06-02-2019, 01:16 PM
(06-01-2019, 08:26 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: I see almost the entire history of Russia between 1905 as, on the whole, cataclysm between the Russo-Japanese War and some horrible pogroms to the extreme carnage of the Nazi-Soviet Front up to the fall of Berlin. There were efforts to get Russia and the Soviet Union on the right track (establishment of a Duma in 1906, NEP in the mid-1920s, and the inevitable abatement of the Great Purge) with some political catastrophes. Tsar Nicholas II might have been wiser to let the inchoate democracy forming after 1906 to take its course, but somehow he chose to turn the Duma into a debating club for his political flunkies. The pogroms against the Jews created an internal enemy hostile to everything conservative and Russian -- the "Jewish bolshevik" who would do the worst when the opportunity arose. World War I showed the unreadiness of Russia for modern warfare and the fragility of its economic and political order -- no redundancy and no competence -- and what might have been deliverance from the breakdown of civil order, the February Revolution toppling the Tsar and establishing a flimsy republic, failed because a wartime enemy was more intent on turning most of the western part of what had been the Russian Empire into colonies of the German Empire. Lenin would do what William II wanted.
Lenin's Bolshevik regime took over in a coup in November 1917 and split Russia into two hostile and exclusive camps, similarly destructive and intolerant, set on annihilating each other. The Reds won, but it is not certain that the Whites would have been any better. Lenin imposed some revolutionary experiments upon the Russian economy and found that they did not work, so he made some compromises with capitalism that might have worked had they gotten the chance -- only for Stalin to seize power by squeezing out rivals and then impose a collectivism of Soviet agriculture that turned peasants into serfs if they did not starve to death. Stalin killed off real and imagined rivals until he surrounded himself with yes-men. He thought that he would buy some time by arranging to partition eastern Europe with Hitler -- and dismember potential allies against Hitler. Then came the Great Patriotic War, one of the greatest slaughters of Humanity that ever existed.
It is the historical language of Arnold Toynbee that fits Russia in the first half of the twentieth century -- the Time of Troubles -- and not that of Howe and Strauss. If the Great Depression and World War II are horribly inconvenient for Americans who wanted neither, at least the Depression compelled lasting reforms, and the enemies of America ravaged 'only' a colony (the Philippines) that America had scheduled for independence but compelled America to become a Great Power establishing its own new order. Sure, America exacted revenge -- on murderers.
Russia experienced a Crisis Era too long and too severe for any country to survive without being weakened as an economic power and compromised as a military power. Russia's leaders either were too incompetent (Nicholas II), had no chance to establish themselves (Kerensky), or were simply too ruthless (Lenin and Trotsky) or too ruthless, cruel, cynical, and insane (Stalin) to achieve anything more than survival.
See also China.
(06-01-2019, 09:28 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: Maybe the circles in Russia work in a different way. Not only that it's shifted by one Turning or so, but it really works very different. This might also apply to other cultures. In the Muslim world, Mohammed was a prophet AND a general/statesman - as if he had the strengths of both HERO and PROPHET. And in Khaldun's cycle of four generations, each generation is worse than that before.
I don´t think its so complicated in the russian case. Russia has just in this and the last saeculum a very hard Unraveling. The reasons for this? Exhausting conflicts like WWI and the Cold War; clinging to long to ineffective political and economic system like absölutism and communism and strong influenceof Western civilisation on Russia.