The french revolution started a chain of events leading to democracies across europe. For some reason, Russian tsars were able to hold on to more power than other monarchs, though they did concede some power.
By the time their revolution came, it wasn't democracy that was trendy, but communism. This was bad luck for Russia, and partially happened due to Germany helping the communists prior to the revolt. The communist leadership took things in a pretty wretched direction and Russia was stuck with it for a while. To make sure further revolutions would not happen, Stalin did his famous purge of russian leadership, which crippled them prior to world war 2.
Post soviet russia wasn't very good at democracy, the nation had been run by crooks and murderers for decades. Naturally, a soviet figure was able to take advantage of things. This was bad luck in part, but also not terribly unlikely.
It's not exactly a tendency so much as that it's really hard to get to democracy from a non-democracy, and russia's handful of chances were characterized by some crazy autocrats being at hand to take things over at the right time
Stephen Kotkin has a good talk on this. TLDR is the Russian culture has a tendency towards supporting strong autocratic rulers, especially those “in defiance of” something (capitalism, the west, etc)
Curiously one can thus be grateful for, e.g., Sci-Hub (defiance of the western copyright regime), and the wellbeing of Snowden.
I’m kidding?
I guess you might say that Russians are kind of collective anarchists. Principled— I mean fairly not based on ethnohistorical pride like say the occasional defiance of the Chinese.
Life is not cheap, only too willing to pay the price. Vodka loosens up the psychic joints..
Here, to the defiance of the soi disant curious of the orange site )
Apparently this tendency comes all the way back from the Mongols era. This lecture goes through over 800 years of Russian history (it’s in Finnish but you can turn on English subtitles): https://youtu.be/CvonRMSuFpw
Yup. A lot of people are short sighted when they think Russian history begins with the October Revolution. As you show, it is a pattern of Russia that extends well before the October Revolution. I read Gary Kasparov's Winter is Coming and as he says, the best way to understand Putin is to understand Russian history in its entirety.
The first sentence makes sense, though. On the Maslow’s pyramid, democracy is quite high compared to… “basic quality of life”, for lack of a better word. You can’t develop a proper social mechanics when you’re starving.
Russians are peace-loving democratic modern people that have a well developed civilization based on equal rights, laws, accountability, and intertwined checks and balances. They know no such thing as corruption and their leaders are justly elected representatives of the thriving Russian population, who contribute to peace and stability in the world. It's so great to be their neighbor and, generally speaking, in their sphere of influence as that alone guarantees you prosperity and safety from purges, famines, slavery in cold and remote concentration camps, war, death and destruction.
