Newspaper “Signal”, Nov 13, 1917:
Russia is ruled by a lunatic! We demand an investigation into the mental state of the “autocrat” Lenin!
Reps of Army Committee of South-West Front said he’s a madman after a conversation with him. …
Save Russia from him … Or he will doom us!
Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.
Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.
Apart from writing books, reviews, travel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
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I know a popular alternate history scenario among Russian nationalists is 1917 not happening and Russia emerging as a US class superpower by the 1950s.
Is there similar enthusiasm for another alternate history scenario of the USSRs economy being reformed before the rot set in the 1970s?
Though hardly an expert I believe the Khrushchev administration had something major in mind before the Cuban missile crisis torpedoed his political career and permanently shelved these plans.
Wasn’t there some secret medical report that said Kaiser Wilhelm was a madman?
Though in reality I think that normative mental status in political leaders is probably overrated. In the distant future, I have high hopes of a battery of mental tests being used to keep cucks from power.
Putin would almost certainly be classified as an “authoritarian” with severe dark triad traits – I find little use for psychology most of the time despite more than a passing familarity with its tenants. Frankly, basically any masculinity is essentially problematic by modern definitions.
Lenin wanted to devote Russia’s wealth to help working people. That made him a lunatic in the minds of some people, especially the ultra-wealthy. He had to be stopped:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMtLknSFXa8
Russia would never in any case have become a “US class superpower” unless you set the point of divergence hundreds of years earlier.
I don’t think so. Khrushchev’s (very limited, and disastrous) economic reforms were more about spreading patronage around to his people and away from alternative power bases.
However, during the post-Stalin power struggle, Beria had planned a Deng Xiaopeng-esque reform agenda. But he of course lost out to Khrushchev and the Gang of Four. This is the best point of divergence for your scenario.
Another one, albeit pre-WWII, is a continuation of the New Economic Policy.
Yes I don’t agree with this over optimistic alternate history fantasy either but this seems very popular among Russian nationalists.
I do believe however that absent a Russian revolution Russia would today be a fully developed country with a core East Slavic population of around 300 million and therefore a US class superpower today.
If I had to hazard a guess then in a no Russian revolution scenario Russia would become a fully developed country by around the 1980s/1990s (Similar to Spain though Spain had the advantages of access to EU markets and economic assistance from more developed western countries which is balanced by Russia’s natural resources windfall and a top tier smart fraction very comparable to advanced western nations)
Russia is already a “fully developed country”, you dunce.
Though to be honest, it’d be vastly better if Russia wasn’t; “fully developed” basically means you’re on a fast track to civilizational death.
Fully developed means a nominal per capita income of around USD 30,000 , a broad internationally competitive industrial base and exports not overwhelmingly dominated by natural resources(unless per capita availability of natural resources is exceptionally high like in the case of Norway or Australia).
Also not being a fully developed country is not some sort of a virtue you idiot.Civilizational suicide is the result of policies imposed by the ruling class on the country often as a result of pandering to internal parasites.It is not the automatic result of getting rich and powerful relative to the rest of the world.
Every other European country managed to do that without killing 15 million people in a civil war and millions more in repressions and starvations, and the people still lived worse then the people of capitalist France and Germany
Get it through your thick head, they justified their deeds with promises of a utopia and the experiment ended with total failure and a state of almost anarchy within the territory of the former USSR
“B-but they had to catch up”
So did Japan, and they had way less resources at their disposal yet they managed it without adopting such a self destructive system
It`s a streetshitter, what did you even expect.
If Great Russian Galactic Empire was really single handedly overthrown by one lunatic (with few Latvian and Jewish sidekicks), maybe mental health is greatly overrated?
https://images.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/16235646/Unknown-Artist-Speech-by-Lenin-1.jpg
Very few countries are “fully developed” by those standards. No where in Eastern Europe would count and Southern Europe is borderline.
The only developed countries in Europe are Britain and the Germanic countries. Even France hardly counts and gets worse every year, many French have left for better prospects in Britain and likely other Anglo/Germanic countries.
“And then, when there was no way out, they themselves simply played stupid”
If no Russian revolution then a strong chance that at least one successful Communist revolution occurs in the post-WW1 aftermath of either Germany, Italy, UK, France or much later on – less foreign anti-communist intervention in the Spanish Civil War.
In some of those other great European countries you would expect less capacity for a large-scale civil war afterwards.
None of the monarchist countries were begging to take in exile Nicholas II and his family, probably due to expecting some pro-communist backlash
As one of its national projects, Russia is currently aspiring to bring its road network to the level of Malaysia. Putin set that goal himself.
It’s very popular among Russian liberals and libertarians aswell, although they root for Kerensky instead of the Tsar
I sometimes wonder what happens to victims of fetal alcohol syndrome when they are older.Sad.
No it doesn’t, you dunce.
Nauru had more than that for a while.
The Arab Gulf states have lots of GDP but no functioning water or sewage systems. Dubai used to, effectively, shit in bucket until 2013.
You know what places have the best roads?
Nevada and Namibia. Wonder why, must be all the ‘fully development’ pixie dust!
What does the rest of the article say?
The alternative to Lenin wasn’t sanity it was Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Kerensky
Kerensky, insanely kept Russia in WWI, but don’t worry about his welfare he fell on his feet.
He spent the remainder of his life in exile, in Paris and New York City, and worked for the Hoover Institution.
Idiot! I stated per capital income greater than USD 30000 AND a broad diversified internationally competitive industrial base AND exports not dominated by natural resources(Except in cases of countries which are exceptionally resource rich on a per capita basis like Norway and Australia).
What was insane about it, they were on the winning side
Had they done nothing but hold the line on the fronts they would’ve won
‘…Into this world descended an amoral, power-hungry man, cruel and godless, the greatest liar and plebe in the history of the world, having learned from the Europeans to swear by the name of the ‘proletariat’, and how to justify, by his own ends, the most henious ends.’
Ivan Ilyin on Lenin
http://apocalypse.orthodoxy.ru/problems/046.htm
None of that shit has anything to do with being ‘fully developed’. All it means is being more fully integrated into the globalist financial system; which is a detriment to being ‘fully developed’, if anything. (Modern Russia is less ‘fully developed’ than the USSR used to be.)
Oh yeah, there are always special cases and particular provisions whenever the Eternal Anglo is concerned. Top, as they say, kek.
Also, you have to be completely and utterly nuts to believe that Australia is more ‘fully developed’ than Russia.
Yes, I agree. Putin’s got a different mindset.
Some time ago, thinking of Churchill (not that I am a particular fan) hiding in a dark mineshaft in South Africa with rats, I pondered the question of how many of the leaders in the West today could tell a similar story of close-contact with rats, or would tell one, if they could.
Of course, Putin has told his own rat story, and, as a young man, he basically asked for a job at the KGB, which probably could be considered another differentiator, and even though that arch-neocon George HW Bush once worked for the CIA, he came in at the top.
And some say that Putin’s first car was given to him by the Red Army Faction, which has got to be considerably different from the way Bush got his first car.
But didn’t that( improvement in the welfare of the common folks ) have to wait until the end ( begin ing in USA) of WW2?
Sovok babble ignoring his elitist un-democrtatic and anti-Russian snobbery. That photo/video you give is BS for the reasons previously discussed by your truly in forums and articles.
Isn’t it always the case?
Well, I like Putin.
Lenin was trash. A demonic psychopath.
You should go back to having czars, of course, the Bolshejews having killed all the Romanov line including the little children made it harder, but not impossible.
Well, of course Russia / USSR cannot be considered developed, while Australia must be excused. Australia is part of the axis of goodness. In contrast, Putin is a godless Bolshevik.
If you were a paid troll, you have earned your kopeik or reminbi. Luckily, you are just a pure, honest soul. Go watch a Bloomberg ad, to soothe your corn-syrup-fed brain.
And Freud (in conjunction with US diplomat William Bullitt) wrote a biography of Woodrow Wilson claiming that Woody was a lunatic.
Bismarck began Germany’s social safety net in the late 19th century (1880s, I believe), if I recall correctly. That’s over half a century before WWII!
Putin is not at all from some terrible harsh origin. (American presidents, like Bill Clinton,* are from far worse origin.)
Putin’s parents were just average people, apparently very nice parents, and older parents – and he was a single surviving child, so he has obviously a lot of help from them.
Putin was also loved by his teachers at school, as he was a well behaved intelligent, organized child, that completes his homework.
Putin doesn’t match “dark triad” personality in his youth either. People with psychopathy are typically very badly behaved in their youth. While Putin’s worst behaviour – according to his own claim – is that he was a little friends with tough kids in courtyard and sometimes had fights with the “tough kids”, and was confident to defeat bullies.
Rats is because in the post-war people were living in tougher conditions, and his family was in a communal apartment (instead of elite housing, or more modern housing which is created later). This condition with rats in his apartment, will seem surreal for Putin now, because he had a good job by his 30s, and was already living above average then, lived in a nice apartment in Germany.
Then he became wealthy since the early 1990s, – so he has one of the most surreal life stories of his genifeeration, not because he started low (he started just at a normal level), but just because he had achieved such high position by his fourth decade.
–
Actually, Lenin was not alone. All Bolsheviks were lunatics.
See for example Luna-charsky, the ‘Commissar for Education and Enlightenment’ (Narkompros), the father of ‘Soviet education’ and of ‘Proletkult’, aptly described by NY Times in an article of 1919 entitled “Reds Are Ruining Children of Russia” as a “system of calculated moral depravity […] in one of the most diabolical of all measures conceived by the Bolshevik rulers of Russia”, “a deliberate part of the Bolshevist plan to corrupt and deprave the children …and to train them as future propagandists of Lenin’s materialistic and criminal doctrine”.
Stalin was perhaps the only sane man when he drained that swamp and promoted ‘socialist realism’.
Yes; exactly! Incremental reforms in free Western democratic countries seem more attractive than engaging in a revolution to create a brutal totalitarian state. Once you create a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, there’s no guarantee that this dictatorship will actually turn out the way that you want it to–and this could be far worse than it is in a country that remains free and democratic since at least in a free and democratic party one would be able to vote out one’s leaders and replace them with new, hopefully better leaders.
That’s interesting. I guess Freud really did not like breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Source? Russian or English
I’m not sure if Clinton’s story about his abusive stepfather is credible or not. I would say living in a house is much different than walking up many flights of stairs to a communal apartment. Later on, you can see another divergence between him and Putin where he is living better than Putin – elected class president twice, goes to Georgetown, then Oxford, and Yale. You can see, he is already in the globohomo elite track by the early ’70s.
I don’t mean to say that Putin had a rough early life, and certainly not by Russian standards. Just that he did not have the early life of the typical elite.
But I’m not sure how accurate the theory of youth stimuli is. Merkel probably had a pretty weird early life and is likely interchangeable with many others.
Putting those two together, we have: Australia is less developed than the USSR.
This is gold.
I’m beginning to think coward’s under the influence of some rare, poorly understood psychiatric condition which causes sufferers to get off on coming across like complete loons. He pours too much heart and soul into his nutty opinions to be just some run of the mill nitwit.
I wasn’t aware of this, what sounds like the “sane side of Stalin”. Please continue and tell us more…
I am very much against democracy (Führerprinzip is the best form of government), but the tsars were not good for Russia. I am not even just talking about the incompetent Nicholas 2. The tsars were adhering to their ordained by god ideology where the “Russian” empire was a multi ethnic entity, and since one of those groups were the jews it means it was doomed.
Why does Unz allow people like Metallicman and Godfree Roberts to post articles in this site, when we have no idea who these people are, or what qualifications they have, since they post under pseudonyms, does Unz even know who these people are? For all we know these could be just bums posting underneath a bridge somewhere. What do we expect next, articles about the benefits of showering to avoid getting AIDS, how man lived with dinosaurs, and alien abductions? Is Unz planning to deliberately sabotage this site, so he can create a new more mainstream one?
Of course it is.
Even Brazil and South Africa are more developed than Australia.
Or are you the sort of cuckold that thinks “development” is personal comfort and safety?
When we say that Chayden is more developed as a person than Jamal, we don’t mean his bank account balance.
P.S. The mental and spiritual disease that makes and individual unable to imagine anything that doesn’t directly relate to personal comfort and safety is the primary cause of civilization collapse. I already mentioned Gumilyov in the previous thread; too bad he’ll never be translated to English.
Stalin outlawed abortion and killed all the ‘permanent revolution’ jewish fanatics, i.e. the real psycopathic communist believers. He also relaxed the oppression of the church.
Basically he pulled the social fabric of Russia back together.
That said, he was still a Godless communist murderer and it was not until his death that the gulags were emptied and the paranoia relaxed somewhat.
He didn’t need abortions to help him cull the population of “undesirables”. Any idea of how many children died because of his usage of famines to control the populace? How about the effects of his policies in minimizing birthrates? His “relaxation of oppression of the church” was only a wartime response of needing to rally the troops in a patriotic manner (apparently communist ideology wasn’t enough). The church was infested with all sorts of KGB operatives and spies, sound familiar?
It’s not Turkey’s job to protect “the West” from reaping what it has sown.
OT
If this source is true then it seems like Putler didn’t cuck out
https://www.bfm.ru/news/437956
Based.
No venue is perfect. You’re right on the general point of some sub par pieces appearing here, in place of better commentary – something evident elsewhere. Likewise with some (stress some) of the star designated commenters.
Some might recall one glaring example (at least for me) of a person of an apparent (based on her name) Turkic Russian based background who took the anti-Russian side on some matters in an Unz posted article.
AC is well known for being very consistently wrong.
Not really, you’re just rustled that your preconceptions are being destroyed. It’s not like you have any real arguments to counter me. (Sticking fingers in your ears and calling names isn’t an argument, though it certainly makes you feel better.)
The best point of divergence is the assassination of Stolypin. His reforms were working. If he had stayed in the picture, Russia would have had its own Bismark.