Love these. The Dictator Book Club is one of my favorite things on the blog.
>Wait, hadn’t Putin already resigned from the KGB? [...] resigning from the KGB is futile; once you’re a part of the network, they will always feel free to call on you when needed.
There's a Hollywood producer called Scott Rudin who's notorious for firing people. He fires so many people that sometimes he forgets who he's fired. Often this means the "firing" isn't serious—you can chill at a Starbucks for a few hours, come back to work, and he'll have forgotten he was mad at you.
One guy got "fired" four times in a row. Sadly, the last one stuck.
I used to work for a guy who owned two restaurants and employed a drunk and belligerent cook. Every time they were in the same place at the same time they had a big fight, and the owner would fire the cook on the spot. And immediately order him to report to his new job in the *other* restaurant.
As of this writing, Wiktionary prefers 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘺𝘢𝘯, and calls 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘯 "inexact."
(Fuck, italicizing text shouldn't be this hard.)
EDIT: based on the replies, it looks like "Chechen" might be the race of people traditionally inhabiting the region, and "Chechnyan" includes other people who've moved there more recently.
(all of my knowledge here comes from (a) consulting wikipedia a minute ago and (b) a rudimentary ability to read Cyrillic script)
It looks like the Russian term is indeed (inflected forms of) "Chechen". The Russian term Chechnya is derived from this term; it appears to be pretty transparent to an Anglophone if conceived of as Chechen-ia. The Russian name of the governmental unit is Chechenskaya Respublika. I vaguely believe that the -skaya suffix denotes something like "home of [the Chechens, in this case]"; I remember a German board game that went to some effort to label countries by their own native terms and called Russia "Rossiskaya". (Which isn't actually the Russian term for the country, but is presumably a particular way to refer to it.)
By contrast, the Chechen term for Chechen-related things does not appear to be related to the Russian root "chechen".
So a preference for "Chechnyan" over "Chechen" would have to reflect the modern American bias toward seeing people as extensions of the government that rules them rather than the other way around. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine most often visible in the American urge to refer to "Mongolians" rather than "Mongols".
I cannot blame the German board game printers too much: single-world reference to Russia in Russian is transliterated as «Rossiya», but at least since XVIII century there is always some longer name with «Rossiyskaya» («of Rossiya») being the intersection between Empire of Russia, Republic of Russia, Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of Russia, and Federation of Russia.
"I vaguely believe that the -skaya suffix denotes something like 'home of [the Chechens, in this case]'"
It's just a version of a relational ('the kind of thing it is') adjective suffix, in feminine form to agree with the noun of 'republic', which has inherited its Latin femininity in all gendered languages.
You raise an interesting point with the comment about Mongolians, and now I'm trying to think about when we do this and when we don't. Obviously we don't say, e.g., Irelanders to refer to non-diaspora Irish, but splitting, say, the Koreans by polity does make sense. And wouldn't Mongols be more of a cluster, like Slavs or Arabs?
The Irish are actually an example of the unusual pattern, a people being named after the place (Eire) where they live.
> wouldn't Mongols be more of a cluster, like Slavs or Arabs?
They are an ethnic group, like Slavs and somewhat unlike Arabs. (Arabic ethnicity is prestigious and is therefore routinely claimed by people who don't have it.)
It is generally more useful to think in terms of ethnic groups than to think in terms of political boundaries; you'd want to distinguish between Mongols and Russians in Mongolia, not to elide the difference by calling them both Mongolians. (Not that the Russians are particularly numerous - Wikipedia has the demographics of Mongolia at ~96% Mongols and ~4% Turks.) Similarly, you'd want to call the Mongols of Inner Mongolia Mongols rather than calling them Chinese.
You almost never want to talk about people who have citizenship in Mongolia. One of the examples I've collected of this confusion was someone recognizing Genghis Khan as a "ruler of the Mongolians".
"It is generally more useful to think in terms of ethnic groups than to think in terms of political boundaries; you'd want to distinguish between Mongols and Russians in Mongolia, not to elide the difference by calling them both Mongolians."
I don't think that's the case - that it's generally more useful. Countries, whether we like it or not, are sovereign actors in political and economic spheres (both much discussed) in the way that ethnic groups are not.
For example, we routinely call the Buryats - ethnic Mongols who happen to be somewhat overrepresented as military volunteers in the Russian army - Russians, in the context of the actions of the Russian armed forces. And it would be weirdly pedantic not to. Nationhood, in its more successful forms, transcends ethnicity.
Does it? I would say that nationhood in its more successful forms assimilates people into one ethnicity. As long as there's more than one, the nation hasn't yet succeeded.
What do you think would happen if the Buryat Mongols were 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 overrepresented in the Russian army? What if they were 80% of the army?
Your "we" might be far too narrow. Race realists are usually careful to distinguish subject populations and their imperial rulers. Even YOU probably think of, for example, the Kurds as an meaningful faction.
The classic example is Malays/Malayans/Malaysians - Malays are members of an ethnic group, Malayans are inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula (which is split between Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar), and Malaysians are citizens of the country Malaysia (about half of which lies on the Malay Peninsula). So one can be a Malay Malayan Malaysian, a non-Malay Malayan Malaysian, a Malay non-Malayan Malaysian, a Malay Malayan non-Malaysian, or any other combination.
I remember the insult/slur "mongoloid" from when I was growing up (which I seem to remember falling out of fashion, so to speak, even then in the 90's), so I usually push for "Mongolian" so that there is little chance of confusion.
You're probably right that the tendency to conflate the government and the people it rules is part of it, but it might also be a (subconscious) tendency against ethnonationalism in favor of "civic nationalism": most traditional demonyms (on that scale; obviously not for cities and the like) have strong blood-and-soil vibes.
As a linguist friend of mine used to joke, the Cyrillic alphabet is the Greek alphabet with the serial numbers filed off :-) Seriously, though, anyone with a STEM background can probably already read most of the Cyrillic alphabet by recognising variants of the Greek characters they know from maths and science. I once tested this with my girlfriend, who studied biology to graduate level but never took Greek: she got most of the uppercase Cyrillic letters and a decent fraction of the lowercase ones. I think a mathematician or physicist would do even better.
Referring to "Mongolians" rather than "Mongols" may be in part because Down's Syndrome used to be called "Mongolism" (due to the eyes) and people suffering from it were called "Mongoloids" or "Mongols". So calling "Mongolians" "Mongols" could be seen as derogatory/a slur because of referencing the disorder.
More likely IMO is that in the current-day USA, the term Mongols is often assumed to refer either to the 13th century Asian conquerors or the contemporary outlaw motorcycle club. So in a sense that word is "taken," and thus a substitute is used when a speaker or writer wants to avoid confusion.
I think "Chechen" vs "Chechnyan" and "Mongol" vs "Mongolian" actually marks a clear distinction, between the people of a given ethnic group, and the permanent residents or citizens of a particular republic. It so happens that in these two cases there's a large amount of overlap between the two, but the distinction is adhered to fairly well for some ethnic groups and nations/republics that have more divergence, like "Arabs" vs "Omanis/Iraqis/Saudis/Jordanians/etc" and "Bengalis/Tamilians/Punjabis/etc." vs "Indians".
It's a bit awkward that there is no distinct pair of words for the ethnicity and nationality associated with certain major nations, like French, German, Japanese, etc.
> It's a bit awkward that there is no distinct pair of words for the ethnicity and nationality associated with certain major nations, like French, German, Japanese, etc.
I get the impression that this is a deliberate political choice.
I doubt anything about this is deliberate. Most things about words aren’t. But I think the unifying feature is that in the cases where there is a different word for the ethnicity and the nationality, the nation is named after the ethnicity, and the nationality is then formed by taking the name of the nation and adding a standardized suffix. The cases where there is no difference are the ones where the ethnicity is named after the nation.
I mean, for America we sort of had the civic ideal for a while that anyone who came here was an American, period. Imperfect, to be sure, but possibly best exemplified in Reagan-era videos of East European immigrants talking in thick accents about how much they love being American. Now we seen to have moved on to some form of proto-Balkanization.
Whereas in France I think they had some idea that being French was a linguistic and cultural state that could be gained, and a lot of faith in the superiority and desirability of said language and culture. That may have changed, though.
Russian distinguishes between russkij 'ethnic Russian (adj)' and rossiskij 'of Russian citizenship (adj)'. For example, the RSFSR was Rossiskaja, not Russkaja, Sovetskaja Federativnaja Sotsialisticheskaja Respublika. Similarly, among Mongolists, it is standard terminology to use "Mongol" for the ethnicity and "Mongolian" for the citizen: Most Mongolians are Mongols, but only around a third of Mongols are Mongolians.
>since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns.
This seems like an un-Scott-like aside, but an apropos one given the paragraph that it's in.
>Could it happen here?
I think this is also a question of the FBI currently finds to be justifiable. They definitely find it justifiable to infiltrate and provoke domestic terrorist groups on a small scale - e.g. the Whitmer plot - so there's hardly a norm against it. Whether that translates into something that can be leveraged by any particular executive, I don't know.
> They definitely find it justifiable to infiltrate and provoke domestic terrorist groups on a small scale - e.g. the Whitmer plot - so there's hardly a norm against it
That seems like a very different thing. The FBI has been notorious in the post-9/11 era (and probably before but I only remember reading about since 9/11) of essentially drumming up terrorism charges by convincing yahoos to "plot" non-sensical terrorist plots. But it seems like the intention is not to actually have them carried out but to make headlines by "foiling" the plot.
Yes, but doesn't that still seem like a major problem? For one thing they are actually helping radicalize people on the edge of radicalization. Taking people from not-planning-terrorism to planning-terrorism. For another thing, they are doing this to political enemies of the FBI's leaders (and presumably Democrat politicians). They go find people who like to shoot guns on the weekends and convince them to break the law so that they can arrest them. I read a very long account of the Whitmer plot, and it sounds very unlikely that *any* of the people involved would have done something even close to what they were accused of, had the FBI not worked so hard to get them there.
Oh yeah, it absolutely seems like a major problem. I'm just saying that there is a big difference between basically entrapping hapless idiots into committing crimes in order to impress your superiors and actually orchestrating serious crimes and terrorist acts. The former is still inexcusable though.
If the people they were targeting were more competent, it could have led to an actual attack on a sitting governor.
That they were in fact incompetent at doing what the government spent years trying to get them to do is part of my point. These weren't even people who could have potentially pulled it off - making it pointless to entrap them in the first place - but had they been competent then this could easily have resulted in something very bad happening because of the FBI.
I think there was a DEA informant who was involved in the big terrorist attack in Mumbai a few years ago, but IIRC there wasn't any DEA involvement other than embarrassment about the shit their guy had gotten mixed up in overseas.
IIRC Ruby Ridge came about because an undercover ATF agent asked Randy Weaver to saw off a shotgun half an inch below the legal limit, with the idea of blackmailing him into becoming an informant.
First, and this seems the obvious one, is Putin actually running the show or is he more of a front-man for the established FSB-KGB network? Because this review makes him sound like a non-entity and most of the actual power lies in the KGB-FSB network. Perhaps to clarify, if Putin just dropped dead from a natural heart attack tomorrow, would another Russian leader just easily take his place?
Second, was there any discussion of economic performance? I'm no Russian expert but a brief glance at their GDP numbers indicate that the first 10 years of his reign were...really good, economically speaking. (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?locations=RU)
First question was valid until the Ukraine war, but I think by now it's pretty obvious that he is actually running the show - it seems fairly clear that the war is his personal project and he was able to strongman everyone who matters into starting (and continuing) it.
The FSB failed monumentally with its operations in ukraine. Putin had been feeding them billions of dollars to distribute amongst Ukrainian officials as bribe money to lay the groundwork for the invasion. The FSB stole that money instead. After the invasion failed so hard, and it became clear what had happened, Putin imprisoned and likely tortured several of the FSB's higher ups and transferred authority for covert operations to the GRU.
Do you have a source on this? What I heard, from admittedly Ukrainian Media which is basically propaganda, was that Russia paid bribes but the Ukrainians heroically didn't actually rebel, and instead kept the money and their loyalty to Ukraine. Your story sounds more plausible, but this is the first I heard if it
I understand that the Russians were able to expand relatively rapidly from the Crimea because of bribes. Given the limited connection Crimea had to the rest of Ukraine, I would have expected the Russian forces to be held up for a few days.
Ukraine had a (largely correct, it turned out) defense strategy of not stopping them and bleeding them out as they overstretched deep into its territory. This alone is sufficient to explain the rapid expansion.
(This is not to deny they had the ground prepared, and the bribed locals may have helped them hold the territory they have held, which, notably, is just a fraction of what they originally invaded.)
I vaguely recall the FSB/GRU restructuring at that time. Nobody officially gave the reason for it, but it stood out to me because that sounded like an odd thing to do, especially at that time.
1) after the invasion, Putin pulled the FSB's funding quite dramatically, and reallocated that funding to the other security agencies Russia has
2) Bortnikov disappeared from public for several months following the invasion. Rumors began circulating on russian imageboard-analogs that he was being held and perhaps tortured for his incredible failure and deception. After the rumors began reaching the general population, he reappeared in public and refused to answer questions.
I don't think my theory is unreasonable given those two facts. The culture of corruption and grift in Russia is so strong, especially amongst the top, that it is beyond belief that that money didn't go into the fsb's pockets for their own personal enrichment. That is what happens to every other state resource.
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tweeted: “Strong leaders defeat their opponents in free and fair elections. Weak leaders arrest their opponents.”
> Hard to tell if he’s referring to Putin or Biden.
I hope you are joking. But in any case, the joke is a deeply misleading one: Biden cannot order the arrest of anyone: The decision about indictment is taken by a jury under judges who are independent from executive branch. I guess Biden could pressure prosecutors to prosecute (or not to prosecute), but this is not the same thing. And yes, I understand why people think that it is somewhat wrong to prosecute your political enemy, and why people may think it interferes with people's choices, especially seeing what happens in non-democratic countries, but that's one of the reasons why in liberal democratic countries we have independent judiciary and many other checks and balances, such as independent journalism which can make it politically costly, if not outright politically suicidal to prosecute without justification (yes I know, "independent journalists" from liberal press live in a liberal bubble and sympathize with Biden and hate Trump, but as discussed elsewhere on this very blog even they have limits, and there are many others on the right which would not allow such cases to be buried). And consider the alternative: do we really want to send the signal that politicians, especially popular ones, are effectively above the law?
Grand juries in the 'States are notorious for being effectively pawns of the prosecutor ("by and large, district attorneys can get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich"), and the prosecutor *is* a member of the executive branch.
Moreover, law creep means that in general, if a prosecutor wants you in trouble, there's a law for that. Police and prosecutor discretion is, in the modern West, probably the biggest factor in who does and does not go to jail, which means that if they're biased you have a Problem.
Perhaps you are right in case of poor people, those nobody cares about, but the American law practice and theory seems to be unusually lenient towards the rich and famous, those who can afford a good lawyer, so I doubt what you said applies to Trump prosecutions.
Unusually lenient where skilful lawyer can make a difference using loopholes in the law or procedural complexities is not the same as being above the law when the rules are clear. But yes, I had chosen my wording rather poorly
I suppose your comment might remain technically correct though; I didn't line up the timeline to check if he was the richest man on the planet when he finally succeeded.
Ok, I did read about the Grand jury, and how the defense is not present, so it does seem to be deeply flawed (if not quite fictional) form of independent control. But there seems to exist multiple possibilities of challenging indictment by good defense lawyers, so I believe my point still stands at least partially, though I did learned something new about American law, and was rather disappointed about it.
My rule of thumb is to sympathize with the outrage of someone discovering systemic inadequacies, and to promptly ignore any of their policy prescriptions... the first time. There's a lot that's disappointing with the system, but where it's more or less at an equilibrium there's usually a reason why; politics can be cyclic, but institutions suffer for it.
"It's outrageous that this should happen to My Guy and Something Must Be Done, but after that business can return to normal" isn't something I like to accuse people of on a personal level, but it's a typical human reflex and one must have a strategy that plays around it.
This - indictment and the grand jury is not a contest between the defense and the prosecution, it's between the prosecution and opportunity cost. Optimal defense strategy at that stage is to be a combination of uninteresting and conspicuously well-prepared (and thus slow and expensive to prosecute). There's no particular reason to wait until proceedings actually start to pursue that strategy though, so when it works it takes the form of prosecutors declining to start rather than failing at the institutional hurdle.
A 'target letter' is an invitation sent by the prosecutor to the defense to make an appearance before the grand jury. It's pretty much always a bad idea to take them up on it, even more so than the reason why it's a bad idea to waive your Fifth Amendment rights and take the stand during the trial itself.
There is no real "defense strategy" in the sense of a court case unless you're so unwise as to show up as the result of a target letter. If you don't get one, you likely won't even know there's a grand jury considering charges against you.
"Defense strategy" is more in the sense of "Si vis pacem, para bellum". I.e. be a hard target. But that only goes a little way if you are setting out to challenge the powers that be.
I'm wondering why anyone would ever actually appear before a grand jury? It's not like you can present anything. I think at most you are under the (most likely deluded) impression that the prosecutor will mess up enough during the presentation to make an own goal, and he's much less likely to do so if you're not there looking at him. But the control the prosecutor has over the presentation, and the pace they're made at (from what I've heard 8-10 cases a day is not unusual) means this is hoping for a miracle.
It's just because of the name. "Grand Jury" sounds like "Supreme Court", so people think it's more important than a normal jury, when it's really a test that the prosecution can spell their names correctly.
Grand juries were rather more important back when private prosecution was the norm in Anglo-American law, and public prosecutors were an adjunct to the system. I suspect that if the grand jury requirement hadn't been specifically enshrined in the federal Constitution, they'd have been abolished in the US the same way they were in the rest of the countries using English law.
I think the relevant comparison in this case is to see how, among all the potentially politicized prosecutions being brought by Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed prosecutors (or Republican-elected and Democratic-elected attorneys general in the jurisdictions where they are elected), there are certain people that keep getting hit, like Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Bob Menendez, and plenty of others that don't, like Joe Biden and Ted Cruz. Even if prosecutors have some room to maneuver, they have to work with what they've got in terms of shady behavior on the part of the target.
Just look at the allegations.[1] If they allegations are true, it's not simply a matter of "a prosecutor wants Trump in trouble". Trump knew what he was doing. (If, on the other hand, you think the US legal system is so corrupt as to produce unsubstantiated allegations, a prosecutor wouldn't need "a law for that", he'd just pick false allegations that happen to be illegal.)
(Russia seems to have taken both paths as of late, by the way―passing a series of new laws and also fraudulently charging various innocent people under both old and new laws)
Considering that tweet was sent in August 1, 2023, I think McFaul's intention was to call Biden weak by comparing him to Putin, who he also considers weak. Not saying I agree with him, but I don't think McFaul is joking
This is no laughing matter. Governments should only use their police powers to charge and prosecute people credibly suspected of committing crimes when those people are members of the permanently criminal underclass. These powers should never be used against tough-talking guys who "tell it like it is" and would probably be fun to have a beer with.
Hillary Clinton once related an interesting story from Putin (I can't remember where but it's on video somewhere). They were sitting next to each other at some international event and she brought up the topic of the siege of Leningrad. According to her, his eyes lit up and he told her about how they had to pile up the bodies (not enough manpower/time to bury everyone I guess?).
One day his grandfather was walking home past one of the piles of bodies and he recognised a leg sticking out of the pile as belonging to his wife. Frantically he began trying to pull her out. A guard tried to stop him (because they didn't want disease to spread), but he persisted. And he got her out - and she was still alive. And he took her back home and nursed her back to health from the brink of death.
Clinton in her telling went on to relate this story to Putin's supposed self image. She thinks he sees himself as filling a role akin to that of his grandfather - pulling the near-dead Russia from the brink of death and returning it to strength. I don't know to what extent her analysis is true, but it was interesting to get that sort of view from one major world figure of another.
Wow, little details like that help drive home how different Russia is in some ways. Especially because most of their stories are like that (fantastically dark), back to the Tsars, Mongols, and beyond.
the Leningrad siege is super-mythologised in Soviet narrative, but it doesn't hold the independent check. First of all, it wasn't siege - there was never complete encirclement of the city. Second, the communist already had a history of self-inflicted famines prior to WW2, look Holodomor etc. It was a deliberate suppression of provision to possibly soon-to-be-won city and population to impose as much damage on the enemy as possible. Once the changes of Leningrad fall slimmed, the provision stabilized. All blame was put on Nazis, as always.
Soviet narrative is strictly about «blockade of Leningrad» (never a siege or encirclement), and USSR did lose control of all the previously used surface transport lines. Anything on Ladoga got built only after losing other options.
There were some airlift operations, but not enough to supply a city (that's before taking into account the capacity subtracted for deliveries of food for the top officials, which food would count as luxurious even in the USSR cities safely far away from the frontlines…)
There is enough truth in this story, but also too much distortion.
Here's what the real story is, and I hope you can see the difference:
Barely recovering from his wound, the father of the prime minister in besieged Leningrad managed at the last moment to save his wife, whom the orderlies, who carried the corpses out of the house, considered dead.
“The corpses and mother are being taken out of the house, from the entrance. My father approached her, and it turned out that she was alive. To this he was told: she will not survive, she will pass along the way,” Putin said. According to him, the father, using crutches, forced the orderlies to bring his wife back into the house.
Note that this is about people dying from malnutrition.
I'll note that the Russian Orthodox Church had a long history of being a subordinate branch of the Russian state (going back to Peter the Great's "reforms"), and the level of KGB infiltration of the church from its Soviet rehabilitation to the fall of the USSR that it's not particularly certain that one can draw a solid line between the post-Soviet church hierarchy and the network of ex-KGB agents.
Inheriting the Byzantine precedents certainly inclined things to go the way they eventually went, but between the Time of Troubles and Peter the Great (or, to put it another way, from the time of Patriarch Filaret to Patriarch Adrian), there was a substantial degree of independence.
There was a long struggle of church vs state, mostly over who appointed the head of the church. Every time a strong secular ruler came up, he tried to make it himself as the appointer.
The various Orthodox churches didn't have that. Since they didn't acknowledge the primacy of Rome, the appointer of new bishops etc. was either the local ruler or the people of the church (probably the earliest mechanism, but likely fell into disuse when the church became rich).
This was important not only because the bishops controlled a lot of money etc. but also because they had the ability to declare you excommunicated, i.e. not a church member.
Autocephaly and Caesaropapism. Up to about the early Middle Ages, the one outside authority to whom competing and clashing factions within the church(es) could appeal was the Emperor. Those who did not recognise the authority of the Bishop of Rome to make final decisions on doctrine naturally preferred the Emperor as the final voice.
With autocephaly, each national church was its own authority - within a union of churches - but subordinate, in practice, to the ruler of the country (be that the Emperor or, after the Eastern Empire finally collapsed itself, the new Emperor of Russia or wherever). The Greek Orthodox in Turkey found, and find, themselves under the authority of the secular Muslim state with varying degrees of freedom (e.g. there is a *lot* of crackdown on what they can do that is totally contrary to American norms of freedom of religion and the much-quoted 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion'):
"The relationship between Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire was frequently bitter, due in no small part to the privilege given to Islam. In the secular Republic of Turkey, tensions are still constant. Turkey requires by law that the Patriarch be a Turkish citizen by birth, which all Patriarchs have been since 1923—all ethnic Greeks from the minuscule and steadily decreasing Greek minority of Turkey, which is causing a shortage of priests and consequently potential candidates for the post of Ecumenical Patriarch. The state's expropriation of church property and the closing of the Orthodox Theological School of Halki are also difficulties faced by the Patriarchate."
That's a view that the Turkish authorities are hoping to/trying to strangle the church by neglect; if the law is that the Patriarch has to be Turkish, and there are no more Greeks as clergy, and all the Turkish citizens are Muslim or secular, then there will be no more Patriarch and eventually no more church.
>That's a view that the Turkish authorities are hoping to/trying to strangle the church by neglect
Isn’t that more like the church just dying by itself? If there were no more Christians (Greek or otherwise) in Turkey to have any clergy that are born there, even if the authorities allowed non-Turkish people to become Patriarch, in what sense would that Patriarchate still exist?
If I emigrate to Irak and build a temple to An, Enki, and Enlil, does that mean that the Sumerian religion is still alive?
Re: 3., only an extremely ham-fisted ruler would give direct orders to have his or her enemies physically assaulted. The standard way to get that done is to let your displeasure be known, and some enterprising member of the rank-and-file will do what you want.
Exactly. Scott even references the phenomenon in this review! "Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify [election results]; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own." So why dismiss the possibility so blithely in an American context?
Probably because this requires the existence, in actual reality, of an rank-and-file whose members would go around roughing people up because their leader expressed displeasure with them. In the case of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Chuck Schumer, this wouldn't even be allowed into the room where the laugh test is being administered.
Or did you mean the broader American context, wherein people with actual devoted supporters (as distinct from the ability to get people to vote for you with a sigh because at least you probably won't ban abortion or be excessively mean to immigrants) occasionally become President?
The one really good thing still going on with the US system is that no matter how corrupt it may appear, nobody is loyal enough to get caught holding the bag. So long as general rule of law is at least fairly strong, the people who might actually rough somebody up are likely to get prosecuted and therefore unlikely to go through with it.
As long as leaders feel the need to disavow those accused of crimes, that should hold. When leaders can ignore crimes committed by those close to them, or especially if they can flaunt those crimes (perhaps by promoting those accused, or publicly involving them in their plans), then that's a bad place to be.
What the hell are you talking about? The FBI misled the FISA court on multiple occasions in order to surveil a Presidential candidate and only one guy got punished, which turned out to be such a light punishment that it couldn't even be classified as a slap on the wrist.
this is a romanticized version, but KGB is bureaucracy, not a mafia family. Their methods and procedures formalized since Sudoplatov killings (and probably earlier) and till the recent Navalny assassination attempt. It's a coordinated team activity with multiple actors and failures, where nobody wants to assume responsibility for something they didn't do. So yes, until there's a disclosure threat there is a document chain for every execution. Plus, the execution is only one point in a huge list of other activities - threatening, blackmailing, public badmouthing, vigilance, prosecution etc. This has to be formally managed on different levels.
On Navalny, am I taking crazy pills or is it odd that the KGB has tried to assassinate multiple people with the same chemical weapon that is considered one of the deadliest ever created, yet they constantly fail? It's almost as odd as Assad doing the one thing that will do the most harm to his reputation internationally every time he got the upper hand in the Civil War.
"But also, the man who came closest to overthrowing Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was Putin’s former cook! Again, this is pretty weird, but I don’t know what the alternative is. Some kind of conspiracy of Russian cooks?"
If you're a dictator, I suppose your personal cook is someone you trust more than most. Certainly if I were a dictator I'd look carefully at the person who made my meals.
It's also a position that doesn't often have a lot of explicit power or publicity.
It's a bit like coups are traditionally led by a colonel rather than a general - far enough from power to not be looked at closely, but close enough to have a lot of people loyal to you.
In the case of Prigozhin at least, he owned some companies that got a bunch of lucrative catering contracts from the Russian government. The "Putin's Chef" nickname is a bit of derisive hyperbole on this: he was never literally Putin's chef.
Catering contracts seem like a relatively easy route for disguising sinecures and graft as legitimate use of public money. Since taste is subjective and the stakes are relatively low, it's easy to cook (so to speak) the selection process. And being a major investor in a catering company that's getting generous contracts handed to it doesn't necessarily require any particular expertise if you can hire a competent business manager.
Complicating this hypothesis, however, Prigozhin seems to have an entire early career as a restauranteur before he started getting contacts from Putin.
When Putin as a president brought visiting heads of states to Prigozhin's restaurants in 2000s, Prigozhin would personally bring the food and serve the guests. There are some published photos with him doing that. Presumably this is the public side of him personally supervising the execution of these special orders (under joint supervision of two state bodyguard services).
Calling him a waiter would be another option, but chef is shorter (in Russian too).
> Masha Gessen, a rare surviving Russian investigative journalist
Masha is an American who was born in Russia and emigrated here in her teens. Her experiences in Russia are mostly as a small child or as an American working in Russia. This explains a good deal of her survival.
> Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine.
Putin's childhood is not that mysterious if you assume Putin is mostly reliable about it. Admittedly, not a great assumption. But also no one's caught him in obvious lies as far as I know. Very little about his narrative of his own childhood is heroic. The closest thing he tells of great tales of derring do is that his father apparently saved his mother. She was so malnourished a corpse collector had thrown her on the cart. His father tried to take her back and, when the corpse collector tried to stop him, his father pulled a gun. He brought her back to an apartment where when he was not fighting, he would bring her food and medicine and fuel to nurse her back to health. This story is unverified but the relevant people were definitely in the right place and the right place was under siege by the Nazis.
Likewise, he agrees that he was quarrelsome as a child (backed up by school discipline records) though he claims he rarely started fights. Instead he portrays himself as bullied for being physically small. And that he tended to ambush or rapidly attack bigger boys to overwhelm them and win. You can see a political message there but it's also not on its face unbelievable as Putin was, and is, not that physically imposing.
> Life as a KGB officer was disappointing. Gessen describes it as sitting in a Leningrad office, cutting articles out of newspapers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them.
While they too have their reliability issues, most people report that Putin in the KGB was regarded as competent but not extroardinarily so. Being assigned to Leningrad then East Germany is not a stellar career path. A better agent would have been assigned to West Germany or Berlin.
> Also, it seems unclear whether you can disband the KGB. Around this point in the story, the Soviet generals launched their coup, Yeltsin defeated them, and the KGB was replaced by various other security agencies more congenial to a newly democratic state.
The Soviet Union post-Brezhnev was made up of a series of power blocks in negotiation with each other. Brenzhev was about as democratic as a Soviet leader could have realistically been (which is not very). The Soviet Union had always had a conflict between the security services and the military going all the way back to Stalin's time. Generally in direct confrontation the military won as with Khruschev or in 1991. But the security services could gain dominance when the political elite sided with them.
The security services, being Communist security services, had very little obligation to maintain more than the appearance of law and order. Their primary goal was protecting the party and waging the spy war abroad. As you can imagine, this involved all kinds of shady dealings and ties and international connections. When the Soviet state collapsed they attempted to preserve it (1991 again). When they failed they... just kind of kept all those contacts with criminals, foreign entities, and untraceable bank accounts for bribes or whatever. They never really accepted the fall of the Soviet Union and resented they had lost the confrontation in the early 1990s. But there was also money to be made in the new Russia and they set about making it through crime and through oligarchs.
Putin was in many senses a post-Soviet reaction by this KGB-oligarch-criminal nexus. He had no interest in literally returning to communism. But once these surviving KGB networks (criminal, intelligence, business) saw he had a chance of getting the presidency they all backed him to the hilt. And it worked. Putin got into power, the security services returned to prominence. Putin didn't do anything different than what tens of thousands of similar minded thinkers would have done. And they aren't loyal to Putin more than the changes Putin represents. But Putin, uniquely, attempted to chart a somewhat different course because he wasn't that successful post-Soviet. He joined politics partly as a way to get out of being a cab driver and then, through hook and crook and more than a little luck, was in a position where he could be boosted into a useful position.
> This was Anatoly Sobchak, a two-faced politician who had climbed to the top by convincing both the pro-democracy protesters and the communists he was on their side.
The degree of Putin and Sobchak's corruption in St. Petersburg is disputed. By some accounts he was not unusually corrupt (which still means he was corrupt) and it was instead exogenous economic shocks that caused the lost election. Notably, insofar as he was corrupt he was "machine politician" corrupt where gigantic festivals or public works served as a way to transfer kickbacks and buy votes. He only lost the vote narrowly. Sobchak appears to have enticed Putin because he offered a way out of the humiliation of being financially precarious through political loyalty. Which Putin was willing to give, somewhat uniquely for an ex-KGB agent, at least for a time. If you look at footage from that time period he actually looks quite modest and somewhat anxious over the possibility of losing that position.
> Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory.
This story of the transition is not what is most commonly said. Instead there were other successors but, in the aftermath of the 1998 Russian financial crisis, the economic pain plus corruption made most candidates untenable. Most people think the actual intended successor was Nemtsov but he was too high up and tainted by the affair. Why Yeltsin specifically chose Putin is up to speculation but the quid pro quo was obvious. Putin immediately pardoned Yeltsin and immunized him from prosecution, allowing him and his cronies to retire with any ill gotten gains.
> Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012?
Putin was always a conservative and Russian nationalist. However, while he never really approved of gays or liberals or intellectuals, he was also mostly content to leave them alone early in his rule. It was only in the late 2000s and early 2010s that he began to crack down on them, partly because he was riding a wave of popular conservative sentiment and partly because as he increasingly became confrontational with the west (Georgia etc) he felt needed to shore up the home front by removing dissident elements. After all, before then protests would be over much more esoteric constitutional issues. It was also useful for Putin to adopt the growing right populist movement as a kind of internationalist movement that Russian intelligence could move through, a replacement for Communism as a tool of Russian state interests.
> V. Could It Happen Here?
It can't but not for the reasons you say. Schumer actually did say on the news that he expected the security services to sabotage Trump with a kind of "ha ha" tone. The reason American security services can't do this kind of thing isn't the virtue of left wing leaders or norms. It's that they cannot expect the kind of deference the KGB required. When Democrats have tried to weaponize such institutions they have faced backlash. (And Republicans have generally not been able to for the reasons you say.) The reason the security services can't suppress the Republicans is that the Republicans have real power and will strike back. And the same for the Democrats.
I mean, I think there's also a difference between "secret services will be willing to sabotage via inaction or malicious compliance some guy in charge they don't like" and "secret services will walk into Hell and do anything out of loyalty for some guy in charge they really like". The former might not be the best if their antipathy is unwarranted but it's a negative feedback - it contains power rather than amplifying it. The latter is what's really dangerous (and what happened in Russia with Putin, apparently).
Yeah, my impression is that the FBI all the way back to Hoover was corrupt (to the extent that it was corrupt) not from loyalty to anybody outside but just for its own aggrandizement. This can involve doing favors for an administration when there is something to be gained, but it’s not something an aspiring tyrant could count on.
My point is that the former is just a milder form of the latter. In both cases it's the security services are sabotaging political power they don't agree with. One is just much more extreme. And I think the reason the American version never got that extreme is because they faced backlash and didn't just get to arrest the backlash.
In short, it's not the goodness of certain politicians or institutional norms but that they could not get away with it. If there was credible evidence that the FBI staged a terrorist attack to get Joe Biden elected the Republicans would howl about it until the end of time. And if the FBI started rounding up Republicans or they mysteriously started dying then the Democrats would probably lose the next election. I'm not saying they did any of these things. But I think if they could without consequences they would. But they can't so they don't.
As to it "containing rather than amplifying power" I don't think that's a coherent standard. Though I agree with DM's point that their interests are not so much partisan as institutional. Likewise with the KGB shifting from being pro-Communist to conservative.
1.) The Gretchen Whitmer plot never actually was put into practice (actual people shot etc), unlike the bombings.
2.) Republicans are howling about what happened. It also seems unlikely it was intended as election interference on behalf of a Democratic governor that won re-election in a blue leaning state.
The Israelis and Saudis got away with their involvement in 9/11, and because of that I assume some element of the US government was involved. We literally caught Isreali spies celebrating the attack almost immediately after it happened, those same spies worked for a moving company that helped move one of the hijackers, the richest Isreali gave a large interest free loan to the NY Police Chief less than a month before 9/11, multiple Israeli art student groups (fronts for Israeli intelligence) were in the immediate vicinity of the 9/11 hijackers, etc.
Wait, Putin's father pulled his apparently-deceased-but-still-alive mother from a pile of bodies, and has to defend his actions against someone trying to prevent him, and afterwards nurses her back to health at home?
After according to Ash Lael above, Hillary Clinton said Putin told her how at Stalingrad, his GRANDfather pulled his apparently-deceased-but-still-alive GRANDmother from a pile of bodies, and has to defend his actions against someone trying to prevent him, and afterwards nurses her back to health at home?
Sounds like an unlikely coincidence...
I guess either Hillary (or Ash Lael) misremembered which generation the tale was about.
Or it is one of those stories created to project an image repeated by Putin so often he himself starts to get the details confused.
Putin was born in 1952 and his father was born in 1911. His grandfather was born in 1879. The siege of Leningrad was 1941 to '44. So his father would have been 30 while his grandfather would be retirement age. Perhaps I'm misremembering but the father is closer to the right age.
“But also, the man who came closest to overthrowing Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was Putin’s former cook! Again, this is pretty weird, but I don’t know what the alternative is. Some kind of conspiracy of Russian cooks?”
Prigozhin’s catering service was more a front for organized crime rather than an actual chef related thing. It is possible that a similar thing was true under the czars but I doubt it.
> Also, it seems unclear whether you can disband the KGB.
Not quite the right framing of things. The KGB is *itself* very much continuous with the much earlier 'Cheka' set up by Lenin pretty much the afternoon after he seized power, to the extent that 'Chekist' is a widely-used informal term for the Russian secret police in the Soviet era and through the modern day.
Attempts to break, mitigate or modulate the power of the Russian intelligence agencies, or factions therein, by reorganizing them have a *very* long tradition in Russian politics.
Decentralization is America’s strength. A mayor of an American small town has more actual power than the governor of a Russian province. How a would a Democrat controlled FBI be able to bring Florida under control? How could a Republican Christian fundamentalist authoritarian take over Massachusetts? Russia started on the glide path to irrevocable decline when Putin neutered regional governors. Centralization has made Putin personally more secure but it has made the Russian state exceptionally brittle. One of the PRC’s strengths vis-a-vis Russia post Mao is that the Communist Party actually allowed significant power to stay in local hands. Unfortunately Xi has been busy centralizing which probably portends rougher times ahead for China.
Hard to depend on the “actual power” of a small-town mayor or even a state governor when we see them going after an actual former President and current Presidential candidate.
An actual former President and current Presidential and candidate who apparently committed a bunch of felonies. Do you think being a former president or Presidential candidate should confer blanket immunity? I hope you can see the holes in that logic.
We’ve all been over and over this. It’s not whataboutism to say, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the bunch of felonies.” The felonies I have read alleged sound like pretty small beer to me anyway.
No, I don’t think it should grant blanket immunity. But I think even less that it should open you up to persecution and questionable policing that is very hard for the man in the street to distinguish from political shenanigans. That’s mostly not out of fairness to any particular individual but out of my desire that our political process be seen as legitimate.
I made a fair bit of money on PredictIt six years ago by betting that Hillary would not be indicted, not because I thought she was innocent but because that’s just not the way America does things, and I’m very sad to see that change.
> The felonies I have read alleged sound like pretty small beer to me anyway
Maybe if you see it that way then your position makes sense, but I don't think it is accurate. Taking the classified document indictment alone, there seems to be (in the public indictment) pretty incontrovertible evidence of Trump doing things that people are prosecuted and given lengthy prison sentences for, including during the actual Trump administration. For your claim to standup you'd have to make the case that what he has been indicted for is something that another politician wouldn't have been and I don't think that's the case at all. I think that basically any politician would (and should) be prosecuted for what he did. And I haven't seen anyone arguing that Trump is being "persecuted" come up with an actual counterexample.
Yes, I do. The details actually matter here. In the case of Biden, he (improperly) had some classified documents at his private residence. When he discovered this he proactively notified the appropriate authorities, returned the documents and cooperated with a further search to ensure there were no other classified materials at his residence. If Trump had sone the same thing he would also never have been prosecuted. But that's not what he did. What he did was spend a full year obstructing the efforts of authorities to reclaim the documents. He also on multiple occasions was showing off the documents to other people who did not have security clearance while he was saying (on tape!) that he knew they were not declassified.
Seriously, read the indictment and then tell me of something that Biden or Hillary did that was even remotely comparable.
I think a lot of people, myself included, are very skeptical about the charges against Trump. The Washington Post put out an article the day of Trump's inauguration saying that he should be impeached. He hadn't even done anything yet, let alone worthy of being impeached. The history of his presidency since that time has shown a very strong willingness on the part of his enemies to push for prosecution at any level. He was impeached twice and spent most of his time in office under official investigation. Notably, those investigations found *nothing* against Trump himself and none of the charges against people around him were related to the various things Trump was accused of. That the FBI could find things to charge people with after a multi-year investigation is not at all surprising and would be the same if Biden's administration was put under serious investigation for years. I don't think anyone serious doubts that.
The first charge against Trump was widely panned as weak and politically motivated, even by his enemies. The second as stronger, but something that could easily not have been prosecuted (and former presidents doing "similar" things were not prosecuted - Biden had boxes of classified documents loose at his house as well. The argument that Trump is being prosecuted because he did not cooperate with NARA is weak at best, since former presidents have to this day never complied with NARA and never had their house raided). That the third set of charges is stronger again is not helpful as whatever goodwill existed for prosecuting Trump has mostly been used up by the last seven years of premeditated attempts at prosecuting him for *something* and the various times he was accused but not guilty.
> The Washington Post put out an article the day of Trump's inauguration saying that he should be impeached
Which article was that? I don't recall.
> The history of his presidency since that time has shown a very strong willingness on the part of his enemies to push for prosecution at any level
Yes, like every president in the last 30 year, the political opposition spends a lot of their time investigating them.
> Notably, those investigations found *nothing* against Trump himself and none of the charges against people around him were related to the various things Trump was accused of
I don't really want to litigate it here, but I think this is broadly incorrect and I don't accept this premise at all.
> The second as stronger, but something that could easily not have been prosecuted (and former presidents doing "similar" things were not prosecuted - Biden had boxes of classified documents loose at his house as well. The argument that Trump is being prosecuted because he did not cooperate with NARA is weak at best, since former presidents have to this day never complied with NARA and never had their house raided)
"Similar" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If Trump had simply returned the documents in question when asked he also would never have been prosecuted. What he is actually being prosecuted for is engaging in a year-long conspiracy to obstruct the authorities from getting the documents back. Also, there is very concrete evidence (including recordings) of him showing off the highly classified documents to people he knew didn't have clearance and saying (again, on tape) that he knew they were still classified. During the Trump administration Reality Winner was given a 5 year prison sentence for giving a classified document to a reporter, which is exactly what Trump did.
>"Similar" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If Trump had simply returned the documents in question when asked he also would never have been prosecuted.
This is excessively charitable, imo. Biden didn't even have to be asked.
Agreed on not litigating the details here. I'm no fan of Trump, but it's inescapable to say that his opponents, which included both Democrats and Republicans, were gunning for him from the very beginning. And, that they were looking for anything at all they could pin on him, whether it was legitimate, newsworthy, or in line with previous treatments of presidents.
Read the article from the WP. From day one that playbook was rolled out and what we saw was exactly what was planned, long before Trump actually did anything - other than win the election.
First, I don't disagree that there was broad opposition to Trump from day one. But that is the case for every US President in the modern era. There is always an organized political opposition which will try and pin whatever they can on them. When they can't come up with anything they try and drum up a bunch of nonsense.
As to the particular article, I don't think it really proves your point. The advocacy groups in question had an actual concrete argument about why Trump was impeachable. From the article:
>The organizers behind the campaign, Free Speech for People and RootsAction, are hinging their case on Trump’s insistence on maintaining ownership of his luxury hotel and golf course business while in office
Which honestly makes sense. It's been drowned out now by years of various scandals but it really was both unprecedented and deeply troubling that the POTUS decided to not divest himself of his privately held business while he was in office. Basically his entire net worth was tied up in an opaque company that was operating in numerous countries (many of which with these diplomatic relations with the US). I personally don't think that is grounds for impeachment absent concrete evidence of some specific corrupt dealings, but it doesn't seem particularly outlandish for an advocacy group to make the argument.
I think the overarching point I want to make here is just that you the fact that Trump faced a lot of investigations and was actually impeached twice does not in fact tell you anything in and of itself. Maybe he was a normally corrupt politician and the increased scrutiny was because he was in fact treated especially unfairly. Or maybe he was in fact extraordinarily corrupt and the increased scrutiny was a rational reaction to that fact. I personally think there is abundant evidence that the latter is true.
And a President's son, and a sitting Democratic Senator, and a number of other criminals of various political connections. It actually seems like a remarkably *good* feature of our country that it is possible to prosecute highly-connected people when they commit crimes, or when at least they have very publicly done things that are very likely to be crimes.
If there’s a credible felony accusation, prosecutors would be willing to go after them. There’s a reason the people getting prosecuted are Bob Menendez and Hunter Biden rather than Ted Cruz or Joe Biden. Prosecutors have a well-known bias against criminals.
Do some research into the immunity clauses that the Hunter Biden prosecutors tried to get past the judge. In exchange for *reducing* the charges against him, they were offering immunity to other charges. Does that sound normal to you, or the kind of thing that people with a "bias against criminals" would do?
There's repeat video evidence of Hunter breaking a number of laws, it's not like it's a hard case to make.
I have no idea how plea deals usually go, but don’t they usually involve reduced sentences for the ones you plead to, as well as immunity to others? In any case, the final judgment hasn’t happened in his case - didn’t the judge challenge some of the moves he has made?
They did not "try" to get those past the judge. They did not understand those clauses to mean immunity to other charges and said so when the judge asked. It was the defence who thought they meant immunity, and it was this disagreement that led the judge to toss the agreement.
I'm reluctant to play the person instead the ball, but Masha Gessen isn't a brilliant choice for a biographer of Putin. The Gessen siblings come from a particular milieu of Russian expatriates in New York, strategically fostered by the nickel magnate Mikhail Prokhorov. He was a major beneficiary of the state asset fire sale during the Yeltsin 1990s, the end of which (and partial repatriation) is perhaps Putin's one genuinely positive achievement.
This isn't to imply that Gessen is a mindless mouthpiece of the oligarch, or that the book is useless. But the trajectory of making Putin appear as an inhuman cipher is rather locked in, and it takes away from the purpose of the Book Club, which I take to be an understanding of the autocrat in terms of external force vectors and available levers.
Perhaps Philip Short's or Steven Lee Myers's books might have been the better choice, a little more detached from Russian inside baseball. (Or perhaps inside basketball; there's a Nets joke in there somewhere)
Also:
"The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators.
The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure."
It's probably true that this mother of 'October events' was orchestrated. And it helped Putin's image as the securocrat candidate who was going to bring the terrorists to justice. It's not clear that it was necessary, however. The main factor was Putin's control of the media (Berezovsky's NTV in particular), as well as probably a bit of straight-up ballot fraud. It was not all that different from Yeltsin's victory over Zyuganov in 1996, except in intensity.
Having read Gessen's biography and Short's biography, I now view Gessen's as almost worthless. This is partly because I read "Brothers" by Gessen, about the Tsarnaev brothers and Boston Marathon bombing, which made flagrant errors when discussing American law and by the end was filled with utterly incoherent and evidence-free conspiracy theories. For example, Gessen gives serious weight to the possibility that the Tsarnaevs were innocent, but that when they saw they were wanted for the bombing they killed a cop and then threw homemade explosives (which I guess they had lying around?) at other cops. They also argue that Dzokhar's note in the boat was not a confession. They'd become friends with the Tsarnaev family by that point and were willing to propose whatever FBI frame-up would make them look less bad. It was sad to read, and my reaction at the time was to think I now had to unlearn everything Gessen said about Putin.
Interestingly, Short begins his biography by explaining why he doesn't think the apartment bombings were Putin's doing. Among other things, there was a smaller bomb in Volgodonsk set off by gangsters a few days before the apartment bomb which had appeared in Moscow press in a manner that could fool a parliamentarian into thinking another apartment bombing had occurred. Also, for some stupid reason, it really was KGB/FSB practice to conduct drills like the Ryazan incident. Finally, the bombings occurred in the context of a Russian counteroffensive in Dagestan, and the conspiracy version requires us to believe that insurgents like Shamir Basayev were willing to lie about the origin of the bomb to help Putin for some reason.
Short's biography certainly isn't pro-Putin, but very different from Gessen's. His Putin is somewhat defensible until the mid-2000s: not corrupt in Saint Petersburg, loyal to Sobchak and not responsible for his heart attack, not bombing apartments to come to power, willing to cooperate with the west until criticisms of the War in Chechnya pissed him off. Ultimately Short acknowledges that Putin became very evil with time, but it's quite a different biography than Gessen's in the aggregate it seemed better researched and more convincing.
A priori, Shamil Basayev did have an incentive to claim deep strike capabilities for expanding external support from religious extremism allies. Note that by that time the containment status quo where Checnya / Ichkeriya was given de facto independence short only of ability to formally secede had already failed after Basayev tried to expand the zone of control to Dagestan.
I'm confused; they described a 40-second-long video arguing that "Firearms Must Be Legalized" as "a 40-second argument for gun rights". Is that not straightforwardly true?
Edit: some people in the comments are suggesting that the complaint is the guy who briefly flashes up as an example of an "insect" one might need to take care of, who is apparently Chechen? OK, even if it's a racist argument for gun rights, it's still pretty straightforwardly an argument for gun rights?
The video depicts ethnic immigrants as cockroaches that need to be exterminated using weapons. So yes, it did indeed call for gun rights. But to merely describe the video as "a forty-second argument for gun rights," while ignoring the elephant in the room, is dishonest.
Additionally, in the same article (from 2021) she claims that:
>Navalny’s reputation as an ultranationalist stems from statements and actions that are more than a decade old.
But her very article undermines that assertion, by stating:
>In 2013, he made illegal immigration from Central Asia a central theme of his campaign...In 2014, after Russia occupied Crimea, he said that, while he opposed the invasion, he did not think that Crimea could be just “handed back”...In the past seven years, though, Navalny appears to have not made any comments that could be interpreted as hateful or ethno-nationalist.
So which is it? Did he stop his ultranationalist rhetoric a decade earlier, or 7 years earlier?
Furthermore, she seemed to bend the truth in the above quote, writing:
>He said that, while he opposed the invasion, he did not think that Crimea could be just “handed back."
As far as I can tell, besides for saying that he wouldn't give Crimea back to Ukraine, Navalny didn't say that he opposed the invasion. In reading that part of the interview that she apparently references, the closest I can find, is him saying that "despite the fact that the Crimea was seized with outrageous violations of all international norms, nevertheless, the realities are such that Crimea is now part of the Russian Federation."
Her comments about him recanting his position on Georgia are also less than honest.
She wrote:
>In 2008, Navalny, like an apparent majority of Russians, supported Russian aggression in Georgia... He has publicly apologized for his comments on Georgia.
The implication is that he apologized for supporting aggression in Georgia. However, he didn't do that. He only apologized for referring to Georgians as rodents - and it wasn't exactly much of an apology.
What he actually said in the interview that she hyperlinked was:
>Я написал пост, в котором называл грузин грызунами, за что извинялся. Могу извиниться еще раз. Но по сути я своего взгляда не изменил.
> I wrote a post calling Georgians rodents, for which I apologized. I can apologize again. But in essence I have not changed my views.
My focus was Gessner's honesty - not Navalny. I quoted the specific interviews that she referenced or hyperlinked and examined whether she described them accurately - not any comment he ever made, including comments after her article was written. I edited my post to try to clarify this.
FWIW, what I noticed in "The Brothers" was not so much dishonesty as crazy leaps in logic. For example:
Cops failed to solve the 2011 Waltham triple murder in which Tamarlan Tsarnaev is now a suspect -> The cops failed to seriously investigate the murder -> Tamarlan was an FBI information source protected by the FBI -> The FBI might have given Tamarlan the bombs to plant, akin to how they gave fake bombs to entrap the Newburgh 4 (as if those are remotely similar things, and also why are entrapping an agent they are protecting?) -> The reason he was killed in a shootout with cops was that the police wanted to kill him before he could talk.
I do not trust someone who makes leaps like this to sort through different accounts and assess how corrupt Putin was in 1990s Saint Petersburg.
Any thoughts on how apartment bombing investigators Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya all ended up dead?
I don't doubt they were murdered either on Putin's orders or by people in Putin's orbit, but they did more than investigate the apartment bombings. Shchekochikhin was killed while investigating the Three Whales corruption scandal, Litvinenko was a disloyal agent, Politkovskaya reported on atrocities by Chechens aligned with Putin.
I do think that one issue with Short's biography was that while he acts as if Putin wasn't that bad in the beginning, Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin were killed pretty early in his regime, and even if he didn't directly order their killings he was clearly okay with being the head of a journalist-killing regime.
Re: Putin being a terrible communicator, this whole Ukraine war strikes me as maybe now because of bad communication on Russia's part.
Russia amassed troops on the border and denied they were planning an invasion. The US says their intelligence says Russia is planning an invasion. The international community is...., skeptical!
If Russia really didn't want this war, it did a terribly bad job of getting that across. It should have said "Yes! Those are our troops! Yes! We will invade if you can't guarantee Ukraine will stay unaligned! Yes! We're serious!"
Unless of course it wanted to invade the whole time. That's what I used to think, but maybe Putin really is that bad at getting his message across?
Doesn’t the fact they made obvious preparations for the war, the US intelligence services predicted it, and the Russians then invaded kind of prove they wanted to invade the whole time? You are overthinking this.
A majority of Ukrainians, at the time, did not believe Putin would invade. It maybe had something to do with Putin amassing troops at the border multiple times before? Lots of analysts thought he wouldn't invade (e.g. [1], and even Vlad Vexler talking about "Why Putin Is Invading Ukraine" [2] didn't really expect a full-scale invasion that year). Putin said "These military exercises, drills, are purely defensive and are not a threat to any other country" a week before invading[3]. And RT reported on how the US was nuts for claiming Russia would invade[4].
It was clear afterward that yeah, he totally wanted to invade. But it wasn't a miscommunication; Putin wanted the invasion to be a surprise.
You said: "As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here".
What?
Last century, there were tons of terrorist attacks and bombings from the revolutionary left, over 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone, and the whole time the perpetrators were funded by the National Lawyer's Guild, getting funding and authority from the New York City government, and were entirely ignored, or even supported, by the mainstream media. Many of the worst perpetrators are still free and supported by the left: For example, Obama commuted the sentence of of Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the FALN Puerto Rican terrorist group.
Ted Kennedy was a mainstream Democrat; the conspiracy theories about the Clintons are probably false but don't have the "against their ideological DNA" sense to me.
That's sort of circular, though, inasmuch as having an avowed ideology of "let's do Mafia-style killings" would make a party/group definitionally not "mainstream."
FWIW, the three "Mafia-style killing" political conspiracy theories that have attracted the most adherents in the USA during my lifetime all involve the Democrats:
1. LBJ killed JFK
2. The Clintons killed Vince Foster
3. Various Dems something something something Jeffrey Epstein
I'm genuinely trying to think of some similar conspiracy theory involving GOP politicians and coming up empty. Obviously that doesn't prove that the Dems actually did or could or would do any of those things, and may simply prove that anti-Dem people have been consistently more attracted to conspiracy theories for the past 60 years. But it does suggest there's at least some sort of inchoate popular intuition that it's not exactly "against their ideological DNA."
It is odd there aren’t more “Republicans killed Epstein” theories given Trump’s relationship with the guy and, far more damning, Barr’s long history with Epstein. Probably a bipartisan agreement.
I think that Republicans aren't capable of doing anything sneaky any more; the Democrats control all the subtle fingers of power, and Republicans only control the ones you actually see. If the Republicans wanted a prisoner dead in an apparent suicide, they simply wouldn't have the contacts to make that happen.
I don't think Scott is claiming, "everyone, even the most conspiracy-minded people, agree that this is against the ideological DNA of mainstream Democrats". He is just claiming "this is clearly against the ideological DNA of mainstream Democrats". The fact that there is a conspiracy-minded bunch that thinks it isn't just doesn't do much as a counter to that claim.
I have an abiding contempt for both men, who have abetted and countenanced truly loathsome deeds. But so far as I'm aware, neither has been associated with targeted killing (or intimidation generally) of political opponents. Rather, their sin has been to approve of harm to random bystanders killed or injured in the course of a political stunt.
Intent follows the bullet. I'm pretty sure Sharpton specifically target Fred Harari for harassment just like Ayers targeted the soldiers (and their dates) at Ft. Dix.
"Oopsie, it got out of hand" isn't very mafia-like, I'll agree.
Oh, I certainly agree, and I'm not in any way trying to dismiss Sharpton's or Ayers's conscious malice in targeting the people they did.
My point is just that it's not as if Harari was some sort of rival to Sharpton or prominent anti-Sharptonian journalist or something. He was just a guy minding his own business who had the misfortune of it becoming politically convenient for Sharpton to use him as a scapegoat.
This is a failure of imagination IMO. The Democrats don't have to have the stomach for killings (which I think you err on) the stomach for political prosecutions and economic blackmail gets you there even faster in the modern age. And they have that stomach in spades.
Just compare Trump's vs Hillary's dealings with classified documents, the Floyd rioters vs J6 rioters, etc. These people may have violated the law, but the disparity in punishment is undeniable.
Was there any allegation that Clinton refused to return classified documents after her time in government? I thought there were issues about the e-mail server, but nothing like refusing a direct request, and then lying about the presence of documents.
Haven't the Jan. 6 and George Floyd rioters been treated about the same? People who caused significant damage were arrested and sentenced (though the ones who invaded government buildings got higher punishment).
Clinton deleted 30k emails, which is clear obstruction of justice.
And name one single Floyd rioter who was denied bail and put in solitary confinement for months, despite not committing an actual act of violence like the Q Shaman was.
I'm not going to sit through a 30 minute video by a partisan. My question is: she deleted 30k emails in violation of public records laws, sent classified information in an illegal way. Why shouldn't she be prosecuted?
I find this slightly ironic given that Scott is obviously aware not just of the Days of Rage, not just the book about it titled "Days of Rage", but the exact book review you're linking to. From https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ (BOOK REVIEW: AGES OF DISCORD):
"The same problems: labor unrest, racial violence, terrorism – repeated during the 1970s spike. Instead of quoting Turchin on this, I want to quote this Status 451 review of Days of Rage, because it blew my mind..."
"In popular understanding of American history, you can trace out optimistic and pessimistic periods. The national narrative seems to include a story of the 1950s as a golden age of optimism. Then everyone got angry and violent in the early 1970s (the Status 451 review of Days Of Rage is pretty great here, and reminds us that “people have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States”)..."
Democrats aren't extreme leftist groups. In Italy in the 70s we had a long season of political terrorism too, both from the right wing (e.g. the Bologna train station bombing) and the left wing (e.g. the kidnapping and murder of former PM Aldo Moro), and over all of it hangs the shadow of possible CIA/KGB interference as Italy was a key strategic battlefield during the Cold War, part of NATO but dangerously leaning towards the Warsaw Pact or at least becoming unaligned at times. But if someone told me that the current parliamentary Italian left was thus inclined to bombings and kidnappings I'd laugh in their face (and to be fair, neither I think is the current right, though they are far more reactionary than they were, say, 20 years ago). Every wing has its extremists.
And then, there's antifa. Which is if not openly endorsed, then gladly tolerated by the mainstream left, and these guys are as violent as one can get, and do not try to hide that. Just days ago, the attempt of Andy Ngo, beaten by antifa thugs within inches of his life, to hold them accountable in the Portland court, predictably failed miserably. Antifa openly threatened the jury, disrupted the proceedings and attacked the journalists reporting - and they got exactly what they wanted, and largely continue to enjoy complete freedom from consequences. They are literally a violent mob, operating in shadows, intimidating and violently suppressing anybody who crosses them, and enjoying clandestine support from the societal institutions. If that's not Mafia-style, what is?
They don't exist so much that the defense lawyer on the aforementioned court proclaimed "I am antifa" and warned the jury that she remembers all their faces, and her comrades tried to find out all personal info about the jurors (not sure whether they succeeded). Given that this is happening in the process about antifa almost murdering another person they hated - I think that sent a pretty strong message. The message being, of course, that there's no antifa and nobody who crosses the non-existing antifa is in any danger whatsoever. Completely unlike Mafia, of course.
This is gross hyperbole. Antifa might beat up fascists, but they're no IRA, no Hamas - and for that matter, nowhere near the power and violence of *the actual mafia*. Yeah, sure, some antifascists are definitely violent ("antifa" is not an organization), but they're overgrown adolescents compared to what we're talking about here.
I think the bare minimum for accusing a group of mafia-style killings is, y'know, actual, actual killings.
To paraphrase Scott above "Even [antifa's] enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what [actually violent groups with any actual power] were doing."
OK, you are right, I stand corrected. They are not actually as violent as they could be, it was just a turn of phrase. While they beat up people, destroy property, intimidate journalists, injure policemen, set federal buildings on fire and perform a plethora of other violent activities, they certainly could do more. They could rob banks, murder policemen and bomb federal buildings, like Weather Underground did (I am not sure who those were but they must be right wing because I have it on good authority political murder is not in the Left's DNA). They could unleash a terror campaign like RAF (another organization that is likely right-wing) or even a full blown war, like IRA. So yes, they could be more violent. But I think right now they are violent enough already for people to notice.
> "antifa" is not an organization
There might not be a single official organization, with 501c3 registration and official letterhead, but they are definitely organized and capable of projecting organized power. Someone here mentioned the Mafia, which makes me want to check the list of official NGOs and see if I can find "Mafia" there. If I don't, do you think it means Mafia does not exist and anybody who talks about Mafia is just an ignorant conspiracy theorist?
> Antifa might beat up fascists
By "fascist" here we mean anybody they disagree with. And it's simple logic - if you are against them, then you are anti-anti-fascist - which by simple logic inference means you are a fascist. You can't argue with logic!
> I think the bare minimum for accusing a group of mafia-style killings is, y'know, actual, actual killings.
Sure, they tried to kill Ngo, but it didn't work out, he survived. How about Aaron Danielson? He was murdered by Michael Reinoehl, self-described antifa, who lately died in a shootout with the police (fortunately, police shoots better so they didn't give him a chance to increase his body count). It's, y'know, actual actual actual killing right here.
Connor Betts murdered nine people, and is on record as an avid antifa supporter. While we can't claim his radical leftist beliefs necessarily led to the killings - they could be coincidental to his insanity, certainly nothing in his ideological DNA suggested to him that mass murder is taboo. And to be honest, how could it - the ideology of communism, and it practice, where implemented, necessitates violent overthrow of existing order and violent suppression of dissent. It's not an ideology that has non-violence in its DNA.
Now, I'm not going to claim all - or even majority - of Democrats follow such ideology. No, that's certainly not true - most of them are as averted to such practices as I am, and I hope you are. But on the left wing of the party - where people like antifa reside - this is the ideology that is accepted and endorsed. And since the mainstream party is not recoiling in revulsion from them, and not expelling them from any association with the party (and we all know if they know how to do something with gusto it's expelling and shunning people) - on the contrary, they support and enable them - I think we can conclude that while they many not be endorsing such ideas, their ideological DNA is also not completely incompatible with them.
>There might not be a single official organization, with 501c3 registration and official letterhead, but they are definitely organized and capable of projecting organized power. Someone here mentioned the Mafia, which makes me want to check the list of official NGOs and see if I can find "Mafia" there.
They aren't an organization because it's a political ideology, not a organization. No one is in charge of "antifa". It's like saying "communism" or "capitalism" or "fascism" are organizations - it's a plain category error. As such, it is totally dissimilar to the Mafia, which regardless of official registration (what? how did that come up?) has a clear organizational structure, and clear people in charge.
>If I don't, do you think it means Mafia does not exist and anybody who talks about Mafia is just an ignorant conspiracy theorist?
Okay, now you're just engaging in bad faith. At no point did I imply antifa "doesn't exist" (we're openly talking about its effects) and I certainly didn't accuse you of being "an ignorant conspiracy theorist" (although, now that I think about it, I am accusing you of seeing a conspiracy where none exists, fair enough)
> By "fascist" here we mean anybody they disagree with.
I mean, your example was a man assaulted while attending a rally organized by the Proud Boys, a literal (violent!) neo-fascist organization. Or are you talking about the time after he got caught with another far-right group while they were literally discussing a plan to assault antifascists? But sure, we could easily broaden the definition to "far right".
>Sure, they tried to kill Ngo
I mean according to Andy, sure.
>How about Aaron Danielson?
That is considerably closer to a Mafia-style killing, and meets the minimum threshold of being an actual killing. It remains to be seen if he was acting under anyone else's orders, which is the other crucial part of the analogy. As far as I can tell, no credible source (i.e. one that might face repercussions for lying) has accused him of that. And AFAICT, this is an outlier event - sources note this is "the first killing linked to an anti-fascist in the United States in 25 years."
>> To paraphrase Scott above "Even [antifa's] enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what [actually violent groups with any actual power] were doing."
>That's as much an excuse as excusing a murderer by saying "the atomic bomb in Hiroshima killed thousands and your court did nothing,
Okay, this just gives me evidence that you've entirely missed the point here. Because:
a) Nothing I said was about excusing them (I literally made a point to agree that they are violent)
b) The *topic*† of the thread is political actors who could be comparison to the KGB/FSB, and you brought up antifa - which, to use your surprisingly apt metaphor, is like entering a conversation about how, say, Belgium never committed any wartime atrocities comparable to the civilian casualties of the US's nuclear assault on Japan, and going "yeah they do, this one guy murdered an old lady"
†And yes, your reply is expected to be on-topic, because otherwise it fails *at least two* of Kind, True, or Necessary
> They aren't an organization because it's a political ideology, not a organization.
This is of course completely false. It's like claiming Communist Parties do not exist, because communism is a political ideology, not an organization. Communism is an ideology, and Communist Party is an organisation following this ideology. Similarly, antifa is an organisation following the ideology of violently attacking anybody they designate "fascist" - which is anybody they dislike and anybody who is to the right to them.
It is obvious that such organisation exists - they conduct trainings, perform actions, have media groups, permanent and semi-permanent members, etc. It is all documented (including by Andy Ngo, but not only), and not even addressing it is just an attempt at gaslighting at this point.
> I mean according to Andy, sure.
Are you implying that Ngo severely beat himself and put himself to the hospital, just to slander antifa, and no antifa members actually beaten him? Or that they actually beat him, but their purpose was something else than causing grave bodily harm that they caused? What, in your opinion, was that purpose?
> Nothing I said was about excusing them (I literally made a point to agree that they are violent)
Who are "they"? You just claimed antifa is just an ideology. Ideology does not beat up people and does not set up courhouses on fire. Who are "they" that did all that and that you admit are violent? Just random people, for no reason at all regularly assembling, dressing similarly and acting cohesively, and deciding at random to be violent at exactly the same place in exactly the same way, which they announced in advance, and signed as "antifa"? Is there a point where denying there's an ogranized effort behind it would sound ridiculous already?
> The *topic*† of the thread is political actors who could be comparison to the KGB/FSB, and you brought up antifa
No, the topic was that the violence in service of political goals "is not in the DNA" of the Democrats. That's why I brought antifa - because it is the movement whose whole point is the violence in service of leftist political goals - and Democrats are helping, tolerating, and enabling it. If political violnce weren't part of their DNA, that would be a very strange thing to comprehend. Of course, the solution is simple - the hypothesis that political violence is contrary to their politican DNA is just false.
As for the "conspiracy" angle, I agree there's no conspiracy. Conspiracy implies clandestine action. Antifa acts openly and boldly, and is not afraid of publicity - it enjoys it. A mafia lawyer would never dare to proclaim in open court to the jury "I am from Mafia, and I remember each and every of your faces" - but an antifa lawyer does it, with no sanctions, and successfully intimidates the jury into compliance. And nobody on the left has any objections to it, either. What does it say about their political DNA?
> To paraphrase Scott above "Even [antifa's] enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what [actually violent groups with any actual power] were doing."
That's as much an excuse as excusing a murderer by saying "the atomic bomb in Hiroshima killed thousands and your court did nothing, and my defendant here just robbed one old lady, which maybe had a year to live at most anyway - how dare you to accuse him while not saying anything about the victims of Hiroshima?!" Somebody else doing something you consider bad is not an excuse for you to do bad. Yes, antifa is a tiny fraction of a vast ocean of evil that exist around us. Still, they are fraction of that ocean, and the existence of the rest of the ocean does not excuse them one tiny bit.
Didn't check everything you said, but I looked at Rivera's Wikipedia page, especially the "Imprisonment section": Dude spent 36 yrs in prison (12 solitary), was 77 at release, killed no one and there was broad international support (UN, South Africa, Puerto Rico, ...) for his release.
This account misses something fundamental in my view. I myself was born in Russia and lived most of my life there, participating in some of the events described in the post, such as the 2011-2014 protests. What is really crucial for understanding how Putin came to power is *how bad the 90s were*. The GDP per capita fell by half (by way of comparison, the GDP per capita fell only about 25% during the Great Depression in the US).
It was not just economical too, a lot of people who used to have a stable or even respectable occupation (manufacturing workers, doctors, teachers, scientists) lost their jobs or saw their income evaporate. The amount of misery was simply enormous, and it explains the real support for someone who promised and seemed to deliver a measure of stability and even growth. This level of support is of course less that the percentage Putin gets in elections but it's real nonetheless. When I was an observer at the elections in Moscow, seeing the whole process at one polling station, Putin got almost exactly 50% and the next candidate got thirty-something.
The experience of the 90s also had another, more subtle effect. The people who were against Putin from the beginning and understood what he was up to were mostly associated with the "liberals" who were held responsible for the disastrous reforms in the 90s. Since they were almost universally hated, their calls were for the most part ignored. Now you might say that this is irrational - Putin was an active participant in the 90s looting, probably more so than many "liberals," but that's how it was felt.
"What is really crucial for understanding how Putin came to power is *how bad the 90s were*. "
It's impossible to overstate this.
Among the things entirely missing from most Western comments on the Russian 1990s is how dictatorial Yeltsin actually became, in terms of rule by decree, as a direct consequence of the 1993 constitutional crisis, which was precipitated by this early misery and anticipation of more misery to come. And concluded by way of a very dodgy referendum.
Viewed in the light of fresh experience of that time, as they were during Putin's consolidation of power, Putin's early chicanery seems scarcely out of the ordinary.
I mean, the actual story of how Putin came to power is “the previous dictator appointed him.” He then held power by a mixture of competence and Chekist support. At most, it’s the story of how bandits become stationary.
Yes, I think that's exactly right -- except that the becoming-stationary part is non-trivial and may even be the whole explanatory enchilada.
Not surprising: in a period of extreme instability, whichever rando the previous dictator appoints gets the jump on his rivals and becomes dictator himself.
Surprising: said rando stays in power for three decades (and counting), becoming Augustus and reshaping the state's formal institutions around the contingent circumstances of his own anomalous rise to power.
1) People actually voted for him in 2000 and in the later elections too
2) His opponents were completely discredited and no one believed in their (ultimately correct) warnings
But also the question "how Putin came to power" isn't the same as "why didn't democracy and rule of law take hold in Russia" because the 90s were no less corrupt and the 1996 elections were likely fraudulent. So the question "how Putin came to power" becomes less interesting.
Those are good points. It depends what question one is asking. But how Putin came to power is interesting because it illustrates something about what he is like, and also something about what Russia was and is like, if connections to the intelligence services and that level of behind the scenes plotting (as described in the review) is what puts people in power.
Yes, I agree. If the goal is to prevent it from happening elsewhere, then it's more helpful to focus on fundamentals. A strongman will emerge and how he establishes his power will depend on the circumstances. Caesar used his army and patronage network, Hitler relied on his thugs and friendly capitalists while Putin used his FSB connections.
The question is why Vladimir Putin. Initially his blandness helped. Russians in the 1990s/2000 weren’t actually looking for a strong man and Putin wasn’t perceived as one. He was enough of a blank slate that anyone angry with the status quo could project their preferences on him. That makes him more interesting than the usual Latin American caudillo type
But was it more-or-less inevitable that a strongman would end up in power, and Putin happened to be the guy in the right place to end up in that position?
Wow, that's a big question. The fact is that there are countries which handled the transition from socialist economy much more successfully, like China or Poland. Obviously the paths these two countries took were completely different so it's hard to say what would've worked better for Russia. It seems like it got the worst of the two approaches. Unlike China, it had no strong state capable of long-term planning and opening the economy just to the right extent and in the right sectors to capitalise on the advantages it had and achieve growth. Unlike Poland, there was no real prospect of the EU/NATO membership which imposed some discipline of the Polish governments and made them do things they wouldn't have done otherwise.
Btw I was too young when these reforms were happening, so I don't have personal insights. The closest thing to that was when I spoke with someone who was involved at a pretty high level in privatisation campaigns in Poland and some post-Soviet states (not Russia itself), and they said that the corruption in the latter was at a completely different level, with predictable consequences on the privatisation results and their legitimacy in the eyes of wider public.
I think it was too late to do much differently in 90's - Gorbachev's bungled Perestroika in 80's might have been a place to start. His well-meaning but inept attempts to introduce kind-of-free-but-not-really-market basically created Russian mafia and future oligarchs, or at least gave them ways to gain power and money.
Also, I remain of an opinion that if America was more ready for collapse of USSR and had a kind of "Marshall Plan" ready, things might have gone differently. From all I've read, the event came as a surprise, and Russia was left to fend on its own - a few abortive and inadequate attempts at help were vastly overshadowed by predatory behavior (potentially competing factories bought out and shut down, resources both physical and informational siphoned) and general indifference. On the other hand, it's perfectly understandable: Marshall Plan was needed, because of Cold War. With collapse of USSR, America had no more worthy opponents, so there was no need to prop up the former enemy against some new force (could anyone have predicted China then? Probably not).
Yes. I think world-systems theorists were already like 80% there. "The Long Twentieth Century", in 1993, already describes East Asia's economic domination as fait accompli. It still uses Japan as its main representative, Arrighi didn't start focusing specifically on China until late 1990s, but if you know US hegemony is in terminal crisis, and the capital is all heading towards Asia, it should certainly be possible to notice the enormous state power in the very center of it and add two and two together.
I recommend the BBC documentary "Traumazone" to bring this across. You can watch it on Youtube.
Putin is quoted saying the the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the "greatest catastrophe of the 20th century", which is quite a statement, considering that WW2 was in the 20th century, too.
It's not a mistranslation. Here is the actual quote:
"Прежде всего следует признать, что крушение Советского Союза было крупнейшей геополитической катастрофой века. "
If Putin intended to say "a major disaster" (like is claimed in the article) rather than "the greatest disaster" he would have said "крупной катастрофой" instead of "крупнейшей катастрофой".
As the linked article points out, "крупнейшей катастрофой" is ambiguous and does not exactly correspond to English superlative ("the greatest catastrophe"). That being the case, the intended meaning of the speech is either intentionally ambiguous or Putin's speechwriter is the ultimate authority. In the latter case the official English translation is the one provided by Kremlin. Why would you want to resolve the ambiguity any other way?
Because there is no ambiguity. It is understandable that the government translators wished to soften the meaning for foreign audience consumption, but the Russian version is not ambiguous.
> The simple superlative is commonly used to express a value judgment on the part of the speaker and may be used when no comparison is made (English example: a most interesting film).
"....The people who were against Putin from the beginning and understood what he was up to were mostly associated with the "liberals" who were held responsible for the disastrous reforms in the 90s."
I assume you are referring to the privatization programmes and the "cold turkey" approach to shift to a market economy. And yes, it did create a lot of suffering, plus it unfortunately has discredited the "liberals" for decades. But you must remember the context. The argument back then was that privatization would have to happen fast, and be extensive, because there was a real possibility that the old guards in the Communist Party might get back into (absolute) power. Fast, massive privatization was assumed to create a power base for other actors (oligarchs, but so be it) that would reduce this risk/probability. Essentially, the idea was to get the toothpaste out of the tube as fast as possible, assuming that it would then be very difficult for the Communists to put it back in.
My point is that this strategy made a lot of sense. Many people at the time were well aware that this risked a lot of "collateral damage" in the form of corruption, temporary economic decline and so on. The point is that it was seen as a risk worth taking, considering that the alternative - the risk that the Communist Party would regain absolute power - was regarded as a greater evil. And I still think that - given the context, which everybody now forgets - this was a rational and understandable way to think.
Well, if I may rephrase it a bit less charitably, the purpose was to maximise the odds of survival of the group in power at that time by creating a new power base different from the old communist party elites. This has nothing to do with the well-being of ordinary Russians, unfortunately.
This also begs the question of how bad the communist government would have been. To take my two examples of the more successful transformation, in Poland the former communists did not restore a dictatorship, and Poland joined the NATO when they were in power. In China, of course, the communist party was never removed from the power in the first place, and economically it's the biggest success story of the last 100 years. As a side note, Deng's reforms started in the early 1980s, and so Russia had the opportunity to learn from them.
"Well, if I may rephrase it a bit less charitably, the purpose was to maximise the odds of survival of the group in power at that time by creating a new power base different from the old communist party elites. This has nothing to do with the well-being of ordinary Russians, unfortunately."
I disagree with that rephrasing. On the political side, the actors on the "liberal" side wanted competition for power, i.e. secret ballots and elections - they did not want any particular new party to stay in power forever. On the economic side, the attempt was to create extremely broad "shareholder capitalism". This soon morphed into oligarchs, but that was not the initial aim.
That said, I personally count oligarchs as the lesser evil, compared to continuous one-party control of the economy. Oligarchs may compete with each other. And if not, private monopolies can be broken up more easily that the former amalgam of economic and political monopoly power in the form of a single party. For that reason, I am hopeful for the long-run prospects of Russia. At least I was, until Putin made the cardinal miscalculation to try to topple the regime in Kiev/Kyiv.
Be that as it may, we can probably agree that none of us have empirical access to the inner thoughts of the central actors of that time. So it is impossible to know which interpretation of their actions is "correct" - yours or mine. (I would argue, though, that it is a quite valuable heuristic not to interpret the behaviour of those one disagrees with, as a sign they are evil people.)
I'm disappointed no one understands the real story behind why shock therapy worked in Poland, but not Russia. Jeffrey D. Sachs, the architect of both programs explains why here. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1097135961
Basically the US wanted Poland as an ally and wanted to crush Russia. The key would have been some monetary support to tamper down the inflation, the US blocked it and that somewhat forced the firesale of state assets that created the oligarchs.
Typos: "There is no record of Spiridon passing any advantage on to his son Vladimir Sr, or of the Spiridon connection further Vladimir Jr’s career. It seems like a total coincidence. But surely the chance that the grandson of the chef of one Russian dictator becoems the next Russian dictator is millions-to-one."
"becomes" is misspelled. And "further" should possibly be "furthering"
Managed is spelled maanged.
I'll edit if I find more. Good article, as usual. This is a great series.
Edit:
"apeearances". Two of these have been within quotation. If they appear in the original, you may want to fix them or add a [sic].
Also: The sentence "As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it." is within the quotation, but its tone sounds very much like Scott, so I assume he wrote this and it shouldn't be within the quotation bar?
Having worked in Russia several times between 1992 and 2018 I had to smile at Scott's "I don’t know exactly how he got the prosecutors and courts to do his bidding ... " Big part of the job of Soviet judges was to do the bidding of the prosecutors who did the bidding of the state! Of course, they would do the bidding of a president who actually paid them wages again (+let them keep bribes). True, some outright criminals* were given the position of prosecutors et al. under Putin, but the "judiciary " in Russia was never a "branch of power" to begin with. *See pic on Kamil Galeev's tweet https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498711038568640512
Just a quick comment on one of the most striking coincidences in the post: most probably there's nothing strange or sinister about the Duma speaker's early announcement of the Volgodonsk explosion. There was a *different* explosion in Volgodonsk, much less serious (three injured, none dead), on September 12, 1999; it made the news but was never linked to Chechnya, it was a local crime thing and was quickly forgotten. Gennady Seleznev (the speaker) mentioned a Volgodonsk explosion on September 13, and most probably he meant that one.
You already know about Putin's ties to KGB. What is missing is the links the ROC has to the KGB, and there are many.
Current Patriarch Kirill "used to be" a KGB agent, and there many other officials in higher hierarchy of ROC with that sort of background. And the previous patriarch Alexei was covering up for KGB aswell.
> According to a Forbes article in 2006, Kirill's wealth was $4 billion [...] In 2009, Kirill was photographed wearing a $30,000 gold Breguet watch.[156] Officials associated with the Moscow Patriarchate airbrushed the watch (but not its reflection on the table at which Kirill was sitting)[156] out of the photo,[1] while Kirill claimed that the watch had been doctored into the image.[157] Kirill later admitted that he did in fact own the watch.[157]
(Also, I could have sworn an "archimandrite" was either an Iain M Banks villain or a Warhammer 40k character. Apparently it's a superior abbot in the Eastern Orthodox Church!)
> (Also, I could have sworn an "archimandrite" was either an Iain M Banks villain or a Warhammer 40k character.
Hardly astonishing considering how much fun writers in w40k have repurposing impressively sounding actual historical terminology. For example I guess some w40k fans might be amused learning that archon or exarch are actual offices from antiquity:
There have long been allegations that churches in the Communist Bloc countries were heavily infiltrated by party agents who may have become clergy who attained high positions and who steered the churches along paths to align with the state.
Look at China and the Catholic Patriotic Association:
Which is, of course, why there is a significant "house church" movement that China periodically tries to stamp out. They know they can't trust the churches sanctioned by China.
> So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA.
> I absolutely believe the FBI is spreading fear of terrorism for their own gain, often crosses the line between monitoring extremists and entrapping/provoking them, and is part of the general censorship apparatus. But even their enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what Putin and his security services were doing.
This is a weird juxtaposition. The CIA does get accused of similar things.
It feels to me like this is just a matter of degree. The FBI/CIA/NSA seem to have gone completely off the rails with regards to what they are *supposed* to be doing in a democracy, and while the KGB has arguably done worse I see no reason to believe the US intelligence agencies won't continue to deteriorate until they reach a similar place where the KGB was back in the 90s.
The US has covert intelligence organizations that murder, deal drugs, spy on everyone including own citizens, appears to not answer to anyone, seem to be immune to any real punishment for committing crimes (like spying on citizens), and they appear to be actively utilized by politicians to go after political opponents. This seems to me like half way down a slippery to where the KGB was in the 90s.
Without some very substantial change, it feels *likely* to me that the US will end up in a similar situation, rather than it being implausible as this article suggests.
One of the big differences between Russia and the US is that the US has stable institutions and Russia doesn’t. One reason the intelligence services have so much power in Russia is that there was apparently more continuity in their membership and goals than in other institutions after the fall of the USSR and no one to push back against them. (That is, they were relatively stable compared to the rest of the government.)
Couldn't you say the same thing about US institutions today? The CIA/FBI/NSA have more continuity than the presidency certainly. The supreme Court has continuity over time, which perhaps helps some, but I'm not convinced that it is obviously enough. This is especially true given that the supreme Court doesn't appear to have the power to actually punish rogue government institutions, only stop their bad behavior long after the fact.
I didn’t express myself well, it’s the institution of the presidency, for instance, that is stable and continuous, not who the president is, (obviously). And everyone knows the President performs certain functions and switches every four or eight years. After the fall of the Soviet Union there wasn’t a settled way things were supposed to work in the visible government but the KGB/FSB was still there in the background.
More basic principles like equality before the law, property rights and independent judiciary are also much weaker in Russia and always have been. For example it is unclear whether it is possible to be rich and own a large business in Russia without being in cahoots with the regime.
The hardest part of any democratic revolution is establishing democracy as an institution. So many revolutions end with "And then the first (sometimes second) president declared himself president for life." The fact that everybody knows the American president can only serve for 8 years, and will leave the white house after a lost election, and that will happen as it has always happened, is huge. I mean, just look at the issue Trump has with Pence. Trump wanted Pence to subvert the process and Pence, despite being extremely loyal to Trump for all four years wouldn't conscience the idea. It's not how we do things in America. Almost 250 years of tradition weighed down on Pence: he wouldn't break that for Trump.
Ah yes, the subtle difference between pulling the trigger yourself and training someone else to pull the trigger, providing him with a gun, supplies, money and support.
As for murdering Americans, well we just have to work on the difference between being an American and being an American citizen. As long as we kill the American citizens overseas, it's not at all the same thing, is it?
You're always free to make the argument that the enemies of the CIA are crackpots, but it isn't possible to make the argument "not even the enemies of the CIA accuse them of something _this_ bad". They are accused of managing domestic political assassinations!
It is so weird that libertarians took the side of a violent pedo cult. They were clearly the bad guys who killed their own members. They started shooting and locked their members in a burning building, aside from out of control contrarianism there is no possible real way to think that the ATF bare any moral responsibility.
1. If you believe that rights are only for good people, then well, you're on the same side as the ACLU I guess, but you don't actually believe in the concept of "rights."
2. I understand that there's no way you'll be convinced that The Branch Davidians didn't commit mass suicide, but can you explain why you have any faith in what the ATF say happened, especially when David Chipman as late as 2021 was still telling obvious lies, claiming that the Davidians shot down helicopters, etc? Do you still believe that thetear gas was non-flammable?
You said: "It is so weird that libertarians took the side of a violent pedo cult" the (obvious) answer has to do with civil rights. Which admittedily is a "weird" thing to be concerned with if you don't believe they exist.
And then you said: "They were clearly the bad guys who killed their own members." which leads to the mechanism by which the conflagration occurred, i.e. pumping in combustible gas. Which goes again to your statement that "there is no possible real way to think that the ATF bare any moral responsibility."
Still wondering if there's any reason for that last categorial statement other than blind faith in the LEO/government.
David Koresh jogged through Waco every morning at the same time. If the ATF wanted to apprehend him, they easily could have without putting on the jackboots.
There's a graph from Scott's old Against Hijacking Utopia post showing the Russian GDP over time: https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/soviet_gdp.png . It seems like GDP fell by 50% under Yeltsin and then doubled back to the original again under Putin by 2007. Even if these statistics are partly fake, it seems like despite him handing half the jobs to his mates, Putin somehow got the Russian economy going again. If so, that may be another point why he was able to consolidate power.
In mid-90s to early 00s Russia was essentially ruled by bandits on local level, pretty much everywhere.
It's hard to do business when at any point you can get raided and held at a gunpoint. A related anecdote: when two bands could not agree who would "protect" the company my father was working for at the time, me and my mother ended up being kidnapped. Thankfully situation got resolved without anyone getting seriously hurt, but you know, not exactly a great experience. And that was in the middle of Moscow, in late 90s.
Putins wrestled power from them, you can say he monopolized the racket and made it less obvious. Most of people who were involved in bands either died, went to jail or switched sides (and now work in various official positions). While far from ideal, it made doing business in Russia less of a suicidal endevour.
Another thing to understand is that Russian economy was severely mismanaged both by late Soviet goverment and by early Russian goverment, so it would be fairly hard to do worse at the time when Putin can to power. Expected result of no interventions at all should probably be positive in that situation. It's entirely plausible that Putin's actions were on net negative, but other positve dynamics offset that difference (switch to capitalistic system, western investements, increased international trade, increased opportunities for enterpreneurs, various side-effects of global technological progress, and so on, most of which can't really be attribited to Putin in any meaningfull way).
Notice that some countries' GDP grew much more in the same time frame, the US and China being probably most obvious examples.
But I must admit that I'm a total ignoramus when it comes to economics, so I'm probably missing quite a lot here. I'm just trying to say that's a rather complicated issue.
Thank you for the insight and for sharing your experience.
Scott finishes by asking "How did it happen, and could it happen here?". The two points he listed, while true, I feel they don't tell the full story - if someone can move a country from sort-of anarchy with local gangs fighting all the time to a dictatorship where there's one strong guy in charge, I can imagine a lot of people - including what was left of the middle class - might see that as the lesser evil at the time. I agree with you it would make doing business easier even if the other economic policies are net-negative, or at least not as good as someone else might have managed.
On a more positive note, it does suggest that America is not anywhere close to being taken over in that particular way though - we'd have had to completely go through with the whole defund-the-police idiocy to have a chance at producing anything like a comparable bandit wars situation.
the amount of anarchy in 90s Russia vs 00s Russia is overstated and is part of Putin's 'bad 90s' narrative. Yes, the power has been more centralized over years, but that's just how the police and special services kept up with the time and got most businesses in their hands. Putin has never been tough on crime, even declaratively, as he was tough on rogue businessmen etc. He is part of cleptocracy with some kgb flavor, and was very ineffective in economy, trillions of dollars didn't get Russia anything remote of modern infrastructure or even army, which was his top priority.
> I do think it’s a valid question whether, even if the allegations against Trump are fair, we ought not to make them, as part of a norm of making it hard to investigate enemies of the regime.
The counterpoint to this is that if the norm is "never pursue allegations against politicians of the opposite side, no matter how serious", that also weakens democracy, because it means politicians can essentially do whatever while in charge and have no retribution to fear even after they leave power. This is particularly critical here since Trump's alleged crimes are specifically about violating important parts of the democratic process (or, well, trying to), and doing other things which went against his duties and responsibilities as part of his job (such as being very cavalier with secret information).
The balance is hard because of course "whenever some guy leaves power, the next guy tries to find whatever dirt he can on him and puts him under trial" is not a healthy dynamic, but neither is Nixon's "if the President does it, it means it's not illegal" approach. There really is no other way than keeping powers separate, having checks and balances, and trying to stick to the actual rule of law as well as reasonably possible.
ISTM there's a big problem when prosecutors end up taking the decision of whom will be president from the voters, particularly on crimes that require a novel claim of law from the prosecution or that look like stuff that most powerful people could probably be charged on. The decision of whom will be president should be in the hands of the voters, not prosecutors or even judges/juries.
There are cases where the need to punish a serious crime overrides this, but (as a not-that-informed observer) I don't think any of the three cases against Trump now qualify. Even the classified document case seems like no further harm can be done (the documents have ben seized) and there's not really a useful deterrence thing happening here because the situation is so unusual. (If Biden hadn't revoked Trump's clearance, there would be no crime, right?)
Trump is now being indicted on conspiracy charges over trying to overthrow the election; that *definitely* looks like something that should be punished.
Honestly I think everything should be free game - though I can see the practical limits to it, as in, judicial power can be abused or corrupted, I think as a principle, the voters can as well choose among the pool of citizens who just have a clean criminal record. There's far less important jobs that you can turned away from for having the tiniest stain on your reputation than "man who has control of the entire country, including the most powerful military in the world". But I can at least see that theoretically there's a problem here. But Trump has absolutely gone beyond the pale, and IMO in giving him enough benefit of the doubt to start counting as "oh but maybe the judiciary is overreaching" here is way past the point of reason. TBF I'm talking the election stuff here mostly (since he's not being indicted for the Ukraine thing too, the one from the first impeachment, which was ALSO despicable); the secret documents thing mostly I find baffling as an indicator of his character than particularly dangerous. As in, it IS theoretically dangerous and criminally negligent, I don't think he was necessarily doing actual damage with it. Still, it's the sort of thing that would get you fired from much less important positions. I think the clearance is revoked automatically upon leaving the job? Biden merely revoked his right to receive security briefings, that I know of. You don't have any special "keep top secret documents as a memento" rights as a former president, as it should be, since those are supposed to be still used and available.
My general point is that we already are RIDICULOUSLY lenient with public charges, and we probably need to balance that a little if anything. Again, any of us can do a job that doesn't involve having a nuclear weapons button and be subject to a lot more scrutiny than this guy, apparently. Politics shouldn't be dominated by courts but right now this is way to the other end of the spectrum, where people are even questioning if a former president should be indictable at all. That's not even supposed to be a question.
Not sure if this is within your content policies, but it seems to me that if you want to cover someone like Putin, presumably reading more than one book is a good idea. Especially if that one book is written by a they/them Jewish journalist? Presumably, there is some christian gentile somewhere who wrote a biography from another perspective. Putin apparently wrote a book about himself in 2000 (https://www.amazon.com/First-Person-Astonishingly-Self-Portrait-President/dp/1586480189). Of course, I imagine it's full of lies and omissions, but maybe still worth reading.
Searching Amazon gives you books by Anna Revell and Philip Short, for starters, both of whom seem to have the usual pronouns at least. Other commenters have agreed that Gessen is definitely biased (for example Western fleecing of Russia and the fact Putin cleaned up the economy somewhat after the awful nineties aren't mentioned), but why jump straight to Putin himself, who like any politician is going to do a lot of lying and dissembling?
As usual for these sorts of posts, the Gell-Mann amnesia hits hard. Primakov wasn't a "communist opposition leader", he was another KGB goon leading a rival blob of unprincipled crooks and thieves. Russia wasn't "invading" Chechnya, it was quelling a rebellion in a province that had been a part of the country for more than a century. Members of the lower house of the Parliament are still (nominally) elected by the public. And these are falsehoods easily spotted off-hand by anyone who has more than passing knowledge of Russia, doubtlessly a thorough fact-check would reveal many more. But then again, the purpose of such books isn't rigorous analysis, it's vibes-based propaganda. The 'Russia bad' bottom line is taken for granted in the West anyway, and there's much more public demand for dramatic fiction than for getting details accurately.
Yeah, the bit about Primakov also stuck me as wrong. And let's not forget, 90's being what they were, there were no really "investigative journalists" in Russia - just people who were hired by the other gang to write a hit piece, truth be damned (or at least heavily twisted to serve the needs). Maybe in America a man who offends all sides might still be preserved by his reputation and fame, but in Russia it got you killed and people just shrugged and moved on, so writing people either died or chose their protector and served him well.
Does it? Searching for the word "invade" and related terms, I only get the following results:
"On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding contract, and called any secession "legally void". He had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but said that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property,[130] including forts, arsenals, mints, and customhouses that had been seized by the Southern states."
"Realizing that Washington could not intervene in Mexico as long as the Confederacy controlled Texas, France invaded Mexico in 1861."
"Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading Kentucky and retreat due to lack of logistical support and lack of infantry recruits for the Confederacy in that state."
"Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin–Nashville Campaign."
"Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory to win but only needed to fight a defensive war to convince the North that the cost of winning was too high."
So of the five uses of the term, one is summarising Lincoln's inaugural address, one is referring to a completely different war, and the other three are all referring to Confederate forces entering Union-held territory.
You appear to have forgotten to search for "invasion", which I would consider to be almost the same word. There are 11 results for "inva":
"During a brief invasion [of Kentucky] by Confederate forces in 1861..."
"Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion of the North with the Maryland Campaign."
"Antietam is considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North"
"Gen. Hooker was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade during Lee's second invasion of the North"
"Leonidas Polk's invasion of Columbus ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned it against the Confederacy. "
"Bragg's second invasion of Kentucky in the Confederate Heartland Offensive included initial successes..."
This doesn't affect your point; every reference to invading in that article has the Confederates doing the invading. I can't imagine what Joshua M was thinking. But you managed to undercount uses of the term by a huge margin.
Actually, no, it was a very likely series of events. After Yeltsin's corruption and weakness, a strong hand was much in demand. If not Putin, some other man would step up to provide it. Voters wouldn't support anyone else, even in completely free and honest elections. Putin's main opponent in his first elections, Moscow's mayor Luzhkov, for example, was a big proponent of Russian Crimea by any means. He might have done things a little differently in details, but a lot of things that happened in 21th century in Russia were a long time coming, and generally welcomed by population.
And no, this isn't the worst timeline. Some stuff proposed by some of "opposition in exile" would be that, like fragmenting the country further into several entities. Or maybe a radical nationalist leader - things with migrants being what they are, a man proposing severe actions against Southern gastarbaiters actually would have a chance of winning elections against Putin, who's seen too pro-business on these problems.
Actually, most of Putin's tenure wasn't quite so bad. Russians remember earlier times as the "worst possible". Plenty of countries have gotten worse dictators (though the absolute worst might not last long and leave a legacy of instability & coups/civil wars as each dictator gets replaced in turn).
"I think the allegations against Trump are mostly fair and there aren’t a lot of other, unfair ones I know about...the investigations of Nixon and Clinton went further, on less serious charges"
This is one of those statements that's made every now and then on this blog that, for me, puts into question the entirety of what Scott has ever written. Just immediately, Nixon and Clinton were never charged with anything. Nobody besides Trump has ever been charged. Are we using "charged" as a synonym for "accused of things we don't like"?
Without getting too deep into this because I have something else I want to talk about, we can take an example. Trump's first indictment was about paying hush money to Stormy Daniels in the process of committing another crime. It is the fact that it was in the process of committing another crime that is supposed to make Trump's actions actionable. So what is that other crime? Alvin Bragg does not tell us, assuring us that he is not legally required to. The very idea that this is in fact "mostly fair" is unbelievably ludicrous.
Anyway. What I really want to talk about is FBI. It's not true that their enemies never accuse them of the "tiniest fraction" of what Putin and his security service were doing. Off the top of my head there was the Waco incident, which detractors such as myself would describe as the FBI and others, murdering a bunch of women and children by setting the building on fire and deliberately blocking off all the exits, doing this only after they systematically tortured the building's occupants. Then most of the media heralded this as a great victory, and nobody cared until long after it was relevant. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but it's hardly a non-existent accusation.
If you want bigger, consider something I don't subscribe to but which is rather common, the "Bush did 9/11" sentiment. Generally nobody thinks George W Bush personally flew two planes into some buildings. Rather they think him and his intelligence apparatus enacted it, or at the very least knew about it and allowed it to happen.
Or we could go back further. Isn't it pretty common among some to say that Reagan and the FBI deliberately created the crack epidemic in the 1980's to target black people? Or how about the assassination of MLK, or Malcolm X? There is a presidential candidate right now who publicly and loudly accuses the American security apparatus of having assassinated American President Robert F Kennedy. This particular theory has become so common even I can feel myself getting pressured into believing it through sheer commonality.
I think the investigation into Clinton did cross over from "pursuit of the public interest" into "obsessive quest for personal vengeance" and I didn't approve.
I think the same has happened with Trump but it's even more concerning given that the Democratic Party seems currently to have pinned *everything* on "We're not Trump" and "Trump is the New Fascist Dictator in waiting, we ain't kidding" (the Washington Post still has their "Democracy dies in darkness" masthead every time they email me about taking out a subscription).
Instead of letting him fade back into irrelevance over the past three years of the Biden Administration, they are keeping him alive by constantly drumming up fear, and by this pursuit of various charges, which pursuit seems to me to have crossed over into "obsessive quest for vengeance": how dare he have snatched the rights of the Anointed Empress when it was Her Turn Now? How dare he be popular?
I don't know if they think that anti-Trumpism won for them last time so it's still a winning strategy, but the Clinton campaign seems to have made the mistake of pumping up Trump in the first instance as the Republican nominee because they were sure they could beat him, and that blew up in their faces. The current Democrats pumping up Trump as the boogeyman for them to beat is also a mistaken strategy; if they really are worried he is a possible populist Mussolini, then squelching all attention paid to him other than "oh, that has-been?" is better, rather than making him the Number One Rival and getting people to think "Huh, maybe he *does* have a chance of beating those guys, maybe I should stick with him!"
Whether he's done criminal things, I don't know (and the courts have to sort that out) but, for instance, the difference in views online about the classified documents when it's Trump or Biden is striking - Trump stole top-secret documents, Biden did nothing.
At least let it be that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, otherwise you *are* in Putin territory of using the courts to go after your enemies!
I first want to make it clear that it does not concern me who or what is investigated, per se. What concerns me is that between Clinton and Trump, whichever Clinton you mean, only one of these was actually charged with something. That in fact, the same comparison could be made between Trump and literally every other president.
Another thing about the FBI and CIA and such. While some of my examples are untrue conspiracy theories that don't really make any sense to me, the undertaking of (domestic) political assassinations seem to generally be accusations from the past. Is this evidence that they never happened, because they do not happen now? Or is it evidence of an evolving strategy? In this time we're living in, the general consensus is that assassination of political opponents makes martyrs. Why do that then, when you can just bog the opposition down in endless legal disputes for the rest of time? Especially when you've confirmed that a sizable amount of people are going to go with expert consensus and that you just so happen to be the expert consensus?
You may say that it's a mistaken strategy, but the lessons of 2020 make this a real question. What is most important is turnout, so the formula is making sure Trump continues to be Demon-Hitler, because Demon-Hitler increases democratic turnout more than it increases Republican turnout, and so long as turnout overall remains high, Democrats win. That I think, is the thinking here.
> In this time we're living in, the general consensus is that assassination of political opponents makes martyrs. Why do that then, when you can just bog the opposition down in endless legal disputes for the rest of time?
You can misdirect the martyrdom to a cause that you favor. I understand that JFK's assassination was used as a justification for passing civil rights legislation, while his wife complained that in reality he'd been killed by a communist. (When, in a better world, he should have been killed by an anti-civil-rights activist.)
> Trump's first indictment was about paying hush money to Stormy Daniels in the process of committing another crime. [...] So what is that other crime? Alvin Bragg does not tell us [....] unbelievably ludicrous.
No the other crime wasn't the primary crimes. I am not going to watch a Legal Eagle video. If you have watched this video and come away with "the other crime was falsifying business records", you either have misunderstood my question, or Legal Eagle remains incompetent at best, malicious at worst. Or potentially you have misunderstood Legal Eagle.
All crimes charged were dealing with falsifying business records, in this case, in order to pay off Stormy Daniels in ways that constitute federal violations. The question is, why are these felony charges? The reply is, they are charged as felonies because they were in service to another crime. What is the other crime? I did not just make up the idea that Bragg has not told us. This is a quote from him, during his press conference following his indictment.
"Under New York state law it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and intent to conceal another crime. That is exactly what this case is about. Thirty-four false statements made to cover up other crimes."
Again, what is the other crime? Can you find Alvan Bragg explicitly answering this question? I grow quite tired of people making up things to fill in missing information.
Quote: "The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators....The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily."
This sounds like a conspiracy theory on par with "9/11 was an inside job".
It is an unlikely theory because it presupposes a scenario somewhat like the following: Putin and some cronies sit around a table, brainstorming how to improve their popularity come the next election. Someone - let's call him Vlad - says: "How about killing hundreds of innocent countrymen by placing bombs in apartments and then blaming it on terrorists?" To which the others, assuming they are sane people who know a minimum of decision theory, are likely to say things like: "Great idea Vlad, you are always very creative at our meetings. But have you thought of the risks? For starters, dozens of people beside us in this room must be in on this in order for it to work, such as those who place the bombs, and we must be certain they will never talk, ever..." And: "Isn't it easier to simply rig the election?" And so on. (Matt Taibbi wrote a hilarious story along these lines related to the "9/11 was an inside job" conspiracy theory).
Yeah, there have been several operations and assassinations conducted over the years of equal complexity as the apartment bombings, for whom Putin and company are the only likely suspects.
A good argument, I think. It's a bit more possible that the actual line sounded like "It would take a tragedy to unite this nation. And it would be a complete shame if our under-staffed and under-financed security apparatus failed to prevent yet another terrorist plot (of which we had enough happen in the last few years, because apparently Chechens weren't happy to just win the war against federal forces, but continued their terrorist attacks with unclear purposes)". I don't think I ever saw that particular theory pop up, but "letting real terrorists through just that one time" sounds a little more likely than using own security forces. It would take maybe two or three people to pull through (which is still a lot more than "two, if one of them is dead"): somebody would just have to misfile or disregard a report by an underling, just like Stalin, supposedly, disregarded reports about German invasion (we still don't know if he did: some say that there were a report about invasion pretty much every day, so Stalin had no way to know which one of them was true, in a real-life Cry Wolf scenario).
Yeah, I had heard about the apartment bombings, but was surprised at Scott's claim that the standard line in the west is that they were false flags. It's true that I don't remember *much* about the apartment bombings, but I would have thought that if this was the "standard line", that it would have been frequently mentioned whenever people are talking about Putin's relationship with Ramzan Kadyrov (an interesting character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzan_Kadyrov)
It *sounds* like a conspiracy theory on par with "9/11 was an inside job", but as I mentioned elsewhere, four investigators of the apartment bombings ended up dead, one was sent to prison, and one more later claimed to be "the only person publicly accusing the regime of responsibility who had not been killed".
As I often say: things are different in Russia. Even if all these events somehow have another explanation ― things are different in Russia! American conspiracy theorists have a persecution complex; Russian ones ― maybe if they remain alive and unprosecuted, they count their blessings.
Make of that what you wish, but while I believe that there was election fraud, it was never enough to tip the balance in favor of Putin's opponents. He IS really popular outside of big liberal cities, and even there he has enough supporters (you might think the war has changed that, but no - most of those who were against it fled the country to avoid being mobilized, and now I predict Putin's support is higher than ever). That, of course, should come as no surprise - even the harshest dictator usually have to rely on support with a part of population (as well as a big part of elites) to continue his rule, and Putin is quite a populist when he can afford that - he wouldn't go completely against will of people, unless there is no choice (e.g. pension reform that raised pension age: it was very unpopular, but it seems obvious enough that with aging population and stagnating productivity, it was inevitable).
I think this is a decent review and gives a good account of the book. It is interesting to read how Putin rose without trace, as it were, and you do have to wonder why a kid is so determined to become a member of the KGB - maybe there were family stories about Grandpa and what he did/saw/experienced, so young Vlad learned that the best and safest way (and maybe the most patriotic, who knows?) is to become part of the national security apparatus that seems to have the most power and that every Russian ruler needs.
"Putin’s official mother, Maria Putina, was 42 and sickly when he was born. Officially, Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 to Vladimir Putin Sr. and Maria Putina, two middle class laborers who had lost their previous two children in the hellish Nazi siege of Leningrad a decade before."
I think if you've survived the Siege of Leningrad, you have plenty of reason to be sickly in later life. If they had other children previously who had died, then maybe they tried afterwards to have more kids, and it's not impossible for a woman in her early forties to get pregnant. It is strange that there is little about his early life, but whether he scrubbed it (for whatever reason) or whether his family just weren't that notable and nobody had a reason to keep track of one more worker's kid in the mass of workers' kids, who knows?
"The closest MWAF comes to an answer is describing the near-trauma reaction that Putin and his colleagues had when the Soviet Union abandoned them. It suggests that some relic of the KGB ethos or network survived the fall of the USSR, hated its democratic successor, and got reconsolidated by Putin in his FSB. Their loyalty was originally to some sort of spirit-of-the-KGB ethos and not to existing democratic Russia, and it was simple for Putin to transmute that to loyalty to him personally, who promised to restore Soviet-era norms."
I think that's probably it: everything Putin and those around him had known had suddenly collapsed under them, they were left dangling without the ostensible authorities to whom they reported caring a damn about them, so huddling together in a spirit of "we can't trust anyone but ourselves" and putting your group first above the interests of anyone else makes sense. Why the hell should you care about the new 'democratic' Russia, when you know it's sham democracy and you've had proof that if anything goes wrong this time round, nobody is going to look out for you? If, as it seems from what the book says about young Putin, he really had some belief in the KGB, it makes sense for him to try and protect and preserve that, and when he gets into power to make the KGB his in-group, foster personal loyalty to himself rather than the state, and use that.
"Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times."
Oh, that stings! 😁
"The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators."
Entirely possible, whether this was the plan all along, or whether it was just the use of agents provocateurs (which the secret police in Russia had a long tradition of doing, ever since the Csars) finding patsies to egg on into doing something for which a crackdown would then be justified.
See the Dirty War in Northern Ireland, where British security forces infiltrated paramilitaries on both sides and were allegedly complicit in bombings and assassinations:
"So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA. Right now they seem more aligned with the Democratic side of the aisle, so Trump or some future Trump would have a hard time winning their total loyalty. As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. "
Bull Connors was a Democrat. Richard Daley was a Democrat. With the polarisation into Right and Left, on the left there are plenty of "Communism has never been tried!" ideologues who may (or may not) be in a marriage of convenience with the Democrats to get some issues, but really do hope to get power themselves and want the Revolution to come, and are happy to talk about "liberals get the bullet too". They do want a bloody purge of all the wrongthinkers.
I don't trust the Democrats to be any more pure than the Republicans, which means also that I don't think the Republicans are more likely to engage in "Mafia-style killings" regardless of the foofarah around Trump.
And yes, I too would love to know why Putin turned down that particular bribe. Had he been bribed earlier/better by a rival of Berezhovsky? Did he have some plan in mind that a first refusal might get him offered a second, bigger bribe? Was he trying to impress Berezhovsky, as you say?
> a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”
This is incorrect. The chorus contains the words "Срань господня" which is originally a translation of English phrase "Holy shit" or "Holy crap". More direct translation back to English would be "the Lord's shit" (the 's indicates a possessive). The phrase is used to express displeasure at the situation in Russia.
The song is a "punk-prayer" and have religious undertones. It asks the Virgin Mary to relieve us of Putin in it's first line: "Virgin Mary, deliver us from Putin". You can probably see why the government wouldn't like this.
I once knew a Polish guy and a Russian guy who shared a laugh over the name of Sriracha. I believe they were laughing over a similarity to срань, but that doesn't look hugely similar to me - is there another form of the word that brings it closer to Sriracha?
1. The most likely reason why Putin was accepted to the university, in my opinion, is because he was quite decent in sports (his official biography says he twice won city competitions during his university studies), and Soviet / Russian universities sometimes admit and keep mediocre students who are good in sports to score some cookie points with the higher authorities (saw that during my studies myself). For what I know from my dad, who did his university studies in USSR in 70's as well, KGB used to approach students in their second or third year of studies, and they usually tried to enlist the most mediocre ones (which kinda fits Putin's description), so I think it's most likely he was enlisted to KGB while studying.
2. There was a high degree of continuity between KGB and FSB (with FCS in between): for example, two of the heads of FCS / FSB before Putin out of three also had a career in KGB, a better one than Putin had, though.
3. For explanation why Sobchak hired Putin: I heard a story that Sobchak was looking for a loyal subordinate and asked then-chancellor of the university if he had someone on his mind (it makes sense for Sobchak to ask that person, since he spent most of his career in the university), and the chancellor recommended Putin. It's worth noting that Putin was quite loyal to Sobchak and even helped him to flee Russia in 1997, when Sobchak was investigated for bribery. The death of Sobchak in early 2000 is, however, very mysterious and foul play was suspected.
4. For the search of Yeltsin's successor: the search was quite active from circa 1998 and many people were considered for the role (Nemtsov, Stepashin, the now-forgotten Aksenenko, to name a few). I think Putin got the job for two reasons: first, he was lucky to get not the financial crisis (which Nemtsov got), but the rebound from it, and second, he got the rally-around-the-flag effect from 2 Chechen War beginning.
5. The apartments bombing story is extremely murky, but I tend to see no conspiracy here, at least because by the time of the bombings Chechen rebels have already invaded Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Dagestan_(1999)), which already makes an ample casus belli (and Chechnya was already bombed in retaliation). The strange story about the Volgodonsk bombing was due to another explosion in Volgodonsk on September 12 (which was due to the mafia wars).
6. I'd say that the key movement in solidifying Putin's power was not the electoral fraud in 2004 presidential election, but the parliament election in 2003 (where both fraud and spoiler parties helped to dilute opposition votes and gave the ruling party the supermajority later used to remove most of the election procedures and rig the election rules in favor of the ruling party).
7. For the culture wars: I think Putin uses it as a tool. Majority of Russians hardly believe in God, but find some kind of church desecration (and what Pussy Riot did would qualify in people's mind) to be disgusting. Thus, Pussy Riot action put the anti-Putin coalition in a kind of trap: on the one hand, their persecution was absolutely lawless (the corresponding penal code article is extremely broad in formulation, but is normally used to persecute people who aggresively brandish their weapons but don't attack anyone), but on the other hand, the majority of Russian citizens were not happy with the Pussy Riot actions. This allowed Putin to rebrand himself as a savior of the "traditional values" (whatever they are) and claim that the anti-Putin coalition wants to destroy them, getting over the general weariness of Russians with the ruling party (which could be noted from the 2011 parliamentary election: many of the regions where United Russia had bad performance do not have big cities in them).
Afterwards, this tool became too handy not to use.
8. Why this couldn't happen in US? The key reason, in my opinion, is not because CIA and FBI wield less power than FSB, but because the Russian Constitution of 1993 gives exceeding powers to the president even in its original form. By itself, it was a result of the constitutional crisis of 1993 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_crisis), where Yeltsin first illegally dissolved the parliament, then ignored the decision of the constitutional court and his impeachment by the parliament to bomb the parliament into submission and later dissolution. I'd say that this coup was the key blow to the Russian democracy, all that happened afterwards inside Russia were just consequences (which obviously does not absolve the people who brought the consequences into life).
That was what I would have guessed! There are probably many staff who would be equally notable as a cook! The thing I found interesting here was the connection to Rasputin, whose nominal connection I had noticed before.
> Why were the security services so pliant? The closest MWAF comes to an answer is describing the near-trauma reaction that Putin and his colleagues had when the Soviet Union abandoned them. It suggests that some relic of the KGB ethos or network survived the fall of the USSR, hated its democratic successor, and got reconsolidated by Putin in his FSB. Their loyalty was originally to some sort of spirit-of-the-KGB ethos and not to existing democratic Russia, and it was simple for Putin to transmute that to loyalty to him personally, who promised to restore Soviet-era norms.
I think this is too ideological and not personal enough; I think governments have historically looked like 'stationary bandits', or clubs of oppressors who extract rents from the oppressed. It doesn't have to be the case that they agreed on ideology or ideals in order to successfully work together to keep extracting rents.
I imagine it would be based on how the FBI handled the investigations on Clinton, Trump, and Hunter Biden. Could also be based on the number of federal employees that are Democrats.
Scott could possibly be wrong about the CIA, but honestly, the Democrats are so Hawkish these days, that I don't think he is.
Police vote ~90% R. The FBI is probably a little more D because they have more education but it's hard to believe it's a majority in the environment of "defund the police." The way the FBI handled the investigations into Trump and Clinton was to keep quiet on Trump until after the 2016 election while throwing a bomb at the Clinton campaign in the last week that plausibly swung the election.
Those charts are strange, and I think misleading, because they rely on how people choose to self-report their employer and occupation.
Let's call pure grey 0N, grey-blue 1B, light blue 2B, grey-red 1R, and so on.
- The Navy is the same 2B as DOD, and only slightly smaller.
- Army and Air Force are both 0N, and the same size as DOD and Navy respectively.
- "US Military" is 1R, and much, *much* smaller than the other 3 (are these scaled by diameter or area?)
- Marines are 3R and the same size as "US Military"
- "US Government" is 3B and only slightly larger than DOD.
- Department of Homeland Security is 1B.
- "Military Personnel" (presumably people actually serving in the military, but possibly not all of them) is 1B.
I think the main thing the by-employer chart is telling us is that there's a partisan skew in how government employees identify their employer. That is, declaring your affiliation with the "U.S. Government" is a very "blue tribe" thing to do (bluer than any single agency! bluer than "State of California!"), while declaring your affiliation with the "U.S. Military" is "red tribe" signaling.
There's a deeper pattern that I'm having trouble describing. I think the best I can do is to say that institution-based language ("government," "department of") codes more blue while organization/function-based language ("military," "Marines") codes more red.
Given that the Department of Justice (home of the FBI) is entirely absent from the top-100 list despite having more employees than the DOD and USDA, my guess would be that DOJ employees are disproportionately affiliating with their specific agencies. And their specific agencies code quite red even beyond the broader pattern: they're all law enforcement and criminal justice.
Good insights, thank you. I had noticed that some options on the chart seemed redundant, but didn't pick up on how different political views might affect the decision of which employment category to identify with in the first place.
How did the FBI hand the election to Trump. They could have easily indicted and convicted his opponent. Instead they gave her a pass. Then her aid's ex husband got caught being a child pornographer who also had classified emails on his laptop that proved that she had obstructed justice even harder than they already knew. They then tried to sit on that information, but eventually found out that Rudy Guiliani had the story and was going to drop it, so they tried to frontrun Rudy and downplay the newly discovered crimes.
Considering the leadership of both organizations is politically appointed by the president, its probably fair to say the FBI and CIA are more aligned with which ever party controls the presidency.
Not sure if this is what Scott meant, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
That's not unreasonable, although the current FBI director is still Christopher Wray, appointed by Trump in 2017 after firing James Comey (also a Republican, appointed by Obama).
Not really. Since 1935 there has been exactly one FBI director who was a democrat and he was only an acting director for all of 3 months. Even democratic presidents tend to appoint republican FBI directors because the FBI careerists are overwhelmingly republican.
Sure but to me that just further supports the idea that the FBI/CIA could not take control of political activities in the US like the KGB/FSB is thought to have in Russia. That democratic presidents are appointing leaders who are not just their cronies is a good thing and means the decision is being made with at least hand waving towards objectivity/meritocracy.
> Even democratic presidents tend to appoint republican FBI directors because the FBI careerists are overwhelmingly republican.
Then why do Republican presidents usually appoint Republicans as directors (or equivalent) of other federal agencies? Democrats are widely agreed to outnumber Republicans within most federal agencies. What makes the FBI different?
Wait, the CIA being neocons makes you think they are aligned with *Democrats*?!?! What do you think "neocon" means? Do you think that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are aligned with Democrats?
Wait, are *any* of those people aligned with Democrats? They all campaign against Trump, but I haven’t heard of any one of them supporting any Democrat for any other office. Trump is anti-neocon, but that doesn’t mean that the Republican Party is, or that neocons are anti-Republican.
I also don’t know how you square how the two parties’ current positions on the Ukraine invasion with a belief that Republicans are still the more neocon-aligned party.
This is helpful. Though I note that Frum is saying what he *wants* Democrats to do so that he will *stay* aligned with them.
On Ukraine, I think that Republicans are where you find both more taste for escalation and more taste for isolation, while Democrats are more fine with the status quo. I think the escalationists are the neocons.
> Do you think that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are aligned with Democrats?
Yes.
I never looked into it much, and a quick web search doesn't corroborate, but a hardcore Democrat I know was trying to tell me how awful Trump was during the 2020 election cycle, and proudly boasted how all the Bushes and Cheneys etc were speaking at the big Democrat election convention.
He was trying to say: "Trump is so awful, that all of the sane Republicans are united against him."
My takeaway was "Oh, Democrats are working with Neocons now."
That doesn’t sound like the neocons are aligned with Democrats - it sounds like they’re against Trump. The way you can tell the difference is by seeing whether they support a Democrat for any other office than President.
You obviously know absolutely nothing about the neocons. They are a school of thought that started with former Trotskyites who thought the Democrats weren't stern enough Cold Warriors. Outside of warmongering, they are generally left libertarians.
They were historically Trotskyites, yes, but was there anything left-aligned remaining about them by the 2000s other than the idea that democracy is better than authoritarianism? They weren't culture warriors, and they weren't particularly interested in higher taxes or social services.
FSB have a big inheritance from KGB, and in some way it related to current Ukrainian disaster.
Story is, that in USSR times GRU (main intelligence bureau) was super strictly forbidden from working inside country. So, when Union dissolved, they had zero assets and competency inside now-independent states - but KGB had, and by some institutional logic this foreign affairs were kept in FSB kingdom.
Skipping thirty years, it turned out that secret police and foreign intelligence require different skills, and based on completely wrong assumptions war have started. (My opinion - part of wrongness of this assumptions and many general mistakes of russian politic on post-soviet space - is that FSB wanted to keep appearance of new republics as "our backyard" to not lost this part of job and resources)
Also yes, Gessen is definitely a simpatisant of one of sides of Russian politics ("liberals", who, for american reader, is much more lib-rights than lib-lefts), and push theirs narratives - some critic of "FSB explodes homes" here in comments, also I don't think that 2004 election was rigged so heavy - Putin was popular, really popular. State Duma and local elections were much dirtier.
Based on this review, I don't think that book gives justice to how Putin took over Russia. Moreover, imho that story is well known.
First, I'd argue that Yeltsin was also kind of a dictator, just incompetent one compared to Putin. For example, he sent an army against the parliament once during a constitutional dispute. Yea, it was a parliament controlled by pro-Soviet communists, but still.
In the 90s, living standards in Russia plunged compared to even the late Soviet Union times, plus, there was a huge crime wave and horrible war with Chechnya (which Russia lost). For first years of Putin's rule, there was a growth, improvements in security situation, and also something like reconquest of Chechnya - admittedly accomplished by putting friendly native warlord in charge of the rebellious province.
Growth was at least partially fueled by a global increase in oil and other commodity prices, but it should be noted that Putin's Russia weathered global financial crisis relatively well, and it got back to growth, until another fall of oil prices in 2014, which was by this time combined with first (post-Soviet) Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, living standards in Russia stagnated, but on a level which is highest in Russian history.
Putin could've decided to use political capital he acquired due to improvement in the quality of life of average Russians to move the country toward liberal democracy (which it wasn't under Yeltsin); instead he decided to make himself a dictator for life. But I don't think it is any great mystery to why; when given an option to be lifelong dictators, great many people would gladly exercise it.
Of course, there is a separate question on why was Putin specifically and not someone else chosen as Yeltsin's successor, but that is the realm of kremlinology, which is not a science with a good reputation, and I doubt that Gessen's explanation is especially insightful; it is also imho kind of beside point of this series.
> Yeltsin was also kind of a dictator, just incompetent one compared to Putin
Were there things that he tried to do and failed where simply being better at dictatorship would help him (without higher oil prices)? He had an interesting idea what «checks and balances» means, apparently he considered it proper to make sure different parts of the government are offsetting each other, but that was his explicitly acknowledged preference.
The fact that Yeltsin was an unstable alcoholic, while Putin is not, and that first Chechen war under Yeltsin went far worse for Russia than second Chechen war under Putin makes me primed to believe Putin is more competent. Also same point as about the Chechen war might be said about 1997 emerging market crisis (disaster for Russia) vs 2008 crisis (also a disaster for Russia but less so).
Yeltsin also largely failed to establish meaningful mutually beneficial relations with EU and especially China, which imho was both important and possible for Russia in the 90s. China was isolated for a few years after Tiennanmen massacre, but apparently (checks sources) Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin took until 1996 to meet and establish a cooperation agreement which was moreover not very expansive (first meeting between Jiang and US president was in 1997). Pipeline network between Russia and China is underdeveloped to this day. Until recently, main source of natural gas for China was Turkmenistan.
But you make a good point that correlation doesn't mean causation, and maybe had Putin been president in the 90s with low oil prices, things would be similarly bad regardless of his sobriety.
We do have a bipartisan norm of not going after office holders. Disproportionately this protects Republican officials because they do more illegal stuff. EG, Ford pardons Nixon; Bush (41) pardons Iran-Contra crimes; the Bush (43) torture program not investigated; approximately any national security whistle-blower / document leak case: whistle-blower is intensely persecuted, no action regarding the actual content and decision-makers behind it. Also, SCotUS ruling in McDonnell (VA - Gov) case makes it immensely challenging to prosecute corruption, and this could be fixed by amending the statute (ruling was statutory not constitutional), but no serious movement toward this.
It is pretty reasonable to say that a literal coup attempt exceeds the parameters of this norm.
Very surprised to hear that FBI and CIA broadly side with Democrats. I think they mostly work towards being independent (which seems to work pretty well see whistle-blowers above), but if there's a bias it's the other way. Unless maybe specifically in context of "Democrats vs Trump"? (Which is principally a matter of subordination to elected branches vs independence?) FBI Directors have ~always been registered Republicans and if they had political operative history it was in GOP-aligned orgs. CIA has a long history of interfering against left-ist regimes elsewhere, primarily under GOP administrations.
Mostly I think their story is a red herring, and/or reflects on Trump and Trumpism v.a.v dictatorship- the thing they did was have political opinions, not take political actions; treating political opinions as a loyalty test is the faulty action, not privately having the opinions. I think it's pretty self-evident that a security service where everyone is on the same political team is an institutionally more dangerous security service, and that's what Trump et al were advocating when they blew this story up.
TBC I don't think it's unreasonable of FBI to have policy about this nor for Mueller to have removed Strzok from his investigation, appearance of impropriety is bad and worth avoiding, but it is not the case that there was evidence of misconduct/actual impropriety (ie getting into bad things), just violations of policy (ie, slipping the fence that maintains safe & clear perimeter around bad things).
I would expect some right-ward skew in political registration/preferences among FBI employees (by analogy to cops) but not enough to make Democratic partisans 'atypical', and not enough for it to be surprising if particular offices or teams or however sub-groups are structured happen to skew the other way. But either way they're not a compelling example of a risk that the FBI will be co-opted to political purposes by a Democrat because a) Democrats aren't trying to do this, "secure my power base by using gov't agencies to attack my political opponents" is not actually a move Democrats go for at this juncture, and b) Strzok was active in the Clinton email investigation
Read the source, he pushed for the press conference (about re-opening the investigation) that is popularly considered to have tanked Clinton's campaign. That effect was predictable. It's evidence against the claim that his personal opinions biased his execution of the job.
Also, you can't manage to interact with anything else I said?
You ... want to make the distinction that a coup has been charged but not convicted? Sure, that's true; but it was clearly a coup, I'm not waiting to hear whether a jury of irrational buffoons is convinced of that.
You ... are thinking something else? By all means please elaborate.
In summary, the thing he & his team were trying to do was delay the EC certification so they could convince people to change the results. One way they did this was by inducing people to invade the capitol building, ie 'the insurrection'.
The indictment has no evidence Trump or his team told people to riot in the Capitol building. If you're going with "Trump lied to his supporters and organized a protest that turned into a riot, therefore he should go to jail," then you'd have to jail every black lives matter organizer.
This is true, but the indictment is not focused on the riot. It's focused on conspiracy to commit three other crimes (the riot kind of features in conspiracy #2 though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbIhNmoZLJQ
The short discussion at the end of the FBI seems way over-indexed on an image of the bureau gleaned from the last 5 years of NYT headlines. I'd argue that COINTELPRO (most obviously the Hampton assassination), the Green Scare, Waco, and more recently the assassination of Michael Reinoehl (albeit by U.S. Marshals, not FBI) amount to much more than the "tiniest fraction" of the FSB's butchery.
I agree it's laughable that the Democratic Party, which can't bring itself to abolish the filibuster to confirm a few judges even after its opponents freely made up and broke norms to nab Garland's seat, is going to do DEI fascism. But there's absolutely a path from the American state's consensus around fanatical, violent anti-communism/anti-antifascism to Trump's proposal to steal an election and "use the Insurrection Act" to put down the resulting "riots", and this path could have been much clearer if Trump hadn't made the unforced error of setting himself against the FBI's self-important self-image out of pique.
All the examples you've given of FBI brutality seem like them being trigger-happy when dealing with people they were sent to deal with for good reasons, not them deliberately targeting the most effective enemies of the regime.
COINTELPRO definitely targeted many completely nonviolent and groups purely because they opposed the regime. Wiretapping MLK and sending him blackmail recordings encouraging him to kill himself is the best-known example, but Hoover also targeted and made efforts to interfere with the operations of practically all anti-Vietnam-War organizations; the civil-rights-focused National Lawyers Guild; a bunch of feminist student groups and academics (here's an interesting read from one who FOIA'd her file: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20459215); and every American communist or socialist political organization.
That said, you're right that FBI brutality and FBI overreach haven't overlapped very much: the FBI didn't do the Kent State massacre, for example. But I think the possibility of their overlapping in the future ranks pretty high among existential risks to American democracy.
Were the victims of Putin's false flag attacks really the most effective enemies of the regime? Or the random investigative journalists who all ended up dead or imprisoned? I'm not sure that's the standard.
Good review. Was mostly tracking this post, up until the last 4 words of the last footnote.
> But I’m not sure there has ever been such a norm [against investigating the enemies of the regime] - the investigations of Nixon and Clinton went further, *on less serious charges*.
The charges against Clinton were less serious, certainly, bordering on "unserious". But the charges against Nixon were both shocking and important. That's not to contest the point that we ought to investigate fair and important charges against public officials or recently-ex public officials, regardless of whether it's unseemly and we'd prefer to not. But we can't make light of what Nixon did (e.g. turning the IRS into a political weapon), because it presaged what Trump tried to do and is still trying to do (and his allies still accusing Biden of trying to do it, without evidence, as a form of projection).
I think the point is more that Nixon, for all his underhanded behavior, didn't marshal a group of his supporters to try and revere an election he lost.
Pussy Riot annoyed the [bleep] out of me, so even with strong dislike and disapproval of Putin, even I thought he was right to tell them off for being silly attention-grabbers. Prison sentences were maybe a bit much, but a hefty fine would have been proportionate.
So you can probably imagine how this went down well with Russians who were (1) genuinely religious or (2) fed-up of these kinds of manufactured pop group outrage bait. Going by the Wikipedia account they seem to have been the usual blend of anarachist/collectivist 'artists' high on their own self-importance and who degenerated into purity spiral in-fighting and splitting off to make money off the notoriety from the cathedral arrests:
"The more I think about this fact, the more confused I am. There is no record of Spiridon passing any advantage on to his son Vladimir Sr, or of the Spiridon connection further Vladimir Jr’s career. It seems like a total coincidence. But surely the chance that the grandson of the chef of one Russian dictator becoems the next Russian dictator is millions-to-one. I can only appeal to Pyramid-and-Garden style reasoning about how in a big world, we should expect many such coincidences."
One of the benefits of having a famous/bigshot ancestor, even if he doesn't contribute directly to your upbringing or pass on other direct benefits, is simply that it gives you the knowledge and affirmation that you, too, can one day be important in your own way, that "important" people are in the end just regular people. I mean, that's one of the big initial hurdles of becoming something; simply realizing that you *can* become something, that you're not just destined to being in the same rough social role as your lineage of peasant ancestors; I suspect this alone explains more than a bit of why wealth, fame and power tend to be in the same families.
> So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA.
????
Its public knowledge that the cia sells drugs, and when a intelligence agency sells drugs it gets a "black budget", where part of its operations is separate from any sort of oversight, with people trained to kill, some hazing and you get yourself a deep state in the original pure sense. No different from the kgb surviving the end of communism.
The biggest difference here is that maybe the cia facing an americain public that's well armed, can't set up an extortion racket outside the courts, to then conquer the courts and all of society.
The problem with calling Masha Gessen, "a journalist" is that she has zero pretense of objectivity.
She hates Putin and Russia as it exists today very openly.
So the question anyone reading her work should be constantly asking is: is any given thing she says real, or is it a Chalabi situation?
For those not familiar: it is 100% clear that the machinations of one Ahmed Chalabi feeding "Iraq intelligence" into the US government served as probably the single strongest plank for the US invasion of Iraq under the (now openly acknowledged) false pretext of WMDs. And it worked out very well for Mr. Chalabi - he wound up in a term as Prime Minister of Iraq as well as various other ministerial positions.
I hate people who take away free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, use corruption as a form of government, and... *checks notes* get hundreds of thousands of people killed.
You suggest objectivity requires condoning such things? And that Masha Gessen was rewarded handsomely like Mr. Chalabi for... for what, criticizing Putin?
> I absolutely believe there are factions among the Democrats who would love to restrict free speech, pack the Supreme Court, divert Congressional powers to the executive branch, and lots of other creepy authoritarian things. But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up.
Conspicuously missing from this list: anyone named Clinton.
Actually, in this context, the Belarusian one seems like a parallel to the allegations that Gessen makes about all the people meeting mysterious accidents after crossing Putin (except that we do have a couple of cases where definitely it is good advice not to go drinking tea with old pals from the Old Country who turn up for a visit).
Also, Chuck Schumer said on Rachel Maddow that Trump should stop criticizing the intelligence agencies because they "have six ways from Sunday to get you." He basically did the mafia "nice business you have here, it would be a shame if some one vandalized it."
I wonder if somewhere along the line, an established power broker (Yeltsin maybe?) favoured Putin mainly because he seemed like a non-entity who would be easy to control.
I can think of two or three examples in history where the same was assumed of a parvenu, but turned out to be a spectacularly bad misjudgement!
One such would be Cicero and co scoffing between themselves at the idea that young Octavian, "that boy" as Cicero called him, would ever be anything but a pliant leader. (Cicero wasn't just a long winded orator - He had been consul at some point, and was thus a senior senator.) But Octavian soon morphed into Caesar Augustus!
Another example of course was Hindenburg and his generation promoting and enabling Adoph Hitler, not because they liked him, quite the opposite, but because they were confident they could control him.
A third example is Stalin. He was regarded as a competent, ideologically middle-of-the road administrator by others in the Party, compared to his main competitor for the leadership: the left-wing firebrand Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army. (... And although Stalin turned out more ruthless than expected, killing most old Party comrades plus millions in Gulags, Trotsky would probably have been even more ruthless and killed even more. Plus, Trotsky - unlike Stalin - was not content to limit the revolution to one country ("socialism in one country"), but wanted a world revolution, i. e. setting the whole world on fire. So the old Party comrades probably made as rational a decision as was possible, under the circumstances. )
> And although Stalin turned out more ruthless than expected, killing most old Party comrades plus millions in Gulags, Trotsky would probably have been even more ruthless and killed even more.
I think this is honestly unlikely because, to put it succinctly, the vast majority of the people Stalin killed, he did not need to kill for any reason, including the securing of his own power. It was all his personal paranoia, which Trotsky (presumably) did not share, and subsequent Soviet leaders did not repeat the task of throwing millions in the gulags to shore up their own power.
Trotsky would probably have had a more adventurist foreign policy in the interwar period, yes.
We can probably agree that none of us can know if Trotsky would have turned out an even bigger mass murderer than Stalin. Since after 1927 (when Stalin expelled him from the Party), Trotsky was not in a position to order anyone killed any more. While Stalin from then on was in a position to order anyone killed that he wanted killed - which he did.
A more interesting question, in particular in this ACX setting, is to look at the decision problem from the point of view of the delegates to the 13th party congress in May 1924, when Stalin first got the upper hand in his power struggle with Trotsky. The decision problem facing the 700+ delegates can be formulated as follows: Which of these two is more likely to leave me in peace if I should disagree with them in the future, and which one is more likely to instead have me executed?
On the right: Stalin, General Secretary of the Party since 1922, who had blood on his hands, but not a conspicuous amount. On the left: Trotsky, leader of the Red Army since 1918, who in that capacity already had blood up to his armpits. Also, Stalin: Supporting limited markets (the New Economic Policy (NEP), indicating pragmatism), plus satisfied with "socialism in one country" (indicating reasonableness: cut your losses and consolidate). On the left: Trotsky, against NEP (indicating gung-ho radicalism), and advocating World Revolution/permanent revolution (go for everything-or-nothing: The stars or bust).
In all such situations, the candidates' stated positions and past reputations serve as signals to decision-makers (here: the delegates). And given the information available to the delegates, Stalin arguably appeared as the sanest choice.
> But also, the man who came closest to overthrowing Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was Putin’s former cook! Again, this is pretty weird, but I don’t know what the alternative is. Some kind of conspiracy of Russian cooks?
Not surprising that cooks would be in a position to gain power. You need to trust your cook a lot if you don’t want to get poisoned, and if you trust them to feed you, you probably trust them to command political or military power.
I think it would be worthwhile to read a book about somebody in this club by an author that isn't completely opposed to the person they're writing about. Otherwise you'll only ever get one perspective, and it's a bit of an echo chamber.
I haven't been selecting too hard for opposition, and I did (by accident) get a pro-Modi one.
I do think erring on the side of opponents is better than supporters, because my main interest here is how countries get less democratic, and only people who believe a country *did* get less democratic are going to focus on that / tell that story. I agree that if possible I should try to find someone completely objective.
You should do one for FDR. If Trump had as much power over the government as president (and used it) as FDR did, he would surely be considered a dictator. Many on the left would be absolutely convinced that there had been a fascist takeover of the US.
I do think this would be very interesting! It's hard to get a critical take on FDR, because he seems to be so beloved across the political spectrum, particularly because of Social Security.
Well, the US did really well under FDR--we got out of the depression, won the biggest war in history, and ended up as the dominant economic and military power on the planet. FDR had too much power, but it's easier to tolerate an autocrat who makes your country better off than one who makes it worse off.
>and only people who believe a country *did* get less democratic are going to focus on that / tell that story.
Choosing someone less obviously opposed to Putin (but from a western country) would make it more likely you'll find greater insight, because they're disagreeing with the hegemonic western institutional viewpoint and so will be writing their book in spite of this and not because they're confirming the biases of the sort of people who buy books like this.
Well, in principle, you could find someone who believes the country DID get less democratic AND views that a good thing, but such people probably don't published, at least not in America.
I could imagine a world where opposition writers are less able to take the dictator's supporters' position, and so are less able to figure out why the dictator came to power. Consider a transhumanist trying to understand why religion is so popular, and writing a book about the history of religion. They may emphasize the fear of death, lack of the invention of probability theory, tribalism biases, and other stuff. This will be different from a Christian's emphasis, maybe the Christian talks about community, theological thought, Platonism, and divine revelation (you can probably tell where I fall on the transhumanist-Christian axis, I hope the Christians can forgive me for misunderstanding their alien mentality & knowledge base).
I'd like to hear both of their stories, but I've heard the transhumanist version so much, I may actually gain a lot more information by reading the Christian story. If I want to know why so many people allow Christianity to spread, it would make sense to ask the Christians, who want it spread, and may have been among those who helped it spread. Similarly, maybe if I want to know how a dictator rose to power, it makes sense to ask those who lifted them up what they did & why.
My position is not confident, but more confidently asserting yours seems too confident & extreme in favor of oppositions.
A similar, but not as relevant judgement I've made has been that reading the justifications people made for keeping slavery in the Antebellum South has been more enlightening to my understanding of psychology than the justifications people made against slavery.
I'd suggest Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. I have my issues with him, namely, that he is not so good in explaining why was the USSR in crisis before Gorbachev. I am not disputing there was a crisis, Kotkin just doesn't have a good explanation of ti and of Brezhnev era generally imho. But he is very good in explaining Gorbachev and the 90s.
That book is sort of symphatetic to Putin, since its last edition is 2008, but Kotkin is no apologist for things like invasion of Ukraine, as his recent prolific output makes clear. And he is a rare American with good observation skills immersed in Russian culture.
Also, he is an author of unfinished biography of Stalin, btw. I haven't read that one.
Expertise usually comes with some kind of opinion, though. You don't get really into things without some kind of animating interest. Even with complete scientific esoterica like atomic structure or protein folding scientists get attached to theories.
Reason evolved to convince, using it to understand the world is a hack. It's a very *good* hack, I like science and modern medicine and cars and the internet a lot, but you're using a pin to clean out your phone charger port. Works OK but sometimes you still get poked and you always have to be careful not to poke yourself. Being objective is HARD! Scientists use statistical tests to see if their results are due to chance, and then have to use new statistical tests to see if other scientists are gaming those (look at publication bias and p-hacking, for instance).
I think probably the only thing I can think of is that you really should try to understand, 'why would anybody support this person'? Usually they did *something* right and solved some huge social problem, even if they created worse ones later. Lenin got rid of the Tsar and the backward Russian feudal system. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Depression. Stalin industrialized Russia. Mao got rid of the landlords. Doesn't sound like Gessen talks about that much. Be as suspicious of reverse hagiographies as you are of hagiographies.
>and only people who believe a country *did* get less democratic are going to focus on that / tell that story.
And they're all too often going to be categorically incapable of understanding why this has happened, because they construct a caricature of the person/regime they hate and offer no insight accordingly. To understand Putin, you need to be able to think like Putin and his supporters. This is literally no different than thinking you're going to learn anything about the rise of Trump by reading some screed by someone who says Trump won the election because "white supremacy".
You wouldn't say that about, say, the dictator they're covering now (failed painter from Austria in case someone reads this much later). Though I actually do think in terms of understanding his rise to power it would be good to cover, say, his role in repudiating the German war debt (which was quite unfairly placed on them at Versailles) and rebuilding the economy. These guys don't keep power if they're *totally* incompetent, and the mountain of bodies only came later. (Well, there were a few hills of bodies, but the *mountain range* of bodies didn't arise until after the war.)
Boris Yeltsin gets short shrift in many of the comments. Please remember that without his decisions and courage in the fateful days 19-22 August 1991, the coup against Gorbachev would likely have succeeded, and we would highly likely live in a world where "actual existing communism" would still be the order of the day for people both in Russia, the Baltic states and elsewhere.
I remember an interview with him a few years after he became President of Russia. The journalist, hostile and obviously trying to set a trap, asked: "but President Yeltsin, what is your vision on behalf of Russian youth? Yeltsin, momentarily taken aback, became thoughtful. Then he said (quoting from memory): "A main problem of Russian history has been that rulers have had visions on behalf of our youth. My vision is to create a Russia where youth are free to pursue their own visions".
It is also hard to forget his reply when another journalist asked him about his opinion of Communism: "Communism was a very important experiment. It was a necessary experiment. The only tragedy is that this important experiment had to take place in such a big country."
It's worth noting that China is *still* slightly poorer than Russia (in GDP per capita terms) and only around 20% as rich as the US. Only the sheer size of the population makes them anything other than a run-of-the-mill poor-but-not-super-poor country like Mexico or Malaysia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
This is true. Another extremely important point is that China is no longer communist in the sense of being a fully centralized economy like it was under Mao, (although they kept the name "Chinese Communist Party), which is precisely *why* they are at all prosperous.
Progress began with Mao's death in 1976 when Deng began privatization reforms to achieve his so called "market socialism with Chinese characteristics." Private farming was legalized in the early 80's, and was a major driver economic progress in that decade, while private enterprises were recognized in the late 80's. The 90's saw further reforms, with a large share of state owned enterprises being corporatized and market pricing being implemented.
During Mao's tenure (1949-1976), Chinese PPP per capita only increased by 11%, going from $945 to $1050. In the 28 years after his death, PPP per capita increased by over 370% from $1070 to $5050.
Today, apparently state owned enterprises account for 40% of China's GDP. Its current lack of economic freedom relative to Western countries like the USA and Germany and other East Asian countries like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea explains why it so much poorer per capita than them, but the massive reforms it has made explain why it went from being much poorer than Pakistan or Zimbabwe to being the solidly developing country it now is.
GDP is a miserably bad statistic. If an apartment in Bejing costs 20% of what it does in NY, comparing GDP per capita between the 2 countries is useless.
That would be obviously very bad for people in Baltic countries, but for actual Russians, indicators of well being are very clear that their living standards declined as a consequence of the fall of the USSR and only improved above 80s levels under Putin. If it would be Yeltsin's intention, it could be said that he sacrificed Russians in order to help the Baltics; and it is understandable that Russians don't appreciate that. But imho he had no such intention and just threw his hat into the power struggle because he wanted to became a dictator, in which he succeeded.
Also all this presumes that the USSR was salvageable in 1991, which is far from certain.
I mean, yes. He still did a bad job as head of state afterward. I admired Rudy Giuliani's cleaning up NYC, he's acted like a complete idiot since then. Few people are all good or all bad.
Also, 'good for us in the West' and 'good for Russia' are two very different things. Russians are understandably more concerned about the latter.
> But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up.
I believe the accepted phrase is "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
(There is a very convenient synergy between people too delicate to order violence directly and helpful folks willing to interpret indirect orders into existence.)
I agree Jan. 6 was an actual coup attempt (I'm more or less in the 'Democrats are less bad as long as Trump exists' camp), but while I think Biden and Schumer are way too old for such things, I wonder about Kamala.
So, while the progressive upper middle class Scott hangs around with is unlikely to get their hands dirty, I could definitely see some of their associates looking the other way while some Trumpies get beaten up.
An actual coup attempt, wherein infamously gun loving loonies weirdly left their guns at home, and where the US government is a call of duty 'king of the hill' match that grants rule of the country to those who occupy the capitol rotunda for 5 continuous minutes.
Trump may have wanted one, but there was no world in which the Jan 6 riot could have put Trump into power. It was the Four Seasons Landscaping of coup attempts.
>Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa
With all due respect this is absurdly out of context. How did Putin get this rammed through? Dictator magic?
Russia before Putin took power was in an extremely violent anarchy. Putin brought peace and relative prosperity. That’s why he has the support of the Russian people. Understanding how bad things got under yeltsin is critical to understanding modern Russia.
You hit the nail on the head. People were so disillusioned with their elected leaders and brutal free market, a strong hand in Kremlin was a welcome change. Somebody was in charge now.
I’ll add that the quote is also false. As in, factually incorrect. Members of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament are still elected, only the upper chamber is appointed. (In addition to elections for a number of more local positions, such as mayor)
I wonder how meaningful it really is to describe the people of Russia (even those who hate Putin) "liv[ing] in fear". We are talking about a culture with literally no experience of democracy or freedom (from the state) in its entire history. The closest they've ever come to anything resembling those things are, as I understand it: the absurdly corrupt, crime-ruled 1990s, the upheaval, confusion and series of coups and uprisings of most of 1917, and the independence-asserting boyars of the 1500s-1600s, pursuing their violent and corrupt self-serving feuds. The idea that the average Russian spends his or her life thinking "isn't it terrible to live under an aggressively strong government I must obey" is as plausible as suggesting that we in the west spend our lives dwelling on the stressfulness of finding jobs and trying to get rich, the loneliness of waiting often decades to get married, and the depressing emptiness of having to search for our own spritual meaning, with no guidance from society, that we may never find at all.
All of those stresses are obviously present for some people, to some extent. But the arch-traditionalist who claims that we're all constantly thinking something like "if only I lived in the 'natural' society of the past, where I do the job my father did, marry the girl my parents choose for me when I'm 15, and believe, like everyone else, the state religion of my society" is missing, first, the fact that we are used to our society and probably can't imagine living any other way, and second, the fact that we are constantly exposed to endless stories, from Shakespeare's romances to the Spanish Inquisition, reminding us of all the negative aspects of the alternative order of things.
I see no reason Russians wouldn't think in a similar way about a strong government.
100%. Habit is a powerful force, and nobody likes being told their habits are bad.
In fact, perhaps we should stop using democracy (or liberal market) as a synonym for freedom at all. A given person living a traditional life in Senegal may feel more free than an American who can choose between 200 types of breakfast cereal and gets to vote every two years. Not saying the latter isn’t freedom, just that there are different kinds of freedom.
I think you're not good at understanding the perspectives of people in different societies. Liberals in general are also often guilty of this - they (at least implicitly) believe that everyone around the world is actually a democracy loving progressive, but some in many non-western societies they are forced to endure an authoritarian, conservative government and they hate this. No, this isn't how things are. Progressive democracy is the weird ideology, not the lack of it. People in Russia aren't democrats waiting to be freed from the oppression of Putin et al. They grew up in a different society with a different history and culture (and different alleles, but even putting that aside....), and they feel differently about things on average than people in America do.
Conservatives are less guilty of this. Not because they're so cosmopolitan and culturally sensitive - they just recognize that different cultures are different and that's just the way things are, even if they don't have detailed knowledge around any given culture.
Also, the alleged benefits of "progressive" "democratic" society may itself be a kind of cargo cult, wherein the type of PEOPLE who result in "democratic" countries being created/maintained are the type of people who build good countries, and these countries would still be much nicer places to live even if they abolished elections.
Weren't "conservatives" the ones trying to spread "democracy" (at least ostensibly)? "Every soul carries the desire to live in freedom" and all that? If conservatives have actually learned the lesson that this is simply not true, that there are many people actively opposed to the freedom (the most dangerous of whom are not abroad, but that's besides the point), it must have been very recently.
I think you're running together two different distinctions here (and I don't blame you, as categorising ideologies becomes very complex very quickly). On the one hand, there's whether or not you accept that different people have fundamentally different values, which they honestly believe in. And on the other, there's whether you believe that some values are better than others, or they're all equally valid.
The first is a factual position and the second is a moral position. Thus you can identify four groups:
1. "There are many sets of values, and one of them is correct and the others wrong" (most conservatives, especially Christians and neoconservatives, but also libertarians where the "correct" value is narrowly "you should let others live in freedom" and other value differences beyond that are irrelevant).
2. "There are many sets of values, and they're all equally valid" (standard relativism, which becomes absurdly self-contradictory when it's combined, as it usually is, with "and so you shouldn't impose your values on others").
3. "There is really only one set of values that people hold and it's the correct one; people who say they believe otherwise either haven't thought through it or are being deliberately evil" (many ordinary (non-relativist) progressives, especially utilitarians and wokeists).
4. "There is one set of general values humans hold, but it's an evolutionary accident and there's nothing innately special about it" (apolitical scientists, as well as poets and the like who talk non-judgementally about "the human condition").
Feel free to disagree with my analysis here, but I think it's well-justified by the way the two sides speak. Notably, right-wing publications are filled with the language of conflict and contrast: "clash of civilisations", "the Christian worldview vs the secular worldview", "what conservatives believe and what liberals believe". While that very prominant ideology on the left, that its opponents call "wokeness", "SJWs", "political correctness" or "identity politics" notoriously has no clear name that its proponents will accept as a self-description, other than laughable things like "non-bigotry" and "basic decency". As if the very idea that anyone might think differently to them, that their beliefs are anything less the consensus of all reasonable people everywhere, is utterly incomprehensible.
That's a good model! I'm pretty strongly in the 1. camp, with some shades of 4. against claims that there are literally no constraints on what values human societies may hold.
I think that's going a bit too far--there are values that are near universals across history and geography, but we tend not to notice them outside an academic study (ie, bias against incest, etc) because that's the water we swim in. There are other values that vary considerably across cultures (marriage practices, governing systems) and there are values that differ, but perhaps by not all that much. These are values that seem sustained not by being somehow cosmically superior, but because the cultures which hold them tend over long periods of time to be more successful than those that don't (some version of the Golden Rule, a tolerance for different belief systems).
I think one's position on the Universal vs Diverse spectrum will have something to do with one's views of the status quo: to the extent that current conditions and trends seem largely benevolent towards one's own interests, one tends to believe that everyone really supports that status quo, even if they don't know it yet. Meanwhile, if the world seems to be heading in a bad direction, well then, the mainstream belief system is wrong, and so everyone is free to believe what they will (even if each of us still thinks we are the correct ones).
I think it was neoconservatives doing that, who aren't quite the same (even though they have a similar name due to the vagaries of US political coalition-forming).
It is my understanding that "neoconservative" is used to mean "non-conservatives (read as: 'Democrats') who allied with the conservatives on foreign policy."
Or 'Jewish conservative' if you're feeling antisemitic (of course, it doesn't really describe, say, Stephen Miller or Breitbart). It's kind of like 'globalists' in that it has an exoteric meaning that's theoretically neutral and describes a philosophy that actually exists but tends to get used as an occult ethnic slur nowadays.
It actually does describe a type of conservatism, originally centered around the magazine _Commentary_, that started out opposing the New Left and communism and after winning the Cold War, wanted to spread democracy around the world. The atrocious failure of the Iraq War means it's no longer in vogue on the right, and in fact modern conservatives seem eager to prove they are not neocons. But they were in charge for a while from the 1980s to 2000s.
"It's kind of like 'globalists' in that it has an exoteric meaning that's theoretically neutral and describes a philosophy that actually exists but tends to get used as an occult ethnic slur nowadays."
It's actually the opposite. The people who get called neocons are actually way less Jewish than the actual neocons. The Kristols, Kagans, Max Boot, Jen Rubin, Paul Wolfowitz, etc are all actual ideological neocons, and are all Jewish. There are only a couple of card carrying neocons who are not Jewish. But the term has been applied to Gentiles who are not technically neocons like Cheney, Bush II, Rumsfeld, etc.
I don't think the average conservative supported nation-building conservatism (and they certainly don't these days), or to the extent that they did, it was motivated primarily by wanting to 'kill the terrorists' and regimes that support them, not liberate people. But Trump is the most anti-intervention president in recent history. He wisely supported the maintenance of the Assad regime, while Obama and co funded and armed 'rebels' (read: foreign insurrectionists) in their efforts to overthrow his 'dictatorship'.
And I mean, it should be well known by now that neoconservatism has its roots in pre-1960s liberalism (or even socialism). Conservatives have traditionally been the isolationists, and to the extent they weren't it was to press american interests abroad and CERTAINLY not to "liberate" anyone. Neo-conservatism basically emerged during the cold war, splitting off from the rising anti-war left.
They certainly don't these days, but I think you're mistaken about the attitude in the past. You're right about the roots of neoconservatism, but isolationism among the conservatives was nowhere close to universal: it's a big tent, and I think that was restricted mostly to the libertarian faction.
Patrick Buchanan was one of the most prominent conservative isolationists, and he certainly wasn't a libertarian.
And again, to the extent conservatives supported this, it was mostly about advancing what they felt were American interests, not liberating people. A 'democracy' in the middle east seems less likely to breed terrorists and more susceptible to US influence and control.
It depends on the era. It's always hard to compare ideologies of the past, but the "right" was on the isolationist side from the founding through WWII. The were more pro-intervention during the Cold War through the War on Terror, but now are probably less interventionist since Trump.
<i>Also, the alleged benefits of "progressive" "democratic" society may itself be a kind of cargo cult, wherein the type of PEOPLE who result in "democratic" countries being created/maintained are the type of people who build good countries, and these countries would still be much nicer places to live even if they abolished elections.</i>
I suspect there's an element of survivorship bias, too. Countries where democracy doesn't work out -- such as Russia, or most of post-colonial Africa -- don't get called democracies any more, even if the dictator was originally democratically elected and even if the country still has (rigged) elections. Of course democracy is going to look like a good form of government if only successful examples are allowed to count.
As a Russian, this is 100% accurate. Westerners, even very smart ones, often assume that people living in authoritarian countries just can’t wait to have an election, a flag-burning and no-fault divorce.
It's even worse in China. Western politicians who visit China always ask them to improve human rights, and the Chinese smile and don't give a darn, because the concept is unfamiliar to them.
But how can we reach the "Frankl-steins" (see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-mans-search-for for this word) and make them understand that the current Russian politics -- mildly speaking -- estranges it from the world? Could it be better not to talk about liberty, free speech, etc., but about corruption, kleptocracy, mafia state?
Why would we? Do you want to turn Japan into a western country? Rip out their whole complicated system of hierarchy and politeness so we can force them to behave like Westerners? If not, why Russia?
As for estranging it from the world...China doesn't seem to care that much. It estranges them from *us*, meaning the USA and its allies/vassal states, but we're their principal geopolitical competitor anyway.
I actually like liberal democracy, but forcing it on countries that don't want it seems kind of obnoxious, and occasionally murderous if we get too serious about it.
TBH I'm not sure Russian politics does estrange it from the world. It estranges it from the west, certainly, but the rest of the world seems generally to have been pretty apathetic about the whole Ukraine thing.
The rest of the world has also made it clear that it doesn't see why they should torpedo their relations with Russia over Ukraine when no one did with the US after Iraq.
I think it's pretty safe to assume most people around the world are in fact supportive of democracy and liberalism in a general sense. The problem with western liberals is different - they (falsely) imagine themselves as representing these values, both in popular perception and in practice.
People in Russia aren't waiting to be freed from the oppression of Putin not because they think oppression is fine, actually. They aren't waiting because they remember how their introduction to the "free world" went and would prefer not to repeat that. You really don't need to assume they "feel differently about things" for that, it suffices that they have a different choice of options.
A more illustrative example may perhaps be people of Afghanistan, who faced a choice between [people who drop bombs on them] and [people who don't drop bombs on them] and, reasonably, chose the latter. And I'm bringing this up because the people who dropped bombs on them were both western liberals and "the type of people who build good countries", making both yours and the liberals' sense of superiority strikingly similar (and equally unfounded).
>I think it's pretty safe to assume most people around the world are in fact supportive of democracy and liberalism in a general sense.
No, it's not. People are supportive of whatever they think will give them the best life, and if that means a dictator protecting the nation and enacting policies aligned with the people's values, they would happily support that. To the extent that people in non-western countries do support democracy and liberalism, this is significantly part of the cargo cultism I referred to. They see the wealthy west and assume that its wealthy because of elections and welfare policies.
>People in Russia aren't waiting to be freed from the oppression of Putin not because they think oppression is fine, actually.
You're assuming that a majority of Russians think they're oppressed - it's not clear at all that this is true. That's the whole point I was making in the first place!
>making both yours and the liberals' sense of superiority strikingly similar (and equally unfounded).
The only reason the American government is in a position to bomb almost whomever they like is because America's population historically built such a wealthy country in the first place. There's countless countries who would love to wage war against countless enemies, but the reason they don't is not moral superiority but a lack of power.
The remarkable thing about America's foreign military interventions is not they occur, but precisely that they're so limited and rare (and not directly aimed at securing territory and direct control of countries). If you could give America's power to non-western countries today or any country historically, on average we would see vastly more aggression and explicit empire building. The mongols conquered vast swathes of the earth and killed tens of millions of people, with little more than horses, bows and arrows. Imagine if they had a tenth the firepower of the modern US military?
If you take a loaded word out, "a [leader] enacting policies aligned with the people's values" sounds like, well, democracy. I don't think we actually meaningfully disagree here, my point is specifically that [democratic values] and [western governance model] are not the same. Adopting the latter, yes, often misguided and cargo cultish (plus, on the peripheries, often a signal of elite upbringing rather than genuine adherence to democratic values). But that's precisely why [adoption of western governance model] should not be used as a measure of [support for democratic, liberal values]. Strip the latter into bare principles, and I'm confident most people around the earth will readily get behind "live and let live, and let's talk through conflicts rather than fighting them out, choose options with the highest popular support".
I'm also confident most Russians think they're oppressed. First, to go with a fairly strong example, the people who / whose friends and family are forced to die on Ukrainian soil clearly do. But more generally, feeling you're oppressed is normal, a human universal. A majority of westerners think they're oppressed one way or another, and they're not necessarily wrong. This is perfectly consistent with [wholeheartedly supporting one of the options actually on the table for you rather than chasing an ideal state that eliminates all oppression].
But where we really disagree is America's position. First, I'm pretty sure it's not one that allows it to bomb almost everywhere. It can always find one or two places in the world that it can bomb, some of them even inhabited, but the majority of the world is clearly off limits, some of it because it would strike back, some of it because doing so would undermine the very position America enjoys. (As adventuring into, e.g., Iraq and Vietnam did - the actually remarkable thing about America's military interventions is that they tend to fail, which alone would easily explain why they're so limited and rare.)
But the issue is not with America vis a vis the mongols or other empires past. America had its share of successful imperialist use of military power, historically. Panama, Philippines, you name it. It's just that, somewhere in the first part of XX century, something has changed and made brute military force unsuitable for subjugating foreign populations. Empires dismantled, colonies went free - it did not actually diminish America's power, in fact, at first, it rode that wave to the top of the world. But this pragmatism should not be confused for a lack of appetite.
What happened, exactly? Hell knows, but my suspicion is that the speed with which information travels changed. The people conquered by mongols quite literally didn't see them coming. Many might have never seen further than a neighboring village, making a large scale organizing of resistance impossible. Then, the world got smaller and smaller, until your best bet at controlling the country's population changed from [garrisons in strategic places, and they're fucked] to [not giving the people an enemy to unite against, because then you're fucked].
TBH I think your definition of "democracy" is overly-expansive, since it would cover, e.g., an autocratic emperor whose merest word is law just as long as he passes popular policies. Democracy is a function of how decisions get made, not which decisions get made. Indeed, as the UK has shown on topics like crime and immigration, it's entirely possible for a democracy to consistently enact policies which run contrary to the people's values.
<i>What happened, exactly? Hell knows, but my suspicion is that the speed with which information travels changed. The people conquered by mongols quite literally didn't see them coming. Many might have never seen further than a neighboring village, making a large scale organizing of resistance impossible. Then, the world got smaller and smaller, until your best bet at controlling the country's population changed from [garrisons in strategic places, and they're fucked] to [not giving the people an enemy to unite against, because then you're fucked].</i>
The Mongols conquered plenty of big empires, including China, the most populous country in the world at the time. The difference, I'd say, isn't that large-scale resistance is possible whereas it previously wasn't, but that we're much less willing to countenance civilian casualties and reprisals. A city that rebelled against the Mongols could expect to be massacred down to the dogs and cats; a city that rebels against US occupation can expect to suffer a fair amount of collateral damage, but civilians won't be directly targetted, and any civilian casualties that do occur will be blamed on the US, not the rebels.
Yeah, liberal democracy is a weird (should I say WEIRD, per Heinrich?) ideology. Europe didn't believe in it before about 1800, most of East Asia still doesn't (the same party's run Japan forever), India believes 100 different things from what I can tell, and Latin America staggers from ideology to ideology without ever really making it out of the middle-income trap.
Most people just want to make a living and raise a family. As it's been for thousands of years.
As with all Russia explainers, I'm left with more questions than answers. But that's good in its own way - a subject I'll never get bored of or feel remotely competent to opine on...some giant regions of the world remain huge ???s on my map, no matter how many times I try to fill them in with Minimally Viable Model. (Also, it's hard not to reverse "man without a face" into "Faceless Man".)
Weirdly high number of typos in this post, definitely bugged me. Including in the block quotes, which is weird? I still enjoy Scott book reviews as a general rule, but polish makes good work great. Wish Substack had that functionality of being able to highlight text and enter a key combination to send off an Official Typo Report, it always feels weird to do so in the comments...
Stephen Kotkin is good on Russia and its relationship with the US. There are some interviews and lectures on YouTube, dome before the 2022 escalation of the war, some after.
“At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble.”
I’m reminded of the Nabokov story, ‘Death To Tyrants,’ where the narrator reminisces about his pre-revolutionary schooldays with the current dictator (a thinly disguised Lenin?), with an emphasis on the curious, even pitiful, anti-charisma of the tyrant-to-be.
There is a number of factual inaccuracies here which make me distrust the book overall.
1) "and members of Parliament were elected by governors" This is false. The upper chamber of Russian parliament is no longer elected directly, but the lower one is.
Context for non-Russians: I remember those reforms and Russians were overwhelmingly fine with them. Politicians were presumed to be useless and corrupt, so much so that it was not uncommon for the "against all" option to win in regional elections. A strong central hand was even somewhat welcome. "At least fascists made trains run on time" sort of thing.
2) "1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history" I take it Masha Gessen never lived in the developing world. As much as I disdain Russian politicians, corruption is the accepted part of power in most (all?) of the world.
One of the things that stunned me about living in <unspecified South American country> was how open elected leaders are about their corruption. At least in Russia, they bothered to deny it.
3) This makes Pussy Riot sound pretty innocent. My memory is, it’s not disruption of church service or blasphemous words that triggered most people. Russians are not _that_ religious. It was the nudity.
Imagine a pride parade, leather on, giblets galore, on the main street in a rural Kentucky town. Russia is more socially conservative than Kentucky. (And so is most of the world)
---------------
These and a few other examples of "artistic licence" make the book look like a wish-fulfilment fantasy of a disappointed Russian liberal. I fully expect Putin to be thuggish and corrupt and murderous, but that doesn’t mean he is literally the worst person in the universe. In fact, that makes him pretty unremarkable.
If you want to really know why Russians allowed him to keep power, see my "trains" comment above. 1990s was the time when many people had nothing to eat. Quite literally. You could have a job essential to the economy and not be paid for months at a time. That’s why for many people it was “80s = good, 90s = bad, 2000s = good”. Food, fuel, heating.
What brought food back? Not an expert, but three things off the top of my head:
- Putin was willing to strong arm local elected officials and oligarchs who made electorate unhappy. As opposed to the “chaos capitalism" of the 90s.
- More control of the media meant less news about starving coal-miners blocking rail lines in Magadan.
>Imagine a pride parade, leather on, giblets galore, on the main street in a rural Kentucky town. Russia is more socially conservative than Kentucky. (And so is most of the world)
Better, imagine something one tenth as bad ocurring at a mosque. I don't even know if westerners who cried for pussy riot would have even condemned their punishment.
Russians aren’t particularly religious at all, are they?
Gessen may be biased and have her own agenda, but in hindsight she is one of the people who got Putin ”right” from the Western perspective (that is, warned about him). Others include Kasparov, John McCain.
> Putin was a mediocre student; schoolmates who remember him at all recall that he was easily-offended, often got in physical fights, and always won.
I think that this sentence is missing something important. Are those former schoolmates on the record, or anonymous?
Imagine that they are on the record. How likely would they be to report that Putin had lost one or more fights? A supporter of Putin probably wouldn't want to embarrass him. Anyone - supporter, opponent, indifferent - would probably want to avoid being a target of retaliation.
Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, and Waco have something to say about naive regard to the capability and intent of US security services, with or without a wink from Congessional fossils.
Analysis of Putin in a vacuum can be misleading. Keep in mind the opposing forces are communist military hardliners and western robber barrons. There isn't some alternate universe where Russia thrives in a Putin-free utopia, just other bad options.
> he briefly got a position at the university as “assistant chancellor for foreign relations” on the grounds that he was one of the only people in the city who had ever been to a foreign country
Given that Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg) is the second largest Russian city - and former capital - this is exaggerating it quite a bit.
>The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators.
Ok so this is definitely not the "standard" position in the West, though it is a position with quite some supporters.
> So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA. Right now they seem more aligned with the Democratic side of the aisle, so Trump or some future Trump would have a hard time winning their total loyalty. As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here. I absolutely believe there are factions among the Democrats who would love to restrict free speech, pack the Supreme Court, divert Congressional powers to the executive branch, and lots of other creepy authoritarian things. But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up
This line of thinking seems to miss the part where Putin wasn't a leader of an existing major party. As the book review just described, he came through the security services and took over from a combination of those connections and happenstance. The rough hypothesis to think about in comparison would be direct takeover by one of these agencies (yes, Putin left and did other things--but it seems like his connections did most of the heavy lifting) or one of their former leaders getting into politics. Which doesn't feel particularly likely, at least not so brazenly, but given recent history it doesn't seem completely out of the realm of plausibility for the FBI to interfere with elections in a way that would help their favored candidate get elected. False flags, trumped-up charges, etc.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the fate of people investigating the Apartment Bombings. From Wikipedia:
> Attempts at an independent investigation have faced obstruction. State Duma deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin filed two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the events, but the motions were rejected by the State Duma in March 2000. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings was chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev. The commission was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries.
> Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, have since died in apparent assassinations. The Commission's lawyer and investigator Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested and served four years in prison for revealing state secrets. Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who defected and blamed the FSB for the bombings, was poisoned and killed in London in 2006. A British inquiry later determined that Litvinenko's murder was "probably" carried out with the approval of Putin and Patrushev.
> Journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former security service member Alexander Litvinenko, who investigated the bombings, were killed in 2006.
I understand that Putin's United Russia party thrice voted unanimously not to investigate the bombings - one of several tidbits I learned from this Frontline documentary on Putin: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1507210690427174916
Kind of related - does substack have tags yet? How soon are they likely to come? I'd love a "dictator book club" tag so I can just share that series of posts with select friends
“But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up.”
Oh, my sweet summer child! This was before your time, but I’m old enough to remember pre-senility Biden. He was an amoral narcissistic prick. I can totally see him giving such an order.
Here’s the thing: the democrats don’t bother “roughing someone up” they whack them with hellfire missiles and kill everyone in the area. Name Anwar Al-Alwaki ring a bell?
But there’s a key difference between Russia and the US. When Putin assassinates his own people he lies about it because he’s afraid of the reaction of the Russian people to such crimes. When Obama murders his own people, he brags about it, because he knows that Americans are bloodthirsty and power worshiping and won’t cause any trouble.
I hope that someday we can have the moral backbone of the Russians but it seems like that’s still a long way off.
Pausing to admire the genius of "The Agony And The Ex-Stasi".
Didn't catch it on first read, thanks for pointing it out!
Yeah, knowing how "Stasi" is actually pronounced (would you transcribe it like "shtuh-zee"?) doesn't help at all spotting the witty pun.
Noice catch
Love these. The Dictator Book Club is one of my favorite things on the blog.
>Wait, hadn’t Putin already resigned from the KGB? [...] resigning from the KGB is futile; once you’re a part of the network, they will always feel free to call on you when needed.
There's a Hollywood producer called Scott Rudin who's notorious for firing people. He fires so many people that sometimes he forgets who he's fired. Often this means the "firing" isn't serious—you can chill at a Starbucks for a few hours, come back to work, and he'll have forgotten he was mad at you.
One guy got "fired" four times in a row. Sadly, the last one stuck.
I used to work for a guy who owned two restaurants and employed a drunk and belligerent cook. Every time they were in the same place at the same time they had a big fight, and the owner would fire the cook on the spot. And immediately order him to report to his new job in the *other* restaurant.
Did George Steinbrener have a reputation for doing this?
Isn't it "Chechen" rather than "Chechnyan"?
As of this writing, Wiktionary prefers 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘺𝘢𝘯, and calls 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘯 "inexact."
(Fuck, italicizing text shouldn't be this hard.)
EDIT: based on the replies, it looks like "Chechen" might be the race of people traditionally inhabiting the region, and "Chechnyan" includes other people who've moved there more recently.
(all of my knowledge here comes from (a) consulting wikipedia a minute ago and (b) a rudimentary ability to read Cyrillic script)
It looks like the Russian term is indeed (inflected forms of) "Chechen". The Russian term Chechnya is derived from this term; it appears to be pretty transparent to an Anglophone if conceived of as Chechen-ia. The Russian name of the governmental unit is Chechenskaya Respublika. I vaguely believe that the -skaya suffix denotes something like "home of [the Chechens, in this case]"; I remember a German board game that went to some effort to label countries by their own native terms and called Russia "Rossiskaya". (Which isn't actually the Russian term for the country, but is presumably a particular way to refer to it.)
By contrast, the Chechen term for Chechen-related things does not appear to be related to the Russian root "chechen".
So a preference for "Chechnyan" over "Chechen" would have to reflect the modern American bias toward seeing people as extensions of the government that rules them rather than the other way around. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine most often visible in the American urge to refer to "Mongolians" rather than "Mongols".
I cannot blame the German board game printers too much: single-world reference to Russia in Russian is transliterated as «Rossiya», but at least since XVIII century there is always some longer name with «Rossiyskaya» («of Rossiya») being the intersection between Empire of Russia, Republic of Russia, Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of Russia, and Federation of Russia.
"I vaguely believe that the -skaya suffix denotes something like 'home of [the Chechens, in this case]'"
It's just a version of a relational ('the kind of thing it is') adjective suffix, in feminine form to agree with the noun of 'republic', which has inherited its Latin femininity in all gendered languages.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9#Russian
You raise an interesting point with the comment about Mongolians, and now I'm trying to think about when we do this and when we don't. Obviously we don't say, e.g., Irelanders to refer to non-diaspora Irish, but splitting, say, the Koreans by polity does make sense. And wouldn't Mongols be more of a cluster, like Slavs or Arabs?
The Irish are actually an example of the unusual pattern, a people being named after the place (Eire) where they live.
> wouldn't Mongols be more of a cluster, like Slavs or Arabs?
They are an ethnic group, like Slavs and somewhat unlike Arabs. (Arabic ethnicity is prestigious and is therefore routinely claimed by people who don't have it.)
It is generally more useful to think in terms of ethnic groups than to think in terms of political boundaries; you'd want to distinguish between Mongols and Russians in Mongolia, not to elide the difference by calling them both Mongolians. (Not that the Russians are particularly numerous - Wikipedia has the demographics of Mongolia at ~96% Mongols and ~4% Turks.) Similarly, you'd want to call the Mongols of Inner Mongolia Mongols rather than calling them Chinese.
I guess it depends on what you want to talk about?
If you want to talk about the ethnic group, or about the people who have the citizenship of the country of Mongolia.
You almost never want to talk about people who have citizenship in Mongolia. One of the examples I've collected of this confusion was someone recognizing Genghis Khan as a "ruler of the Mongolians".
"It is generally more useful to think in terms of ethnic groups than to think in terms of political boundaries; you'd want to distinguish between Mongols and Russians in Mongolia, not to elide the difference by calling them both Mongolians."
I don't think that's the case - that it's generally more useful. Countries, whether we like it or not, are sovereign actors in political and economic spheres (both much discussed) in the way that ethnic groups are not.
For example, we routinely call the Buryats - ethnic Mongols who happen to be somewhat overrepresented as military volunteers in the Russian army - Russians, in the context of the actions of the Russian armed forces. And it would be weirdly pedantic not to. Nationhood, in its more successful forms, transcends ethnicity.
Does it? I would say that nationhood in its more successful forms assimilates people into one ethnicity. As long as there's more than one, the nation hasn't yet succeeded.
What do you think would happen if the Buryat Mongols were 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 overrepresented in the Russian army? What if they were 80% of the army?
Your "we" might be far too narrow. Race realists are usually careful to distinguish subject populations and their imperial rulers. Even YOU probably think of, for example, the Kurds as an meaningful faction.
The classic example is Malays/Malayans/Malaysians - Malays are members of an ethnic group, Malayans are inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula (which is split between Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar), and Malaysians are citizens of the country Malaysia (about half of which lies on the Malay Peninsula). So one can be a Malay Malayan Malaysian, a non-Malay Malayan Malaysian, a Malay non-Malayan Malaysian, a Malay Malayan non-Malaysian, or any other combination.
A great illustration! Thanks!
Thanks for this. I don't think I knew about 'Malayans' as a possibility before.
I don't know how widely-used it is these days, but it was very common in the colonial era (i.e. before "Malaysian" was a possibility).
I remember the insult/slur "mongoloid" from when I was growing up (which I seem to remember falling out of fashion, so to speak, even then in the 90's), so I usually push for "Mongolian" so that there is little chance of confusion.
For much the same reasons, I push for "Mong," to mean "of or relating to the Mongols."
Ahem, Shankar! I think you know what that means in British English as much as I do:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/joepublic/2011/oct/19/ricky-gervais-mong-twitter
I do, though only via Jimmy Carr's famous denunciation of "PC culture": "Political Correctness has gone fucking spastic like a mong rapist."
You're probably right that the tendency to conflate the government and the people it rules is part of it, but it might also be a (subconscious) tendency against ethnonationalism in favor of "civic nationalism": most traditional demonyms (on that scale; obviously not for cities and the like) have strong blood-and-soil vibes.
> I vaguely believe that the -skaya suffix denotes something like "home of [the Chechens, in this case]"
As others have said, -skaya is just an adjective ending; "Chechenskaya Respublika" literally means "Chechen Republic".
For anyone wants the rudiments of reading Cyrillic: https://www.ryanestrada.com/russian/index.html
As a linguist friend of mine used to joke, the Cyrillic alphabet is the Greek alphabet with the serial numbers filed off :-) Seriously, though, anyone with a STEM background can probably already read most of the Cyrillic alphabet by recognising variants of the Greek characters they know from maths and science. I once tested this with my girlfriend, who studied biology to graduate level but never took Greek: she got most of the uppercase Cyrillic letters and a decent fraction of the lowercase ones. I think a mathematician or physicist would do even better.
Referring to "Mongolians" rather than "Mongols" may be in part because Down's Syndrome used to be called "Mongolism" (due to the eyes) and people suffering from it were called "Mongoloids" or "Mongols". So calling "Mongolians" "Mongols" could be seen as derogatory/a slur because of referencing the disorder.
More likely IMO is that in the current-day USA, the term Mongols is often assumed to refer either to the 13th century Asian conquerors or the contemporary outlaw motorcycle club. So in a sense that word is "taken," and thus a substitute is used when a speaker or writer wants to avoid confusion.
I think "Chechen" vs "Chechnyan" and "Mongol" vs "Mongolian" actually marks a clear distinction, between the people of a given ethnic group, and the permanent residents or citizens of a particular republic. It so happens that in these two cases there's a large amount of overlap between the two, but the distinction is adhered to fairly well for some ethnic groups and nations/republics that have more divergence, like "Arabs" vs "Omanis/Iraqis/Saudis/Jordanians/etc" and "Bengalis/Tamilians/Punjabis/etc." vs "Indians".
It's a bit awkward that there is no distinct pair of words for the ethnicity and nationality associated with certain major nations, like French, German, Japanese, etc.
> It's a bit awkward that there is no distinct pair of words for the ethnicity and nationality associated with certain major nations, like French, German, Japanese, etc.
I get the impression that this is a deliberate political choice.
I doubt anything about this is deliberate. Most things about words aren’t. But I think the unifying feature is that in the cases where there is a different word for the ethnicity and the nationality, the nation is named after the ethnicity, and the nationality is then formed by taking the name of the nation and adding a standardized suffix. The cases where there is no difference are the ones where the ethnicity is named after the nation.
I mean, for America we sort of had the civic ideal for a while that anyone who came here was an American, period. Imperfect, to be sure, but possibly best exemplified in Reagan-era videos of East European immigrants talking in thick accents about how much they love being American. Now we seen to have moved on to some form of proto-Balkanization.
Whereas in France I think they had some idea that being French was a linguistic and cultural state that could be gained, and a lot of faith in the superiority and desirability of said language and culture. That may have changed, though.
Doesn't Russian (the language) do this too, with "Rosija" (associated with the government) vs. "Russkiy" (ethnic Rus)?
Russian distinguishes between russkij 'ethnic Russian (adj)' and rossiskij 'of Russian citizenship (adj)'. For example, the RSFSR was Rossiskaja, not Russkaja, Sovetskaja Federativnaja Sotsialisticheskaja Respublika. Similarly, among Mongolists, it is standard terminology to use "Mongol" for the ethnicity and "Mongolian" for the citizen: Most Mongolians are Mongols, but only around a third of Mongols are Mongolians.
Thanks!
>since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns.
This seems like an un-Scott-like aside, but an apropos one given the paragraph that it's in.
>Could it happen here?
I think this is also a question of the FBI currently finds to be justifiable. They definitely find it justifiable to infiltrate and provoke domestic terrorist groups on a small scale - e.g. the Whitmer plot - so there's hardly a norm against it. Whether that translates into something that can be leveraged by any particular executive, I don't know.
> They definitely find it justifiable to infiltrate and provoke domestic terrorist groups on a small scale - e.g. the Whitmer plot - so there's hardly a norm against it
That seems like a very different thing. The FBI has been notorious in the post-9/11 era (and probably before but I only remember reading about since 9/11) of essentially drumming up terrorism charges by convincing yahoos to "plot" non-sensical terrorist plots. But it seems like the intention is not to actually have them carried out but to make headlines by "foiling" the plot.
Yes, but doesn't that still seem like a major problem? For one thing they are actually helping radicalize people on the edge of radicalization. Taking people from not-planning-terrorism to planning-terrorism. For another thing, they are doing this to political enemies of the FBI's leaders (and presumably Democrat politicians). They go find people who like to shoot guns on the weekends and convince them to break the law so that they can arrest them. I read a very long account of the Whitmer plot, and it sounds very unlikely that *any* of the people involved would have done something even close to what they were accused of, had the FBI not worked so hard to get them there.
Oh yeah, it absolutely seems like a major problem. I'm just saying that there is a big difference between basically entrapping hapless idiots into committing crimes in order to impress your superiors and actually orchestrating serious crimes and terrorist acts. The former is still inexcusable though.
If the people they were targeting were more competent, it could have led to an actual attack on a sitting governor.
That they were in fact incompetent at doing what the government spent years trying to get them to do is part of my point. These weren't even people who could have potentially pulled it off - making it pointless to entrap them in the first place - but had they been competent then this could easily have resulted in something very bad happening because of the FBI.
I think there was a DEA informant who was involved in the big terrorist attack in Mumbai a few years ago, but IIRC there wasn't any DEA involvement other than embarrassment about the shit their guy had gotten mixed up in overseas.
IIRC Ruby Ridge came about because an undercover ATF agent asked Randy Weaver to saw off a shotgun half an inch below the legal limit, with the idea of blackmailing him into becoming an informant.
> But it seems like the intention is not to actually have them carried out but to make headlines by "foiling" the plot.
Counterexample: OKC.
Two questions:
First, and this seems the obvious one, is Putin actually running the show or is he more of a front-man for the established FSB-KGB network? Because this review makes him sound like a non-entity and most of the actual power lies in the KGB-FSB network. Perhaps to clarify, if Putin just dropped dead from a natural heart attack tomorrow, would another Russian leader just easily take his place?
Second, was there any discussion of economic performance? I'm no Russian expert but a brief glance at their GDP numbers indicate that the first 10 years of his reign were...really good, economically speaking. (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?locations=RU)
The conventional explanation for the economic success is rising oil prices.
Yeah, Venezuela had a struggling 1990s followed by good GDP numbers 2000-2010, too, which is well-explained by https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/historical-crude-oil-prices-table/
I think it's widely accepted that the situation in Russia was utterly disastrous when he came to power and it has improved significantly since then.
Yeltsin really did a number on Russia and the world.
First question was valid until the Ukraine war, but I think by now it's pretty obvious that he is actually running the show - it seems fairly clear that the war is his personal project and he was able to strongman everyone who matters into starting (and continuing) it.
The FSB failed monumentally with its operations in ukraine. Putin had been feeding them billions of dollars to distribute amongst Ukrainian officials as bribe money to lay the groundwork for the invasion. The FSB stole that money instead. After the invasion failed so hard, and it became clear what had happened, Putin imprisoned and likely tortured several of the FSB's higher ups and transferred authority for covert operations to the GRU.
Do you have a source on this? What I heard, from admittedly Ukrainian Media which is basically propaganda, was that Russia paid bribes but the Ukrainians heroically didn't actually rebel, and instead kept the money and their loyalty to Ukraine. Your story sounds more plausible, but this is the first I heard if it
I’ve read about this conspiracy theory here first
https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2022/03/is-putins-invasion-failing-because.html
For me it sounds somewhat believable. It at least with my limited mental model of russia (that is probably mostly based on prejudice and western bias)
I understand that the Russians were able to expand relatively rapidly from the Crimea because of bribes. Given the limited connection Crimea had to the rest of Ukraine, I would have expected the Russian forces to be held up for a few days.
Ukraine had a (largely correct, it turned out) defense strategy of not stopping them and bleeding them out as they overstretched deep into its territory. This alone is sufficient to explain the rapid expansion.
(This is not to deny they had the ground prepared, and the bribed locals may have helped them hold the territory they have held, which, notably, is just a fraction of what they originally invaded.)
I vaguely recall the FSB/GRU restructuring at that time. Nobody officially gave the reason for it, but it stood out to me because that sounded like an odd thing to do, especially at that time.
The actual facts are:
1) after the invasion, Putin pulled the FSB's funding quite dramatically, and reallocated that funding to the other security agencies Russia has
2) Bortnikov disappeared from public for several months following the invasion. Rumors began circulating on russian imageboard-analogs that he was being held and perhaps tortured for his incredible failure and deception. After the rumors began reaching the general population, he reappeared in public and refused to answer questions.
I don't think my theory is unreasonable given those two facts. The culture of corruption and grift in Russia is so strong, especially amongst the top, that it is beyond belief that that money didn't go into the fsb's pockets for their own personal enrichment. That is what happens to every other state resource.
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tweeted: “Strong leaders defeat their opponents in free and fair elections. Weak leaders arrest their opponents.”
Hard to tell if he’s referring to Putin or Biden.
https://twitter.com/mcfaul/status/1686249958671069184?s=46&t=0c1FiWOiWcyAWfYmoA0XEg
I thought this was an old tweet, but no. Wow! He can't be THAT oblivious, can he?
> Hard to tell if he’s referring to Putin or Biden.
I hope you are joking. But in any case, the joke is a deeply misleading one: Biden cannot order the arrest of anyone: The decision about indictment is taken by a jury under judges who are independent from executive branch. I guess Biden could pressure prosecutors to prosecute (or not to prosecute), but this is not the same thing. And yes, I understand why people think that it is somewhat wrong to prosecute your political enemy, and why people may think it interferes with people's choices, especially seeing what happens in non-democratic countries, but that's one of the reasons why in liberal democratic countries we have independent judiciary and many other checks and balances, such as independent journalism which can make it politically costly, if not outright politically suicidal to prosecute without justification (yes I know, "independent journalists" from liberal press live in a liberal bubble and sympathize with Biden and hate Trump, but as discussed elsewhere on this very blog even they have limits, and there are many others on the right which would not allow such cases to be buried). And consider the alternative: do we really want to send the signal that politicians, especially popular ones, are effectively above the law?
Grand juries in the 'States are notorious for being effectively pawns of the prosecutor ("by and large, district attorneys can get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich"), and the prosecutor *is* a member of the executive branch.
Moreover, law creep means that in general, if a prosecutor wants you in trouble, there's a law for that. Police and prosecutor discretion is, in the modern West, probably the biggest factor in who does and does not go to jail, which means that if they're biased you have a Problem.
Perhaps you are right in case of poor people, those nobody cares about, but the American law practice and theory seems to be unusually lenient towards the rich and famous, those who can afford a good lawyer, so I doubt what you said applies to Trump prosecutions.
Bill Gates still couldn't import his Porsche into the US, when he was the richest guy on the planet.
Unusually lenient where skilful lawyer can make a difference using loopholes in the law or procedural complexities is not the same as being above the law when the rules are clear. But yes, I had chosen my wording rather poorly
Actually, allying with a fellow wealthy Porsche enthusiast and employing a number of skilled lawyers to change the law to be more congenial, he ultimately did: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/bill-gates-illegal-porsche-sat-customs-10-years/
I suppose your comment might remain technically correct though; I didn't line up the timeline to check if he was the richest man on the planet when he finally succeeded.
Ok, I did read about the Grand jury, and how the defense is not present, so it does seem to be deeply flawed (if not quite fictional) form of independent control. But there seems to exist multiple possibilities of challenging indictment by good defense lawyers, so I believe my point still stands at least partially, though I did learned something new about American law, and was rather disappointed about it.
> though I did learned something new about American law, and was rather disappointed about it
The more you look into American law, the more that will happen.
My rule of thumb is to sympathize with the outrage of someone discovering systemic inadequacies, and to promptly ignore any of their policy prescriptions... the first time. There's a lot that's disappointing with the system, but where it's more or less at an equilibrium there's usually a reason why; politics can be cyclic, but institutions suffer for it.
"It's outrageous that this should happen to My Guy and Something Must Be Done, but after that business can return to normal" isn't something I like to accuse people of on a personal level, but it's a typical human reflex and one must have a strategy that plays around it.
It's not really meant to be "independent control". It's supposed to avoid wasting the court's time.
If your case is so weak that even without the defense the jury says "no way", then it's better to find that out quickly.
Also since the defendant is often under arrest it's better to minimize that time if the prosecution is just putting up nonsense.
People however seem to think of it as in some way equivalent to being found guilty, so I'm not sure it's serving its purpose.
This - indictment and the grand jury is not a contest between the defense and the prosecution, it's between the prosecution and opportunity cost. Optimal defense strategy at that stage is to be a combination of uninteresting and conspicuously well-prepared (and thus slow and expensive to prosecute). There's no particular reason to wait until proceedings actually start to pursue that strategy though, so when it works it takes the form of prosecutors declining to start rather than failing at the institutional hurdle.
A 'target letter' is an invitation sent by the prosecutor to the defense to make an appearance before the grand jury. It's pretty much always a bad idea to take them up on it, even more so than the reason why it's a bad idea to waive your Fifth Amendment rights and take the stand during the trial itself.
"Defense strategy" could be misconstrued there.
There is no real "defense strategy" in the sense of a court case unless you're so unwise as to show up as the result of a target letter. If you don't get one, you likely won't even know there's a grand jury considering charges against you.
"Defense strategy" is more in the sense of "Si vis pacem, para bellum". I.e. be a hard target. But that only goes a little way if you are setting out to challenge the powers that be.
I'm wondering why anyone would ever actually appear before a grand jury? It's not like you can present anything. I think at most you are under the (most likely deluded) impression that the prosecutor will mess up enough during the presentation to make an own goal, and he's much less likely to do so if you're not there looking at him. But the control the prosecutor has over the presentation, and the pace they're made at (from what I've heard 8-10 cases a day is not unusual) means this is hoping for a miracle.
It's just because of the name. "Grand Jury" sounds like "Supreme Court", so people think it's more important than a normal jury, when it's really a test that the prosecution can spell their names correctly.
Grand juries were rather more important back when private prosecution was the norm in Anglo-American law, and public prosecutors were an adjunct to the system. I suspect that if the grand jury requirement hadn't been specifically enshrined in the federal Constitution, they'd have been abolished in the US the same way they were in the rest of the countries using English law.
I think the relevant comparison in this case is to see how, among all the potentially politicized prosecutions being brought by Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed prosecutors (or Republican-elected and Democratic-elected attorneys general in the jurisdictions where they are elected), there are certain people that keep getting hit, like Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Bob Menendez, and plenty of others that don't, like Joe Biden and Ted Cruz. Even if prosecutors have some room to maneuver, they have to work with what they've got in terms of shady behavior on the part of the target.
Just look at the allegations.[1] If they allegations are true, it's not simply a matter of "a prosecutor wants Trump in trouble". Trump knew what he was doing. (If, on the other hand, you think the US legal system is so corrupt as to produce unsubstantiated allegations, a prosecutor wouldn't need "a law for that", he'd just pick false allegations that happen to be illegal.)
(Russia seems to have taken both paths as of late, by the way―passing a series of new laws and also fraudulently charging various innocent people under both old and new laws)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@LegalEagle/videos
Show me the man and I will show you the crime . . .
Considering that tweet was sent in August 1, 2023, I think McFaul's intention was to call Biden weak by comparing him to Putin, who he also considers weak. Not saying I agree with him, but I don't think McFaul is joking
>I hope you are joking.
This is no laughing matter. Governments should only use their police powers to charge and prosecute people credibly suspected of committing crimes when those people are members of the permanently criminal underclass. These powers should never be used against tough-talking guys who "tell it like it is" and would probably be fun to have a beer with.
I thought this was going one way, then pivoted to the opposite conclusion. Well done.
I think McFaul is a conservative. At the least, I’ve heard him say much more complimentary things about Reagan than I would expect from a progressive.
Hillary Clinton once related an interesting story from Putin (I can't remember where but it's on video somewhere). They were sitting next to each other at some international event and she brought up the topic of the siege of Leningrad. According to her, his eyes lit up and he told her about how they had to pile up the bodies (not enough manpower/time to bury everyone I guess?).
One day his grandfather was walking home past one of the piles of bodies and he recognised a leg sticking out of the pile as belonging to his wife. Frantically he began trying to pull her out. A guard tried to stop him (because they didn't want disease to spread), but he persisted. And he got her out - and she was still alive. And he took her back home and nursed her back to health from the brink of death.
Clinton in her telling went on to relate this story to Putin's supposed self image. She thinks he sees himself as filling a role akin to that of his grandfather - pulling the near-dead Russia from the brink of death and returning it to strength. I don't know to what extent her analysis is true, but it was interesting to get that sort of view from one major world figure of another.
Wow, little details like that help drive home how different Russia is in some ways. Especially because most of their stories are like that (fantastically dark), back to the Tsars, Mongols, and beyond.
the Leningrad siege is super-mythologised in Soviet narrative, but it doesn't hold the independent check. First of all, it wasn't siege - there was never complete encirclement of the city. Second, the communist already had a history of self-inflicted famines prior to WW2, look Holodomor etc. It was a deliberate suppression of provision to possibly soon-to-be-won city and population to impose as much damage on the enemy as possible. Once the changes of Leningrad fall slimmed, the provision stabilized. All blame was put on Nazis, as always.
Soviet narrative is strictly about «blockade of Leningrad» (never a siege or encirclement), and USSR did lose control of all the previously used surface transport lines. Anything on Ladoga got built only after losing other options.
There were some airlift operations, but not enough to supply a city (that's before taking into account the capacity subtracted for deliveries of food for the top officials, which food would count as luxurious even in the USSR cities safely far away from the frontlines…)
There is enough truth in this story, but also too much distortion.
Here's what the real story is, and I hope you can see the difference:
Barely recovering from his wound, the father of the prime minister in besieged Leningrad managed at the last moment to save his wife, whom the orderlies, who carried the corpses out of the house, considered dead.
“The corpses and mother are being taken out of the house, from the entrance. My father approached her, and it turned out that she was alive. To this he was told: she will not survive, she will pass along the way,” Putin said. According to him, the father, using crutches, forced the orderlies to bring his wife back into the house.
Note that this is about people dying from malnutrition.
I'll note that the Russian Orthodox Church had a long history of being a subordinate branch of the Russian state (going back to Peter the Great's "reforms"), and the level of KGB infiltration of the church from its Soviet rehabilitation to the fall of the USSR that it's not particularly certain that one can draw a solid line between the post-Soviet church hierarchy and the network of ex-KGB agents.
Inheriting the Byzantine precedents certainly inclined things to go the way they eventually went, but between the Time of Troubles and Peter the Great (or, to put it another way, from the time of Patriarch Filaret to Patriarch Adrian), there was a substantial degree of independence.
There was a long struggle of church vs state, mostly over who appointed the head of the church. Every time a strong secular ruler came up, he tried to make it himself as the appointer.
The various Orthodox churches didn't have that. Since they didn't acknowledge the primacy of Rome, the appointer of new bishops etc. was either the local ruler or the people of the church (probably the earliest mechanism, but likely fell into disuse when the church became rich).
This was important not only because the bishops controlled a lot of money etc. but also because they had the ability to declare you excommunicated, i.e. not a church member.
Autocephaly and Caesaropapism. Up to about the early Middle Ages, the one outside authority to whom competing and clashing factions within the church(es) could appeal was the Emperor. Those who did not recognise the authority of the Bishop of Rome to make final decisions on doctrine naturally preferred the Emperor as the final voice.
With autocephaly, each national church was its own authority - within a union of churches - but subordinate, in practice, to the ruler of the country (be that the Emperor or, after the Eastern Empire finally collapsed itself, the new Emperor of Russia or wherever). The Greek Orthodox in Turkey found, and find, themselves under the authority of the secular Muslim state with varying degrees of freedom (e.g. there is a *lot* of crackdown on what they can do that is totally contrary to American norms of freedom of religion and the much-quoted 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion'):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenical_Patriarchate_of_Constantinople
"The relationship between Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire was frequently bitter, due in no small part to the privilege given to Islam. In the secular Republic of Turkey, tensions are still constant. Turkey requires by law that the Patriarch be a Turkish citizen by birth, which all Patriarchs have been since 1923—all ethnic Greeks from the minuscule and steadily decreasing Greek minority of Turkey, which is causing a shortage of priests and consequently potential candidates for the post of Ecumenical Patriarch. The state's expropriation of church property and the closing of the Orthodox Theological School of Halki are also difficulties faced by the Patriarchate."
That's a view that the Turkish authorities are hoping to/trying to strangle the church by neglect; if the law is that the Patriarch has to be Turkish, and there are no more Greeks as clergy, and all the Turkish citizens are Muslim or secular, then there will be no more Patriarch and eventually no more church.
>That's a view that the Turkish authorities are hoping to/trying to strangle the church by neglect
Isn’t that more like the church just dying by itself? If there were no more Christians (Greek or otherwise) in Turkey to have any clergy that are born there, even if the authorities allowed non-Turkish people to become Patriarch, in what sense would that Patriarchate still exist?
If I emigrate to Irak and build a temple to An, Enki, and Enlil, does that mean that the Sumerian religion is still alive?
Re: 3., only an extremely ham-fisted ruler would give direct orders to have his or her enemies physically assaulted. The standard way to get that done is to let your displeasure be known, and some enterprising member of the rank-and-file will do what you want.
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
"No not like that"
Exactly. Scott even references the phenomenon in this review! "Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify [election results]; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own." So why dismiss the possibility so blithely in an American context?
Probably because this requires the existence, in actual reality, of an rank-and-file whose members would go around roughing people up because their leader expressed displeasure with them. In the case of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Chuck Schumer, this wouldn't even be allowed into the room where the laugh test is being administered.
Or did you mean the broader American context, wherein people with actual devoted supporters (as distinct from the ability to get people to vote for you with a sigh because at least you probably won't ban abortion or be excessively mean to immigrants) occasionally become President?
The one really good thing still going on with the US system is that no matter how corrupt it may appear, nobody is loyal enough to get caught holding the bag. So long as general rule of law is at least fairly strong, the people who might actually rough somebody up are likely to get prosecuted and therefore unlikely to go through with it.
As long as leaders feel the need to disavow those accused of crimes, that should hold. When leaders can ignore crimes committed by those close to them, or especially if they can flaunt those crimes (perhaps by promoting those accused, or publicly involving them in their plans), then that's a bad place to be.
What the hell are you talking about? The FBI misled the FISA court on multiple occasions in order to surveil a Presidential candidate and only one guy got punished, which turned out to be such a light punishment that it couldn't even be classified as a slap on the wrist.
this is a romanticized version, but KGB is bureaucracy, not a mafia family. Their methods and procedures formalized since Sudoplatov killings (and probably earlier) and till the recent Navalny assassination attempt. It's a coordinated team activity with multiple actors and failures, where nobody wants to assume responsibility for something they didn't do. So yes, until there's a disclosure threat there is a document chain for every execution. Plus, the execution is only one point in a huge list of other activities - threatening, blackmailing, public badmouthing, vigilance, prosecution etc. This has to be formally managed on different levels.
On Navalny, am I taking crazy pills or is it odd that the KGB has tried to assassinate multiple people with the same chemical weapon that is considered one of the deadliest ever created, yet they constantly fail? It's almost as odd as Assad doing the one thing that will do the most harm to his reputation internationally every time he got the upper hand in the Civil War.
Which people? Who says the "new type of Novichok" used on Navalny[1] is "one of the deadliest ever created"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexei_Navalny
"But also, the man who came closest to overthrowing Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was Putin’s former cook! Again, this is pretty weird, but I don’t know what the alternative is. Some kind of conspiracy of Russian cooks?"
What, haven't you seen The Hunt for Red October?
Or read Treasure Island?
If you're a dictator, I suppose your personal cook is someone you trust more than most. Certainly if I were a dictator I'd look carefully at the person who made my meals.
It's also a position that doesn't often have a lot of explicit power or publicity.
It's a bit like coups are traditionally led by a colonel rather than a general - far enough from power to not be looked at closely, but close enough to have a lot of people loyal to you.
I post this to be playful, not conspiratorial, but: "Obamas’ personal chef drowns near family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard" (July 24, 2023)
https://apnews.com/article/obama-chef-drowning-marthas-vineyard-7c75e65b4e550823ee21334a0450323c?utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
In the case of Prigozhin at least, he owned some companies that got a bunch of lucrative catering contracts from the Russian government. The "Putin's Chef" nickname is a bit of derisive hyperbole on this: he was never literally Putin's chef.
Catering contracts seem like a relatively easy route for disguising sinecures and graft as legitimate use of public money. Since taste is subjective and the stakes are relatively low, it's easy to cook (so to speak) the selection process. And being a major investor in a catering company that's getting generous contracts handed to it doesn't necessarily require any particular expertise if you can hire a competent business manager.
Complicating this hypothesis, however, Prigozhin seems to have an entire early career as a restauranteur before he started getting contacts from Putin.
When Putin as a president brought visiting heads of states to Prigozhin's restaurants in 2000s, Prigozhin would personally bring the food and serve the guests. There are some published photos with him doing that. Presumably this is the public side of him personally supervising the execution of these special orders (under joint supervision of two state bodyguard services).
Calling him a waiter would be another option, but chef is shorter (in Russian too).
> Masha Gessen, a rare surviving Russian investigative journalist
Masha is an American who was born in Russia and emigrated here in her teens. Her experiences in Russia are mostly as a small child or as an American working in Russia. This explains a good deal of her survival.
> Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine.
Putin's childhood is not that mysterious if you assume Putin is mostly reliable about it. Admittedly, not a great assumption. But also no one's caught him in obvious lies as far as I know. Very little about his narrative of his own childhood is heroic. The closest thing he tells of great tales of derring do is that his father apparently saved his mother. She was so malnourished a corpse collector had thrown her on the cart. His father tried to take her back and, when the corpse collector tried to stop him, his father pulled a gun. He brought her back to an apartment where when he was not fighting, he would bring her food and medicine and fuel to nurse her back to health. This story is unverified but the relevant people were definitely in the right place and the right place was under siege by the Nazis.
Likewise, he agrees that he was quarrelsome as a child (backed up by school discipline records) though he claims he rarely started fights. Instead he portrays himself as bullied for being physically small. And that he tended to ambush or rapidly attack bigger boys to overwhelm them and win. You can see a political message there but it's also not on its face unbelievable as Putin was, and is, not that physically imposing.
> Life as a KGB officer was disappointing. Gessen describes it as sitting in a Leningrad office, cutting articles out of newspapers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them.
While they too have their reliability issues, most people report that Putin in the KGB was regarded as competent but not extroardinarily so. Being assigned to Leningrad then East Germany is not a stellar career path. A better agent would have been assigned to West Germany or Berlin.
> Also, it seems unclear whether you can disband the KGB. Around this point in the story, the Soviet generals launched their coup, Yeltsin defeated them, and the KGB was replaced by various other security agencies more congenial to a newly democratic state.
The Soviet Union post-Brezhnev was made up of a series of power blocks in negotiation with each other. Brenzhev was about as democratic as a Soviet leader could have realistically been (which is not very). The Soviet Union had always had a conflict between the security services and the military going all the way back to Stalin's time. Generally in direct confrontation the military won as with Khruschev or in 1991. But the security services could gain dominance when the political elite sided with them.
The security services, being Communist security services, had very little obligation to maintain more than the appearance of law and order. Their primary goal was protecting the party and waging the spy war abroad. As you can imagine, this involved all kinds of shady dealings and ties and international connections. When the Soviet state collapsed they attempted to preserve it (1991 again). When they failed they... just kind of kept all those contacts with criminals, foreign entities, and untraceable bank accounts for bribes or whatever. They never really accepted the fall of the Soviet Union and resented they had lost the confrontation in the early 1990s. But there was also money to be made in the new Russia and they set about making it through crime and through oligarchs.
Putin was in many senses a post-Soviet reaction by this KGB-oligarch-criminal nexus. He had no interest in literally returning to communism. But once these surviving KGB networks (criminal, intelligence, business) saw he had a chance of getting the presidency they all backed him to the hilt. And it worked. Putin got into power, the security services returned to prominence. Putin didn't do anything different than what tens of thousands of similar minded thinkers would have done. And they aren't loyal to Putin more than the changes Putin represents. But Putin, uniquely, attempted to chart a somewhat different course because he wasn't that successful post-Soviet. He joined politics partly as a way to get out of being a cab driver and then, through hook and crook and more than a little luck, was in a position where he could be boosted into a useful position.
> This was Anatoly Sobchak, a two-faced politician who had climbed to the top by convincing both the pro-democracy protesters and the communists he was on their side.
The degree of Putin and Sobchak's corruption in St. Petersburg is disputed. By some accounts he was not unusually corrupt (which still means he was corrupt) and it was instead exogenous economic shocks that caused the lost election. Notably, insofar as he was corrupt he was "machine politician" corrupt where gigantic festivals or public works served as a way to transfer kickbacks and buy votes. He only lost the vote narrowly. Sobchak appears to have enticed Putin because he offered a way out of the humiliation of being financially precarious through political loyalty. Which Putin was willing to give, somewhat uniquely for an ex-KGB agent, at least for a time. If you look at footage from that time period he actually looks quite modest and somewhat anxious over the possibility of losing that position.
> Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory.
This story of the transition is not what is most commonly said. Instead there were other successors but, in the aftermath of the 1998 Russian financial crisis, the economic pain plus corruption made most candidates untenable. Most people think the actual intended successor was Nemtsov but he was too high up and tainted by the affair. Why Yeltsin specifically chose Putin is up to speculation but the quid pro quo was obvious. Putin immediately pardoned Yeltsin and immunized him from prosecution, allowing him and his cronies to retire with any ill gotten gains.
> Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012?
Putin was always a conservative and Russian nationalist. However, while he never really approved of gays or liberals or intellectuals, he was also mostly content to leave them alone early in his rule. It was only in the late 2000s and early 2010s that he began to crack down on them, partly because he was riding a wave of popular conservative sentiment and partly because as he increasingly became confrontational with the west (Georgia etc) he felt needed to shore up the home front by removing dissident elements. After all, before then protests would be over much more esoteric constitutional issues. It was also useful for Putin to adopt the growing right populist movement as a kind of internationalist movement that Russian intelligence could move through, a replacement for Communism as a tool of Russian state interests.
> V. Could It Happen Here?
It can't but not for the reasons you say. Schumer actually did say on the news that he expected the security services to sabotage Trump with a kind of "ha ha" tone. The reason American security services can't do this kind of thing isn't the virtue of left wing leaders or norms. It's that they cannot expect the kind of deference the KGB required. When Democrats have tried to weaponize such institutions they have faced backlash. (And Republicans have generally not been able to for the reasons you say.) The reason the security services can't suppress the Republicans is that the Republicans have real power and will strike back. And the same for the Democrats.
I mean, I think there's also a difference between "secret services will be willing to sabotage via inaction or malicious compliance some guy in charge they don't like" and "secret services will walk into Hell and do anything out of loyalty for some guy in charge they really like". The former might not be the best if their antipathy is unwarranted but it's a negative feedback - it contains power rather than amplifying it. The latter is what's really dangerous (and what happened in Russia with Putin, apparently).
Yeah, my impression is that the FBI all the way back to Hoover was corrupt (to the extent that it was corrupt) not from loyalty to anybody outside but just for its own aggrandizement. This can involve doing favors for an administration when there is something to be gained, but it’s not something an aspiring tyrant could count on.
The extent to which it was/is corrupt is extensive. And it was even before Hoover, he was just more notorious than his predecessors.
It would be more difficult to demonstrate when it *stopped* being a blackmail/domestic spying organization.
My point is that the former is just a milder form of the latter. In both cases it's the security services are sabotaging political power they don't agree with. One is just much more extreme. And I think the reason the American version never got that extreme is because they faced backlash and didn't just get to arrest the backlash.
In short, it's not the goodness of certain politicians or institutional norms but that they could not get away with it. If there was credible evidence that the FBI staged a terrorist attack to get Joe Biden elected the Republicans would howl about it until the end of time. And if the FBI started rounding up Republicans or they mysteriously started dying then the Democrats would probably lose the next election. I'm not saying they did any of these things. But I think if they could without consequences they would. But they can't so they don't.
As to it "containing rather than amplifying power" I don't think that's a coherent standard. Though I agree with DM's point that their interests are not so much partisan as institutional. Likewise with the KGB shifting from being pro-Communist to conservative.
Gretchen Whitmer seems to be fairly successful
1.) The Gretchen Whitmer plot never actually was put into practice (actual people shot etc), unlike the bombings.
2.) Republicans are howling about what happened. It also seems unlikely it was intended as election interference on behalf of a Democratic governor that won re-election in a blue leaning state.
The Israelis and Saudis got away with their involvement in 9/11, and because of that I assume some element of the US government was involved. We literally caught Isreali spies celebrating the attack almost immediately after it happened, those same spies worked for a moving company that helped move one of the hijackers, the richest Isreali gave a large interest free loan to the NY Police Chief less than a month before 9/11, multiple Israeli art student groups (fronts for Israeli intelligence) were in the immediate vicinity of the 9/11 hijackers, etc.
Wait, Putin's father pulled his apparently-deceased-but-still-alive mother from a pile of bodies, and has to defend his actions against someone trying to prevent him, and afterwards nurses her back to health at home?
After according to Ash Lael above, Hillary Clinton said Putin told her how at Stalingrad, his GRANDfather pulled his apparently-deceased-but-still-alive GRANDmother from a pile of bodies, and has to defend his actions against someone trying to prevent him, and afterwards nurses her back to health at home?
Sounds like an unlikely coincidence...
I guess either Hillary (or Ash Lael) misremembered which generation the tale was about.
Or it is one of those stories created to project an image repeated by Putin so often he himself starts to get the details confused.
Leningrad, not Stalingard
You are right, sorry.
Putin was born in 1952 and his father was born in 1911. His grandfather was born in 1879. The siege of Leningrad was 1941 to '44. So his father would have been 30 while his grandfather would be retirement age. Perhaps I'm misremembering but the father is closer to the right age.
“But also, the man who came closest to overthrowing Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was Putin’s former cook! Again, this is pretty weird, but I don’t know what the alternative is. Some kind of conspiracy of Russian cooks?”
Prigozhin’s catering service was more a front for organized crime rather than an actual chef related thing. It is possible that a similar thing was true under the czars but I doubt it.
> Also, it seems unclear whether you can disband the KGB.
Not quite the right framing of things. The KGB is *itself* very much continuous with the much earlier 'Cheka' set up by Lenin pretty much the afternoon after he seized power, to the extent that 'Chekist' is a widely-used informal term for the Russian secret police in the Soviet era and through the modern day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Soviet_secret_police_agencies
Attempts to break, mitigate or modulate the power of the Russian intelligence agencies, or factions therein, by reorganizing them have a *very* long tradition in Russian politics.
Typos: Gusinsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gusinsky), not Gulinsky; Chechen, not Chechnyan.
Decentralization is America’s strength. A mayor of an American small town has more actual power than the governor of a Russian province. How a would a Democrat controlled FBI be able to bring Florida under control? How could a Republican Christian fundamentalist authoritarian take over Massachusetts? Russia started on the glide path to irrevocable decline when Putin neutered regional governors. Centralization has made Putin personally more secure but it has made the Russian state exceptionally brittle. One of the PRC’s strengths vis-a-vis Russia post Mao is that the Communist Party actually allowed significant power to stay in local hands. Unfortunately Xi has been busy centralizing which probably portends rougher times ahead for China.
Hard to depend on the “actual power” of a small-town mayor or even a state governor when we see them going after an actual former President and current Presidential candidate.
An actual former President and current Presidential and candidate who apparently committed a bunch of felonies. Do you think being a former president or Presidential candidate should confer blanket immunity? I hope you can see the holes in that logic.
We’ve all been over and over this. It’s not whataboutism to say, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the bunch of felonies.” The felonies I have read alleged sound like pretty small beer to me anyway.
No, I don’t think it should grant blanket immunity. But I think even less that it should open you up to persecution and questionable policing that is very hard for the man in the street to distinguish from political shenanigans. That’s mostly not out of fairness to any particular individual but out of my desire that our political process be seen as legitimate.
I made a fair bit of money on PredictIt six years ago by betting that Hillary would not be indicted, not because I thought she was innocent but because that’s just not the way America does things, and I’m very sad to see that change.
> The felonies I have read alleged sound like pretty small beer to me anyway
Maybe if you see it that way then your position makes sense, but I don't think it is accurate. Taking the classified document indictment alone, there seems to be (in the public indictment) pretty incontrovertible evidence of Trump doing things that people are prosecuted and given lengthy prison sentences for, including during the actual Trump administration. For your claim to standup you'd have to make the case that what he has been indicted for is something that another politician wouldn't have been and I don't think that's the case at all. I think that basically any politician would (and should) be prosecuted for what he did. And I haven't seen anyone arguing that Trump is being "persecuted" come up with an actual counterexample.
You say that about the classified document charge?? In the wake of Hillary and Biden’s handling of classified documents?? I’m flabbergasted.
Yes, I do. The details actually matter here. In the case of Biden, he (improperly) had some classified documents at his private residence. When he discovered this he proactively notified the appropriate authorities, returned the documents and cooperated with a further search to ensure there were no other classified materials at his residence. If Trump had sone the same thing he would also never have been prosecuted. But that's not what he did. What he did was spend a full year obstructing the efforts of authorities to reclaim the documents. He also on multiple occasions was showing off the documents to other people who did not have security clearance while he was saying (on tape!) that he knew they were not declassified.
Seriously, read the indictment and then tell me of something that Biden or Hillary did that was even remotely comparable.
I think a lot of people, myself included, are very skeptical about the charges against Trump. The Washington Post put out an article the day of Trump's inauguration saying that he should be impeached. He hadn't even done anything yet, let alone worthy of being impeached. The history of his presidency since that time has shown a very strong willingness on the part of his enemies to push for prosecution at any level. He was impeached twice and spent most of his time in office under official investigation. Notably, those investigations found *nothing* against Trump himself and none of the charges against people around him were related to the various things Trump was accused of. That the FBI could find things to charge people with after a multi-year investigation is not at all surprising and would be the same if Biden's administration was put under serious investigation for years. I don't think anyone serious doubts that.
The first charge against Trump was widely panned as weak and politically motivated, even by his enemies. The second as stronger, but something that could easily not have been prosecuted (and former presidents doing "similar" things were not prosecuted - Biden had boxes of classified documents loose at his house as well. The argument that Trump is being prosecuted because he did not cooperate with NARA is weak at best, since former presidents have to this day never complied with NARA and never had their house raided). That the third set of charges is stronger again is not helpful as whatever goodwill existed for prosecuting Trump has mostly been used up by the last seven years of premeditated attempts at prosecuting him for *something* and the various times he was accused but not guilty.
> The Washington Post put out an article the day of Trump's inauguration saying that he should be impeached
Which article was that? I don't recall.
> The history of his presidency since that time has shown a very strong willingness on the part of his enemies to push for prosecution at any level
Yes, like every president in the last 30 year, the political opposition spends a lot of their time investigating them.
> Notably, those investigations found *nothing* against Trump himself and none of the charges against people around him were related to the various things Trump was accused of
I don't really want to litigate it here, but I think this is broadly incorrect and I don't accept this premise at all.
> The second as stronger, but something that could easily not have been prosecuted (and former presidents doing "similar" things were not prosecuted - Biden had boxes of classified documents loose at his house as well. The argument that Trump is being prosecuted because he did not cooperate with NARA is weak at best, since former presidents have to this day never complied with NARA and never had their house raided)
"Similar" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If Trump had simply returned the documents in question when asked he also would never have been prosecuted. What he is actually being prosecuted for is engaging in a year-long conspiracy to obstruct the authorities from getting the documents back. Also, there is very concrete evidence (including recordings) of him showing off the highly classified documents to people he knew didn't have clearance and saying (again, on tape) that he knew they were still classified. During the Trump administration Reality Winner was given a 5 year prison sentence for giving a classified document to a reporter, which is exactly what Trump did.
>"Similar" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If Trump had simply returned the documents in question when asked he also would never have been prosecuted.
This is excessively charitable, imo. Biden didn't even have to be asked.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/20/the-campaign-to-impeach-president-trump-has-begun/?postshare=2711484932964031
Agreed on not litigating the details here. I'm no fan of Trump, but it's inescapable to say that his opponents, which included both Democrats and Republicans, were gunning for him from the very beginning. And, that they were looking for anything at all they could pin on him, whether it was legitimate, newsworthy, or in line with previous treatments of presidents.
Read the article from the WP. From day one that playbook was rolled out and what we saw was exactly what was planned, long before Trump actually did anything - other than win the election.
First, I don't disagree that there was broad opposition to Trump from day one. But that is the case for every US President in the modern era. There is always an organized political opposition which will try and pin whatever they can on them. When they can't come up with anything they try and drum up a bunch of nonsense.
As to the particular article, I don't think it really proves your point. The advocacy groups in question had an actual concrete argument about why Trump was impeachable. From the article:
>The organizers behind the campaign, Free Speech for People and RootsAction, are hinging their case on Trump’s insistence on maintaining ownership of his luxury hotel and golf course business while in office
Which honestly makes sense. It's been drowned out now by years of various scandals but it really was both unprecedented and deeply troubling that the POTUS decided to not divest himself of his privately held business while he was in office. Basically his entire net worth was tied up in an opaque company that was operating in numerous countries (many of which with these diplomatic relations with the US). I personally don't think that is grounds for impeachment absent concrete evidence of some specific corrupt dealings, but it doesn't seem particularly outlandish for an advocacy group to make the argument.
I think the overarching point I want to make here is just that you the fact that Trump faced a lot of investigations and was actually impeached twice does not in fact tell you anything in and of itself. Maybe he was a normally corrupt politician and the increased scrutiny was because he was in fact treated especially unfairly. Or maybe he was in fact extraordinarily corrupt and the increased scrutiny was a rational reaction to that fact. I personally think there is abundant evidence that the latter is true.
Hillary Clinton violated government records laws and then committed obstruction of justice to cover it up. Yet Comey let her go with no penalty.
And a President's son, and a sitting Democratic Senator, and a number of other criminals of various political connections. It actually seems like a remarkably *good* feature of our country that it is possible to prosecute highly-connected people when they commit crimes, or when at least they have very publicly done things that are very likely to be crimes.
A President’s son. Good one. Wake me when there’s a felony charge, or when the Big Guy faces the music.
If there’s a credible felony accusation, prosecutors would be willing to go after them. There’s a reason the people getting prosecuted are Bob Menendez and Hunter Biden rather than Ted Cruz or Joe Biden. Prosecutors have a well-known bias against criminals.
Do some research into the immunity clauses that the Hunter Biden prosecutors tried to get past the judge. In exchange for *reducing* the charges against him, they were offering immunity to other charges. Does that sound normal to you, or the kind of thing that people with a "bias against criminals" would do?
There's repeat video evidence of Hunter breaking a number of laws, it's not like it's a hard case to make.
I have no idea how plea deals usually go, but don’t they usually involve reduced sentences for the ones you plead to, as well as immunity to others? In any case, the final judgment hasn’t happened in his case - didn’t the judge challenge some of the moves he has made?
They did not "try" to get those past the judge. They did not understand those clauses to mean immunity to other charges and said so when the judge asked. It was the defence who thought they meant immunity, and it was this disagreement that led the judge to toss the agreement.
I'm reluctant to play the person instead the ball, but Masha Gessen isn't a brilliant choice for a biographer of Putin. The Gessen siblings come from a particular milieu of Russian expatriates in New York, strategically fostered by the nickel magnate Mikhail Prokhorov. He was a major beneficiary of the state asset fire sale during the Yeltsin 1990s, the end of which (and partial repatriation) is perhaps Putin's one genuinely positive achievement.
This isn't to imply that Gessen is a mindless mouthpiece of the oligarch, or that the book is useless. But the trajectory of making Putin appear as an inhuman cipher is rather locked in, and it takes away from the purpose of the Book Club, which I take to be an understanding of the autocrat in terms of external force vectors and available levers.
Perhaps Philip Short's or Steven Lee Myers's books might have been the better choice, a little more detached from Russian inside baseball. (Or perhaps inside basketball; there's a Nets joke in there somewhere)
Also:
"The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators.
The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure."
It's probably true that this mother of 'October events' was orchestrated. And it helped Putin's image as the securocrat candidate who was going to bring the terrorists to justice. It's not clear that it was necessary, however. The main factor was Putin's control of the media (Berezovsky's NTV in particular), as well as probably a bit of straight-up ballot fraud. It was not all that different from Yeltsin's victory over Zyuganov in 1996, except in intensity.
Having read Gessen's biography and Short's biography, I now view Gessen's as almost worthless. This is partly because I read "Brothers" by Gessen, about the Tsarnaev brothers and Boston Marathon bombing, which made flagrant errors when discussing American law and by the end was filled with utterly incoherent and evidence-free conspiracy theories. For example, Gessen gives serious weight to the possibility that the Tsarnaevs were innocent, but that when they saw they were wanted for the bombing they killed a cop and then threw homemade explosives (which I guess they had lying around?) at other cops. They also argue that Dzokhar's note in the boat was not a confession. They'd become friends with the Tsarnaev family by that point and were willing to propose whatever FBI frame-up would make them look less bad. It was sad to read, and my reaction at the time was to think I now had to unlearn everything Gessen said about Putin.
Interestingly, Short begins his biography by explaining why he doesn't think the apartment bombings were Putin's doing. Among other things, there was a smaller bomb in Volgodonsk set off by gangsters a few days before the apartment bomb which had appeared in Moscow press in a manner that could fool a parliamentarian into thinking another apartment bombing had occurred. Also, for some stupid reason, it really was KGB/FSB practice to conduct drills like the Ryazan incident. Finally, the bombings occurred in the context of a Russian counteroffensive in Dagestan, and the conspiracy version requires us to believe that insurgents like Shamir Basayev were willing to lie about the origin of the bomb to help Putin for some reason.
Short's biography certainly isn't pro-Putin, but very different from Gessen's. His Putin is somewhat defensible until the mid-2000s: not corrupt in Saint Petersburg, loyal to Sobchak and not responsible for his heart attack, not bombing apartments to come to power, willing to cooperate with the west until criticisms of the War in Chechnya pissed him off. Ultimately Short acknowledges that Putin became very evil with time, but it's quite a different biography than Gessen's in the aggregate it seemed better researched and more convincing.
A priori, Shamil Basayev did have an incentive to claim deep strike capabilities for expanding external support from religious extremism allies. Note that by that time the containment status quo where Checnya / Ichkeriya was given de facto independence short only of ability to formally secede had already failed after Basayev tried to expand the zone of control to Dagestan.
Another example of her dishonesty: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1609153360707346432.
I'm confused; they described a 40-second-long video arguing that "Firearms Must Be Legalized" as "a 40-second argument for gun rights". Is that not straightforwardly true?
Edit: some people in the comments are suggesting that the complaint is the guy who briefly flashes up as an example of an "insect" one might need to take care of, who is apparently Chechen? OK, even if it's a racist argument for gun rights, it's still pretty straightforwardly an argument for gun rights?
The video depicts ethnic immigrants as cockroaches that need to be exterminated using weapons. So yes, it did indeed call for gun rights. But to merely describe the video as "a forty-second argument for gun rights," while ignoring the elephant in the room, is dishonest.
Additionally, in the same article (from 2021) she claims that:
>Navalny’s reputation as an ultranationalist stems from statements and actions that are more than a decade old.
But her very article undermines that assertion, by stating:
>In 2013, he made illegal immigration from Central Asia a central theme of his campaign...In 2014, after Russia occupied Crimea, he said that, while he opposed the invasion, he did not think that Crimea could be just “handed back”...In the past seven years, though, Navalny appears to have not made any comments that could be interpreted as hateful or ethno-nationalist.
So which is it? Did he stop his ultranationalist rhetoric a decade earlier, or 7 years earlier?
Furthermore, she seemed to bend the truth in the above quote, writing:
>He said that, while he opposed the invasion, he did not think that Crimea could be just “handed back."
As far as I can tell, besides for saying that he wouldn't give Crimea back to Ukraine, Navalny didn't say that he opposed the invasion. In reading that part of the interview that she apparently references, the closest I can find, is him saying that "despite the fact that the Crimea was seized with outrageous violations of all international norms, nevertheless, the realities are such that Crimea is now part of the Russian Federation."
Her comments about him recanting his position on Georgia are also less than honest.
She wrote:
>In 2008, Navalny, like an apparent majority of Russians, supported Russian aggression in Georgia... He has publicly apologized for his comments on Georgia.
The implication is that he apologized for supporting aggression in Georgia. However, he didn't do that. He only apologized for referring to Georgians as rodents - and it wasn't exactly much of an apology.
What he actually said in the interview that she hyperlinked was:
>Я написал пост, в котором называл грузин грызунами, за что извинялся. Могу извиниться еще раз. Но по сути я своего взгляда не изменил.
> I wrote a post calling Georgians rodents, for which I apologized. I can apologize again. But in essence I have not changed my views.
Here's Navalny opposing the annexation of Crimea weeks before it happened:
https://navalny.livejournal.com/914090.html
Here's Navalny calling for 1991 borders (i.e. Crimea in Ukraine) in 2023:
https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1627632098608644099
>What he actually said was:
He apologized for that comment multiple times, most recently when he called for Sakiashvili's release from prison in April.
My focus was Gessner's honesty - not Navalny. I quoted the specific interviews that she referenced or hyperlinked and examined whether she described them accurately - not any comment he ever made, including comments after her article was written. I edited my post to try to clarify this.
FWIW, what I noticed in "The Brothers" was not so much dishonesty as crazy leaps in logic. For example:
Cops failed to solve the 2011 Waltham triple murder in which Tamarlan Tsarnaev is now a suspect -> The cops failed to seriously investigate the murder -> Tamarlan was an FBI information source protected by the FBI -> The FBI might have given Tamarlan the bombs to plant, akin to how they gave fake bombs to entrap the Newburgh 4 (as if those are remotely similar things, and also why are entrapping an agent they are protecting?) -> The reason he was killed in a shootout with cops was that the police wanted to kill him before he could talk.
I do not trust someone who makes leaps like this to sort through different accounts and assess how corrupt Putin was in 1990s Saint Petersburg.
Any thoughts on how apartment bombing investigators Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya all ended up dead?
I don't doubt they were murdered either on Putin's orders or by people in Putin's orbit, but they did more than investigate the apartment bombings. Shchekochikhin was killed while investigating the Three Whales corruption scandal, Litvinenko was a disloyal agent, Politkovskaya reported on atrocities by Chechens aligned with Putin.
I do think that one issue with Short's biography was that while he acts as if Putin wasn't that bad in the beginning, Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin were killed pretty early in his regime, and even if he didn't directly order their killings he was clearly okay with being the head of a journalist-killing regime.
Re: Putin being a terrible communicator, this whole Ukraine war strikes me as maybe now because of bad communication on Russia's part.
Russia amassed troops on the border and denied they were planning an invasion. The US says their intelligence says Russia is planning an invasion. The international community is...., skeptical!
If Russia really didn't want this war, it did a terribly bad job of getting that across. It should have said "Yes! Those are our troops! Yes! We will invade if you can't guarantee Ukraine will stay unaligned! Yes! We're serious!"
Unless of course it wanted to invade the whole time. That's what I used to think, but maybe Putin really is that bad at getting his message across?
But that's exactly what he said! See his demands from December 2021.
Doesn’t the fact they made obvious preparations for the war, the US intelligence services predicted it, and the Russians then invaded kind of prove they wanted to invade the whole time? You are overthinking this.
A majority of Ukrainians, at the time, did not believe Putin would invade. It maybe had something to do with Putin amassing troops at the border multiple times before? Lots of analysts thought he wouldn't invade (e.g. [1], and even Vlad Vexler talking about "Why Putin Is Invading Ukraine" [2] didn't really expect a full-scale invasion that year). Putin said "These military exercises, drills, are purely defensive and are not a threat to any other country" a week before invading[3]. And RT reported on how the US was nuts for claiming Russia would invade[4].
It was clear afterward that yeah, he totally wanted to invade. But it wasn't a miscommunication; Putin wanted the invasion to be a surprise.
[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/why-putin-wont-invade-ukraine/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwU13-4SakE
[3] https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-putin-says-military-drills-purely-defensive-and-not-a-threat-as-western-leaders-warn-invasion-imminent-12545284
[4] I can't be bothered to look it up
Sounds a bit like the lop-sided way he proposed to his wife.
Can we get Huey Long for Dictator Book Club? ;)
You said: "As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here".
What?
Last century, there were tons of terrorist attacks and bombings from the revolutionary left, over 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone, and the whole time the perpetrators were funded by the National Lawyer's Guild, getting funding and authority from the New York City government, and were entirely ignored, or even supported, by the mainstream media. Many of the worst perpetrators are still free and supported by the left: For example, Obama commuted the sentence of of Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the FALN Puerto Rican terrorist group.
A summary of this is here: https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
1. I didn't say 'the Left', I'm referring specifically to the mainstream Democrats as they exist at this moment.
2. IIRC even the bombing campaigns of the 70s put a surprising amount of work into destroying property but not killing people.
Ted Kennedy was a mainstream Democrat; the conspiracy theories about the Clintons are probably false but don't have the "against their ideological DNA" sense to me.
That's sort of circular, though, inasmuch as having an avowed ideology of "let's do Mafia-style killings" would make a party/group definitionally not "mainstream."
FWIW, the three "Mafia-style killing" political conspiracy theories that have attracted the most adherents in the USA during my lifetime all involve the Democrats:
1. LBJ killed JFK
2. The Clintons killed Vince Foster
3. Various Dems something something something Jeffrey Epstein
I'm genuinely trying to think of some similar conspiracy theory involving GOP politicians and coming up empty. Obviously that doesn't prove that the Dems actually did or could or would do any of those things, and may simply prove that anti-Dem people have been consistently more attracted to conspiracy theories for the past 60 years. But it does suggest there's at least some sort of inchoate popular intuition that it's not exactly "against their ideological DNA."
It is odd there aren’t more “Republicans killed Epstein” theories given Trump’s relationship with the guy and, far more damning, Barr’s long history with Epstein. Probably a bipartisan agreement.
I think that Republicans aren't capable of doing anything sneaky any more; the Democrats control all the subtle fingers of power, and Republicans only control the ones you actually see. If the Republicans wanted a prisoner dead in an apparent suicide, they simply wouldn't have the contacts to make that happen.
I don't think Scott is claiming, "everyone, even the most conspiracy-minded people, agree that this is against the ideological DNA of mainstream Democrats". He is just claiming "this is clearly against the ideological DNA of mainstream Democrats". The fact that there is a conspiracy-minded bunch that thinks it isn't just doesn't do much as a counter to that claim.
Jeffrey Epstein was like Sid Hudgens in La Confidential. If he was murdered (which seems plausible but not certain), the suspect list was *very* long.
> "let's do Mafia-style killings" would make a party/group definitionally not "mainstream."
It's not "by definition" that killings are not mainstream. They could be mainstream, like in Russia, but they aren't. Let's keep it that way.
I guess neither Bill Ayers nor Al Sharpton count as "mafia-style."
I have an abiding contempt for both men, who have abetted and countenanced truly loathsome deeds. But so far as I'm aware, neither has been associated with targeted killing (or intimidation generally) of political opponents. Rather, their sin has been to approve of harm to random bystanders killed or injured in the course of a political stunt.
Intent follows the bullet. I'm pretty sure Sharpton specifically target Fred Harari for harassment just like Ayers targeted the soldiers (and their dates) at Ft. Dix.
"Oopsie, it got out of hand" isn't very mafia-like, I'll agree.
Oh, I certainly agree, and I'm not in any way trying to dismiss Sharpton's or Ayers's conscious malice in targeting the people they did.
My point is just that it's not as if Harari was some sort of rival to Sharpton or prominent anti-Sharptonian journalist or something. He was just a guy minding his own business who had the misfortune of it becoming politically convenient for Sharpton to use him as a scapegoat.
This is a failure of imagination IMO. The Democrats don't have to have the stomach for killings (which I think you err on) the stomach for political prosecutions and economic blackmail gets you there even faster in the modern age. And they have that stomach in spades.
Is there any evidence of a Democratic penchant for politicized prosecutions?
Just compare Trump's vs Hillary's dealings with classified documents, the Floyd rioters vs J6 rioters, etc. These people may have violated the law, but the disparity in punishment is undeniable.
Was there any allegation that Clinton refused to return classified documents after her time in government? I thought there were issues about the e-mail server, but nothing like refusing a direct request, and then lying about the presence of documents.
Haven't the Jan. 6 and George Floyd rioters been treated about the same? People who caused significant damage were arrested and sentenced (though the ones who invaded government buildings got higher punishment).
Clinton deleted 30k emails, which is clear obstruction of justice.
And name one single Floyd rioter who was denied bail and put in solitary confinement for months, despite not committing an actual act of violence like the Q Shaman was.
Yes, let's compare Trump's vs Hillary's dealings with classified documents. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pDEPDxMbh4
I'm not going to sit through a 30 minute video by a partisan. My question is: she deleted 30k emails in violation of public records laws, sent classified information in an illegal way. Why shouldn't she be prosecuted?
I find this slightly ironic given that Scott is obviously aware not just of the Days of Rage, not just the book about it titled "Days of Rage", but the exact book review you're linking to. From https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ (BOOK REVIEW: AGES OF DISCORD):
"The same problems: labor unrest, racial violence, terrorism – repeated during the 1970s spike. Instead of quoting Turchin on this, I want to quote this Status 451 review of Days of Rage, because it blew my mind..."
& from https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/ (BOOK REVIEW: SECULAR CYCLES):
"In popular understanding of American history, you can trace out optimistic and pessimistic periods. The national narrative seems to include a story of the 1950s as a golden age of optimism. Then everyone got angry and violent in the early 1970s (the Status 451 review of Days Of Rage is pretty great here, and reminds us that “people have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States”)..."
Democrats aren't extreme leftist groups. In Italy in the 70s we had a long season of political terrorism too, both from the right wing (e.g. the Bologna train station bombing) and the left wing (e.g. the kidnapping and murder of former PM Aldo Moro), and over all of it hangs the shadow of possible CIA/KGB interference as Italy was a key strategic battlefield during the Cold War, part of NATO but dangerously leaning towards the Warsaw Pact or at least becoming unaligned at times. But if someone told me that the current parliamentary Italian left was thus inclined to bombings and kidnappings I'd laugh in their face (and to be fair, neither I think is the current right, though they are far more reactionary than they were, say, 20 years ago). Every wing has its extremists.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
And then, there's antifa. Which is if not openly endorsed, then gladly tolerated by the mainstream left, and these guys are as violent as one can get, and do not try to hide that. Just days ago, the attempt of Andy Ngo, beaten by antifa thugs within inches of his life, to hold them accountable in the Portland court, predictably failed miserably. Antifa openly threatened the jury, disrupted the proceedings and attacked the journalists reporting - and they got exactly what they wanted, and largely continue to enjoy complete freedom from consequences. They are literally a violent mob, operating in shadows, intimidating and violently suppressing anybody who crosses them, and enjoying clandestine support from the societal institutions. If that's not Mafia-style, what is?
They don't exist so much that the defense lawyer on the aforementioned court proclaimed "I am antifa" and warned the jury that she remembers all their faces, and her comrades tried to find out all personal info about the jurors (not sure whether they succeeded). Given that this is happening in the process about antifa almost murdering another person they hated - I think that sent a pretty strong message. The message being, of course, that there's no antifa and nobody who crosses the non-existing antifa is in any danger whatsoever. Completely unlike Mafia, of course.
>these guys are as violent as one can get
This is gross hyperbole. Antifa might beat up fascists, but they're no IRA, no Hamas - and for that matter, nowhere near the power and violence of *the actual mafia*. Yeah, sure, some antifascists are definitely violent ("antifa" is not an organization), but they're overgrown adolescents compared to what we're talking about here.
I think the bare minimum for accusing a group of mafia-style killings is, y'know, actual, actual killings.
To paraphrase Scott above "Even [antifa's] enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what [actually violent groups with any actual power] were doing."
OK, you are right, I stand corrected. They are not actually as violent as they could be, it was just a turn of phrase. While they beat up people, destroy property, intimidate journalists, injure policemen, set federal buildings on fire and perform a plethora of other violent activities, they certainly could do more. They could rob banks, murder policemen and bomb federal buildings, like Weather Underground did (I am not sure who those were but they must be right wing because I have it on good authority political murder is not in the Left's DNA). They could unleash a terror campaign like RAF (another organization that is likely right-wing) or even a full blown war, like IRA. So yes, they could be more violent. But I think right now they are violent enough already for people to notice.
> "antifa" is not an organization
There might not be a single official organization, with 501c3 registration and official letterhead, but they are definitely organized and capable of projecting organized power. Someone here mentioned the Mafia, which makes me want to check the list of official NGOs and see if I can find "Mafia" there. If I don't, do you think it means Mafia does not exist and anybody who talks about Mafia is just an ignorant conspiracy theorist?
> Antifa might beat up fascists
By "fascist" here we mean anybody they disagree with. And it's simple logic - if you are against them, then you are anti-anti-fascist - which by simple logic inference means you are a fascist. You can't argue with logic!
> I think the bare minimum for accusing a group of mafia-style killings is, y'know, actual, actual killings.
Sure, they tried to kill Ngo, but it didn't work out, he survived. How about Aaron Danielson? He was murdered by Michael Reinoehl, self-described antifa, who lately died in a shootout with the police (fortunately, police shoots better so they didn't give him a chance to increase his body count). It's, y'know, actual actual actual killing right here.
Connor Betts murdered nine people, and is on record as an avid antifa supporter. While we can't claim his radical leftist beliefs necessarily led to the killings - they could be coincidental to his insanity, certainly nothing in his ideological DNA suggested to him that mass murder is taboo. And to be honest, how could it - the ideology of communism, and it practice, where implemented, necessitates violent overthrow of existing order and violent suppression of dissent. It's not an ideology that has non-violence in its DNA.
Now, I'm not going to claim all - or even majority - of Democrats follow such ideology. No, that's certainly not true - most of them are as averted to such practices as I am, and I hope you are. But on the left wing of the party - where people like antifa reside - this is the ideology that is accepted and endorsed. And since the mainstream party is not recoiling in revulsion from them, and not expelling them from any association with the party (and we all know if they know how to do something with gusto it's expelling and shunning people) - on the contrary, they support and enable them - I think we can conclude that while they many not be endorsing such ideas, their ideological DNA is also not completely incompatible with them.
>> "antifa" is not an organization
>There might not be a single official organization, with 501c3 registration and official letterhead, but they are definitely organized and capable of projecting organized power. Someone here mentioned the Mafia, which makes me want to check the list of official NGOs and see if I can find "Mafia" there.
They aren't an organization because it's a political ideology, not a organization. No one is in charge of "antifa". It's like saying "communism" or "capitalism" or "fascism" are organizations - it's a plain category error. As such, it is totally dissimilar to the Mafia, which regardless of official registration (what? how did that come up?) has a clear organizational structure, and clear people in charge.
>If I don't, do you think it means Mafia does not exist and anybody who talks about Mafia is just an ignorant conspiracy theorist?
Okay, now you're just engaging in bad faith. At no point did I imply antifa "doesn't exist" (we're openly talking about its effects) and I certainly didn't accuse you of being "an ignorant conspiracy theorist" (although, now that I think about it, I am accusing you of seeing a conspiracy where none exists, fair enough)
> By "fascist" here we mean anybody they disagree with.
I mean, your example was a man assaulted while attending a rally organized by the Proud Boys, a literal (violent!) neo-fascist organization. Or are you talking about the time after he got caught with another far-right group while they were literally discussing a plan to assault antifascists? But sure, we could easily broaden the definition to "far right".
>Sure, they tried to kill Ngo
I mean according to Andy, sure.
>How about Aaron Danielson?
That is considerably closer to a Mafia-style killing, and meets the minimum threshold of being an actual killing. It remains to be seen if he was acting under anyone else's orders, which is the other crucial part of the analogy. As far as I can tell, no credible source (i.e. one that might face repercussions for lying) has accused him of that. And AFAICT, this is an outlier event - sources note this is "the first killing linked to an anti-fascist in the United States in 25 years."
>> To paraphrase Scott above "Even [antifa's] enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what [actually violent groups with any actual power] were doing."
>That's as much an excuse as excusing a murderer by saying "the atomic bomb in Hiroshima killed thousands and your court did nothing,
Okay, this just gives me evidence that you've entirely missed the point here. Because:
a) Nothing I said was about excusing them (I literally made a point to agree that they are violent)
b) The *topic*† of the thread is political actors who could be comparison to the KGB/FSB, and you brought up antifa - which, to use your surprisingly apt metaphor, is like entering a conversation about how, say, Belgium never committed any wartime atrocities comparable to the civilian casualties of the US's nuclear assault on Japan, and going "yeah they do, this one guy murdered an old lady"
†And yes, your reply is expected to be on-topic, because otherwise it fails *at least two* of Kind, True, or Necessary
> They aren't an organization because it's a political ideology, not a organization.
This is of course completely false. It's like claiming Communist Parties do not exist, because communism is a political ideology, not an organization. Communism is an ideology, and Communist Party is an organisation following this ideology. Similarly, antifa is an organisation following the ideology of violently attacking anybody they designate "fascist" - which is anybody they dislike and anybody who is to the right to them.
It is obvious that such organisation exists - they conduct trainings, perform actions, have media groups, permanent and semi-permanent members, etc. It is all documented (including by Andy Ngo, but not only), and not even addressing it is just an attempt at gaslighting at this point.
> I mean according to Andy, sure.
Are you implying that Ngo severely beat himself and put himself to the hospital, just to slander antifa, and no antifa members actually beaten him? Or that they actually beat him, but their purpose was something else than causing grave bodily harm that they caused? What, in your opinion, was that purpose?
> Nothing I said was about excusing them (I literally made a point to agree that they are violent)
Who are "they"? You just claimed antifa is just an ideology. Ideology does not beat up people and does not set up courhouses on fire. Who are "they" that did all that and that you admit are violent? Just random people, for no reason at all regularly assembling, dressing similarly and acting cohesively, and deciding at random to be violent at exactly the same place in exactly the same way, which they announced in advance, and signed as "antifa"? Is there a point where denying there's an ogranized effort behind it would sound ridiculous already?
> The *topic*† of the thread is political actors who could be comparison to the KGB/FSB, and you brought up antifa
No, the topic was that the violence in service of political goals "is not in the DNA" of the Democrats. That's why I brought antifa - because it is the movement whose whole point is the violence in service of leftist political goals - and Democrats are helping, tolerating, and enabling it. If political violnce weren't part of their DNA, that would be a very strange thing to comprehend. Of course, the solution is simple - the hypothesis that political violence is contrary to their politican DNA is just false.
As for the "conspiracy" angle, I agree there's no conspiracy. Conspiracy implies clandestine action. Antifa acts openly and boldly, and is not afraid of publicity - it enjoys it. A mafia lawyer would never dare to proclaim in open court to the jury "I am from Mafia, and I remember each and every of your faces" - but an antifa lawyer does it, with no sanctions, and successfully intimidates the jury into compliance. And nobody on the left has any objections to it, either. What does it say about their political DNA?
> To paraphrase Scott above "Even [antifa's] enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what [actually violent groups with any actual power] were doing."
That's as much an excuse as excusing a murderer by saying "the atomic bomb in Hiroshima killed thousands and your court did nothing, and my defendant here just robbed one old lady, which maybe had a year to live at most anyway - how dare you to accuse him while not saying anything about the victims of Hiroshima?!" Somebody else doing something you consider bad is not an excuse for you to do bad. Yes, antifa is a tiny fraction of a vast ocean of evil that exist around us. Still, they are fraction of that ocean, and the existence of the rest of the ocean does not excuse them one tiny bit.
Didn't check everything you said, but I looked at Rivera's Wikipedia page, especially the "Imprisonment section": Dude spent 36 yrs in prison (12 solitary), was 77 at release, killed no one and there was broad international support (UN, South Africa, Puerto Rico, ...) for his release.
Releasing him seems very sensible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_L%C3%B3pez_Rivera#Imprisonment
This account misses something fundamental in my view. I myself was born in Russia and lived most of my life there, participating in some of the events described in the post, such as the 2011-2014 protests. What is really crucial for understanding how Putin came to power is *how bad the 90s were*. The GDP per capita fell by half (by way of comparison, the GDP per capita fell only about 25% during the Great Depression in the US).
It was not just economical too, a lot of people who used to have a stable or even respectable occupation (manufacturing workers, doctors, teachers, scientists) lost their jobs or saw their income evaporate. The amount of misery was simply enormous, and it explains the real support for someone who promised and seemed to deliver a measure of stability and even growth. This level of support is of course less that the percentage Putin gets in elections but it's real nonetheless. When I was an observer at the elections in Moscow, seeing the whole process at one polling station, Putin got almost exactly 50% and the next candidate got thirty-something.
The experience of the 90s also had another, more subtle effect. The people who were against Putin from the beginning and understood what he was up to were mostly associated with the "liberals" who were held responsible for the disastrous reforms in the 90s. Since they were almost universally hated, their calls were for the most part ignored. Now you might say that this is irrational - Putin was an active participant in the 90s looting, probably more so than many "liberals," but that's how it was felt.
"What is really crucial for understanding how Putin came to power is *how bad the 90s were*. "
It's impossible to overstate this.
Among the things entirely missing from most Western comments on the Russian 1990s is how dictatorial Yeltsin actually became, in terms of rule by decree, as a direct consequence of the 1993 constitutional crisis, which was precipitated by this early misery and anticipation of more misery to come. And concluded by way of a very dodgy referendum.
Viewed in the light of fresh experience of that time, as they were during Putin's consolidation of power, Putin's early chicanery seems scarcely out of the ordinary.
I mean, the actual story of how Putin came to power is “the previous dictator appointed him.” He then held power by a mixture of competence and Chekist support. At most, it’s the story of how bandits become stationary.
Yes, I think that's exactly right -- except that the becoming-stationary part is non-trivial and may even be the whole explanatory enchilada.
Not surprising: in a period of extreme instability, whichever rando the previous dictator appoints gets the jump on his rivals and becomes dictator himself.
Surprising: said rando stays in power for three decades (and counting), becoming Augustus and reshaping the state's formal institutions around the contingent circumstances of his own anomalous rise to power.
How bad the nineties were might explain some of Putin’s early popularity but it doesn’t explain how he specifically came to power.
It does, to some extent
1) People actually voted for him in 2000 and in the later elections too
2) His opponents were completely discredited and no one believed in their (ultimately correct) warnings
But also the question "how Putin came to power" isn't the same as "why didn't democracy and rule of law take hold in Russia" because the 90s were no less corrupt and the 1996 elections were likely fraudulent. So the question "how Putin came to power" becomes less interesting.
Those are good points. It depends what question one is asking. But how Putin came to power is interesting because it illustrates something about what he is like, and also something about what Russia was and is like, if connections to the intelligence services and that level of behind the scenes plotting (as described in the review) is what puts people in power.
Yes, I agree. If the goal is to prevent it from happening elsewhere, then it's more helpful to focus on fundamentals. A strongman will emerge and how he establishes his power will depend on the circumstances. Caesar used his army and patronage network, Hitler relied on his thugs and friendly capitalists while Putin used his FSB connections.
The question is why Vladimir Putin. Initially his blandness helped. Russians in the 1990s/2000 weren’t actually looking for a strong man and Putin wasn’t perceived as one. He was enough of a blank slate that anyone angry with the status quo could project their preferences on him. That makes him more interesting than the usual Latin American caudillo type
But was it more-or-less inevitable that a strongman would end up in power, and Putin happened to be the guy in the right place to end up in that position?
In a perfect world, how should the 90s reforms have been handled, in your opinion? Or was it inevitable that there would be problems?
Wow, that's a big question. The fact is that there are countries which handled the transition from socialist economy much more successfully, like China or Poland. Obviously the paths these two countries took were completely different so it's hard to say what would've worked better for Russia. It seems like it got the worst of the two approaches. Unlike China, it had no strong state capable of long-term planning and opening the economy just to the right extent and in the right sectors to capitalise on the advantages it had and achieve growth. Unlike Poland, there was no real prospect of the EU/NATO membership which imposed some discipline of the Polish governments and made them do things they wouldn't have done otherwise.
Btw I was too young when these reforms were happening, so I don't have personal insights. The closest thing to that was when I spoke with someone who was involved at a pretty high level in privatisation campaigns in Poland and some post-Soviet states (not Russia itself), and they said that the corruption in the latter was at a completely different level, with predictable consequences on the privatisation results and their legitimacy in the eyes of wider public.
I think it was too late to do much differently in 90's - Gorbachev's bungled Perestroika in 80's might have been a place to start. His well-meaning but inept attempts to introduce kind-of-free-but-not-really-market basically created Russian mafia and future oligarchs, or at least gave them ways to gain power and money.
Also, I remain of an opinion that if America was more ready for collapse of USSR and had a kind of "Marshall Plan" ready, things might have gone differently. From all I've read, the event came as a surprise, and Russia was left to fend on its own - a few abortive and inadequate attempts at help were vastly overshadowed by predatory behavior (potentially competing factories bought out and shut down, resources both physical and informational siphoned) and general indifference. On the other hand, it's perfectly understandable: Marshall Plan was needed, because of Cold War. With collapse of USSR, America had no more worthy opponents, so there was no need to prop up the former enemy against some new force (could anyone have predicted China then? Probably not).
>could anyone have predicted China then?
Yes. I think world-systems theorists were already like 80% there. "The Long Twentieth Century", in 1993, already describes East Asia's economic domination as fait accompli. It still uses Japan as its main representative, Arrighi didn't start focusing specifically on China until late 1990s, but if you know US hegemony is in terminal crisis, and the capital is all heading towards Asia, it should certainly be possible to notice the enormous state power in the very center of it and add two and two together.
I recommend the BBC documentary "Traumazone" to bring this across. You can watch it on Youtube.
Putin is quoted saying the the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the "greatest catastrophe of the 20th century", which is quite a statement, considering that WW2 was in the 20th century, too.
That's a [mistranslation](https://www.hillsdale.net/story/opinion/columns/2022/10/29/paul-delespinasse-the-politics-of-translation-putins-geopolitical-disaster-remark/69593248007/) but it sure is popular.
Thank you for pointing this out! Very good to know.
It's not a mistranslation. Here is the actual quote:
"Прежде всего следует признать, что крушение Советского Союза было крупнейшей геополитической катастрофой века. "
If Putin intended to say "a major disaster" (like is claimed in the article) rather than "the greatest disaster" he would have said "крупной катастрофой" instead of "крупнейшей катастрофой".
As the linked article points out, "крупнейшей катастрофой" is ambiguous and does not exactly correspond to English superlative ("the greatest catastrophe"). That being the case, the intended meaning of the speech is either intentionally ambiguous or Putin's speechwriter is the ultimate authority. In the latter case the official English translation is the one provided by Kremlin. Why would you want to resolve the ambiguity any other way?
Because there is no ambiguity. It is understandable that the government translators wished to soften the meaning for foreign audience consumption, but the Russian version is not ambiguous.
http://www.study-languages-online.com/russian-adjective-superlative.html
> The simple superlative is commonly used to express a value judgment on the part of the speaker and may be used when no comparison is made (English example: a most interesting film).
Is one of you fluent in Russian?
"....The people who were against Putin from the beginning and understood what he was up to were mostly associated with the "liberals" who were held responsible for the disastrous reforms in the 90s."
I assume you are referring to the privatization programmes and the "cold turkey" approach to shift to a market economy. And yes, it did create a lot of suffering, plus it unfortunately has discredited the "liberals" for decades. But you must remember the context. The argument back then was that privatization would have to happen fast, and be extensive, because there was a real possibility that the old guards in the Communist Party might get back into (absolute) power. Fast, massive privatization was assumed to create a power base for other actors (oligarchs, but so be it) that would reduce this risk/probability. Essentially, the idea was to get the toothpaste out of the tube as fast as possible, assuming that it would then be very difficult for the Communists to put it back in.
My point is that this strategy made a lot of sense. Many people at the time were well aware that this risked a lot of "collateral damage" in the form of corruption, temporary economic decline and so on. The point is that it was seen as a risk worth taking, considering that the alternative - the risk that the Communist Party would regain absolute power - was regarded as a greater evil. And I still think that - given the context, which everybody now forgets - this was a rational and understandable way to think.
Well, if I may rephrase it a bit less charitably, the purpose was to maximise the odds of survival of the group in power at that time by creating a new power base different from the old communist party elites. This has nothing to do with the well-being of ordinary Russians, unfortunately.
This also begs the question of how bad the communist government would have been. To take my two examples of the more successful transformation, in Poland the former communists did not restore a dictatorship, and Poland joined the NATO when they were in power. In China, of course, the communist party was never removed from the power in the first place, and economically it's the biggest success story of the last 100 years. As a side note, Deng's reforms started in the early 1980s, and so Russia had the opportunity to learn from them.
"Well, if I may rephrase it a bit less charitably, the purpose was to maximise the odds of survival of the group in power at that time by creating a new power base different from the old communist party elites. This has nothing to do with the well-being of ordinary Russians, unfortunately."
I disagree with that rephrasing. On the political side, the actors on the "liberal" side wanted competition for power, i.e. secret ballots and elections - they did not want any particular new party to stay in power forever. On the economic side, the attempt was to create extremely broad "shareholder capitalism". This soon morphed into oligarchs, but that was not the initial aim.
That said, I personally count oligarchs as the lesser evil, compared to continuous one-party control of the economy. Oligarchs may compete with each other. And if not, private monopolies can be broken up more easily that the former amalgam of economic and political monopoly power in the form of a single party. For that reason, I am hopeful for the long-run prospects of Russia. At least I was, until Putin made the cardinal miscalculation to try to topple the regime in Kiev/Kyiv.
Be that as it may, we can probably agree that none of us have empirical access to the inner thoughts of the central actors of that time. So it is impossible to know which interpretation of their actions is "correct" - yours or mine. (I would argue, though, that it is a quite valuable heuristic not to interpret the behaviour of those one disagrees with, as a sign they are evil people.)
I'm disappointed no one understands the real story behind why shock therapy worked in Poland, but not Russia. Jeffrey D. Sachs, the architect of both programs explains why here. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1097135961
Basically the US wanted Poland as an ally and wanted to crush Russia. The key would have been some monetary support to tamper down the inflation, the US blocked it and that somewhat forced the firesale of state assets that created the oligarchs.
Interesting, I will read it!
Still waiting for "Dictator book club: Caesar"
(only half joking)
That’s be amazing! Episodes on past/historic dictators in general actually.
An investigative journalist named Much Guessing, eh?
Typos: "There is no record of Spiridon passing any advantage on to his son Vladimir Sr, or of the Spiridon connection further Vladimir Jr’s career. It seems like a total coincidence. But surely the chance that the grandson of the chef of one Russian dictator becoems the next Russian dictator is millions-to-one."
"becomes" is misspelled. And "further" should possibly be "furthering"
Managed is spelled maanged.
I'll edit if I find more. Good article, as usual. This is a great series.
Edit:
"apeearances". Two of these have been within quotation. If they appear in the original, you may want to fix them or add a [sic].
"universtiy"
Also: The sentence "As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it." is within the quotation, but its tone sounds very much like Scott, so I assume he wrote this and it shouldn't be within the quotation bar?
Having worked in Russia several times between 1992 and 2018 I had to smile at Scott's "I don’t know exactly how he got the prosecutors and courts to do his bidding ... " Big part of the job of Soviet judges was to do the bidding of the prosecutors who did the bidding of the state! Of course, they would do the bidding of a president who actually paid them wages again (+let them keep bribes). True, some outright criminals* were given the position of prosecutors et al. under Putin, but the "judiciary " in Russia was never a "branch of power" to begin with. *See pic on Kamil Galeev's tweet https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498711038568640512
Just a quick comment on one of the most striking coincidences in the post: most probably there's nothing strange or sinister about the Duma speaker's early announcement of the Volgodonsk explosion. There was a *different* explosion in Volgodonsk, much less serious (three injured, none dead), on September 12, 1999; it made the news but was never linked to Chechnya, it was a local crime thing and was quickly forgotten. Gennady Seleznev (the speaker) mentioned a Volgodonsk explosion on September 13, and most probably he meant that one.
Source (Russian only): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%82_%D0%B2_%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B5
On Putin and Russian Orthodox Church.
You already know about Putin's ties to KGB. What is missing is the links the ROC has to the KGB, and there are many.
Current Patriarch Kirill "used to be" a KGB agent, and there many other officials in higher hierarchy of ROC with that sort of background. And the previous patriarch Alexei was covering up for KGB aswell.
Corruption runs deep.
So it's only natural for Putin to ally with ROC.
Edit: fixed typos.
You know you've got a great Wikipedia page when 75% of the text is "Public controversies" and "Criticism".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Kirill_of_Moscow
This part made me laugh:
> According to a Forbes article in 2006, Kirill's wealth was $4 billion [...] In 2009, Kirill was photographed wearing a $30,000 gold Breguet watch.[156] Officials associated with the Moscow Patriarchate airbrushed the watch (but not its reflection on the table at which Kirill was sitting)[156] out of the photo,[1] while Kirill claimed that the watch had been doctored into the image.[157] Kirill later admitted that he did in fact own the watch.[157]
(Also, I could have sworn an "archimandrite" was either an Iain M Banks villain or a Warhammer 40k character. Apparently it's a superior abbot in the Eastern Orthodox Church!)
> (Also, I could have sworn an "archimandrite" was either an Iain M Banks villain or a Warhammer 40k character.
Hardly astonishing considering how much fun writers in w40k have repurposing impressively sounding actual historical terminology. For example I guess some w40k fans might be amused learning that archon or exarch are actual offices from antiquity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exarch
Speaking of eastern orthodox offices, there are still people holding offices of exarchs in the various orthodox churches…
SF/Fantasy writers like taking obscure religious references and re-purposing them, see Clive Barker and the Cenobites.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cenobite
There have long been allegations that churches in the Communist Bloc countries were heavily infiltrated by party agents who may have become clergy who attained high positions and who steered the churches along paths to align with the state.
Look at China and the Catholic Patriotic Association:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Patriotic_Association
They've done the same with various Protestant churches, or so I've been informed.
Which is, of course, why there is a significant "house church" movement that China periodically tries to stamp out. They know they can't trust the churches sanctioned by China.
> So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA.
> I absolutely believe the FBI is spreading fear of terrorism for their own gain, often crosses the line between monitoring extremists and entrapping/provoking them, and is part of the general censorship apparatus. But even their enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what Putin and his security services were doing.
This is a weird juxtaposition. The CIA does get accused of similar things.
It feels to me like this is just a matter of degree. The FBI/CIA/NSA seem to have gone completely off the rails with regards to what they are *supposed* to be doing in a democracy, and while the KGB has arguably done worse I see no reason to believe the US intelligence agencies won't continue to deteriorate until they reach a similar place where the KGB was back in the 90s.
The US has covert intelligence organizations that murder, deal drugs, spy on everyone including own citizens, appears to not answer to anyone, seem to be immune to any real punishment for committing crimes (like spying on citizens), and they appear to be actively utilized by politicians to go after political opponents. This seems to me like half way down a slippery to where the KGB was in the 90s.
Without some very substantial change, it feels *likely* to me that the US will end up in a similar situation, rather than it being implausible as this article suggests.
One of the big differences between Russia and the US is that the US has stable institutions and Russia doesn’t. One reason the intelligence services have so much power in Russia is that there was apparently more continuity in their membership and goals than in other institutions after the fall of the USSR and no one to push back against them. (That is, they were relatively stable compared to the rest of the government.)
Couldn't you say the same thing about US institutions today? The CIA/FBI/NSA have more continuity than the presidency certainly. The supreme Court has continuity over time, which perhaps helps some, but I'm not convinced that it is obviously enough. This is especially true given that the supreme Court doesn't appear to have the power to actually punish rogue government institutions, only stop their bad behavior long after the fact.
I didn’t express myself well, it’s the institution of the presidency, for instance, that is stable and continuous, not who the president is, (obviously). And everyone knows the President performs certain functions and switches every four or eight years. After the fall of the Soviet Union there wasn’t a settled way things were supposed to work in the visible government but the KGB/FSB was still there in the background.
More basic principles like equality before the law, property rights and independent judiciary are also much weaker in Russia and always have been. For example it is unclear whether it is possible to be rich and own a large business in Russia without being in cahoots with the regime.
The hardest part of any democratic revolution is establishing democracy as an institution. So many revolutions end with "And then the first (sometimes second) president declared himself president for life." The fact that everybody knows the American president can only serve for 8 years, and will leave the white house after a lost election, and that will happen as it has always happened, is huge. I mean, just look at the issue Trump has with Pence. Trump wanted Pence to subvert the process and Pence, despite being extremely loyal to Trump for all four years wouldn't conscience the idea. It's not how we do things in America. Almost 250 years of tradition weighed down on Pence: he wouldn't break that for Trump.
Is the CIA ever accused of murdering investigative journalists or prosecutors?
I have seen credible accusations they try and bury stories or encourage tax investigations but American persecutions are entirely bloodless.
Look up School of the Americas, Allende, the Contras, etc. There are a lot of allegations about what the CIA was doing outside of American soil.
Chilean intelligence murdering Chilean people in Chile isn't the CIA murdering Americans.
Ah yes, the subtle difference between pulling the trigger yourself and training someone else to pull the trigger, providing him with a gun, supplies, money and support.
As for murdering Americans, well we just have to work on the difference between being an American and being an American citizen. As long as we kill the American citizens overseas, it's not at all the same thing, is it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-22634614
That isn't a subtle difference, it is a huge one.
They aren't even remotely comparable
Yeah, but operating outside US territory also removes a lot of the risk of the CIA taking power in some kind of a coup.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-and-the-covid-cover-up/#tucker-carlson-and-rfk-jr-on-the-jfk-assassination
You're always free to make the argument that the enemies of the CIA are crackpots, but it isn't possible to make the argument "not even the enemies of the CIA accuse them of something _this_ bad". They are accused of managing domestic political assassinations!
I like unz and read him, he is smart and interesting but not credible.
Sorry, was the question whether the CIA sometimes does terrible things, or was it what people are willing to accuse it of?
"American persecutions are entirely bloodless."
Sam and Vicky Weaver, LaVoy Finicum, and a whole lot of Branch Davidians say "hi!"
Actually, no they don't because they're dead.
Also a good reminder that we should include the [B]ATF as one of the federal armed agencies that gets up to shady stuff.
It is so weird that libertarians took the side of a violent pedo cult. They were clearly the bad guys who killed their own members. They started shooting and locked their members in a burning building, aside from out of control contrarianism there is no possible real way to think that the ATF bare any moral responsibility.
1. If you believe that rights are only for good people, then well, you're on the same side as the ACLU I guess, but you don't actually believe in the concept of "rights."
2. I understand that there's no way you'll be convinced that The Branch Davidians didn't commit mass suicide, but can you explain why you have any faith in what the ATF say happened, especially when David Chipman as late as 2021 was still telling obvious lies, claiming that the Davidians shot down helicopters, etc? Do you still believe that thetear gas was non-flammable?
I never mentioned rights and have absolutely no opinion on the flammability of tear gas.
My point remains that David Koresh wasn't an investigative journalist or successful politician challenging Clinton.
You said: "It is so weird that libertarians took the side of a violent pedo cult" the (obvious) answer has to do with civil rights. Which admittedily is a "weird" thing to be concerned with if you don't believe they exist.
And then you said: "They were clearly the bad guys who killed their own members." which leads to the mechanism by which the conflagration occurred, i.e. pumping in combustible gas. Which goes again to your statement that "there is no possible real way to think that the ATF bare any moral responsibility."
Still wondering if there's any reason for that last categorial statement other than blind faith in the LEO/government.
David Koresh jogged through Waco every morning at the same time. If the ATF wanted to apprehend him, they easily could have without putting on the jackboots.
The American state is in the process of slowly murdering Julian Assange.
There's a graph from Scott's old Against Hijacking Utopia post showing the Russian GDP over time: https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/soviet_gdp.png . It seems like GDP fell by 50% under Yeltsin and then doubled back to the original again under Putin by 2007. Even if these statistics are partly fake, it seems like despite him handing half the jobs to his mates, Putin somehow got the Russian economy going again. If so, that may be another point why he was able to consolidate power.
In mid-90s to early 00s Russia was essentially ruled by bandits on local level, pretty much everywhere.
It's hard to do business when at any point you can get raided and held at a gunpoint. A related anecdote: when two bands could not agree who would "protect" the company my father was working for at the time, me and my mother ended up being kidnapped. Thankfully situation got resolved without anyone getting seriously hurt, but you know, not exactly a great experience. And that was in the middle of Moscow, in late 90s.
Putins wrestled power from them, you can say he monopolized the racket and made it less obvious. Most of people who were involved in bands either died, went to jail or switched sides (and now work in various official positions). While far from ideal, it made doing business in Russia less of a suicidal endevour.
Another thing to understand is that Russian economy was severely mismanaged both by late Soviet goverment and by early Russian goverment, so it would be fairly hard to do worse at the time when Putin can to power. Expected result of no interventions at all should probably be positive in that situation. It's entirely plausible that Putin's actions were on net negative, but other positve dynamics offset that difference (switch to capitalistic system, western investements, increased international trade, increased opportunities for enterpreneurs, various side-effects of global technological progress, and so on, most of which can't really be attribited to Putin in any meaningfull way).
Notice that some countries' GDP grew much more in the same time frame, the US and China being probably most obvious examples.
But I must admit that I'm a total ignoramus when it comes to economics, so I'm probably missing quite a lot here. I'm just trying to say that's a rather complicated issue.
The oil price is very important, too.
Thank you for the insight and for sharing your experience.
Scott finishes by asking "How did it happen, and could it happen here?". The two points he listed, while true, I feel they don't tell the full story - if someone can move a country from sort-of anarchy with local gangs fighting all the time to a dictatorship where there's one strong guy in charge, I can imagine a lot of people - including what was left of the middle class - might see that as the lesser evil at the time. I agree with you it would make doing business easier even if the other economic policies are net-negative, or at least not as good as someone else might have managed.
On a more positive note, it does suggest that America is not anywhere close to being taken over in that particular way though - we'd have had to completely go through with the whole defund-the-police idiocy to have a chance at producing anything like a comparable bandit wars situation.
the amount of anarchy in 90s Russia vs 00s Russia is overstated and is part of Putin's 'bad 90s' narrative. Yes, the power has been more centralized over years, but that's just how the police and special services kept up with the time and got most businesses in their hands. Putin has never been tough on crime, even declaratively, as he was tough on rogue businessmen etc. He is part of cleptocracy with some kgb flavor, and was very ineffective in economy, trillions of dollars didn't get Russia anything remote of modern infrastructure or even army, which was his top priority.
The life expectancy of Russians dropped by about 5 years in the 90's. That can't be handwaved away. It was a complete disaster.
> I do think it’s a valid question whether, even if the allegations against Trump are fair, we ought not to make them, as part of a norm of making it hard to investigate enemies of the regime.
The counterpoint to this is that if the norm is "never pursue allegations against politicians of the opposite side, no matter how serious", that also weakens democracy, because it means politicians can essentially do whatever while in charge and have no retribution to fear even after they leave power. This is particularly critical here since Trump's alleged crimes are specifically about violating important parts of the democratic process (or, well, trying to), and doing other things which went against his duties and responsibilities as part of his job (such as being very cavalier with secret information).
The balance is hard because of course "whenever some guy leaves power, the next guy tries to find whatever dirt he can on him and puts him under trial" is not a healthy dynamic, but neither is Nixon's "if the President does it, it means it's not illegal" approach. There really is no other way than keeping powers separate, having checks and balances, and trying to stick to the actual rule of law as well as reasonably possible.
ISTM there's a big problem when prosecutors end up taking the decision of whom will be president from the voters, particularly on crimes that require a novel claim of law from the prosecution or that look like stuff that most powerful people could probably be charged on. The decision of whom will be president should be in the hands of the voters, not prosecutors or even judges/juries.
There are cases where the need to punish a serious crime overrides this, but (as a not-that-informed observer) I don't think any of the three cases against Trump now qualify. Even the classified document case seems like no further harm can be done (the documents have ben seized) and there's not really a useful deterrence thing happening here because the situation is so unusual. (If Biden hadn't revoked Trump's clearance, there would be no crime, right?)
Trump is now being indicted on conspiracy charges over trying to overthrow the election; that *definitely* looks like something that should be punished.
Honestly I think everything should be free game - though I can see the practical limits to it, as in, judicial power can be abused or corrupted, I think as a principle, the voters can as well choose among the pool of citizens who just have a clean criminal record. There's far less important jobs that you can turned away from for having the tiniest stain on your reputation than "man who has control of the entire country, including the most powerful military in the world". But I can at least see that theoretically there's a problem here. But Trump has absolutely gone beyond the pale, and IMO in giving him enough benefit of the doubt to start counting as "oh but maybe the judiciary is overreaching" here is way past the point of reason. TBF I'm talking the election stuff here mostly (since he's not being indicted for the Ukraine thing too, the one from the first impeachment, which was ALSO despicable); the secret documents thing mostly I find baffling as an indicator of his character than particularly dangerous. As in, it IS theoretically dangerous and criminally negligent, I don't think he was necessarily doing actual damage with it. Still, it's the sort of thing that would get you fired from much less important positions. I think the clearance is revoked automatically upon leaving the job? Biden merely revoked his right to receive security briefings, that I know of. You don't have any special "keep top secret documents as a memento" rights as a former president, as it should be, since those are supposed to be still used and available.
My general point is that we already are RIDICULOUSLY lenient with public charges, and we probably need to balance that a little if anything. Again, any of us can do a job that doesn't involve having a nuclear weapons button and be subject to a lot more scrutiny than this guy, apparently. Politics shouldn't be dominated by courts but right now this is way to the other end of the spectrum, where people are even questioning if a former president should be indictable at all. That's not even supposed to be a question.
Not sure if this is within your content policies, but it seems to me that if you want to cover someone like Putin, presumably reading more than one book is a good idea. Especially if that one book is written by a they/them Jewish journalist? Presumably, there is some christian gentile somewhere who wrote a biography from another perspective. Putin apparently wrote a book about himself in 2000 (https://www.amazon.com/First-Person-Astonishingly-Self-Portrait-President/dp/1586480189). Of course, I imagine it's full of lies and omissions, but maybe still worth reading.
None of the other entries in the Dictator Book Club were autobiographies.
I thought that one of the books about Xi (or maybe it was someone else?) was basically an authorized hagiography, which isn't that different.
Doesn't seem to be Xi https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping
It sounds like it was Modi.
Searching Amazon gives you books by Anna Revell and Philip Short, for starters, both of whom seem to have the usual pronouns at least. Other commenters have agreed that Gessen is definitely biased (for example Western fleecing of Russia and the fact Putin cleaned up the economy somewhat after the awful nineties aren't mentioned), but why jump straight to Putin himself, who like any politician is going to do a lot of lying and dissembling?
As usual for these sorts of posts, the Gell-Mann amnesia hits hard. Primakov wasn't a "communist opposition leader", he was another KGB goon leading a rival blob of unprincipled crooks and thieves. Russia wasn't "invading" Chechnya, it was quelling a rebellion in a province that had been a part of the country for more than a century. Members of the lower house of the Parliament are still (nominally) elected by the public. And these are falsehoods easily spotted off-hand by anyone who has more than passing knowledge of Russia, doubtlessly a thorough fact-check would reveal many more. But then again, the purpose of such books isn't rigorous analysis, it's vibes-based propaganda. The 'Russia bad' bottom line is taken for granted in the West anyway, and there's much more public demand for dramatic fiction than for getting details accurately.
Yeah, the bit about Primakov also stuck me as wrong. And let's not forget, 90's being what they were, there were no really "investigative journalists" in Russia - just people who were hired by the other gang to write a hit piece, truth be damned (or at least heavily twisted to serve the needs). Maybe in America a man who offends all sides might still be preserved by his reputation and fame, but in Russia it got you killed and people just shrugged and moved on, so writing people either died or chose their protector and served him well.
<i>Russia wasn't "invading" Chechnya, it was quelling a rebellion in a province that had been a part of the country for more than a century.</i>
I was struck by that, as well. It's like accusing Abraham Lincoln of invading the CSA.
The Wikipedia entry on the American Civil War refers to the Union army "invading" the CSA several times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
Does it? Searching for the word "invade" and related terms, I only get the following results:
"On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding contract, and called any secession "legally void". He had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but said that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property,[130] including forts, arsenals, mints, and customhouses that had been seized by the Southern states."
"Realizing that Washington could not intervene in Mexico as long as the Confederacy controlled Texas, France invaded Mexico in 1861."
"Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading Kentucky and retreat due to lack of logistical support and lack of infantry recruits for the Confederacy in that state."
"Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin–Nashville Campaign."
"Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory to win but only needed to fight a defensive war to convince the North that the cost of winning was too high."
So of the five uses of the term, one is summarising Lincoln's inaugural address, one is referring to a completely different war, and the other three are all referring to Confederate forces entering Union-held territory.
You appear to have forgotten to search for "invasion", which I would consider to be almost the same word. There are 11 results for "inva":
"During a brief invasion [of Kentucky] by Confederate forces in 1861..."
"Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion of the North with the Maryland Campaign."
"Antietam is considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North"
"Gen. Hooker was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade during Lee's second invasion of the North"
"Leonidas Polk's invasion of Columbus ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned it against the Confederacy. "
"Bragg's second invasion of Kentucky in the Confederate Heartland Offensive included initial successes..."
This doesn't affect your point; every reference to invading in that article has the Confederates doing the invading. I can't imagine what Joshua M was thinking. But you managed to undercount uses of the term by a huge margin.
Oh yes, so I did. How embarrassing.
Damn, what a unlikely series of events
I mean Russia wasn’t likely to end up with a good leader, but I feel like this is one of the worst timelines for them
Actually, no, it was a very likely series of events. After Yeltsin's corruption and weakness, a strong hand was much in demand. If not Putin, some other man would step up to provide it. Voters wouldn't support anyone else, even in completely free and honest elections. Putin's main opponent in his first elections, Moscow's mayor Luzhkov, for example, was a big proponent of Russian Crimea by any means. He might have done things a little differently in details, but a lot of things that happened in 21th century in Russia were a long time coming, and generally welcomed by population.
And no, this isn't the worst timeline. Some stuff proposed by some of "opposition in exile" would be that, like fragmenting the country further into several entities. Or maybe a radical nationalist leader - things with migrants being what they are, a man proposing severe actions against Southern gastarbaiters actually would have a chance of winning elections against Putin, who's seen too pro-business on these problems.
Actually, most of Putin's tenure wasn't quite so bad. Russians remember earlier times as the "worst possible". Plenty of countries have gotten worse dictators (though the absolute worst might not last long and leave a legacy of instability & coups/civil wars as each dictator gets replaced in turn).
"I think the allegations against Trump are mostly fair and there aren’t a lot of other, unfair ones I know about...the investigations of Nixon and Clinton went further, on less serious charges"
This is one of those statements that's made every now and then on this blog that, for me, puts into question the entirety of what Scott has ever written. Just immediately, Nixon and Clinton were never charged with anything. Nobody besides Trump has ever been charged. Are we using "charged" as a synonym for "accused of things we don't like"?
Without getting too deep into this because I have something else I want to talk about, we can take an example. Trump's first indictment was about paying hush money to Stormy Daniels in the process of committing another crime. It is the fact that it was in the process of committing another crime that is supposed to make Trump's actions actionable. So what is that other crime? Alvin Bragg does not tell us, assuring us that he is not legally required to. The very idea that this is in fact "mostly fair" is unbelievably ludicrous.
Anyway. What I really want to talk about is FBI. It's not true that their enemies never accuse them of the "tiniest fraction" of what Putin and his security service were doing. Off the top of my head there was the Waco incident, which detractors such as myself would describe as the FBI and others, murdering a bunch of women and children by setting the building on fire and deliberately blocking off all the exits, doing this only after they systematically tortured the building's occupants. Then most of the media heralded this as a great victory, and nobody cared until long after it was relevant. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but it's hardly a non-existent accusation.
If you want bigger, consider something I don't subscribe to but which is rather common, the "Bush did 9/11" sentiment. Generally nobody thinks George W Bush personally flew two planes into some buildings. Rather they think him and his intelligence apparatus enacted it, or at the very least knew about it and allowed it to happen.
Or we could go back further. Isn't it pretty common among some to say that Reagan and the FBI deliberately created the crack epidemic in the 1980's to target black people? Or how about the assassination of MLK, or Malcolm X? There is a presidential candidate right now who publicly and loudly accuses the American security apparatus of having assassinated American President Robert F Kennedy. This particular theory has become so common even I can feel myself getting pressured into believing it through sheer commonality.
I think the investigation into Clinton did cross over from "pursuit of the public interest" into "obsessive quest for personal vengeance" and I didn't approve.
I think the same has happened with Trump but it's even more concerning given that the Democratic Party seems currently to have pinned *everything* on "We're not Trump" and "Trump is the New Fascist Dictator in waiting, we ain't kidding" (the Washington Post still has their "Democracy dies in darkness" masthead every time they email me about taking out a subscription).
Instead of letting him fade back into irrelevance over the past three years of the Biden Administration, they are keeping him alive by constantly drumming up fear, and by this pursuit of various charges, which pursuit seems to me to have crossed over into "obsessive quest for vengeance": how dare he have snatched the rights of the Anointed Empress when it was Her Turn Now? How dare he be popular?
I don't know if they think that anti-Trumpism won for them last time so it's still a winning strategy, but the Clinton campaign seems to have made the mistake of pumping up Trump in the first instance as the Republican nominee because they were sure they could beat him, and that blew up in their faces. The current Democrats pumping up Trump as the boogeyman for them to beat is also a mistaken strategy; if they really are worried he is a possible populist Mussolini, then squelching all attention paid to him other than "oh, that has-been?" is better, rather than making him the Number One Rival and getting people to think "Huh, maybe he *does* have a chance of beating those guys, maybe I should stick with him!"
Whether he's done criminal things, I don't know (and the courts have to sort that out) but, for instance, the difference in views online about the classified documents when it's Trump or Biden is striking - Trump stole top-secret documents, Biden did nothing.
At least let it be that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, otherwise you *are* in Putin territory of using the courts to go after your enemies!
I first want to make it clear that it does not concern me who or what is investigated, per se. What concerns me is that between Clinton and Trump, whichever Clinton you mean, only one of these was actually charged with something. That in fact, the same comparison could be made between Trump and literally every other president.
Another thing about the FBI and CIA and such. While some of my examples are untrue conspiracy theories that don't really make any sense to me, the undertaking of (domestic) political assassinations seem to generally be accusations from the past. Is this evidence that they never happened, because they do not happen now? Or is it evidence of an evolving strategy? In this time we're living in, the general consensus is that assassination of political opponents makes martyrs. Why do that then, when you can just bog the opposition down in endless legal disputes for the rest of time? Especially when you've confirmed that a sizable amount of people are going to go with expert consensus and that you just so happen to be the expert consensus?
You may say that it's a mistaken strategy, but the lessons of 2020 make this a real question. What is most important is turnout, so the formula is making sure Trump continues to be Demon-Hitler, because Demon-Hitler increases democratic turnout more than it increases Republican turnout, and so long as turnout overall remains high, Democrats win. That I think, is the thinking here.
> In this time we're living in, the general consensus is that assassination of political opponents makes martyrs. Why do that then, when you can just bog the opposition down in endless legal disputes for the rest of time?
You can misdirect the martyrdom to a cause that you favor. I understand that JFK's assassination was used as a justification for passing civil rights legislation, while his wife complained that in reality he'd been killed by a communist. (When, in a better world, he should have been killed by an anti-civil-rights activist.)
In context, "charges" meant "allegations".
> Trump's first indictment was about paying hush money to Stormy Daniels in the process of committing another crime. [...] So what is that other crime? Alvin Bragg does not tell us [....] unbelievably ludicrous.
The other crime was falsifying business records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltw-SN9QiII
No the other crime wasn't the primary crimes. I am not going to watch a Legal Eagle video. If you have watched this video and come away with "the other crime was falsifying business records", you either have misunderstood my question, or Legal Eagle remains incompetent at best, malicious at worst. Or potentially you have misunderstood Legal Eagle.
All crimes charged were dealing with falsifying business records, in this case, in order to pay off Stormy Daniels in ways that constitute federal violations. The question is, why are these felony charges? The reply is, they are charged as felonies because they were in service to another crime. What is the other crime? I did not just make up the idea that Bragg has not told us. This is a quote from him, during his press conference following his indictment.
"Under New York state law it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and intent to conceal another crime. That is exactly what this case is about. Thirty-four false statements made to cover up other crimes."
Again, what is the other crime? Can you find Alvan Bragg explicitly answering this question? I grow quite tired of people making up things to fill in missing information.
Quote: "The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators....The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily."
This sounds like a conspiracy theory on par with "9/11 was an inside job".
It is an unlikely theory because it presupposes a scenario somewhat like the following: Putin and some cronies sit around a table, brainstorming how to improve their popularity come the next election. Someone - let's call him Vlad - says: "How about killing hundreds of innocent countrymen by placing bombs in apartments and then blaming it on terrorists?" To which the others, assuming they are sane people who know a minimum of decision theory, are likely to say things like: "Great idea Vlad, you are always very creative at our meetings. But have you thought of the risks? For starters, dozens of people beside us in this room must be in on this in order for it to work, such as those who place the bombs, and we must be certain they will never talk, ever..." And: "Isn't it easier to simply rig the election?" And so on. (Matt Taibbi wrote a hilarious story along these lines related to the "9/11 was an inside job" conspiracy theory).
But all those mysteriously disappeared investigative reporters never get conclusively tied back to KGB
They have a lot of experience using these sorts of measures to protect their public records image
A bombing campaign is similarly small-scale too and not much harder to conceal than offing investigative reporters
I mean what logistically is different between placing poison in someone’s tea & placing a bomb in someone’s flat?
Yeah, there have been several operations and assassinations conducted over the years of equal complexity as the apartment bombings, for whom Putin and company are the only likely suspects.
A good argument, I think. It's a bit more possible that the actual line sounded like "It would take a tragedy to unite this nation. And it would be a complete shame if our under-staffed and under-financed security apparatus failed to prevent yet another terrorist plot (of which we had enough happen in the last few years, because apparently Chechens weren't happy to just win the war against federal forces, but continued their terrorist attacks with unclear purposes)". I don't think I ever saw that particular theory pop up, but "letting real terrorists through just that one time" sounds a little more likely than using own security forces. It would take maybe two or three people to pull through (which is still a lot more than "two, if one of them is dead"): somebody would just have to misfile or disregard a report by an underling, just like Stalin, supposedly, disregarded reports about German invasion (we still don't know if he did: some say that there were a report about invasion pretty much every day, so Stalin had no way to know which one of them was true, in a real-life Cry Wolf scenario).
Yeah, I had heard about the apartment bombings, but was surprised at Scott's claim that the standard line in the west is that they were false flags. It's true that I don't remember *much* about the apartment bombings, but I would have thought that if this was the "standard line", that it would have been frequently mentioned whenever people are talking about Putin's relationship with Ramzan Kadyrov (an interesting character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzan_Kadyrov)
It *sounds* like a conspiracy theory on par with "9/11 was an inside job", but as I mentioned elsewhere, four investigators of the apartment bombings ended up dead, one was sent to prison, and one more later claimed to be "the only person publicly accusing the regime of responsibility who had not been killed".
As I often say: things are different in Russia. Even if all these events somehow have another explanation ― things are different in Russia! American conspiracy theorists have a persecution complex; Russian ones ― maybe if they remain alive and unprosecuted, they count their blessings.
Make of that what you wish, but while I believe that there was election fraud, it was never enough to tip the balance in favor of Putin's opponents. He IS really popular outside of big liberal cities, and even there he has enough supporters (you might think the war has changed that, but no - most of those who were against it fled the country to avoid being mobilized, and now I predict Putin's support is higher than ever). That, of course, should come as no surprise - even the harshest dictator usually have to rely on support with a part of population (as well as a big part of elites) to continue his rule, and Putin is quite a populist when he can afford that - he wouldn't go completely against will of people, unless there is no choice (e.g. pension reform that raised pension age: it was very unpopular, but it seems obvious enough that with aging population and stagnating productivity, it was inevitable).
I think this is a decent review and gives a good account of the book. It is interesting to read how Putin rose without trace, as it were, and you do have to wonder why a kid is so determined to become a member of the KGB - maybe there were family stories about Grandpa and what he did/saw/experienced, so young Vlad learned that the best and safest way (and maybe the most patriotic, who knows?) is to become part of the national security apparatus that seems to have the most power and that every Russian ruler needs.
"Putin’s official mother, Maria Putina, was 42 and sickly when he was born. Officially, Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 to Vladimir Putin Sr. and Maria Putina, two middle class laborers who had lost their previous two children in the hellish Nazi siege of Leningrad a decade before."
I think if you've survived the Siege of Leningrad, you have plenty of reason to be sickly in later life. If they had other children previously who had died, then maybe they tried afterwards to have more kids, and it's not impossible for a woman in her early forties to get pregnant. It is strange that there is little about his early life, but whether he scrubbed it (for whatever reason) or whether his family just weren't that notable and nobody had a reason to keep track of one more worker's kid in the mass of workers' kids, who knows?
"The closest MWAF comes to an answer is describing the near-trauma reaction that Putin and his colleagues had when the Soviet Union abandoned them. It suggests that some relic of the KGB ethos or network survived the fall of the USSR, hated its democratic successor, and got reconsolidated by Putin in his FSB. Their loyalty was originally to some sort of spirit-of-the-KGB ethos and not to existing democratic Russia, and it was simple for Putin to transmute that to loyalty to him personally, who promised to restore Soviet-era norms."
I think that's probably it: everything Putin and those around him had known had suddenly collapsed under them, they were left dangling without the ostensible authorities to whom they reported caring a damn about them, so huddling together in a spirit of "we can't trust anyone but ourselves" and putting your group first above the interests of anyone else makes sense. Why the hell should you care about the new 'democratic' Russia, when you know it's sham democracy and you've had proof that if anything goes wrong this time round, nobody is going to look out for you? If, as it seems from what the book says about young Putin, he really had some belief in the KGB, it makes sense for him to try and protect and preserve that, and when he gets into power to make the KGB his in-group, foster personal loyalty to himself rather than the state, and use that.
"Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times."
Oh, that stings! 😁
"The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators."
Entirely possible, whether this was the plan all along, or whether it was just the use of agents provocateurs (which the secret police in Russia had a long tradition of doing, ever since the Csars) finding patsies to egg on into doing something for which a crackdown would then be justified.
See the Dirty War in Northern Ireland, where British security forces infiltrated paramilitaries on both sides and were allegedly complicit in bombings and assassinations:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230614727_5
https://www.historyireland.com/kitsons-irish-war-mastermind-of-the-dirty-war-in-ireland/
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-udr-a-potent-weapon-in-britain-s-dirty-war-in-northern-ireland-1.4846097
"So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA. Right now they seem more aligned with the Democratic side of the aisle, so Trump or some future Trump would have a hard time winning their total loyalty. As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. "
Bull Connors was a Democrat. Richard Daley was a Democrat. With the polarisation into Right and Left, on the left there are plenty of "Communism has never been tried!" ideologues who may (or may not) be in a marriage of convenience with the Democrats to get some issues, but really do hope to get power themselves and want the Revolution to come, and are happy to talk about "liberals get the bullet too". They do want a bloody purge of all the wrongthinkers.
I don't trust the Democrats to be any more pure than the Republicans, which means also that I don't think the Republicans are more likely to engage in "Mafia-style killings" regardless of the foofarah around Trump.
And yes, I too would love to know why Putin turned down that particular bribe. Had he been bribed earlier/better by a rival of Berezhovsky? Did he have some plan in mind that a first refusal might get him offered a second, bigger bribe? Was he trying to impress Berezhovsky, as you say?
> a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”
This is incorrect. The chorus contains the words "Срань господня" which is originally a translation of English phrase "Holy shit" or "Holy crap". More direct translation back to English would be "the Lord's shit" (the 's indicates a possessive). The phrase is used to express displeasure at the situation in Russia.
The song is a "punk-prayer" and have religious undertones. It asks the Virgin Mary to relieve us of Putin in it's first line: "Virgin Mary, deliver us from Putin". You can probably see why the government wouldn't like this.
yes, that struck me too
I once knew a Polish guy and a Russian guy who shared a laugh over the name of Sriracha. I believe they were laughing over a similarity to срань, but that doesn't look hugely similar to me - is there another form of the word that brings it closer to Sriracha?
I can't speak for the Polish language, but in Russian there is the verb "срать" which when put into the 3rd person singular form becomes "сри" ("sri")
Some comments:
1. The most likely reason why Putin was accepted to the university, in my opinion, is because he was quite decent in sports (his official biography says he twice won city competitions during his university studies), and Soviet / Russian universities sometimes admit and keep mediocre students who are good in sports to score some cookie points with the higher authorities (saw that during my studies myself). For what I know from my dad, who did his university studies in USSR in 70's as well, KGB used to approach students in their second or third year of studies, and they usually tried to enlist the most mediocre ones (which kinda fits Putin's description), so I think it's most likely he was enlisted to KGB while studying.
2. There was a high degree of continuity between KGB and FSB (with FCS in between): for example, two of the heads of FCS / FSB before Putin out of three also had a career in KGB, a better one than Putin had, though.
3. For explanation why Sobchak hired Putin: I heard a story that Sobchak was looking for a loyal subordinate and asked then-chancellor of the university if he had someone on his mind (it makes sense for Sobchak to ask that person, since he spent most of his career in the university), and the chancellor recommended Putin. It's worth noting that Putin was quite loyal to Sobchak and even helped him to flee Russia in 1997, when Sobchak was investigated for bribery. The death of Sobchak in early 2000 is, however, very mysterious and foul play was suspected.
4. For the search of Yeltsin's successor: the search was quite active from circa 1998 and many people were considered for the role (Nemtsov, Stepashin, the now-forgotten Aksenenko, to name a few). I think Putin got the job for two reasons: first, he was lucky to get not the financial crisis (which Nemtsov got), but the rebound from it, and second, he got the rally-around-the-flag effect from 2 Chechen War beginning.
5. The apartments bombing story is extremely murky, but I tend to see no conspiracy here, at least because by the time of the bombings Chechen rebels have already invaded Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Dagestan_(1999)), which already makes an ample casus belli (and Chechnya was already bombed in retaliation). The strange story about the Volgodonsk bombing was due to another explosion in Volgodonsk on September 12 (which was due to the mafia wars).
6. I'd say that the key movement in solidifying Putin's power was not the electoral fraud in 2004 presidential election, but the parliament election in 2003 (where both fraud and spoiler parties helped to dilute opposition votes and gave the ruling party the supermajority later used to remove most of the election procedures and rig the election rules in favor of the ruling party).
7. For the culture wars: I think Putin uses it as a tool. Majority of Russians hardly believe in God, but find some kind of church desecration (and what Pussy Riot did would qualify in people's mind) to be disgusting. Thus, Pussy Riot action put the anti-Putin coalition in a kind of trap: on the one hand, their persecution was absolutely lawless (the corresponding penal code article is extremely broad in formulation, but is normally used to persecute people who aggresively brandish their weapons but don't attack anyone), but on the other hand, the majority of Russian citizens were not happy with the Pussy Riot actions. This allowed Putin to rebrand himself as a savior of the "traditional values" (whatever they are) and claim that the anti-Putin coalition wants to destroy them, getting over the general weariness of Russians with the ruling party (which could be noted from the 2011 parliamentary election: many of the regions where United Russia had bad performance do not have big cities in them).
Afterwards, this tool became too handy not to use.
8. Why this couldn't happen in US? The key reason, in my opinion, is not because CIA and FBI wield less power than FSB, but because the Russian Constitution of 1993 gives exceeding powers to the president even in its original form. By itself, it was a result of the constitutional crisis of 1993 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_crisis), where Yeltsin first illegally dissolved the parliament, then ignored the decision of the constitutional court and his impeachment by the parliament to bomb the parliament into submission and later dissolution. I'd say that this coup was the key blow to the Russian democracy, all that happened afterwards inside Russia were just consequences (which obviously does not absolve the people who brought the consequences into life).
Surely Spiridon Putin wasn't their only cook? Maybe it wasn't so impressive and one-in-a-million, maybe he was just one of the many staff?
That was what I would have guessed! There are probably many staff who would be equally notable as a cook! The thing I found interesting here was the connection to Rasputin, whose nominal connection I had noticed before.
> Why were the security services so pliant? The closest MWAF comes to an answer is describing the near-trauma reaction that Putin and his colleagues had when the Soviet Union abandoned them. It suggests that some relic of the KGB ethos or network survived the fall of the USSR, hated its democratic successor, and got reconsolidated by Putin in his FSB. Their loyalty was originally to some sort of spirit-of-the-KGB ethos and not to existing democratic Russia, and it was simple for Putin to transmute that to loyalty to him personally, who promised to restore Soviet-era norms.
I think this is too ideological and not personal enough; I think governments have historically looked like 'stationary bandits', or clubs of oppressors who extract rents from the oppressed. It doesn't have to be the case that they agreed on ideology or ideals in order to successfully work together to keep extracting rents.
> The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA. Right now they seem more aligned with the Democratic side of the aisle
How did you come to believe this?
I imagine it would be based on how the FBI handled the investigations on Clinton, Trump, and Hunter Biden. Could also be based on the number of federal employees that are Democrats.
Scott could possibly be wrong about the CIA, but honestly, the Democrats are so Hawkish these days, that I don't think he is.
Police vote ~90% R. The FBI is probably a little more D because they have more education but it's hard to believe it's a majority in the environment of "defund the police." The way the FBI handled the investigations into Trump and Clinton was to keep quiet on Trump until after the 2016 election while throwing a bomb at the Clinton campaign in the last week that plausibly swung the election.
The FBI has a *very* different culture from a typical city police department, even though both can be broadly termed "law enforcement."
Note the contrast between US Department of Defense employees and actual military personnel (Army, etc.) in these charts: https://twitter.com/annalecta/status/1323370439306055683
I suspect the FBI bubble, if it were on that chart, would be much closer to the DoD bubble than to the NYPD.
Those charts are strange, and I think misleading, because they rely on how people choose to self-report their employer and occupation.
Let's call pure grey 0N, grey-blue 1B, light blue 2B, grey-red 1R, and so on.
- The Navy is the same 2B as DOD, and only slightly smaller.
- Army and Air Force are both 0N, and the same size as DOD and Navy respectively.
- "US Military" is 1R, and much, *much* smaller than the other 3 (are these scaled by diameter or area?)
- Marines are 3R and the same size as "US Military"
- "US Government" is 3B and only slightly larger than DOD.
- Department of Homeland Security is 1B.
- "Military Personnel" (presumably people actually serving in the military, but possibly not all of them) is 1B.
I think the main thing the by-employer chart is telling us is that there's a partisan skew in how government employees identify their employer. That is, declaring your affiliation with the "U.S. Government" is a very "blue tribe" thing to do (bluer than any single agency! bluer than "State of California!"), while declaring your affiliation with the "U.S. Military" is "red tribe" signaling.
There's a deeper pattern that I'm having trouble describing. I think the best I can do is to say that institution-based language ("government," "department of") codes more blue while organization/function-based language ("military," "Marines") codes more red.
Given that the Department of Justice (home of the FBI) is entirely absent from the top-100 list despite having more employees than the DOD and USDA, my guess would be that DOJ employees are disproportionately affiliating with their specific agencies. And their specific agencies code quite red even beyond the broader pattern: they're all law enforcement and criminal justice.
Good insights, thank you. I had noticed that some options on the chart seemed redundant, but didn't pick up on how different political views might affect the decision of which employment category to identify with in the first place.
How did the FBI hand the election to Trump. They could have easily indicted and convicted his opponent. Instead they gave her a pass. Then her aid's ex husband got caught being a child pornographer who also had classified emails on his laptop that proved that she had obstructed justice even harder than they already knew. They then tried to sit on that information, but eventually found out that Rudy Guiliani had the story and was going to drop it, so they tried to frontrun Rudy and downplay the newly discovered crimes.
Downplaying by writing a dramatic letter to congress that made front page news for a week?
Considering the leadership of both organizations is politically appointed by the president, its probably fair to say the FBI and CIA are more aligned with which ever party controls the presidency.
Not sure if this is what Scott meant, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
That's not unreasonable, although the current FBI director is still Christopher Wray, appointed by Trump in 2017 after firing James Comey (also a Republican, appointed by Obama).
Not really. Since 1935 there has been exactly one FBI director who was a democrat and he was only an acting director for all of 3 months. Even democratic presidents tend to appoint republican FBI directors because the FBI careerists are overwhelmingly republican.
Sure but to me that just further supports the idea that the FBI/CIA could not take control of political activities in the US like the KGB/FSB is thought to have in Russia. That democratic presidents are appointing leaders who are not just their cronies is a good thing and means the decision is being made with at least hand waving towards objectivity/meritocracy.
> Even democratic presidents tend to appoint republican FBI directors because the FBI careerists are overwhelmingly republican.
Then why do Republican presidents usually appoint Republicans as directors (or equivalent) of other federal agencies? Democrats are widely agreed to outnumber Republicans within most federal agencies. What makes the FBI different?
It's a lot easier to hold the FBI to objective performance standards?
I can’t speak for Scott but a few reasons I came to believe this:
1. The Hunter Biden laptop story: intelligence officials universally called it Russian disinformation.
2. The CIA seems like neocon central and Trump has talked about kicking all the neocons out of the party.
3. People like MTG and Vivek Ramaswamy literally talk about abolishing the FBI.
Wait, the CIA being neocons makes you think they are aligned with *Democrats*?!?! What do you think "neocon" means? Do you think that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are aligned with Democrats?
See the second part of that statement. The realignment is ongoing but yes, I would say Dems are more neocon-aligned today than Republicans.
The punditry and former politicians moved first (David Frum, Bill Kristol, Colin Powell, etc). It’s harder for the establishment neocon Republicans to make the jump but they may have to call it quits: More here: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/4/trump-promises-gop-will-never-again-be-led-freaks-/.
Wait, are *any* of those people aligned with Democrats? They all campaign against Trump, but I haven’t heard of any one of them supporting any Democrat for any other office. Trump is anti-neocon, but that doesn’t mean that the Republican Party is, or that neocons are anti-Republican.
You can read Frum’s own words here, as he lambasts the modern-day Republican Party and how Democrats are his new friends despite their differences: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/never-trumpers-democrats-now/620055/.
Bill Kristol supported McAuliffe over Youngkin in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, even though Youngkin is not a very Trumpy Republican: https://jewishinsider.com/2021/09/bill-kristol-has-no-political-direction-home/.
So yes, they are aligned with Democrats.
I also don’t know how you square how the two parties’ current positions on the Ukraine invasion with a belief that Republicans are still the more neocon-aligned party.
This is helpful. Though I note that Frum is saying what he *wants* Democrats to do so that he will *stay* aligned with them.
On Ukraine, I think that Republicans are where you find both more taste for escalation and more taste for isolation, while Democrats are more fine with the status quo. I think the escalationists are the neocons.
> Do you think that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are aligned with Democrats?
Yes.
I never looked into it much, and a quick web search doesn't corroborate, but a hardcore Democrat I know was trying to tell me how awful Trump was during the 2020 election cycle, and proudly boasted how all the Bushes and Cheneys etc were speaking at the big Democrat election convention.
He was trying to say: "Trump is so awful, that all of the sane Republicans are united against him."
My takeaway was "Oh, Democrats are working with Neocons now."
That doesn’t sound like the neocons are aligned with Democrats - it sounds like they’re against Trump. The way you can tell the difference is by seeing whether they support a Democrat for any other office than President.
You obviously know absolutely nothing about the neocons. They are a school of thought that started with former Trotskyites who thought the Democrats weren't stern enough Cold Warriors. Outside of warmongering, they are generally left libertarians.
They were historically Trotskyites, yes, but was there anything left-aligned remaining about them by the 2000s other than the idea that democracy is better than authoritarianism? They weren't culture warriors, and they weren't particularly interested in higher taxes or social services.
FSB have a big inheritance from KGB, and in some way it related to current Ukrainian disaster.
Story is, that in USSR times GRU (main intelligence bureau) was super strictly forbidden from working inside country. So, when Union dissolved, they had zero assets and competency inside now-independent states - but KGB had, and by some institutional logic this foreign affairs were kept in FSB kingdom.
Skipping thirty years, it turned out that secret police and foreign intelligence require different skills, and based on completely wrong assumptions war have started. (My opinion - part of wrongness of this assumptions and many general mistakes of russian politic on post-soviet space - is that FSB wanted to keep appearance of new republics as "our backyard" to not lost this part of job and resources)
Also yes, Gessen is definitely a simpatisant of one of sides of Russian politics ("liberals", who, for american reader, is much more lib-rights than lib-lefts), and push theirs narratives - some critic of "FSB explodes homes" here in comments, also I don't think that 2004 election was rigged so heavy - Putin was popular, really popular. State Duma and local elections were much dirtier.
Based on this review, I don't think that book gives justice to how Putin took over Russia. Moreover, imho that story is well known.
First, I'd argue that Yeltsin was also kind of a dictator, just incompetent one compared to Putin. For example, he sent an army against the parliament once during a constitutional dispute. Yea, it was a parliament controlled by pro-Soviet communists, but still.
In the 90s, living standards in Russia plunged compared to even the late Soviet Union times, plus, there was a huge crime wave and horrible war with Chechnya (which Russia lost). For first years of Putin's rule, there was a growth, improvements in security situation, and also something like reconquest of Chechnya - admittedly accomplished by putting friendly native warlord in charge of the rebellious province.
Growth was at least partially fueled by a global increase in oil and other commodity prices, but it should be noted that Putin's Russia weathered global financial crisis relatively well, and it got back to growth, until another fall of oil prices in 2014, which was by this time combined with first (post-Soviet) Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, living standards in Russia stagnated, but on a level which is highest in Russian history.
Putin could've decided to use political capital he acquired due to improvement in the quality of life of average Russians to move the country toward liberal democracy (which it wasn't under Yeltsin); instead he decided to make himself a dictator for life. But I don't think it is any great mystery to why; when given an option to be lifelong dictators, great many people would gladly exercise it.
Of course, there is a separate question on why was Putin specifically and not someone else chosen as Yeltsin's successor, but that is the realm of kremlinology, which is not a science with a good reputation, and I doubt that Gessen's explanation is especially insightful; it is also imho kind of beside point of this series.
> Yeltsin was also kind of a dictator, just incompetent one compared to Putin
Were there things that he tried to do and failed where simply being better at dictatorship would help him (without higher oil prices)? He had an interesting idea what «checks and balances» means, apparently he considered it proper to make sure different parts of the government are offsetting each other, but that was his explicitly acknowledged preference.
This is a good question.
The fact that Yeltsin was an unstable alcoholic, while Putin is not, and that first Chechen war under Yeltsin went far worse for Russia than second Chechen war under Putin makes me primed to believe Putin is more competent. Also same point as about the Chechen war might be said about 1997 emerging market crisis (disaster for Russia) vs 2008 crisis (also a disaster for Russia but less so).
Yeltsin also largely failed to establish meaningful mutually beneficial relations with EU and especially China, which imho was both important and possible for Russia in the 90s. China was isolated for a few years after Tiennanmen massacre, but apparently (checks sources) Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin took until 1996 to meet and establish a cooperation agreement which was moreover not very expansive (first meeting between Jiang and US president was in 1997). Pipeline network between Russia and China is underdeveloped to this day. Until recently, main source of natural gas for China was Turkmenistan.
But you make a good point that correlation doesn't mean causation, and maybe had Putin been president in the 90s with low oil prices, things would be similarly bad regardless of his sobriety.
We do have a bipartisan norm of not going after office holders. Disproportionately this protects Republican officials because they do more illegal stuff. EG, Ford pardons Nixon; Bush (41) pardons Iran-Contra crimes; the Bush (43) torture program not investigated; approximately any national security whistle-blower / document leak case: whistle-blower is intensely persecuted, no action regarding the actual content and decision-makers behind it. Also, SCotUS ruling in McDonnell (VA - Gov) case makes it immensely challenging to prosecute corruption, and this could be fixed by amending the statute (ruling was statutory not constitutional), but no serious movement toward this.
It is pretty reasonable to say that a literal coup attempt exceeds the parameters of this norm.
Very surprised to hear that FBI and CIA broadly side with Democrats. I think they mostly work towards being independent (which seems to work pretty well see whistle-blowers above), but if there's a bias it's the other way. Unless maybe specifically in context of "Democrats vs Trump"? (Which is principally a matter of subordination to elected branches vs independence?) FBI Directors have ~always been registered Republicans and if they had political operative history it was in GOP-aligned orgs. CIA has a long history of interfering against left-ist regimes elsewhere, primarily under GOP administrations.
So in your opinion Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are atypical?
Mostly I think their story is a red herring, and/or reflects on Trump and Trumpism v.a.v dictatorship- the thing they did was have political opinions, not take political actions; treating political opinions as a loyalty test is the faulty action, not privately having the opinions. I think it's pretty self-evident that a security service where everyone is on the same political team is an institutionally more dangerous security service, and that's what Trump et al were advocating when they blew this story up.
TBC I don't think it's unreasonable of FBI to have policy about this nor for Mueller to have removed Strzok from his investigation, appearance of impropriety is bad and worth avoiding, but it is not the case that there was evidence of misconduct/actual impropriety (ie getting into bad things), just violations of policy (ie, slipping the fence that maintains safe & clear perimeter around bad things).
I would expect some right-ward skew in political registration/preferences among FBI employees (by analogy to cops) but not enough to make Democratic partisans 'atypical', and not enough for it to be surprising if particular offices or teams or however sub-groups are structured happen to skew the other way. But either way they're not a compelling example of a risk that the FBI will be co-opted to political purposes by a Democrat because a) Democrats aren't trying to do this, "secure my power base by using gov't agencies to attack my political opponents" is not actually a move Democrats go for at this juncture, and b) Strzok was active in the Clinton email investigation
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/31/politics/strzok-fbi-comey-clinton-letter/index.html
To be clear -- Strzok being involved in the investigation that resulted in Clinton NOT being charged is evidence that he's NOT partisan?
Exactly what would it take to be considered proof of his bias?
Read the source, he pushed for the press conference (about re-opening the investigation) that is popularly considered to have tanked Clinton's campaign. That effect was predictable. It's evidence against the claim that his personal opinions biased his execution of the job.
Also, you can't manage to interact with anything else I said?
> It is pretty reasonable to say that a literal coup attempt exceeds the parameters of this norm.
Oh, please. You were doing so well until this.
You... wish to characterize the violent insurrection on January 6 differently? Sure let's talk. The indictment is crystal clear that it was a coup. https://www.jan-6.com/_files/ugd/2cf5f9_e0790657e2dc4bc2bd8675069a6e7911.pdf
You ... want to make the distinction that a coup has been charged but not convicted? Sure, that's true; but it was clearly a coup, I'm not waiting to hear whether a jury of irrational buffoons is convinced of that.
You ... are thinking something else? By all means please elaborate.
What evidence is there that Trump orchestrated any of the rioting on Jan 6, outside of calling for a protest?
Jack Smith wrote 45 pages answering that - read the DC indictment here https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
In summary, the thing he & his team were trying to do was delay the EC certification so they could convince people to change the results. One way they did this was by inducing people to invade the capitol building, ie 'the insurrection'.
The indictment has no evidence Trump or his team told people to riot in the Capitol building. If you're going with "Trump lied to his supporters and organized a protest that turned into a riot, therefore he should go to jail," then you'd have to jail every black lives matter organizer.
This is true, but the indictment is not focused on the riot. It's focused on conspiracy to commit three other crimes (the riot kind of features in conspiracy #2 though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbIhNmoZLJQ
The short discussion at the end of the FBI seems way over-indexed on an image of the bureau gleaned from the last 5 years of NYT headlines. I'd argue that COINTELPRO (most obviously the Hampton assassination), the Green Scare, Waco, and more recently the assassination of Michael Reinoehl (albeit by U.S. Marshals, not FBI) amount to much more than the "tiniest fraction" of the FSB's butchery.
I agree it's laughable that the Democratic Party, which can't bring itself to abolish the filibuster to confirm a few judges even after its opponents freely made up and broke norms to nab Garland's seat, is going to do DEI fascism. But there's absolutely a path from the American state's consensus around fanatical, violent anti-communism/anti-antifascism to Trump's proposal to steal an election and "use the Insurrection Act" to put down the resulting "riots", and this path could have been much clearer if Trump hadn't made the unforced error of setting himself against the FBI's self-important self-image out of pique.
All the examples you've given of FBI brutality seem like them being trigger-happy when dealing with people they were sent to deal with for good reasons, not them deliberately targeting the most effective enemies of the regime.
COINTELPRO definitely targeted many completely nonviolent and groups purely because they opposed the regime. Wiretapping MLK and sending him blackmail recordings encouraging him to kill himself is the best-known example, but Hoover also targeted and made efforts to interfere with the operations of practically all anti-Vietnam-War organizations; the civil-rights-focused National Lawyers Guild; a bunch of feminist student groups and academics (here's an interesting read from one who FOIA'd her file: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20459215); and every American communist or socialist political organization.
That said, you're right that FBI brutality and FBI overreach haven't overlapped very much: the FBI didn't do the Kent State massacre, for example. But I think the possibility of their overlapping in the future ranks pretty high among existential risks to American democracy.
Ray Epps?
The Branch Davidians were in complete compliance with the existing gun laws you lying asshole.
Were the victims of Putin's false flag attacks really the most effective enemies of the regime? Or the random investigative journalists who all ended up dead or imprisoned? I'm not sure that's the standard.
Good review. Was mostly tracking this post, up until the last 4 words of the last footnote.
> But I’m not sure there has ever been such a norm [against investigating the enemies of the regime] - the investigations of Nixon and Clinton went further, *on less serious charges*.
The charges against Clinton were less serious, certainly, bordering on "unserious". But the charges against Nixon were both shocking and important. That's not to contest the point that we ought to investigate fair and important charges against public officials or recently-ex public officials, regardless of whether it's unseemly and we'd prefer to not. But we can't make light of what Nixon did (e.g. turning the IRS into a political weapon), because it presaged what Trump tried to do and is still trying to do (and his allies still accusing Biden of trying to do it, without evidence, as a form of projection).
I think the point is more that Nixon, for all his underhanded behavior, didn't marshal a group of his supporters to try and revere an election he lost.
But Al Gore did.
<< Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”
No, no, no, it wasn't like that! The chorus was "срань Господня", it's more like, "the shit of Lord" or the "God's shit".
Pussy Riot annoyed the [bleep] out of me, so even with strong dislike and disapproval of Putin, even I thought he was right to tell them off for being silly attention-grabbers. Prison sentences were maybe a bit much, but a hefty fine would have been proportionate.
So you can probably imagine how this went down well with Russians who were (1) genuinely religious or (2) fed-up of these kinds of manufactured pop group outrage bait. Going by the Wikipedia account they seem to have been the usual blend of anarachist/collectivist 'artists' high on their own self-importance and who degenerated into purity spiral in-fighting and splitting off to make money off the notoriety from the cathedral arrests:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot
"The more I think about this fact, the more confused I am. There is no record of Spiridon passing any advantage on to his son Vladimir Sr, or of the Spiridon connection further Vladimir Jr’s career. It seems like a total coincidence. But surely the chance that the grandson of the chef of one Russian dictator becoems the next Russian dictator is millions-to-one. I can only appeal to Pyramid-and-Garden style reasoning about how in a big world, we should expect many such coincidences."
One of the benefits of having a famous/bigshot ancestor, even if he doesn't contribute directly to your upbringing or pass on other direct benefits, is simply that it gives you the knowledge and affirmation that you, too, can one day be important in your own way, that "important" people are in the end just regular people. I mean, that's one of the big initial hurdles of becoming something; simply realizing that you *can* become something, that you're not just destined to being in the same rough social role as your lineage of peasant ancestors; I suspect this alone explains more than a bit of why wealth, fame and power tend to be in the same families.
> So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA.
????
Its public knowledge that the cia sells drugs, and when a intelligence agency sells drugs it gets a "black budget", where part of its operations is separate from any sort of oversight, with people trained to kill, some hazing and you get yourself a deep state in the original pure sense. No different from the kgb surviving the end of communism.
The biggest difference here is that maybe the cia facing an americain public that's well armed, can't set up an extortion racket outside the courts, to then conquer the courts and all of society.
I almost had a stroke reading that line from Scott
The problem with calling Masha Gessen, "a journalist" is that she has zero pretense of objectivity.
She hates Putin and Russia as it exists today very openly.
So the question anyone reading her work should be constantly asking is: is any given thing she says real, or is it a Chalabi situation?
For those not familiar: it is 100% clear that the machinations of one Ahmed Chalabi feeding "Iraq intelligence" into the US government served as probably the single strongest plank for the US invasion of Iraq under the (now openly acknowledged) false pretext of WMDs. And it worked out very well for Mr. Chalabi - he wound up in a term as Prime Minister of Iraq as well as various other ministerial positions.
I hate people who take away free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, use corruption as a form of government, and... *checks notes* get hundreds of thousands of people killed.
You suggest objectivity requires condoning such things? And that Masha Gessen was rewarded handsomely like Mr. Chalabi for... for what, criticizing Putin?
Who exactly are you referencing and in which country?
The reality is that there is an entire industry in the US consisting of manufacturing nonsense in support of war hawk goals. Do you dispute this?
Whether Gessen is one of these or not - everyone can decide for themselves.
Putin.
> I absolutely believe there are factions among the Democrats who would love to restrict free speech, pack the Supreme Court, divert Congressional powers to the executive branch, and lots of other creepy authoritarian things. But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up.
Conspicuously missing from this list: anyone named Clinton.
That has morphed into the "Killary" meme, has it not?
https://www.quora.com/A-lot-of-people-say-Killary-instead-of-Hillary-Why
And apparently there is a (tongue-in-cheek) "Clinton Body Count":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_body_count_conspiracy_theory
Well, I hope it's tongue-in-cheek. Why did the Belarusians get in on it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dugwscdrTls
Actually, in this context, the Belarusian one seems like a parallel to the allegations that Gessen makes about all the people meeting mysterious accidents after crossing Putin (except that we do have a couple of cases where definitely it is good advice not to go drinking tea with old pals from the Old Country who turn up for a visit).
I assure you, having lived through the 1990s in the US, that the people who said "Clinton body count" were not kidding.
Also, Chuck Schumer said on Rachel Maddow that Trump should stop criticizing the intelligence agencies because they "have six ways from Sunday to get you." He basically did the mafia "nice business you have here, it would be a shame if some one vandalized it."
I wonder if somewhere along the line, an established power broker (Yeltsin maybe?) favoured Putin mainly because he seemed like a non-entity who would be easy to control.
I can think of two or three examples in history where the same was assumed of a parvenu, but turned out to be a spectacularly bad misjudgement!
One such would be Cicero and co scoffing between themselves at the idea that young Octavian, "that boy" as Cicero called him, would ever be anything but a pliant leader. (Cicero wasn't just a long winded orator - He had been consul at some point, and was thus a senior senator.) But Octavian soon morphed into Caesar Augustus!
Another example of course was Hindenburg and his generation promoting and enabling Adoph Hitler, not because they liked him, quite the opposite, but because they were confident they could control him.
A third example is Stalin. He was regarded as a competent, ideologically middle-of-the road administrator by others in the Party, compared to his main competitor for the leadership: the left-wing firebrand Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army. (... And although Stalin turned out more ruthless than expected, killing most old Party comrades plus millions in Gulags, Trotsky would probably have been even more ruthless and killed even more. Plus, Trotsky - unlike Stalin - was not content to limit the revolution to one country ("socialism in one country"), but wanted a world revolution, i. e. setting the whole world on fire. So the old Party comrades probably made as rational a decision as was possible, under the circumstances. )
Another great one is Idi Amin Dada, and Mobutu in Zaire/Congo.
> And although Stalin turned out more ruthless than expected, killing most old Party comrades plus millions in Gulags, Trotsky would probably have been even more ruthless and killed even more.
I think this is honestly unlikely because, to put it succinctly, the vast majority of the people Stalin killed, he did not need to kill for any reason, including the securing of his own power. It was all his personal paranoia, which Trotsky (presumably) did not share, and subsequent Soviet leaders did not repeat the task of throwing millions in the gulags to shore up their own power.
Trotsky would probably have had a more adventurist foreign policy in the interwar period, yes.
We can probably agree that none of us can know if Trotsky would have turned out an even bigger mass murderer than Stalin. Since after 1927 (when Stalin expelled him from the Party), Trotsky was not in a position to order anyone killed any more. While Stalin from then on was in a position to order anyone killed that he wanted killed - which he did.
A more interesting question, in particular in this ACX setting, is to look at the decision problem from the point of view of the delegates to the 13th party congress in May 1924, when Stalin first got the upper hand in his power struggle with Trotsky. The decision problem facing the 700+ delegates can be formulated as follows: Which of these two is more likely to leave me in peace if I should disagree with them in the future, and which one is more likely to instead have me executed?
On the right: Stalin, General Secretary of the Party since 1922, who had blood on his hands, but not a conspicuous amount. On the left: Trotsky, leader of the Red Army since 1918, who in that capacity already had blood up to his armpits. Also, Stalin: Supporting limited markets (the New Economic Policy (NEP), indicating pragmatism), plus satisfied with "socialism in one country" (indicating reasonableness: cut your losses and consolidate). On the left: Trotsky, against NEP (indicating gung-ho radicalism), and advocating World Revolution/permanent revolution (go for everything-or-nothing: The stars or bust).
In all such situations, the candidates' stated positions and past reputations serve as signals to decision-makers (here: the delegates). And given the information available to the delegates, Stalin arguably appeared as the sanest choice.
Which, in my opinion, he probably was.
> But also, the man who came closest to overthrowing Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was Putin’s former cook! Again, this is pretty weird, but I don’t know what the alternative is. Some kind of conspiracy of Russian cooks?
Not surprising that cooks would be in a position to gain power. You need to trust your cook a lot if you don’t want to get poisoned, and if you trust them to feed you, you probably trust them to command political or military power.
Masha Gessen is not by any means a good biographer of the guy, she is too emotionally opposed to him, maybe understandably so.
Try this Short’s Putin biography for a less partisan (although much longer and detailed) coverage of the man.
Try Philip Short’s Putin biography*
I think it would be worthwhile to read a book about somebody in this club by an author that isn't completely opposed to the person they're writing about. Otherwise you'll only ever get one perspective, and it's a bit of an echo chamber.
Dis ^
I haven't been selecting too hard for opposition, and I did (by accident) get a pro-Modi one.
I do think erring on the side of opponents is better than supporters, because my main interest here is how countries get less democratic, and only people who believe a country *did* get less democratic are going to focus on that / tell that story. I agree that if possible I should try to find someone completely objective.
You should do one for FDR. If Trump had as much power over the government as president (and used it) as FDR did, he would surely be considered a dictator. Many on the left would be absolutely convinced that there had been a fascist takeover of the US.
There was, and the country has never recovered.
I do think this would be very interesting! It's hard to get a critical take on FDR, because he seems to be so beloved across the political spectrum, particularly because of Social Security.
Well, the US did really well under FDR--we got out of the depression, won the biggest war in history, and ended up as the dominant economic and military power on the planet. FDR had too much power, but it's easier to tolerate an autocrat who makes your country better off than one who makes it worse off.
We did not get out of the depression under FDR. The economy was still stagnant in 1941, and unemployment was still high.
>and only people who believe a country *did* get less democratic are going to focus on that / tell that story.
Choosing someone less obviously opposed to Putin (but from a western country) would make it more likely you'll find greater insight, because they're disagreeing with the hegemonic western institutional viewpoint and so will be writing their book in spite of this and not because they're confirming the biases of the sort of people who buy books like this.
Well, in principle, you could find someone who believes the country DID get less democratic AND views that a good thing, but such people probably don't published, at least not in America.
They might not have American publishing companies knocking down the door making cash advances, but the books do get around in America.
I could imagine a world where opposition writers are less able to take the dictator's supporters' position, and so are less able to figure out why the dictator came to power. Consider a transhumanist trying to understand why religion is so popular, and writing a book about the history of religion. They may emphasize the fear of death, lack of the invention of probability theory, tribalism biases, and other stuff. This will be different from a Christian's emphasis, maybe the Christian talks about community, theological thought, Platonism, and divine revelation (you can probably tell where I fall on the transhumanist-Christian axis, I hope the Christians can forgive me for misunderstanding their alien mentality & knowledge base).
I'd like to hear both of their stories, but I've heard the transhumanist version so much, I may actually gain a lot more information by reading the Christian story. If I want to know why so many people allow Christianity to spread, it would make sense to ask the Christians, who want it spread, and may have been among those who helped it spread. Similarly, maybe if I want to know how a dictator rose to power, it makes sense to ask those who lifted them up what they did & why.
My position is not confident, but more confidently asserting yours seems too confident & extreme in favor of oppositions.
A similar, but not as relevant judgement I've made has been that reading the justifications people made for keeping slavery in the Antebellum South has been more enlightening to my understanding of psychology than the justifications people made against slavery.
To understand nazism, you need to be able to think like a nazi, and Stalinism, like Stalin.
I'd suggest Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. I have my issues with him, namely, that he is not so good in explaining why was the USSR in crisis before Gorbachev. I am not disputing there was a crisis, Kotkin just doesn't have a good explanation of ti and of Brezhnev era generally imho. But he is very good in explaining Gorbachev and the 90s.
That book is sort of symphatetic to Putin, since its last edition is 2008, but Kotkin is no apologist for things like invasion of Ukraine, as his recent prolific output makes clear. And he is a rare American with good observation skills immersed in Russian culture.
Also, he is an author of unfinished biography of Stalin, btw. I haven't read that one.
Expertise usually comes with some kind of opinion, though. You don't get really into things without some kind of animating interest. Even with complete scientific esoterica like atomic structure or protein folding scientists get attached to theories.
Reason evolved to convince, using it to understand the world is a hack. It's a very *good* hack, I like science and modern medicine and cars and the internet a lot, but you're using a pin to clean out your phone charger port. Works OK but sometimes you still get poked and you always have to be careful not to poke yourself. Being objective is HARD! Scientists use statistical tests to see if their results are due to chance, and then have to use new statistical tests to see if other scientists are gaming those (look at publication bias and p-hacking, for instance).
I think probably the only thing I can think of is that you really should try to understand, 'why would anybody support this person'? Usually they did *something* right and solved some huge social problem, even if they created worse ones later. Lenin got rid of the Tsar and the backward Russian feudal system. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Depression. Stalin industrialized Russia. Mao got rid of the landlords. Doesn't sound like Gessen talks about that much. Be as suspicious of reverse hagiographies as you are of hagiographies.
>and only people who believe a country *did* get less democratic are going to focus on that / tell that story.
And they're all too often going to be categorically incapable of understanding why this has happened, because they construct a caricature of the person/regime they hate and offer no insight accordingly. To understand Putin, you need to be able to think like Putin and his supporters. This is literally no different than thinking you're going to learn anything about the rise of Trump by reading some screed by someone who says Trump won the election because "white supremacy".
You wouldn't say that about, say, the dictator they're covering now (failed painter from Austria in case someone reads this much later). Though I actually do think in terms of understanding his rise to power it would be good to cover, say, his role in repudiating the German war debt (which was quite unfairly placed on them at Versailles) and rebuilding the economy. These guys don't keep power if they're *totally* incompetent, and the mountain of bodies only came later. (Well, there were a few hills of bodies, but the *mountain range* of bodies didn't arise until after the war.)
So I agree.
Boris Yeltsin gets short shrift in many of the comments. Please remember that without his decisions and courage in the fateful days 19-22 August 1991, the coup against Gorbachev would likely have succeeded, and we would highly likely live in a world where "actual existing communism" would still be the order of the day for people both in Russia, the Baltic states and elsewhere.
I remember an interview with him a few years after he became President of Russia. The journalist, hostile and obviously trying to set a trap, asked: "but President Yeltsin, what is your vision on behalf of Russian youth? Yeltsin, momentarily taken aback, became thoughtful. Then he said (quoting from memory): "A main problem of Russian history has been that rulers have had visions on behalf of our youth. My vision is to create a Russia where youth are free to pursue their own visions".
It is also hard to forget his reply when another journalist asked him about his opinion of Communism: "Communism was a very important experiment. It was a necessary experiment. The only tragedy is that this important experiment had to take place in such a big country."
>would still be the order of the day for people both in Russia, the Baltic states and elsewhere.
This isn't a necessary implication of the coup succeeding, especially for the baltic states.
By the way, China is still ruled by communist party, and it is quite prosperous, as in to rival the US.
So maybe there are versions of "communism" that are fine?
It's worth noting that China is *still* slightly poorer than Russia (in GDP per capita terms) and only around 20% as rich as the US. Only the sheer size of the population makes them anything other than a run-of-the-mill poor-but-not-super-poor country like Mexico or Malaysia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
This is true. Another extremely important point is that China is no longer communist in the sense of being a fully centralized economy like it was under Mao, (although they kept the name "Chinese Communist Party), which is precisely *why* they are at all prosperous.
Progress began with Mao's death in 1976 when Deng began privatization reforms to achieve his so called "market socialism with Chinese characteristics." Private farming was legalized in the early 80's, and was a major driver economic progress in that decade, while private enterprises were recognized in the late 80's. The 90's saw further reforms, with a large share of state owned enterprises being corporatized and market pricing being implemented.
During Mao's tenure (1949-1976), Chinese PPP per capita only increased by 11%, going from $945 to $1050. In the 28 years after his death, PPP per capita increased by over 370% from $1070 to $5050.
Today, apparently state owned enterprises account for 40% of China's GDP. Its current lack of economic freedom relative to Western countries like the USA and Germany and other East Asian countries like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea explains why it so much poorer per capita than them, but the massive reforms it has made explain why it went from being much poorer than Pakistan or Zimbabwe to being the solidly developing country it now is.
GDP is a miserably bad statistic. If an apartment in Bejing costs 20% of what it does in NY, comparing GDP per capita between the 2 countries is useless.
That would be obviously very bad for people in Baltic countries, but for actual Russians, indicators of well being are very clear that their living standards declined as a consequence of the fall of the USSR and only improved above 80s levels under Putin. If it would be Yeltsin's intention, it could be said that he sacrificed Russians in order to help the Baltics; and it is understandable that Russians don't appreciate that. But imho he had no such intention and just threw his hat into the power struggle because he wanted to became a dictator, in which he succeeded.
Also all this presumes that the USSR was salvageable in 1991, which is far from certain.
I mean, yes. He still did a bad job as head of state afterward. I admired Rudy Giuliani's cleaning up NYC, he's acted like a complete idiot since then. Few people are all good or all bad.
Also, 'good for us in the West' and 'good for Russia' are two very different things. Russians are understandably more concerned about the latter.
> But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up.
I believe the accepted phrase is "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
(There is a very convenient synergy between people too delicate to order violence directly and helpful folks willing to interpret indirect orders into existence.)
Great point!
BLM protesters trashed quite a few places.
I agree Jan. 6 was an actual coup attempt (I'm more or less in the 'Democrats are less bad as long as Trump exists' camp), but while I think Biden and Schumer are way too old for such things, I wonder about Kamala.
So, while the progressive upper middle class Scott hangs around with is unlikely to get their hands dirty, I could definitely see some of their associates looking the other way while some Trumpies get beaten up.
An actual coup attempt, wherein infamously gun loving loonies weirdly left their guns at home, and where the US government is a call of duty 'king of the hill' match that grants rule of the country to those who occupy the capitol rotunda for 5 continuous minutes.
Trump may have wanted one, but there was no world in which the Jan 6 riot could have put Trump into power. It was the Four Seasons Landscaping of coup attempts.
>Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa
With all due respect this is absurdly out of context. How did Putin get this rammed through? Dictator magic?
Russia before Putin took power was in an extremely violent anarchy. Putin brought peace and relative prosperity. That’s why he has the support of the Russian people. Understanding how bad things got under yeltsin is critical to understanding modern Russia.
Doubters: listen to the podcast “thoughts on Ukraine” by martyrmade on Spotify
You hit the nail on the head. People were so disillusioned with their elected leaders and brutal free market, a strong hand in Kremlin was a welcome change. Somebody was in charge now.
I’ll add that the quote is also false. As in, factually incorrect. Members of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament are still elected, only the upper chamber is appointed. (In addition to elections for a number of more local positions, such as mayor)
I wonder how meaningful it really is to describe the people of Russia (even those who hate Putin) "liv[ing] in fear". We are talking about a culture with literally no experience of democracy or freedom (from the state) in its entire history. The closest they've ever come to anything resembling those things are, as I understand it: the absurdly corrupt, crime-ruled 1990s, the upheaval, confusion and series of coups and uprisings of most of 1917, and the independence-asserting boyars of the 1500s-1600s, pursuing their violent and corrupt self-serving feuds. The idea that the average Russian spends his or her life thinking "isn't it terrible to live under an aggressively strong government I must obey" is as plausible as suggesting that we in the west spend our lives dwelling on the stressfulness of finding jobs and trying to get rich, the loneliness of waiting often decades to get married, and the depressing emptiness of having to search for our own spritual meaning, with no guidance from society, that we may never find at all.
All of those stresses are obviously present for some people, to some extent. But the arch-traditionalist who claims that we're all constantly thinking something like "if only I lived in the 'natural' society of the past, where I do the job my father did, marry the girl my parents choose for me when I'm 15, and believe, like everyone else, the state religion of my society" is missing, first, the fact that we are used to our society and probably can't imagine living any other way, and second, the fact that we are constantly exposed to endless stories, from Shakespeare's romances to the Spanish Inquisition, reminding us of all the negative aspects of the alternative order of things.
I see no reason Russians wouldn't think in a similar way about a strong government.
100%. Habit is a powerful force, and nobody likes being told their habits are bad.
In fact, perhaps we should stop using democracy (or liberal market) as a synonym for freedom at all. A given person living a traditional life in Senegal may feel more free than an American who can choose between 200 types of breakfast cereal and gets to vote every two years. Not saying the latter isn’t freedom, just that there are different kinds of freedom.
I think you're not good at understanding the perspectives of people in different societies. Liberals in general are also often guilty of this - they (at least implicitly) believe that everyone around the world is actually a democracy loving progressive, but some in many non-western societies they are forced to endure an authoritarian, conservative government and they hate this. No, this isn't how things are. Progressive democracy is the weird ideology, not the lack of it. People in Russia aren't democrats waiting to be freed from the oppression of Putin et al. They grew up in a different society with a different history and culture (and different alleles, but even putting that aside....), and they feel differently about things on average than people in America do.
Conservatives are less guilty of this. Not because they're so cosmopolitan and culturally sensitive - they just recognize that different cultures are different and that's just the way things are, even if they don't have detailed knowledge around any given culture.
Also, the alleged benefits of "progressive" "democratic" society may itself be a kind of cargo cult, wherein the type of PEOPLE who result in "democratic" countries being created/maintained are the type of people who build good countries, and these countries would still be much nicer places to live even if they abolished elections.
Weren't "conservatives" the ones trying to spread "democracy" (at least ostensibly)? "Every soul carries the desire to live in freedom" and all that? If conservatives have actually learned the lesson that this is simply not true, that there are many people actively opposed to the freedom (the most dangerous of whom are not abroad, but that's besides the point), it must have been very recently.
I think you're running together two different distinctions here (and I don't blame you, as categorising ideologies becomes very complex very quickly). On the one hand, there's whether or not you accept that different people have fundamentally different values, which they honestly believe in. And on the other, there's whether you believe that some values are better than others, or they're all equally valid.
The first is a factual position and the second is a moral position. Thus you can identify four groups:
1. "There are many sets of values, and one of them is correct and the others wrong" (most conservatives, especially Christians and neoconservatives, but also libertarians where the "correct" value is narrowly "you should let others live in freedom" and other value differences beyond that are irrelevant).
2. "There are many sets of values, and they're all equally valid" (standard relativism, which becomes absurdly self-contradictory when it's combined, as it usually is, with "and so you shouldn't impose your values on others").
3. "There is really only one set of values that people hold and it's the correct one; people who say they believe otherwise either haven't thought through it or are being deliberately evil" (many ordinary (non-relativist) progressives, especially utilitarians and wokeists).
4. "There is one set of general values humans hold, but it's an evolutionary accident and there's nothing innately special about it" (apolitical scientists, as well as poets and the like who talk non-judgementally about "the human condition").
Feel free to disagree with my analysis here, but I think it's well-justified by the way the two sides speak. Notably, right-wing publications are filled with the language of conflict and contrast: "clash of civilisations", "the Christian worldview vs the secular worldview", "what conservatives believe and what liberals believe". While that very prominant ideology on the left, that its opponents call "wokeness", "SJWs", "political correctness" or "identity politics" notoriously has no clear name that its proponents will accept as a self-description, other than laughable things like "non-bigotry" and "basic decency". As if the very idea that anyone might think differently to them, that their beliefs are anything less the consensus of all reasonable people everywhere, is utterly incomprehensible.
That's a good model! I'm pretty strongly in the 1. camp, with some shades of 4. against claims that there are literally no constraints on what values human societies may hold.
I think that's going a bit too far--there are values that are near universals across history and geography, but we tend not to notice them outside an academic study (ie, bias against incest, etc) because that's the water we swim in. There are other values that vary considerably across cultures (marriage practices, governing systems) and there are values that differ, but perhaps by not all that much. These are values that seem sustained not by being somehow cosmically superior, but because the cultures which hold them tend over long periods of time to be more successful than those that don't (some version of the Golden Rule, a tolerance for different belief systems).
I think one's position on the Universal vs Diverse spectrum will have something to do with one's views of the status quo: to the extent that current conditions and trends seem largely benevolent towards one's own interests, one tends to believe that everyone really supports that status quo, even if they don't know it yet. Meanwhile, if the world seems to be heading in a bad direction, well then, the mainstream belief system is wrong, and so everyone is free to believe what they will (even if each of us still thinks we are the correct ones).
I think it was neoconservatives doing that, who aren't quite the same (even though they have a similar name due to the vagaries of US political coalition-forming).
It is my understanding that "neoconservative" is used to mean "non-conservatives (read as: 'Democrats') who allied with the conservatives on foreign policy."
Or 'Jewish conservative' if you're feeling antisemitic (of course, it doesn't really describe, say, Stephen Miller or Breitbart). It's kind of like 'globalists' in that it has an exoteric meaning that's theoretically neutral and describes a philosophy that actually exists but tends to get used as an occult ethnic slur nowadays.
It actually does describe a type of conservatism, originally centered around the magazine _Commentary_, that started out opposing the New Left and communism and after winning the Cold War, wanted to spread democracy around the world. The atrocious failure of the Iraq War means it's no longer in vogue on the right, and in fact modern conservatives seem eager to prove they are not neocons. But they were in charge for a while from the 1980s to 2000s.
"It's kind of like 'globalists' in that it has an exoteric meaning that's theoretically neutral and describes a philosophy that actually exists but tends to get used as an occult ethnic slur nowadays."
It's actually the opposite. The people who get called neocons are actually way less Jewish than the actual neocons. The Kristols, Kagans, Max Boot, Jen Rubin, Paul Wolfowitz, etc are all actual ideological neocons, and are all Jewish. There are only a couple of card carrying neocons who are not Jewish. But the term has been applied to Gentiles who are not technically neocons like Cheney, Bush II, Rumsfeld, etc.
I don't think the average conservative supported nation-building conservatism (and they certainly don't these days), or to the extent that they did, it was motivated primarily by wanting to 'kill the terrorists' and regimes that support them, not liberate people. But Trump is the most anti-intervention president in recent history. He wisely supported the maintenance of the Assad regime, while Obama and co funded and armed 'rebels' (read: foreign insurrectionists) in their efforts to overthrow his 'dictatorship'.
And I mean, it should be well known by now that neoconservatism has its roots in pre-1960s liberalism (or even socialism). Conservatives have traditionally been the isolationists, and to the extent they weren't it was to press american interests abroad and CERTAINLY not to "liberate" anyone. Neo-conservatism basically emerged during the cold war, splitting off from the rising anti-war left.
They certainly don't these days, but I think you're mistaken about the attitude in the past. You're right about the roots of neoconservatism, but isolationism among the conservatives was nowhere close to universal: it's a big tent, and I think that was restricted mostly to the libertarian faction.
Patrick Buchanan was one of the most prominent conservative isolationists, and he certainly wasn't a libertarian.
And again, to the extent conservatives supported this, it was mostly about advancing what they felt were American interests, not liberating people. A 'democracy' in the middle east seems less likely to breed terrorists and more susceptible to US influence and control.
It depends on the era. It's always hard to compare ideologies of the past, but the "right" was on the isolationist side from the founding through WWII. The were more pro-intervention during the Cold War through the War on Terror, but now are probably less interventionist since Trump.
<i>Also, the alleged benefits of "progressive" "democratic" society may itself be a kind of cargo cult, wherein the type of PEOPLE who result in "democratic" countries being created/maintained are the type of people who build good countries, and these countries would still be much nicer places to live even if they abolished elections.</i>
I suspect there's an element of survivorship bias, too. Countries where democracy doesn't work out -- such as Russia, or most of post-colonial Africa -- don't get called democracies any more, even if the dictator was originally democratically elected and even if the country still has (rigged) elections. Of course democracy is going to look like a good form of government if only successful examples are allowed to count.
Good point!
As a Russian, this is 100% accurate. Westerners, even very smart ones, often assume that people living in authoritarian countries just can’t wait to have an election, a flag-burning and no-fault divorce.
It's even worse in China. Western politicians who visit China always ask them to improve human rights, and the Chinese smile and don't give a darn, because the concept is unfamiliar to them.
But how can we reach the "Frankl-steins" (see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-mans-search-for for this word) and make them understand that the current Russian politics -- mildly speaking -- estranges it from the world? Could it be better not to talk about liberty, free speech, etc., but about corruption, kleptocracy, mafia state?
Why would we? Do you want to turn Japan into a western country? Rip out their whole complicated system of hierarchy and politeness so we can force them to behave like Westerners? If not, why Russia?
As for estranging it from the world...China doesn't seem to care that much. It estranges them from *us*, meaning the USA and its allies/vassal states, but we're their principal geopolitical competitor anyway.
I actually like liberal democracy, but forcing it on countries that don't want it seems kind of obnoxious, and occasionally murderous if we get too serious about it.
TBH I'm not sure Russian politics does estrange it from the world. It estranges it from the west, certainly, but the rest of the world seems generally to have been pretty apathetic about the whole Ukraine thing.
The rest of the world has also made it clear that it doesn't see why they should torpedo their relations with Russia over Ukraine when no one did with the US after Iraq.
I think it's pretty safe to assume most people around the world are in fact supportive of democracy and liberalism in a general sense. The problem with western liberals is different - they (falsely) imagine themselves as representing these values, both in popular perception and in practice.
People in Russia aren't waiting to be freed from the oppression of Putin not because they think oppression is fine, actually. They aren't waiting because they remember how their introduction to the "free world" went and would prefer not to repeat that. You really don't need to assume they "feel differently about things" for that, it suffices that they have a different choice of options.
A more illustrative example may perhaps be people of Afghanistan, who faced a choice between [people who drop bombs on them] and [people who don't drop bombs on them] and, reasonably, chose the latter. And I'm bringing this up because the people who dropped bombs on them were both western liberals and "the type of people who build good countries", making both yours and the liberals' sense of superiority strikingly similar (and equally unfounded).
>I think it's pretty safe to assume most people around the world are in fact supportive of democracy and liberalism in a general sense.
No, it's not. People are supportive of whatever they think will give them the best life, and if that means a dictator protecting the nation and enacting policies aligned with the people's values, they would happily support that. To the extent that people in non-western countries do support democracy and liberalism, this is significantly part of the cargo cultism I referred to. They see the wealthy west and assume that its wealthy because of elections and welfare policies.
>People in Russia aren't waiting to be freed from the oppression of Putin not because they think oppression is fine, actually.
You're assuming that a majority of Russians think they're oppressed - it's not clear at all that this is true. That's the whole point I was making in the first place!
>making both yours and the liberals' sense of superiority strikingly similar (and equally unfounded).
The only reason the American government is in a position to bomb almost whomever they like is because America's population historically built such a wealthy country in the first place. There's countless countries who would love to wage war against countless enemies, but the reason they don't is not moral superiority but a lack of power.
The remarkable thing about America's foreign military interventions is not they occur, but precisely that they're so limited and rare (and not directly aimed at securing territory and direct control of countries). If you could give America's power to non-western countries today or any country historically, on average we would see vastly more aggression and explicit empire building. The mongols conquered vast swathes of the earth and killed tens of millions of people, with little more than horses, bows and arrows. Imagine if they had a tenth the firepower of the modern US military?
If you take a loaded word out, "a [leader] enacting policies aligned with the people's values" sounds like, well, democracy. I don't think we actually meaningfully disagree here, my point is specifically that [democratic values] and [western governance model] are not the same. Adopting the latter, yes, often misguided and cargo cultish (plus, on the peripheries, often a signal of elite upbringing rather than genuine adherence to democratic values). But that's precisely why [adoption of western governance model] should not be used as a measure of [support for democratic, liberal values]. Strip the latter into bare principles, and I'm confident most people around the earth will readily get behind "live and let live, and let's talk through conflicts rather than fighting them out, choose options with the highest popular support".
I'm also confident most Russians think they're oppressed. First, to go with a fairly strong example, the people who / whose friends and family are forced to die on Ukrainian soil clearly do. But more generally, feeling you're oppressed is normal, a human universal. A majority of westerners think they're oppressed one way or another, and they're not necessarily wrong. This is perfectly consistent with [wholeheartedly supporting one of the options actually on the table for you rather than chasing an ideal state that eliminates all oppression].
But where we really disagree is America's position. First, I'm pretty sure it's not one that allows it to bomb almost everywhere. It can always find one or two places in the world that it can bomb, some of them even inhabited, but the majority of the world is clearly off limits, some of it because it would strike back, some of it because doing so would undermine the very position America enjoys. (As adventuring into, e.g., Iraq and Vietnam did - the actually remarkable thing about America's military interventions is that they tend to fail, which alone would easily explain why they're so limited and rare.)
But the issue is not with America vis a vis the mongols or other empires past. America had its share of successful imperialist use of military power, historically. Panama, Philippines, you name it. It's just that, somewhere in the first part of XX century, something has changed and made brute military force unsuitable for subjugating foreign populations. Empires dismantled, colonies went free - it did not actually diminish America's power, in fact, at first, it rode that wave to the top of the world. But this pragmatism should not be confused for a lack of appetite.
What happened, exactly? Hell knows, but my suspicion is that the speed with which information travels changed. The people conquered by mongols quite literally didn't see them coming. Many might have never seen further than a neighboring village, making a large scale organizing of resistance impossible. Then, the world got smaller and smaller, until your best bet at controlling the country's population changed from [garrisons in strategic places, and they're fucked] to [not giving the people an enemy to unite against, because then you're fucked].
TBH I think your definition of "democracy" is overly-expansive, since it would cover, e.g., an autocratic emperor whose merest word is law just as long as he passes popular policies. Democracy is a function of how decisions get made, not which decisions get made. Indeed, as the UK has shown on topics like crime and immigration, it's entirely possible for a democracy to consistently enact policies which run contrary to the people's values.
<i>What happened, exactly? Hell knows, but my suspicion is that the speed with which information travels changed. The people conquered by mongols quite literally didn't see them coming. Many might have never seen further than a neighboring village, making a large scale organizing of resistance impossible. Then, the world got smaller and smaller, until your best bet at controlling the country's population changed from [garrisons in strategic places, and they're fucked] to [not giving the people an enemy to unite against, because then you're fucked].</i>
The Mongols conquered plenty of big empires, including China, the most populous country in the world at the time. The difference, I'd say, isn't that large-scale resistance is possible whereas it previously wasn't, but that we're much less willing to countenance civilian casualties and reprisals. A city that rebelled against the Mongols could expect to be massacred down to the dogs and cats; a city that rebels against US occupation can expect to suffer a fair amount of collateral damage, but civilians won't be directly targetted, and any civilian casualties that do occur will be blamed on the US, not the rebels.
Yeah, liberal democracy is a weird (should I say WEIRD, per Heinrich?) ideology. Europe didn't believe in it before about 1800, most of East Asia still doesn't (the same party's run Japan forever), India believes 100 different things from what I can tell, and Latin America staggers from ideology to ideology without ever really making it out of the middle-income trap.
Most people just want to make a living and raise a family. As it's been for thousands of years.
As with all Russia explainers, I'm left with more questions than answers. But that's good in its own way - a subject I'll never get bored of or feel remotely competent to opine on...some giant regions of the world remain huge ???s on my map, no matter how many times I try to fill them in with Minimally Viable Model. (Also, it's hard not to reverse "man without a face" into "Faceless Man".)
Weirdly high number of typos in this post, definitely bugged me. Including in the block quotes, which is weird? I still enjoy Scott book reviews as a general rule, but polish makes good work great. Wish Substack had that functionality of being able to highlight text and enter a key combination to send off an Official Typo Report, it always feels weird to do so in the comments...
> but polish makes good work great
For a second, probably due to the subject of the post, I read that as "Polish", as in "relating to Poland and the Poles". :-)
Stephen Kotkin is good on Russia and its relationship with the US. There are some interviews and lectures on YouTube, dome before the 2022 escalation of the war, some after.
“At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble.”
I’m reminded of the Nabokov story, ‘Death To Tyrants,’ where the narrator reminisces about his pre-revolutionary schooldays with the current dictator (a thinly disguised Lenin?), with an emphasis on the curious, even pitiful, anti-charisma of the tyrant-to-be.
There is a number of factual inaccuracies here which make me distrust the book overall.
1) "and members of Parliament were elected by governors" This is false. The upper chamber of Russian parliament is no longer elected directly, but the lower one is.
Context for non-Russians: I remember those reforms and Russians were overwhelmingly fine with them. Politicians were presumed to be useless and corrupt, so much so that it was not uncommon for the "against all" option to win in regional elections. A strong central hand was even somewhat welcome. "At least fascists made trains run on time" sort of thing.
2) "1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history" I take it Masha Gessen never lived in the developing world. As much as I disdain Russian politicians, corruption is the accepted part of power in most (all?) of the world.
One of the things that stunned me about living in <unspecified South American country> was how open elected leaders are about their corruption. At least in Russia, they bothered to deny it.
3) This makes Pussy Riot sound pretty innocent. My memory is, it’s not disruption of church service or blasphemous words that triggered most people. Russians are not _that_ religious. It was the nudity.
Imagine a pride parade, leather on, giblets galore, on the main street in a rural Kentucky town. Russia is more socially conservative than Kentucky. (And so is most of the world)
---------------
These and a few other examples of "artistic licence" make the book look like a wish-fulfilment fantasy of a disappointed Russian liberal. I fully expect Putin to be thuggish and corrupt and murderous, but that doesn’t mean he is literally the worst person in the universe. In fact, that makes him pretty unremarkable.
If you want to really know why Russians allowed him to keep power, see my "trains" comment above. 1990s was the time when many people had nothing to eat. Quite literally. You could have a job essential to the economy and not be paid for months at a time. That’s why for many people it was “80s = good, 90s = bad, 2000s = good”. Food, fuel, heating.
What brought food back? Not an expert, but three things off the top of my head:
- Putin was willing to strong arm local elected officials and oligarchs who made electorate unhappy. As opposed to the “chaos capitalism" of the 90s.
- More control of the media meant less news about starving coal-miners blocking rail lines in Magadan.
- Major surge in oil prices during 2000s helped.
>Imagine a pride parade, leather on, giblets galore, on the main street in a rural Kentucky town. Russia is more socially conservative than Kentucky. (And so is most of the world)
Better, imagine something one tenth as bad ocurring at a mosque. I don't even know if westerners who cried for pussy riot would have even condemned their punishment.
Russians aren’t particularly religious at all, are they?
Gessen may be biased and have her own agenda, but in hindsight she is one of the people who got Putin ”right” from the Western perspective (that is, warned about him). Others include Kasparov, John McCain.
Scott is, perhaps too subtly, satirising a book length hit piece here, surely ?
> Putin was a mediocre student; schoolmates who remember him at all recall that he was easily-offended, often got in physical fights, and always won.
I think that this sentence is missing something important. Are those former schoolmates on the record, or anonymous?
Imagine that they are on the record. How likely would they be to report that Putin had lost one or more fights? A supporter of Putin probably wouldn't want to embarrass him. Anyone - supporter, opponent, indifferent - would probably want to avoid being a target of retaliation.
I don't think easily offended is especially flattering.
In a healthy culture, maybe there is no reformulation of «easily offended» that is flattering, but many large scale cultures are not too healthy…
Did he really murder hundreds of Journalists?
Since 1991 38 journalists have been murdered in Russia, not all I guess by Putin.
Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, and Waco have something to say about naive regard to the capability and intent of US security services, with or without a wink from Congessional fossils.
Analysis of Putin in a vacuum can be misleading. Keep in mind the opposing forces are communist military hardliners and western robber barrons. There isn't some alternate universe where Russia thrives in a Putin-free utopia, just other bad options.
> he briefly got a position at the university as “assistant chancellor for foreign relations” on the grounds that he was one of the only people in the city who had ever been to a foreign country
Given that Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg) is the second largest Russian city - and former capital - this is exaggerating it quite a bit.
>The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators.
Ok so this is definitely not the "standard" position in the West, though it is a position with quite some supporters.
> So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA. Right now they seem more aligned with the Democratic side of the aisle, so Trump or some future Trump would have a hard time winning their total loyalty. As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here. I absolutely believe there are factions among the Democrats who would love to restrict free speech, pack the Supreme Court, divert Congressional powers to the executive branch, and lots of other creepy authoritarian things. But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up
This line of thinking seems to miss the part where Putin wasn't a leader of an existing major party. As the book review just described, he came through the security services and took over from a combination of those connections and happenstance. The rough hypothesis to think about in comparison would be direct takeover by one of these agencies (yes, Putin left and did other things--but it seems like his connections did most of the heavy lifting) or one of their former leaders getting into politics. Which doesn't feel particularly likely, at least not so brazenly, but given recent history it doesn't seem completely out of the realm of plausibility for the FBI to interfere with elections in a way that would help their favored candidate get elected. False flags, trumped-up charges, etc.
The extraordinary lengths to which some posters will go to map Biden over Putin are truly fascinating.
I wonder if it's just US chauvinism (everything is related to the USA), or something else about politics.
What do you mean ”map Biden over Putin”? I don’t understand the expression.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the fate of people investigating the Apartment Bombings. From Wikipedia:
> Attempts at an independent investigation have faced obstruction. State Duma deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin filed two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the events, but the motions were rejected by the State Duma in March 2000. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings was chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev. The commission was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries.
> Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, have since died in apparent assassinations. The Commission's lawyer and investigator Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested and served four years in prison for revealing state secrets. Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who defected and blamed the FSB for the bombings, was poisoned and killed in London in 2006. A British inquiry later determined that Litvinenko's murder was "probably" carried out with the approval of Putin and Patrushev.
> Journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former security service member Alexander Litvinenko, who investigated the bombings, were killed in 2006.
A fellow named David Satter claimed to have been, by 2007, "the only person publicly accusing the regime of responsibility who had not been killed" (say, have any of you heard from David Satter lately?): https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible/
I understand that Putin's United Russia party thrice voted unanimously not to investigate the bombings - one of several tidbits I learned from this Frontline documentary on Putin: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1507210690427174916
Kind of related - does substack have tags yet? How soon are they likely to come? I'd love a "dictator book club" tag so I can just share that series of posts with select friends
“But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up.”
Oh, my sweet summer child! This was before your time, but I’m old enough to remember pre-senility Biden. He was an amoral narcissistic prick. I can totally see him giving such an order.
Here’s the thing: the democrats don’t bother “roughing someone up” they whack them with hellfire missiles and kill everyone in the area. Name Anwar Al-Alwaki ring a bell?
But there’s a key difference between Russia and the US. When Putin assassinates his own people he lies about it because he’s afraid of the reaction of the Russian people to such crimes. When Obama murders his own people, he brags about it, because he knows that Americans are bloodthirsty and power worshiping and won’t cause any trouble.
I hope that someday we can have the moral backbone of the Russians but it seems like that’s still a long way off.