QuickTidal, on 22 May 2025 - 12:11 PM, said:
Now I've moved onto the previous TURNING POINT series THE BOMB & THE COLD WAR.
I'm on the last episode of this (ep 9) and it's been fascinating throughout but the focus in the last like 3 episodes on Russian Federation in the post-Soviet, Yeltsin and Putin rise era has given me SO much more insight into why Russia is where it is today and why Putin is who he is...
Like here's a guy who seemingly loved the Soviet Union, but hated the rigamarole of a whole slew of leadership in a room making decision, cuts his teeth as a minor KGB guy in Dresden East Germany, and the first brick in making him who he is was when he watched the Berlin Wall fall and Gorbachev did nothing and let it happen, let that territory cede from Soviet control...something Putin in later years would call a disaster, famously lamenting as his KGB HQ in Dresden Germany is besieged by unification enthusiasts that "Moscow was Silent". That MFer HATED Gorbachev's push towards a free Soviet Union in a more capitalist and western mold. But when he gains power after Yeltsin steps down, you can ALMOST see him trying to do things in a sort of altruistic way. He thinks 9/11 is a signal that the US can join him in fighting terrorism (which at the time was Chechnya), and he seemingly tries to be like the Western leaders he was surrounded by. Gracious and helpful. Though behind closed doors it seems he may have been the person responsible for the bombings that resulted in the push against Chechnya....either way. He was a. nationalist and felt that Soviet more fascistic rule was correct and as long as the people feel their lives were better, then that worked. The mess that was Russia after the fall of the USSR is a cesspool of corruption and lack of support for the system they'd functioned on for decades...and there is a key point in the doc where Condoleeza Rice actually says....The US could have gone all in, we could have gone in and helped them re-create non-communist free versions of their existing system to ease that transition to democracy, but Cold War suspicions loom large and GB Sr. was like "Fuck em, we won the Cold War, Huzzah!" and the US just let them stew. So into that you put a guy who is like "I'm going to make your lives better, but it won't be a democracy" and then cheered him and elected him....then the turning point comes...the richest of the Oligarchs that bought up the post-Soviet fall government resources to become rich, is arrested and put in jail for 10 years...This is a good thing. Oligarchs are bad, and what they did to Russia was bad. But then Putin is given a choice..the other Oligarchs come to him and say "what can we do to avoid being thrown in jail too?"...and the altruistic Putin who wanted an Imperial Russia in the mode of the USSR he grew up in, if not in function made a choice. Instead of the correct option, which would have been "You're all going to jail" sealing away the last of the stress from the post-Cold War madness and chaos...he tells them "50% of all your take"...because money corrupts and the prospect of becoming THE BIGGEST Oligarch mobster himself was more important to him than whatever dream he once had about setting Russia back on what he deemed the "right path"...you can watch him just dive in after that moment, as deeply as he can swim in the muck and mire of the very things and people who tore a vulnerable population apart after a massive upheaval. Absolutely despicable, but you can see exactly how he gets there when the money on the table is too much to ignore, and the power that came with that.
Add into this the fact that Putin feels that Ukraine is a made up country, and that it's very much part of Russia....whether that comes down to how it's at the very heart of Russian history, or if it's becuase their 50mil population makes up a significant portion of the what he deems Russia. That's fully what he believes....I wonder if he believes that about all the other breakaway former Soviet countries....he doesn't remotely believe in Democracy of any kind...he is convinced it cannot work...
But yeah, watching the guy go from pretty much nobody, who seemingly was a nationalistic dude who liked the country he grew up in, throw it all away for money and power is a take as old as time man. Becoming an Authoritarian shitbag who poisons and imprisons and kills anyone who speaks out against him... Wild.
This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 26 May 2025 - 06:06 PM
"When the last tree has fallen, and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money, oh no." ~Aurora
"Someone will always try to sell you despair, just so they don't feel alone." ~Ursula Vernon
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