Red Cossacks.
They also accord with the impressions the Jewish community had of the Cossack rebellion 250 years prior.
And with this unnamed Hungarian Prelate’s vignette: http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=WC19150106.2.43.3
And with the behavior of Von Pannwitz’s Cossacks in Yugoslavia and Northern Italy.
At some point, you have to say there is a pattern here.
That doesn’t answer the question.
What happened was that you slandered an ethnic group, on the basis of fiction.
That is the kind of thing that a pig-faced ethnopopulist would do.
That is the kind of thing you would object to if someone else did it to your ethnic group.
So the first thing to do is to notice that you’re practicing one law for yourself and trying to impose a very different law on people outside your group.
The second thing to notice is that you’re not willing to delve into the non-fiction resources available.
>Do you question this?
Yes, I do. What key elements of Ukrainian national existence did the Poles target? As for the Russians, Khmelnitsky delivered the Ukraine into their hands. Further, a Ukrainian peasant and a Cossack are two very different things, nationally speaking, though some of the former joined the latter. What key elements of Cossack life did the Poles target?
>Khmelnitsky’s experience with Polish nobles was very far from unique, to say nothing of rank-and-file Cossacks’ experience with Polish szlachta and peasants’ experience with their estate managers.
I am sure that an exploitative estate manager is much better than Tatar slavery or starving to death after your food has been requisitioned.
You would do well, lover of truth that you are, to learn some Ukrainian history before questioning this, or stating that a Ukrainian peasant and a Ukrainian Cossack are two very different things nationally (Russian Cossacks of XIX and XX centuries are, indeed, a very different thing, but that is beside the point). For one thing, half Ukrainian folk songs are about Cossacks or feature Cossacks.
The Poles targeted Cossack privileges and self-government, time and again reducing the number of registered Cossacks and degrading the rest into ‘pospolyti’ peasants, and attacked the Orthodox church. This repeatedly provoked Cossack rebellions.
What is your basis for saying that? Peasants on managed estates had to work on the estate, dawn to dusk, five or six days a week; they had no right to leave or resist. And on top of that they often had to pay an infidel (from their point of view) to use their parish church, insult added to injury. The estate managers would have done well to leave at least the churches alone, but Marx hadn’t yet written at that time his lines about the opium of the people and the sigh of the oppressed.
What a pity you hadn’t been on hand to advise during Jewish-Roman wars! (Selling war prisoners into slavery was standard Roman practice.) The two sides would surely have found some acceptable compromise. But I forget, it is a very hard question.
Anyhow, since your stated position is that Khmelnitsky is unfit to be anyone’s hero because he killed Jews, I see no point in further arguments on this topic. If you wish, you can continue in your own space.
Fiction written by a member of that ethnic group and corroborated by non-fiction about the behavior of that ethnic group in other times and places.
If you have alternate sources, please bring them.
Incidentally, we are not Universalists.
You linked to a newspaper article reporting the theft of a watch, not a gang rape, in 1915.
It would be a step up for you to imitate more competent slanderers, like Cracked.com. It still wouldn’t be history, but it would be more impressive than your attempts so far.
As for alternate sources, I’ll analyze CHERESHNEFF, but not in a comment thread that’s supposed to be about Sochi.
The newspaper piece shows that, as late as WW1, Cossacks were associated with looting, despite the best efforts of their Russian patrons to break them of the habit. Later and earlier sources, Cossack and Jewish, agree. For some reason, when it comes to black criminality, common sense and consensus are enough, but when it comes to Cossacks, I must dig into the Moscow State University’s archives and find the 1876 Cossack Studies Department’s handwritten dissertations on Gangrape and Looting Amongst The Cossacks, A Survey Conducted Along The Terek With Double Regression Analysis.
Your initial slander wasn’t an issue of theft – if it had been, I wouldn’t have disputed it.
Your initial slander was that Cossacks were gang rapists comparable to Zulus.
Now that you’re changing the story to “theft,” you can go back and apologize for the “gang rape” and “Zulu” comments.
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Slitty Eye has something to say about it:
Darwin’s balls! I’m going to be even busier this weekend.
Good Post. There’s far too much uncritical approval of Putin amongst Neoreactionaries. On the other hand, with leaders like Obama, Cameron and Merkel, it’s understandable why many see him so positively.
Thank you!