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Kamil Galeev Profile picture
@kamilkazani
Sep 11, 2022 • 23 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
It's time to update the list of introductory threads

1. By February 27, I concluded that Russia would lose this war. Russian army was overrated, Ukrainian - underrated, while Russian political goals misunderstood. They planned for 1968-style pacification

2. Avocado economy: Why Russia cannot manufacture anything?

An industry's level of complexity negatively correlates with the rank of interest groups controlling it in the Russian hierarchy. The more mafia-like, the more dominant, the simpler the industry

3. Russian military industry completely depends upon technological import from the West, not from China. Whereas Kremlin closed their eyes on importing European equipment and pretending it's Russian, it jailed those who tried to do the same with Chinese

4. Russia is primarily the natural resources exporter. This created two problems. First, sources of cheap-to-extract resources are depleting. Second, it can't compensate for losses on Western markets in China. It just doesn't pay off

5. Crisis and Jubilee

Russia's spiralling into a deep crisis. It was visible before the war but now it's rapidly accelerating. And every major crisis entails mass redistribution of power, property and status. Because crisis is essentially a Jubilee

6. A crash introduction into Chechnya

7. How to hack the system. On the procedurality of bureaucracy and thus of state, etc.

8. Vladislav Surkov and Putin's rise to power

9. Stalin's industrialisation. Mostly based on Sonia Melnikova-Raich's research which I absolutely recommend

10. The motivation behind Z-war is not "security", "alliances" or even political affiliation. It's the need to extinguish wrong cultural memes and impose correct ones. That's why the war has wide popular support and why Russians so easily agreed for it

11. Parliamentarism in Russia. What should you know about the Communist Party (TL;DR Communists = Russian GOP)

12. TDZ Turn -> Kr Prom -> Krasmash

Case study on supply chains of the Russian nuclear delivery systems producing industry. Krasmash is the only* liquid propellant ICMB producing plant in the country

* MAAZ may be doing it too, but I'll cover it later

13. Die Fürstenstadt

Moscow is the city built around a princely court and living off prince's expenses. Its prosperity results from its central status in the imperial system. Moscow is uniquely expensive to feed. That's why its colonies are so destitute

14. Why mass mobilisation in Russia won't work?

TL;DR Mass Soviet style mobilisation requires expensive infrastructure and cadres being maintained for it even in the peace time, just in case. In the post-Soviet era these inefficient expenses were cut

15. Elon Musk

Innovators create wealth. And yet, they're greenhouse flowers who flourish only in *very* safe societies. They prosper because they've outsourced their security. If they don't get it, ignore their opinion on security and foreign policy

16. Fall of Kazan

or deescalation: the limits of applicability

17. Poverty of Realism



On the fallacies and intellectual dishonesty of Mearsheimer's analysis which is instrumental in legitimising the appeasement advocacy
18. National Divorce

Every Russian setback in Ukraine increases the chance of imperial collapse. Still, debates about Russian breakup are mostly based upon the Wilsonian axiom (ethnolinguistic differences -> nation building). But that's not how it works

19. National Divorce: Q and A

There's a major misconception about Russia "being 77% Russian". This view is incorrect as it ignores:

1. Massive census fraud
2. Suppression of regional "Russian" identities
3. Ethnic balance depending upon ethnic hierarchy

20. @navalny



TL;DR Started independent political career with hate propaganda. Repeatedly confirmed his ultranationalist platform has not changed, never apologised (except for a few slurs). Enjoyed thorough whitewashing by the Moscow and Western media
@navalny 21. Disintegration of Russia: a plausible scenario

TL;DR It's not some cartoonish regime fighters raising arms. It's moneyed interest groups integrated into the previous regime, deciding that

a) Costs >>> benefits
b) No "doctors" will come from Moscow

22. Why Navalny's succession is not an answer

TL;DR Westerners are often astonished to see many Ukrainians/Russian minorities being rather unenthusiastic about the @navany's succession to the Russian throne. In this thread I will try to show why

23. Why Russian elite is "acting mad"?



TL;DR. They are not acting mad, they are playing mad to show Putin they are not dangerous:

😛 You are playing mad-> 🐷Reputation destroyed -> 👁️Putin sees you can't betray him now-> He lets you live 😊

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More from @kamilkazani

Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Sep 17
Wagner march was incredible, unprecedented to the extent most foreigners simply do not understand. Like, yes, Russia had its military coups in the 18th c. But those were the palace coups, all done by the Guards. Purely praetorian business with zero participation of the army.
Yes, there was a Kornilov affair in 1917, but that happened after the coup in capital. In March they overthrew the Tsar, then there was infighting in the capital, including a Bolshevik revolt in July, and only in September part of the army marches to St Petersburg.

Half a year after the coup. Not the same thing
I think the last time anything like that happened was in 1698, when the Musketeers marched on Moscow from the Western border. And then, next time, only in 2023.

(Army leaves the border/battlefield and marches on the capital without a previous praetorian coup in the capital)
Read 17 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Sep 14
As a person from a post-Soviet country, I could not but find the institutions of People’s Republic of China oddly familiar. For every major institution of the Communist Russia, I could find a direct equivalent in Communist China.

With one major exception:

China had no KGB
For a post-Soviet person, that was a shocking realisation. For us, a gigantic, centralised, all-permeating and all powerful state security system appears to be almost a natural phenomenon. The earth. The sky. Force of gravity. KGB

All basic properties of reality we live in Image
It was hard to come up with any explanation for why the PRC that evolved in a close cooperation with the USSR, that used to be its client state, that emulated its major institutions, failed to copy this seemingly prerequisite (?) institution of state power

Unexplainable Image
Read 7 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Aug 30
Soviet Union was making a lot of weaponry.

No, it was making A LOT of it.

Soviet output of armaments was absolutely gargantuan, massive, unbeatable. “Extraordinary by any standard” , it was impossible for any other country to compete with. Image
From 1975 to 1988, the Soviets produced four times as many ICBMs and SLBMs, twice as many nuclear submarines, five times as many bombers, six times as many SAMs, three times as many tanks and six times as many artillery pieces as the United States.

Impossible to compete with. Image
Which raises a question:

How could the USSR produce so much?

It is not only that the USSR invested every dime into the military production. It is also that the Soviet industry was designed for the very large volumes of output, and worked the best under these very large volumesImage
Read 5 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Aug 24
We are releasing our investigation on Roscosmos, covering a nearly exhaustive sample of Russian ICBM producing plants. We have investigated both primary ICBM/SLBM producers in Russia, a major producer of launchers, manufacturers of parts and components.

Image
We have five OSINT materials, one per each plant. To access our materials, you can either:

a) Click on a respective plant in the diagram
b) Choose it from the list below it

Follow the link: rhodus.com/roscosmos
Image
Each material includes an eclectic collection of sources, ranging from the TV propaganda to public tenders, and from the HR listings to academic dissertations. Combined altogether, they provide a holistic picture of Russian ICBM production base that no single type of source can. Image
Read 20 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Aug 8
Two observations. In the recent years,

1. Silicon Valley has been turning red
2. MAGA discourse has been increasingly dominated by a few tech moguls

Now the thing with moguls is they are extreme outliers, who do not understand they are outliers.
Overall, you can expect tech moguls to have much, much higher level of reasoning abilities compared to the political/administrative class. But this comes at a cost. Their capacities for understanding the Other (masses count as the “Other”) are much poorer.
E.g. Putin is much, much less of an outlier in terms of intelligence compared to Thiel. He is much more average. At the same time, I am positively convinced that Putin understands the masses and works with masses much better.
Read 12 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Aug 3
One problem with that is that too much of the supply chain for drone production is located in China. The thing with drones is that they grew out of toys industry. Cheap plastic & electronic crap that all of a sudden got military significance

America forgot how to produce cheap
Image
That is also the major problem I have with "China supports Russia" argument. China could wreck Ukraine easily, simply obstructing & delaying the drone/drone components shipments. That would be an instant military collapse for Ukraine.
Both Russian and Ukrainian drone industries are totally dependent upon the continuous shipments from China. To a very significant degree, their "production" is assembly from the Chinese components which are non alternative and cannot be substituted with anything else (as cheap).
Read 4 tweets

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