Posted on 08/04/2013 11:29:06 PM PDT by TexGrill
Russia turned westward in the 18th century, but its relationship with the West has remained strained. The two civilizations were like oil and water: No matter how you stir the mixture, the substances stayed separate and Russia always shrugged off Western influences.
For 200 years, Russia was ruled from St. Petersburg, a city built by Western architects and planned under the spell of the French Enlightenment. However, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and other writers despised it, describing it as an alien sore on the body of Mother Russia.
After the 1848 revolution in Europe, ideas such secularism, individualism and universal education didn't take hold in Russia. Even the abolition of serfdom in 1861 was greeted skeptically by peasants, and it was restored anyway in the form of collective farms 70 years later. In the 19th century, narodniks — idealistic students who tried to educate and politically engage "ordinary folks" — rarely found a sympathetic ear in villages. Their failure to rally popular support radicalized narodniks as surely as repression and lack of reforms. As a result, Russia developed the nastiest left-wing terror network in Europe.
Discontent over the explosive growth of Western-style capitalism in the years before World War I and the collapse of feudal society on the countryside were instrumental in the 1917 Revolutions. When Nicholas II abdicated the throne, the Provisional Government tried to position itself as a Western democracy and promptly lost popular support. The Bolsheviks were more successful not because of their Communist ideology, but because they rejected capitalism and proclaimed themselves anti-Western.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
I hope for their sake that Russians don’t take on the worst aspects of Western culture, like social liberalism: gay marriage, homosexuality, vulgar rap music, vulgar TV sitcoms, and my own personal axe to grind, medical ADs on TV listing every possible and grotesque side effect of the advertised drugs known to mankind.
They’ve already taken on the vulgarity in spades.
You have no idea how bad it is in the former soviet union. Drugs, alcohol, prostitution, poverty is way above anywhere in the West. It may take few generations to make it better but the chance is maybe 1%...
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