Anyone who as read Tolstoy’s amazing Hadji Murad will wonder who Nicholas I was more like, Putin or Trump. Here is a ChatGPT summary of the depiction: “In the novel, Nicholas appears as a vain, pompous, and profoundly shallow autocrat — obsessed with appearances, flattery, and discipline, but almost totally devoid of empathy or self-awareness. Tolstoy contrasts Nicholas’s stiff, ritualized power with the more vital and human (if flawed) character of Hadji Murad and others caught up in the Caucasus conflict. The tsar’s court is portrayed as a grotesque theater of sycophancy, where reality is warped to suit the sovereign’s vanity.”
I wonder if a closer parallel is with the Russo-Finnish War, when Stalin, in his let’s-be-friends-with-Hitler period, thought he could reabsorb the old Duchy of Finland. Apart from shaving off some border areas, he lost, badly, but had enough in the terrifying-totalitarian-control tank to remain in power. Putin doesn’t have that level of control, or the Third International to keep the propaganda fires stoked, but he does have his internet trolls and sovereignist stooges to keep imbeciles like J. D. Vance and Viktor Orbán onside.
That said, the armchair diplomat in me keeps thinking, “let Russia have some small bit of Ukrainian territory in exchange for full Ukrainian membership in NATO and the EU and a giant ‘fuck you’ from Europe and the U. S.”
Anyone who as read Tolstoy’s amazing Hadji Murad will wonder who Nicholas I was more like, Putin or Trump. Here is a ChatGPT summary of the depiction: “In the novel, Nicholas appears as a vain, pompous, and profoundly shallow autocrat — obsessed with appearances, flattery, and discipline, but almost totally devoid of empathy or self-awareness. Tolstoy contrasts Nicholas’s stiff, ritualized power with the more vital and human (if flawed) character of Hadji Murad and others caught up in the Caucasus conflict. The tsar’s court is portrayed as a grotesque theater of sycophancy, where reality is warped to suit the sovereign’s vanity.”
I wonder if a closer parallel is with the Russo-Finnish War, when Stalin, in his let’s-be-friends-with-Hitler period, thought he could reabsorb the old Duchy of Finland. Apart from shaving off some border areas, he lost, badly, but had enough in the terrifying-totalitarian-control tank to remain in power. Putin doesn’t have that level of control, or the Third International to keep the propaganda fires stoked, but he does have his internet trolls and sovereignist stooges to keep imbeciles like J. D. Vance and Viktor Orbán onside.
That said, the armchair diplomat in me keeps thinking, “let Russia have some small bit of Ukrainian territory in exchange for full Ukrainian membership in NATO and the EU and a giant ‘fuck you’ from Europe and the U. S.”
The burning question I have after listening: did Jeff at some point play MTG?