[Guessnotgauss]

That map makes no sense in relation to your comment. The country is mostly ethinic Kazak, and peoples similar in the sense they are more Turkic than Slavic. Calling them Russian seems weird, making a case for irredentism even weirder considering they wont have the same idea as what is the "motherland."

Russia trying to recreate the USSR, I can see. They will start with the states the West is concerned with the least.

[int_19h]

The map shows heavy concentration of ethnic Russians in the north of the country. Russian ethnonationalists often refer to north Kazakhstan as "South Siberia" for this reason, and there's a long-standing desire in those circles to annex it to Russia.

This is quite similar to Ukraine, where Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian.

[kgran]

>Russia trying to recreate the USSR, I can see.

USSR? Nope. Russian Empire? Maybe. Any resemblance to USSR, IMHO, requires at least some kind of Marxism derivative and state-planned economy.

[int_19h]

USSR had a nationalist component to it from Stalin onwards (see e.g. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945...). It is that part that the modern ideologues tap into, blending it with similar stuff from the Imperial Russia period.

[kgran]

I agree. But still - I see no Marxism in Putin's Russia.

[int_19h]

Oh, sure. But then again, many would argue that there was no Marxism in USSR, either (at least not after the first decade or so).

One particular interpretation that seems to be fairly popular in "patriotic" circles is that the original Bolsheviks were Marxist, and they almost ruined Russia because of that; but then Stalin took power, purged them, and restored the imperial glory.

[vanusa]

There's no dichotomy here. In Putin's mind they were one and the same:

"It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union," Putin said of the 1991 breakup, in comments aired on Sunday as part of a documentary film called "Russia. New History", the RIA state news agency reported.

"We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," said Putin, saying 25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy".

In any case Marxism was pretty much always window dressing in the USSR, anyway, post-Stalin. And in its final years the USSR was ditching any signficant pretext of Marxist-inspired socialism altogether. If it could have survived would probably would have evolved into a hybrid capitalist autocracy like modern China -- with significant state planning characteristics, but with the ideological mumbo-jumbo dialed down to a bare minimum.

[kgran]

In Putin's mind, USSR and Russia might be one and the same. But I'm not sure Putin's words about the ideals and politics of a historical state which was originally built after a revolution led by a radical Marxist faction, the Bolsheviks, should be taken seriously. After all, the first anthem of the Soviet Union was "The Internationale" up until sometime in the 1940s. I am not completely sure about what was on Lenin's mind though, so I might be wrong - maybe he was secretly nationalist (or a left-wing fascist, if I could use this other loose term).

[int_19h]

Consider policies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya. Early USSR was already totalitarian for sure, but I don't think it could be described as nationalist in any meaningful sense.

Whether it was socialist or not is another interesting question. Some would say that it wasn't, on the basis that real socialism cannot be non-democratic, as that precludes meaningful common ownership of property - and Bolsheviks were consistently anti-democratic very early on, what with shutting down the Constituent Assembly, instituting kombeds to suppress local councils that were in opposition to them, and even explicitly writing a formula into the constitution that made urban (i.e. predominantly worker) councils have 5x voting power of rural (i.e. predominantly peasant) councils. But even ignoring that, it's hard to reconcile socialism with suppression of trade unions in politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Opposition) - which also happened under Lenin.

[int_19h]

I would argue that it was already a window dressing under Stalin; more so than afterwards, in fact, given that it was fairly common for high-level party functionaries and other important figures to have e.g. domestic servants.

Then again, if we take pure Marxism, a socialist revolution was supposed to be impossible in Russia anyway, simply because proletariat was not the majority of the population. Lenin and co had to do a lot of handwaving to explain that away, and one could reasonably claim that the result deviated sufficiently from what Marx had in mind that it shouldn't really be lumped together.

[vanusa]

Yeah, I should have said "from Stalin onwards".