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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Feb 8

Why does Russia attack?

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.

Let's see why

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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Feb 2

On the origins of Napoleon

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.

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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Jan 4

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

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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Dec 16, 2024

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

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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Nov 30, 2024

In his “Clash of Civilizations” Samuel Huntington identified eight civilisations on this planet:

Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Western, Orthodox, Latin American, and, possibly, African

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.

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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Nov 23, 2024

Revolution and the Jews

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

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