Kamal, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much.
Nice to see you. So you've got a very interesting
voice on X and a voice on Sub Stack.
And I think we're both sort of, I don't know, politically
idiosyncratic kind of people who like to sort of see things from
a distance. And we've carried on discussion
over the last few years and so on and so forth.
Do you want to kind of introduce yourself for the audience, for
those people don't know you're camillekazani.subsec.com.
I think you're go ahead. Yeah.
So thank you so much for introduction.
My name is Camille Gallef and I'm writing a pen name, Camille
Kazani. So OK.
Great. 55. I didn't know whether you wanted
to say what your pen name was, but go ahead.
Yeah. Yeah, so our region lamp from
Russia, I'm a cousin taught her. So that is why where my nickname
is coming from, and I'm primarily interested on this in
the social institutions and how they work in their dynamics.
And at this point, my primary focus of interest is revolution.
So basically when transformative social change happens, how and
why? And I find it really interesting
and promising partially because in modern discourse, revolution
and coup, they have a sort of like theological or religious
meaning, a sort of like miracle just in social sphere.
So what I find interesting is and promising is just trying to
parse it into a sort of like more mechanic sequence of events
just to see like how this happened in a real time.
And that is what I'm primarily interested in right now.
OK, got it. And so The thing is you
mentioned you're, you know, you have a Tatar background or Tatar
background. Is it Tatar or Tatar or should I
pronounce it OK? So I find that interesting and
helpful because basically, you know, for example, for when I'm,
when I'm, when I'm understanding China, I will try to read things
from a Chinese nationalist perspective or Chinese Communist
perspective, but also from a Chinese liberal perspective.
And then I could kind of triangulate and figure out, you
know, like, like views from that.
And so I like reading your views and I kind of, you know, can,
can contrast that from the Russian nationalist perspective
of the Estonian perspective. And it's helpful because I think
then you can sort of triangulate and, and figure things out.
And there are a few of your posts over the years I found
insightful. And so one that you did recently
was a very good one where you basically said something like
people think that what a revolution means is everybody's
free. And and so that's how it's
always promised. But the French Revolution, the
Russian Revolution were followed by extreme regimentation and a
market loss of freedom, right? And maybe you can talk about
that. Yes, I think that is indeed
somewhat contributive and kind of may sound as a sort of heresy
to most people. But I think it is pretty obvious
because if we look at the countries where some sort of
like great fundamental revolutions happened that really
shook the political order from the upside down, that could be
Russia in 1917 or it could be France in 1789, or some could
even say it's England in 1642. We would see the pattern.
And the pattern is in these countries we have a capital,
which is clearly a capital and very pronounced.
It's the largest city in the country and basically everyone
hits in the base street. So basically one.
And the that is the first pattern we see is that
revolution really happened only in monocentric countries.
So usually what we see in countries like the US and 19th
century. There has to be, there has to be
a London, a Moscow or a Paris where there's like a clear
capital, OK. And in the US in eight in 1860s,
there was nothing like that. I would even say that in China
in the early 20th century, one reason why Russian Revolution,
it basically happened in a blink of an eye.
And in China there was long and bloody civil war for decades.
Is that China just did not have this pronounced capital in a
sense that Saint Petersburg. Well, it was preceded by the
Warlord era, right? So that almost was by definition
like the Chinese Civil War was preceded by the Warlord era.
And. So that was almost like
definitionally decentralized. Right, well, one could say that
originally when they overthrew monarchy, like see higher
evolution that that was the beginning of it by basically
that is also interesting what happens.
So in China they overthrow monarchy and the power just
breaks down and you immediately have lots of regiments and
statelets. So it's not the like someone
else can see this power. And my understanding is that
revolution is something very different.
That is what happened in France or in Russia.
It's where there's a prebuilt omnipotence.
It falls into other hands. But for that you need to have it
in the first place. Yeah.
So I mean a a better term than for revolution is really perhaps
from the corporate world, hostile takeover.
I think I think that is a not bad.
I think that is not bad framing. I am really enjoyed.
Because the hot set, yeah, go ahead.
You can use that if you want if you find that good.
Yeah, no, I think it's really a great comparison.
I'm now really enjoying reading Tuckerville.
So he's primarily known in Vago Phone world as the author of
Democracy in America. Democracy in America.
The one wrote on American political institutions.
Right, but what else has he done?
Actually, I don't know. Yeah, he wrote on his home
country, on French Revolution. It's pretty interesting because
he originally did not intend to. He wanted to write on Napoleon,
but as it often happens, so he tried to.
When you are writing about Napoleon and his career, you
kind of have to dive into the revolution.
Yeah, when you're diving into the revolution, you become like
interested in how it happened in the 1st place.
So it's interesting because he never really finished his book
on Napoleon, but he finished a great and interesting volume 1
of his future intended multi volume history that was
basically mostly on Louisa Forteins on the Sun Kings and he
is administrative reforms. So basically it's a great point
of Techville. What he was writing about is
that really it was the kings of France who did all the
preparatory groundwork for the revolution.
Sort of like we are arguably for.
Yeah. So.
So why? In what sense did they do the
preparatory groundwork in the classical sense of, Oh my God,
they impoverish everybody? Or in some other sense.
I think it's more interesting than that.
So basically what is 1 of original Taquila's ideas?
So basically usually when we talk about revolution, we kinda
put it into a position to the old regime.
So there was this unsure regime, kinda monarchist regime, then
Kaboom and then Republic takes its place.
The Queen is suggesting something more interesting.
So if before the Republic there was ancient regime, then the old
regime, then what was before the old regime?
Because we don't really think that in that time and Arctic
period, that's like from Middle Ages, from something like 1800s
to their almost leader of steam, that France was governed exactly
the same way. It's just impressible.
So he's saying that when we see old regime, unchanged regime, we
usually mean absolute monarchy. I'm the king, I decide
everything. But it's not how it used to be
in the Middle Ages. So before the absolute monarchy,
before the extreme centralization of power, that
really happened only very early, late in history, there used to
be a very different medieval order.
So absolute monarchy, it build itself upon the medieval order
and its ruins. So how did it look like?
So how was France governed? And like many Western European
countries governed in fact before the absolute monarchy, In
Tocqueville's mind, it's he defines it as aristocracy with
elements of democracy. So this may sound somewhat like
bizarre and weird and logically contradictory, but that is
primarily because the medieval order was indeed contradictory.
So first of all, over most of country, of course the ultimate
power belongs to nobles. So kind of noble land owners,
aristocrats of high pedigree who control the land, who control
peasants and who basically execute all the power on the
ground, police, judicial administration, politics,
military, it all really belongs to the nobles.
So even even theory France is governed by the king in practice
in far off provinces and like far away from the royal power.
You will not be real to do. You will not be ready to do
anything against the will of the local aristocrats who really
hold all the power in the ground.
So they are like small gods in their provinces.
And that is 1. The most characteristic element
of medieval order that basically all of us kind of know.
And we call it feudalism, but it was not limited to feudalism.
It was pretty interesting. So a part of countryside where
mostly the ultimate power belonged to nobles.
We had cities, we had towns. Some of these towns had
overlords like maybe bishops or Dukes, but many of them and
maybe actually most of them were republics.
That is the that is quite interesting.
And then again, maybe, maybe it sounds and unusual and
unexpected for in reference to. Republics.
In what sense of the term? Like this as you mean the sense?
I think the. Not the modern.
Sense, the best way to frame it is compared to with their
police, with the city state of antiquity, because when we think
of city states, we usually think of Sparta, of Korean force.
I don't know of ancient Rome of car figure, but in reality in
Middle Ages cities and towns in Western Europe they functioned
very often in somewhat similarish manner.
So while the power of the king exists in terms of everyday
governance, it is more theoretical and in practice.
In practice cities and towns they had great degree of
internal autonomy. How they're governed, well
that's a different question. So some of them are more
oligarchic. So in some basically local
governments is controlled by rich merchants, in others it's
more democratic with much greater saying of like working
classes or urban classes. But basically everywhere it's
some sort of electoral democracy, but not quite in
middles in modern sense. When their vote and when their
opinion of different classes and different guiles, different
corporations, it weighs differently.
And so, you know, this is actually similar in some ways.
You know, the Chinese concept of the mountains are high in the
emperor's far away, that the king would have formal
authority, but the technology of the time limited the extent to
which he could monitor all of these villages and towns and so
and so forth. So sort of an obligate sense in
which power was decentralized because he couldn't monitor
everything. He couldn't enforce everywhere.
He didn't have cameras everywhere or communication, you
know, telephones or whatever everywhere.
So many of these things sort of had to develop their own
governance, and maybe the king could overrule it with his
Knights or what have you. But in practice, a lot of
decisions had to be made and were made locally.
Is that roughly correct? I think, I think to a greater
degree I agree with you. So basically indeed.
And that is one difference. For example, the power of Baron,
it was usually much, much more real.
So if a city is governed by account, it is really governed
by account. But if it is governed by a king,
it usually means it is not really gone by anyone.
He's far away, right? But that's.
Interesting. So a federal, it's kind of like
you're in the concept of a union territory in India, for example,
there's some territories that are directly governed by the
federal government and others that have state governments and
local governments. And so interestingly, the one
that's quote, directly governed by the king is in your view, the
one that's not governed because king doesn't have time to govern
it. But the other ones covered by a
counter Baron are actually governed because that Baron or
count has nothing else to do, right?
So it's roughly like almost the number of people that fold in to
the person. Exactly correct.
This is one way to put it, but it's not only about the lack of
capacity and capacity of enforcement.
OK, what else is it? It's also about constitution,
about legal mechanisms. So basically all of these towns,
they have their local laws, they have their own charters.
So there is this bizarre legal world which is not really
uniformed yet. So basically some territories,
they're governed more, especially in the South of
France, they're governed more according to Roman law,
according to the written law, especially in the north.
It's more like some kind of like customary, more like Germanic
systems of legislation. So basically territories and
townships and villages that are located miles away.
They could have completely different systems of governance
and of law and of constitution that are not even like brought
to some kind of uniform standard yet.
That will happen like many centuries later.
So and 3rd interesting institution and which is
especially important in the context of France.
It is of that of Western European countries.
France, it had an unusually important and unusually bloated
significance of legal profession.
So at some point, at some point Judith, and it is called local
parliaments because in England Parliament it was kind of
legislative, it was like kind of kind of Congress.
And in France it referred to judicial bodies.
They usurped a great degree not only of judicial but also of
legislative authority. So how it was, and I'll just
give you an example because it shows it well, illustrate I
think, the bizarreness and weirdness of the old medieval
order. So for a royal decree to become
a law, it must be registered in Parliament of Paris, in it's
like judicial body of Paris. So Kim is sending order and it
often happens, it's completely normal that a parliament doesn't
want to register it and gives it objections.
We send another order, bless you, and the Parliament send its
objections. And this kind of fight can go on
and on and on and on with many objections by our parliament.
But finally, yeah, King can put a stopper to it.
If he comes personally to Parliament, he can just order
them through it and then it's the end of it.
But paradoxically enough, they can still give their
remonstrances and they can still protest.
It's not they can do anything. No, it will be registered.
The royal will become the law but they can still protest and
say how it's like bad and illegal and everything and
unjust so while they could not. Practice.
What does that mean? It it, it gives him hesitation
because he knows that they're complying, but they're doing so
against their will. And so therefore their
compliance will be, you know, letter of the law rather than
spirit of the law, right? Because he's not going to get,
he, he, you know, whatever he's ordering, he may get what he
orders, but not beyond that. And it may be subtly sabotage.
Is that kind of the thinking as to why he'd want their full
consent without the remonstrance?
I think this is, I think this is 1 framing and there's a lot of
proof on that. And another part is that all of
the judicial bodies part of that power was that they were simply
becoming 4 car of more general dissent, sometimes by Township
populaces, just by urban people and sometimes aristocracy,
because basically it was giving like other oppositional groups
and fractions some sort of kind centered group around.
So from the perspective of French market, I would say these
three the three primarily challenges to their power.
SO3 primary internal security threats and starting from
somewhere like 16th century, but especially under the sunken
under the Louis 14th, the monarchy basically breaks the
back of all three institutions, submitting them to its power.
But it is an interesting and I get somewhat bizarre process.
So what could the king do? So I have great nobles, I have
independent towns that are governed by their own elected
governments and that may have their own opinion on politics.
And three is judicial bodies. Like theoretically,
theoretically speaking, I could have abolished them, but it
would be some optimal. So basically, as Maccabella put
put it, there is nothing more dangerous than replacing the old
order and the old habits with the new.
It's just probably not going to pass.
So they, and by they mean primarily the Sun King Louis
Fourteens did something more interesting than that.
So you have these traditional medieval constitution and
traditional medieval institutions of France that
govern the country till then and you don't have all of them.
They keep their power, they keep their prestige, they keep their
glory. But you are building apparel,
set of institutions, apparel government that that is not
rooted in any tradition, that is not true, rooted in any customer
law and depends upon your will only exclusively.
You build a peril government near the old one.
So let me give you an example. However, the French province was
governed before. So here's the province it is
governed by, well, it's governor.
Governor is always a great noble.
He's some kind of Duke or count or Baron.
He is hugely governed, the same province where he grew up in,
where he holds his estates. He's connected by mainly
familial and other links with the local nobility.
And he just by the virtue of his birth and with his family, he
commands great respect and loyalty among the local
population. And on top of that he gets an
official right to command by the name of the king.
And realistically speaking, it just becomes it is too much.
It is too much because you're uncontrollable.
So imagine you are Duke, you have like a small private army
of yourself already and now you become a governor.
How to control you? So imagine there's some kind of
conflict between the king and the governor.
Whom will the popular support? Truth is that very, very often
they'll support the governor because he's he's already there
for the league and the locality of it.
Yes. And he's kind of rooted in all
this noble world and he probably can like drag many of the nobles
onto his side if he's alone. That is not a big problem.
King is more powerful than in a governor.
But imagine if he's not. Imagine if there is a group of
governors now, like theoretically, if they can
replace king like in fury, they can replace monarchy.
And that is indeed what could have happened in the early years
of Louis Fourteens. Because when young Louis
Fourteens faced a coalition of nobles and it looked like they
could have potentially toppled him.
So basically he was a prisoner for a brief period of time.
So when he became adult and decided to do something with it,
he did not release them of their oaths, he did not display them.
So basically all this office continues, all these offices
continued. And usually it was still great
nobles who were ruling them, but in peril to that he built a
separate hierarchy. So basically he was sending
their, he was sending their other guys, and these guys were
called intendants. So who are these intendants?
You have a royal consulate in Paris.
This royal council, it is never composed of noble of nobles,
never. It's always ignoble people of
common origin usually who have some roots in bureaucracy, in
the administrative profession. But they're never, they're rich,
they never have an noble connections and they compose a
center of royal administration. So OK, so let me.
First of all, this is very helpful.
Let me let me ask you a few questions based on some of their
just. This is actually very good
color. So the relevance of your post
the other day, just coming back to that post, the one on on like
revolutions are actually more like my paraphrase hostile
takeovers. That actually a revolution which
can be conceptualized as a hostile takeover that installs a
new harsh order is actually the better outcome relative to the
multi polarity, which is really just anarchy.
Right? Like when no faction actually
has the power to impose a revolution, you get Warlord era,
you get multipolarity, you get anarchy that's actually even
worse than a revolution that is. One interesting way to put it,
you saw that this kind, I think you said something like that.
I've come to a similar conclusion.
Go ahead. That is an interesting idea and
I think there is like lots of truth in that, you know, and
that is indeed what our intuition kind of tells us.
So basically either some big boss, maybe good or bad boss.
It's kind of better than when there is like 100 bosses and
they're fighting each other. So and that kind of matches our
intuition. So there's for example, some
kind of great empire, let's say Roman Empire.
It breaks down into warlordism and and then in theory some
other empire can be rebuilt again from this warlordism.
I think it is partially true, because indeed probably
experiences of most humans, they are wars at the times of
breakdown of empires at the times when their order breaks
down completely, then when wears just just another warlord and he
like kind assumes power. But but you could look at a
different way. You could look not from
individual human perspective, but for example from the
perspective of kind of long term trends of history.
And then one could see that often it is the periods of
breakdown and often complete collapse not only of political
but also of economic, logistical and cultural structures.
It is often the times of complete breakdown that become,
I'd say, highly notive and kind of give a sort of reset, a sort
of recharge just to the general flow of civilization.
Great example, European Middle Ages.
So although in fact the collapse of Roman Empire probably
worsened conditions of I think almost everyone who lived who
lived there, I think that's quite likely true.
At the same time, I think that many of the innovations in
agriculture, in cavalry again then probably sometime later in
navigation that I think the old and sort of stable order was
kind of withholding, kind of freezing them on this level.
I think they could just blow blow up kind of have their
chance when the power and the existing like economic and
logistical structures breakdown. Maybe, maybe, probably the
people of Bronze Age would kill me for that.
But I would even argue that the Bronze Age collapse, it played a
similar role. There is this weird theory about
the history of iron mining and kind of iron book that basically
why people in the ancient Mediterranean switched to iron.
It's not because it was superior, actually probably for
quite a long time iron, it was inferior to the bronze, but
because the logistical structure they broke down.
So kind, it all worked based on their very long and very
vulnerable supply chains. So you bring this team from
somewhere, from England, from Cornwall, and when nothing works
anymore, then you have to work with whatever resources there
and people just switch to iron. I find this software
provocative. So very often these elements, so
very often, these times of breakdown, they also become
times of innovation. You can kind of deviate from old
patterns to the good or to the bad, right?
Exactly. Because the old order goes away
and everything that was restricting upward and downward
deviation goes away. And you do get a lot of things
that are worse off, but you also get the upper deviation, which
is being constrained by the old system.
You know, on that point, by the way, I thought you had another
very insightful post recently. It was like the art of not
noticing things. And, you know, on the topic of
sort of who's in power versus not, you said the Reds or the
Republicans will notice that if somebody says the word
censorship, they're probably Republican, Republican
sympathetic. But Blues won't use that word.
And why is that? And the answer is because Blues
had been in power so long that they didn't call things by their
name. And Reds were out of power and
used to having power used against them.
So they call things by their name.
And this is even before Trump. And in some ways, you know, is
Trump in power now? Kind of, you know, you know,
arguably much more so than he was certainly in the first term.
But even still, habits die hard. And I.
Thought there's a very good insight or very good way of
phrasing it that the ones in power basically are like, oh,
that's just the way things are. And the ones out of power a
sign, you know, they they they, they put a sharper label on
things on. Anyway, I wanted to just note
that I thought that was a very good post.
Maybe you have some thoughts on that I?
Think I think, yeah, that that is a sort of general pattern.
And actually I think that that of not noticing things and not
admitting that you have power, it's actually very good for
those in power. So when for example, like French
kings, they in the mid 18th century say something like like
the state is me and all the laws come from me in me alone, like
all the power and all the authorities, that is not very
smart. Like even if it's really true,
you shouldn't say that. And I'll give you an opposite
example. When I was reading on October
and Augustus, so kind of the person who is considered to be
the first emperor, he didn't really, he didn't really show
off. He didn't really show.
He didn't really demonstrate how much power he has.
So he walked among, he walked around Rome in very simple
clothes, all assumed by his own, like wife and daughters, with
very simple stick in very simple shoes when in a theatre, just
some kind, some author. He deviated from the play, from
the script and just addressed Octavian, calling him a king
actor and rose and show. He show his furious and just in
indignation left the theater. So you should not he did not
allow even a thought that he aims to holds maniacal power,
even though in reality it was probably true.
And I think it's interesting. Because basically this is
something I think that. Perhaps the center?
Right is smarter on this and the quote far right, because the far
right is actually enamored with vibes and, you know, explicit
displays of power and all of that kind of stuff, right?
And, you know, once in a while maybe you do need an explicit
display of power, perhaps for a regime to stay in power.
But you definitely don't want to be doing it all the time because
if you do have to do it all the time, then you're maybe not in
power, you know, and because you have to keep saying how powerful
you are, blah, blah, blah, blah #1 and #2 is you give a target
to put on your back and. #3 so. There's a there's a sense also,
you know, encrypted, there's constant decentralization and
enlightened self-interest is in part splitting power so that
there isn't one person to target.
You know, of course, if you do that too much, then nobody can
make a decision, just a balance between the two.
But, but there is a balance and it's not simply that the optimal
strategy is always, you know, if there's only one person who can
make all decisions, well, there's no robustness.
You've got single point of failure.
You know, and you've mentioned this in the context of
succession and so on and so forth.
Maybe you have some thoughts on that.
I agree with you basically. And yes, it is pretty often
that, for example, in regimes that we now retrospectively see
as tyrannical or dysportic, they very often had to either work
out some sort of internal constitution, some sort of
objective rules. So we kind rule by law or at
least pretend they have it. One remark, I have not written
about it yet, but I wanted some future point.
Stalin was never really accepting or showing within the
Soviet elite that it's all his personal wimo Caprice.
He was kind of avoiding this. So when he wanted to give a
decision, he wouldn't say, oh, it's my decision because I'm a
boss. You maybe.
No, no, no, no, he should never do that.
He would approach a bookshelf, take a volume of Lenin, find a
quote and say, let's look what Vladimir Lenin told us about
that. And kind of that was the
decision for the pretense was so we have a constitution.
It is something like 50 volumes of Lenin's works, and we obey
them and we live by these rules. And Stalin, who is Stalin?
He's not a God. He's more like a priest.
He's interpreter. He's kind of appealing to the
God and getting his opinion. Of course, there was some sort
of trickster in all of that because every Soviet student
knew that Lenin contradicted himself and contradicted all the
time. So you could, like, justify
whatever decisions based on Lenin's quotes, but you have to
pretend there is some kind of formal procedure and you have to
pretend there is some sort of source constitution or it
doesn't work. Interesting.
Yes. And I think, you know, what's
interesting about this, by the way, is one thing that was it's
always surprising for people who've studied the Soviets or
what have you is even when they're shooting and liquidating
this and that person, even deporting whole ethnicities and
so on and so forth, they're really focused on the optics and
the paperwork. Even when they're doing all.
This stuff, you know, they, they really want to have some like
veneer of formalism around this. And you know, eventually I sort
of realized that it's like a camouflage to a sneak, you know,
they just have to have it. It's just part of how they
operate because, you know, if they're shooting somebody in a
room, but they write it up as if, oh, you know, he resisted so
on and so forth. Nobody knows any different.
And then nobody can align against them on that, right?
So like the there's only a few people in the room who actually
saw that shooting. But the official report says,
you know, this guy resisted and, you know, he committed an
offense against state security or something like that.
Same with the show trials, for example.
Now the issue is they can only lie to so many people at once.
And, you know, eventually the whole thing breaks down.
But just at a very fundamental level, they're very invested in
camouflage, of which one dimension is the dimension that
we just discussed, which served camouflaging, like who's making
decisions and so on, you see. I remember I was reading
interesting memoirs. It's a framed aristocrat who
visited Russia in 18th century and kind of visited Russian
army. So how it works.
And in the 18th century, one of his greatest surprises was the
degree of bureaucracy. Like incredible, absolutely mind
blowing. He says that no arm in the world
and no like state in the world is so much buried under the
paper because Russian. So that like Russian general, he
will be spending his day reading and signing papers on like
mattress in Germany. No one would even put them on
paper. They're just be done earlier.
So I think paradoxically, much of what we see as solid
tradition, for example, is formalism.
It's not so much even communist thing as just rough and thing of
doing everything formally and putting over everything on paper
very meticulously because much of what was happening, yes, of
course there were show trials, there were.
But much of what was Stalin doing, it was completely
illegal, including by Soviet laws.
It was of course, completely secret.
Nothing of that was published. And I think that a great deal of
it is not has not been published yet and will not be published in
the foreseeable future. But but it was still very
formalized. So for example, if we compare
with Nazi Germany, they were just documenting stuff less.
I think in many cases they could have just not used any paper at
all, just do it orally. And in Soviet Union, you'd have
protocol, you'd have kind of decisions, you'd have
signatures, much more papers as a result, including when it's
illegal and included with secret.
I think that is, to some degree, just the national way of doing
things. Interesting.
OK, so now one other thing that relatively few people
understand, but that you understand deeply is that the
Soviet Union and actually also Russia is actually much more
multi ethnic than Americans think.
Americans think it's just Russians to 1st order, right?
And even when I was a kid, they used to call the Soviets
Russians. But it's, it was actually the
Soviet Union had Eastern Europeans and it had Baltics and
had Turkish people and had all different kinds of Central Asian
people. And for lack of a term, it
celebrated its diversity. And actually towards the end of
the Soviet Union, it got down to actually 51% Russia, I think in
the 89 census, if you remember that.
And nationalism of both the Russian and the non Russian
variety was as big in ending the Soviet Union as the economic
collapse. And really those things kind of
work together where the crazy economics combined with the
internal ethnic clashing such that the whole thing broke apart
and everybody got their own state and or there's a lot of
shooting over who's going to get a state.
And maybe you. Have a view on that given that
you, you know, obviously have to study this whole thing and being
a kind of ethnic minority yourself within the the former
Soviet Union. I mean, you're not old enough to
have lived through that, you know what I'm saying?
Well, I. Think that the region I'm coming
from, it's not really in the spotlight.
So when I was in DCI was doing a fellowship at Wilson Centre and
kind I suggested them that maybe I'll write something on North
Caucasus. They said me, Oh no, no, no
thank you. There's no need because there's
so much written on North Caucasus.
We have that already. Maybe better you write something
on your own region on vulgar worlds, because actually
everyone knows about Chechnya and Pakistan, but much more
humorous like ethnicities of vulgar worlds.
They're not. There's not much reason on that
at all. So it was kind of, I don't know,
So some kind of unexplored land for them, Western discourse.
So yes, I think there's a significant element of truth in
that. Regarding the collapse of Soviet
Union, I think that one of under discussed factors was of course
population explosion in Central Asia.
So basically fertility in Slavic lands, in what is in Russia,
Ukraine, Belarus, it crashed much earlier and in Central Asia
it it remained pretty high. So I think in fact they wanted
to. Remain at the end with the in
the 1991 All Union referendum, which I think was like the first
real vote in the Soviet Union in a long time.
The Central Asian countries wanted to remain in the Soviet
Union, but Estonia, the Baltics, boycotted it and that was
actually them breaking away led to the failure Soviet Union.
In a sense, the Estonians felt the deal was not good for them,
but the central is itself. The deal was good for them.
Yeah, I think it is. I think it is true and I think
that indeed there were countries in which there are pretty strong
separatist movements. Most importantly it's the
Baltics, but also Georgia and also Ukraine, but Central Asia.
It was not one of them. Azerbaijan was not one of them.
And I think it was the other way around in the sense that it were
mostly Russians, including Russian and including Russian
bureaucracy that wanted to cut off Central Asia, partially
because they saw it as a sort of like economic kind of that they
would have to support it financially.
And another thing that you're just afraid there will be too
many Central Asians. Yes, and and the thing of it.
You know, one thing that I think is a very important period for
Americans to understand is Russia in the 90s because.
You know a friend of. Mine, you know, Joe Max
Kebinski, he's a Russian, you know, immigrant to post on X.
Maybe you knew him from X, but he mentioned that the 2024
election, in the aftermath, it felt to him a lot like the
moment in Russia when the Soviet Union ended.
And I actually thought that was a very good analogy because
essentially a far left ideology was no longer a hegemonic.
You could openly criticize it. There were people who still
believed in it, but no longer like the roof over your head
that you just had to obey, right?
It was something that had less than 50% support and it knew
that it had less than 50% support, which led to a negative
feedback loop. But.
What happened, as you know, is after that afterglow of yay, the
Soviet Union's over, a lot of the Russians thought that they
were going to have capitalism and everything's going to be
fine and so, so forth. Then Jaeger Guider then
basically just flipped the economy of capitalism overnight.
And, and there's many other reasons as to why it didn't
work. You know, there was sort of,
there was 70 years of communism, people didn't know how to do
capitalism and the ruble hyperinflated.
There are all kinds of crazy wars, from the Juxy Sunny civil
war to the Chechnya thing to to many other conflicts.
And, you know, people were massively impoverished.
A lot of the smart people left territory that they had won in
blood was lost in, you know, days and on and on and on.
And basically a superpower. What you know, Yeltsin was drunk
and the there was like this whole thing with them shelling
the White House and on and on and on.
Basically, it's really sucked to be Russian in the 90s.
And then it was the aftermath of that that led to Putin being
like sort of a, I think you know the term if I'm mispronouncing
it, the Silovicki figures, right, The security state thing,
which you've written about. So they came to, he came to
power in 99 and he was a total cipher and people didn't know
what to make of him. But he was Yeltsin's guy for I
think running Moscow. And then, you know, got elevated
and then he consolidated power, went after the businessmen, the
so-called oligarchs, basically knocked him out one by one,
reconsolidated power in Russia, made nice with the West while
doing so, kept in the G8 and then only really started getting
aggressive by the late 2000s with the invasion of Georgia.
And then it was finally with the invasion of Crimea in 2014 that
then, you know, the the US started to they kicked him out
of the G8 and then started to arm Ukraine.
And then over the last 10 years, Russia's economy is being
flattish, but it's actually seemingly done surprisingly well
in this war, which is totally unnecessary.
But they're being backed in part by China, and it looks like
they're kind of fighting to a standstill now.
So that is at least how I understand the last 20-30 years
of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.
I'm not sure if you'd agree or disagree with that or give your
kind of take on what I'm getting brought, obviously as you know
this appointment. By 1990s, not only but I think
most of people in former Soviet Union would agree with that
because that is indeed what happened to a significant
degree. So kind of invalid USR.
There was a lot of like positive hope and positive dreams and
many kind of Harvard ideas that now will kind of throw away
people partners. Will kind of throw.
Away communism and we'll go to capitalism and it's going to be
all right. And yes, indeed, for almost
everyone it was a bitter disappointment, except very few.
That is indeed true. Why was this the case?
That's an interesting question. You see, I wouldn't really
formulate it in terms of like communism and capitalism
dichotomy, although many of like Russian or Ukrainian or
whatever, like people were really disappointed by
capitalism. That is true because let's look
up on let's look at China. So basically another splendid
economy with very similar ideology with similar
institutions that roughly the same period also went through
market reforms, but with very different results.
And I think that may be a sort of an illusion like a foreign
like me could harbor that China went through them smoothly.
Oh no, not at all. Because China, of course, like
pretty much every post communist country, it had its own painful
transition. It had its own socio economic
health. So just a small example.
So like in China, when Mao Zedong died, they had their
plans of economic reforms. They had plans of
industrializations or we'll build so much industry all based
upon assumption that we have very much oil.
So we are planning to discover new oil deposits of which we are
sure there are many and become an oil superpower and by like
1985, we are going to export more than Saudi Arabia.
That was the plan. So in 1979, I don't remember,
they mined something like 8,000,000 meters.
They drilled like some 8,000,000 meters of holes and found
exactly 0 new oil deposit. Next year they closed more than
half of their steel plants. So what I mean that there had
been a lot of like economic pain, economic disillusionment,
disappointment, a lot of a lot of state owned enterprises in
China, plenty of them they suffered or just were wiped out.
So generally speaking, you have some of the processes you are
witnessing in the SSR with the Blues on the state of the
industry, of the government sponsored organizations and a
huge pain it inflicts on the population.
So for example, imagine that you've worked all your life on
some kind of steel state owned plant and then it closes and the
entire sector basically wipes getting wiped out.
And you are maybe, I don't know, at the age of 40, you don't have
any skills for the private market.
And you are basically like, it's really, really bad.
So entire generations of Chinese people, they ended with very bad
like final results of their life just due to the economic
transition. In this regard, it's very
similar to what was happening in the post USSR.
The question is what was different.
And I think part of the answer is the logic of the leadership
was very, very different in the USSR.
Part of difference between like Russia or Ukraine, for example,
from China is that in the USSR a socialist economy and planned
economy, it will just better. So Soviet planned economy was
better than Chinese planned planned economy.
It was bad, it was richer, it was more functional.
If the SSR by the end of USSR, you had plenty of enterprises
that functioned well, that were equipped well, that were like
equipped with like modern machines and that could make
export products for years and for decades and actually earn
some cash for their owners. So basically you can just see
some plant, you can take control over it and you can milk it for
decades investing nothing. And in China, nothing like that
really existed. Very, very little, partially
because Chinese planned economy was just so much more
dysfunctional. Yes.
They actually had to add value and whereas the Russians had to
a greater extent working minds to Co opt that.
So let me slightly push back on that because my view is it's
actually hard to do anything at a profit and.
Impartial. Defense.
OK, so let me get, let me give something which let's call it a
thought experiment, OK? Let's say you're a.
Foreign businessman. And it's 1992, OK, And someone
is telling you, hey, do you want to buy this coal mine in
Siberia? It hasn't made a profit in 70
years. It doesn't really have great
infrastructure. And by the way, this is in the
former Soviet Union. You don't know if communism is
going to come back, which abolish all private property.
And even if it doesn't come back, you don't really have as
much of A functional state. You've got this mafia government
which will cut you if you try to move anything out, and also
contracts. Who's going to enforce the
contracts? Workers, 234 generations haven't
even understood what capitalism is.
It's basically pre 1917 before they remember stock markets,
contracts, even the fact that they can be fired and on and on.
There's all these operational difficulties associated with it.
And as a consequence, you say, OK, if we're going to do that,
I'm going to need to get this for cents on the dollar.
Right that. Would be the argument of that
foreign businessman for them to make that kind of investment,
given how uncertain it would be and how difficult it would be to
operate that business profitably if you just put yourself in the
shoes of someone who's doing something like that, they say,
OK, we need to get this for cents on the dollar because
someone could get killed. Like we'd have to figure out,
you know, how to make this thing make a profit.
We're going to have to buy crazy new equipment since the Soviet
equipment is often terrible or breaks or it's made to low
standards and so on and so forth.
And a lot of that will have to be imported and it'll have to be
gotten through and God knows what, you know, the customs are
going to charge. And so and so it's all kinds of
uncertain costs which are which arise because you have to
provide your own security and so on.
So I think that's maybe somewhat at least without seeing numbers,
my intuition would be it's not that easy to.
One other thing, by the way, is something like coal or oil.
It is a commodity product, right?
The whole point is it can be pulled out of the ground at a
lot of different places around the world and the sort of global
market for it. And if you're producing the
commodity product, you're not in control of your price.
So that's just different from let's say you're producing
something like an Apple iPhone, you've set your price.
If you're producing coal or oil, your price is set by the market.
I mean, there's various, you know, different subtypes of coal
and oil and, you know, light, sweet, crude or whatever the
terminology is for different kinds of, you know, like like
like refinements and so on. But but you're not in control of
your price. So I would somewhat push back
maybe on the idea that it was just goldmine waiting to be
exploited. Let me know your thoughts on
that. Go ahead.
Now let's look. At it another way.
So basically, I think you're right that for example, imagines
there's some kind of mine or a factory and a foreign investor
comes and he is indeed probably likely to pay for it
considerably less than if like exactly the same plant was
located like in France, I don't know, or in Germany, that is
true. So he would probably buy it
relatively cheap if you could. But that is a foreign investor
who comes with money. Unlike foreign investors, there
are no basically no people with money and they started by that
point. So when we do privatization and
we limit each to kind of local nations, that means practically
speaking that is what happened, that we do not sell anything
because there are no people with money.
We in reality distributing it for free.
Maybe it will be kind of disguised by also like tricky
financial schemes, but in practice we can only distribute
it. And that means, first of all,
that we are not getting any money.
If the governor more wanted to get any money for their
manufacturers, it should have sells them for foreigners
because they were the only people with money.
And that is one thing. Foreigners could have brought
money that could pay, for example, for social expenses in
general, like alleviate the general crisis, like the life
conditions could be better. Second, foreign companies could
have brought expertise because if you look in China, that is
exactly what happened. Almost all of complicated
technologies, almost all of complicated knowledge.
It was originally brought by foreigners, by the Taiwanese, by
the Japanese, by the Koreans, by all sorts of westerners.
Like one story I read recently, it's pretty funny.
So how Chinese micro industry began?
As I read, it began with Dutch Philips company that opened its
factory in Tsenjin. And it's interesting because
they're not really planning to do changing.
Originally it was not a part of the plan.
They're planning to do it in Pakistan.
It's just that Pakistan basically kicked them away.
They just were making new and new conditions, like new and
new, like burdens, and eventually they just changed
location. So my point is that for China,
foreign companies and foreign investors, they served not only
as a major source of cash, but also as a major source of
expertise, of knowledge. And what makes a major
difference between Russian, let's say privatization in
Chinese, that in China, foreign investors will loot.
They're often like invited. And in Russia, they're
absolutely excluded. It was more like 0 sum thinking
and a little bit, you know, like dragon, dragon smile thinking.
So that is my kind hoard of gold and I'll not allow like any
filthy hobbits to take a bit of it.
So it was much more of defensive thinking.
It's not that we will create something new and interesting if
it was in China, as that we will not allow anyone to take a bit
of our treasure. Better like in practice.
In practice, it's not that we'll do anything with this factory,
but better let this factory erode than to give it to someone
else. So, and one thing I'm indeed
noticing in modern America that yeah, I think there's a little
bit of post of advice here, a little bit of like 0 sum and
very defensive kind of thinking, not so much about like creating
anything cool, interesting. I don't know, profitable as
about like guarding our like pile of wealth against all kinds
of like hungry thieves all around.
Interesting. OK, cool.
All right. So I am if there's one of the
things I want to wrap now and we'll let's see if we can add
this down into some crisp stuff. If there's any essays that you
want to put on screen, if you've got some good sub sects.
I actually I thought the revolution was very good.
I thought the conservatives noticing things was a good one,
meaning the I thought the one where conservatives or those who
are out of power can. Call something by its.
Name in a way those in power will ignore it, like Stalin
would ignore the power, but those outside.
That was an interesting one. And then I thought you had a
third one, a thread on the Sylvic's, which is good.
Anything else that people should go and read?
I think let's do. One, let's do all that of
noticing things among other like good among it has a good
quality, it is relatively short good so.
Thank you. Thank you Sir, and this is
interesting. And send me any books that you
think we should put on and I'll put them on screen.
Any like, you know, for example, all this book, you know, because
you're talking about the structure of Europe and so and
so forth with a specific book or two, maybe maybe there's three
books. Do you recommend any three books
that people read that maybe people don't know?
Thank. You I'll send by the evening.
OK, Good all. Right.
Thanks, Sir. Thank you.
Have a good day.