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Sept. 8, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
49:18
Prole Rage

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comEd Dutton joins the group to discuss the life of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022), and important parallels and differences to be found between the end of the Soviet Union and contemporary America. The gang also takes up the idea of a “proletarian revolution” and how this relates to the MAGA movement.

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The one thing he didn't want to do, though, was strange, was that people understood that his predecessors, Brezhnev and people like that, I think they kind of understood that things were going very wrong, that communism, the communist system wasn't working, and it was going to collapse, and all those that were strongly invested in it.
lose out severely and so they had this clamp this clamp down in the in the 70s where it was it was in many ways more strict uh than in the 60s but but But that's what tends to happen when a system is on its last legs, like the 50s, was more strict on homosexuality, for example, than in the 40s or 30s.
And it was interesting that he realised that there was a niche, there was a way of gaining power and popularity by saying things need to change, we need to have glasnost, we need to have perestroika.
Yeah.
But then I saw a documentary where he was negotiating with the leaders of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania, and they basically wanted to, of course, just get rid of communism.
And at this, of course, he balked and was like, oh, no, no, our people would never accept that.
They would think it was unfair.
So he had this different contradiction in a way whereby his niche that he planned for himself was, oh, I will be the great reformer and therefore I can keep the system going.
Exactly.
That's the contradiction.
First off, Gorbachev did have some blood on his hands in terms of repressing popular revolts, but he is probably most remembered for ultimately being a reformer and thus encouraging popular revolts and basically reform.
Being intended as something to maintain the system, but then ultimately inspiring a total delegitimization and demoralization of the system.
So, I mean, and you can kind of, I don't know, I mean, I think there's some different figures.
I mean, because, like, Khrushchev's secret speech on Stalin was not published until, like, the 80s or something like that, but it was well known.
But he basically said, he kind of gave the line about communism that the system is perfect, there's just some bad people in it.
So, you know, Stalin was a complete jerk, and we shouldn't repeat all of his follies, but the system itself works.
So he was a kind of rotten apple.
And I think that was kind of one way of moving forward.
He was pushed out by Brezhnev, who was his, I believe it's like deputy or something later on.
And then Gorbachev, I think, was trying something different.
I mean, like the late 1960s and 70s, there's a term for it in Soviet historiography, which is it's like the...
Eternal time or like the no time or something.
There was this point where the system of Soviet communism was just existing.
And it was just like the train was rolling down the track and it wasn't gaining any speed.
And it was maybe slowly slowing down, but it wasn't really coming to a crashing halt.
And there was all of this.
Like, you know, social change going on in the West that was almost, that was just absent in the East.
So you had this, like, 20-year period of, like, no time, basically.
Again, I'm reading, many of you guys have seen this.
Philip Short has this new biography of Putin out.
And Philip Short, he's a good historian.
He actually did...
I've not read these, but he's done biographies of Mao and Pol Pot or something.
So he seems to really like writing massive biographies of dictators.
And he's now taken on Putin.
It's a biography, but he really brings in the cultural aspects of things.
So he kind of places Putin within a broader trajectory.
A number of the biographies.
I've read one real biography of Gorbachev, and one of the things that this guy concluded was that, yeah, this guy was Machiavellian and calculating.
So, for example, he wanted his relationship with Edward Shepard-Nardzer, who was the foreign minister.
And he wanted to move and later became the kind of de facto dictator of Georgia.
And he wanted to move Shepard Daza to being kind of vice president so that he could basically take all the blame for all of the reforms and whatever.
And Shepard Daza saw this was a trap and didn't want to move.
And then the contrast then with Yeltsin is really interesting.
Exactly the wrong...
Moment, basically.
Gorbachev was careful and cautious and whatever and didn't want to strike.
And so therefore, and certainly didn't want to overthrow communism.
And so therefore, there was a coup and of course he was imprisoned in his, is it DACA they call it?
Yeah.
And you've got this Yeltsin who was kind of just an impulsive risk taker, gambler.
Yeah.
Who just saw such different personalities, who just saw his chance, probably not even particularly calculating towards it, just saw his chance and just took it.
And it's an amazing difference.
But the idea they're trying to portray him now because of the context in which he's died of the Russian.
He was this good man, and he tried really hard, and all of his reforms have been undone.
Well, I think he was actually a good man.
But he also stuck, he kept hold of communism to the last minute.
He wanted to make sure communism didn't fail.
There's no question about that.
I think he actually was a very moral...
And to give him credit and to look at him realistically.
I think he genuinely believed in his reforms.
And, you know, opening things up, you know, at least what I was reading is that there were these publications of these magazines.
You know, that Putin was reading when he was stationed in Dresden.
And there actually was a kind of opening up of criticism and discourse and so on.
I mean, Gorbachev basically, like, all of his reforms to save communism triggered the total delegitimization of communism.
But to his...
Credit, I guess.
He was not willing to engage in full-on suppression.
So you have Glasnost and Perestroika in Russia, and from what I can understand, when he was traveling to Germany, there was all of this almost kind of like jealousy of East Germany, of like, we want what you have.
We actually want to kind of have an opening up of discourse.
We want communism with a human face.
There was this kind of notion of, it was Wir sind das Volk, which means we are the people.
And it was a kind of bottom-up, I don't know, like tea party, almost like rebellion against the government.
And he basically encouraged it effectively.
He never, he always said.
That communism is the right system.
And East Germany is the East German Democratic Republic.
This is the right system.
But we hear you.
And again, that kind of toppled these dominoes where you have this total delegitimization of East Germany by people just crossing over the border.
Ransacking the Secret Service and all this kind of stuff that was just totally demoralizing and shows this contempt of the people for the government.
Which again, he triggered and he allowed to happen.
And I guess to his credit, he could have cracked down.
He did crack down in certain places in the Baltic states.
He didn't ultimately stop it.
And he did give over power, which is pretty remarkable.
I mean, he resigned from being the leader of the party.
I mean, on Christmas Day, it's pretty incredible that someone would do that, knowing communism's history.
But I do think he's misunderstood in the sense that he was certainly Machiavellian, as you say.
He was...
I mean, he was charismatic and interesting and he was a good politician.
But, you know, again, I guess it's that, I don't know if this is comparable to kind of our own time, but you just kind of allow, you give them an inch and they take a mile.
Like, you allow some sort of reform and openness and the whole thing just starts collapsing.
Yeah, but the difference is that they were, I mean, it was more extreme.
Their situation was they couldn't get hold of food.
Yeah.
It was so extreme.
And, well, maybe that's coming.
But everyday life was severely hampered, and they could remember, even in the 50s or 60s, that it wasn't as bad as this.
Yeah.
Of course, people understood that there was something seriously wrong, and there was only such an extent to which they could stop people talking, and they could stop rumours of what life was like in the West from coming out.
Oh, look, they were listening to Western radio stations.
Yeah, that was the thing that did for Ceausescu, was that once the neighbouring country to Romania fell, they had a trump card, because they knew.
That communism had fallen in other parts of Europe.
And, of course, people knew that.
Of course, it was suppressed by the Romanian media, but they knew that.
And then there was this massacre or whatever it was in Timisoara.
Over this process.
And then that was it.
Everyone just knew.
And something, some sort of process, like perhaps you've talked about before, that process of people just feeling sad or whatever, and so their clothes reflect whatever, that term I always forget.
And something like, yes, the social mood just kind of changed.
And he stood up in Bucharest and was just booed.
And everyone just, everyone, apparently the military just kind of almost immediately switched sides.
Yeah.
And they just knew the social movement was changing.
This is it.
He's been booed in public.
That's it.
It's over.
And so it would take something dramatic like that.
And so in our situation, they keep prognosticating doom in this part of the world, but certainly in places like Britain or whatever, with regard to the winter.
And Germany, that no one's going to be able to heat their homes and it's going to be really serious trouble.
So perhaps it would take something like that for people to...
I just can't see it getting as bad.
The thing is, I mean, I see, I don't...
I was thinking through this, I don't think the situations really are analogous.
I mean, because there was an out and there was an end.
So it's like...
Again, when Gorbachev was reforming communism, even before the Soviet Union, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, McDonald's had established a restaurant in Moscow.
I think it was 1987 or 1988.
There was a famous episode, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, Spitting Image, which is where they have these...
These wax, these latex puppets that lampoon politicians and whatever, exaggerate.
And there's a spud you like, which is sort of baked potatoes.
I now declare the Moscow branch of spud you like open.
And someone says, I would like one potato, please.
I am sorry.
We are sold out.
Yeah.
And it...
It's interesting.
I saw this report on YouTube of a...
I think it was like the nightly news with Peter Jennings or something.
And they were...
So this was in 1988, I believe, is when the first McDonald's opened in Moscow.
And they were interviewing the people.
And it was a bit expensive.
It was kind of like going out for a night at the town, of course, in terms of price.
But you were at McDonald's.
And the woman who works there, who's this nice Russian girl, she said, like, I've been trained to smile constantly.
Like, it's a very kind of American and kind of down-home quality of you smile and you're nice to everyone.
And she said that it was disturbing all the customers because they thought that they had done something wrong or that she was laughing at them.
So the customers are like, "What's this issue here?
Everything okay?" And she's like, "Welcome to McDonald's!" It was kind of amusing.
It was almost like this like...
Cultural tyranny of smiling all the time, which is very American.
Oh, it is.
I mean, it's a hideous thing in America, the way they say, have a nice day.
Of course, they don't want you to have a nice day.
They want you to have a very unnice day.
But have a nice day.
You have a good one.
You have a good one.
I don't know if it kind of makes you feel good to say it.
I don't know.
But it's so ubiquitous in America.
Have a nice day.
And we just balk at it.
It becomes hollow.
It's so honest.
And you have to say it.
So it's like if you say to someone, like in Britain, there's a kind of code which Finns don't get.
Finnish people, people who don't know this, I live in Finland, Finnish people will be very literal about it.
If you say to a Finn, hey, we must go for a drink sometime.
Yeah, I'll ring you.
I'll ring you.
Then they take that literally.
And they will wonder why you haven't done so.
Whereas in Britain, that's just part of a code.
That's just saying, I don't wish you any specific harm.
Right.
And that difference, and that is taken to a further degree in America.
They'll say things like, if you're ever in Badiddly-Hoy, Idaho, you must come and stay in my house.
Yeah.
And of course they didn't mean a word of it, but it's a very strange thing.
Yeah, right, because it is a kind of hollow promise.
Like, how are things going?
It's like, oh, things are great.
Yeah, thank you.
And it's like we have these, like, you know, high suicide rates and people dying.
Drug overdosis left and right.
Things are just great.
Thanks.
Things are great.
But they are much more friendly in America, but there is a degree to which you wonder, do they mean it?
Exactly.
But I would almost kind of prefer that, too.
I don't know.
You dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
There's something to be said for smiling and being friendly.
Just, like, people being endlessly dreary and frowning, it actually does bother me.
I kind of get sick of it.
It's just like, you know...
You wouldn't like Eastern Europe, then?
No.
Particularly Northeast Europe, they don't smile.
They don't even say, excuse me.
Even in Latvia, it's the same.
They'll just sort of snake past you.
They won't say, excuse me, because to say excuse would involve social interaction, and that could be embarrassing.
It's like a race of autistics or something.
Yeah, in some ways they're a race of autistics, but in other ways they're kind of like a race of schizophrenics because they overread social signals and they get terribly upset.
So I've been in this situation where I've offended somebody.
They'll say, you shouted.
I did not shout, I raised my voice.
There's no distinction in Finland between shouting and raising your voice.
If you raise your voice, you're shouting.
There's no word that distinguishes them at all.
Interesting.
Where are these people from then that are here in the group?
We've got somebody that looks like they're Swedish.
And I'm thinking American, British.
Is that what we are?
Yeah, we've got some Americans here.
Yeah.
You know, my Boris, I guess Boris is busy.
He's probably working.
Boris has some very interesting things to say about Russia.
This is the issue.
These calls that we did, as you noticed on the Substack link, I've just gone to one Zoom link because I don't know what was going on with the real euro hours Zoom link, but as opposed to recording the call in the cloud.
It gives me these, like, 17-second clips of nothing.
It's just totally bizarre.
But anyway, this should work because this link has never not worked.
The link I got through my email works, but the link that you sent me through Skype, that didn't work.
That took me just kind of a list of international phone numbers.
Oh, you needed to hit the link above it, I think.
Well, it doesn't matter.
But just to go back, see, I don't...
Real quick, I don't think the situations are completely analogous.
During the Cold War, there was an out and there was an in.
Certainly in the beginnings of communism, and even up to, say, the famous kitchen speech with...
Khrushchev and Nixon.
I think there was a genuine concern that communism actually had gotten it right and that it was sweeping the world.
I mean, in 1945, Stalin was to some degrees accommodating of the Western powers in the sense that he felt...
Like in the next three years, there's going to be a communist revolution in Britain and all of these evil capitalist powers will fight against each other and take each other down.
Like our, you know, bulldozing all of Europe is just inevitable.
And so we can actually be rather patient in this.
And there was reason to believe that.
When he was meeting with Mao in the next years of, I can't remember when that famous trip was, when Mao visited Moscow, you know, there was just this friendly banter of like, you handle the East, we'll handle the West.
We're all on the same team.
This was inevitable.
And in terms of Nixon meeting Khrushchev in this famous kitchen, there was just this notion of Soviet production is more efficient.
Why would you create 200 different washing machines?
There's no possible reason to do that.
Just create one.
It's the best and the most efficient.
And we will bury you, is the kind of famous line by Khrushchev.
And so I don't know when it basically occurred that, you know, the Soviet economy was just frozen in ice and was just unworkable.
And they were just existing in this, like, two-decade-long stagnation and slow decline, whereas the West was moving forward.
Yeah, it was really the 70s, the kind of president, these older...
People in charge.
I mean, similar to, I guess, Biden, you could say.
These gerontocrats.
Right.
There's all these theories in economics.
I don't know if we have any people that are trading economics here.
I'd be interested in your views on it.
But try and make sense of something, which it seems to me...
It just makes sense on some other level, which is in terms of sort of group hormonal differences and changes in how people feel and that these spread across society and people understand how other people feel and despair spreads as well.
There's a number of studies on this.
Depression spreads.
And so you could end up with really just a kind of a depressed society.
And what's his name?
Theodore Dalrymple has done a number of books on his time in the Soviet Union towards the end, particularly in Albania.
And you just get this sense of just doom.
And that no one sees any point, and that therefore something at that point has to snap on an individual level.
If people are highly depressed, they'll often have sort of religious experiences, not often, but they'll sometimes have, which will inspire them to bring about change.
And this kind of thing, I suppose, to stretch the metaphor, can happen at a societal level.
And I just think that something like that, it was just this sense of doom.
I get the impression on the ground in Britain...
There is increasingly people, older people particularly, but are just really annoyed by the situation.
They're annoyed by the fact that whenever they watch a TV commercial, it's a mixed-race couple, for example.
Not that they object to mixed-race couples, but they object to it being in your face like that.
It can never not be a mixed-race couple, ever.
Unless it's a commercial for paying funeral insurance.
And they're irritated.
And they will become aware that other people are irritated, and they'll talk about it and whatever, and these things kind of organically spread.
There's an irritation, I feel, in the UK, which wasn't there perhaps in 2015, that is growing now.
I can't talk for America, but...
Oh, well, yeah, the irritation in America is intense.
And it's actually, it is getting very extreme.
I mean, I think a lot of this, like, 80 to 90% of the fear of, like, critical race theory in schools and so on, or the gender stuff, I think it is massively overblown.
And it's due to the fact that we...
We live, we have this kind of social media or I guess to some degree like televised environment where people are existing, you're kind of existing everywhere and the most intense experience in the country is your experience.
So I actually saw this thing last night.
I was just browsing through YouTube and it was in Idaho.
These Christian fundamentalists who view Idaho as the, I think it's like the last redoubt movement or something, where they're all, I had never heard of this before, but they're all moving to Idaho to create the last redoubt of Christian fundamentalism.
There was actually a white nationalist version of that as well.
I think this one is like, you know, a thousand times more popular.
And they're freaking out at, like, local librarians and so on.
And they're, like, they want to get rid of books that the library doesn't even house.
You know, so they're just over, like, they see something on social media, and because social media is becoming their consciousness.
So their consciousness isn't about, you know, everyday experience of walking down to the coffee shop or whatever.
Their consciousness is actually libs of TikTok.
Yeah, sorry.
It's so easy.
Sorry, carry on.
I'll just finish real quick.
There is this nice, I would imagine, liberal lady who is the librarian.
She kind of read as liberal, but who knows?
It doesn't even matter.
She's saying they're like...
Telling me that I'm harming their children and they're saying that they want me to ban books that the library doesn't even own.
And they're coming to my house protesting while engaging in open carry.
And she just kind of resigned at some point.
She was like, this is not...
You're openly carrying a weapon.
I don't even know all the national laws.
Is that legal to openly carry a gun?
Yes, you can open carry.
The issue actually is concealed carry in many cases.
But yes, you can absolutely do that in America.
I mean, I doubt you could do that in New York City or something, but yes.
I will occasionally see it out here in Montana of someone just with a sidearm openly carried.
But yeah, and so again, like maybe these people are kind of crazy, but I think it's something kind of Bigger in the sense that their experience is now digital.
And so they'll see some crazy woman on TikTok, who is genuinely crazy, kind of talking about puberty blockers and critical race theory and all of this stuff.
And that is their experience.
Their experience actually isn't real or local.
It's this social media consciousness that they've developed.
Well, yes, and you can say that obviously it's perfectly natural in a polarised society that you transpose everything that you feel about the most extreme manifestations of that, if you don't know any of them personally, onto all people that are that.
So in Northern Ireland, for example, you have a totally polarised society.
Catholics and Protestants have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
And the only...
The only Catholics that you'd see on the telly would be Catholic extremists from Sinn Féin or something like that.
The only Protestants you'd see on the telly would be Protestant extremists from the Democratic Unionists or something like that, or the politicised Protestants anyway.
And so the idea that there's just an ordinary person that's Protestant who's basically just like you, but has slightly different views on whether you have to pray to the big man one-to-one or you need an intercessor.
It just doesn't happen.
And that's more so now, of course, they've kind of come together.
And I think you're getting that, and it's very sad in a way, that you're getting that with politics, that when I was 20, I meet people now at conferences and whatever, who are 20 years younger than me.
And it's extraordinary.
They have like opinions and pubic hair and, and they, and, and, and they, you know, they, and they, I would have no friends who were left-wing.
Right.
No, absolutely not.
They would never date a girl that was left-wing.
They just have nothing.
And that's apparently what it's like.
I was talking to these people that were at the same university that I was at, but obviously 20 years later.
And they're saying it's totally polarised now.
At Derby University, there's right-wing secret societies and things like this.
And you'd have nothing to do with people.
It's just, you're either a right-wing person or a left-wing person, or you don't care.
But increasingly, you are either one or the other.
Whereas when I was there, most people didn't care.
And if they were right-wing, they were a bit right-wing, and they would be perfectly happy to be friends with them.
I was good friends with the girl that lived next door to me.
She was an active member of the Labour Party, and she later became Deputy Mayor of Tower Hamlets.
And we were perfectly good friends.
Indeed, she put me next to her at the table on her 21st birthday party.
And that just wouldn't, it seems that they were saying, these 20-year-olds, that just wouldn't happen now.
It's just totally, because I think the internet, it's a cliche, but the internet must have, more than social trends and hormones, but it must have contributed to this, because there's no one culture anymore.
Imagine a situation where 60% of British people would tune in and watch one television programme.
More than half the country are all sitting there, around the telly, watching Coronation Street.
And now that's just gone.
We don't have anything.
Maybe American football somewhat resembles that, but I don't think any television show actually resembles that anymore.
Even when I was a child, everyone watched the nightly news.
And there was just a general sense of like, what is newsworthy?
What's up?
What's down?
What's left?
What's right?
I don't think anything approaches that.
I mean, even the, like, again, I'm kind of going off a little bit of a stray here, but like, the difference between music now, and I keep, I'll talk to young people about this just to make sure that I'm right, because...
You know, there is a tendency that you listen to the same music that you liked in your 20s or maybe even your teens.
Like for the rest of your life, you just become inherently nostalgic about music.
But I'll talk to people about this.
In the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, there were bands that...
It's not that everyone bought their album or everyone was listening to them.
You know, constantly, but, like, they kind of defined a certain era.
You know, I mean, to go back to, like, the Soviet Union, I mean, when, was it Billy Joel or John Bon Jovi?
I think it was Billy Joel.
No, no, hold on.
Who did Born in the USA?
I always get these guys mixed.
Springsteen, excuse me.
I always get, those three I always kind of mix up.
Like, I know they're a little bit different, but.
Springsteen did a concert in the Soviet Union that was the kind of like back in the USSR.
This was like a tremendous event.
U2, in their heyday of the kind of like late 80s and 90s, they were a kind of global band that was representing the West.
And the coincidence that they were called U2, named after a U2 spy plane, is kind of fascinating in that regard.
The Octoon Baby album was actually produced in former East Berlin.
And it was a kind of cultural event where this one band was kind of defining an era and speaking to the world.
And even Nirvana...
Which was this, you know, cool band in some ways, but it is a kind of nihilistic, like, downward, spiraling band, where it's reducing the musicality, it's playing guitars out of tune, it's screaming, you know, it's very influenced by punk, of course, but, like, it represented a certain, like, nihilistic urge in the late 90s, but it kind of, like...
In that way was a national and global phenomenon.
It was the band of its era.
There is nothing even approaching that at this point.
There's no...
I mean, rock is dead in many ways, but there's no one band...
There are people who are popular, of course, but there's no one band that is kind of defining a moment in time.
I think everything has just been...
So massively fragmented.
Do you disagree, Ed?
You're looking at me.
What?
Britney surely has defined the last 25 years.
Britney Spears.
One woman has defined a quarter of a century.
Surely we could agree on that.
You're talking about Britney Spears?
Of course.
Richard, would you say that Lady Gaga and some of those female pop artists have defined the sound of the Early 2010s, at least, or the late...
Yeah, I think that's fair.
I think that's fair.
But Lady Gaga is, like, again, her popularity declined.
I mean, she had a lot of albums that were duds.
And she still is a kind of, like, icon, and she does Hollywood soundtracks.
I mean, I'm a person that...
But you see my point.
I have very...
I've no real interest in music apart from Iron Maiden.
I used to quite like Iron Maiden when I was about seven.
And otherwise, I've just never been particularly into music.
And somehow, I don't know how, but certain musicians have come to my attention.
And I'll have them on while I'm jogging or something.
Such as this Canadian.
Hey, hey, you, you, do you have a girlfriend?
That, her.
I think her name's Avril Lavigne.
Okay.
So that's one that's come to my attention.
Lady Gaga's another.
And then there's this Taylor Swift.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then there's this Katy Perry.
So those are the ones that I know.
I've heard them on the radio in the car or something like that, and I found them a bit catchy.
Right.
Look, there are...
I mean, I do think that Taylor Swift is kind of a national...
Band in some degree.
But I think you see my point in the sense that everything is so fragmented.
There's no unifying artist that kind of almost speaks to a time or something.
There are these ever-fragmenting niches.
And, you know, for better and for worse, there's a lot of move towards just listening to stuff on SoundCloud and so on.
So anyway, it was just the point, like, if you were listening, and I was getting this in this Philip Short biography of Putin, like, if you were buying Blue Jeans, or you were listening to Bruce Springsteen, or you owned a VCR in 1988, that was...
That wasn't just mere entertainment or fashion.
That was also kind of a political act.
There was a notion of a West that was more dynamic and more intoxicating and more certainly wealthier and so on that was kind of like outside you.
I mean, that now famous commercial that Gorbachev starred in in, I don't know, 93 or something.
Where he's at Pizza Hut.
And there's this family where the young man in the family says, you know, oh, we have these great opportunities now that communism's over.
And then his father is basically saying, oh, it's all chaos.
It used to make sense.
Now, you know, whatever.
And then he's like, well, you know, we have, you know, again, they were going back and forth.
Like, you know, we've got cool art and things like that.
Like, no, it's unpatriotic or whatever.
And then they both said, oh, but we now have Pizza Hut.
And they both raised the glass to Gorbachev.
We all love Pizza Hut.
There was a notion of Western cultural imperialism.
There was a kind of West outside of the East that you could look to and say, I want that.
If you don't care about things like free speech or democracy or whatever, or if you're not particularly materialistic, then it could be argued, what did Gorbachev give you?
He gave you...
Fast food and materialism and glamour.
Yeah.
And that's all that's remained as well, because the free speech bit, that's all that's gone.
So what his legacy is to Russia is fast food, the Americanisation of Russia.
Pizza Hut.
Which is not necessarily a brilliant thing.
No.
And I think Russians do, in some ways, understandably...
I mean, you can see this on these, like, crazy television programs, which are like Fox News on steroids, where you have these, you know, commentators are all standing at podiums, and they're just, like, blithely discussing nuking Poland.
I mean, again, I'm not exaggerating.
I see these things.
They're translated.
I presume they're not mistranslated.
And they're just talking about putting people in gulags.
They're just like, oh, well, we have gulag solution to the Ukrainian question.
I mean, it's just insane.
I was taken aback in 2012 when I spent a week and a half in Latvia.
Without anybody else there.
It's always really interesting to go on holiday and not be with another foreigner.
Well, not holiday, it was a working thing.
I was lecturing at Riga Stradina University and I was saying to them, these Latvian 20-something master's students, we have so many Latvians and whatever in the UK working in pubs and apparently they actually earn more than, let's say, a doctor does in Latvia.
And why aren't you part of that?
That exodus to the West.
And it was really interesting.
A lot of them agreed, well, no, no, we want to be here because this is where we're from.
We're from here.
Our friends are from here.
Our family are from here.
But then they made the interesting further point that, oh, we want Latvia to be great.
We want to stay here and build Latvia up so that in 10 or 20 years' time, we're richer than you and you're wanting to come here to work.
And they had that idea.
You'd never, at that point 10 years ago, and certainly not now, hear a person like that say something like that.
This idea of the future is ours and the future is great and we have this desire for future glory.
And that was the fascinating difference.
Well, but I think Russians, I mean, I think there is a little bit of that.
I mean, I think that's like a kind of...
I sense a great deal of desperation and kind of depression of, you know, life might not be shitty, but we can still threaten Warsaw with nuclear annihilation.
You know, a kind of, like, dark version of what you're talking about.
Because all of those professionals, like there was this, I don't know if you saw this leaked memo from Russia, but like 200,000 IT professionals have left, fled Russia after the invasion over the past six months.
I mean, that's insane.
Yes, I certainly saw that a lot of middle class Russians that don't support Putin have fled to Georgia.
Because that's one of the places that they can get to without any visa problems or whatever.
They can easily get there.
So there's this growing community of sort of young, hip Russians in Tbilisi.
So that's certainly true.
But yeah, I mean, you're losing...
We talked a lot about this last week.
I mean, there's the 1%, and you obviously have this 1% in Russia of monopolistic...
Capitalists who are multi-billionaires and then half of them end up slaughtered alongside their family in some, you know, villa.
I mean, this is happening at an alarming rate.
But there's also like the 10% of, you know, professional class and upper society and they are fleeing and Putin just basically said good riddance at one point.
I mean, what was the metaphor he used?
Like, it's like a fly comes into our mouth and we spit it out or something.
I mean, it was remarkable.
And so you're left with this like desperate proletarian class that doesn't necessarily want there to be successful, you know, lawyers and doctors and businessmen and artists and journalists or whatever in Russia, but are just basically like...
Fuck you, we'll nuke your ass.
And I think that's what I see.
I'm not sure I see, like, coming greatness.
I see, like, troll anger, basically.
Proll anger.
So sort of, how can I put this?
You know that film that you told me about that you watched about the Vikings?
What was it called now?
Oh, yeah.
The Norseman.
I finally managed to watch it.
I was on a plane coming back from the UK and it happened to be quite a big plane and so there was movies on it and things.
I managed to watch half of it on the plane and then I managed to watch the rest of it.
That's quite good actually.
I was surprisingly impressed by it.
But it would be kind of Viking greatness.
You know, greatness within a context of poverty.
Greatness within a context of general destruction.
That kind of greatness.
Yeah.
And I think that, like, pro-linger, I mean, I think you can see a lot of that in the United States.
I mean, I think, to tie a bow around what I was saying earlier, I mean, there was an out and there was an in.
So, I mean, when I was a kid in the 80s, you know, granted, the 1980s were not like...
The 1960s and the Cold War, where people were talking about duck and cover and nuclear annihilation and so on like that.
Things were much more muted in my childhood.
I think there was a kind of Soviet freakout over Operation Ryan.
They were speculating about a first strike from NATO and things like that.
But anyway, it was much more muted than the 40s, 50s, and 60s and so on.
But there was an out and there was an end.
So I could kind of imagine, oh, like, what would it be like to be in communism?
Like, you know, it'd be oppressive and horrible.
And if you were living in the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc, you'd say, what would it be like to live in the West?
You know, everyone has blue jeans and Coca-Cola and listens to Bruce Springsteen and U2 and whatever.
And now there's no out or in.
Like, there's no...
There's no other world out there.
So, I mean, that's where I think, like, Gorbachev's fascinating, but I don't think it's really analogous.
Like, he basically, he was a dyed-in-the-wool communist who wanted to save communism for the world.
And maybe just save it in Russia or save it in the territory that they had.
It wasn't going to be a global revolution, but still save it.
And so he ended the Cold War, effectively, with...
With Ronald Reagan, he, you know, these are positive things.
He encouraged reform, encouraged reform in Germany, the most important, you know, Eastern Bloc state.
And this all led to the collapse.
So it's a kind of, you give them an inch, they take a mile.
Once you kind of open up the floodgates just a touch, then the water just rushes through and then you end up resigning.
You know, in this almost kind of depressing spectacle on Christmas Day, just saying, I'm leaving, you know, this is what it is, and you give over power.
But I don't think it's really analogous now, because it's like, what is the alternative?
Like, what is the East or the West in comparison for what we have today?
All I see is kind of pro-anger.
It's, you know, like...
With Trump fans, what are they demanding outside of, I want Donald Trump to be my president?
There's no other world that they're demanding.
There's certainly no policy that they're demanding.
I don't know, vague notions of tariffs.
They don't even talk about tariffs.
Getting control of illegal immigration, I mean, okay.
But it's all just extremely vague.
And it's basically, I mean, what are the applause lines for Trump fans?
It's basically the 2020 election was stolen.
And Trump should be in office.
That's what you get with a lot of ideological movements like that.
It's very, very vague.
Well, yeah.
But I guess what I'm saying is, like, what I was saying, like, it actually, there's a lot of similarities between Russians, again, at least as I understand them, looking at them, you know, from living in the United States, you know.
But, like, there's a lot of similarities of this troll outrage of, like, you know, fuck you, we're just going to drop a nuclear bomb in Warsaw and...
Ukrainian bastards.
We're just gonna, you know, throw you into a gulag.
Ha ha ha.
And then on the other side, in the West, it's basically, fuck you.
We don't care, you know, what the FBI says.
We're gonna defund the FBI.
Trump is my president.
Like, it's this just, like, totally, it's this lashing out and, like, just totally unproductive.
I mean, Marx is an interesting writer.
I was actually reading some Marx recently.
He's a particularly early Marx.
He's kind of a fascinating writer.
He actually reminds me a lot of Icha.
They had many similar concerns and they were actually attacking the same people, the young Hegelians.
But, I mean, he was fundamentally wrong when he thought that...
And he came to this conclusion intellectually.
He was like, you know, basically there's this working class in Germany.
They have nothing to lose but their chains.
So they will be a kind of like universal subject of history.
Like they'll liberate us all because they almost have to.
And so I mean, I think relying on the proletarian really is, you know, just totally incorrect.
And what you get from proletarian revolutions are the kind of things that we're seeing now.
Just this general F-you world sentiment.
And I don't think they're really kind of capable.
I think you just run into that brick wall with those people.
I mean, again, I would temper that with also the notion that we've reached this kind of end of possibilities where there's nothing There's nothing outside of the West that people would want.
Can't we be like them?
No.
What do you want to be like?
China, they want to be like you.
In Russia, I'm sure they want to be wealthier or something, but what's the difference?
You have McDonald's or something like it in Russia.
You can buy Gucci handbags in Russia.
You can buy...
I mean, what else?
There's no alternative that you would go to.
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