Former deep-cover-spy-turned-expert Andrei Bezrukov called for precisely this in summer 2013 before the Ukrainian Crisis derailed his similarly proposed reforms, but they now seem to be making a comeback, and “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” should support them.
Some of the things that he wrote would get someone defamed by the "Non-Russian Pro-Russian" cult as "anti-Russian" or even a Western "spy" if they shared them word-for-word on X.
"Unfortunately, Russia doesn’t fit into this new economic map as an influential stakeholder. It has not been included in any of the free trade zones. Its membership in the BRICS has no obvious economic benefits. The creation of the Eurasian Union enlarges Russia’s economic space, but does not grant it access to the most promising markets of tomorrow.
Russia has little influence on the mechanisms that form prices on the market for natural resources, upon which the country greatly depends. Its reputation as a place for investments, deserved or not, is horrible. Being an outsider to the circles that set global economic policies, it carries all the risks and has none of the opportunities. As the processes of globalization and economic integration continue, Russian authorities may find themselves in a bind: while lacking a sufficient set of economic tools, they will be held accountable for the outcomes of their policies and the wellbeing of their citizens.
From the point of view of strategic security, Russia is squeezed between two expanding centers of power – China and the European Union. The country has a shrinking population and no reliable friends. Its huge natural resources provoke envy. While the possession of a nuclear arsenal makes a direct attack on Russia improbable, the country is vulnerable to low intensity warfare along its southern borders that exploits its religious and ethnic problems."
"In the West, predominantly Orthodox Russia is neither small enough to be absorbed by the closest civilizational center, nor big enough to be a global center on its own, such as, for example, China or India. Despite Russia’s growing economic and cultural ties with the rest of Europe, its religious and political differences are preventing the inclusion of Russia into the Euro-Atlantic club.
In the East, culturally and ethnically, Russia will always be a loner. It may have difficulty managing its dormant conflict with Japan, not to mention its potential tensions with China. In the best of scenarios, the future of these relationships could be defined by the principle that “good fences make good neighbors.” As Central Asia enters the orbit of a Greater China by the logic of the dominant market ties, Russia is facing cultural and political isolation. The Russian cultural and language space keeps shrinking.
The more restless and self-conscious the Islamic world will become, the less comfortable will Russia be living next to it. Its own Muslims, as their numbers and influence grow, may experience a cultural pull to the South – towards modernizing Turkey and rich Gulf countries. And the changes in the Middle East, where religious forces are gaining political power, will not go unnoticed."
"In terms of its internal instability, Russia is entering this century being not in peace with itself, increasingly socially polarized, ethnically divided and religiously intolerant. From the point of view of the quality of life, Russia has little to be proud of. Its populated areas are polluted. Its infrastructure is inadequate. Its cities are mismanaged and often dirty. Its bureaucracy creates a nightmare for businesses and private citizens alike, negating the attractiveness of its tax rates. Despite its dynamic cultural life, the everyday habits of excessive drinking and hazardous driving are unappealing to both natives and outsiders.
Russian culture has managed to absorb and blend together a great number of ethnicities that lived within the borders of the Empire and, later, the Soviet Union. However, as a fairly remote and self-sufficient country, Russia has little experience in dealing with “real foreigners” – those who do not belong to its civilizational space. Just as young, mobile, curious Russians are open to the world, Russia as a country is not. Its businesses and bureaucracy work with little regard of how things are done elsewhere. For the huge majority of the “best and brightest” of the world, Russia may look exciting to visit, but not nearly open, inclusive, safe or convenient to do business with or to settle in.
Russia has no competitive advantage in any drivers of wealth other than natural resources. However, even as a resource-rich country, it is forecast to lose its clout, as the United States becomes a net oil and gas exporter and the world develops alternative ways of producing energy."
Every single point, and there are more too but readers who haven't yet gone through his article should already get the gist, is "anti-Russian" per the standards of the "Non-Russian Pro-Russian" cult.
Nevertheless, Bezrukov is a modern-day Russian hero due to his decades-long service as a deep-cover spy in Canada and the US. He therefore cannot by any stretch of the imagination be defamed as "anti-Russian".
Accordingly, every single point that he made is now shielded from that defamation, and anyone who still resorts to such low-IQ attacks is themselves the bonafide "anti-Russian" troll.
"Just as young, mobile, curious Russians are open to the world, Russia as a country is not. Its businesses and bureaucracy work with little regard of how things are done elsewhere. For the huge majority of the “best and brightest” of the world, Russia may look exciting to visit, but not nearly open, inclusive, safe or convenient to do business with or to settle in."
While I sincerely enjoy living in Moscow, it's indeed still extremely difficult to move here and receive the equivalent of a green card (permanent residency).
Despite migration reforms aimed at facilitating this process, including for "highly skilled workers" (a legal category of migrants who work in specific fields and earn above a certain amount monthly), all bureaucratic processes remain byzantine.
I'd go as far as saying that the stereotypes about Russian bureaucracy aren't just true, but aren't true enough and actually downplay how difficult it is to deal with these processes.
For example, last year, a new policy was implemented whereby folks have to register their SIM cards, which is aimed at reducing their use by Ukrainian drones in terrorist attacks. Fair enough, that makes sense, but the process itself is Kafka-esque.
It took me over six weeks and 13 trips to three different places -- the local office of the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), my bank, and my phone company -- to complete this process, mostly due to the MVD's database taking 5-14 days to update (!!!) as was confirmed separately by several employees on different visits who I asked because it was so surreal for me to hear that database of a nuclear power's Ministry of the Interior is so far behind other countries'!
This is a nightmare for tourists since they have to waste all this time (and the process might now relatively be "streamlined" by Russian standards) going to the MVD, waiting for the database to update, going to the bank (which is where you do your biometrics unless the local MVD office now has the ability (was always bizarre to me that they didn't have it originally!), and only then go to the phone company, and keep in mind, NOBODY IN THIS SEQUENCE SPEAKS ENGLISH, ESPECIALLY NOT AT THE MVD!
So you either try to wing it somehow and hope that there's a kind soul working there or just an average Russian getting things done who'll spend the time translating (and it can take a very, very long time!) or hire an interpreter, which costs a lot of money (you'll be going to several places and the whole thing takes a long time at each place, also keep in mind that you as a tourist will have to look up all these places in advance, including bus or metro routes there!), and could very easily ruin someone's vacation.
This site, which helps people move to Russia, created a handy infographic summarizing the seven steps and candidly informs folks that "the entire process usually takes 2 weeks and requires a total of 20-25 hours of effort"!
And don't even get me started on how rude and honestly ignorant many of the employees at "My Documents" (the name of the local MVD office in every neighborhood) can be!
Speaking as an American, we don't tolerate public employees literally screaming in our faces, but boy oh boy, does it happen so often here in Russia!
That's for sure the most intense "cultural shock" that I experienced and still suffer every time I have to go there, which I now without exaggeration dread.
I always laugh thinking back on how I once though that my university's bureaucrats were so ignorant and rude, but by comparison, they're 19-century European aristocrats compared to typical Russian bureaucrats! lol
" Russian culture has managed to absorb and blend together a great number of ethnicities that lived within the borders of the Empire and, later, the Soviet Union. "
Only through force and cultural dominance. This never works in "democracies".
Oh really? And the American Civil War—was that a joke? And the forced integration of Scotland and Ireland by the English parliamentary monarchy? And the eradication of all strong regional cultures by the French Republic starting in 1873? And the Italianization of South Tyrol or the Slavization of Slovenia from 1918 onward
You misunderstood me. I meant " has managed to absorb and blend together a great number of ethnicities that lived within the borders " never works in "democracies."
Andrew, frankly, I think you're getting carried away with what is nothing but empty talk. No concrete proposals, a grotesque overvaluation of the EU, no recognition of what makes Russia strong, and a profound self-loathing. Before finding Russian cities unsanitary, I suggest he come see the rats scurrying around Notre Dame in Paris, the garbage-filled sidewalks of London, the pervasive filth of major US cities. Let him compare the Moscow metro with that of any Western capital. Instead of displaying his contempt for the work accomplished over the last 30 years, let him start by making some proposals so we can have a laugh.
I think that some of his critiques from 2013 are outdated, like cities being dirty, but the gist of what he talked about is spot-on in my opinion. The mindset also needs to change in order for Russia to adapt with the times. I genuinely do feel like it's lagging behind a bit in some aspects like the tech race.
Bureaucracy also needs to be streamlined and the country should be easier for highly skilled foreigners to relocate to or Russia will only continue getting laborers, not experts, doctors, etc. The natural population replacement also continues to decline so attracting quality "new Russians" is important.
Yes, yes, the criticisms are valid, and so are the intentions—but the road to hell is paved with them. I’d like to see what concrete proposals are actually being put forward. We have the same people in France, with their bleak diagnoses—we’ve even given them a nickname: ‘declinists’—but invariably, when it comes to proposing solutions, all we get is a jumble of ultra-liberal ideas that only accelerate the decline they claim to denounce.
They call for reforms?
Which ones?
It’s always the same: fewer civil servants, fewer public services, less public healthcare, fewer regulations on employers—at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment—for the greater benefit of free foxes in a free henhouse.
Since Thatcher and Reagan, and especially since the end of the USSR, the entire West knows what “reform” really means. The Russians, for their part, learned it during the dreadful Yeltsin era. Quite a period of “reforms,” wasn’t it?
When I hear the word ‘reform’ in the mouth of a Valdai henchman, I find myself instinctively reaching for the grip of my revolver
Aside from that, you’re right about the issue of attractiveness. My son, who graduated from one of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools and is now specialized in finance, feels a strong pull toward the Russian civilizational model—just like a surprisingly large number of very bright young graduates who are becoming less and less interested in the London or New York mirage. But while the Anglo-Saxons are highly attractive and welcoming, Russia remains dismissive of these talents in search of a new homeland that still believes in itself. Nothing is being done to attract them—absolutely nothing.
If Russia were to set up a one-stop immigration desk in its embassies, connecting employers with candidates, smoothing out all administrative procedures, and providing support for relocation, I’m certain the results would be striking across Western Europe.
One should never forget that amid the current wave of hysterical Russophobia, there are still 25 to 30% of Europeans who feel more sympathy for Russia than for the United States. We’re talking about 150 million people.
It’s hard to believe that Russia doesn’t attract at least one million young graduates with their spouses and children.
Moreover, there remains a concern—perhaps unfounded—that, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, Russians will always retain a certain distrust toward foreigners and will not allow them to reach the highest positions within companies.
Absolutely, it's self-inflicted damage to the national interest not to optimize the migration process for highly skilled foreigners like your son. I can only speak for Sputnik since I never worked in the private sector here, but non-Russians had a glass ceiling and could only rise so far in the company.
What's ironic is that two of our top editors for Sputnik English/International ended up leaving Russia sometime after they left their posts. One got married to a Brit or Scot, I think, and ultimately moved to Texas while the other moved to Israel.
They weren't bad people and they seemed to take their job seriously, but it says a lot about who Sputnik picked to lead a top soft power institution that two of them eventually left Russia.
One of the more significant issues that most foreigners face in Russia is finding someone to register them. It used to be that your employer registered you at their address but then that was changed in 2017 or somewhere around then to where you have to be registered at your actual place of residence. That's so that the authorities know where to find you if you commit a crime.
Sensible, sure, but the problem is that many landlords don't want to register foreigners. Doing so gives them specific legal rights that they fear could be exploited to stay in the residence without paying rent. Another reason is that foreigners have to register every time they return to Russia from abroad.
Although it can apparently be done online, my former landlady before I bought my apartment in 2022 did it in person, and it could take a very long time if there's a line. One time we were there for something like 2-3 hours. You'd think that registration would remain the same no matter how many times you leave and return to Russia, but no, you have to give the government a copy of all pages of your passport every time and then receive a slip from the government in exchange.
You have to show your registration whenever you do anything related to bureaucracy, and without the document, they're not supposed to service you. You also have to register within a strict, short deadline too. One time I literally couldn't do it on time because my landlady's father died, which is understandable, so I had to pay a fine and I got a strike on my record. If you get three within a certain period of time, it's automatic deportation, I think.
Again, I understand the importance of these rules in principle for security purposes and agree that rules must be enforced or they're worthless, but I feel that this registration system has become excessive and beyond burdensome for foreign renters and domestic landlords alike. It's a major obstacle in why people struggle to permanently relocate to Russia.
Bezrukov's proposals are very impressive. Thankyou.
If Peter the Great is surveying the field today, he is surely going to find little to learn from the West, if we are honest, perhaps that is the answer.
To follow on from that, China's path to rejuvenation has primarily been through self improvement, and a highly disciplined foreign policy. That's perhaps another answer.
Think there are lots of propositions (which according to OED means assertions/judgements), but also proposals (after the headline THE NEW STRATEGIC PARADIGM).
Right now it's unacceptable to propose detailed reforms in public because that's seen as challenging the government by suggesting that a specific current policy is inadequate, thus raising the question of why it's remained in place for so long, who's responsible, why they didn't address it already, etc.
It took a whole four years for just two top experts to suggest that not everything is going well and that there are very serious stakes at play if Russia remains along the same course or reforms. I do believe that he and Trenin are more detailed with their proposals behind the scenes though.
But being detailed in public can be seen as trying to pit people against the government and I don't think either of them wanted to take that chance after already bravely sticking their necks out simply talking about the general need for reform. SMO-related national security laws have had a chilling effort on public debate.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the reason behind them, but that's an inadvertent consequence. Take my public critiques of Russia that I share under my analyses' comments: I would never type them in Russian and share them on a Russian page where Russians might read them. Never.
I keep my critiques in English and on a platform that many Russians don't use since I have zero interest in risking everything by having some overzealous bureaucrat salivate at the thought of a raise by falsely implicating me in some "meddling" plot, God forbid. I imagine that Trenin and Timofeev have similar concerns.
Sometimes, great leaders themselves have big problems of inertia in their own administration and need that other people launch trial balloons to see reactions with possible dénégations
100% they follow you and the fact you have content just in english in which you critique(however mildly) the government will be used against you if they deem it necessary.
as a romanian i tell you that every ex-warsaw pact country has a deep dark core of former siloviki(or their children) that controls the state, the banks and the mob.
russia's little expansionist experiment is done, they failed and soon they'll start searching for scape-goats.
they have no humanity or shame, get out of there while you can.
i hope i'm wrong but i don't think so, stories similar to yours happened thousands of times here on this bloodlands.
Thanks, but I feel like everything will be okay since my critiques are constructive and aimed at improving policy formulation and implementation.
I'm a credentialed expert after receiving my MA an PhD at the MFA-run MGIMO so my critiques are always fact-based and grounded in the political reality that I can to learn about from the inside-out.
I just know that we foreigners can never critique the government to Russians, in Russian, or on Russian platforms just in case, which I'd never do.
I also humbly believe that my overall public activities are beneficial to Russia in the sense of analyzing and articulating its policies as they objectively exist for clarifying their goals and modi operandi among a foreign audience.
With that in mind, I don't think anyone would authorize what would in that case be my literal persecution.
Sure, corruption exists and anything can happen, but anyone can be charged with anything on whatever false basis if someone powerful really wants to take you down so I'm not going to live in fear and self-censor forever.
I'm already not invited to major events, having been de facto blacklisted for not parroting low-IQ talking points like others do, but I think that's as far as it'll go.
I've been here for 12.5 years, including the entirety of the SMO (I haven't left Russia since a trip abroad in 2019), and everything is slowly but surely opening back up a bit right now compared to 2022-2023.
I'm not therefore not worried about that at all since I was even more constructively critical about even more sensitive issues back then than I am now.
I know what we're allowed to do and not allowed to do as foreigners here and I very strictly remain within my limits, never getting anywhere near crossing them (I have no such intent either). In that sense, I serve as a model for other expats.
all this is perfect except in the situation that shit really hits the fan.
i don't want to seem a debbie downer but have an emergency plan at least.
while russian people are usually great the russian state apparatus is an absolute monster.
again, take care :)
le: i mean in the eventuality of a blockade or things like that, things that creates social upheavals, some heads need to be delivered to the hoi-poloi; who's heads are better than of the foreign 'assets'? :)))
It's also not possible for me to have an emergency plan since my wife and two kids are Russian citizens who cannot receive visas to the US or Poland right now.
My entire life savings is in rubles, which cannot easily be transferred out of the country (let alone in a huge amount due to SMO-related limits), and I own my apartment here.
I invested my whole life into Russia, I went all in and put myself on what Robert Greene (my favorite author by far) describes as "death ground" where failure isn't an option.
I understood the risks when I first came here but am proud of the decision I've made despite the extremely frustrating bureaucratic difficulties that I've had and which have been humiliating at times.
Anyhow, if a decision was made to persecute me (which I'm not worried about but hypothetically speaking), I wouldn't be able to get past the passport check in Russia anyhow.
So it is what it is, honestly I've become a lot more apathetic in recent years, I'd say from summer 2024 onward and especially after last summer's Anchorage Summit.
I'm glad to see that top experts are vaguely talking about reforms and pushing the limits of what's acceptable to say in public, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high .
Russia isn't known for gradual change -- it either stagnates, declines or radically changes -- and what I foresee is a "managed decline" UNLESS there are radical but controlled changes.
A "managed decline" isn't too bad, and maybe after some time there'll finally be radical but controlled changes, even if they're implemented by whoever ultimately succeeds Putin.
At any rate, I've made my peace with that scenario. If things got even worse, I'd probably pull back a bit from my work and invest more time in my hobbies instead of "harshly criticize" anything.
I can't be "more pro-Russian than the Russians themselves", and with full respect to them, it's ultimately their country and therefore their responsibility to improve things as required.
" The authors noted that “European NATO dwarfs Russia in economic scale, population, and, thus, latent military power.” "
The Western Europeans dont have the manpower to field their armies and are deathly afraid of recruiting, or drafting the Muslims and Africans. If they only draft White Europeans they will unleash massive resentment and possible civil war.
Fair enough, they must all be very patriotic "Frenchmen" then. The US army has many non-Whites in it also. However, most would turn their guns against "Whitey" at the first opportunity they get. I'd wager the situation in France is the same.
Andrew said (begin quote) pointing to China as a new model, and not ruling out cooperating with the West. (end quote)
I would also point out a few Chinese historical facts to show that Chinese and Russian histories are probably a better model for Russia's continued reform than China of the last ten years. Even China of 1990-2010 should be studied with some real understanding of Chinese before one jumps in. Russia has some inherent strengths that China does not have. And let's not forget the historical heritage: A lot of them are good. But all winners tend to sit on their laurels and forget their mistakes. I think Russians are no exception. The USSR era had burned down a lot of good heritage, while solidifying the bad heritage. I don't see how the damage can be reversed in 30 years of Putin's rule/influence. More obviously have to be done.
(1) Qing kingdom unified China. Qing kingdom was considered a Western barbarian in the then-China. Qing's successive kings recruited intellectuals from all over China, both domestically and internationally and improved Qing in every aspect. The Eastern side of the kings, however, sat on their laurels and were proud of their historical heritage and past achievements. They progressed, but at a snail pace.
(2) Tang dynasty. The royal blood contained significant Turk ethnics. This dynasty also started from the West side of China and was accustomed to international trade through the Silk Road. Tang allowed seaborne trades but did not pursue naval supremacy. Tang did try to maintain supremacy over the Central Asia countries, but rarely used force after Turk was divided. Tang dynasty broke the tradition of picking newer generation of administrator from descendants of former minister, and adopted a new system to use exams to pick junior administrators, then gradually promoted them to higher levels. In the first half the Tang dynasty, Tang dynasty welcomed and attracted foreign merchants and travelers, and absorbed some good foreign things into China.
(3) On the second half of the Ming dynasty, China suffered major problems of Japanese piracy (I think by then Japan was in severe civil wars). However, the Ming dynasty did not close down seaborne trade. Portuguese Jesuits brought in many Western gadgets. For example, cannon-making, telescope, to astronomy, etc. In the early days of the Manchurian dynasty, the emperor used such Portuguese cannons and firearms to defeat and suppress the Junggar in a critical battle.
(4) Portuguese Jesuits were implicated in the Manchurian royal court succession power struggle, and the fourth emperor drove out all foreigners and their influences, teachings, and books, etc. During the full bloom of Western Renaissance, China closed its doors and looked only inside. When the foreigners came again, they came to sell kerosene and opium. There were ministers who wanted reform to at least matching the Western firepower and they got marginal success. However, no discussion of further reform was attempted until the final 40 years of Manchurian dynasty. By then, it was too late, and the Manchurian royals were still reluctant.
(5) China suffered tremendously during Mao's era. When Deng took over in 1976, Deng reverted to older system he and Liu Shaoqi promoted. But he then realized that was far from enough. And finally he pushed for economic reform with large-scale "open-up" (remove central planning and government intervention) and allowed foreign influence and investment (especially from Taiwan and Hongkong) In many aspects, China's most recent rounds of reform-openness (1990-2010) is more of relaxing government control, promote infrastructure and basic industries, seeking foreign technologies and knowledge, but NOT seeking reform of political system. In Deng's mind, and in many senior cadets' mind, learning the right form of economy can be separated from the right form of political system. There is some truth about the last concept, but economy is never fully separated from political system.
Therefore, if the "Young Turks" are seeking to "deepen the Reform" (a frequently used term in China's official language these days) there are both pros and cons about using China as a model.
(1) The strategy of relaxing government control (slowly), increasing infrastructures investment (don't overdo it), and participating in technology and education exchange is still good. DO NOT forget the Americans were helping China for that move so as to drag China away from the USSR. Today the US is trying to subdue Russia, Yet China is afraid of losing some of its own relative advantages it needs to exchange with Russia for Russia's resources and technology.
(2) The current Chinese system is extremely corrupt. The shiny new skyscrapers are literally built on sandy beaches as they come up with huge debt rather than organic wealth. The wealth distribution is extremely unequal. About half of the population are still under or near the poverty line. China's development of cities and rural areas are extremely biased. Russia already has the problem of Moscow and St. Petersburg well above everywhere else of China. At a time when Russia should consider the population gravity center moving east or at least less concentrated to serve as nuke attack targets, infrastructure development in the rural areas is far more important than building skyscrapers in Moscow. Siberia as the new industrial development center obviously should be considered.
(3) China suffered severe capital flight. Any opening up of the financial system in Russia will cause similar capital flight. Capitalists have no fatherland. It was true in the past, it is still true now or in the future.
(4) What to learn from the outside? Semiconductor lithography? Would Western countries be willing to teach? Aerospace? Stealth fighter jets, aircraft carriers, tanks with composite armor or smooth-bore gun barrels? Basic Science? The West are not necessarily better than Russia. For biotechnology and medicine? Perhaps. But do remember mRNA and all other Western world scandals gradually unwrapped now. After wall, the Western world did not solve all their problems. And Ditto for China.
(5) There is a strong pro-China faction in Russia. And China does have many historical and modern examples for Russians to study. But, is the current pro-China faction in Russia for China or for Russia? What exactly do you intend to learn from China? Rocket science? Collapsing dams? Damaged ecology? Exploding EVs? One must have a clear goal and scope before taking up an example as a model. It is better to study the model well before commencing large scale similar projects.
Fascinating post, thank you so much for investing the time in writing it and explaining all of this to us! You're totally right about Russia; as I've been saying for some time, there are periods where it enters into complacency, these lead to stagnation, and then decline follows, sometimes even an abrupt collapse.
Prior to the SMO, in retrospect, Russia had entered the stagnation phase. There's now greater awareness that the country needs to reform, but the new problem is that complacency is ironically creeping back due to broken feedback loops and the recycling of propaganda within them by the foreign "Potemkinists" (who are only allowed to parrot low-IQ talking points to Russian officials, diplomats, and experts about how "Russia is always winning", "the West is in irreversible decline", "everything is going according to plan" because someone or some forces more likely allow them to, I suspect, for the purpose of stifling reforms, including foreign policy ones).
So what we see is this assumption that the West is irreversibly on decline but still a threat for the time being, but that time is supposedly on Russia's side since its victory is "inevitable". That's really what the unofficial ideology here is and it's led to massive self-censorship, I feel, that only Trenin and now Timofeev are brave enough to defy.
Indeed. The ones who stand up to say that we are not good enough are always the one get cold-bench treatment, if not the cold guillotine treatment. I claim that Taiwan fell into this trap in the early 1970s (Asian 4-tiger era) and did not push for industrial upgrades (to the precision machinery and high attached values like Japan did). Once China started reform and openness, Taiwan's businessmen flocked to China and taught them everything. Taiwan was left with no relative advantage. By the time Taiwan's government woke up and pushed the right things, China had finished the most difficult "bootstrap" stage, and rocketed up. Given China's base volume, Taiwan needed a significant edge to remain independent. Taiwan's military was in even worse shape (mentally) and encouraged no independent or new thinking. There were a couple of foresighted persons in Taiwan at that time, but they were not in power.
Thankyou for your extensive comment, although I can't agree with substantive parts of it - I hope you don't mind me saying that your picture of China seems consistent with most what the West says it is (e.g. exploding EVs? Shouldn't it be exploding EV exports?), and not what I have studied and seen in person.
I feel obliged to comment because your description of China's political system runs contrary to my impression that it is their fundamental strength and advantage. It is a system very few have sought to understand, and indeed few open source description gives it justice. Party Life by Eric Li is worth reading for those interested - it is not hard to see why their political system IS the reason for their economic and other successes. How else could any country experience their decades long break-neck changes while achieving exemplary population trust and satisfaction in their leadership (see Harvard Ash, Edelman, AoD etc. surveys for yourself).
The fly in the ointment, is China's political system would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any electoral democracy, real or pretend, to imitate.
My impression IS influenced by Chinese overseas dissidents on YouTube. And since many of these people are kept alive by the CIA, they do have bias about China, but many of them still have good connections to China. I am from Taiwan, and I understand China before 1949 fairly well. I knew China up to 1979 less well. My mother, my younger brother, and my sister-in-law have all been to China many times since 1991. However, they are not sharp observers. They see all the things that awe the Western observers. If I had gone to China as well, of course, I would likely be impressed. But as an analyst, it is very important to see what we don't see immediately. Or perhaps I should say we should dig below the facade.
China's society is definitely stratified: you are either in the system (party or government, military) or you are not. There are certain rules, written or unwritten. The party mechanism is very corrupt, but seriously, so were every Chinese dynasty before the Republic of China, and including the Republic of China. The key is that if one wants to impact national politics, there is only one way. You either have to have the right parents or you have to pass the hierarchy to reach the top. People who are good at power struggles, such as Xi, are not always good at leading a country. Most communist leaders listened to the staff, with Mao and Xi being the noticeable exceptions. Mao successfully dominated political power and screwed up China's economy. Xi initially succeeded in political domination, but he has always "messed up" the economic affairs. Some of those mess-ups were due to stupidity, but some of those "mess-ups" are really for war preparation. War preparation always hurts the civilian economy, whether in China or in the US. I have a "draft" intended to write about Xi's policy "achievement" in messing up the civilian economy but making China more ready for war, perhaps I should finish it up.
How did China achieve a great deal during 1979-2012? I believe the key reason is "decentralize". They decentralized not only at the execution level, but also at the policy decision level whenever applicable. Western observers who believe power concentration is the key to China's fast development were at best half right. Concentration is better for the infrastructure stage. For example, China continued work on railroad, irrigation, steel-making, and weapon manufacturing throughout all the turbulent years. Most Westerners ignored the fact that China had a very strong railroad system, dams, and hydro-electric generation, as well as weapon development and manufacturing, BEFORE 1979. The US today does not have an equivalent infrastructure due to the hollowing out of manufacturing.
However, the pursuit of unconstrained capitalism backfired in China as well as in the US, except that neither would confess. This can explain the slowdown during the Hu Jingtao years and part of the reasons for China's economic retrograde during Xi years. Capital flight can also explain why China's central stimulus packages have less and less impact.
By now, I might have worn your patience down. Perhaps I should reformulate and post a better-structured one later. Finally, I want to emphasize that China's political system is simply too easy to learn and mimic, even with a nominal democracy. The issue is probably not any specific type of political system, as China did have a few strong and prosperous periods under supposedly autocratic emperors. The reality is that most of the Chinese emperors were constrained by their own deep states and not really autocratic in the usual sense.
I believe the key is to find a small group of elite intellectuals, give them good training for basics, and good tours of duty to understand practical matters. These people must be well paid but not selfish, i.e., not corruptible, much like the Jedi. Let these people design core policies, but allow a wide freedom for local adjustment. The central government focuses on "validation" and "verification", rather than execution. Distribute the decision power as much as one can (the military power was never distributed, for example, in any country, any time). Allow the people to work and produce, but tax properly to maintain social cohesion. This is why I write my Substack.
I suspect you already know that I can't agree with much of what you say.
As I mentioned earlier, you probably should get hold of a copy of Party Life by Eric Li - it is not possible for me to tell you here how the CPC works - I am pretty sure theirs is the only logical, viable solution I am aware to ensure competent governance long term, not just for a single crop - if you can think of any better institutional structure to deliver those elite intellectuals you mention who must also be virtuous, crop after crop, do tell. We can agree electoral democracy fails miserably for anything except tiny entities, right?
Since I detect you detest autocracy - a funny way to look at it, is to ask ourselves which organisation was able to survive 2000 years, despite peddling virgin birth and rise from the dead, and how their Human Resource department works? Certainly not democratic elections, right? If universal suffrage is so great, surely all organisations / companies, private or public, would run with it to be more competitive? So why not? Because it doesn't work, as Socrates long opined.
If the autocractic CPC is so bad, the Taiwan government, let alone the mighty US of A, needs not worry about China rising, surely?
I guess the above is my rebuttal to your reference to Chinese autocracy. I am all ears!
Regarding corruption, and how it has been tamed and indeed perhaps over-tamed, I suggest Dean of Shantong written by Daniel Bell.
Having extensive training in engineering, I like to judge a system by its results. Is there any competiton between what the CPC has achieved and anybody else's, or in terms of leadership performance compared to any other nation's? I think not, bearing in mind what China started off with, the magnitude and complexity of what they had to overcome, and what they have achieved. Everything else can be smoke and mirrors, and we all know there is no shortage of that where we are in the West. But aren't we lucky though to see how some smoke clearing in the last 40 odd days, after all these years... Can you see?
Why, may I ask? What concept in Chinese is indescribable in, say, English?
Since we have been debating, or are you trying to invalidate my views of the CPC by saying / assuming I haven't / can't "read stuff in Chinese"?
Are you going to tell me next I also need to have the same name as modern China’s founding father, 中山? Wait!
Do I need a Japanese persona to understand CPC too? For someone with a Taiwanese/Chinese heritage interested in geopolitics, isn't Zhongshan more apt, given Taiwan's brutal colonial history, and the 靖國神社 traffic today?
Alastair Crooke said that Israeli media published in English tell the foreigners what they want the foreigners to know; the Hebrew media, however, reflect the more realistic political discussions. The Chinese government does similar things. If you read only English media published inside China, you are not getting the full picture. Instead, if you can read Korean or Japanese, then you will get a better view. Taiwan's media are either controlled by CIA or by CCP, and there are few truly independent media. Feel free to disagree with me. Going to China and making your own observations can also be helpful.
Andrew, thank you for the newsetter and all the comments. Russia has been locked into a C OMPO TION with EU & the West . There ae good aspects about the West. Russia needs to modernize and get some of the good points that are in thhe EU & the West. Russia needs to go see the West & what would help them modernize. The West is not all bad.
Exactly! A lot of "Non-Russian Pro-Russians" literally hate everything about the West despite many of them ironically being Westerners themselves, but there are indeed certain aspects of its civilization, strategic culture, management style, etc., that could greatly benefit Russia if adopted and adapted to its national circumstances.
Putin himself praised the West till the SMO and even to this day still laments that they forced Russia into this position where it had to defend itself from them whom he sincerely wanted to partner with this entire time and still does (ergo why he regularly calls on them to end their sanctions and resume pre-SMO economic cooperation).
Truly, as a proud "Non-Russian Pro-Russian" (NRPR) literally living in Russia unlike many others, any honest person here Russian or otherwise would tell you that reforms of some sort are required.
In fact, I've never met a Russian who didn't have at least one constructive critique to share about their country, which doesn't mean that Russia is "bad", "underdeveloped", etc., just that it could be better, they know it, and they want it to be.
I published this piece in March 2018 documenting the many constructive criticisms that Putin made about Russia during one of his keynote speeches at the time, which the NRPR would decry as "anti-Russian" if someone shared them word-for-word on social media:
"It’s Okay To Constructively Criticize Russia, Even President Putin Does It!"
What's happened over the years is that the NRPR community morphed from an intellectual community of high-IQ free-thinkers to an ignorant club of low-IQ literal propagandists who always without exception cheer every single policy and viciously cancel anyone who constructively critiques Russia.
In effect, NRPRs flip-flopped from an asset for Russia which advances its national interests that they share (even if they constructively critique its policies with the aim of improving implementation) to a liability that harms its interests and discredits intellectual high-IQ free-thinking NRPRs by association.
The easiest way to discern whether someone is an intellectual high-IQ free-thinking NRPRs or a low-IQ literal propagandist is to ask them what they think about Russian-Israeli relations. The first will acknowledge they're close even if they don't like it while the second will lie that Putin is an anti-Zionist secretly plotting against Israel.
I've run this test countless times over the years and it never fails: every single person who parrots the "Potemkinist" (https://korybko.substack.com/p/potemkinism-is-responsible-for-false) lie about him ends up being a low-IQ propagandist who'll decry as "anti-Russian" the exact same constructive critiques that Bezrukov and even Putin himself shared if someone posts them on social media word-for-word without attribution.
The Catastrophe Clause — When Elites Finally Remember the People Exist
There is a grim regularity to Russian history that, once seen, cannot be unseen. It operates like a law of political physics, as reliable as any natural phenomenon: Russian elites discover the value of their own population only when the alternative is annihilation. Not reform, not stagnation, not relative decline — annihilation. The threshold is extraordinarily high, and the discovery, when it comes, is always presented as a voluntary embrace rather than a desperate concession. But the timing never lies. The people are remembered precisely when the elites have run out of everything else.
This pattern did not begin with Stalin, though he provided its most dramatic modern expression. It runs through the entire arc of Russian state formation. Peter the Great's modernization, for all its genuine transformative ambition, was fundamentally triggered by the catastrophic defeat at Narva in 1700, where a Swedish army a fraction of Russia's size destroyed his forces with humiliating ease. The reforms that followed were not the product of Enlightenment idealism. They were the product of existential shock. Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs in 1861 came in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War, where Russia's military backwardness had been exposed to the entire world on its own territory. The Stolypin reforms of the early twentieth century followed the revolutionary trauma of 1905, itself triggered by the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War. In each case, the structure is identical: catastrophe first, then the sudden discovery that the human beings who constitute the country might matter.
Stalin's pivot in the Great Patriotic War is simply the most viscerally documented instance of this recurring logic, and it deserves close examination because it illuminates not only the past but the present.
The scale of the disaster in the summer and autumn of 1941 remains almost incomprehensible. Within weeks of the German invasion, the Red Army had suffered losses that, in any rational military calculus, should have ended the war. Entire army groups were encircled and destroyed. By December 1941, the Soviet Union had lost approximately 4.5 million soldiers killed, wounded, or captured. The Wehrmacht stood at the gates of Moscow. Leningrad was under siege. Kiev had fallen. The industrial heartland of Ukraine was occupied. The system that Stalin had built — the command economy, the political commissars, the terror that had decapitated the officer corps in the purges of 1937-38, the ideological rigidity that had refused to believe the Germans would actually attack — had produced a catastrophe of world-historical proportions, most of it self-inflicted.
And in that moment, something extraordinary happened. Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the man who had spent two decades dismantling pre-revolutionary Russian culture, persecuting the Orthodox Church, suppressing national identities, and insisting that the only meaningful collective identity was the Soviet one — this man went on the radio and addressed his listeners not as "comrades," not as "citizens of the Soviet Union," not as the vanguard of international communism, but as "brothers and sisters." He invoked not Marx and Lenin but Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy. He called upon not the revolutionary tradition but the ancestral one. He reached past everything his system had built and grabbed the deepest available roots — ethnicity, soil, church bells, the graves of grandfathers — because the ideological construction had failed and only the ancient, pre-political identity retained enough cohesive power to hold people together in the face of catastrophe.
The Church, which had been systematically persecuted for two decades, was quietly rehabilitated. Patriotism — Russian patriotism specifically, not Soviet internationalism — was permitted and then actively promoted. Officers were allowed to wear the traditional shoulder boards that had been abolished as symbols of the old regime. The language of sacred soil, of the motherland, of Russia as a living entity worth dying for, flooded the propaganda space that had previously been occupied by class struggle and proletarian internationalism.
This was not a spiritual conversion. Stalin did not suddenly discover the Russian soul. He discovered that the Soviet ideological apparatus, left to its own devices, was insufficient to motivate men to die in sufficient numbers and with sufficient commitment to stop the most powerful military machine in the world. He needed something older, deeper, and more viscerally compelling than party loyalty. He needed, in short, the people — their actual identity, their actual attachments, their actual reasons for living and dying — rather than the ideological construct he had tried to substitute for those things.
It worked. Not immediately, and not without the additional instruments of terror and coercion that Stalin never entirely set aside. But it worked. The combination of genuine patriotic mobilization from below and desperate pragmatism from above produced one of the most remarkable reversals in military history. The people, once actually addressed as people rather than as ideological units, found within themselves a capacity for sacrifice and endurance that the system, on its own terms, could never have generated.
The lesson has never been fully internalized, because internalizing it would require the elites to draw the logical peacetime conclusion: that the people who can save you in extremis are the same people you are currently ignoring, obstructing, and treating with bureaucratic contempt during ordinary times. The wartime pivot is politically easy because it costs the elite nothing structural. It does not require them to share power, to create accountability, to permit genuine institutional representation of popular interests. It requires only a change of rhetorical register — from ideological abstraction to ethnic and civilizational feeling — while the fundamental hierarchy of the system remains intact. And crucially, once the crisis passes, the pivot reverses. The Church was rehabilitated in 1941 and reined in again in the 1950s. The nationalist language was permitted in wartime and gradually re-subordinated to Soviet orthodoxy in peacetime. The people were remembered and then forgotten again, until the next catastrophe.
This cycle is where Russia finds itself now, in a form that is at once familiar and novel. The SMO has been, in significant respects, a slow-motion version of 1941's shock — not in its absolute military catastrophe, which has not reached anything like those proportions, but in its revelatory function. It has exposed, to those willing to see, the gap between Russia's self-image and its actual institutional capacity. The mobilization of September 2022 was the first moment since the Soviet collapse when the state reached directly into the lives of ordinary Russian men and said: we need your body, not just your taxes and your compliance. That is a different kind of claim. It is the beginning of the catastrophe clause being activated.
Timofeev and Trenin's calls for modernization, Korybko's honest documentation of bureaucratic dysfunction, Bezrukov's prophetic 2013 diagnosis — these are all symptoms of elites beginning to sense that the threshold may be approaching. Not because they have undergone a moral transformation, but because the strategic situation is forcing a reckoning with realities that were previously comfortable to ignore. NATO's economic and demographic scale, the depletion of Soviet-era military stocks, the flight of human capital, the failure to diversify away from hydrocarbons — none of these are new. What is new is the growing difficulty of sustaining the Potemkinist feedback loop in the face of tangible evidence that the country's actual performance falls short of its self-representation.
The danger — and this is where historical honesty demands clarity — is that the catastrophe clause, even when activated, tends to produce the minimum adjustment necessary to survive rather than the structural transformation necessary to thrive. Stalin's pivot to Russian nationalism saved the Soviet state and then was gradually reversed, leaving the fundamental pathologies intact for another generation until they eventually consumed the system entirely in 1991. The question for Russia today is whether its current generation of reformist voices can convert a crisis-driven opening into something durable — whether the recognition, once again forced by emergency, that the people are the country's primary asset can this time be institutionalized rather than merely instrumentalized.
History suggests the odds are poor. The elites' track record of using the people in extremis and then returning to managing them from above once the immediate danger passes is nearly unbroken across centuries. What would break it is precisely what neither Stalin nor any of his predecessors were willing to do: create institutions that make the people's participation in their own governance a permanent structural feature rather than a wartime concession — accountability mechanisms, genuine civic culture, a state apparatus that serves rather than commands. The alternative is another cycle: crisis, mobilization, rhetoric of the nation, survival, forgetting, stagnation, and the slow accumulation of the next catastrophe.
Russia has survived every catastrophe it has yet encountered. The open question — the one that Timofeev's dry academic language and the Confucian framing both circle, from different directions — is whether surviving catastrophe indefinitely is the same thing as flourishing. And whether a civilization of this depth, this cultural richness, this human potential, is content to keep finding that out the hard way.
The Ground Is Rich, the People Are Poor — Resource Wealth and the Neglect of Human Capital
There is a specific kind of poverty that afflicts wealthy countries, and it is more dangerous than the ordinary kind because it is invisible to those suffering from it. It is the poverty of underinvested human beings in a state that does not need them to be exceptional in order to remain solvent. Russia is, by most honest assessments, deep in this condition — and has been for long enough that many of its symptoms are now mistaken for cultural characteristics rather than policy consequences.
The resource curse in its standard economic formulation is well documented. Countries with abundant extractable natural wealth — oil, gas, minerals — tend to develop institutions optimized for extraction and distribution rather than for production and innovation. Taxation of citizens becomes less important when the ground itself pays the state's bills, which means citizens have less leverage over the state and states have less incentive to develop the administrative capacity that genuine taxation requires. Elites cluster around the resource rents. Manufacturing and agriculture atrophy from neglect. And the exchange rate effects of commodity exports make other industries structurally uncompetitive.
Russia exhibits every one of these symptoms. But the resource curse has a dimension that economists underweight, because it does not show up cleanly in GDP figures or institutional quality indices. It is the attitudinal curse — the way that resource abundance shapes a society's relationship to its own people.
When the ground is your primary asset, people are secondary. They are needed to pump, refine, and ship; to staff the administrative apparatus that distributes the proceeds; to man the military that protects the territory containing the reserves. But they do not need to be genuinely creative, entrepreneurially free, or institutionally empowered to generate value, because value is already there, underground, waiting. The incentive to cultivate human potential — to educate deeply, to create competitive markets for ideas, to reward innovation rather than loyalty — is structurally suppressed. The return on investment in people is speculative. The return on investment in a pipeline is not.
This logic, operating across decades, produces a particular kind of human landscape. The most talented individuals — those with the drive and capability to generate value rather than merely capture it — find themselves in a system that has no real place for them unless they subordinate their creativity to the existing hierarchy's needs. Many leave. Bezrukov noted this with clinical precision in 2013: Russia had no competitive advantage in any driver of wealth other than natural resources. That was not a statement about Russian people. It was a statement about what the Russian system had chosen to develop and what it had chosen to neglect.
The neglect is not merely economic. It is, crucially, relational. The way a state treats its citizens in ordinary interactions — at the ministry counter, in the school, at the hospital, in the court — communicates, cumulatively and unmistakably, what the state believes those citizens are worth. Korybko's SIM card ordeal is not a bureaucratic anecdote. It is a data point in a vast, continuous message that the Russian state sends to its population: your time does not matter, your dignity is not our concern, your convenience is irrelevant to our function. This message, received daily by millions of people, shapes what those people believe is possible. It shapes whether a young scientist in Novosibirsk thinks her ideas are worth pursuing, whether an entrepreneur in Kazan believes a business can be built on quality rather than connections, whether a schoolteacher in Chelyabinsk believes that what he does in the classroom genuinely matters to anyone in authority.
Human capital is not simply the number of engineers a country produces. It is the aggregate of what people believe they can do, and that belief is formed in the daily texture of institutional life. A society that systematically communicates contempt for its members' time, dignity, and initiative will not produce an innovative economy regardless of how many STEM graduates it mints, because innovation requires not just knowledge but the psychological freedom and institutional security to act on it.
China's most instructive lesson — drawn from Nakayama's historical survey — is not the economic miracle itself but the conditions that made it possible: the decision, under Deng, to actually trust people's economic instincts, to relax state control over individual initiative, to allow the hunger and creativity that were always there to find productive outlets. China did not create human capital in the 1980s and 1990s. It released it. The capital had been there all along, suppressed by decades of ideological rigidity and institutional violence.
Russia's human capital is similarly latent rather than absent. Russian mathematical and scientific culture is genuinely exceptional — the product of a Soviet educational system that, whatever its political pathologies, took intellectual formation seriously and produced generations of people capable of remarkable things. Russian literature, music, and artistic tradition represent one of the great civilizational achievements of the modern world. These are not myths. They are real, and they are there to build on.
What is required is not the importation of foreign genius but the creation of conditions in which domestic genius can function and stay. This means, first and most urgently, the reform of the institutions that interact with people daily — making them serve rather than obstruct, making accountability real rather than theoretical, making the experience of dealing with the state something other than a repeated lesson in one's own powerlessness.
It means education built around respect for the student's mind rather than compliance with the instructor's authority — education that teaches people to question, to build, to create, not merely to memorize and reproduce.
It means a tolerance for the kind of creative destruction that genuine innovation requires — the acceptance that some enterprises will fail, some ideas will be wrong, some experiments will produce nothing useful, and that this is not waste but investment.
And it means, ultimately, the cultural shift that underlies all of these: the recognition that Russia's people are not the passive beneficiaries of its resource wealth but its primary and most renewable source of strength — and that every year spent treating them as secondary is a year of compound loss that no oil price recovery can repay.
The Cross They Could Have Carried — Orthodoxy as Squandered Civilizational Capital
There is a thought experiment worth conducting. Imagine a state that shares a sacramental tradition with roughly 260 million people across four continents. Imagine that this tradition includes a common liturgical language, a shared iconographic universe, an identical theology of salvation, and centuries of martyrology that bind its adherents in a collective memory of suffering and transcendence. Imagine further that this state is the largest, most powerful, and historically most prestigious representative of that tradition — its natural center of gravity, the place where its greatest cathedrals stand, where its theological patrimony was preserved through centuries of pressure from both East and West.
Now imagine that state spending thirty years methodically alienating every other member of that tradition.
This is not a thought experiment. It is the history of Russian Orthodox diplomacy since 1991.
The opportunity was extraordinary. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Orthodox Church re-emerged from decades of KGB infiltration and state suppression with its spiritual credibility battered but its cultural prestige largely intact. Across the Orthodox world — in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories — there was a genuine hunger for reconnection with Moscow as the senior patriarchate, as the symbolic home of a shared civilization. This was soft power of a kind that cannot be manufactured. It is either inherited or it is not, and Russia had inherited it in abundance.
Soft power, as Joseph Nye defined it, works through attraction rather than coercion. It is the power of making others want what you want, of setting the agenda not through threat but through appeal. Its instruments are culture, values, and the credibility of one's institutions. It is, by nature, slow, patient, and easily destroyed by the visible application of hard power — because the moment the attractive becomes the coercive, the spell is broken. People do not feel drawn to what they feel threatened by.
Russia has never fully grasped this distinction, or has grasped it and found it temperamentally intolerable. The imperial reflex — the need to make power felt as pressure, to produce visible deference rather than quiet affinity — consistently overrides the strategic logic of attraction. And nowhere is this more damaging than in the Orthodox space, precisely because the potential there was so great.
The Romanian and Moldovan case is instructive to the point of being almost pedagogical in its clarity. Romania is a Latin-speaking Orthodox nation — a combination unique in the Christian world — with a complex historical relationship with Russia that includes both genuine religious kinship and the living memory of Soviet occupation. After 1991, Russia had a real opening. The Romanian Orthodox Church is the second largest Orthodox church in the world by membership. Romanian religiosity runs deep, particularly in rural areas. There was no inherent reason why Romania had to become one of the most instinctively anti-Russian nations in Europe.
But Moscow's behavior in Moldova — using the frozen conflict in Transnistria as a permanent coercive lever, manipulating the Moldovan Orthodox Church's canonical dependence on the Moscow Patriarchate as a tool of political pressure, treating the country not as a neighbor to be cultivated but as a sphere to be controlled — sent a message that every Romanian understood viscerally: Russian protection and Russian domination are the same thing. The thin wedge of shared faith, which could have been driven gently and patiently to create genuine cultural affinity, was instead swung like a hammer. The result was not obedience. It was revulsion.
The same pattern repeated in Georgia, where the 2008 war severed whatever remaining threads of Orthodox solidarity might have bridged the political divide. It repeated in Ukraine in 2019, when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine received autocephaly from Constantinople — a development that was, in significant part, a consequence of Russian ecclesiastical overreach over decades, and which represented a catastrophic institutional defeat for the Moscow Patriarchate that no military operation can reverse. It repeated, subtly but unmistakably, in Serbia, where Moscow's support has been emotionally real but strategically clumsy — offering solidarity in ways that reinforce Serbian isolation rather than building Serbian capacity.
What would the alternative have looked like? It would have required, first, the genuine separation of church from state instrumentalization. The Moscow Patriarchate's credibility across the Orthodox world has been consistently undermined by its visible role as an arm of Russian foreign policy. Orthodox Christians in other countries are not naive. They can see when their patriarchs are being used as diplomatic assets rather than spiritual shepherds. The moment a church becomes visibly subordinated to a state, it loses the independent moral authority that is the source of its soft power. Russia hollowed out the very instrument it needed most by refusing to let it function independently.
Second, it would have required patient investment in cultural and educational institutions — Orthodox universities, language programs, pilgrimage infrastructure, scholarly exchanges — that create genuine human connections between Russian and non-Russian Orthodox communities. China has spent decades building Confucius Institutes of debatable quality but undeniable strategic intent. The Vatican has sustained a global network of educational and charitable institutions for centuries, and it is this network — not papal declarations — that gives Catholicism its persistent civilizational reach. Russian Orthodoxy has nothing comparable, and Moscow has never seriously tried to build it.
Third, and most fundamentally, it would have required Russia to behave, in its relations with smaller Orthodox-majority neighbors, in ways consistent with the values it claims to embody. Orthodox theology speaks at length about kenosis — the self-emptying of power in service of love, exemplified in the incarnation. It is, admittedly, a demanding standard for any state. But the gap between Russia's theological claims and its political behavior is so enormous, so visible, and so consequential, that it functions as a standing advertisement of hypocrisy. You cannot simultaneously claim to be the defender of a spiritual civilization and use that civilization's institutions as a weapon of hybrid warfare.
The deepest irony is that Russia, of all states, should understand this. Russian literature — Dostoevsky above all — is saturated with the insight that authentic spiritual authority cannot be coerced, that the Grand Inquisitor's error is precisely his belief that people can be made to love what they are forced to obey. Russia has produced the most penetrating cultural critique of power-as-domination in the modern world. It has simply never managed to apply that critique to its own foreign policy.
The window is not entirely closed. The Orthodox world remains a potential civilizational space in which Russia could exercise genuine moral leadership — but only if it is willing to earn that leadership rather than assert it, to attract rather than pressure, to offer rather than extract. That requires, above all, the rectification of a single name: the recognition that influence and control are not synonyms, and that confusing them has cost Russia more
I am adding another post to this very interesting essay put forward by Andrew (tip of the hat) and the even more interesting debate that has ensued. I work from home and I am a bit of a hermit that way. My place of employment is several hours away by car and boat. So I sometimes discuss and debate things with Claude. Yes, that Claude. Can be a very useful assistant. And I presented it the issue raised by the original Valdai article, Andrew's essay, the comments, and my original perspective, described in my first post. The instruction was to expand, using the same filter. This is what Claude had to say:
Rectification of Names: What Russia Actually Needs
Your invocation of Confucius is not mere rhetorical flourish — it is the most precise analytical instrument one could apply to this entire conversation. The word "modernization" is doing enormous ideological work in Timofeev's article and in Korybko's commentary, and almost none of it is honest labor. It papers over distinctions that, if named correctly, would make the path forward far clearer — and far more politically uncomfortable for those in power.
The Semantic Trap of "Modernization"
Timofeev's core argument is that Russia is "doomed to perish" without modernization, and that while Peter's "window to Europe" is being bricked up, the Petrine paradigm itself — of borrowing from superior sources to overcome backwardness and strengthen the state — remains as relevant as ever. This is intellectually defensible but strategically evasive, because it frames everything through the lens of state power and military competitiveness. Modernization, in this reading, means closing the technological gap with NATO. It is a geopolitical concept dressed in the language of reform.
But your comment cuts to something more fundamental: the problem is not that Russia lacks advanced enough missiles or semiconductors. The problem is that Russian civil servants scream at citizens' faces. These are not the same problem, and treating them with the same word — "modernization" — allows the system to pursue one (military-industrial upgrading) while indefinitely deferring the other (civic culture and accountable governance).
Korybko makes this concrete in a way that is almost comical in its mundanity: getting a SIM card registered required over six weeks and 13 trips to three different institutions, largely because the Ministry of the Interior's database takes 5–14 days to update — and nobody at any point in the process speaks English, especially not at the MVD. This is not a technology deficit. Russia has nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. It is a governance culture deficit — a profound institutional contempt for the time, dignity, and basic needs of the individual citizen.
Bezrukov, whom Korybko repeatedly cites as a prophet ignored in his own time, named this more bluntly in 2013: Russia's "bureaucracy creates a nightmare for businesses and private citizens alike, negating the attractiveness of its tax rates," and the country "has little experience in dealing with 'real foreigners'" because, while young mobile Russians are open to the world, "Russia as a country is not." He wrote this over a decade ago. Nothing has fundamentally changed, because "modernization" — the word chosen by elites — doesn't require changing anything about how the state relates to the person standing in front of it.
Your proposed corrective is elegant and practical: a public accountability registry where citizens can document specific incidents of bureaucratic misconduct, with dismissal as a consequence. This is not radical. It is simply the application of what any functioning service organization already does — measure performance against the needs of those being served. The reason it sounds radical in the Russian context is precisely because the category of "citizen as client of the state" is not culturally embedded. The state is not understood as serving the population. The population is understood as existing to serve the state. Until that relationship is inverted in both law and culture, no amount of technological importing will produce a modernized society. It will produce a modernized military guarded by a medieval bureaucracy.
The Resource Curse as Human Capital Neglect
Your phrase — "Russia needs to stop being lazy, given the richness of its resources" — touches on what economists call the resource curse, but you are extending it in a direction economists rarely go: from material laziness to intellectual and human laziness.
The resource curse in its classic form holds that abundant natural wealth tends to suppress diversification, breed rent-seeking elites, and weaken institutions. Russia is a textbook case. But the more insidious dimension, which your comment highlights, is that resource abundance breeds a particular attitude toward human beings. When the ground produces your wealth, people become secondary. You do not need to cultivate them, educate them deeply, respect their creativity, or give them institutional space to compete and innovate. You need them, at best, to extract and process what the ground already offers.
This creates a catastrophic feedback loop. The most talented people — those with options — leave. Bezrukov noted in 2013 that "for the huge majority of the 'best and brightest' of the world, Russia may look exciting to visit, but not nearly open, inclusive, safe or convenient to do business with or to settle in." Brain drain is not a mystery. It is the rational response of human capital to an environment that does not value it. And the loss compounds: the people who remain in positions of institutional power are disproportionately those who are comfortable with — or depend on — the existing dysfunctional system.
The alternative you sketch — maximizing human capital through deep, respectful education and creating competitive conditions for the production of advanced technology, art, social thought, and intellectual goods — is precisely what Nakayama's rich historical analysis of Chinese dynastic cycles illustrates from the opposite direction. The Tang dynasty, he notes, succeeded partly by opening administrative positions through merit-based examination rather than hereditary privilege, and by welcoming foreign merchants and absorbing external knowledge. The decline came when the doors closed. The Qing opened their court to intellectuals from across China and reformed relentlessly; those who sat on their historical laurels and were proud of past achievements "progressed, but at a snail pace." Russia is in the snail-pace phase, consoled by the memory of Sputnik and the Soviet atomic program.
The comparison to China today is, as Nakayama wisely cautions, more complex than it appears. China's post-1990 economic miracle was partly built on learning from Taiwan and Hong Kong, attracting diaspora capital, and operating under a highly disciplined developmental state that — whatever its political character — maintained ferocious internal performance standards. Whether Russia's siloviki-oligarchic system, as "Vade Retro" bluntly notes in the comments, is structurally capable of even permitting such a transformation is a real question. Genuine modernization of governance culture would threaten the very networks through which current elites accumulate and protect their positions. That is why "modernization" as a word is so useful to them — it promises change while guaranteeing the continuation of everything that matters.
The Soft Power Catastrophe: The Bear and the Honey
Your most politically acute observation concerns Orthodoxy and the Moldova-Romania case, and it deserves considerable elaboration because it illustrates a Russian strategic failure that recurs with almost mechanical regularity.
Russia possesses, in Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the most potentially potent instruments of cultural and civilizational influence available to any state in the world. The Orthodox world encompasses Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Cyprus, Ethiopia, and significant communities throughout the Middle East — hundreds of millions of people who share a sacramental tradition, iconographic vocabulary, liturgical memory, and theological worldview with Russia. This is, in Huntingtonian terms, a civilizational asset of extraordinary value. It costs almost nothing to maintain and generates goodwill that no amount of military spending can purchase.
And Russia has spent thirty years systematically destroying it.
The Moldova case you cite is exemplary. Moscow's strategy toward the Republic of Moldova has been to use the breakaway territory of Transnistria as a coercive lever, to manipulate the Moldovan Orthodox Church's relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate as an instrument of political control, and to make Russian "protection" feel indistinguishable from Russian domination. The result? A country that is Orthodox, Slavic-adjacent, economically weak, and geographically landlocked — in other words, a country that should have been Russia's most natural partner — has lurched toward EU integration with genuine popular support. Romanian Moldovans increasingly identify as Romanian rather than as a distinct people under Russian tutelage. The thin wedge of Orthodoxy, as you put it, was there to use. Russia used it as a crowbar instead.
This pattern — "the bear cannot stop itself" — is not accidental. It reflects a deep structural feature of how Russian power conceives of itself: as something that must be felt, that must produce visible compliance, that must demonstrate dominance rather than simply enjoy influence. Soft power, properly understood, works precisely because it does not feel like power to the recipient. It feels like affinity, like cultural recognition, like being seen. Russia's instinct is to make its power felt as pressure, and the moment it does, the affinity evaporates and is replaced by resentment. The Romanian experience of the 20th century — of Soviet occupation, of forced incorporation into a geopolitical sphere defined by Moscow — left scars that Russian cultural diplomacy has never seriously tried to heal, preferring instead to reinforce them through continued manipulation.
The Confucian principle applies here too, and acutely. If Russia genuinely wishes to lead a civilizational bloc, to be what Timofeev's language of "civilisational state" implies — a center of gravity for a world alternative to Western liberal hegemony — then it must act like a civilization and not merely like an empire in civilizational clothing. Civilizations attract. Empires coerce. The two modes are not impossible to combine, but they require a strategic discipline and cultural humility that Russian foreign policy has rarely demonstrated, and never sustained.
The Feedback Loop Problem and What Breaks It
Korybko's analysis of what he calls "Potemkinism" — the phenomenon of broken feedback loops, where foreign admirers are permitted or encouraged to feed back only uncritical praise to Russian officials, while internal critics are marginalized — is perhaps the most structurally important point in the entire discussion. His concern is that "complacency is ironically creeping back due to broken feedback loops and the recycling of propaganda within them by the foreign 'Potemkinists'" who are only permitted to tell Russian officials that Russia is winning, the West is declining, and everything is proceeding according to plan.
This is exactly the dynamic that has felled every modernizing impulse in Russian history. Bezrukov's 2013 proposals were shelved because the Ukrainian crisis provided a new justification for the old reflexes. The Medvedev-era modernization discourse evaporated because oil revenues returned. Now, even with the SMO having dramatically exposed Russia's industrial and human capital deficits, the Potemkinist infrastructure is already reasserting itself — telling the system what it wants to hear, which is that the current trajectory is sufficient.
What breaks this loop? Not top-down reform declarations from Timofeev or Trenin, however brave and important those are as signals. Those are symptoms of the awareness that something must change, but they do not constitute change. What breaks feedback loops, historically, is the institutionalization of accountability — precisely the mechanism you propose. Public records of civil servant misconduct, with real consequences, are not merely an anti-corruption tool. They are an epistemological tool. They force information about the actual state of the country's governance — as experienced by actual citizens — to flow upward through the system rather than being filtered out at every level by officials protecting their own positions.
Peter the Great's most underappreciated reform was not the navy or the beard tax or even the Table of Ranks. It was his personal willingness to witness dysfunction directly — to travel incognito through his own country and through Europe, to work as a shipwright in Dutch docks, to submit himself to the education of those who knew more than he did. He rectified names by insisting on seeing things as they actually were. Modern Russia's tragedy is that its leadership has surrounded itself with people whose careers depend on ensuring that names remain comfortably misapplied.
Toward What, Then?
The debate in the comments between those who favor China as a model and those who are skeptical of it ultimately rests on a false binary. China is not a monolithic model; it is a historical process, and Nakayama's dynastic analysis makes clear that Chinese success has always come from openness, meritocracy, and the willingness to learn — and Chinese decline has always followed the closing of doors and the calcification of self-congratulatory elites.
Russia does not need to become Western, Chinese, or anything else. It needs, as you put it, to rectify its names. To call its bureaucracy what it is: a system of entrenched rent-seekers who have confused the authority to obstruct with the right to rule. To call its resource wealth what it risks becoming: a narcotic that substitutes for the harder work of developing human beings. To call its foreign policy instincts what they too often are: imperial reflexes dressed in civilizational language. And to call the human beings within its borders what they actually are: not subjects, not raw material, not demographic statistics, but the primary source of whatever greatness Russia has ever achieved or could yet achieve.
The Confucian insight is not just philosophical. It is practical. Until names are correct, language cannot accord with reality; until language accords with reality, policy cannot succeed; until policy succeeds, the population cannot know how to move — hand or foot. Russia is currently in exactly that position: a vast country in motion, spending enormous energy, producing enormous noise, uncertain of its direction because those who name its problems are not yet permitted to name them accurately.
Timofeev and Trenin are, tentatively, beginning to correct some names. The question is whether the system has the structural capacity — and the political will — to follow the words with the deeds they actually imply.
I think Confucius said that the first thing to be done to put things on the right path is the rectification of names.
"A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."
The word "modernization" here carries a lot and masks even more. From what you are saying Andrew in this upstanding tour of force post, the Russian bureaucracy doesn't need to "modernize", but it needs to become more civil, and to understand that it serves the population. A public site with records of civil servants misbehaving (I wonder how their bosses behave towards their subordinates...?) where people can post such incidents like you describe should be followed by immediate dismissals and you'll see how things change.
Russia needs to stop being lazy, given the richness of its resources and optimize the use of human capital. creating it, educating it maximally (with a lot of respect) and make it compete on the production of advance technologies and also artistic, social, intelectual products.
Russia could have tried to use the thin wedge of Orthodoxy, but it fucked up big time alienating Romanians for instance, by trying to keep a tight grip on R of Moldova, for instance. They know that one can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but the bear cannot stop itself. So much more to say about this topic.
Great minds think alike, since around the same time, Socrates said: ‘the corruption of cities begins with the fraud of words.’
I am extremely wary whenever the word ‘reform’ is used. For the past 30 years in France, we have constantly been told about reforms that have ultimately amounted to dismantling the entire social system and public services, letting profiteers—and even criminals who make our lives miserable—do as they please, and the near institutionalization of corruption
I highly recommend that everybody read in full Bezrukov's proposals from 2013 that I hyperlinked to and which I'm sharing below for convenience:
https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/a-fresh-wind-of-optimism/
Some of the things that he wrote would get someone defamed by the "Non-Russian Pro-Russian" cult as "anti-Russian" or even a Western "spy" if they shared them word-for-word on X.
For instance:
"Unfortunately, Russia doesn’t fit into this new economic map as an influential stakeholder. It has not been included in any of the free trade zones. Its membership in the BRICS has no obvious economic benefits. The creation of the Eurasian Union enlarges Russia’s economic space, but does not grant it access to the most promising markets of tomorrow.
Russia has little influence on the mechanisms that form prices on the market for natural resources, upon which the country greatly depends. Its reputation as a place for investments, deserved or not, is horrible. Being an outsider to the circles that set global economic policies, it carries all the risks and has none of the opportunities. As the processes of globalization and economic integration continue, Russian authorities may find themselves in a bind: while lacking a sufficient set of economic tools, they will be held accountable for the outcomes of their policies and the wellbeing of their citizens.
From the point of view of strategic security, Russia is squeezed between two expanding centers of power – China and the European Union. The country has a shrinking population and no reliable friends. Its huge natural resources provoke envy. While the possession of a nuclear arsenal makes a direct attack on Russia improbable, the country is vulnerable to low intensity warfare along its southern borders that exploits its religious and ethnic problems."
"In the West, predominantly Orthodox Russia is neither small enough to be absorbed by the closest civilizational center, nor big enough to be a global center on its own, such as, for example, China or India. Despite Russia’s growing economic and cultural ties with the rest of Europe, its religious and political differences are preventing the inclusion of Russia into the Euro-Atlantic club.
In the East, culturally and ethnically, Russia will always be a loner. It may have difficulty managing its dormant conflict with Japan, not to mention its potential tensions with China. In the best of scenarios, the future of these relationships could be defined by the principle that “good fences make good neighbors.” As Central Asia enters the orbit of a Greater China by the logic of the dominant market ties, Russia is facing cultural and political isolation. The Russian cultural and language space keeps shrinking.
The more restless and self-conscious the Islamic world will become, the less comfortable will Russia be living next to it. Its own Muslims, as their numbers and influence grow, may experience a cultural pull to the South – towards modernizing Turkey and rich Gulf countries. And the changes in the Middle East, where religious forces are gaining political power, will not go unnoticed."
"In terms of its internal instability, Russia is entering this century being not in peace with itself, increasingly socially polarized, ethnically divided and religiously intolerant. From the point of view of the quality of life, Russia has little to be proud of. Its populated areas are polluted. Its infrastructure is inadequate. Its cities are mismanaged and often dirty. Its bureaucracy creates a nightmare for businesses and private citizens alike, negating the attractiveness of its tax rates. Despite its dynamic cultural life, the everyday habits of excessive drinking and hazardous driving are unappealing to both natives and outsiders.
Russian culture has managed to absorb and blend together a great number of ethnicities that lived within the borders of the Empire and, later, the Soviet Union. However, as a fairly remote and self-sufficient country, Russia has little experience in dealing with “real foreigners” – those who do not belong to its civilizational space. Just as young, mobile, curious Russians are open to the world, Russia as a country is not. Its businesses and bureaucracy work with little regard of how things are done elsewhere. For the huge majority of the “best and brightest” of the world, Russia may look exciting to visit, but not nearly open, inclusive, safe or convenient to do business with or to settle in.
Russia has no competitive advantage in any drivers of wealth other than natural resources. However, even as a resource-rich country, it is forecast to lose its clout, as the United States becomes a net oil and gas exporter and the world develops alternative ways of producing energy."
Every single point, and there are more too but readers who haven't yet gone through his article should already get the gist, is "anti-Russian" per the standards of the "Non-Russian Pro-Russian" cult.
Nevertheless, Bezrukov is a modern-day Russian hero due to his decades-long service as a deep-cover spy in Canada and the US. He therefore cannot by any stretch of the imagination be defamed as "anti-Russian".
Accordingly, every single point that he made is now shielded from that defamation, and anyone who still resorts to such low-IQ attacks is themselves the bonafide "anti-Russian" troll.
I'd also like to briefly elaborate on this point:
"Just as young, mobile, curious Russians are open to the world, Russia as a country is not. Its businesses and bureaucracy work with little regard of how things are done elsewhere. For the huge majority of the “best and brightest” of the world, Russia may look exciting to visit, but not nearly open, inclusive, safe or convenient to do business with or to settle in."
While I sincerely enjoy living in Moscow, it's indeed still extremely difficult to move here and receive the equivalent of a green card (permanent residency).
Despite migration reforms aimed at facilitating this process, including for "highly skilled workers" (a legal category of migrants who work in specific fields and earn above a certain amount monthly), all bureaucratic processes remain byzantine.
I'd go as far as saying that the stereotypes about Russian bureaucracy aren't just true, but aren't true enough and actually downplay how difficult it is to deal with these processes.
For example, last year, a new policy was implemented whereby folks have to register their SIM cards, which is aimed at reducing their use by Ukrainian drones in terrorist attacks. Fair enough, that makes sense, but the process itself is Kafka-esque.
It took me over six weeks and 13 trips to three different places -- the local office of the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), my bank, and my phone company -- to complete this process, mostly due to the MVD's database taking 5-14 days to update (!!!) as was confirmed separately by several employees on different visits who I asked because it was so surreal for me to hear that database of a nuclear power's Ministry of the Interior is so far behind other countries'!
This is a nightmare for tourists since they have to waste all this time (and the process might now relatively be "streamlined" by Russian standards) going to the MVD, waiting for the database to update, going to the bank (which is where you do your biometrics unless the local MVD office now has the ability (was always bizarre to me that they didn't have it originally!), and only then go to the phone company, and keep in mind, NOBODY IN THIS SEQUENCE SPEAKS ENGLISH, ESPECIALLY NOT AT THE MVD!
So you either try to wing it somehow and hope that there's a kind soul working there or just an average Russian getting things done who'll spend the time translating (and it can take a very, very long time!) or hire an interpreter, which costs a lot of money (you'll be going to several places and the whole thing takes a long time at each place, also keep in mind that you as a tourist will have to look up all these places in advance, including bus or metro routes there!), and could very easily ruin someone's vacation.
This site, which helps people move to Russia, created a handy infographic summarizing the seven steps and candidly informs folks that "the entire process usually takes 2 weeks and requires a total of 20-25 hours of effort"!
https://welcome-to-russia.com/tutorial/how-to-obtain-a-russian-simcard/
And don't even get me started on how rude and honestly ignorant many of the employees at "My Documents" (the name of the local MVD office in every neighborhood) can be!
Speaking as an American, we don't tolerate public employees literally screaming in our faces, but boy oh boy, does it happen so often here in Russia!
That's for sure the most intense "cultural shock" that I experienced and still suffer every time I have to go there, which I now without exaggeration dread.
I always laugh thinking back on how I once though that my university's bureaucrats were so ignorant and rude, but by comparison, they're 19-century European aristocrats compared to typical Russian bureaucrats! lol
" Russian culture has managed to absorb and blend together a great number of ethnicities that lived within the borders of the Empire and, later, the Soviet Union. "
Only through force and cultural dominance. This never works in "democracies".
Oh really? And the American Civil War—was that a joke? And the forced integration of Scotland and Ireland by the English parliamentary monarchy? And the eradication of all strong regional cultures by the French Republic starting in 1873? And the Italianization of South Tyrol or the Slavization of Slovenia from 1918 onward
You misunderstood me. I meant " has managed to absorb and blend together a great number of ethnicities that lived within the borders " never works in "democracies."
Andrew, frankly, I think you're getting carried away with what is nothing but empty talk. No concrete proposals, a grotesque overvaluation of the EU, no recognition of what makes Russia strong, and a profound self-loathing. Before finding Russian cities unsanitary, I suggest he come see the rats scurrying around Notre Dame in Paris, the garbage-filled sidewalks of London, the pervasive filth of major US cities. Let him compare the Moscow metro with that of any Western capital. Instead of displaying his contempt for the work accomplished over the last 30 years, let him start by making some proposals so we can have a laugh.
I think that some of his critiques from 2013 are outdated, like cities being dirty, but the gist of what he talked about is spot-on in my opinion. The mindset also needs to change in order for Russia to adapt with the times. I genuinely do feel like it's lagging behind a bit in some aspects like the tech race.
Bureaucracy also needs to be streamlined and the country should be easier for highly skilled foreigners to relocate to or Russia will only continue getting laborers, not experts, doctors, etc. The natural population replacement also continues to decline so attracting quality "new Russians" is important.
Yes, yes, the criticisms are valid, and so are the intentions—but the road to hell is paved with them. I’d like to see what concrete proposals are actually being put forward. We have the same people in France, with their bleak diagnoses—we’ve even given them a nickname: ‘declinists’—but invariably, when it comes to proposing solutions, all we get is a jumble of ultra-liberal ideas that only accelerate the decline they claim to denounce.
They call for reforms?
Which ones?
It’s always the same: fewer civil servants, fewer public services, less public healthcare, fewer regulations on employers—at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment—for the greater benefit of free foxes in a free henhouse.
Since Thatcher and Reagan, and especially since the end of the USSR, the entire West knows what “reform” really means. The Russians, for their part, learned it during the dreadful Yeltsin era. Quite a period of “reforms,” wasn’t it?
When I hear the word ‘reform’ in the mouth of a Valdai henchman, I find myself instinctively reaching for the grip of my revolver
Aside from that, you’re right about the issue of attractiveness. My son, who graduated from one of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools and is now specialized in finance, feels a strong pull toward the Russian civilizational model—just like a surprisingly large number of very bright young graduates who are becoming less and less interested in the London or New York mirage. But while the Anglo-Saxons are highly attractive and welcoming, Russia remains dismissive of these talents in search of a new homeland that still believes in itself. Nothing is being done to attract them—absolutely nothing.
If Russia were to set up a one-stop immigration desk in its embassies, connecting employers with candidates, smoothing out all administrative procedures, and providing support for relocation, I’m certain the results would be striking across Western Europe.
One should never forget that amid the current wave of hysterical Russophobia, there are still 25 to 30% of Europeans who feel more sympathy for Russia than for the United States. We’re talking about 150 million people.
It’s hard to believe that Russia doesn’t attract at least one million young graduates with their spouses and children.
Moreover, there remains a concern—perhaps unfounded—that, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, Russians will always retain a certain distrust toward foreigners and will not allow them to reach the highest positions within companies.
Absolutely, it's self-inflicted damage to the national interest not to optimize the migration process for highly skilled foreigners like your son. I can only speak for Sputnik since I never worked in the private sector here, but non-Russians had a glass ceiling and could only rise so far in the company.
What's ironic is that two of our top editors for Sputnik English/International ended up leaving Russia sometime after they left their posts. One got married to a Brit or Scot, I think, and ultimately moved to Texas while the other moved to Israel.
They weren't bad people and they seemed to take their job seriously, but it says a lot about who Sputnik picked to lead a top soft power institution that two of them eventually left Russia.
One of the more significant issues that most foreigners face in Russia is finding someone to register them. It used to be that your employer registered you at their address but then that was changed in 2017 or somewhere around then to where you have to be registered at your actual place of residence. That's so that the authorities know where to find you if you commit a crime.
Sensible, sure, but the problem is that many landlords don't want to register foreigners. Doing so gives them specific legal rights that they fear could be exploited to stay in the residence without paying rent. Another reason is that foreigners have to register every time they return to Russia from abroad.
Although it can apparently be done online, my former landlady before I bought my apartment in 2022 did it in person, and it could take a very long time if there's a line. One time we were there for something like 2-3 hours. You'd think that registration would remain the same no matter how many times you leave and return to Russia, but no, you have to give the government a copy of all pages of your passport every time and then receive a slip from the government in exchange.
You have to show your registration whenever you do anything related to bureaucracy, and without the document, they're not supposed to service you. You also have to register within a strict, short deadline too. One time I literally couldn't do it on time because my landlady's father died, which is understandable, so I had to pay a fine and I got a strike on my record. If you get three within a certain period of time, it's automatic deportation, I think.
Again, I understand the importance of these rules in principle for security purposes and agree that rules must be enforced or they're worthless, but I feel that this registration system has become excessive and beyond burdensome for foreign renters and domestic landlords alike. It's a major obstacle in why people struggle to permanently relocate to Russia.
Bezrukov's proposals are very impressive. Thankyou.
If Peter the Great is surveying the field today, he is surely going to find little to learn from the West, if we are honest, perhaps that is the answer.
To follow on from that, China's path to rejuvenation has primarily been through self improvement, and a highly disciplined foreign policy. That's perhaps another answer.
What proposition? I only see criticism, but no proposition.
Think there are lots of propositions (which according to OED means assertions/judgements), but also proposals (after the headline THE NEW STRATEGIC PARADIGM).
Don't believe it would be easy, however.
Sorry, but without concrete proposals, all this is just talk.
You are a tough customer! :-)
Given the paper is 2013 vintage, it has faired quite well, imho.
Not wrong for both.
More I get old more I'm a bad customer.
And true too for 2013.
but modernization implies getting rid of the siloviki-oligarchic system and that will never happen.
Well, well, well, we can clearly see the criticisms and viewpoints. But I haven’t seen a single proposal for reform.
Concretely, what is the guy actually proposing?
Right now it's unacceptable to propose detailed reforms in public because that's seen as challenging the government by suggesting that a specific current policy is inadequate, thus raising the question of why it's remained in place for so long, who's responsible, why they didn't address it already, etc.
It took a whole four years for just two top experts to suggest that not everything is going well and that there are very serious stakes at play if Russia remains along the same course or reforms. I do believe that he and Trenin are more detailed with their proposals behind the scenes though.
But being detailed in public can be seen as trying to pit people against the government and I don't think either of them wanted to take that chance after already bravely sticking their necks out simply talking about the general need for reform. SMO-related national security laws have had a chilling effort on public debate.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the reason behind them, but that's an inadvertent consequence. Take my public critiques of Russia that I share under my analyses' comments: I would never type them in Russian and share them on a Russian page where Russians might read them. Never.
I keep my critiques in English and on a platform that many Russians don't use since I have zero interest in risking everything by having some overzealous bureaucrat salivate at the thought of a raise by falsely implicating me in some "meddling" plot, God forbid. I imagine that Trenin and Timofeev have similar concerns.
Ok Andrew, I understand.
Sometimes, great leaders themselves have big problems of inertia in their own administration and need that other people launch trial balloons to see reactions with possible dénégations
do not underestimate them.
100% they follow you and the fact you have content just in english in which you critique(however mildly) the government will be used against you if they deem it necessary.
as a romanian i tell you that every ex-warsaw pact country has a deep dark core of former siloviki(or their children) that controls the state, the banks and the mob.
russia's little expansionist experiment is done, they failed and soon they'll start searching for scape-goats.
they have no humanity or shame, get out of there while you can.
i hope i'm wrong but i don't think so, stories similar to yours happened thousands of times here on this bloodlands.
take care.
Thanks, but I feel like everything will be okay since my critiques are constructive and aimed at improving policy formulation and implementation.
I'm a credentialed expert after receiving my MA an PhD at the MFA-run MGIMO so my critiques are always fact-based and grounded in the political reality that I can to learn about from the inside-out.
I just know that we foreigners can never critique the government to Russians, in Russian, or on Russian platforms just in case, which I'd never do.
I also humbly believe that my overall public activities are beneficial to Russia in the sense of analyzing and articulating its policies as they objectively exist for clarifying their goals and modi operandi among a foreign audience.
With that in mind, I don't think anyone would authorize what would in that case be my literal persecution.
Sure, corruption exists and anything can happen, but anyone can be charged with anything on whatever false basis if someone powerful really wants to take you down so I'm not going to live in fear and self-censor forever.
I'm already not invited to major events, having been de facto blacklisted for not parroting low-IQ talking points like others do, but I think that's as far as it'll go.
I've been here for 12.5 years, including the entirety of the SMO (I haven't left Russia since a trip abroad in 2019), and everything is slowly but surely opening back up a bit right now compared to 2022-2023.
I'm not therefore not worried about that at all since I was even more constructively critical about even more sensitive issues back then than I am now.
I know what we're allowed to do and not allowed to do as foreigners here and I very strictly remain within my limits, never getting anywhere near crossing them (I have no such intent either). In that sense, I serve as a model for other expats.
all this is perfect except in the situation that shit really hits the fan.
i don't want to seem a debbie downer but have an emergency plan at least.
while russian people are usually great the russian state apparatus is an absolute monster.
again, take care :)
le: i mean in the eventuality of a blockade or things like that, things that creates social upheavals, some heads need to be delivered to the hoi-poloi; who's heads are better than of the foreign 'assets'? :)))
Check this out, for example, which I published in November 2022 and have regularly hyperlinked into my analyses since then:
https://korybko.substack.com/p/20-constructive-critiques-about-russias
Shit already hit the fan by then since Russia had just completed its tactical pullbacks from Kharkov and Kherson Regions.
They were its first real setbacks of the conflict and the partial mobilization of experienced reservists was declared two months prior.
There was no reaction to what I wrote from anyone who I know, including diplomats, public media employees, etc.
No messages being passed along at anyone else's behest to self-censor, no threats conveyed, nothing.
That's because it wasn't shared with Russians, written in Russian, and/or shared on Russian platforms.
Other than not discrediting the government and armed forces, which I'd never do, those are the three unofficial limits on foreigners' speech.
i will.
and i take this opportunity to commend your work, rational discussion and debate is the only thing that can keep the monsters at bay.
but again brother, the monsters exist and are lurking much closer than one imagine; take care.
It's also not possible for me to have an emergency plan since my wife and two kids are Russian citizens who cannot receive visas to the US or Poland right now.
My entire life savings is in rubles, which cannot easily be transferred out of the country (let alone in a huge amount due to SMO-related limits), and I own my apartment here.
I invested my whole life into Russia, I went all in and put myself on what Robert Greene (my favorite author by far) describes as "death ground" where failure isn't an option.
I understood the risks when I first came here but am proud of the decision I've made despite the extremely frustrating bureaucratic difficulties that I've had and which have been humiliating at times.
Anyhow, if a decision was made to persecute me (which I'm not worried about but hypothetically speaking), I wouldn't be able to get past the passport check in Russia anyhow.
So it is what it is, honestly I've become a lot more apathetic in recent years, I'd say from summer 2024 onward and especially after last summer's Anchorage Summit.
I'm glad to see that top experts are vaguely talking about reforms and pushing the limits of what's acceptable to say in public, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high .
Russia isn't known for gradual change -- it either stagnates, declines or radically changes -- and what I foresee is a "managed decline" UNLESS there are radical but controlled changes.
A "managed decline" isn't too bad, and maybe after some time there'll finally be radical but controlled changes, even if they're implemented by whoever ultimately succeeds Putin.
At any rate, I've made my peace with that scenario. If things got even worse, I'd probably pull back a bit from my work and invest more time in my hobbies instead of "harshly criticize" anything.
I can't be "more pro-Russian than the Russians themselves", and with full respect to them, it's ultimately their country and therefore their responsibility to improve things as required.
" The authors noted that “European NATO dwarfs Russia in economic scale, population, and, thus, latent military power.” "
The Western Europeans dont have the manpower to field their armies and are deathly afraid of recruiting, or drafting the Muslims and Africans. If they only draft White Europeans they will unleash massive resentment and possible civil war.
Those are already more than half of french army...
I doubt it based on videos I've seen. Its still mainly indigenous Frenchmen.
Yes, the video
I talk reality.
You have not much in air force or marine, but in army...
Fair enough, they must all be very patriotic "Frenchmen" then. The US army has many non-Whites in it also. However, most would turn their guns against "Whitey" at the first opportunity they get. I'd wager the situation in France is the same.
Andrew said (begin quote) pointing to China as a new model, and not ruling out cooperating with the West. (end quote)
I would also point out a few Chinese historical facts to show that Chinese and Russian histories are probably a better model for Russia's continued reform than China of the last ten years. Even China of 1990-2010 should be studied with some real understanding of Chinese before one jumps in. Russia has some inherent strengths that China does not have. And let's not forget the historical heritage: A lot of them are good. But all winners tend to sit on their laurels and forget their mistakes. I think Russians are no exception. The USSR era had burned down a lot of good heritage, while solidifying the bad heritage. I don't see how the damage can be reversed in 30 years of Putin's rule/influence. More obviously have to be done.
(1) Qing kingdom unified China. Qing kingdom was considered a Western barbarian in the then-China. Qing's successive kings recruited intellectuals from all over China, both domestically and internationally and improved Qing in every aspect. The Eastern side of the kings, however, sat on their laurels and were proud of their historical heritage and past achievements. They progressed, but at a snail pace.
(2) Tang dynasty. The royal blood contained significant Turk ethnics. This dynasty also started from the West side of China and was accustomed to international trade through the Silk Road. Tang allowed seaborne trades but did not pursue naval supremacy. Tang did try to maintain supremacy over the Central Asia countries, but rarely used force after Turk was divided. Tang dynasty broke the tradition of picking newer generation of administrator from descendants of former minister, and adopted a new system to use exams to pick junior administrators, then gradually promoted them to higher levels. In the first half the Tang dynasty, Tang dynasty welcomed and attracted foreign merchants and travelers, and absorbed some good foreign things into China.
(3) On the second half of the Ming dynasty, China suffered major problems of Japanese piracy (I think by then Japan was in severe civil wars). However, the Ming dynasty did not close down seaborne trade. Portuguese Jesuits brought in many Western gadgets. For example, cannon-making, telescope, to astronomy, etc. In the early days of the Manchurian dynasty, the emperor used such Portuguese cannons and firearms to defeat and suppress the Junggar in a critical battle.
(4) Portuguese Jesuits were implicated in the Manchurian royal court succession power struggle, and the fourth emperor drove out all foreigners and their influences, teachings, and books, etc. During the full bloom of Western Renaissance, China closed its doors and looked only inside. When the foreigners came again, they came to sell kerosene and opium. There were ministers who wanted reform to at least matching the Western firepower and they got marginal success. However, no discussion of further reform was attempted until the final 40 years of Manchurian dynasty. By then, it was too late, and the Manchurian royals were still reluctant.
(5) China suffered tremendously during Mao's era. When Deng took over in 1976, Deng reverted to older system he and Liu Shaoqi promoted. But he then realized that was far from enough. And finally he pushed for economic reform with large-scale "open-up" (remove central planning and government intervention) and allowed foreign influence and investment (especially from Taiwan and Hongkong) In many aspects, China's most recent rounds of reform-openness (1990-2010) is more of relaxing government control, promote infrastructure and basic industries, seeking foreign technologies and knowledge, but NOT seeking reform of political system. In Deng's mind, and in many senior cadets' mind, learning the right form of economy can be separated from the right form of political system. There is some truth about the last concept, but economy is never fully separated from political system.
Therefore, if the "Young Turks" are seeking to "deepen the Reform" (a frequently used term in China's official language these days) there are both pros and cons about using China as a model.
(1) The strategy of relaxing government control (slowly), increasing infrastructures investment (don't overdo it), and participating in technology and education exchange is still good. DO NOT forget the Americans were helping China for that move so as to drag China away from the USSR. Today the US is trying to subdue Russia, Yet China is afraid of losing some of its own relative advantages it needs to exchange with Russia for Russia's resources and technology.
(2) The current Chinese system is extremely corrupt. The shiny new skyscrapers are literally built on sandy beaches as they come up with huge debt rather than organic wealth. The wealth distribution is extremely unequal. About half of the population are still under or near the poverty line. China's development of cities and rural areas are extremely biased. Russia already has the problem of Moscow and St. Petersburg well above everywhere else of China. At a time when Russia should consider the population gravity center moving east or at least less concentrated to serve as nuke attack targets, infrastructure development in the rural areas is far more important than building skyscrapers in Moscow. Siberia as the new industrial development center obviously should be considered.
(3) China suffered severe capital flight. Any opening up of the financial system in Russia will cause similar capital flight. Capitalists have no fatherland. It was true in the past, it is still true now or in the future.
(4) What to learn from the outside? Semiconductor lithography? Would Western countries be willing to teach? Aerospace? Stealth fighter jets, aircraft carriers, tanks with composite armor or smooth-bore gun barrels? Basic Science? The West are not necessarily better than Russia. For biotechnology and medicine? Perhaps. But do remember mRNA and all other Western world scandals gradually unwrapped now. After wall, the Western world did not solve all their problems. And Ditto for China.
(5) There is a strong pro-China faction in Russia. And China does have many historical and modern examples for Russians to study. But, is the current pro-China faction in Russia for China or for Russia? What exactly do you intend to learn from China? Rocket science? Collapsing dams? Damaged ecology? Exploding EVs? One must have a clear goal and scope before taking up an example as a model. It is better to study the model well before commencing large scale similar projects.
Fascinating post, thank you so much for investing the time in writing it and explaining all of this to us! You're totally right about Russia; as I've been saying for some time, there are periods where it enters into complacency, these lead to stagnation, and then decline follows, sometimes even an abrupt collapse.
Prior to the SMO, in retrospect, Russia had entered the stagnation phase. There's now greater awareness that the country needs to reform, but the new problem is that complacency is ironically creeping back due to broken feedback loops and the recycling of propaganda within them by the foreign "Potemkinists" (who are only allowed to parrot low-IQ talking points to Russian officials, diplomats, and experts about how "Russia is always winning", "the West is in irreversible decline", "everything is going according to plan" because someone or some forces more likely allow them to, I suspect, for the purpose of stifling reforms, including foreign policy ones).
So what we see is this assumption that the West is irreversibly on decline but still a threat for the time being, but that time is supposedly on Russia's side since its victory is "inevitable". That's really what the unofficial ideology here is and it's led to massive self-censorship, I feel, that only Trenin and now Timofeev are brave enough to defy.
Indeed. The ones who stand up to say that we are not good enough are always the one get cold-bench treatment, if not the cold guillotine treatment. I claim that Taiwan fell into this trap in the early 1970s (Asian 4-tiger era) and did not push for industrial upgrades (to the precision machinery and high attached values like Japan did). Once China started reform and openness, Taiwan's businessmen flocked to China and taught them everything. Taiwan was left with no relative advantage. By the time Taiwan's government woke up and pushed the right things, China had finished the most difficult "bootstrap" stage, and rocketed up. Given China's base volume, Taiwan needed a significant edge to remain independent. Taiwan's military was in even worse shape (mentally) and encouraged no independent or new thinking. There were a couple of foresighted persons in Taiwan at that time, but they were not in power.
Thankyou for your extensive comment, although I can't agree with substantive parts of it - I hope you don't mind me saying that your picture of China seems consistent with most what the West says it is (e.g. exploding EVs? Shouldn't it be exploding EV exports?), and not what I have studied and seen in person.
I feel obliged to comment because your description of China's political system runs contrary to my impression that it is their fundamental strength and advantage. It is a system very few have sought to understand, and indeed few open source description gives it justice. Party Life by Eric Li is worth reading for those interested - it is not hard to see why their political system IS the reason for their economic and other successes. How else could any country experience their decades long break-neck changes while achieving exemplary population trust and satisfaction in their leadership (see Harvard Ash, Edelman, AoD etc. surveys for yourself).
The fly in the ointment, is China's political system would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any electoral democracy, real or pretend, to imitate.
You are welcome.
My impression IS influenced by Chinese overseas dissidents on YouTube. And since many of these people are kept alive by the CIA, they do have bias about China, but many of them still have good connections to China. I am from Taiwan, and I understand China before 1949 fairly well. I knew China up to 1979 less well. My mother, my younger brother, and my sister-in-law have all been to China many times since 1991. However, they are not sharp observers. They see all the things that awe the Western observers. If I had gone to China as well, of course, I would likely be impressed. But as an analyst, it is very important to see what we don't see immediately. Or perhaps I should say we should dig below the facade.
China's society is definitely stratified: you are either in the system (party or government, military) or you are not. There are certain rules, written or unwritten. The party mechanism is very corrupt, but seriously, so were every Chinese dynasty before the Republic of China, and including the Republic of China. The key is that if one wants to impact national politics, there is only one way. You either have to have the right parents or you have to pass the hierarchy to reach the top. People who are good at power struggles, such as Xi, are not always good at leading a country. Most communist leaders listened to the staff, with Mao and Xi being the noticeable exceptions. Mao successfully dominated political power and screwed up China's economy. Xi initially succeeded in political domination, but he has always "messed up" the economic affairs. Some of those mess-ups were due to stupidity, but some of those "mess-ups" are really for war preparation. War preparation always hurts the civilian economy, whether in China or in the US. I have a "draft" intended to write about Xi's policy "achievement" in messing up the civilian economy but making China more ready for war, perhaps I should finish it up.
How did China achieve a great deal during 1979-2012? I believe the key reason is "decentralize". They decentralized not only at the execution level, but also at the policy decision level whenever applicable. Western observers who believe power concentration is the key to China's fast development were at best half right. Concentration is better for the infrastructure stage. For example, China continued work on railroad, irrigation, steel-making, and weapon manufacturing throughout all the turbulent years. Most Westerners ignored the fact that China had a very strong railroad system, dams, and hydro-electric generation, as well as weapon development and manufacturing, BEFORE 1979. The US today does not have an equivalent infrastructure due to the hollowing out of manufacturing.
However, the pursuit of unconstrained capitalism backfired in China as well as in the US, except that neither would confess. This can explain the slowdown during the Hu Jingtao years and part of the reasons for China's economic retrograde during Xi years. Capital flight can also explain why China's central stimulus packages have less and less impact.
By now, I might have worn your patience down. Perhaps I should reformulate and post a better-structured one later. Finally, I want to emphasize that China's political system is simply too easy to learn and mimic, even with a nominal democracy. The issue is probably not any specific type of political system, as China did have a few strong and prosperous periods under supposedly autocratic emperors. The reality is that most of the Chinese emperors were constrained by their own deep states and not really autocratic in the usual sense.
I believe the key is to find a small group of elite intellectuals, give them good training for basics, and good tours of duty to understand practical matters. These people must be well paid but not selfish, i.e., not corruptible, much like the Jedi. Let these people design core policies, but allow a wide freedom for local adjustment. The central government focuses on "validation" and "verification", rather than execution. Distribute the decision power as much as one can (the military power was never distributed, for example, in any country, any time). Allow the people to work and produce, but tax properly to maintain social cohesion. This is why I write my Substack.
I suspect you already know that I can't agree with much of what you say.
As I mentioned earlier, you probably should get hold of a copy of Party Life by Eric Li - it is not possible for me to tell you here how the CPC works - I am pretty sure theirs is the only logical, viable solution I am aware to ensure competent governance long term, not just for a single crop - if you can think of any better institutional structure to deliver those elite intellectuals you mention who must also be virtuous, crop after crop, do tell. We can agree electoral democracy fails miserably for anything except tiny entities, right?
Since I detect you detest autocracy - a funny way to look at it, is to ask ourselves which organisation was able to survive 2000 years, despite peddling virgin birth and rise from the dead, and how their Human Resource department works? Certainly not democratic elections, right? If universal suffrage is so great, surely all organisations / companies, private or public, would run with it to be more competitive? So why not? Because it doesn't work, as Socrates long opined.
If the autocractic CPC is so bad, the Taiwan government, let alone the mighty US of A, needs not worry about China rising, surely?
I guess the above is my rebuttal to your reference to Chinese autocracy. I am all ears!
Regarding corruption, and how it has been tamed and indeed perhaps over-tamed, I suggest Dean of Shantong written by Daniel Bell.
Having extensive training in engineering, I like to judge a system by its results. Is there any competiton between what the CPC has achieved and anybody else's, or in terms of leadership performance compared to any other nation's? I think not, bearing in mind what China started off with, the magnitude and complexity of what they had to overcome, and what they have achieved. Everything else can be smoke and mirrors, and we all know there is no shortage of that where we are in the West. But aren't we lucky though to see how some smoke clearing in the last 40 odd days, after all these years... Can you see?
To understand CCP, you have to read stuff in Chinese.
Why, may I ask? What concept in Chinese is indescribable in, say, English?
Since we have been debating, or are you trying to invalidate my views of the CPC by saying / assuming I haven't / can't "read stuff in Chinese"?
Are you going to tell me next I also need to have the same name as modern China’s founding father, 中山? Wait!
Do I need a Japanese persona to understand CPC too? For someone with a Taiwanese/Chinese heritage interested in geopolitics, isn't Zhongshan more apt, given Taiwan's brutal colonial history, and the 靖國神社 traffic today?
Alastair Crooke said that Israeli media published in English tell the foreigners what they want the foreigners to know; the Hebrew media, however, reflect the more realistic political discussions. The Chinese government does similar things. If you read only English media published inside China, you are not getting the full picture. Instead, if you can read Korean or Japanese, then you will get a better view. Taiwan's media are either controlled by CIA or by CCP, and there are few truly independent media. Feel free to disagree with me. Going to China and making your own observations can also be helpful.
Given my opinion that the West is only prospering in the arms industry and is stagnating in almost every other area, I have a fundamental question:
From the current situation, where should Russia's development be headed?
Towards a phlegmatic, ossified Europe with a great deal of staid know-how?
Or towards China and emerging economies?
Andrew, thank you for the newsetter and all the comments. Russia has been locked into a C OMPO TION with EU & the West . There ae good aspects about the West. Russia needs to modernize and get some of the good points that are in thhe EU & the West. Russia needs to go see the West & what would help them modernize. The West is not all bad.
Exactly! A lot of "Non-Russian Pro-Russians" literally hate everything about the West despite many of them ironically being Westerners themselves, but there are indeed certain aspects of its civilization, strategic culture, management style, etc., that could greatly benefit Russia if adopted and adapted to its national circumstances.
Putin himself praised the West till the SMO and even to this day still laments that they forced Russia into this position where it had to defend itself from them whom he sincerely wanted to partner with this entire time and still does (ergo why he regularly calls on them to end their sanctions and resume pre-SMO economic cooperation).
Truly, as a proud "Non-Russian Pro-Russian" (NRPR) literally living in Russia unlike many others, any honest person here Russian or otherwise would tell you that reforms of some sort are required.
In fact, I've never met a Russian who didn't have at least one constructive critique to share about their country, which doesn't mean that Russia is "bad", "underdeveloped", etc., just that it could be better, they know it, and they want it to be.
I published this piece in March 2018 documenting the many constructive criticisms that Putin made about Russia during one of his keynote speeches at the time, which the NRPR would decry as "anti-Russian" if someone shared them word-for-word on social media:
"It’s Okay To Constructively Criticize Russia, Even President Putin Does It!"
https://web.archive.org/web/20180401072630/https://orientalreview.org/2018/03/06/okay-constructively-criticize-russia-even-president-putin/
What's happened over the years is that the NRPR community morphed from an intellectual community of high-IQ free-thinkers to an ignorant club of low-IQ literal propagandists who always without exception cheer every single policy and viciously cancel anyone who constructively critiques Russia.
In effect, NRPRs flip-flopped from an asset for Russia which advances its national interests that they share (even if they constructively critique its policies with the aim of improving implementation) to a liability that harms its interests and discredits intellectual high-IQ free-thinking NRPRs by association.
The easiest way to discern whether someone is an intellectual high-IQ free-thinking NRPRs or a low-IQ literal propagandist is to ask them what they think about Russian-Israeli relations. The first will acknowledge they're close even if they don't like it while the second will lie that Putin is an anti-Zionist secretly plotting against Israel.
I've run this test countless times over the years and it never fails: every single person who parrots the "Potemkinist" (https://korybko.substack.com/p/potemkinism-is-responsible-for-false) lie about him ends up being a low-IQ propagandist who'll decry as "anti-Russian" the exact same constructive critiques that Bezrukov and even Putin himself shared if someone posts them on social media word-for-word without attribution.
The Catastrophe Clause — When Elites Finally Remember the People Exist
There is a grim regularity to Russian history that, once seen, cannot be unseen. It operates like a law of political physics, as reliable as any natural phenomenon: Russian elites discover the value of their own population only when the alternative is annihilation. Not reform, not stagnation, not relative decline — annihilation. The threshold is extraordinarily high, and the discovery, when it comes, is always presented as a voluntary embrace rather than a desperate concession. But the timing never lies. The people are remembered precisely when the elites have run out of everything else.
This pattern did not begin with Stalin, though he provided its most dramatic modern expression. It runs through the entire arc of Russian state formation. Peter the Great's modernization, for all its genuine transformative ambition, was fundamentally triggered by the catastrophic defeat at Narva in 1700, where a Swedish army a fraction of Russia's size destroyed his forces with humiliating ease. The reforms that followed were not the product of Enlightenment idealism. They were the product of existential shock. Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs in 1861 came in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War, where Russia's military backwardness had been exposed to the entire world on its own territory. The Stolypin reforms of the early twentieth century followed the revolutionary trauma of 1905, itself triggered by the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War. In each case, the structure is identical: catastrophe first, then the sudden discovery that the human beings who constitute the country might matter.
Stalin's pivot in the Great Patriotic War is simply the most viscerally documented instance of this recurring logic, and it deserves close examination because it illuminates not only the past but the present.
The scale of the disaster in the summer and autumn of 1941 remains almost incomprehensible. Within weeks of the German invasion, the Red Army had suffered losses that, in any rational military calculus, should have ended the war. Entire army groups were encircled and destroyed. By December 1941, the Soviet Union had lost approximately 4.5 million soldiers killed, wounded, or captured. The Wehrmacht stood at the gates of Moscow. Leningrad was under siege. Kiev had fallen. The industrial heartland of Ukraine was occupied. The system that Stalin had built — the command economy, the political commissars, the terror that had decapitated the officer corps in the purges of 1937-38, the ideological rigidity that had refused to believe the Germans would actually attack — had produced a catastrophe of world-historical proportions, most of it self-inflicted.
And in that moment, something extraordinary happened. Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the man who had spent two decades dismantling pre-revolutionary Russian culture, persecuting the Orthodox Church, suppressing national identities, and insisting that the only meaningful collective identity was the Soviet one — this man went on the radio and addressed his listeners not as "comrades," not as "citizens of the Soviet Union," not as the vanguard of international communism, but as "brothers and sisters." He invoked not Marx and Lenin but Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy. He called upon not the revolutionary tradition but the ancestral one. He reached past everything his system had built and grabbed the deepest available roots — ethnicity, soil, church bells, the graves of grandfathers — because the ideological construction had failed and only the ancient, pre-political identity retained enough cohesive power to hold people together in the face of catastrophe.
The Church, which had been systematically persecuted for two decades, was quietly rehabilitated. Patriotism — Russian patriotism specifically, not Soviet internationalism — was permitted and then actively promoted. Officers were allowed to wear the traditional shoulder boards that had been abolished as symbols of the old regime. The language of sacred soil, of the motherland, of Russia as a living entity worth dying for, flooded the propaganda space that had previously been occupied by class struggle and proletarian internationalism.
This was not a spiritual conversion. Stalin did not suddenly discover the Russian soul. He discovered that the Soviet ideological apparatus, left to its own devices, was insufficient to motivate men to die in sufficient numbers and with sufficient commitment to stop the most powerful military machine in the world. He needed something older, deeper, and more viscerally compelling than party loyalty. He needed, in short, the people — their actual identity, their actual attachments, their actual reasons for living and dying — rather than the ideological construct he had tried to substitute for those things.
It worked. Not immediately, and not without the additional instruments of terror and coercion that Stalin never entirely set aside. But it worked. The combination of genuine patriotic mobilization from below and desperate pragmatism from above produced one of the most remarkable reversals in military history. The people, once actually addressed as people rather than as ideological units, found within themselves a capacity for sacrifice and endurance that the system, on its own terms, could never have generated.
The lesson has never been fully internalized, because internalizing it would require the elites to draw the logical peacetime conclusion: that the people who can save you in extremis are the same people you are currently ignoring, obstructing, and treating with bureaucratic contempt during ordinary times. The wartime pivot is politically easy because it costs the elite nothing structural. It does not require them to share power, to create accountability, to permit genuine institutional representation of popular interests. It requires only a change of rhetorical register — from ideological abstraction to ethnic and civilizational feeling — while the fundamental hierarchy of the system remains intact. And crucially, once the crisis passes, the pivot reverses. The Church was rehabilitated in 1941 and reined in again in the 1950s. The nationalist language was permitted in wartime and gradually re-subordinated to Soviet orthodoxy in peacetime. The people were remembered and then forgotten again, until the next catastrophe.
This cycle is where Russia finds itself now, in a form that is at once familiar and novel. The SMO has been, in significant respects, a slow-motion version of 1941's shock — not in its absolute military catastrophe, which has not reached anything like those proportions, but in its revelatory function. It has exposed, to those willing to see, the gap between Russia's self-image and its actual institutional capacity. The mobilization of September 2022 was the first moment since the Soviet collapse when the state reached directly into the lives of ordinary Russian men and said: we need your body, not just your taxes and your compliance. That is a different kind of claim. It is the beginning of the catastrophe clause being activated.
Timofeev and Trenin's calls for modernization, Korybko's honest documentation of bureaucratic dysfunction, Bezrukov's prophetic 2013 diagnosis — these are all symptoms of elites beginning to sense that the threshold may be approaching. Not because they have undergone a moral transformation, but because the strategic situation is forcing a reckoning with realities that were previously comfortable to ignore. NATO's economic and demographic scale, the depletion of Soviet-era military stocks, the flight of human capital, the failure to diversify away from hydrocarbons — none of these are new. What is new is the growing difficulty of sustaining the Potemkinist feedback loop in the face of tangible evidence that the country's actual performance falls short of its self-representation.
The danger — and this is where historical honesty demands clarity — is that the catastrophe clause, even when activated, tends to produce the minimum adjustment necessary to survive rather than the structural transformation necessary to thrive. Stalin's pivot to Russian nationalism saved the Soviet state and then was gradually reversed, leaving the fundamental pathologies intact for another generation until they eventually consumed the system entirely in 1991. The question for Russia today is whether its current generation of reformist voices can convert a crisis-driven opening into something durable — whether the recognition, once again forced by emergency, that the people are the country's primary asset can this time be institutionalized rather than merely instrumentalized.
History suggests the odds are poor. The elites' track record of using the people in extremis and then returning to managing them from above once the immediate danger passes is nearly unbroken across centuries. What would break it is precisely what neither Stalin nor any of his predecessors were willing to do: create institutions that make the people's participation in their own governance a permanent structural feature rather than a wartime concession — accountability mechanisms, genuine civic culture, a state apparatus that serves rather than commands. The alternative is another cycle: crisis, mobilization, rhetoric of the nation, survival, forgetting, stagnation, and the slow accumulation of the next catastrophe.
Russia has survived every catastrophe it has yet encountered. The open question — the one that Timofeev's dry academic language and the Confucian framing both circle, from different directions — is whether surviving catastrophe indefinitely is the same thing as flourishing. And whether a civilization of this depth, this cultural richness, this human potential, is content to keep finding that out the hard way.
The Ground Is Rich, the People Are Poor — Resource Wealth and the Neglect of Human Capital
There is a specific kind of poverty that afflicts wealthy countries, and it is more dangerous than the ordinary kind because it is invisible to those suffering from it. It is the poverty of underinvested human beings in a state that does not need them to be exceptional in order to remain solvent. Russia is, by most honest assessments, deep in this condition — and has been for long enough that many of its symptoms are now mistaken for cultural characteristics rather than policy consequences.
The resource curse in its standard economic formulation is well documented. Countries with abundant extractable natural wealth — oil, gas, minerals — tend to develop institutions optimized for extraction and distribution rather than for production and innovation. Taxation of citizens becomes less important when the ground itself pays the state's bills, which means citizens have less leverage over the state and states have less incentive to develop the administrative capacity that genuine taxation requires. Elites cluster around the resource rents. Manufacturing and agriculture atrophy from neglect. And the exchange rate effects of commodity exports make other industries structurally uncompetitive.
Russia exhibits every one of these symptoms. But the resource curse has a dimension that economists underweight, because it does not show up cleanly in GDP figures or institutional quality indices. It is the attitudinal curse — the way that resource abundance shapes a society's relationship to its own people.
When the ground is your primary asset, people are secondary. They are needed to pump, refine, and ship; to staff the administrative apparatus that distributes the proceeds; to man the military that protects the territory containing the reserves. But they do not need to be genuinely creative, entrepreneurially free, or institutionally empowered to generate value, because value is already there, underground, waiting. The incentive to cultivate human potential — to educate deeply, to create competitive markets for ideas, to reward innovation rather than loyalty — is structurally suppressed. The return on investment in people is speculative. The return on investment in a pipeline is not.
This logic, operating across decades, produces a particular kind of human landscape. The most talented individuals — those with the drive and capability to generate value rather than merely capture it — find themselves in a system that has no real place for them unless they subordinate their creativity to the existing hierarchy's needs. Many leave. Bezrukov noted this with clinical precision in 2013: Russia had no competitive advantage in any driver of wealth other than natural resources. That was not a statement about Russian people. It was a statement about what the Russian system had chosen to develop and what it had chosen to neglect.
The neglect is not merely economic. It is, crucially, relational. The way a state treats its citizens in ordinary interactions — at the ministry counter, in the school, at the hospital, in the court — communicates, cumulatively and unmistakably, what the state believes those citizens are worth. Korybko's SIM card ordeal is not a bureaucratic anecdote. It is a data point in a vast, continuous message that the Russian state sends to its population: your time does not matter, your dignity is not our concern, your convenience is irrelevant to our function. This message, received daily by millions of people, shapes what those people believe is possible. It shapes whether a young scientist in Novosibirsk thinks her ideas are worth pursuing, whether an entrepreneur in Kazan believes a business can be built on quality rather than connections, whether a schoolteacher in Chelyabinsk believes that what he does in the classroom genuinely matters to anyone in authority.
Human capital is not simply the number of engineers a country produces. It is the aggregate of what people believe they can do, and that belief is formed in the daily texture of institutional life. A society that systematically communicates contempt for its members' time, dignity, and initiative will not produce an innovative economy regardless of how many STEM graduates it mints, because innovation requires not just knowledge but the psychological freedom and institutional security to act on it.
China's most instructive lesson — drawn from Nakayama's historical survey — is not the economic miracle itself but the conditions that made it possible: the decision, under Deng, to actually trust people's economic instincts, to relax state control over individual initiative, to allow the hunger and creativity that were always there to find productive outlets. China did not create human capital in the 1980s and 1990s. It released it. The capital had been there all along, suppressed by decades of ideological rigidity and institutional violence.
Russia's human capital is similarly latent rather than absent. Russian mathematical and scientific culture is genuinely exceptional — the product of a Soviet educational system that, whatever its political pathologies, took intellectual formation seriously and produced generations of people capable of remarkable things. Russian literature, music, and artistic tradition represent one of the great civilizational achievements of the modern world. These are not myths. They are real, and they are there to build on.
What is required is not the importation of foreign genius but the creation of conditions in which domestic genius can function and stay. This means, first and most urgently, the reform of the institutions that interact with people daily — making them serve rather than obstruct, making accountability real rather than theoretical, making the experience of dealing with the state something other than a repeated lesson in one's own powerlessness.
It means education built around respect for the student's mind rather than compliance with the instructor's authority — education that teaches people to question, to build, to create, not merely to memorize and reproduce.
It means a tolerance for the kind of creative destruction that genuine innovation requires — the acceptance that some enterprises will fail, some ideas will be wrong, some experiments will produce nothing useful, and that this is not waste but investment.
And it means, ultimately, the cultural shift that underlies all of these: the recognition that Russia's people are not the passive beneficiaries of its resource wealth but its primary and most renewable source of strength — and that every year spent treating them as secondary is a year of compound loss that no oil price recovery can repay.
The Cross They Could Have Carried — Orthodoxy as Squandered Civilizational Capital
There is a thought experiment worth conducting. Imagine a state that shares a sacramental tradition with roughly 260 million people across four continents. Imagine that this tradition includes a common liturgical language, a shared iconographic universe, an identical theology of salvation, and centuries of martyrology that bind its adherents in a collective memory of suffering and transcendence. Imagine further that this state is the largest, most powerful, and historically most prestigious representative of that tradition — its natural center of gravity, the place where its greatest cathedrals stand, where its theological patrimony was preserved through centuries of pressure from both East and West.
Now imagine that state spending thirty years methodically alienating every other member of that tradition.
This is not a thought experiment. It is the history of Russian Orthodox diplomacy since 1991.
The opportunity was extraordinary. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Orthodox Church re-emerged from decades of KGB infiltration and state suppression with its spiritual credibility battered but its cultural prestige largely intact. Across the Orthodox world — in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories — there was a genuine hunger for reconnection with Moscow as the senior patriarchate, as the symbolic home of a shared civilization. This was soft power of a kind that cannot be manufactured. It is either inherited or it is not, and Russia had inherited it in abundance.
Soft power, as Joseph Nye defined it, works through attraction rather than coercion. It is the power of making others want what you want, of setting the agenda not through threat but through appeal. Its instruments are culture, values, and the credibility of one's institutions. It is, by nature, slow, patient, and easily destroyed by the visible application of hard power — because the moment the attractive becomes the coercive, the spell is broken. People do not feel drawn to what they feel threatened by.
Russia has never fully grasped this distinction, or has grasped it and found it temperamentally intolerable. The imperial reflex — the need to make power felt as pressure, to produce visible deference rather than quiet affinity — consistently overrides the strategic logic of attraction. And nowhere is this more damaging than in the Orthodox space, precisely because the potential there was so great.
The Romanian and Moldovan case is instructive to the point of being almost pedagogical in its clarity. Romania is a Latin-speaking Orthodox nation — a combination unique in the Christian world — with a complex historical relationship with Russia that includes both genuine religious kinship and the living memory of Soviet occupation. After 1991, Russia had a real opening. The Romanian Orthodox Church is the second largest Orthodox church in the world by membership. Romanian religiosity runs deep, particularly in rural areas. There was no inherent reason why Romania had to become one of the most instinctively anti-Russian nations in Europe.
But Moscow's behavior in Moldova — using the frozen conflict in Transnistria as a permanent coercive lever, manipulating the Moldovan Orthodox Church's canonical dependence on the Moscow Patriarchate as a tool of political pressure, treating the country not as a neighbor to be cultivated but as a sphere to be controlled — sent a message that every Romanian understood viscerally: Russian protection and Russian domination are the same thing. The thin wedge of shared faith, which could have been driven gently and patiently to create genuine cultural affinity, was instead swung like a hammer. The result was not obedience. It was revulsion.
The same pattern repeated in Georgia, where the 2008 war severed whatever remaining threads of Orthodox solidarity might have bridged the political divide. It repeated in Ukraine in 2019, when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine received autocephaly from Constantinople — a development that was, in significant part, a consequence of Russian ecclesiastical overreach over decades, and which represented a catastrophic institutional defeat for the Moscow Patriarchate that no military operation can reverse. It repeated, subtly but unmistakably, in Serbia, where Moscow's support has been emotionally real but strategically clumsy — offering solidarity in ways that reinforce Serbian isolation rather than building Serbian capacity.
What would the alternative have looked like? It would have required, first, the genuine separation of church from state instrumentalization. The Moscow Patriarchate's credibility across the Orthodox world has been consistently undermined by its visible role as an arm of Russian foreign policy. Orthodox Christians in other countries are not naive. They can see when their patriarchs are being used as diplomatic assets rather than spiritual shepherds. The moment a church becomes visibly subordinated to a state, it loses the independent moral authority that is the source of its soft power. Russia hollowed out the very instrument it needed most by refusing to let it function independently.
Second, it would have required patient investment in cultural and educational institutions — Orthodox universities, language programs, pilgrimage infrastructure, scholarly exchanges — that create genuine human connections between Russian and non-Russian Orthodox communities. China has spent decades building Confucius Institutes of debatable quality but undeniable strategic intent. The Vatican has sustained a global network of educational and charitable institutions for centuries, and it is this network — not papal declarations — that gives Catholicism its persistent civilizational reach. Russian Orthodoxy has nothing comparable, and Moscow has never seriously tried to build it.
Third, and most fundamentally, it would have required Russia to behave, in its relations with smaller Orthodox-majority neighbors, in ways consistent with the values it claims to embody. Orthodox theology speaks at length about kenosis — the self-emptying of power in service of love, exemplified in the incarnation. It is, admittedly, a demanding standard for any state. But the gap between Russia's theological claims and its political behavior is so enormous, so visible, and so consequential, that it functions as a standing advertisement of hypocrisy. You cannot simultaneously claim to be the defender of a spiritual civilization and use that civilization's institutions as a weapon of hybrid warfare.
The deepest irony is that Russia, of all states, should understand this. Russian literature — Dostoevsky above all — is saturated with the insight that authentic spiritual authority cannot be coerced, that the Grand Inquisitor's error is precisely his belief that people can be made to love what they are forced to obey. Russia has produced the most penetrating cultural critique of power-as-domination in the modern world. It has simply never managed to apply that critique to its own foreign policy.
The window is not entirely closed. The Orthodox world remains a potential civilizational space in which Russia could exercise genuine moral leadership — but only if it is willing to earn that leadership rather than assert it, to attract rather than pressure, to offer rather than extract. That requires, above all, the rectification of a single name: the recognition that influence and control are not synonyms, and that confusing them has cost Russia more
I am adding another post to this very interesting essay put forward by Andrew (tip of the hat) and the even more interesting debate that has ensued. I work from home and I am a bit of a hermit that way. My place of employment is several hours away by car and boat. So I sometimes discuss and debate things with Claude. Yes, that Claude. Can be a very useful assistant. And I presented it the issue raised by the original Valdai article, Andrew's essay, the comments, and my original perspective, described in my first post. The instruction was to expand, using the same filter. This is what Claude had to say:
Rectification of Names: What Russia Actually Needs
Your invocation of Confucius is not mere rhetorical flourish — it is the most precise analytical instrument one could apply to this entire conversation. The word "modernization" is doing enormous ideological work in Timofeev's article and in Korybko's commentary, and almost none of it is honest labor. It papers over distinctions that, if named correctly, would make the path forward far clearer — and far more politically uncomfortable for those in power.
The Semantic Trap of "Modernization"
Timofeev's core argument is that Russia is "doomed to perish" without modernization, and that while Peter's "window to Europe" is being bricked up, the Petrine paradigm itself — of borrowing from superior sources to overcome backwardness and strengthen the state — remains as relevant as ever. This is intellectually defensible but strategically evasive, because it frames everything through the lens of state power and military competitiveness. Modernization, in this reading, means closing the technological gap with NATO. It is a geopolitical concept dressed in the language of reform.
But your comment cuts to something more fundamental: the problem is not that Russia lacks advanced enough missiles or semiconductors. The problem is that Russian civil servants scream at citizens' faces. These are not the same problem, and treating them with the same word — "modernization" — allows the system to pursue one (military-industrial upgrading) while indefinitely deferring the other (civic culture and accountable governance).
Korybko makes this concrete in a way that is almost comical in its mundanity: getting a SIM card registered required over six weeks and 13 trips to three different institutions, largely because the Ministry of the Interior's database takes 5–14 days to update — and nobody at any point in the process speaks English, especially not at the MVD. This is not a technology deficit. Russia has nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. It is a governance culture deficit — a profound institutional contempt for the time, dignity, and basic needs of the individual citizen.
Bezrukov, whom Korybko repeatedly cites as a prophet ignored in his own time, named this more bluntly in 2013: Russia's "bureaucracy creates a nightmare for businesses and private citizens alike, negating the attractiveness of its tax rates," and the country "has little experience in dealing with 'real foreigners'" because, while young mobile Russians are open to the world, "Russia as a country is not." He wrote this over a decade ago. Nothing has fundamentally changed, because "modernization" — the word chosen by elites — doesn't require changing anything about how the state relates to the person standing in front of it.
Your proposed corrective is elegant and practical: a public accountability registry where citizens can document specific incidents of bureaucratic misconduct, with dismissal as a consequence. This is not radical. It is simply the application of what any functioning service organization already does — measure performance against the needs of those being served. The reason it sounds radical in the Russian context is precisely because the category of "citizen as client of the state" is not culturally embedded. The state is not understood as serving the population. The population is understood as existing to serve the state. Until that relationship is inverted in both law and culture, no amount of technological importing will produce a modernized society. It will produce a modernized military guarded by a medieval bureaucracy.
The Resource Curse as Human Capital Neglect
Your phrase — "Russia needs to stop being lazy, given the richness of its resources" — touches on what economists call the resource curse, but you are extending it in a direction economists rarely go: from material laziness to intellectual and human laziness.
The resource curse in its classic form holds that abundant natural wealth tends to suppress diversification, breed rent-seeking elites, and weaken institutions. Russia is a textbook case. But the more insidious dimension, which your comment highlights, is that resource abundance breeds a particular attitude toward human beings. When the ground produces your wealth, people become secondary. You do not need to cultivate them, educate them deeply, respect their creativity, or give them institutional space to compete and innovate. You need them, at best, to extract and process what the ground already offers.
This creates a catastrophic feedback loop. The most talented people — those with options — leave. Bezrukov noted in 2013 that "for the huge majority of the 'best and brightest' of the world, Russia may look exciting to visit, but not nearly open, inclusive, safe or convenient to do business with or to settle in." Brain drain is not a mystery. It is the rational response of human capital to an environment that does not value it. And the loss compounds: the people who remain in positions of institutional power are disproportionately those who are comfortable with — or depend on — the existing dysfunctional system.
The alternative you sketch — maximizing human capital through deep, respectful education and creating competitive conditions for the production of advanced technology, art, social thought, and intellectual goods — is precisely what Nakayama's rich historical analysis of Chinese dynastic cycles illustrates from the opposite direction. The Tang dynasty, he notes, succeeded partly by opening administrative positions through merit-based examination rather than hereditary privilege, and by welcoming foreign merchants and absorbing external knowledge. The decline came when the doors closed. The Qing opened their court to intellectuals from across China and reformed relentlessly; those who sat on their historical laurels and were proud of past achievements "progressed, but at a snail pace." Russia is in the snail-pace phase, consoled by the memory of Sputnik and the Soviet atomic program.
The comparison to China today is, as Nakayama wisely cautions, more complex than it appears. China's post-1990 economic miracle was partly built on learning from Taiwan and Hong Kong, attracting diaspora capital, and operating under a highly disciplined developmental state that — whatever its political character — maintained ferocious internal performance standards. Whether Russia's siloviki-oligarchic system, as "Vade Retro" bluntly notes in the comments, is structurally capable of even permitting such a transformation is a real question. Genuine modernization of governance culture would threaten the very networks through which current elites accumulate and protect their positions. That is why "modernization" as a word is so useful to them — it promises change while guaranteeing the continuation of everything that matters.
Part II
The Soft Power Catastrophe: The Bear and the Honey
Your most politically acute observation concerns Orthodoxy and the Moldova-Romania case, and it deserves considerable elaboration because it illustrates a Russian strategic failure that recurs with almost mechanical regularity.
Russia possesses, in Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the most potentially potent instruments of cultural and civilizational influence available to any state in the world. The Orthodox world encompasses Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Cyprus, Ethiopia, and significant communities throughout the Middle East — hundreds of millions of people who share a sacramental tradition, iconographic vocabulary, liturgical memory, and theological worldview with Russia. This is, in Huntingtonian terms, a civilizational asset of extraordinary value. It costs almost nothing to maintain and generates goodwill that no amount of military spending can purchase.
And Russia has spent thirty years systematically destroying it.
The Moldova case you cite is exemplary. Moscow's strategy toward the Republic of Moldova has been to use the breakaway territory of Transnistria as a coercive lever, to manipulate the Moldovan Orthodox Church's relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate as an instrument of political control, and to make Russian "protection" feel indistinguishable from Russian domination. The result? A country that is Orthodox, Slavic-adjacent, economically weak, and geographically landlocked — in other words, a country that should have been Russia's most natural partner — has lurched toward EU integration with genuine popular support. Romanian Moldovans increasingly identify as Romanian rather than as a distinct people under Russian tutelage. The thin wedge of Orthodoxy, as you put it, was there to use. Russia used it as a crowbar instead.
This pattern — "the bear cannot stop itself" — is not accidental. It reflects a deep structural feature of how Russian power conceives of itself: as something that must be felt, that must produce visible compliance, that must demonstrate dominance rather than simply enjoy influence. Soft power, properly understood, works precisely because it does not feel like power to the recipient. It feels like affinity, like cultural recognition, like being seen. Russia's instinct is to make its power felt as pressure, and the moment it does, the affinity evaporates and is replaced by resentment. The Romanian experience of the 20th century — of Soviet occupation, of forced incorporation into a geopolitical sphere defined by Moscow — left scars that Russian cultural diplomacy has never seriously tried to heal, preferring instead to reinforce them through continued manipulation.
The Confucian principle applies here too, and acutely. If Russia genuinely wishes to lead a civilizational bloc, to be what Timofeev's language of "civilisational state" implies — a center of gravity for a world alternative to Western liberal hegemony — then it must act like a civilization and not merely like an empire in civilizational clothing. Civilizations attract. Empires coerce. The two modes are not impossible to combine, but they require a strategic discipline and cultural humility that Russian foreign policy has rarely demonstrated, and never sustained.
The Feedback Loop Problem and What Breaks It
Korybko's analysis of what he calls "Potemkinism" — the phenomenon of broken feedback loops, where foreign admirers are permitted or encouraged to feed back only uncritical praise to Russian officials, while internal critics are marginalized — is perhaps the most structurally important point in the entire discussion. His concern is that "complacency is ironically creeping back due to broken feedback loops and the recycling of propaganda within them by the foreign 'Potemkinists'" who are only permitted to tell Russian officials that Russia is winning, the West is declining, and everything is proceeding according to plan.
This is exactly the dynamic that has felled every modernizing impulse in Russian history. Bezrukov's 2013 proposals were shelved because the Ukrainian crisis provided a new justification for the old reflexes. The Medvedev-era modernization discourse evaporated because oil revenues returned. Now, even with the SMO having dramatically exposed Russia's industrial and human capital deficits, the Potemkinist infrastructure is already reasserting itself — telling the system what it wants to hear, which is that the current trajectory is sufficient.
What breaks this loop? Not top-down reform declarations from Timofeev or Trenin, however brave and important those are as signals. Those are symptoms of the awareness that something must change, but they do not constitute change. What breaks feedback loops, historically, is the institutionalization of accountability — precisely the mechanism you propose. Public records of civil servant misconduct, with real consequences, are not merely an anti-corruption tool. They are an epistemological tool. They force information about the actual state of the country's governance — as experienced by actual citizens — to flow upward through the system rather than being filtered out at every level by officials protecting their own positions.
Peter the Great's most underappreciated reform was not the navy or the beard tax or even the Table of Ranks. It was his personal willingness to witness dysfunction directly — to travel incognito through his own country and through Europe, to work as a shipwright in Dutch docks, to submit himself to the education of those who knew more than he did. He rectified names by insisting on seeing things as they actually were. Modern Russia's tragedy is that its leadership has surrounded itself with people whose careers depend on ensuring that names remain comfortably misapplied.
Toward What, Then?
The debate in the comments between those who favor China as a model and those who are skeptical of it ultimately rests on a false binary. China is not a monolithic model; it is a historical process, and Nakayama's dynastic analysis makes clear that Chinese success has always come from openness, meritocracy, and the willingness to learn — and Chinese decline has always followed the closing of doors and the calcification of self-congratulatory elites.
Russia does not need to become Western, Chinese, or anything else. It needs, as you put it, to rectify its names. To call its bureaucracy what it is: a system of entrenched rent-seekers who have confused the authority to obstruct with the right to rule. To call its resource wealth what it risks becoming: a narcotic that substitutes for the harder work of developing human beings. To call its foreign policy instincts what they too often are: imperial reflexes dressed in civilizational language. And to call the human beings within its borders what they actually are: not subjects, not raw material, not demographic statistics, but the primary source of whatever greatness Russia has ever achieved or could yet achieve.
The Confucian insight is not just philosophical. It is practical. Until names are correct, language cannot accord with reality; until language accords with reality, policy cannot succeed; until policy succeeds, the population cannot know how to move — hand or foot. Russia is currently in exactly that position: a vast country in motion, spending enormous energy, producing enormous noise, uncertain of its direction because those who name its problems are not yet permitted to name them accurately.
Timofeev and Trenin are, tentatively, beginning to correct some names. The question is whether the system has the structural capacity — and the political will — to follow the words with the deeds they actually imply.
I think Confucius said that the first thing to be done to put things on the right path is the rectification of names.
"A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."
The word "modernization" here carries a lot and masks even more. From what you are saying Andrew in this upstanding tour of force post, the Russian bureaucracy doesn't need to "modernize", but it needs to become more civil, and to understand that it serves the population. A public site with records of civil servants misbehaving (I wonder how their bosses behave towards their subordinates...?) where people can post such incidents like you describe should be followed by immediate dismissals and you'll see how things change.
Russia needs to stop being lazy, given the richness of its resources and optimize the use of human capital. creating it, educating it maximally (with a lot of respect) and make it compete on the production of advance technologies and also artistic, social, intelectual products.
Russia could have tried to use the thin wedge of Orthodoxy, but it fucked up big time alienating Romanians for instance, by trying to keep a tight grip on R of Moldova, for instance. They know that one can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but the bear cannot stop itself. So much more to say about this topic.
Great minds think alike, since around the same time, Socrates said: ‘the corruption of cities begins with the fraud of words.’
I am extremely wary whenever the word ‘reform’ is used. For the past 30 years in France, we have constantly been told about reforms that have ultimately amounted to dismantling the entire social system and public services, letting profiteers—and even criminals who make our lives miserable—do as they please, and the near institutionalization of corruption