Ed. Note: Very rare discussion of the real internal configuration of the interests within Russia. We only disagree on one aspect with the author. And that is that in order to survive as an independent geopolitical civilizational entity, it was essential for Russia to integrate Western Europe into its own space. The last 100 years of European of wars were in fact the fight over Western Europe between the two major White European superpowers: the Anglo-Saxons and the Russians.
In light of such an objective, Russia had to be able to open its borders to integration with the “West”. At the peak of its military power in the late 1970s, it was possible to start the integration process. This is presented in The New CommonWealth published in 1997.
Posted by: shadowbanned
I know I’m like a broken record on this, but people in the West still don’t understand why and how exactly the Cold War ended.
And that includes even the anti-imperialists. Those consist mostly of two groups — a libertarian right and a Trotskyist left, and both of them have their reasons to swallow line hook and sinker the official narrative that is presented to everyone else, namely that the USSR collapsed because it was an unworkable system that history has now firmly rejected.
The libertarians like that idea because they dream of a small state, completely unregulated markets, etc. And obviously the USSR is a mortal enemy of that ideology.
The Trotskyists (and I use this term loosely — most of them don’t identify themselves as such because they have no knowledge of that history) hate the USSR because it was built by Stalin, and Trotskyists and Stalinists hate each other. Also, in later decades communist countries went in a conservative nationalist direction on cultural issues, which is unacceptable for Trotskyists too.
So we have the mainstream narrative converging with the disparate motivations of the “alternative” fringe in creating a huge blind spot, and everyone is thinking the USSR collapsed because it just had to collapse as it was a fundamentally broken system.
Nothing of the sort — if there had been a will, there would still be a USSR. It’s a long topic, but it could not only have been saved, but it would have thrived and been light years ahead of the West if the correct decisions had been taken, especially in the 1960s. You see what China looks like now.
In reality what happened was that the grandest act of treason and betrayal in human history was committed — a certain layer of the late Soviet elites made a deal with the West to surrender without a fight and hand over the USSR’s resources in exchange for a percentage on the rent extraction flow that would allow them to then live in unimaginable under communism luxury. That’s the essence of the whole story.
But again, that isn’t understood in the West, including in the anti-imperialist circles.
It is well understood in Russia though, and this is why there is so much pessimism — because that scum has been in power ever since, it has not been cleansed and purged at all, and everything about the last 14 months smells very strongly of another such betrayal.
do you have a link for this? and why would he resist at all if he were merely an agent of the west. my understanding is he had a great deal to do with transforming Russia from the wild west of the 90’s–why would he do that if he were a western agent? why would China trust him, to the extent that it does, if he were merely an agent of the west which has China next in the crosshairs?Posted by: pretzelattack
Here:
https://youtu.be/i8kkeztq70c?t=12
Putin is one person, and he is simply balancing between competing interest. He is not a dictator (even Stalin wasn’t really one and was always in danger of falling victim to a coup). Roughly it splits like this:
1) Extractive industries — pro-Western
2) Bankers — pro-Western
3) the MIC and the siloviki — patriotic, but with some western intelligence penetration in some of the agencies
4) local civilians industries — patriotic
On some issues one side prevails, on others the other.
So why is Russia even fighting? Why not just break it into saleable parts and get their $$$ and be done with it? Certainly their cohorts in the West would have made it very much worth their while. But that didn’t happen.
I’d like to hear your reasoning why they are betraying Russia and fighting for Russia all at the same time when they could have just competed the process 20 years ago with Yeltsin.I do get the pessimism though, anyone who has suffered trauma would feel the same.
Posted by: K | May 6 2023 12:31 utc | 321
See above. There is a strong patriotic faction, but it has not won the internal war.
Also, and that is very important, the reason why Russia started resisting after Putin became president is that even the extractive industries, while pro-Western, weren’t satisfied with their cut of the loot. And not just that — the original deal from the 1970s and 1980s was made with the understanding on the Russian side that they would be accepted as equal members of the world’s elite. But in fact they weren’t accepted — their money was welcome, but they themselves were always seen as second-class elites. And again, both sides got greedier than what the loot could support in terms of demands on it.
It’s nothing new — vassals have rebelled against their feudal lords because they weren’t satisfied with the terms of their mutual arrangements for many centuries. But vassals and their lords have always been in full agreement that the peasants should be totally suppressed, and that the system should be preserved.
Same thing here — the way things were 15-20 years ago was ideal for them, and that is what those sabotaging the SMO are dreaming about returning to. That ship has sailed though…
Not really. You might say that GDR collapsed in 1990 around the time Deng was changing policy in China – compare and contrast China with former GDR under West German management !China has a sea coast and had Hong Kong and New Territories where UK had let a business culture thrive – it had export ports. ALL Chinese wealth is concentrated in its coastal regions
USSR had no real coastal ports for exports.
USSR offered Akio Morita cheap labour to produce SONY products in Soviet factories – he declined. Outside Mil-Spec USSR quality was pitiful especially in consumer goods.
The areas of USSR best suited to technically advanced optics and electronics were Ukraine and Baltic States which is why USSR produced there and in GDR at Carl Zeiss Jena.
Dreamers like you are big on drama but weak on detail
Posted by: Paul Greenwood
Not at all. We are not talking about business — the whole point of the USSR was to move away from the “business” mentality — and definitely not about exports.
An entirely separate autarkic system had to be created.
If humanity is to survive in the long run, everyone who talks about business must as quickly as possible have their head and body separated from each other and buried in shallow unmarked graves, and everyone who ever talks about “business” again needs to be immediately lined up and shot. There is no viable future that is not based on careful material balancing of physical resources that ensures there is no growth in their use, and in which the ideas of “profit” and “interest” do not become heresies punishable by death. The alternative is extinction for the species and much of life on the planet.
The point is that the USSR refused to pursue the tech that would have allowed independent development along a different trajectory. Computer tech is key indeed, but not so much as a consumer item. And a lot of opportunities were missed.
Disastrous decisions were taken in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
First, not to pursue OGAS, which would have developed an internal Soviet internet before the Western version, and, critically, would have solved the real-time material balance problem (early on central planners had to plan for a few hundred items, but that eventually grew to complexity two orders of magnitude higher, which they couldn’t handle; a problem that was foreseen — there were people there who were not dummies and knew what had to be done — and OGAS would have been the solution). OGAS, in simplest terms, would have been much like what Amazon uses today to manage its logistics, but coming half a century earlier. The problem is that would have taken away the power of the bureaucrats so they blocked it.
Second, the decision was made to not pursue indigenous chip designs but to copy the Western ones. That ensured that they would always be half a decade behind. They were not as far behind initially, especially in theoretical work, and it’s not as if they didn’t have the brains to work on their own tech. Look up the early literature on machine learning, a lot of it is Soviet, and the first examples of what we now call deep learning were also Soviet.
Third, the Sino-Soviet split put them in permanent disadvantage. Circa 1965 it could have been 1.1-1.2 billion Chinese + Soviets + the rest of the communist countries in a single consolidated area of exchange of technology and ideas versus ~800 million in the West. After the Sino-Soviet split, the Eastern bloc was left with less than 400M people, vastly outnumbered by the West, while now having to spend double on the military to guard the eastern borders too.
What happened instead was that in the 1960s resource exports to the West started, which set the process of deep corruption of the system in motion. Why invest in local computer tech if you can just sell oil and buy them ready made?
