Inside Putin's Circle
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ft.com
Just to clarify. The word "siloviki" made from "силовые структуры", which may be translated literally as "structures of force", or less literally but preserving some meaning "armed organizations" (maybe "armed forces", but I think that in English "armed forces" doesn't include the likes of police and security guards). It refers to police, military or any other organization with a dress code that requires a gun.
Though I cannot argue. I rely on my intuitive knowledge of Russian which is hard to use as a rational argument. This knowledge tells me that "силовые структуры"/"structures of force" are organizations that use force to solve problems. And I think that all of them wear guns. But I may be wrong with that last statement, and moreover language is changing, so the generally accepted meaning of the word can differ from what I had learnt in my childhood.
It is a security agency, a.k.a. the “secret police.” (It does, of course, spy on the populace.)
They are also a military branch and have military ranks, although they don't wear uniforms. The FSB acts like a combination of FBI, a border patrol and secret police.
They are also the group allowed to carry out an assassination on foreign soil (according to Russian law), although they are not allowed to authorize such a mission on their own.
Apologies if this comes off abrasively. This is a genuine question that thought to myself when I read your comment. I can't think of a better way to phrase it.
2 (b) to carry on the person; wear a sword
Maybe it's regional. I've never heard it said that way before. "Are you wearing a gun"? "Concealed wearing laws"? Doesn't sound right, but I guess people do use it.
Don't cops ask "Do you have a gun on you" or "Are you carrying?". I think most of us would find it weird if a cop asked us "Are you wearing a gun?".
> Don't cops ask "Do you have a gun on you" or "Are you carrying?"
In person, I’be most frequently observed the former (fortunately, not much experience), but on TV both cops and crooks tend to use “carrying” with an implied direct object a lot.
> I think most of us would find it weird if a cop asked us "Are you wearing a gun?".
Sure, because that's not what a cop is likely concerned about.
I like this usage right here:
> A gun holster is an accessory which is designed to allow someone to wear a gun on his or her body.
Native speaker, I have heard other native speakers say (or seen them write) “wear a gun” quite a bit. “Carry” seems to be more currently common, but far from exclusive.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=carry+a+gun&ye...
"Wear a gun":
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=wear+a+gun&yea...
Shorter: "Carry" is about twice as popular as "wear".
Although you can put on a holster. ;-)
I think this may come down to regional dialect differences, but it doesn't make this pedant look good (and I generally love pedants.)
"Wear" differentiates from things that you carry in your hands or pockets or a bag. Things that are part of your dress, like watches, ties, and handguns in holsters, are more "worn" than "carried", though it could be either.
Sounds a lot like organized crime, is it supposed to have that undertone?
nope. the 2nd word means "structures" and it implies part of the state.
No, that sounds like any armed forces, police force, the secret service, etc.
The root of the word "siloviki" is "sila", which means "force". And it is about using force in order to perform their job. Like policemen do. Or security guards. Or soldiers.
And it is not used to refer to crime activities. They also use force, but they are not "siloviki".
As does "Department of Homeland Security". That was the first federal agency named that way, and prior to that people would have thought that sort of naming to be associated with the Stassi or a totalitarian regime. I suppose it is commonplace now.
I think that undercover or plainclothes in most cases has enough rules that it constitutes a dress code, even if you think a dress code needs to have rules about more than one article of clothing to be considered a dress code.
I don't understand why the need to twist mafia into dress code group. Russian mafia is know entity, so is albanian one. Ukraine mafia exists too. It is just that, dress code is not what would be associated with them.
From https://www.thedailybeast.com/now-russia-is-bombing-western-... :
"Meanwhile, panic appears to be setting in within Putin’s inner circle, with the Russian leader allegedly firing eight generals and putting the head of his FSB spy arm Sergei Beseda and his deputy under house arrest"
Russian: https://meduza.io/news/2022/03/11/zhurnalist-andrey-soldatov...
All that while 3 generals have already been killed in Ukraine in addition to uncounted number of officers with no major military success. That is bound to cause "friction" between various arms of the "siloviki". There is also a large fight brewing between FSB and Chechens (they have been in "cold war" state) as large convoy of Chechen forces in Ukraine was completely destroyed by Ukrainians based on information that seems to had been leaked by FSB.
“ Soldierov told the British Times that it could well be that the FSB had realistic knowledge of the situation in Ukraine - the only question was what was passed on to Putin.
"The problem lies in the fact that it is often risky for those responsible to tell Putin things that he doesn't want to hear," Soldierov said.”
[0] https://newsrnd.com/news/2022-03-11-putin-is-said-to-have-pu...
"He is forceful" if you insist on playing this game. Another derived adjective if forcible but it has a bit more elusive meaning (forcible entry into a building)
Thanks for the laugh. An automated translation tools, especially dumbed down online ones, never work right because they don't have a context or a means to provide it.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0#Russ...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%8...
"siloviki" => members/heads of the law enforcement and security agencies, read "enforcers". But "hard men" passes the forceful connotation well enough.
This statement about Ukraine was presented by Brezezinski without any proof. In fact he just copied that idea from 19th century British geopolitics, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_Hist....
This theory was already controversial in 19th century, but in 21st century it is completely absurd. If you want to be an empire nowadays, you don‘t need a huge Black Sea fleet or a huge amount of land. You need a very strong economy. But occupying Ukraine will not help Russia accomplishing that.
It is absurd, that the Russian elite believes into a theory written by an American, which was originally proposed by the British in the 19th century to explain why they need to fight the Russian empire in the Crimean War of 1853.
I get WSJ through work and NYT/WaPo are all super cheap. I’ve just never found the quality of FT. So I decided to pay for it. Another publication I recommend is The Economist.
Apparently the only real news left is embassy cables.
For the record, I find the East Asia (and Europe) coverage decent. It's their US section that I'd say is in dire need of an improvement. Overall, a lot boils down to individual correspondents/writers: some are great while others not so much and thus best skipped (although the comments can also provide a lot of insight if the topic as such is interesting).
Who knows, maybe he is the "one senior official" mentioned as being the author's source on some of the topics. Protect your sources!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw
I think this is something you should watch if you are interested in how russia works. It's very straight talk and clarified russian mindset a lot for me at least.
* “the Russians have the ability to expect and endure a tremendous amount of suffering”.. “they have made suffering a virtue”
* “global recession is not really a problem to Russia since they are in a recession all the time anyway”
Kind of suggestive that what's happening won't be over anytime soon.
This all seems a bit unfortunate. I mean there are many examples of similar countries next to each other - US/Canada, France/Belgium, maybe even England/Scotland and it's no really tragedy to let the less powerful one do it's own thing and be independent if it wants. In England in the past we've made efforts to control Ireland and it's caused a bunch of problems compared to if we had just let the thing go without the Donbass / Northern Ireland stuff.
Money quote.
I’ve lost a bit of sleep wondering about this over the years.
Telegraphs were used in the 1840s [1]. They went transatlantic in the 1850s [2]. The game change is not in modern autocracies being better at planning. It's in surveillance. What took the KGB and Stasi armies of informants filling cabinets of index cards can now be run out of a single data centre by a small team of loyalists.
The common failure mode of centralized systems, peaceful transitions of power and/or long-run economic power, is thus not addressed. (Founders have a decent record, at least in their early years [3]. But with each subsequent generation, the gap between the stability of monarchies and eccentricity of dictatorships widens. Putin is a first-generation autocrat. Xi is a bit more complicated, though I'd argue the CCP hasn't had power so concentrated since Mao, and China barely limped through that transition.
Maybe the efficiency gains in surveillance and repression will turn what would have been a revolutionary failure into a slow-burn diminishment. Whereas previously a resistance could have festered and grown, today it can be nipped in the bud, preventing the internal power competition that rejuvenates the system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
[3] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/54717/1/670514403.pd...
Central planning hasn’t been “hard to implement” its been a absolute disaster not just due to information scarcity, but for the same reason massive organizations in free markets rot from within.
We’ve had true democracy. It doesn’t work. It careens into majoritarianism while hyperpartisanship tears it apart. The American system balances democracy against oligarchic and monarchic stabilisers. One could argue that our present situation results from forgetting the need for that balance.
There are more and less (de)centralized democracies. The US (and others) are formed from federated regional governments:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism
But there are unitary states (France, Spain) as well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_state
As for democracies: one problem with non-democracies is negative feedback can be difficult. If things are headed in a bad direction, it can be hard to get that message through to those in charge if they lean autocratic and become isolated from reality. Folks are afraid to bear bad news because messenger get shot (proverbially or literally).
The implicit agreement in China is that in exchange for your freedom, you receive prosperity.
Russia - especially after the West seriously damages their economy - can easily form a similar narrative, especially when the West is being sadistic about it. Nationalize most things now when the equity is dirt-cheap because unwise Western governments have forced the hands of banks, investors, and funds; then privatize things as the new anointed class rises. Key for them will be to reward merit and capability, not just loyalty.
Much of its industrial policy actually resembles that of democratic states like Korea and Japan.
I'd argue China's experience presents a great argument for a mixed market economy that allows state intervention, while also recognising the importance of markets and decentralised economic coordination.
However, we shouldn't overhype China's progress. The fact of the matter is that China was always destined to become an economic juggernaut given its population size, stability, and resources.
It's just China had been tied down by Mao and his supporters managed to hijack the government for several decades and hindered China's ascent with their whacky policies. We're now seeing it snap back to where it belongs.
The current system is more similar to Japan with strong oversight and occasional intervention to nudge the economy towards the right goals.
Which is moot, because the USSR planning model also had 5 year plans. Also some European democracies are run by a coalition. See for example the Nederlands and also Germany to a lower degree. It's less efficient in case of armed conflict, but most people are represented in times of peace.
Turning China into an inward-looking closed market is an idea still, not a recipe.
On the other hand, my comment does diddly squat to our relations. Please go on and explain how I'm contributing to international tensions with my not-fully-informed question.
All the Putinology tries to sell you that the trouble with Putin is entirely subjective. But it's not (that much).
The problem is that the Russian understanding of "civilized" is different from the Western one.
Just look at the "civilized" way he treats his people.
Let's not even talk about the Moscow bombings that got him into power. The "it was an inside job" conspiracy is true, but in Russia, not in USA.
Putin views what he's doing now in Ukraine as a civilized thing to do, Russia was promised things, wronged and now he's solving the problem after warning about it. Like civilized man do.
This is why Russia will never be in NATO. Everybody understands that the Russian bear will lash out after a perceived slight.
There is a great talk about "honor culture" versus "dignity culture". Russia is a "honor culture", the West is a "dignity culture". They don't mix.
EDIT: The book was "Putin's People" by Catherine Belton
Julia Ioffe, Masha Gessen
It's partial but has a lot of detail
On the other side there are the Russian friendly views such as Mearsheimer or even Stone.
It's difficult to weigh what is true (even though I'm biased anti aggressor in this case)
I don't know that I would refer to Professor Mearsheimer's view as pro-Russian, he has plenty of criticism of Putin and the Russian political system in general. But the fact that he has been railing on the likely consequences of our approach for dealing with the Russia/Ukraine situation for years, and been proved right, should make his writing and interviews required for anybody seeking to better understand who we got here.
The only person responsible for the invasion into Ukraine is Putin, it was entirely optional, no matter who predicted that it would happen.
Also: there is a substantial number of HN accounts in recent times whose only purpose seems to be to plant Russian talking points and I wonder if those are mostly by useful idiots or by hostile parties, so be careful whose water you carry.
I'm sure you will find a way to tie each and every man, woman and child murdered by Russian soldiers to 'the West' but it isn't very believable, even if you have to find the need to quote a professor (your appeal to authority was noted).
Shall we stick to the world as it is? Also, that's a pretty bad analogy, and no, it is not 'essentially the same'.
Again, can you please stop with the dumb propaganda pieces trying to West-Wash the Russian invasion into Ukraine? It is beyond boring. If it is your goal to drive people away from HN by rehashing the same inane arguments over and over again that is of course your freedom but since you, as a new entrant are not gaining anything and we lose something it would seem that this is a non-zero sum game where in the end we're looking at a net loss.
The only party responsible for the invasion of Ukraine is one V. Putin and by extension the Russian state. Attempts to drag the past in by the ears or otherwise are counterproductive. If anything NATO should have accepted Ukraine because we already know the result of not accepting them. See also several treaties that Russia just decided to wipe its arse with.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/970e8e54b3df46eab593e9e11beb056d
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ukraine-tape/leaked-a...
You have been called out on your "CIA Coup" propaganda before, regarding this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
It's boring.
I kinda agree that the putin logic is far fetched..
Is that not a coup? Is that not a recipe for war?
1: Democratically elected stretches reality towards the end. The end was not a free and fair democracy nor free and fair elections.
Yanukovych was an autocrat and stooge. copying many of the same tactics as his protector Putin to stay in power beyond public support: suppressing opposition, faking votes with international orgs deemed un true/not valid election, using his private military to intimidate and suppress.
The people of Ukraine WANT to join the EU and be a part of European trade. Perhaps not all but a vast majority.
That's the crux of Maidan.
Yanukovych said he would sign the economic agreement which had broad support across the country. But did a 180 and ran to Putin (literally and figuratively, he physically fled). If any country was holding a gun it was Russia.
2: It was not a coup. This was not a military take over, decapitation by a 3rd party nation, or middle of the night execution.
He was removed through an act of parliament after IMENSE popular opposition via democratic sentiment/uprising among the people.
Even if that act itself wasn't laid out exactly in their constitution, what came next were legitimate free and fair elections which is indisputable.
People and countries should be free to chart their own future.
To remove themselves from the foot of authoritarianism and to rewrite and reimagine their government towards Democracy, European trade, & freedom.
A bully autocrat & former controlling country shouldn't be allowed to shut down the will and future of tens of millions just because they have a larger army and threaten nuclear war.
Way to bury the lede. This is the issue. The coup was illegal, was it not? That doesn't even mean it was necessarily wrong, but can we at least be honest and call it unconstitutional?
I guess it's a debate about etymology but coup does not fit reality imho.
That also supposes that the laws were being followed in the first place.
They weren't.
People have a right to chose their government. If the government abuses the people and ignores the rule of law and democracy the people are right to seek better government.
I wouldn't have a huge problem with that characterization, I'm not saying all coups are bad just call it what it is though. The main difference in 1776 though is there was no new leader put in place into an existing government system. The entire government was rebuilt from the ground up. In Ukraine, they just installed their guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
Now, some people believe that, some people don't, but since just before he invaded Ukraine he announced that they were one people, he's literally done the same thing again, blowing up "his own people", for his own political games, but openly.
A key point that has emerged from a number of sources is that Putin's crowd has no plan B. This isn't considered by Russia's leadership to be just a military adventure - if it works, great, if it doesn't work, pull back and try something else. It's a must-win operation.
Historically, this sort of thing ends only when the leader is killed.
Or Russia wins
Generations ago. In essentially a different, more civilized world.
Real people with power build they don't destroy. The likes of Putin only know how to kill and how to destroy.
For Russia, that may be an acceptable outcome. The last century and a half of Russian history has a large number of mass death events.
Citation needed.
This sounds nice but it's just a value statement.
Sometimes not even then. If the person who takes over is also a true believer in this manifest destiny, it can go on until all the believers in the inner circle die off.
"Russia’s Menacing Mix of Religion and Nuclear Weapons In the Kremlin, Faith and Force Go Hand in Hand"[1]
Another member of this inner circle not named in this article is Yuri Kovalchuk who's the largest sharedholders in Rossiya Bank in addition to National Media Group. He is a long time friend and advisor to Putin and subscribes to this same Orthodox Christian mystic narrative where Russia needs to save the world from the West.[2]
There's a book by Gary Lachman about this that came out a couple of years ago called:
"The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World"
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/opinion/putin-russia-ukra...
It can't happen soon enough.
Or the American presidents during the massacres in Vietnam?
"How Vladimir Putin Lost Interest in the Present":
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/opinion/putin-russia-ukra...