After 75 years of failure, one would imagine that a people would learn what works and what doesn’t, both from their own experience, as well as the experience of others.
Much of the analysis of the reshuffle in the Russian government seems to be missing how much it is about coup-proofing Putin's regime rather than making smart decisions for Russia.
#Khrushchev once said that one of his greatest accomplishments as leader of the #SovietUnion was when he promoted #Malenkov to director of a hydroelectric power plant in Kazakhstan and #Kaganovich to director of a potash works in the Urals: he didn't kill them, as #Stalin would have done in his place.
Aleksey Batalov (20 November 1928 – 15 June 2017) was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor, film director, screenwriter, and pedagogue acclaimed for his portrayal of noble and positive characters.
But Johnny was reminded of his father’s words when his professor at his university in Kyiv started reminiscing about life in the #SovietUnion : “They did well. Everyone had a job. They made the society more stable. It was better than #Capitalism,” he recalls the professor saying. “Those words are the same as my father has always said about #china Johnny told the #TheCounteroffensive — while wearing a necklace representing Ukraine wrapped with blue and yellow cotton rope.
German mathematician Emmy Noether was born #OTD in 1882.
One of her most significant contributions is Noether's Theorem, which establishes a fundamental connection between symmetries & conservation laws in physics. This theorem has had profound implications in fields such as quantum mechanics, particle physics & field theory. Despite facing discrimination as a woman in academia during her time, Noether persevered & made enduring contributions to mathematics and physics.
After the Nazis took power she tried to go back to the #SovietUnion but she failed.
On the other hand, her brother Fritz was able to move to the Soviet Union, but then he was arrested during #Stalin's Great Purge and subsequently he was killed in a mass execution ordered by the #Soviet regime.
[The Guardian]: The Long Hangover by Shaun Walker – book review This account of how Putin’s new Russia rose from the ruins of the Soviet Union is judicious, humane and highly entertaining. February 15, 2018
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New Russian high school textbooks – introduced in August 2023 on the instruction of President Vladimir Putin – attempt to whitewash Stalinist crimes and rehabilitate the Soviet Union’s legacy.
(...)
Putin’s efforts to redeem the Soviet past may help explain why Stalin is up in the polls, with 63% of Russians asked in June 2023 expressing a positive attitude toward the Soviet dictator.
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The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction by Alan Barenberg
A vast system of prisons, camps, and exile settlements, the Gulag was one of the defining attributes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and one of the most heinous examples of mass incarceration in the twentieth century, combining the functions of a standard prison system with the goal of isolating and punishing alleged enemies of the Soviet regime.
Today, we had a largish raid group of 11+ to take on an #OriginFormePalkia in - it turned out to be a good raid.
Just for fun, my strongest ditto was backing up my mega salamence who was in #1 position. Turns out that the ditto's shapeshift did not cancel out my salamance's mega form which was a happy surprise 😁
For both #Finland and #Sweden, membership is the end of a long 30-year process of what Dalsjo called "our long goodbye to #neutrality.” First came the collapse of the #SovietUnion and the decision to join the #EuropeanUnion, which meant dropping neutrality for what both countries called "military nonalignment.” #Russia#Ukraine
The political distance that the world has traveled over the last 40 years cannot appear much larger than in the Baltic states. In 1984, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had spent decades locked inside the Soviet Union, but today they exist independently as capitalist democracies–and, as members of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, economic partners and military allies of the United States.
In fewer words, just about everything that the old men leading the USSR wanted to suppress has happened in these three countries. Knowing this has made walking around here this week a little more enjoyable, as it did in visits to Tallinn in 2021 and Riga in 2022.
Friday morning, I took in an additional reminder of why 2024 is not like 1984: a visit to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. The name refers to invasions by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but this exhibit space in a 19th-century government office building–which until 2018 went as the Museum of Genocide Victims despite devoting little of its space to the Holocaust–mainly serves as an indictment of Stalin and his successors.
Room and after room recounts how the Communist regime rounded up Lithuanians for alleged crimes against the state and the party and exiled them to prisons and camps as far away as Siberia. Some of the most affecting exhibits showcase what these internal exiles did to retain a tiny bit of their former lives, such as assembling rosaries from bits of stale bread and sending letters back home that first received strikes through sentences from a censor’s pen and then had to be mailed without envelopes.
The museum also notes the partisan warfare Lithuanians staged in forests for years after World War II, a doomed effort that the country later pointed to as proof that it had never consented to its incorporation into the USSR as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.
A sequence of exhibits upstairs details how Soviet repression grew more organized and bureaucratic under Khrushchev and Brezhnev–one room holds a set of shelves of KGB rubber stamps, while another features cheery cards, posters and booklets celebrating the KGB’s 50th birthday.
They also unpack how advances in technology allowed increasingly intrusive monitoring of Soviet subjects, which reminded me of the exhibits at the Stasi Museum in Berlin, and of foreign visitors, which made me wonder what records linger of me from my 1989 post-high-shool trip to the Soviet Union.
The lowest levels of the museum reveal the grimmest evidence: rows of prison cells (one made over into a documentation of the local chapter of the Holocaust that saw Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators murder proportionally more Jews than anywhere else in Europe), some set up for solitary confinement and various forms of torture, as well as a chilling basement room in which Soviet functionaries shot prisoners.
I exited feeling a profound gratitude at living in a democracy with guarantees of human rights in its constitution. And at the fact that generations have grown up only reading past-tense accounts of the Soviet Union.
This victory over what President Reagan called an “Evil Empire” remains incomplete. The other countries that escaped Moscow’s rule are far less free–especially Belarus, barely 20 miles to the east. And under Putin’s dictatorship, Russia itself now seems to aspire to be an evil empire modernized with crony capitalism and, as highlighted by all the Ukrainian flags flying in Vilnius, the pointless sacrifice of tens of thousands of its own men in the invasion of Ukraine.
But when so much of the news today can inspire doomism, it is worth taking a minute to reflect that the awful Soviet regime that once seemed an immovable object is gone, swept into the dustbin of history.
(Disclosure: All three trips to the Baltics involved travel comped by hosts, in 2021 as part of a press trip, in 2022 because I spoke at the TechChill conference in Riga and in 2024 because my visit involved both my speaking at the Fintech Day conference and arranged visits to a variety of local startups.)
NEW EPISODE Twilight of the #SovietUnion – Memoirs of a British #Journalist in #Moscow
Listen here ⬇️⬇️
coldwarconversations.com/episode325/ @histodons
#CAIRO — After a long journey from #Gaza, more than 100 American citizens and their families have entered #Egypt through the #RafahCrossing. Jonathan Webster, the #USEmbassy in Cairo's consul general, said some of those families are telling him they ran out of food and water during their journeys. #Israel
“#Russia now has an interest in prolonging this conflict in the #MiddleEast,” said a senior European diplomat in #Moscow, speaking on conditions of anonymity. He said he feared an all-out #Israel-#Hezbollah war would further derail any help for #Ukraine.