- What is long, green and smells with sausage?
- Moscow-Tver train
Why? Well, under the USSR provincials had to go shopping to Moscow. Their shops had no food, often very literally. Today we'll learn an expression "supply category"🧵
Under the centrally planned economy it was the state which supplied food to the localities. It would assign each city one of four "supply categories" determining how much food there will be on shelves. Moscow was supplied far better than anyone while cities like Tver - horribly
Provincial Soviet cities of the lower supply categories might have no food on the shelves at all. Sometimes very literally. Sometimes they would have only the scraps from the table of the higher status city: like some algae, or the disgusting paste "Ocean"
That's difficult for a modern Westerner to understand, so I need to reiterate it. When I say "there was no food", I don't mean delicacies. My friend from Moscow who visited Penza in the 1980s was shocked to see that the food shelves there were literally empty. Nothing to buy
How would people survive then? Well, now you get the purpose of dacha. It's not recreational, it's primarily the subsistence farming for food. Extremely tiresome and inefficient, but ppl in many localities had no choice. Shelves were empty, so you must grow potatoes etc. yourself
Second, grey sector. You may not grow food, but you could buy from someone who does or who steals. The USSR had a massive shadow economy which provided much of population with the means of subsistence. Much like the modern Russia. See Simon Kordonsky's writings on гаражный сектор
Of course, much of the shadow economy was just the side hustle of the state. For example, during the Holodomor you absolutely could buy food in Torgsin (="trade with foreigners"). In spite of their name, they were frequented by Soviet citizens. Except you couldn't pay with rubles
During the worst Stalin's famines, you could buy any food in Torgsin for the real values: gold, silver and of course the hard currency. That was the instrument of the Soviet state to milk the values out of it starving population. Bring gold, get food. Rubes are not accepted
In the late Soviet era this role was played by the "collective farm markets" (колхозные рынки). Even though the shop was empty, you still could buy food on these markets from the collective farm (= the state), but for the price several times higher than the official one
While the province had basic subsistence problems, Moscow was supplied lavishly. As a result, much of the country went to shop to Moscow, from hundreds or thousands of kilometres away on the so called "sausage trains". Muscovites hated these aliens for emptying "their" shops
Sausage trains were often organised by the regional enterprises. A factory would organise for its workers an "excursion" to "museums" of Moscow. In reality they're gonna shop. Saratov workers would come to Moscow to buy Saratov-produced food that was impossible to buy in Saratov
Moscow authorities would limit how much food you can get to "one hands" so that hungry provincials wouldn't buy everything. Provincials would not surrender. They would stand in the queue, make a purchase. Then stand in the back of the queue again and repeat. And again. And again
With the economic situation worsening, Moscow took tougher measures against provincials. In 1990 they introduced compulsory "purchaser cards" which only locals were getting. Letters "MA" mean Moscow - best category. If you were from Moscow Oblast, it would be MO which is okayish
Purchaser cards were introduced to exclude the hungry provincials from abundant Moscow shops. In reality personnel wouldn't always demand documents. They recognised provincials from how they are dressed and look like, so they asedk for a card only from suspiciously looking people
Sausage trains demonstrate that the key aspect of the "centrally planned economy" is the word "central". Centrally planned USSR was a hierarchical society of extreme inequality. It was your assigned status rather than cash that determined if you're allowed to buy food or not
Second, that they hierarchy and inequality had the geographical dimension. Those living closer to the centre for power were supplied lavishly. But in just two or three hours away there started a zone of extreme destitution. Another planet
Moscow is not an "economic" or "cultural" centre. It's what Max Weber would call a "Fürstenstadt": city built around a princely court and living off expenses of a prince, his officials and courtiers. Its modern prosperity is a function of its central status in the imperial system
That's why the economic effect of the war is so little visible in Moscow. The prince would make every possible expense and put every effort for maintaining the quality of life and the business as usual mindset in his Fürstenstadt. The rest of the empire can go fuck themselves
That also explains the destitution of much of the Russian empire. That's Arkhangelsk, the capital of Pomorye which had historically been the richest part of the country. All the resources are sucked from the region to feed the Fürstenstadt of enormous size and appetites
Russia is so poor because its Fürstenstadt is just too expensive to maintain. Moscow is a geographic anomaly among the cities of its size, being located so:
1) far north 2) deep inland and far from (used) navigable waterways 3) in a non-farming region
It's too expensive to feed
Almost all large cities of the world lie either close on the shore of the World Ocean (Rio de Janeiro) or close to it (Sao Paolo) or on actually used navigable waterways (Chicago). That makes logistics cheaper and the city easier to maintain
Those few cities that don't lie near the shore/on the navigable waterways lie amidst the highly fertile food producing regions. Examples: Mexico City, Bogota, Delhi. Expensive logistics pretty much sentence them to poverty. But the abundance of food make them sustainable, if poor
Moscow is different. It's located 700 kms away from the nearest seaport in St Petersburg. That looks far enough. In reality though cargo trains connecting Moscow with its seaport go by much longer circular way through Vologda and Yaroslavl. Direct route is occupied by Sapsan
Add to that that Moscow is a uniquely northern and cold megapolis. There are no cities of its size located so far north and on so infertile soils. This regions is called Нечерноземье, Not Black Soil, referring to its infertility in comparison to the Black Soil of the south
Add to that that this extremely bid and extremely expensive to feed Fürstenstadt should never ever feel the slightest worry and discomfort from the reckless imperial policies
And you'll get why Moscow sucks its empire dry. It's just too expensive to feed. The insatiable appetites of the Fürstenstadt are a major reason for the decolonisation of the Russian Empire. End of 🧵
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The great delusion about popular revolts is that they are provoked by bad conditions of life, and burst out when they exacerbate. Nothing can be further from truth. For the most part, popular revolts do not happen when things get worse. They occur when things turn for the better
This may sound paradoxical and yet, may be easy to explain. When the things had been really, really, really bad, the masses were too weak, to scared and too depressed to even think of raising their head. If they beared any grudges and grievances, they beared them in silence.
When things turn for the better, that is when the people see a chance to restore their pride and agency, and to take revenge for all the past grudges, and all the past fear. As a result, a turn for the better not so much pacifies the population as emboldens and radicalises it.
The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today
This entire war is the regime change gone wrong.
Russia did not want a protracted war (no one does). It wanted to replace the government in Kyiv, put Ukraine under control and closely integrate it with Russia
(Operation Danube style)
One thing to understand is that Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable
In 1991, Moscow faced two disobedient ethnic republics: Chechnya and Tatarstan. Both were the Muslim majority autonomies that refused to sign the Federation Treaty (1992), insisting on full sovereignty. In both cases, Moscow was determined to quell them.
Still, the final outcome could not be more different. Chechnya was invaded, its towns razed to the ground, its leader assassinated. Tatarstan, on the other hand, managed to sign a favourable agreement with Moscow that lasted until Putin’s era.
The question is - why.
Retrospectively, this course of events (obliterate Chechnya, negotiate with Tatarstan) may seem predetermined. But it was not considered as such back then. For many, including many of Yeltsin’s own partisans it came as a surprise, or perhaps even as a betrayal.
The single most important thing to understand regarding the background of Napoleon Bonaparte, is that he was born in the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean, in the words of Braudel, is a sea ringed round by mountains
We like to slice the space horizontally, in our imagination. But what we also need to do is to slice it vertically. Until very recently, projection of power (of culture, of institutions) up had been incomparably more difficult than in literally any horizontal direction.
Mountains were harsh, impenetrable. They formed a sort of “internal Siberia” in this mild region. Just a few miles away, in the coastal lowland, you had olives and vineyards. Up in the highland, you could have blizzards, and many feet of snow blocking connections with the world.
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