Anti-Kremlin Protests Take Hold Over Major Russian Cities (March 2017)

[pbrower2a]

(03-16-2021, 04:49 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(03-16-2021, 04:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(03-16-2021, 04:07 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(01-26-2021, 12:19 PM)mamabug Wrote: I haven't studied modern Russian history enough to make any predictions.  If we take 1917 as part of their Crisis era, then they could be as much as one full turning ahead of the West.  Putin certainly has all the characteristics of a totalitarian High leader.  They could be slipping into their next awakening.

I like PBrower's idea that all countries that experienced WW2 seriously are on the same timeline. Russia experienced WW2 in a way much bloodier than the English-speaking nations. So, if WW2 was not a crisis for them, nothing ever was. Then they had a High in the 1960s, with improving quality of daily life and technological successes. The 1980s were an Awakening with glasnost' and perestroika. The 1990s a really bad Unravelling.

Putin is a Crisis leader. It's an unusual 4T since it seemingly consists mostly of a regeneracy. The revival of national identity and interest in tradition is a very typical 4T bit. Remember that from a Putinist POV, Russia is under siege. Western democracies impose sanctions. Inclusivist NGOs try to impose their alien values. Islamist insurgents try to whittle a piece of land away and recreate their Caucasus Emirate. Russians living in Odessa or Kharkov are treated like foreigners. Aren't these typical Crisis concerns?

I've seen young Russians who support Navalny compared to young Poles who support recent "women's strikes". If we accept that Poland is currently undergoing a 4T, then Russia is too.

I could make the case that the birth of the Polish state (Second Polish Republic) in 1918-1919 and especially the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 had many characteristics of a Crisis, with Poland taking on many 1T characteristics... but with serious flaws, as Poland tried to obliterate ethnic differences among ethnic minorities except arguably the Jews. The Belorussians and Ukrainians in part would see the Soviet Union as liberators from Polish oppression, only to often be disgruntled before Operation Barbarossa began, and the large German minority would to a large part betray Poland in the worst possible way as perpetrators of unspeakable brutality on behalf of... 

If anyone wants to know how badly a 4T could go, then look at Poland in the last Crisis Era. Both Hitler and Stalin sought to obliterate Polish nationality with genocide and oppression after wiping the Polish Republic off the map. Hitler saw the Poles suited only for slave labor -- and enslavement under the Nazis made the fictional Simon Legree look charitable and humane by contrast. Hitler treated the Poles much like Leopold II treated the peoples of his Congo "Free" State. Because there was no semblance of any Polish authority aside from local police completely under the Nazi thumb, Poland could be the site of the bulk of the Holocaust, where Jews including the large Polish Jewish community were concentrated in ghettoes on the way to the extermination camps, with Jews from elsewhere in Europe being shipped into murder camps for slaughter.

After World War II, Poland went into a more obvious, and by no means premature 1T -- a Communist version as the Polish Communists established a Marxist version of a repressive, materialistic 1T intended to destroy the Catholic heritage of Poland under the Stalinist quisling Bierut. That obviously went too far. 

It is safe to say that the whole of Europe behind the Iron Curtain to at least the easternmost lines of Nazi conquest in Russia  had obvious parallels of destruction, both material and human. Maybe western Czechoslovakia was spared the material destruction because of the rapid Nazi collapse, but it certainly endured the destruction of its institutions and of course the demographic calamity.

For Eastern Europe, the 4T was 1917 to 45 or even 1953. 36 years in one turning! And I thought the last 3T was long...

The period 1920-1933 was a very troubled time for most of eastern Europe. Except in Czechoslovakia and arguably Romania to an extent, political instability was the norm. Then came Hitler in Germany.

Here's how I saw the 4T in Russia and the Soviet Union:

1916-1917: military, economic, and political collapse of the Tsarist regime
1917: February revolution overthrowing the Tsar, the Kornilov plot in July, and the Bolshevik coup. 
1918: Lenin stops the Constituent Assembly from taking part in politics and establishes a full-blown dictatorship
1918-1922 Russian Civil War (with a Soviet effort to crush Poland and with its sponsorship of the commie regime of Bela Kun in Hungary). 
1922-1924: abortive 1T with NEP.
1924-1929: power struggle that begins in earnest with the death of Lenin and ends in the consolidation of Stalin as the Big Boss 
1930-1934: forced collectivization turns peasants into serfs and causes famine.
1935-1938: Great Purges. Definitely 4T behavior. 
1939-1941: illusory 1T as Stalin gets a shaky peace through complicity with Hitler.
1941-1945: Operation Barbarossa (as Hitler saw it); the Great Patriotic War as seen in Russia. Unspeakable horror of a war in which the opposing sides treated their soldiers as cannon fodder... and horrific genocide, including the Holocaust (which started with massacres in Nazi-occupied sections of the occupied Soviet Union.

After 1945 the Soviet Union could only go 1T.