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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
Aug 9
There's a subtle point here that 99,999% of Western commentariat is missing. Like, totally blind to. And that point is:

Building a huuuuuuuuuuge dam (or steel plant, or whatever) has been EVERYONE's plan of development. Like absolutely every developing country, no exceptions Image
Almost everyone who tried to develop did it in a USSR-ish way, via prestige projects. Build a dam. A steel plant. A huge plant. And then an even bigger one

And then you run out of money, and it all goes bust and all you have is postapocalyptic ruins for the kids to play in
If China did not go bust, in a way like almost every development project from the USSR to South Asia did, that probably means that you guys are wrong about China. Like totally wrong

What you describe is not China but the USSR, and its copies & emulations elsewhere
Read 7 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 7
Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan

Everyone is trying to appropriate the rise of China for their own purposes, like it proves their theory, ideology whatever

No one, however, wants to appropriate the post-Soviets, who, by the way, also made capitalist reforms
What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power

That was almost entirely state's job
Read 4 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 1
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:

“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry

(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)

So, yes, living under the actual communism sucks
Read 5 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jun 28
Some thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s victory

Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc

Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one Image
1. Public outrage does not work anymore

If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while

For a while, this tactics worked

Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
Read 8 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jun 28
People don’t really understand causal links. We pretend we do (“X results in Y”). But we actually don’t. Most explanations (= descriptions of causal structures) are fake.
Theory: X -> Y

Reality:

There may be no connection between X and Y at all. The cause is just misattributed.

Or, perhaps, X does indeed result in Y. but only under a certain (and unknown!) set of conditions that remains totally and utterly opaque to us. So, X->Y is only a part of the equation

And so on
I like to think of a hypothetical Stone Age farmer who started farming, and it worked amazingly, and his entire community adopted his lifestyle, and many generations followed it and prospered and multiplied, until all suddenly wiped out in a new ice age
Read 6 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jun 26
Some thoughts on Zohran Mamdani's victory:

1. Normative Islamophobia that used to define the public discourse being the most acceptable form of racial & ethnic bigotry in the West, is receding. It is not so much dying as rather - failing to replicate. It is not that the old people change their views as that the young do not absorb their prejudice any longer.

In fact, I incline to think it has been failing to replicate for a while, it is just that we have not been paying attention
Again, the change of vibe does not happen at once. The Muslim scare may still find (some) audience among the more rigid elderly, who are not going to change their views. But for the youth, it is starting to sound as archaic as the Catholic scare of know nothings

Out of date
2. What is particularly interesting regarding Mamdani's victory, is his support base. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that its core is comprised of the young (and predominantly white) middle classes, with a nearly equal representation of men and women
Read 12 tweets

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