politics

Vladimir Putin happened to turn 71 last October 7, the day Hamas assaulted Israel. The Russian president took the rampage as a birthday present

This is the first sentence. So deeply unserious i don't even wat to read the rest.

And yet, amid the breakdown that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union but lasted well beyond 1991, Putin consolidated a new autocracy. This fusion of fragility and path dependence derives from many factors that are not easily rewired: geography, a national-imperial identity, an ingrained strategic culture.

"Caused by many, many factors, but NOT Yeltsin's coup and the Neoliberal ravaging of the country that followed. Definitely not!"

Kotkin is one of the very few liberal historians who doesn't completely regurgitate batshit insane takes about the Soviet Union from the Cold War era (For instance he acknowledges that Lenin's testament was a hoax).

However, his takes on politics are so utterly naïve that one might think he's some kind of Harvard MBA failson rather than an actual historian. I remember during a conversation a couple of years ago where he basically states that America will win the new Cold War because they have the capability of "self correction" that China does not. Because choosing between two demented racists in an election is apparently "self correction". This article is more of the same. The Russia-Chinese vassal theory is literally believed by no one and is ludicrous when you consider that America literally controls Europe's foreign policy. Everything else sounds like it came from redditors in early 2022.

I get what he's trying to do, but "Russia as North Korea" is so deeply stupid.

North Korea is the way that it is, due to it being a nation forcibly chopped in half, at constant risk of invasion, and lacks access to important natural resources that only exist in the South. Russia doesn't have those problems, being the largest country by land mass

The way every sentence drips in salt 🤤 it's like a salt lick of bad takes.

Edit: probably my fav:

"On February 16, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service announced the sudden death of the opposition activist Alexei Navalny, aged 47, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle, from which he had continued to reach his millions of followers with instructions on how to protest Putin’s plebiscite."