05-15-2019, 10:07 AM
(05-15-2019, 01:09 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:(05-14-2019, 09:34 PM)Hintergrund Wrote:(04-23-2019, 12:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Does he want to put Fyodor Dostoevsky in the Transcendental Generation?
Would fit his religiousness... then again, he was Russian, their Turnings might work differently. Sure, WW2 killed very many Russians, but it didn't change their political system. The Crisis ending with the Russian Civil War, OTOH...
Russia (and I've been there) is on a different saecular cycle than the West. It could even be argued that the Orthodox East is a completely different civilization from the West as well.
The GPW occurred at the start of the 2T of the Soviet Saeculum and was probably why their 2T was so muted. The majority of the trouble makers were killed off in the Trenches of the Western Front (from the Russian perspective).
My interpretation of Russian history from 1905 (Russo-Japanese War) to 1945 (end of the Great Patriotic War) is an over-extended Time of Troubles. There was a revolution in 1905 after the war -- and some horrible pogroms. Imperial Russia would have been wise to stay out of the First World War, but Imperial Russia bumbled its way into it and demonstrated its backwardness in social conditions and infrastructure. There was a liberal revolution in February 1917, but really too late for salvaging the system. Lenin staged his coup in November, and proved ruthless enough to put Russia back together -- as the world's first totalitarian order. It would take a monstrous civil war in which the Reds and Whites both slaughtered anything that got in their way.
With no concern about elections or a judiciary, Lenin could reform Russia practically at will... and along came Stalin. We all know of the horrors of forced collectivism and of the Great Purge, right? Stalin interpreted Hitler as the final stage of capitalist depravity, the sort that would implode of its own vileness while destroying liberal democracy, and chose to let Hitler divide eastern Europe with him. After that sordid deal, Hitler waited less than two years before invading the Soviet Union.
The Crisis of the West, the Crisis of 1940, came to a country that thought itself exempt from such. World War II was pure Crisis imposed from outside. The Crisis came to an end with the end of the war, and Stalin was weakened in his ability to act as a despot. Russia went into a 1T.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.