We've been through this before in this thread, but it's seem we've reached 'that time' again...
I think this kind of thinking is unproductive, deterministic, a 'rather bad recipe' for setting up continued Dystopian self-fulfilling prophecies and also basically just pseudoscientific. So in short a kind of 'thought trap'.
And how do you explain that
the actual Mongols in Mongolia currently live in a society that gets 84/100 from Freedom House(!)... That is one better than what the US currently gets...
See the Freedom in the World 2024 score and learn about democracy and freedom in Mongolia.
freedomhouse.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The difference between modern Mongolia and Russia is Mongolia isn't currently trying to hold together a multi-ethnic empire as their ancestors did. There is no need for the tactics employed by their ancestors because Mongolia is almost all Mongolians.
Russia conquered all of northern Asia at sword/gun point. Most of the population of Russia today is made up of people who are not ethnically Russian.
Russia is also blended with European ideas too. The culture is a hybrid of Europe and central Asian culture. During the era of the Czars the upper classes cultivated European art, often with artists imported from Europe.
The Russians have also seen themselves as the inheritors of the Roman Empire.
Moscow, third Rome - Wikipedia
The attitudes of Moscow are Roman in origin, but the way they fight is ancient Mongolian. Not modern Mongolian which is a very post-empire culture.
And last time around I think I also brought up Germany for a comparison. For about half a year around 1870 they 'were at it' with the Frenchies in the Franco-Prussian war some 10 years after the American Civil War – so the same industrial like kind of slaughter, but on 'our' side of the pond. The Germans lost about 300K soldiers and civilians...
en.wikipedia.org
And we all know what kind of slaughter WW1 was. Between ~2,2-2.8 MILLION Germans died(!)...
en.wikipedia.org
And then it was time for Hitler. Considering what Germany as an entity did leading up to and during WW2 – how do you explain what Germany was just some 30 years after 1945?....
That can all be explained by the post-WW2 world and its necessities. There was a huge push from the Americans, British, and French to turn the rest of the Europe and Japan (in the American's case) into flourishing liberal democracies that would resist communism. They succeeded extremely well in Germany and Japan.
When the EU was established, the entry requirements included liberal democracy norms that a country had to adhere to before they could get into the union. Because of the economic advantages, liberal democracies spread across Europe.
After the experience of WW2, the Europeans wanted to ensure that war didn't happen again in Europe. Two healthy democracies have never had a shooting war with one another. Encouraging healthy democracy across Europe has helped keep the continent fairly safe from war since 1945. The only two instances are the war in the Balkans after the fall of Yugoslavia that NATO went in and shut down. And the current war in Ukraine.
Again Germany is a post-empire culture. They have no current territorial ambitions and have chosen to exert their dominance economically rather than militarily.
Russia today is not a post-empire culture. I'm not sure what you could call the US. It is not trying to expand its territory any, but it has other hallmarks of an empire culture. One of my big concerns if democracy falls apart in the US.
They didn't just "have" something. Again: That was the result of Neo-liberal Economic Shock Doctrine 'deployed' on a previously Communist/Socialist country. Things could have been
a lot different had they instead modeled their economy on the Nordic countries instead of some Neo-liberal Fantasy.
en.wikipedia.org
A lot of assumptions here. My bet is the 'Stalin'-nostalgia was by design curtesy of the FSB and other similar entities. What are you basing "The people wanted a strong, central leader"-part on?
I've seen this Stalin nostalgia among Russian ex-pats living in the US. Many hold Boris Yeltsin in disdain as a weak leader. They also think the American system is weak and like tin pot strong men like Donald Trump. It's the culture they know.
Because of the Neo-liberal economic reasons outlined above.
I also wonder what Russians think of living in a Military Dictatorship – assuming that we could somehow magically remove the current Russian Military Dictatorship and ordinary Russians were actually really free to tell us what they really think.
One of the things that state media has been doing for years is telling the public that things may be bad in Russia, but they are much worse in democracies.
The oldest Russians grew up with the deprivations of the communist system, then lived through a short span of chaos in the 1990s when Russia tried democracy, then have lived the last 25 years in a more stable Russia under Putin. This reinforces the narratives fed to them by state media that democracies are hell holes and even if things are bad in Russia, they are left thinking things are better than in the western democracies.
The only ones who know differently are those who make enough money off the Russian system to get out. And they aren't talking to the working class Russians about how good things are in the west. They send their kids to western schools and their families live in the west while many of them work as managers over the working class Russians to produce the wealth that they enjoy. The narratives that things are terrible in the west are good for their bottom line.
Russian ex-pats also tend to clump among their own and don't mix with other cultures all that much. Russians moving to Bali have caused a lot of tension with Indonesian authorities
https://www.news.com.au/travel/trav...i/news-story/8dcd594d8706af0a98f8f72a616acda7
I know as much as I do about the local Russian population because the wife of my partner's law partner is a Russian immigrant (her family moved her for medical treatment for her when she was a teenager and they stayed) had broken with the family and married a native born American who is not of Russian descent and has partially rejected the expat Russian culture here. She still attends a Russian church and her family are all much more connected to the Russian community than she is.
So in other words: Because of not living in a functioning Democracy.
Hungary is the only country that has backslid. Every other Country gets about the same score as the US or better from Freedom House. My guess is that Neo-liberal economic polices can be found to be a rather large part of 'the puzzle' in Hungary as well.
Orban was able to change the Hungarian constitution when his party got enough people in parliament. They changed it in such a way that it was much more difficult to get them out of power now. Hungary is an example of why you don't want a constitution that is too easy to change. On the other end of the spectrum the US constitution is too difficult to change.
I disagree for the reasons outlined above.
What could have been if Russia had instead chosen a more Nordic Model kind of economic approach we will never know. And there were of course 'quite a lot' of additional factors at play here. The major one of those of course being that the old KGB were allowed to continue operating as if nothing had happened. And in the end they/Putin were successful in turning Russia into a Military Dictatorship once again.
I don't think that Russia would have ever adopted a Nordic Model. The old Soviet system was riddled with corruption. They just transferred that over to the new system and kept going. They also needed to hold together what was left of their empire. They fought a couple of wars with Chechnya about whether peoples of the Russia who were part of the Russian Republic during the USSR days could break away.
The parts of the Soviet empire that were separate countries such as the Eastern European countries had something they could build a new system on. The former Soviet republics that broke away started with some form of governmental body as a nucleus. The Baltic Republics had memories of being free countries in living memory as well as historical cultural ties with Scandinavia. The Baltic countries were among the most successful in breaking away from Moscow because of a relative handful of people determined to westernize the countries as well as a foundation to build on.
The other Soviet republics have had varying degrees of success in separating themselves from Moscow. Belarus has been a vassal state since independence and the plans Moscow has for reabsorbing them into the Russian empire were leaked a couple of years ago. Ukraine was also a vassal state but they kicked out their Russian puppet and Moscow has tried to punish them for it. Georgia has also tried to break free, but Moscow has kept them under their thumb.
The central Asian countries mostly bend the knee to Moscow, but Moscow interferes with them less.
The Russian leadership are always concerned about invasion routes and there are few through central Asia. As long as their buffer states are relatively friendly Moscow leaves them alone. There are no natural barriers for an invasion from Europe so Russian leadership is very paranoid about that. A too western Ukraine is seen as a major threat to the invasion routes.
I know we've been around this before and the notion that the west would invade Russia is ludicrous from a western perspective. But it's front of mind among Russian leadership. It's an area where there is a big disconnect between western and Russian thought.
Trying to convince Russia that the US has no territorial ambitions on Russia when the US has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 20 years and NATO has expanded eastward throughout the last 30 years (at the demand of the eastern European countries), is pretty much impossible. They see the US and its allies as aggressive and doing things like invading Ukraine is their way of blunting the Americanization of their borders.
We know the west has zero interest in invading Russia, but convincing Russia of that is impossible.
Russian intelligence is good at planting fake stories in their own media as well as the west. They also gin up fake movements to push forward their own agenda. They had a fake Russian gun rights group that was used to co-opt American guns rights groups in the US. The woman who was heading up the effort was arrested for espionage and eventually deported back to Russia. That's just one of the astroturf organizations Russia has created in the west.
To an authoritarian like Putin, there are two types of people in the world, people running cons, or suckers falling for them. There is no such thing as an organic grass roots protest. All protests are caused by some state actor running a con. He thinks that players like the US are just better than the Russians at running these cons because the Russians can't find the US fingerprints on some of the protests like the Maidan Revolution. He's sure it's there, he just can't find the proof. The concept that "suckers" would rise up on their own is incomprehensible.
That thinking is not just limited to Putin. I have seen the same assumptions among American authoritarian wannabes. I haven't looked into modern authoritarian movements in Europe, but I would be the same thinking is there with them too.
There is the saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Authoritarianism is a mindset and it blinds them to other approaches to governing. To them other forms of governing are just authoritarians who are better at the smoke and mirrors then they are.
"flourished and prospered"...
Seems incredibly simplified. And IMO highly debatable...
"...] Since the break up of the
Soviet Union,
thousands of eastern European women end up as prostitutes in China, Western Europe, Israel, and Turkey every year. Some enter the profession willingly [Bullcr@p in my opinion. (My edit.)];
many are tricked, coerced, or kidnapped, and often experience captivity and violence.
[78] There are tens of thousands of women from eastern Europe and Asia working as prostitutes in Dubai. [...]
[79] [..."
en.wikipedia.org
"flourished and prospered"...
Not the words that I would use.
EDIT: Forgot to link to the Wiki-article I quoted, but it's been added now.
A significant number of Russian and Ukrainian women have ended up in this trade too. It's difficult to get solid numbers because it's a black market, but mail order brides, which is a more legal thing and has statistics show that most of the white mail order brides going to western countries originated in Ukraine or Russia. The Philippines leads the word in mail order brides (export) and according to Wikipedia's numbers 76% of all mail order brides come from Asia.
Mail-order bride - Wikipedia
I worked with someone years ago who I considered kind of a sleazebag. He was a white American, but lived most of the time in the Philippines where he said he had two wives. He admitted that by American standards he was a troglodyte, but by Filipino standards he was an enlightened male. He was in the US trying to get an invention he made into production and I was working on the technical side. He disappeared and most people assumed he went back to the Philippines, but he had been trying to get funding from a quasi gangster who was a friend of a friend (I never met the guy) and he had admitted to the gangster type he didn't have rights to the invention or something. The friend thought this guy might be buried on the semi-gangster's back 40 somewhere.
The whole situation was weird and I was never very deeply involved.
I do know some people in the local Russian ex-pat community. Of course immigration has pretty much stopped since the war started, but while I don't know any Russian mail order brides personally, that is the way some of the Russian women got into the US. American men are considered much more enlightened than Russian men.
Eastern Europe is poorer than western Europe. One of the things that fueled Brexit in the UK was eastern European EU workers moving to the UK for better opportunities. I read many years ago about crop workers in Germany. Most of them are from eastern Europe because native Germans won't do the work.
The US has the same phenomenon with immigrants from Latin America. The vast majority of American farm workers doing the grunt work (picking crops, doing any non-mechanical work) are from Central America. For a long time most were from Mexico, but with Mexico's improving economy, it's now more often people from other poorer Latin American countries.
Most developed countries have migrants from poorer countries doing the work the native population won't do. And that also includes sex work, especially the lower end work. Due to racist attitudes, white sex workers are in demand and women from more affluent countries are a lot less likely to end up in that world than white women from poorer countries.
