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Kamil Galeev Profile picture
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Feb 24 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Are Putin's decisions collective or personal? It depends. To my best knowledge annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a collective decision. And about 50% of them were supposed "liberals"

But, I wanna stress, since 2020 Putin's been isolated. He panicked and locked himself in a bunker Image
He largely governed a country through telecom, kinda zoom. No one could get in without a quarantine. So most of his old St Petersburg pals or his staffers simply wouldn't come. Thus their influence over him declined. And let's be honest - his grip over them, too Image
The only big Kremlin boss who locked himself in a bunker with Putin was Alexey Gromov. He wasn't Putin's old friend, he's from the previous Yeltsin's administration. And yet, now he has become the closest one, controlling the access to the body. And the info Putin is getting Image
Perhaps some of the strange we've seen with the public humiliation of Narushkin are not even acting. While sitting isolated for such long, Putin got detached from them and now needs to establish his grip again. A small victorious war would be great in this regard Image
And he will achieve this goal provided that the war is really small and successful, securing the victory with few military casualties or economic consequences for the regime. If Putin gets away with it, his position within the ruling circle becomes much stronger. End of 🧵 Image

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More from @kamilkazani

Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 27
Die Fürstenstadt

There was a Soviet joke:

- What is long, green and smells with sausage?
- Moscow-Tver train

Why? Well, under the USSR provincials had to go shopping to Moscow. Their shops had no food, often very literally. Today we'll learn an expression "supply category"🧵 Image
Under the centrally planned economy it was the state which supplied food to the localities. It would assign each city one of four "supply categories" determining how much food there will be on shelves. Moscow was supplied far better than anyone while cities like Tver - horribly Image
Provincial Soviet cities of the lower supply categories might have no food on the shelves at all. Sometimes very literally. Sometimes they would have only the scraps from the table of the higher status city: like some algae, or the disgusting paste "Ocean" Image
Read 26 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 25
I find this line of argumentation illustrative of the general state of Russian discourse, whether "patriotic" or "liberal". Everything Turkic occupies the same place in the Russian debates as everything Irish in the Imperial British. The Inner Other and the source of all the evil
Reading the Russian-Ukrainian debates with both sides accusing each other of racial impurity and having too many Steppe admixtures or influences, I noticed that their argumentation is mirroring each other. See this Russian nationalist material for example sputnikipogrom.com/history/15934/…
This mutuality and almost exact symmetry of Russian-Ukrainian accusations reminds me of a brilliant thread on the British rule over the Ionian Isles. Bach then the discourse was similar. Brits and Greeks were constantly accusing each other of Irishness
Read 14 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 24
Russian bureaucracy is *massive*. It's also diverse. Judging from my observations, it's less integrated than let's say the apparatus of the U.S. federal bureaucracy. Different agencies have different cultures and operate by different rules. Avoid sweeping generalisations (not🧵)
I see a very common attitude among the Russian pro-war community. It can be summarised this way:

"We expected dumb and incompetent bureaucrats to destroy our economy. But our glorious army would prevail against all odds. It turned out we were wrong. It's the other way around"
Now much of the Z-community argues that they greatly overestimated the Russian army (and the military apparatus). It's very, very much worse than anyone thought before. But they underestimated the economic bureaucracy. Which is very much better than they could have thought
Read 22 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 23
No. Describing Russian regime as "kleptocracy" is misrepresentation. It's not technically false, just absurdly reductionist. Let's be honest, if Putinism was *entirely* about stealing it would not be able to wage wars or produce armaments. And it produces hella lots of them
Keep in mind that public rhetorics work according to the rhetorical logic. Public position doesn't have to be factually accurate, it has to be rhetorically advantageous for it to work. They talk about "corruption" so much because it's rhetorically advantageous. That's it
When you don't have a positive agenda/vision of future or it's too hideous, you talk about "corruption". Examples - Lukashenko or Yeltsin. "Anti-corruption fight" is an ideal topic for a power hungry politician. Because talking about corruption = avoiding the actual conversation
Read 19 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 23
Kremlin may not have a grey cardinal. But it has a bald engineer. The Kinder Egg is a major architect of Putinism. In 1998 he made Putin the FSB Chief. In 2000s he dismantled the regional autonomy imposing the centralised rule. Now he manages Putin's domestic policy and Ukraine🧵
Sergey Kirienko was born as Sergey Israitel in a mixed Russian-Jewish family. After the divorce his mother changed his surname from father's "Israitel" to her own "Kirienko". That could be a pragmatic decision. A boy with a Slavic name would have better career chances in the USSR
In childhood Kirienko lived with his mom in subtropical Sochi. Here he started the bureaucrat career as a Komsomol manager (комсорг) of his high school class. NB: the role of Komsomol in Soviet to post-Soviet transition is underrated. Komsomol management were its main benefactors
Read 35 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 21
Last time I discussed Volgograd - the poorest large city in Russia. Today I read a news about relatives of a Volgograd corporal KIA in Ukraine who are fighting over 12 million rubles of compensation. His aunt illegally appropriated all the money, so other relatives are suing her
That's something that misses from most of discussions. Compensations for soldiers KIA in Ukraine are huge. They are absolutely enormous by the standards of poor Russian province. 12 million rubles is the entire fortune for Volgograd

volgasib.ru/virtual/skanda…
Average salary in the Volgograd oblast is about 38 000 rubles. So 12 million is 315 average monthly salaries (median is lower). In other words, the coffin money amount to 26 average yearly salaries in Volgograd region. Average guy will never ever earn that much money in his life Image
Read 8 tweets

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