Navalny's death seals Russia's fate.

[Beastly Boy]

Last edited Sun Feb 18, 2024, 05:44 PM - Edit history (1)

For centuries, Russia, especially its intelligentsia class, aspired to become an integral and influential part of European liberal culture. Navalny was the iconic figure who embodied this long-standing aspiration for his Russian contemporaries.

With the murder of Navalny, Putin sent an unmistakable message: Russia's co-existence with Europe, let alone affiliation with it through shared culture, is now officially dead. Putin killed it, quite literally. He did a 180 and is now facing east, towards the Asia-centered powers like China and Iran, as models for future developments for Russia. Essentially, he took Russia back to the times of the Mongol Golden Horde and Ivan the terrible, when Russia was the Mongol sphere of influence. Putin is no longer looking at Europe as a partner, but more as a target for conquest, in the same way as China is looking at Tibet and Taiwan, and Iran is looking at the Middle East.

This, more than his failure to subjugate Ukraine, speaks of Putin impotence as a leader of a former and rapidly declining superpower.

Putin may be grossly overestimating his abilities, and Russia is sure to pay the price for it.

[Lovie777]

1. 400 thousand killed so far on Russia's side due to................................

illegitimate war in Ukraine. Countless innocent Ukrainians murdered and maim as well as thousands kidnapped.

The killing of Navalny and the GQP puppets, Putin is a monster.

[WarGamer]

2. 400,000 casualties... not deaths.

Casualties are all KIA plus wounded plus POW plus illness, accidents and MIA.

[anamnua]

3. Four times as many as in the whole Afghan war. NT.

[BootinUp]

4. Slightly over 100K KIA per US intel.

[WarGamer]

5. US intel had AFU KIA at 70k as of last summer... NYT

8/2023

[former9thward]

7. Where are you getting that figure?

No one claims it.

[Deuxcents]

6. Too many deaths per whatever. The op is about Putin's murder of Navalny

And the consequences of Putin’s decisions. Too many deaths even for a madman’s dream of immortality

[former9thward]

8. I don't think anything seals a nation's fate.

Stalin killed his opponent Trotsky, who was living in Mexico, and a year or so later we were allies and giving them food and war materiel. As the saying goes, Nations have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies.

[Model35mech]

9. Russia didn't escape feudalism to free the serfs until the 1860s

And mistreatment of rural poor lasted at least until the 1920s. It's arguable if the countryside is yet really free from the discriminating attitudes and under-development held-over from centuries of chauvinistic provincialism. Industrialization didn't really begin in Russia until the 1920s.

These two things are really important to shaping behaviors of societies the are modern liberal European republics. So I'm having some trouble reconciling the idea that Russia has aspired to be in the mainstream of Europe for centuries.

Their rapid move into the modern era is roughly 90-100 years old, and as a nation they haven't cast off a lot of old baggage like their love of strong-men, colonialism, and being the controlling benefactors of an imperial economy served by vassal states. Those things began to end in Europe in the mid-1800s and really pretty much ended across non-Soviet dominated Europe 10-15 years after WW2.

[Beastly Boy]

11. Russia (the Kievan Rus) started out as a distinctly European collection of principalities.

It lost its European identity after Genghis Khan's descendants eventually conquered almost all of its its territories, and the tiny and otherwise unremarkable principality of Muscovy, a client state of the Mongol Golden Horde, gained power and prominence under the Mongol protection, as other Kievan Rus principalities were being divided between Lithuania, Poland and Sweden.

Ever since then, Russia acquired distinctly Asiatic characteristics while retaining an aspiration to recapture the territories and the Eurocentric character of its predecessor, Kievan Rus.

So these aspirations are easily traced centuries back. Certainly, Peter the Great, inviting European architects and planners to build a new city of St. Petersburg at the westernmost edge of the Russian Empire and moving its capital there speaks volumes of Russia's ambitions. Catherine the Great, an otherwise despotic ruler, nevertheless corresponded with the most "enlightened" minds of her times like Voltaire and Diderot, and made French the de-facto second language of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia. Lenin was influenced by probably the most liberal political theorists of his time, Marx and Engels. Gorbachev tried to align the then Soviet Union with European liberal values and culture.

All of these characters were pivotal, each in their own ways, in shaping Russia's history and its present.

Putin is also pivotal, but in reverse. By killing Navalny, one of the last remaining Euro-liberal Russians of any cultural or political significance, he sent a clear message of breaking ties with the pan-European wing of Russian politics and culture and adopting the Eurasian view of Russia's geopolitical orientation, looking towards the East rather than the West, for Russia's aspirations.

[Former3rdCommittee]

10. There was never much chance that Russia would become and integeral part of Europe

The Warsaw Pact countries all had smaller populations than Germany, UK, France, Italy and Spain. Thus they were manageable and desirable additions to Europe.

But Russia in 1990 after the dissolution of the USSR had a population of over 140 million people, much larger than third place Germany. Admitting the culturally different Russia (and even more different second place Turkey) were seen as dangerous additions, especially by fourth place UK and bystander US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_population