FYI: Mulino is where German Rheinmetall company was building (in their own words):
"Measuring over 500 square kilometres, the state-of-the-art Russian army training centre in Mulino designed to train a reinforced mechanized infantry or armoured brigade"
Mulino was modelled after the training center of Bundesehr in Altmarkt. In order to proceed with the construction, the Rheinmentall entered in the strategic partnership with Russian stated owned defence company Oboronservis
That was the high point of Serdyukov's reform. Serdyukov tried to modernise the Russian army importing ready solutions from the West: from the armaments to the tactics. And the Rheinmetall was more than ready to help to train the Russian troops
Rheinmetall planned to build "the most advanced system of its kind worldwide" and able to train 30 000 troops per year
There is strong evidence that Rheinmetall broke sanction regime. After 2014 it could not supply its equipment directly, because of the sanctions. According to the Russian Deputy Minister of Defence, after Rheinmetall it was the Russian "Garrison" company which finished the center
Here we see the "Garrison" company as one of major purchasers from Rheinmetall
Some examples of shipments from 2019. Russian "Garnison" company was finishing the center (which Rheinmetall started) and it was buying equipment from Rheinmentall. Most probably, Garnison was just a proxy importgenius.com/russia/importe…
Initially Rheinmetall built the Mulino center to "train a reinforced mechanized infantry or armoured brigade". And indeed, in 2020 the Russian Western Military District declared they'll make a "unique training center for tank forces" in Mulino
1. Rheinmetall AG was building the infrastructure to train the Russian land army 2. There is indirect evidence of the Rheinmetall AG bypassing the sanctions through a Russian proxy company "Garnison" as late as in 2019
Lots of materials on the training center for the Russian army built in Mulino by the Rheinmetall AG are obviously deleted but fortunately their press release is still available on the company website
PS. If we look at where the Russian "Garnison" company which finished Mulino training center after the Rheinmetall was importing, we'll see that 100% of its imports are from Germany (Германия). With Rheinmetall being of course the main supplier. Russian company was just a proxy
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Slavonic = "Russian" religious space used to be really weird until the 16-17th cc. I mean, weird from the Western, Latin standpoint. It was not until second half of the 16th c., when the Jesuit-educated Orthodox monks from Poland-Lithuania started to rationalise & systematise it based on the Latin (Jesuit, mostly) model
One could frame the modern, rationalised Orthodoxy as a response to the Counterreformation. Because it was. The Latin world advanced, Slavonic world retreated. So, in a fuzzy borderland zone roughly encompassing what is now Ukraine-Belarus-Lithuania, the Catholic-educated Orthodox monks re-worked Orthodox institutions modeling them after the Catholic ones
By the mid-17th c. this new, Latin modeled Orthodox culture had already trickled to Muscovy. And, after the annexation of the Left Bank Ukraine in 1654, it all turned into a flood. Eventually, the Muscovite state accepted the new, Latinised Orthodoxy as the established creed, and extirpated the previous faith & the previous culture
1. This book (“What is to be done?”) has been wildly, influential in late 19-20th century Russia. It was a Gospel of the Russian revolutionary left. 2. Chinese Communists succeeded the tradition of the Russian revolutionary left, or at the very least were strongly affected by it.
3. As a red prince, Xi Jinping has apparently been well instructed in the underlying tradition of the revolutionary left and, very plausibly, studied its seminal works. 4. In this context, him having read and studied the revolutionary left gospel makes perfect sense
5. Now the thing is. The central, seminal work of the Russian revolutionary left, the book highly valued by Chairman Xi *does* count as unreadable in modern Russia, having lost its appeal and popularity long, long, long ago. 6. In modern Russia, it is seen as old fashioned and irrelevant. Something out of museum
I have always found this list a bit dubious, not to say self-contradictory:
You know what does this Huntingtonian classification remind to me? A fictional “Chinese Encyclopaedia” by an Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges:
Classification above sounds comical. Now why would that be? That it because it lacks a consistent classification basis. The rules of formal logic prescribe us to choose a principle (e.g. size) and hold to it.
If Jorge Borges breaks this principle, so does Samuel P. Huntington.
Literacy rates in European Russia, 1897. Obviously, the data is imperfect. Still, it represents one crucial pattern for understanding the late Russian Empire. That is the wide gap in human capital between the core of empire and its Western borderland.
The most literate regions of Empire are its Lutheran provinces, including Finland, Estonia & Latvia
Then goes, roughly speaking, Poland-Lithuania
Russia proper has only two clusters of high literacy: Moscow & St Petersburg. Surrounded by the vast ocean of illiterate peasantry
This map shows how thin was the civilisation of Russia proper comparatively speaking. We tend to imagine old Russia, as the world of nobility, palaces, balls, and duels. And that is not wrong, because this world really existed, and produced some great works of art and literature
The OKBM Afrikantova is the principal producer of marine nuclear reactors, including reactors for icebreakers, and for submarines in Russia. Today we will take a brief excursion on their factory floor 🧵
Before I do, let me introduce some basic ideas necessary for the further discussion. First, reactor production is based on precision metalworking. Second, modern precision metalworking is digital. There is simply no other way to do it at scale.
How does the digital workflow work? First, you do a design in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. Then, the Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software turns it into the G-code. Then, a Computer Numerical Controller (CNC) reads the code and guides the tool accordingly
Relative popularity of three google search inquiries in the post-USSR. Blue - horoscope. Red - prayer. Green - namaz. Most of Russia is blue, primarily googling horoscopes. Which suggests most of the population being into some kind of spirituality rather than anything "trad".
The primary contiguous red area is not in Russia at all, but in West Ukraine. Which is indeed the only remotely "conservative" (in the American sense) area of the East Slavic world. Coincidentally or not, it had never been ruled by Russia, except for a short period in 1939-1991
In the blue and occasionally red sea, there are two regions that primarily google namaz, the Islamic prayer. That is Moscow & Tatarstan