“I was skeptical simply…
“I was skeptical simply because it seemed to me that the characteristics of the Russian “personality” were crystallized as early as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (or perhaps Peter the Great), that is, the appeal of autocracy and the strong man.”
People say this about Russia and its history all the time, but I don’t get it at all. Didn’t ordinary Russians rebel against the Czar repeatedly? Didn’t they even sort of contemplate a revolution at some point?
Weren’t most of the repressive measures of Soviet Communism directed against internal opposition to the centralization of the Party during the Civil War and post-Civil War period? Wasn’t there an extensive dissident movement? Didn’t the regime finally collapse internally in the face of such opposition?
Russian history is a terribly sad story, but it seems to me that there are much better explanations for that than blaming the victims or their “national character”…
Anticopyright.