[gsf_emergency]

I agree with a slight patch-- the Asian cruel steppe mentality is called "meritocracy" (which the Mongols, or at least Chinggis & his direct successors down thru Kublai, iirc, was enamoured of..)

Russians, ironically, defeated the tartars when they managed to out-meritocrat the greatkhanless hordes somescore later,

-Then they basically reverted to divine right of kings*, aka the mandate of heaven..

-until the time of Lenin, when the cycle began anew..

*Apologies for ignoring the slight detour of Peter the Great** (known to be enlighteningly cruel) whose table of ranks could have been said to have set "his Excellency" (Prevoskhoditel’stvo) Ulyanov up for life

**but we should also pay attention to the current phenomenon of lionizing Catherine as a monarch more Christian than Peter

[Recall that the christians did not meritocracy until roughly... 1848 (again, ignoring the Glourious Revolution) over thence we had Weber retconning for his tribe]

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[082349872349872]

Note that Catherine gets a late soviet mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_IObE7MIqs#t=143s

...and that Goldstein basically writes about the meritocracy* of the Inner Party, as set out in the non-fictional The Managerial Revolution (1941).

* Smith is in the outer party precisely because he did poorly on his A-levels.

[gsf_emergency]

First American-Russians got left high & dry.. and meretocrat A2T (TiGR! Revisit the trial of his assassins) ?

https://sine-or.livejournal.com/60717.html

[082349872349872]

To be fair, NVR may have sung the lines and sat in the Duma, but I think (я думаю?) the songwriter (IIM?) was probably more of a thinker than a sitter and knew exactly what they were doing.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUCs_c643qU

(not sure if the russian fleet really kept the royal navy away during the US Civil War; my impression had been that the Confederacy had waited too long to revolt, and the second-cheapest supplier of cotton [egypt?] for british mills was not much more expensive than the CSA would've been in any case)