x_los | Soon to be a graph. Somehow.

*EDIT* This is pretty much the best thing ever. I mean it. Hamlet with baby seals and emoticons.

There is no reason ever for you to read the below, but I sometimes marvel at the complexity of history. How a seemingly comprehensible period can be so tangled and opaque, how even something you would think could not be subject to personal opinion or ideological concern, the simple, lineal track of what happened when, divorced from such questions of motive, is entirely constructed by interpretation. "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Also, Russia is a fucked up country. Word.

Ostrowski:

Organicist / Comedy, Spring / Conservatism / Synecdochic
Mechanist / Tragedy, Fall / Radical / Metonymic
Contextualist / Satire, Winter / Liberal / Ironic
Formist / Romance, Summer / Anarchism / Metaphoric

Hellie:

KEYWORD: RISE AND CORRUPTION OF BURACRATIC ELITES/ZIGGY STARDUST

Great Russia is a country without suitable natural frontiers and lacking in resources. It needs managed by a competent bureaucratic elite to deal with these issues. From the late sixteenth century to today, there has been extraordinary continuity in the service class. This provides stability but intensifies backwardness. There have been three Service-Class Revolutions. The development of autocratic-bureaucratic government and systems of forced labor are means of mobilizing resources for defense/aggrandizement. A reforming ruler will bust chops and get new, fresh, motivated people into the bureaucratic positions, but over generations this reforming spirit and the will to work of the agents involved will decay into decadence, necessitating a fresh batch of initiative.

Keenan:

KEYWORD: RISK AVERSE

The thin margin of error between survival and mass starvation in Russia led to the formation of tight tribal communities in which members were mutually dependent on each other for survival. The volatility of their position rendered them risk-averse and gave them a low-trust culture. Autocracy arose and persisted because it was the path of least resistance: it had worked well enough to get them by in the past, and would do so in the future. KEENAN FAILS TO ADEQUATELY ACCOUNT FOR CYCLES OF ATTEMPT AT MODERNIZATION.

Pipes:

KEYWORD: ENVIRONMENT

The Russian environment is fundamentally unsuited to farming, and their reliance on farming under adverse conditions is the basic cause of their historical problems. Russia cannot produce a significant surplus, and as Europe’s skill at extracting resources increased, that of Russia lagged further behind. Geopolitical factors necessitate autocracy as the only effective means of governing a fundamentally decentralized people. The state grew with society and then swallowed it, gradually encompassing the free society living outside their personal domains. The police state, which emerged from a need to defend the country against territorial incursion, provided mechanisms of control utilized by the left when it came into power. Again, swallowing effect.

Yanov

KEYWORD: IVANIANA

In the 16th century Muscovoy-based elites were faced with the opportunity to elect re-Europeanization (a la the Kievan Rus) or de-Europeanization. Ivan IV, faced with the option of attacking the Tartars and Turks and thus becoming a de-facto member of the European anti-Turksh coalition or attacking Lavonia and the Baltic and de-facto associating itself with anti-European forces, made the decision to “turn against the Germans” (quoth Ivan). This opened Muscovy up for catastrophic incursion by the Turks. This Oprichnnina of Ivan the Terrible was a political/economic/cultural revolution which imposed the “stereotype of autocracy and an inability to escape from its limits” on Russian minds. It ensured attempts to overtake and pass Europe ended in dependence on Europe—stagnation alternating with feverish modernization.

Poe:

KEYWORD: PRE-MODERN v. MODERN STATES

There is nothing intrinsic to the Russians that makes them demand autocracy. They simply had the misfortune of fusing a pre-modern empire when their dangerous, advancing neighbors were forging more technologically successful, more threatening modern empires. The threat presented to Russia by exterior forces demanded they establish a tight, controlled government that would carry them through to modernism on an alternate path, distinct from the European historical choice. The project of Russia’s alternate approach may be said to have only ended with the fall of communism and, from the perspective of the establishing elites and the perpetuating soviet elites, to have largely accomplished its goals: Russia is a semi-modern state with accompanying bureaucratic institutions and economic infrastructure. It may slowly, organically evolve democratic institutions and a more high-trust culture and democratic tendencies with time and causal proof that such an adaptation is positive.