Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now? %-/
- large academic population and high general education
- a tradition of collecting banned and bootlegged content, particularly Western (samizdat, magnitizdat)
- lack of resources to get things legally (e.g. university subscriptions)
- a culture of hacking and tinkering (the best known book scanning middleware, like ScanTailor and ScanKromsator and various djvu tools, comes from Russian hobbyist programmers).
Also applies to adjacent countries like Ukraine.
Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets?
Before Soviets, Russian population was largely uneducated; could not read or write. Soviets immediately started a country-wide educational campaign, Likbez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
Soviets did many things, some good and some very bad. But their push for free & universal education has been good.
Speaking of a middle class, it was not unusual that a factory worker's salary exceeded that of a high-school teacher with a university diploma.
An exchange program with Manchester, though? That must have been late in the 80s?
The exchange program ran in early 80s.
Makes sense.
Indeed, while the Stalinist rule was not a particularly popular one, the elderly certainly appreciated how their children became engineers, doctors and such. I mean, I heard my own grandmother saying this about my father often, she was a devout communist all her long life (96 years...) even after the Soviet Union fell apart.
Also, zero enforcement of western copyright law, or at least that's what I've observed.
Ignoring foreign copyright was a survival mechanism and by this point, it's almost culturally ingrained.
Sure it does; Russian police do nothing about credit card theft because (and to the point that) that money is ultimately coming out of Western pockets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk).
Same as the North Koreans with their industrial-level counterfeiting of USD (to name one example), for the same reasons.
Might as well be an unofficial letter of marque.
> Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now?
What do credit card thieves and counterfeiters have to do with it? Are credit card thieves preservers of Western culture now?
From the AP Archive -
I feel like its objective fact that Russia is doing whatever is can to undermine the west, considering that they are currently committing industrial sabotage in Europe on a large scale.
I think the OP's comment is meant that the view everyone aligns to a "Nationstate" is simplistic.
The fact that the press release specifically mentions their russian is some kind of political doublespeak.
The true lesson here is that hackers can come from every nationality and that individuals who are trying to enlighten and enrich society will be persecuted by the powers that be. It's a story as old as history itself.
But what exactly did they want? The KGB to send Tolkein fans to the Gulag?
As USSR turned into a “normal” corporate state with a twist, and began having economic relations with other “normal” Capitalist thugs, it started having minimal bilateral agreements that allowed things to move. Post-war reforms in local laws extended copyright terms inside the Soviet Bloc, and made them more similar to the Western agreements (even though licensing deals though the Iron Curtain were exceptions).
Finally, in 1973 USSR joined Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, at the latest possible moment its old terms were still in effect. As a result, everything published before 1973 could be used on old terms, — in particular, translations did not need explicit authorization. Of course, that hurt the Soviet writers in the same manner, but not a lot of people wanted to read Socialist Realist stories about imaginary workers of imaginary factories. As for everything published after 1973, All-Union Agency of Author's Rights handled and controlled all trans-border copyright transfers both ways, and dealt with the money — until the last years of Soviet Union, when free press, and private contracts with publishers made them irrelevant.
A translation of “Hobbit” was published in 1976, a print run of 100 000. An abridged version of “The Fellowship of the Ring” was published in 1982 and 1983, both runs of 100 000.
https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions
Even with the arbitrary government-defined ruble exchange rate, they probably wanted to collect at least some money.
Afterwards, post-Soviet countries joined the worldwide copyright agreements. One of the negative outcomes of those Soviet and post-Soviet copyright extensions made to align local and global law was that previously public domain content (like photos, which newspapers and archives often didn't even bother to track properly) became copyrighted once again, which usually put it into a limbo of orphan works, and prevented re-distribution of old products containing it.
We should be all working together and not against each other. But the world is not simple, and people have complex, and sometimes selfish motivations.
Whatever reason Russians have to preserve humanities culture, it is entirely the West's fault that we are not looking after it ourselves. That wasn't Russia, or China; it was the yacht class and their hirelings in law, politics and media.
Russia's entire GDP is less than that of New York. I highly doubt they own more stupid and planet-destroying assets than US oligarchs, or the dictators we prop up. Feel free to bring evidence of otherwise though.
There's lots of shouting about whether Russia is Western or European, but I think history shows it's really it's own thing. "Rome and Constantinople have fallen. Only Moscow remains."
It's probably still very hard for Russians to get these materials, so the culture and will of stealing and sharing is still there.
These days, at least before the war started... c'mon, you can't be serious.
Adding on to this, my impression of Russian culture, observing both historically and today, is that Might Makes Right(tm) is a core tenet.
That is to say, if you can do it and get away with it you are justice. The two mentioned in the article clearly are (were) getting away with it, so as far as they are concerned they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Russians don't care about ink on paper unless it can literally pickup an AK-47 and shoot them.