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rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoIdk, if they join NATO, they wouldn’t have nearly the excuse to retain a large military and have top-down control since they’re largely protected militarily.
Not that large really, it has large budgets, mostly embezzled, but I’m not sure even now one can call Russia more militarized than something like Israel or Turkey or USA. All those conscripts doing their service mostly contribute to numbers and someone’s ego and criminal power (they are usable to suppress riots or do manual labor, if something), not defense. Ukraine, a pretty corrupt country itself, is doing well enough against that military.
Russia’s military is mediocre, and for its size and economic power just miserable. Certainly those in Kremlin wouldn’t even laugh at this, because for their goals and intentions it’s exactly as it should be.
Top-down control is not a matter of excuses, it’s a matter of those having it deciding what matters.
And to be honest, NATO doesn’t seem to be reliable enough in today’s world, alliances and agreements are used as toilet paper every day, sometimes guaranteed or signed by pretty important parties. So nah, it would have plenty of excuses.
I don’t think Russia really knows how to embrace freedom, since they’ve had authoritarianism for pretty much forever, from the Tsars to the USSR to Putin.
That’s not entirely true, Russia between 1905 and 1914 was free enough, and Russia for a couple decades before 1905 was much better in terms of freedom, checks and balances and such, than today’s Russia. The church wasn’t a branch of the ruling group. The courts judged differently and tried to be open and humane. Manual control of everything happening from the center wasn’t a thing. And when that interfered with what the center wanted, the center wouldn’t try to utterly destroy everyone involved. When people read today various politically-loaded texts written by Russian noblemen from late XIX century, they sometimes do the mistake of equating state officials and thieves from that time with state officials and thieves from now. Both are groups of humans, but if a state official from that time did a small fraction of what state officials of today do every day, they’d lose any status. Even in manners it was impolite and undignified for a nobleman to look down at another person, no matter the rank. The opposite, actually, it was polite to look directly in the eyes on the same level.
Obviously these were all real people and power corrupts, but the gap is still too big for any bridges to exist.
This problem is not that old, it’s something from the late 20s. It’s the house that Stalin built.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I don’t think that’s true.
During the nearly 200 years of the Russian Empire, the people were ruled by an emperor with essentially absolute power. This was reduced somewhat with the introduction of the Duma, but Nicholas II still retained absolute power.
Most people couldn’t read, and there was a ton of censorship for those that could. Serfdom wasn’t abolished until the 1860s and most people still largely lived on farms through the end of the 1800s. The abolition of serfdom created a land-owning peasant class (kulaks), and that land was stripped from them by Stalin. So there was a period of 50-60 years where a substantial portion (but still <20%) owned land, and even fewer could read amd write.
In order to actually exercise rights, you need to know what they are and gave the means to communicate outside your local circle.
It’s much older. But things started getting better in the late 1800s and early 1900s until Stalin reversed everything.
Going back to pre-Stalin government (say, Duma under Nicholas II) might actually be worse than the current status quo.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I specifically said between 1905 and 1914, as in between the first revolution and wartime laws. Most of the 200 years Russia was basically a slaver society, but not as different in that from, say, Austria, as stereotypes might suggest.
Less than Soviet censorship. Imperial censorship was reactive, something published could be forbidden after it was published. Soviet censorship was proactive, nothing could be published without being vetted by censors.
A country being mostly agrarian doesn’t by itself say much about freedom.
That’s Stalinist mythology. In fact there was a more US south-like dynamic, with plenty of poor farm workers from liberated serfs and farm owners hiring them, mostly nobility, but also, yes, more well-off farmers.
Land was stripped from everyone having some land. People could be punished for growing something to eat on a small space like suburb lawn in an American movie.
If you mention “kulaks”, then people classified as that in Stalin’s times formed a much bigger proportion of population.
No, you don’t realize the difference. A working absolutism with working democratic mechanisms, even if subordinate to absolutism, is better than a facade for a bunch of thieves Russia has now.
In any case one can’t just go back to it.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Sure. I guess my point is that ending serfdom didn’t seem to change much about where people lived, implying that people likely still did the same things as under the old system.
This article looks at literacy, and it looks like literacy was ~21% in 1897 (<5% before the end of serfdom), and it doubled over the next 20 years. 40% is a huge increase, but still atrociously low. Literacy is pretty important to other freedoms, so if the majority still wasn’t literate at the peak, that doesn’t sound promising when comparing rights to today. Maybe they were on a better trajectory, idk.
I haven’t studied it extensively, so I could be very mistaken, but it seems like a case of rose colored glasses.
I guess I struggle to see pre-socialist Russia as better than modern Russia, unless we’re merely looking at trajectory.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They were. Russia between 1905 and 1914 was developing faster than at any point under Bolsheviks.
Not entirely, one can call NEP sort of a continuation of those few years.
In quality, not in quantity. Most people were illiterate and rural, but those who were literate had better quality of that literacy, so to say. Among those capable of touching power it was more decentralized, however strange that would seem. Quality of those people was better too, it wasn’t an organized mafia group. They had professors in the parliament and they didn’t have thieves there.