Kraut
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2022–2023
21:09 · 1.9M views · Aug 20, 2021
Kraut traces centuries of political development, from Mongol rule and the Orthodox church to Muscovite autocracy, that shaped Russia's authoritarian state. It uses countryball animation and compares Russia with Europe and China.
HN recommends it as a good introduction to Russian authoritarianism, though some commenters say it is flawed or wrong on many points.
6 comments from Hacker News
I doubt this question can be answered in a short comment. The differences stem from thousands of years of diverging cultural influences, history and geography. As for Russia, this video gives a good introduction to the origins of Russian Authoritarianism (with comparison to power structures in China and Europe over history), that go all the way back to the 5th century A.D. with the Huns and the unique geography/climate of Russia: this video .
>How does it get to this point? I would imagine because, going back to even before Soviet times, all the people who do care are either disappeared or flee, leaving behind only the people who are too jaded to effectively resist. Russian absolutism is generally more, well, absolute than other places. Though it's imperfect, a video[1] by Kraut gets the gist across. [1] this video
It was not really a base for capitalism to take hold and effect. It needs a basic rule of law and democracy to work. All it got was brief window of chaos, before the kleptocracy returned. Best description of the cultural background i found so far was this: this video
It's just wrong on so many points it's just difficult to argue it. Russians didn't build castles: they did and they also had castle-like monasteries (even the Moscow stone Kremlin has been built during the Mongol yoke). Using Polish flags of the 16th century as an illustration is also at best misleading this video The black plague had almost no impact because the black plague was very limited in Russia. All this stuff about aristocracy competing for the favor of the monarch just disregards that almost every Romanov monarch was a result of a coup by aristocracy Russian church was independent till Aleksei Mikhailovich and we still have old-believers. It completely disregards the fact that during Ivan the Terrible rule Siberia was conquered by an independent knyaz (it was basically a private entity). Comparing Russia to China is based on economic developments of the last 30 years. 40 years ago Russia was a super-state while China was recovering from its Cultural revolution. We don't know what is going to happen in the next 30 years. Nowadays Russia in some points is less centralised than even European union.
Russians have never had any real individual rights. Throughout their history the common people have just been resources enslaved to brutal overlords. The Soviets were perhaps somewhat softer overlords on average, but the principle remains. The state will dispose of disobedient people the same way it would dispose of rotten potatoes. this video