The Century-Long Saga of East Europe and the Russian Empire
Explore the history of East Europe's relationship with the Russian Empire. Learn how the USSR was formed, why it failed, and how East Europeans managed to gain their independence.
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦
Writes about economics, tweets about rabbits. For serious opinions/analysis, read my blog: https://t.co/KfUxUlCYPz
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A milestone in the century-long saga of East Europe telling the Russian Empire to fuck entirely off https://t.co/pQhqFFp2mb
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023 -
Half the population of East Europe lives in Russia. All the other half had to do in order to not be subjugated by the Russians was to unite.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023 -
The USSR was the East European countries being tricked into thinking that they could be equal partners with the Russians in a superstate bound together by ideology instead of subject to the rule of an imperial race.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023
That experiment didn't work out, so here we are. -
The USSR was a genuine renaissance of Russian power, but it couldn't have happened without the ingenuity and hard work of the Ukrainians, Poles, Baltics, and other East European peoples that the Russians ethnically subjugated under the guise of "communism".
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023 -
When the USSR turned into a stagnant petrostate, that gave the peoples of East Europe the impetus and the opportunity to break free of Russian domination. The fall of the USSR might have been caused by economics, but was carried out in practice by ethnic separatist movements.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023 -
Putin's revival of Russian power was extremely modest and minor compared to what the USSR accomplished in its early days. A big reason was that he no longer had the peoples of East Europe to give their labor and ingenuity to the effort.https://t.co/1u72jnDVjq
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023 -
Now the weakness of Putin's brief Russian mini-renaissance was exposed by its military failures in Ukraine. This made the rest of East Europe realize that it could be permanently free of Russian domination (even if John Mearsheimer hasn't gotten the message).
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023 -
When Putin says Ukraine is an "anti-Russia", this is what he means. He correctly sees that Ukraine's resistance has galvanized all of East Europe (except Belarus) into uniting against Russian ethnic domination.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023 -
But no matter how much Putin thrashes around, there is no future in which 145 million East Europeans consent to subjugation by 145 million Russians. That ship has sailed.
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2023
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