A great response! I have the impression we need more posting about the internal politics of Russia because too many people have a very superficial and even incorrect understanding of them. I get why we don’t generally do this a lot (in addition to the language barrier, but i hope that nowadays everyone knows how to run a text through a simple translator), as Russian politics is either very boring or depressingly full of culturally reactionary rhetoric and it’s quite disturbing for a leftist to have to read that type of crap, but i think we can’t afford to be thin skinned if we want to really develop our understanding.
We need to understand not just our unambiguous allies but also our enemies, as well as those who we critically support for strategic reasons, even if that sometimes means having to be confronted with some fairly unpleasant realities stemming from unresolved contradictions in a society.
Absolutely, it’s essential to understand how the system in Russia works in order to reason about it. Otherwise, it’s very easy to come to nonsensical conclusions. It’s kind of the same mistake liberals make with China where they just treat as a mirror of the west, and then they’re constantly surprised that things in China aren’t developing the way they expected them to based on how things work here.
A great response! I have the impression we need more posting about the internal politics of Russia because too many people have a very superficial and even incorrect understanding of them. I get why we don’t generally do this a lot (in addition to the language barrier, but i hope that nowadays everyone knows how to run a text through a simple translator), as Russian politics is either very boring or depressingly full of culturally reactionary rhetoric and it’s quite disturbing for a leftist to have to read that type of crap, but i think we can’t afford to be thin skinned if we want to really develop our understanding.
We need to understand not just our unambiguous allies but also our enemies, as well as those who we critically support for strategic reasons, even if that sometimes means having to be confronted with some fairly unpleasant realities stemming from unresolved contradictions in a society.
Absolutely, it’s essential to understand how the system in Russia works in order to reason about it. Otherwise, it’s very easy to come to nonsensical conclusions. It’s kind of the same mistake liberals make with China where they just treat as a mirror of the west, and then they’re constantly surprised that things in China aren’t developing the way they expected them to based on how things work here.