1/ Why is there no uprising in #Russia against #Putin? And what motivates the conscripts to join the brutal #WarinUkraine? A long thread on social divisions in #Russian society. There have been other periods in history, when commentators have asked:
2/ “How does it chime, the barbarity of rapes, the shelling, pillage, devastation—and, indeed, the apathy of Russian society—with the magnificence of Russian Culture? Did not this nation give us Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shostakovich, Sakharov, maestroslike Evgeny Kissin,Emil Gilels?”
3/ And then there’s Chekhov and Bulgakov, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mussorgsky and Bunin… Rudolf Nureyev. The list goes on. Behind these binaries defying comprehension lies a fundamental misconception about the Russian social fabric, which goes back to the communist period.
4/ Many in the west continue to share the myth that communism erased the social divisions of Tzarist Russia and while the USSR was unequal, these were somehow new inequalities intrinsic to the nature of the communist project.
5/I’ve summarised my objections to these arguments in my new book on the Russian social divisions: 5-minute video about the book cambridge.org/core/books/est…
6/(see also 5-minute video about the book Estate Origins. On inequalities in #Russia you may listen also to my latest podcast What’s the future of capitalism? lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=…
7/The social patterns of war draft now expose the subtle divisions that never disappeared—between the better educated bourgeoisie (merchants, wealthy rural tradesmen) plus the superbly educated aristocracy whose descendants became the so-called new soviet intelligentsia,ononehand
8/and the large mass of latter-day peasant society a large chunk of which had experienced serfdom, on the other. Many people have in the past written about Putin’s disdain for westernised intelligentsia because of how he experienced USSR collapse (contd in next thread)
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