Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Силиконовый занавес"
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Great interview, Jonathan! I would love it if you could get Mark Galeotti back. Two months later and the military picture looks different. I wonder what Mark thinks. I wonder if he thinks the war situation has changed with the liberation of Ukraine or if it is fundamentally the same.
I feel fortunate to have discovered your channel. There’s lots of experts here that I haven’t come across who I look forward to watching, and a few with whom I am familiar (probably how your channel entered my recommendation feed). For example, Mark is new to me while I’ve already seen a lot of Vlad Vexler and General Hodges.
One area of curiosity is the blending of the Russian government with Russian organized crime. I’ve never made a deep study of this topic, but I’ve somehow managed to form a perception that I want to check. My perception is not so much based on portrayals of the Russian Mafiya in mainstream western popular culture (movies and such), but from the talk of Russian emigres, a few of Bruce Sterling’s short stories in the early 90s, Solzhenitsyn, and living among Armenian emigres in Los Angeles. I’m sure that my understanding is distorted and/or incomplete.
My understanding is roughly this: Elements of the criminal underground were already being absorbed into the CHEKA during Lenin’s time. Criminals were useful as informants and enforcers.
Later, as the political elite began demanding smuggled luxuries (jeans, jazz records, and whatnot), smuggling became important. These activities were overseen by the KGB, resulting in KGB officers becoming crime lords and crime lords becoming KGB over decades.
Quite a lot of this activity occurred on the periphery of the Soviet Union, which brings in the Armenians (and Chechens?).
This was the foundation of the the Kleptocracy and the Oligarchs when the Soviet Union fell.
How far off the mark am I?
Edit: I am just now watching the interview of Dr. Felshtinsky!
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@CollectiveDefence Yes. GOSPLAN was originally (1921) constituted as an advisory board to plan Lenin’s implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) which was more or less a set of liberal market based reforms. As a side note, this was a bone of contention between Trotsky and Stalin, with Trotsky representing more radical views contrary to Leninism. Stalin continued Lenin’s economic policies until 1928, when he broke from Lenin’s NEP and, under GOSPLAN’s interventions, began the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, industry, and the beginning of forced labor as an economic prop. Under Stalin, GOSPLAN created the infamous 5-Year Plan and its quota system.
You might already be aware of the resulting deaths from GOSPLAN’s collectivization efforts, including the notorious Holodomor Ukraine, but not limited to it. You might also be aware of GOSPLAN’s reliance on GULAG to meet the Five Year Plan quotas, a reliance that led to ever greater repressions under Stalin to feed more bodies into the forced labor system. This is my concern about the rumor that GOSPLAN is being reactivated as Russia moves to a “militarized” economy. It goes hand and hand with the formation of a totalitarian society from an authoritarian one.
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Carlson would have been branded as Pat Buchanan, Jr.
Not as a traitor, but as an isolationist reactionary whose ideas were already discredited and were in the process of being further discredited. In those days of the Reagan presidency, the GOP touted itself as the party of ideas, and to a large degree this was true. Buchananites were given a fair hearing and their ideas were found weak.
We must also remember that throughout the 80s, the Soviet Union was in steep decline and suffering from internal struggles. Its Central European colonies were slipping through its fingers. It was disintegrating before our very eyes. We actually sent to its successor state, Russia, hundreds of billions of dollars to keep it and other parts of the former Soviet Union from collapse and descent into anarchy.
So, no. Carlson wouldn’t have been branded as a traitor. He would have been dismissed as irrelevant by the mainstream GOP.
So the real question is what happened to the GOP? And I would suggest that it became a victim of its own success, that the ideas that worked so well for 20 years had run their course and were no longer the best ideas to address the new problems of the 2000s. Conservatism had run out of new ideas. (I’m not saying that the liberals/Democrats offered a much better idea set, but they were perhaps marginally better or at least worth testing.)
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