Kaplya

Putin to Lukashenko yesterday:

Putin: In the energy sector, unfortunately, we observed a series of attacks on our energy facilities and were forced to respond. I want to emphasize: even for humanitarian reasons, we did not carry out any strikes in winter, meaning that we did not want to leave social institutions, hospitals, and so on without power supply. But after a series of attacks on our energy facilities, we were forced to respond. But I repeat again: if everything comes back to solving those issues that we talked about initially, and they are related to energy issues, including the solution to one of the tasks that we set for ourselves, and this is demilitarization. First of all, we proceed from the fact that in this way we influence the defense industry of Ukraine, and directly. But if we do move on to some conversations, to resolving all issues in other ways - well, of course, as I have said many times, we are ready for this.

I think that they - the opposite side - to a certain extent painted themselves into a corner when they refused to negotiate in the hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield, inflicting a strategic defeat on it. Now they understand that this is impossible, they refused to negotiate and are now in a rather difficult situation. Our goal is not to put everyone in a difficult position; on the contrary, we are ready to work constructively. But of course, there can be no imposition on us of any position that is not based on reality.

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F-16s are not going to help. They need state-of-the-art F-35 stealth multirole fighters if they want to have a chance.

The US has more than 700 F-35s, and the Ukrainians need to have access to as many of them as possible for a coordinated strike to stand a chance against Russia.

How can F-16s engage without getting into Russian air defense range?

Mavericks air to ground has a 20km range. AMRAAM air to air is about 100km.

A Russian S-400 has 400km operational range. At the start of the war, a S-400 in south Belarus turned on its radar for a few minutes and shot down a Ukrainian MiG-29 all the way in Kyiv, which then crashed into an apartment building and the Ukrainians proceeded to blame the Russians for targeting civilian structures.

You are mistaken, at least partially.

The unprecedented growth of the USSR economy occurred under Stalin’s Five Year Plans from 1929-55, at 13.8% (minus 1941-45 during the war, which registered a minus 3.7%) over a 20 year period.

The numbers were calculated using gross national income from the Soviet archive as GDP was not calculated (at least not in the same way) during the Soviet times. Check out the Russian economics book “Crystal Growth” for more details.

For comparison with the other periods in the USSR and Russia:

The growth during the Tsarist Russian empire were 2.8% (1885-1906) and 5.2% (1908-13) respectively.

The NEP period (1921-28) also registered a high growth of 12.7%, but it was largely due to the recovery from an extremely low base that followed directly from the Civil War, and began to peter out near the end of the NEP period. From 1921-26, growth was 14.8% but it fell to 6.7% in 1927-28. (Note: WWI and the Civil War from 1914-20 saw a decline of -11.7%)

Stalin’s Five Year Plans were the true sustained economic growth model, which registered at 14.5% (1929-40) and then immediately after the war at 13.0% (1946-55).

Unfortunately, Khrushchev screwed up and the growth of the rest for the Soviet periods were pitiful:

7.8% from 1956-65;
5.3% from 1966-85;
0.3% from 1986-91.

Post-USSR period under Yeltsin saw a rapid decline: -12.0% (1992-94) and then -2.9% (1995-98).

Putin’s recovery were modest at best: 6.9% (1999-2008) then 1.0% (2009-19).

Note that post-1991 figures were calculated using GDP instead of gross national income (GNI), but the differences never exceeded more than 3%, so the comparison is still largely valid.

For comparison with other countries over a 20-year period:

USSR - 13.8% (1929-55) over 22 years (minus 1941-45)
Taiwan - 11.5% (1947-73) over 27 years
China - 10.4% (1983-2007) over 25 years
South Korea - 10.2% (1966-88) over 23 years
Japan - 9.7% (1966-89) over 24 years

Note that the difference between the USSR and Taiwan/China/South Korea is vast when you take into account the compound growth over 20+ years.

Note also that South Korea copied the Soviet Five Year Plans, among other things, to initiate its rapid economic growth model during the 1960s.

Let’s be fair here, it said:

Powerful Soviet-era weapons modified with fins and sat-navs

i.e., taking old Soviet-era dumb bombs and installing new flight control kits on them and converting them into glide bombs, which is now a new type of weapon. Kinda like JDAM but much cheaper.

But Ukraine is only a shit show for the US if you look at it militarily, and the US is certainly no stranger to losing in wars over the past century as a global hegemon.

The destabilization of Europe during the Ukraine war has effectively created a huge international capital flight into the US, mass de-industrialization and soon mass privatization of European assets as Europe pursues an austerity policy, the destruction of euro as a currency rival to the dollar, as well as the strengthening of the dollar as a result, the disruption of energy supply chain that netted huge profit for the American oil and gas sector, military buildups that grant billions of dollars of contracts to the American military industrial complex, and finally, dozens of billion of aid money to Ukraine that are laundered back to the American politicians and their proxies.

I’m not even going to go into the more conspiratorial territory like the eventual mass emigration of mostly white Europeans to the US as Europe inevitably sinks into fascism (which ironically is what the right wing conspiracy nuts feared about “The Great Replacement” except it’s a realistic plan under Biden to create a white supremacist state in America) to replace Chinese immigrants as the US prepares a war with China. All of these are projects underway that could eventually lay the groundwork for the Fourth Reich in America.

The strategy against China is going to be the same. De-stabilize the Asia-Pacific region, the blockade of which is going to block Chinese exports and shut down the global economy. This is why China couldn’t wait to speed up the Belt and Road Initiative and shift their entire transportation chain inland, to prevent the disastrous consequences of an imminent sea route blockade by the US.

However, the Belt and Road Initiative also has a critical flaw in that most (~70%) of its projects were funded in US dollar, which rendered the entire chain susceptible to US interference through financial warfare. This is why I always say that the only way for China (and the rest of the world) to come out on top is to de-dollarize aggressively. The longer they wait, the more vulnerable the entire system is to the threats posed by the global institutions controlled by the US.

Do not for a moment think that the US strategists are stupid. They may make mistakes (for example, they miscalculated and failed in defeating Russia), but they certainly have achieved a lot of their strategic goals (destroying Europe is a far bigger fish to fry than to defeat a weak economy like Russia, that is, a Europe-China alliance is far scarier to the US than a Russia-China alliance), and have a lot of cards left in their sleeves which they will ruthlessly dispense to make life harder for everyone else in the world. They’re not going to go down willingly, and if they had to, they’d rather take the whole world down with them.

Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (~1913) was probably his best work.

Lenin loved it so much that he proclaimed it to be “the Bolshevik Party’s definitive declaration on the national question”.

Even Trotsky, his arch-nemesis, considered it a great work and had to throw in the jabs “hmm… why has Stalin never published another work of such quality before and after this? very suspicious… don’t you think… was it really written by Stalin himself??” lol.

Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question also became the theoretical foundation of the People’s Republic of China’s classification of its 56 ethnic nationalities, based on the criteria that Stalin had laid out.

Having said that, the Comintern did make a lot of mistakes when it comes to advising anti-colonial struggle in the third world. Mao’s theses were far more applicable to poorly developed colonies in this regard.

The economic growth and societal transformation under Stalin (in particular under his Five Year Plans from 1929-1955) registered the fastest growth in the history of humanity that has never been surpassed.

Not even China with all its achievements came close to what transformed the USSR from a poor feudal backwater of Europe into a space-faring nation within a single generation. And the USSR achieved all this while being isolated and without relying on cheap labor (workers rights were on par with Western European standards) and influx of foreign capital.

If you’re a Western capitalist, you’d be worried too. A country full of illiterate peasants and barely electrified, is now threatening to overtake us because of communism?

Khrushchev reversed much of Stalin’s policies that worked and marked the beginning of an end to the greatest socialist project of the 20th century.

Older generation folks really don’t like to talk about it, but I’ve heard that the real Cultural Revolution as some had experienced was even worse than the scene described in the book.

The scene in Netflix is almost an accurate recreation of the scene in the book, down to the Chinese dialogue. Even the critique against Einstein’s theory of relativity and the Big Bang theory was real. They didn’t add anything of their own to the scene.

The only thing that pisses me off is the banner “Down with social imperialism” which clearly aimed at the USSR, instead of “Down with capitalism” which showed their bias. However, it’s something only noticeable to those who understands Chinese.

My personal theory is that the Cultural Revolution traumatized entire generations of China so much that they are no longer confident in committing to radical paths toward socialism. Everything has to be taken slowly, conservatively, and laying as low as possible. Xi Zhongxun (Xi Jinping’s father), one of the most decorated commanders during the Liberation War (Chinese Civil War), for example, was purged during the Cultural Revolution and had to go through the “struggle session”. Many intellectual and academic families were banished to the countryside. It was a very messy and chaotic times fueled by anti-intellectual frenzy.

Here’s the Cultural Revolution “struggle session” scene from Farewell My Concubine (1993) by the way.

Bloomberg also put out more or less the same thing (https://archive.ph/fAYpB) a week ago if you want a “credible” Western mainstream source.

If you don’t have health insurance in the US, Russia is better if you ever get sick. Not even an argument.