On November 20, 2025, trading algorithms identified what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history—not in months or years, but in 18 hours.
Just llike with many people, what they say and what they do can be two very different things.
Yes, for my specific point here what they say matters and not what they do.
they talked socialism while being totalitarian state capitalists. This was even noted at the time of the Russian revolution by people such as Rosa Luxemburg.
I prefer “red fascism” over “state capitalism” for USSR until the Thaw. After the Thaw it was more of state capitalism, yes.
All those things also took a hit at the end of WW1, in the Great Depression, and during WW2.
Yes, but the way WW2 ended was a push in the opposite direction. Or it wasn’t, but 20 years later, when some of the ruins were rebuilt, it was retrospectively presented as that and the future as bright and peaceful.
Nobody who was paying attention believed the Russian bullshit, before or after the collapse of the Communist Party’s rule.
I mean, you shouldn’t say those things from a different time and a different context.
Much of the Soviet bullshit that many people in the west still take for truth isn’t accepted in ex-USSR and vice versa.
Much of what inside USSR itself was considered bullshit got a new life in the 60s, when a somewhat romantic view became common that there is some virtuous root of revolution that one can find from that nasty place in which the country was then. It was sort of a rebellion against Soviet reality of that time, but it was also a rebirth of its worldview. World revolution was replaced with progress, peace, socialism, yadda-yadda, ideologically correct science and weeding out enemies of the people were replaced with perception of the cold war and space race as of something that will eventually lead to friendship and unification, and pretty typical militarism was replaced with melancholic pacifism, memory of those “fallen to preserve life itself”, pictures of some transcendent emotion unifying the whole world - some sort of spring air and night sky feeling, I can’t even explain it, but I’ve got my share.
It’s a very potent aesthetic, and very young in feeling. I don’t even think it was bad. Unfortunately, it was all purely emotional. And, anyway, many of the people who contributed to that cultural movement were dissidents 20 years later.
But - much of what seems to have always been obviously untrue or true was a reasonable claim for many people 20 years ago.
You can’t believe what you think you clearly see from today. Not without lots of physical proof.
And things that seem small and trivial from far away could have looked quite big and real for those living them.
Yes, for my specific point here what they say matters and not what they do.
I prefer “red fascism” over “state capitalism” for USSR until the Thaw. After the Thaw it was more of state capitalism, yes.
Yes, but the way WW2 ended was a push in the opposite direction. Or it wasn’t, but 20 years later, when some of the ruins were rebuilt, it was retrospectively presented as that and the future as bright and peaceful.
I mean, you shouldn’t say those things from a different time and a different context.
Much of the Soviet bullshit that many people in the west still take for truth isn’t accepted in ex-USSR and vice versa.
Much of what inside USSR itself was considered bullshit got a new life in the 60s, when a somewhat romantic view became common that there is some virtuous root of revolution that one can find from that nasty place in which the country was then. It was sort of a rebellion against Soviet reality of that time, but it was also a rebirth of its worldview. World revolution was replaced with progress, peace, socialism, yadda-yadda, ideologically correct science and weeding out enemies of the people were replaced with perception of the cold war and space race as of something that will eventually lead to friendship and unification, and pretty typical militarism was replaced with melancholic pacifism, memory of those “fallen to preserve life itself”, pictures of some transcendent emotion unifying the whole world - some sort of spring air and night sky feeling, I can’t even explain it, but I’ve got my share.
It’s a very potent aesthetic, and very young in feeling. I don’t even think it was bad. Unfortunately, it was all purely emotional. And, anyway, many of the people who contributed to that cultural movement were dissidents 20 years later.
But - much of what seems to have always been obviously untrue or true was a reasonable claim for many people 20 years ago.
You can’t believe what you think you clearly see from today. Not without lots of physical proof.
And things that seem small and trivial from far away could have looked quite big and real for those living them.