"Authoritarianism in all its forms lies, it conceals, it bluffs. It lies to the world, it lies to its people, it lies to itself. It creates false fear about phantom dangers in order to avoid talking about its lethal accumulation of banal shortcomings."
Does this not describe he imminent future of the United States?
It's useful to think with 30 years of hindsight what the collapse of the USSR really CHANGED in a fundamental way. I was born in Moscow a few years before the USSR collapsed. My family left mostly because what came next was unpredictable and unforeseen-- the USSR was woefully mismanaged, but you could carve out a decent life if you were good at navigating the massive and overlapping patronage networks, and my grandmother in particular was quite good at that.
But in 1992, no one knew what would come next. What's becoming more clear is that, after a wild west decade between, oh, 1991 and 2001 or so, Russia has more or less fallen back into what the USSR was-- an economically sclerotic, moderately totalitarian state. The specific networks are different-- the cult of power is more a personality cult and less a party cult, the economy's patronage networks aren't quite as centralized as they were, but the society is fundamentally quite similar. I suppose a big difference is that the Soviet periphery is no longer a fiefdom expressly controlled by Moscow, but the Soviet periphery was never really central to the Soviet state, except as an expression of the state's geopolitical relevance.
So it seems, from the perspective of someone whose parents came of age in the USSR and who still has some family in Russia, Putin's Russia is more an example of same shit, different day than some kind of momentous and important departure from what Russia has been for the last, oh, half a millennium or so. It's certainly a modern variant, but the differences between, say, Putin and his cronies and Ivan IV and his oprichniki seem... more temporal than fundamental, if that makes sense.
Yes. A lot. And I think's an example of how the specific forms of power have a kind of thermodynamics to them, a tendency to snap back into familiar shapes and envisionings.
Which puts a lot of pressure on the idea that bad times can end.
"Authoritarianism in all its forms lies, it conceals, it bluffs. It lies to the world, it lies to its people, it lies to itself. It creates false fear about phantom dangers in order to avoid talking about its lethal accumulation of banal shortcomings."
Does this not describe he imminent future of the United States?
I fear so.
It's useful to think with 30 years of hindsight what the collapse of the USSR really CHANGED in a fundamental way. I was born in Moscow a few years before the USSR collapsed. My family left mostly because what came next was unpredictable and unforeseen-- the USSR was woefully mismanaged, but you could carve out a decent life if you were good at navigating the massive and overlapping patronage networks, and my grandmother in particular was quite good at that.
But in 1992, no one knew what would come next. What's becoming more clear is that, after a wild west decade between, oh, 1991 and 2001 or so, Russia has more or less fallen back into what the USSR was-- an economically sclerotic, moderately totalitarian state. The specific networks are different-- the cult of power is more a personality cult and less a party cult, the economy's patronage networks aren't quite as centralized as they were, but the society is fundamentally quite similar. I suppose a big difference is that the Soviet periphery is no longer a fiefdom expressly controlled by Moscow, but the Soviet periphery was never really central to the Soviet state, except as an expression of the state's geopolitical relevance.
So it seems, from the perspective of someone whose parents came of age in the USSR and who still has some family in Russia, Putin's Russia is more an example of same shit, different day than some kind of momentous and important departure from what Russia has been for the last, oh, half a millennium or so. It's certainly a modern variant, but the differences between, say, Putin and his cronies and Ivan IV and his oprichniki seem... more temporal than fundamental, if that makes sense.
Yes. A lot. And I think's an example of how the specific forms of power have a kind of thermodynamics to them, a tendency to snap back into familiar shapes and envisionings.
Which puts a lot of pressure on the idea that bad times can end.