Ha, it was nothing that formal. It was just a course concentration inside the polisci department. And I was never realistically headed toward a career in that field, though the timing does make for a great story.
Just for a bit of context: the Ukrainian army includes 169,000 active duty personnel, 75% of whom are contract soldiers (ie volunteers). The Russian army includes 280,000 active duty personnel. The days of the enormous Red Army rolling across Europe are long gone. What the Russians have that Ukraine doesn't is better equipment, especially artillery and armour; better aviation; and a relative lack of concern about killing civilians which allows them to do things like levelling towns using GRAD rockets. (Because, let's face it, they never worried that much even about Russian civilians, and the civilians in question in this situation aren't even Russian.)
No, no. My memory is that you emphatically stood on C-SPAN and argued that the wall would never, ever come down.
Political science is a great way to realize there's so much more money in medical and pharmaceutical research.
Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall!
Apo: Now wait one gosh darn tootin' minute!
Russia has fairly deep foreign reserves, so the threat of steeper sanctions to the state isn't terrifying. Europe has fairly deep natural gas reserves, so the threat that Russia will respond to sanctions by cutting off the gas supply isn't terrifying. Nord stream 2 is built but not turned on.
Individually targeted sanctions (siezing the mansions and accounts of particular individuals) seems to me like the most serious lever, controlled by the UK who otherwise is happy to serve as banker for Russian oligarchs.
I liked the Economist's Jan 29 article on this, one of their Russia correspondents is good. Life in Donbas, the part of Ukraine controlled by Russian militias, is pretty miserable. Sustained occupation is unlikely IMO, if there is an invasion, I'd expect merciless negotiations about control of the power grid and a dismantling of Ukraine's civil institutions. Russia's goal is a weak and pointless Ukraine, a successful democracy is a threat. Explicit control
Respekt, a good Czech weekly, sent a team to Kiev and elsewhere; people there largely have go bags packed, there's apparently some effort to identify and quickly spruce up bomb shelters. No mention of planning for water supplies if there's disruption.
The slef-defense forces there are training to guard key buildings, which hadn't happened when Russians invaded Donbas. There's a lot about Kharkov also, destination for many refugees from Donbas who didn't want to stay.
Russia has fairly deep foreign reserves, so the threat of steeper sanctions to the state isn't terrifying. Europe has fairly deep natural gas reserves, so the threat that Russia will respond to sanctions by cutting off the gas supply isn't terrifying. Nord stream 2 is built but not turned on.
Individually targeted sanctions (siezing the mansions and accounts of particular individuals) seems to me like the most serious lever, controlled by the UK who otherwise is happy to serve as banker for Russian oligarchs.
I liked the Economist's Jan 29 article on this, one of their Russia correspondents is good. Life in Donbas, the part of Ukraine controlled by Russian militias, is pretty miserable. Sustained occupation is unlikely IMO, if there is an invasion, I'd expect merciless negotiations about control of the power grid and a dismantling of Ukraine's civil institutions. Russia's goal is a weak and pointless Ukraine, a successful democracy is a threat. Explicit control
Respekt, a good Czech weekly, sent a team to Kiev and elsewhere; people there largely have go bags packed, there's apparently some effort to identify and quickly spruce up bomb shelters. No mention of planning for water supplies if there's disruption.
The slef-defense forces there are training to guard key buildings, which hadn't happened when Russians invaded Donbas. There's a lot about Kharkov also, destination for many refugees from Donbas who didn't want to stay.
I mean, I was surprised as fuck when the wall came down. Ambassador Kirkpatrick assured me that communist dictatorships were stable.
Timothy Snyder on this topic: https://snyder.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-war-in-ukraine
It's been nearly twenty years since I visited Ukraine (my grandfather was from a city that is now within Ukrainian borders), and I've been quite curious about how much it's changed in that time. The one difference people have told me about is that more of the people in the eastern part of the country have begun to speak Ukrainian rather than Russian.
I visited Ukraine 40 years ago. My mom and I met our relatives in Kiev that were refuseniks. About 5 years later they got out, and they all are living (well, except for those that died) in the US.
You've been behind the Iron Curtain?
I've been trying not to think about this for various reasons, but when I do, I think of the company I worked for with software teams in both Kyiv and Russia-near-Moscow, and how we always wondered what the hell would happen if there was a serious war. The one person I was closest to moved from Kyiv to Stockholm and I think is still there. I knew the Russian teams less well: I had a difficult (but hopefully respectful) relationship with one Russian colleague, and I remember another one posting on Slack that he was taking an extended leave for military service. Working through chaos is 100% on-brand for both countries, but it can't be fun, and the U.S. teams are undoubtedly losing their shit because Americans are very emotional people with stock options and a firm belief that wars only happen in shithole countries.
From 9.1:
Last July, President Putin published a strange missive about Ukraine and Russia and their historical relationship. It present the kind of argument that makes historians wince. The basic idea is that a thousand years ago there was a country called Rus, the most important city in Rus was Kyiv, and now a thousand years later Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine, and therefore Ukraine cannot be a real country, and everyone involved and their descendants must be Russians or a brotherly nation to Russians. A historian confronted with this sort of mess is in the same unhappy situation as a zoologist in a slaughterhouse. You do have expertise, and feel you have to say something, and so: oh yes, that is clearly a femur, and that cartilage was probably from a snout, and that there is a bit of liver; but this isn't your job, and you wish profoundly that you were somewhere else.
That is really exquisite.
Some useful links I got:
1. Minsk II is a vise - a bad deal made under duress, but one Ukraine did formally agree to, with mediation from Germany and France, and is objectively dragging its feet on. Failing to implement it continues the conflict; implementing it arguably greatly weakens the country in the long term, and risks major personal and civil violence from Ukraine's right wing in the short term.
2. Adam Tooze (IATHBLHB): Ukraine has stagnated economically over the decades compared both to Eastern European NATO countries and to Russia. They aren't offering their citizens a lot in the status quo. (Although I wonder how much of that Russian GDP growth is resource extraction.)
Europe has fairly deep natural gas reserves, so the threat that Russia will respond to sanctions by cutting off the gas supply isn't terrifying.
I mean, it's been an ongoing crisis this whole winter even with Russia nominally still sending gas. If they actually shut off the gas entirely it would be crippling.
9 seems really great, not that I know anything. I'm always a bit confused about to what extent people like Putin or Xi are high on their own supply or not. Like in US terms is Putin more like Trump or more like McConnell? At any rate it doesn't seem like Russia has the state capacity for genocide right now that China does, and so it really seems like it's just a question of how long they want to bog themselves down in a useless war.
Is 13.2 the latest Substack post i.e. this one?
Let's also boost this link from an earlier thread.
I also loved this tweet. He already effectively has a substack, a podcast would be the crowning folly.
Instead of trapping the United States, Mr. Putin has trapped himself. Caught between armed conflict and a humiliating retreat, he is now seeing his room for maneuver dwindling to nothing. He could invade and risk defeat, or he could pull back and have nothing to show for his brinkmanship. What happens next is unknown. But one thing is clear: Mr. Putin's gamble has failed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html
I disagree, because this isn't clear to me at all, but I guess it could be true.
19: There are probably still a few other things you don't know about me, Moby.
Those are probably less interesting.
I second 17.
I figured apo would have something funny to say or heebie would come up with something that would make me smile, which she did.
To the author of 14: I thought that Russia's natural gas reserves were a pretty powerful bit of leverage. Do Europeans mostly use natural gas for heat or to generate electricity? If it's heat, does anybody know if there's much conversion to geothermal?
25: I believe it is mostly heat. Europe has a pretty diversified electric supply but not so much on the heating side. The Scandinavian countries use a lot of wood heat and waste-to-energy but I think the rest of the continent is pretty gas-dependent. It's not a seismically active area so traditional geothermal isn't an option, but there is some use of heat pumps.
8: A hippie friend of mine, who majored in agricultural economics, explained to me in the mid-80s that the Soviet system was no longer economically viable and would eventually just dissolve.
I mocked this idea. What empire ever just chose to give it all up without war? And since war involving nuclear weapons was unthinkable and in nobody's interest, the choices were Soviet stability or catastrophe.
I'm still trying to figure out where my flawless logic went wrong.
Russian mothers loved their children too.
Obviously the only people who believed Soviet grain production figures were in the C.I.A.
To the author of 14: I thought that Russia's natural gas reserves were a pretty powerful bit of leverage. Do Europeans mostly use natural gas for heat or to generate electricity? If it's heat, does anybody know if there's much conversion to geothermal?
Sorry, 14 was me. It's not so much Russia's natural gas reserves as Europe's lack of them, and their dependence on Russia for their gas supply (40% of all natural gas imports). It's mostly for heat, but it varies quite a lot from country to country.
To the author of 14: I thought that Russia's natural gas reserves were a pretty powerful bit of leverage. Do Europeans mostly use natural gas for heat or to generate electricity? If it's heat, does anybody know if there's much conversion to geothermal?
Sorry, 14 was me. It's not so much Russia's natural gas reserves as Europe's lack of them, and their dependence on Russia for their gas supply (40% of all natural gas imports). It's mostly for heat, but it varies quite a lot from country to country.
They can have some of ours. Apparently, we have so much they built a plant to turn it into plastic bullshit.
26: Yes, I meant geothermal heat pumps. They are really pushing that (I.e. subsidizing conversions) in MA and some other northeastern states to promote energy efficiency and to reduce our carbon footprint. That's part of why it was on my mind.
I think Europeans use more air-source than ground-source heat pumps. They're cheaper and take up a lot less space, but generally require a backup heating source for the coldest days. (There's a lot less accessible heat in the air than in the ground.)
That why you use a fan to cool off instead of a tiller.
27 would have been really smart in, say, late 1991, before the Russian Empire embarked on a long series of Wars It Was Prepared To Wage Rather Than Give It All Up, but now, downstream of Chechnya, and Georgia, and Crimea, and Tajikistan, and Nagorno Karabakh, and Kazakhstan, and Transnistria, and Debaltsevo, and Donetsk, and Iloviask, and Luhansk, it just looks like you haven't been reading the news.
27 would have been really smart in, say, late 1991, before the Russian Empire embarked
I believe 27 was recounting an exchange from the mid-80s.
27 et seq.: Back in ancient times my PoliSci prof asked "What do we learn from studying the Soviet Union?" Answer: "Repression works."
I also remember a huge amount of pessimism about the survival of the "free world" and the US in particular. Kissinger famously said that his job (under Nixon) was "management of decline."
I guess the point is that the West has often overestimated the strength of Russia. (This goes back to the pre-WW1 era, with the idea that Russia could defeat Germany due to their huge manpower reserves: the "Russian Steamroller.")
What is different now (just in the last few days) is that I see in my Google feed that there is a lot of "Putin has backed himself into corner" showing up, and "Putin doesn't have enough force to actually occupy Ukraine", etc., which is sort of the opposite. Some of this is very likely the intel community trying to raise Putin's doubts and all, but there's more than a bit of truth in claims like that.
All of this makes me more than a little nervous.
34: We were looking at putting in a ductless mini split heat pump mostly for cooling. We've only gotten one estimate so far from the HVAC folks who are known to be more expensive, so take this with grain of salt. He said that some of the newer air ones were still efficient below freezing, but they were about 50% more expensive. He said that they could help with heating during the shoulder seasons. I saw something about a company with a method to bury coils for geothermal that was fairly affordable. It was called Dandelion and spun out from Google. Unfortunately for me, they don't work on ductless systems. We were looking at putting some ducts in the attic and doing something ductless on the first floor.
It seems like that could be a technology that would also be a good way of reducing European dependence on natural gas.
Germany is now building passivhauses that require extremely minimal heating. Maybe this is part of why.
( I was agonizing over how to pluralize that word until I realized I'm writing in English, no one can credibly tell me not to simply add -es.)
9: Snyder's piece is excellent.
On the antiquity or lack thereof vis a vis Ukraine and particularly Kiev, Russia tried for centuries to incorporate it as the mother of Russian identity and Orthodox religion. The Romanovs kept trying and failing. Peter the Great didn't really care about it very much as he was obsessed with opening Russia to the West. He was interested in the Baltic Sea, but so was Sweden. The Great Northern War was about that, and big chunks of it were contested in what is now Ukraine, but Peter's main interest was in the south coast of the Baltic, which was Swedish (with lots of little German states here and there). Peter was also interested the Black Sea, and wanted to grab the Crimea away from the Ottomans.
Catherine the Great finally succeeded in incorporating Kiev, IIRC, as a by-product of the partitions of Poland.
The German Passivhaus movement has a long history, but concerns over gas supply may well be helping it gain in popularity recently.
We were looking at putting in a ductless mini split heat pump mostly for cooling.
We've got some of these that we supplement with a fireplace. The main problem we have with this system is that the house is cold all winter.
That seems like a pretty significant problem for a heating system.
42: Passivhausen? (NB: I don't speak or read a lick of German)
He said that some of the newer air ones were still efficient below freezing, but they were about 50% more expensive.
Can (roughly) confirm this. It's just the heat pump itself that's more expensive, so the bump to the whole system is a lot less than 50%, but it's still a chunk.
This has come up in the context of a large addition that has radiant tubing in the floor and mini-splits for cooling plus supplementary heat. The problem, of course, is that it is precisely when you most need the heat that air source heat pumps are least useful. It's possible that the radiant will suffice, but since we need the mini splits for cooling anyway, we'd like to be able to tell buyers that they'll be able to provide heat if needed.
One issue with the mini splits in the context of Passivhaus is that--setting aside the goal of zero heating/cooling--you're down to very low need, but mini splits aren't designed for whole-house conditioning. So you need (say) a single 9000 BTUH head for a 3 BR house--where does the head unit go, and how does the conditioned air circulate? I believe the canonical answer is that you have no conditioner, just an air-to-air heat exchanger for fresh air, but I don't think that really flies in increasingly hot/humid locales.
42, 47: Passivhäuser
There's a small possibility of a project that would involve 3-4 substantial and 3-4 small (but not tiny) Modernist houses on a big piece of property; I don't know if I can get to Passivhaus or net zero, but I'm going to push and at least see if we can get most of the way there--it would be especially appealing on the smaller ones I think. My other thought is a communal ground-source loop feeding heat pumps for each house.
Wait, a German word compounded from two nearly exact English cognates has to be written in German when you're writing in English? Can't we just refuse?
I choose to interpret 49 as answering for people's curiosity what the proper plural in German is.
Maybe we can compromise with "Passiv houses." This sounds normal when you're talking and only annoys those who deserve to be annoyed in writing. It is possible that I have a chip on my shoulder because, decades ago, I lost a spelling bee thanks to the word "mansard," which I hopefully spelled "mancered." When you're done mancering it, you have a mancered roof, obvs. No, they didn't use that exact sentence, but it was implicit!
I lost the Durham County spelling bee in the fifth grade when I spelled ventricle as ventrical.
I spelled "gable" wrong just this evening.
With all that German having leaked into the conversation already, I figured you were just talking about forks.
I believe 27 was recounting an exchange from the mid-80s.
I may have been too subtle. The point is that 1980s politicalfootball was right and his hippy agronomist friend was, at least partly, wrong. The empire did collapse, as the hippy predicted, but it emphatically did not do so without violence aimed at holding it together in a lot of former imperial possessions, as 1980s pf predicted.
Present-day politicalfootball is wrong, because he thinks that the Russian empire "gave it all up without war", and it didn't.
I guess the point is that the West has often overestimated the strength of Russia. (This goes back to the pre-WW1 era, with the idea that Russia could defeat Germany due to their huge manpower reserves: the "Russian Steamroller.")
The West has also underestimated the strength of Russia quite a lot as well. Manstein IIRC reckoned the campaign against the USSR would last four weeks. Most contemporaries reckoned that the 1812 campaign would be short and catastrophic.
I recommend, again, the Battalion Tactical Group piece, https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/issues/2017/spring/2Fiore17.pdf
along with this from RUSI arguing that Georgia is also a target, because the real threat is the mere existence of functioning ex-Soviet democracies (because what Putin truly fears is a revolution) https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russia-will-not-stop-ukraine
and this from Chatham House on how Russia can be deterred https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/2021-09-23-What-deters-Russia-Giles-pdf.pdf
which makes the points that, no, actually, we shouldn't worry that if we "back Putin into a corner" he will be "unable to back down" because that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how he has operated for the last 22 years. He doesn't mind backing down at all. He has, fundamentally, no sense of shame. What, will it damage his election prospects or something if he looks weak?
If he escalates massively, puts troops on the borders, demands the restoration of Soviet rule over East Germany, threatens nuclear war, and is given $3.50 in exchange for completely de-escalating and returning all his troops to their barracks, that is a win from his perspective because he is $3.50 up.
I'm not disagreeing -- although in the 1980s I thought that the risk of an unprovoked Russian invasion of West Germany was being overstated in bad faith, and I was right -- but it seems to me that if Putin has any sort of coup risk, which is the only reason he would fear a revolution, then there's a certain minimum standard he's going to have to observe with potential power centers for a coup. Getting the military into a bad no-exit kind of thing is what revolutions are made of.
60 is a good point about the military, but I disagree that Putin is only afraid of a coup; I think he is also worried about a colour-revolution scenario in which the population of Moscow rise up and the army (and Interior Ministry troops) refuses to shoot them. A coup can be stopped by murdering a few generals.
(though also back in the 1980s the risk of an unprovoked Russian nuclear attack on NATO was being understated, because back then we didn't know about dear old Stanislas Petrov, or that loon Andropov running Project RYaN to reinforce his own delusions about a first strike).
60 is a good point about the military, but I disagree that Putin is only afraid of a coup; I think he is also worried about a colour-revolution scenario in which the population of Moscow rise up and the army (and Interior Ministry troops) refuses to shoot them. A coup can be stopped by murdering a few generals.
(though also back in the 1980s the risk of an unprovoked Russian nuclear attack on NATO was being understated, because back then we didn't know about dear old Stanislas Petrov, or that loon Andropov running Project RYaN to reinforce his own delusions about a first strike).
Napoleon III was undone by a sedan instead of a coupe.
58: These things are relative, and I wonder if my friend was so radical as to imagine, say, the reunification of Germany or the current membership of NATO. But I think the narrative of 36, taken together with the collapse of the Soviet Union, was wildly optimistic in 1985, and not, to use my word "catastrophe."
64: true, no nuclear weapons actually got used.
But in fact what happened was well within the distribution of most pre-1990 predictions of Soviet collapse - it simply isn't true that "USSR will only collapse in catastrophic nuclear war" was anything like the accepted wisdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_collapse_of_the_Soviet_Union (bonus: Reverend Moon had a better understanding of the USSR than Trotsky)
What people did get wrong is how quickly the collapse would happen.
Reverend Moon had a better understanding of the USSR than Trotsky
Not to mention Ludwig von Mises. And of course, Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was a brutal blow to Soviet hegemony. "Tear down this wall!" And the wall fell.
There is a certain class of prediction that doesn't impress me a whole lot. In certain circles in 2016, people predicted that Trump would win the election based on the fact that more people would vote for him. I don't see them as being particularly vindicated by the actual result. (Though certainly: "He's going to do better than you libs imagine" was on the mark.)
But yeah, the point of 27 is that I continue to be a bit clueless on this stuff. The current configurations of NATO and Germany are still kind of unimaginable to me. Leaving aside nukes, I have a hard time grasping how this happened without tanks rolling. (And yes, I know, Russian tanks were still used after the fall of the Soviet Union. Still ...)
My buddy who 40 years ago predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union remains optimistic about the future of democracy in the United States. So he's still kinda dumb.
62 I was thinking that a color revolution only works in Russia if essentially paired with a coup. The tent needs to have a pole.
The way to Poland is through Ukraine.
27: I was taking pf's side of this argument in the 1980s too. I thought that with his glasnost policy Gorbachev was trying to allow a certain amount of flexibility and open dialogue within the Soviet bloc, but if there was a serious attempt to break with the Soviet Empire, the Red Army would march in like it had done a few times before. As it turned out, there was essentially no one that fought to preserve the Soviet Empire, and I'm not sure anyone predicted that.
68: a revolution only ever works with the acquiescence or support of the military (and security forces) anyway. At some point you have the crowds in the streets and the president ordering his goons to open fire. If they do, the revolution fails. If they stay in their barracks, or join the crowds, the revolution succeeds.
But I think it's still useful to draw a distinction between a revolution and a coup.
You can get a civil war if some of them go each way.
66: I recall being amazed that there was no attempt to stop the collapse. As you said, no tanks. China learned from the USSR's failure, and made sure they had tanks and loyal soldiers (non-urban units) when it looked like they might go the same way. I don't follow hard-core left wing politics, but doesn't "tankie" as a name for hard-core types originate there? Russians didn't send the tanks (as they had done multiple times previously), so they lost.
I thought "tankie" was just referring to "think tanks."
50, 53: Passivhaus is a very specific standard and is in fact very distinct from what the term passive house would mean to an American broadly familiar with green construction (but not quite up to date). And Passiv House just looks like a typo.
I lost on "ennui" in 8th grade even though I was taking French and knew the word "ennuiment"! I was still in my childish phase of not worrying about how to pronounce words that I understood from context cues, so Madame Bovary suffered from ENN-you-eye.
73: I had understood tankie to mean people who thought Hungary 1956 and Tiananman 1989 were awesome.
Okay but for real, is there a case where you pluralize the word when speaking in English and say Passivhäuser? Or would you only refer to the standard as a sort of brand name, not pluralized? That's what I'm wondering. (I was being quite unserious above; my serious belief is that the pronunciation, declension, etc. of non-English words in English has to be taken case by case and you just memorize them all.)
That said, my alternate compromise would be "Passivhice."
76: That's my understanding - though you usually see it in anti-anti form.
Looks like I was right to expect more people would be speaking Ukrainian: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/08/ukraine-russia-language-putin/
My experience twenty years ago was that I rarely heard Ukrainian spoken in their capital, only in Western Ukraine (i.e., the part that had been Poland).
I recall being amazed that there was no attempt to stop the collapse. As you said, no tanks
Well, there were tanks, but in Moscow.
It does seem like the best solution would be to restore to Poland the fullest extent of territory held by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. That would solve the issue with Ukraine and honestly the really Polish Polish voters could really use some diluting.
80: quite. All this "how amazing it all collapsed peacefully" stuff needs to recognise, in addition to the long list of wars I gave upthread, that there was an actual no kidding military coup by the Soviet Army and KGB leadership in 1991.
I don't follow hard-core left wing politics, but doesn't "tankie" as a name for hard-core types originate there?
"Tankie" goes back to 1956, when Hungary attempted to leave the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Army invaded, with weeks of streetfighting in Budapest. The Polish population remained quiet and the Czech army actually joined the Soviets; hence the bitter Hungarian remark that in 1956 "the Hungarians acted like Poles, the Poles acted like Czechs and the Czechs acted like pigs". The tankies were the members of the British communist party who remained loyal to the USSR despite this. Many of them - though not, to its credit, the CPGB leadership - also supported the crushing of the Prague Spring twelve years later.
I don't follow hard-core left wing politics, but doesn't "tankie" as a name for hard-core types originate there?
"Tankie" goes back to 1956, when Hungary attempted to leave the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Army invaded, with weeks of streetfighting in Budapest. The Polish population remained quiet and the Czech army actually joined the Soviets; hence the bitter Hungarian remark that in 1956 "the Hungarians acted like Poles, the Poles acted like Czechs and the Czechs acted like pigs". The tankies were the members of the British communist party who remained loyal to the USSR despite this. Many of them - though not, to its credit, the CPGB leadership - also supported the crushing of the Prague Spring twelve years later.
That said, my alternate compromise would be "Passivhice."
That's what Prince Charles calls them.
I think the best solution is to talk about "Passivhauses" and just accept the fact that it sounds like "passive houses", which isn't a terribly common phrase as far as I know, and should either be ignored, or should come to mean exactly the same as "Passivhaus". If someone told me about building a passive house, I personally would definitely assume they meant "one of those German things" - the term doesn't have any other meaning for me.
Thanks for the info on "tankie." ISTR most of the times I've seen it are in contexts like ajay's 83.*
Also 80. How soon we forget. I wonder if the Chinese success in 1989 stiffened the spine of the Soviet military in 1991? Or maybe they would have tried it regardless.
*Most of my knowledge of British communists comes from reading Ken MacLeod's novels.
87: But it was kind of a pathetic coup attempt, wasn't it? At least that's how Wikipedia describes it.
The 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, also known as the August Coup,[a] was a failed attempt made by communist hard-liners of the Soviet Union to take control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet President and General Secretary of the party. The coup leaders consisted of top military and civilian officials who formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP). They were hard-line opponents of Gorbachev's reform program, angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states, and fearful of the New Union Treaty that was about to be signed. The treaty decentralized much of the central government's power to the 15 republics. The hard-liners were very poorly organized. They met defeat by a short but effective campaign of anticommunist protestors, mainly in Moscow,[11] led by Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who had been both an ally and critic of Gorbachev. The coup collapsed in only two days and Gorbachev returned to office, while all the plotters lost office. Yeltsin became the dominant leader and Gorbachev lost much of his influence. The failed coup led to both the immediate collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the USSR four months later.
88: it was pathetic in retrospect, because it only lasted a few days, but it succeeded - it really did actually seize power and imprison the previous leader.
And who's to say that it wasn't, in the end, successful? For the last 22 years the man in charge has been a "hard-line opponent of Gorbachev's reform program, angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states", and doing his very best to reverse it. (To reverse the glasnost reforms, at least.)
I really do wonder what Lt.Col. Putin was doing in August 1991, and what he thought of what was going on.
"Putin claims that he resigned with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel on 20 August 1991,[46] on the second day of the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt against the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.[47] Putin said: "As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided which side I was on", although he also noted that the choice was hard because he had spent the best part of his life with "the organs"".
I didn't know he had bottom surgery.
I think there's two aspects and we're maybe not being explicit about which one we're describing: there's the Soviet Union, vanguard of International Communism, and there's the Russian Empire.
The latter clawed back at the former for most of its history, but it was the Soviet Union that the US viewed as a threat, not the Russian Empire. Putin is clearly a believer in the Empire, but AFAICT he doesn't give a shit about communism in any form.
Pre-1989, some people spoke in terms of the two distinct entities, but the fundamental question was always about communism, not the boundaries of Russia. That is, if you asked in 1985 whether the West would rather see 15 hardline communist states or 1 Russian one that's abandoned communism, I think the vast consensus would be the latter as preferable. The ideal was 15 capitalist republics, but the order of priorities was IMO clear.
So when we ask about the Soviet Union falling without a fight, from the perspective of 1985, it was a question about communism and, to a lesser extent, the Warsaw Pact. The disposition of the various SSRs was a tertiary concern at best.
"The Russians will never let Ukraine go without a fight" was a far less provocative claim than "The Russians will never let Berlin go without a fight."
77: In speech, I'd almost certainly say Passivhauses; failing that, I'd circumlocute. I'd never seriously say Passivhäuser (I might say it winking to someone who knew some German). Written, I'd almost certainly find a way to avoid that plural (eg "houses built to the Passivhaus standard").
As you point out, because they're not only cognate but also homophonic, you need to establish in speech that you mean Passivhaus and not passive house. So I wouldn't say, "We should build Passivhauses," I'd say, "we should build these houses to be Passivhaus" or something.
Ideally this will change, but we'll see about that.
I'd never heard the term before this thread.
69: The way to Muscovy is also through Ukraine.
In the next Blade Runner remake, the dying replicant will make reference to struggles over Passivhäuser and the word will become regularized. It's just a matter of time, JRoth.
88- I feel like calling coup attempts pathetic is a bad practice.
Oh good, this situation is getting better.
The Biden administration warned on Friday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could mount a major assault on Ukraine at any time . . . U.S. intelligence officials had initially thought Mr. Putin was prepared to wait until the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing before possibly ordering an offensive, to avoid antagonizing President Xi Jinping of China, a critical ally. In recent days, they say, the timeline began moving up
Is it fair to blame Eteri Tutberidze in some way? I'm game.
(I have had enough deadpan failures here that maybe I should make it clear that by "getting better" I mean "not getting better"?)