Best of Twitter - Week of February 7, 2022 - Russian history supplement
(if you are interested in history)
A thread on the rewriting of history by Stalin and the Communist party in USSR:
The largest and the most popular party in Russia in 1917 wasn't Communists. It was a Socialist Revolutionary Party. They were non-Marxist agrarian socialists who built their agenda around land distribution. Ofc they were the most popular in a country of destitute peasants
Who was *the* head of that committee that overthrew the Provisional Government and led communists to power, you may ask? It was Lazimir. How come you never heard of him? Well, he wasn't a Bolshevik. He wasn't Communist at all
I would even speculate, though I can't prove it, that this Stalinist practice might continue till this very day in modern Russia. Being compromised = committing tons of things that are criminal from the perspective of the dominant narrative = prerequisite to promotion
A thread on how power succession works in practice and on the rapid de-federalization of Russia since 2000:
On the bright side, Yeltsin's family made a right choice. Putin indeed was personally loyal and never betrayed his benefactor. His very first order as an acting president was to guarantee safety of an ex-president and his family and give them very wide material privileges
Immediately upon his succession, Putin starts dismantling entire structure of federalism. He saw autonomous elites and regional agency as a problem and sought unlimited power. In fact, Yeltsin could have exercised huge power, too. He was just more hesitant to use it. Putin wasn't
RUSAL - second largest producer of aluminium in the world is headquartered in Moscow. Its main production is concentrated in Siberia. Siberians who actually work there and have to suffer from pollutions RUSAL production creates get almost nothing. Cuz taxes r paid in Moscow