17 Comments
Apr 5, 2022Liked by Konstantin Kisin

An excellent article for those who know very little on Russia and Putin

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Apr 5, 2022Liked by Konstantin Kisin

That's a very good and much needed article Konstantin. It is a real problem, dealing with false beliefs when you get clarity about the mess that things have become.

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Unlike your usual work, I think this essay misses important context and ends up being misleading. Compared to when he took power, Putin raised Russia's per capita GDP 5x. You can remove all current commodities revenue and still end up with a massive economic boost after that. Also, it is not trivial to stabilize Russia enough to enable commodities export. Yeltsin largely failed at that.

Hitler did not turn Germany into an industrial and innovation powerhouse, that was the legacy of imperial Germany. Germany was the leading Nobel prize winning country since the early 1900s, way before Hitler came to power.

Despite it's dysfunctions, Russia is one of the few empires in history that can take a serious punch (see Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions, the Red vs White civil war etc). Purely oppressive empires typically can not and fall apart at the seams (see Persian, Mongol and Islamic kalifate empires).

On balance I think your article is more (self?)persuasion than analysis and fails to get at the full story.

PS You obviously said many things that are correct, I don't want to take that away from you.

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Apr 5, 2022Liked by Konstantin Kisin

The easiest way for someone to comment in today’s world, with one’s social media accounts becoming their actual personality (and level of clout), it is usually done with the simplest imagery (even if it is wrong) we all know about even if we don’t understand the complexity of.

Everyone and everything bad in the world is Hitler and Nazism even if it’s not because people must post else they’ll not be popular and left behind the crowd rushing forward to be right...

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Nationalism is his ideology. Russian nationalism is the base of his support.

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Yes, better to call him Stalin.

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"the Kremlin has made little attempt to unite the country around a philosophical framework of any kind" - not true. The Kremlin has sought to unite the country around Russian Orthodox christianity.

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Enjoying the pro hitler sentiment in an obvs ironic fashion

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A monkey or anybody for that matter could have raised the gdp from nothing to 5x in over 23 years. Corruption at every level (from the top first and foremost) have led to a ‘leader’ for whose regime the news stories about advanced capabilities are more important than the capabilities themselves. Russia ‘s rise attributed to him in any way is a fantasy that the kremlin has promoted constantly.

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It's surreal to see soldiers in a brightly lit grocery store taking their "shopping" and bagging it. Sadly, they used plastic bags instead of reusable bags. ;)

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Lila Wagner, that is a mistaken assumption and conclusion, because the stamping out of Nazism by the allies was not conflated with any idea of exterminating the German people.

The Nazi name-calling by the Russian authorities is the same game being played by those that Konstantin's article is criticizing.

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Jan 15, 2023·edited Jan 15, 2023

You say:

"Despite the rightful disgust we today feel towards Nazi Germany, it was one of the most economically, technologically and culturally advanced countries in the world as proved by the fact that it was able to sustain a brutal war against three (!) of the world’s superpowers (USSR, the British Empire and the United States) at the same time."

Economically advanced: The economic prosperity of Germany during the Nazi regime was driven by a bunch of factors, none of which were sustainable, specifically because they were linked to some of the biggest problems of Nazism.

They improved their economy by incurring deficits to finance military spending, expecting to loot other nations to cover the cost—which is DUMB, as the side-effects of war, particularly once you start meeting heavy resistance, aren't good for your economy. War is wasteful.

Bribery and petty fiefdoms abounded, leading to huge inefficiencies in the economic system.

As for technological advancement, ironically most of the "advanced technology" they had wasn't very reliable and/or cost more in time and resources than competing solutions. I do concede that they had a lot of relatively technologically advanced weapons and war vehicles (albeit not as practically useful).

As for culture, fascism is the death of culture. There is only the leader, embodiment of the state, and their ideas of what counts as culture; a monochrome, meagre thing where ideas are murdered.

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Er, how about also mentioning that Hitler wanted to genocide an entire people?

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It would be nice if Putin's inadequacy was as you indicate, but there's been a message from someone in the Kremlin indicating that "Ukrainian=Nazi" and therefore the extermination of all things/people Ukrainian is now mandatory.

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