Two recent videos from #Russia — first one, people in Belgorod queueing at freezing dawn to buy eggs, whose prices have recently skyrocketed due to inflation and other factors. The first impression I have on watching this: you wanted to return to #USSR, your dream has come true. This looks very much like the Soviet food queues I remember from 1980's.
The second video is the essence of today's Russia: residents of one district of Krasnodar, a town in the south of Russia, appeal to Putin to fix central heating, which has been failing for the last three years and local authorities notoriously ignore and dismiss all complaints. Residents say temperature in their apartments doesn't exceed 15°C since the start of heating season. Such "appeals to Putin" are a very popular and probably the only socially acceptable form of public protest in Russia.
To appreciate the fascinating absurdity of the situation, just imagine yourself, wherever you live, appealing to the president of your country to fix your house's heating system.
Of course, this situation is much more complex from sociological point of view. If we strip it from all the tragicomedy and ritual, the root cause of their problems is that these pension-age citizens of Russia are stripped of any subjectivity, and they know about it. They're treated as powerless serfs at any decisive layer of their country, starting from the local council who is likely responsible for the heating systems. But this serfdom was well earned by their persistent passivity and compliance with the rules of the system when it was only being built. The system has tested them many times during the last decades, checking how far it can go, but their response was always "we love Putin regardless of what he does to us".
Polish writer Stefan Kisielewski wrote in 1980's, from the very depth of Soviet economic depression, a very wise phrase: a government with ambitions to control everything in the country will be inevitably blamed for failures of everything.
That's kind of the model of governance Putin has recreated...
#Russia channel coordinating the work of trolls called “Digital Army of Russia” has posted a task: on Victory Day, remind the people of Eastern Europe what nightmares the German “Plan Ost” was preparing for them, from which the #USSR saved them: physical extermination, genocide by means of artificially induced famine, deportation of masses of people to Siberia, the Caucasus, etc., extermination of educated elites.
That certainly sounds terrible, but there is only one minor problem: most of these genocidal policies were carried out by the USSR itself. Mass executions (Katyn, liquidation of NKVD prisons, the Great Purge), the Ukrainian Holodomor, the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people to the same Siberia (including, for example, the ‘Polish NKVD operation’), mass murder of the intellectual elites of Poland, Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia itself. There’s simply no crime against humanity that the Soviets wouldn’t commit in Eastern Europe during the 70 years of their ruling.
Russian trolls shot themselves in the foot simply because they are unaware of all these colonial and genocidal policies of the USSR - this knowledge appeared in Russian education system briefly during 1990-2000’s but then was gradually reverted and NGOs documenting the historic repressions (e.g. “Memorial”) outlawed.
Bien rentrée au bercail après une journée à #Amiens.
En ces #JEP2023, c'est @alter_unicorn qui m'a fait l'honneur d'une petite balade commentée de la ville à vélo (et de ses infrastructures plus ou moins cyclables 😂), la même que @Flobzh, on verra si tu reconnaîtras 😉
J'ai vu le point de départ des #USSR et #USWR (cc @UnicornChainGang) et j'ai déjeuné le long du chemin de halage.
La fatigue se faisant sentir, c'était le signal qu'il était temps de prendre le train du retour 😴
Bonne soirée 🌙
Today #Russia and #China play best friends forever and #USSR had been traditionally placed in the same “communist” basked as China. Some fun facts that especially tankies are getting completely wrong today.^1
Since 1950’s China and USSR were actually conflicted over each other’s interpretations of #Marxism and in 1960’s the conflict nearly escalated into a full-scale nuclear war between the two countries.
China criticised CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) over Soviet invasion of #Czechoslovakia (1968)^2 and “Brezhnev Doctrine” which denounced any Marxism version outside of the Soviet one as “reactionary” (Marxist newspeak for “heresy”). This included both Czechoslovak reforms and Mao’s Cultural Revolution in equal manner. At that time China actually developed complex relations with Eastern Bloc countries such as Romania and Czechoslovakia behind Kremlin’s back.
Essentially, everyone called each other “reactionary” and claimed their Marxism is the correct one. Any resemblance to past religious wars is entirely incidental. 😉 In 1968 Chinese diplomat Zhou Enlai speaking in Romanian embassy in Beijing called Soviets for “fascist politics, great power chauvinism, national egoism and social imperialism”.^3
Does that ring any bells? 😉
Soviets and China had a number of unresolved border issues in Manchuria. In 1968 China started escalating these, actually killing Soviet border guards. Moscow, knowing of China’s nuclear weapons and Mao’s confrontative attitude preferred to deescalate… which only encouraged Chinese.
Does that remind anything from contemporary history? 😉
At the peak of the conflict in 1969 USSR found itself in the position of a country with high-tech army challenged by a low-tech army which relied on millions of conscripts and human wave tactics.
Does this ring any bells? 😉
In 1969 Soviet army managed to push back overwhelming several Chinese offensives near the island of Zhenbao in spite of their overwhelming numbers with ratios up to 1:10 Soviet to Chinese. That was possible primarily due to the technical advantage, such as then-advanced T-62 tanks.
A ceasefire was signed in 1969 - on Chinese side by the very same Zhou Enlai who called Soviets “fascists” only a year before, but the actual peace agreement was only signed in 1991. The conflict was only completely resolved in 2008 (!) when Russia ceded 340 km² of the disputed lands to China.
As you can see, contrary to the mythology carefully constructed by modern “geopolitical realists”, there’s nothing constant in Russian or Soviet policies. Russia can not always win armed conflicts, it can cede territories and in general conflicts can be won in spite of imbalance of power. Oh, and calling others “fascists” was used by everyone and Russia was both an user and a recipient of this nomination.
#Russia has declared an intention to unilaterally extend its territorial waters on #Baltic sea in a way that collides with territorial waters of #Finland and #Lithuania. Russian Ministry of Defense (!) proposed to cancel the 1985 #USSR decision of demarcation of the sea borders and redraw them according to “new geographical references”, and then declare them “internal waters”.
Obviously, this looks very much like a poorly disguised attempt to create an strategic dilemma for #NATO by unilaterally opening a territorial dispute with two NATO members without really invading anyone yet. In case of NATO inaction the next step will be Russian actually enforcing their “new territorial waters” by threatening or sinking ships sailing to Finland and Lithuania. And if the inaction continues, the next step will be likely establishing “new geographical references” on one of the land borders of NATO countries.
#Poland banned inbound traffic of vehicles with #Russia registration plates, symbolically on 17 September, anniversary of #USSR invasion on Poland in 1939
A little known event from #USSR that happened 91 years ago, in May 1933. It’s hard to imagine any country could do it, but Soviets did - they dumped 6700 people on an uninhabited island on a river in Siberia… and left them there for 13 weeks with no food, tools or even clothes. 4000 people died, with the survivors resorting to widespread violence and cannibalism.
Today in Labor History September 4, 1949: The Peekskill riots at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York. A mob of locals attacked concert-goers with baseball bats and rocks. Police arrived hours later and did little to intervene. Thirteen people were seriously injured, Robeson was lynched in effigy and a cross was burned on the hillside. Robeson was well known for his strong pro-trade union stance, civil rights activism, communist affiliations and anti-colonialism. He also had been increasingly vocal against the Ku Klux Klan and other forces of white supremacy. The concert was a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress. Just prior to the riots, Robeson had spoken at Soviet-sponsored World Peace Conference in Paris, where he said the following:
“We in America do not forget that it was on the backs of white workers from Europe and on the backs of millions of blacks that the wealth of America was built. And we are resolved to share it equally. We reject any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong.... We shall support peace and friendship among all nations, with Soviet Russia and the People's Republics.”
Today in Labor History October 22, 1956: Hungarian workers refused to obey their managers, calling instead for workers' self-management. The next day, the Hungarian Revolution began against the authoritarian government and subservience to the Soviet Union. The uprising last 12 days, before being crushed by Soviet Tanks. Up to 3,000 workers and revolutionaries were killed. 13,000 were wounded. 200,000 were exiled. Hundreds of Hungarian and Soviet troops also died putting down the uprising.
The State Inspection of Architecture and Urban Planning announced on July 13 that it issued a permit to replace the Soviet emblem on the Motherland Monument, one of Kyiv's most significant landmarks, with the Ukrainian trident.
On 29 July 1936, on Stalin's initiative, a secret instruction was adopted on the admissibility of any investigative methods against "spies, counter-revolutionaries, White Guards, Trotskyists and Zinovievists".
Today in Labor History August 15, 1918: The American 27th Infantry landed in Vladivostok to join a Japanese-initiated attack against Bolshevist forces. The soldiers suffered from problems with fuel, ammunition, supplies, and food. Their horses, used to temperate climates, couldn’t function in sub-zero Russia. And their water-cooled machine guns froze and became useless. During their 19 months in Siberia, 189 U.S. soldiers died.
Upton Sinclair referenced the Siberian expedition in his novel “Oil!” and blamed capitalist motives for the intervention.
Today in Labor History January 16, 1969: Jan Palach committed suicide by self-immolation in Prague, Czechoslovakia to protest the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring. Prior to his political suicide, he sent a letter to several public figures demanding an end to censorship and an end to the Soviet propaganda paper, as well as a call for a General Strike to meet these demands. His funeral turned into a major protest against the occupation. Several others also committed self-immolation in the coming months.
"On 13 January 1953, the #USSR-based newspapers Pravda and Izvestiya reported that #Soviet Union Premier Joseph #Stalin had arrested nine #doctors, six of whom were #Jewish, for conspiring to assassinate the country’s political leadership. The “killer doctors,” as they were referred to, were accused of being members of the U.S. and British intelligence services and of serving the interests of international #Jewry."
Dolores is an utterly charming and beautiful soul and I feel very lucky that I got to spend so much time in her company for this article – the first ever about her in the English language, I believe!
Today in Labor History March 23, 1918: 101 IWW members went on trial in Chicago for opposing World War I and for violating the Espionage Act. In September, 1917, 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiring to subvert the draft and encourage desertion. Their trial lasted five months, the longest criminal trial in American history up to that time. The jury found them all guilty. The judge sentenced Big Bill Haywood and 14 others to 20 years in prison. 33 others were given 10 years each. They were also fined a total of $2,500,000. The trial virtually destroyed the IWW. Haywood jumped bail and fled to the USSR, where he remained until his death 10 years later.
'Weddings', by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Those weddings in wartime! The deceiving comfort!...
State approves plans to replace Soviet emblem on Motherland Monument with Ukrainian trident (kyivindependent.com)
The State Inspection of Architecture and Urban Planning announced on July 13 that it issued a permit to replace the Soviet emblem on the Motherland Monument, one of Kyiv's most significant landmarks, with the Ukrainian trident.