Posted on 03/06/2022 3:53:32 PM PST by AdmSmith
2018 lecture in Finnish (subtitled in English), given by Martti Kari, a former Colonel working in military intelligence, with expertise in Russian “strategic culture”, and who is now at the university. Here he is explaining why Russians think and behave so differently from us in the West, which gives us some ways of guessing what they might do in the future. This has, for me, shed much light on the motivation behind the Ukrainian invasion and so much else that Russia has done.
Finland, of course, borders Russia, and at various points in history has been part of Russia, fought with Russia, and invaded by Russia. They held off the Russians in the brutal 1939 Winter War, when they invented the Molotov Cocktail, and have, of course, deep knowledge of their bellicose neighbor.
Here are my summary notes if you need to get back to the demands of work, doomscrolling or the exigencies of CNN.
3:09 Russia has many layers, which he will enumerate. The foundation of Russian society is Slavic culture. The Slavic people are seen as one, Russians are the most numerous and greatest of the Slavic people, and Slavic unity must be defended.
“I took an international business negotiations course once.”
FFS
“Slavs are barbarians.
Russians are products of Scythians, Slavs, and Mongols.”
This should get you banned from this forum.
Statements like this are evil, whether they come from a freeper or BLM.
I am retired CIA, spent 11 years working overseas and under cover, primarily against the Soviet Union.
Yeah there is still a lot of corruption in Russia. 70 years of communism and poverty creates that.
But we have pretty much caught up. Russians and Americans are actually very similar culturally in most ways.
Now, bow you head in shame and go find some Nazi forum so you can rail on slavs some more.
Mr. Robinson - you need to sell this site to me. It needs some care and oversight.
They believe that everything is a zero-sum game, they regard compromise as a weakness.
I think that there is something to this theory. After all Stalin chucked a lot of scientists into the gulag in the 30’s and many of them came out and work their butts off for Mother Russia in WW2, particularly in the aircraft industry.
That's a lot of times. You must be an authority by now.
A friend, who works in Washington DC and has had a lot of contact with mid to low level Russians, is a pretty astute observer of people and makes mental notes on their actions.
His take is the Russians are too eastern to trust, and be trusted by, the west.
They are also too western to trust, and be trusted by, the east.
The result is national paranoia.
The Russian government is paranoid because they’ve been invaded twice in recent modern history (Napoleon and Hitler). The Russian people are not so bad, in St. Petersburg, they’re Westernized because it’s pretty close to Europe. Maybe Putin will cause the collapse of the Russian Federation. Kalingrad should be its own country. Same as Petersburg and Moscow. Chechnya should declare independence. Siberia should become its own nation, it’ll become like Mongolia.
Have you read “A Genius for War”?
Great book on Patton.
Poland has been invaded more times than Russia, and even deleted from the map.
Too much vodka. Same think happened with Pelosi.
Yep. I am not justifying Russia’s reasoning for their actions. I think their location has a role. Russia is located between China and Europe. So they do not really belong in either culture. If Putin didn’t turn out to be a total dictator, I think Russia would have ended up in a different direction today.
So too are Ukrainains - so easy to see why they both have difficulty in negotiations. Neither trusts the other both are paranoid. They understand too - that’s how they are.
Spot on.
This was Tsarist propaganda already in the 19th century. The Western Slavs in particular (Poles and Czechs) have never considered the Russians "fellow Slavs," merely barbarians who wrecked their countries along with the Germans.
Odd, anyone I ever knew from Langley never bragged about it on an online forum.
If you worked for the CIA my guess is you were a contractor at the coffee kiosk.
I’ve been to Russia, too. Russians have Mongol blood. There is definitely a Russian exceptionalism or chauvinism to them. You see that most obviously in conflicts they have with their smaller neighbors. They are not like us and take some pride in that.
> That’s a lot of times. You must be an authority by now.
I’ve adopted three Russian kids and have had a LOT of interaction with Russians, and their bureaucrats, including courts and judges.
I’ve spent a LOT of time with the Russian Apostolic Lutheran community in Russia and in the States, and attended a Slavic Baptist church here in the States for a while. I have many good friends in the Slavic Christian community. I certainly don’t speak it well, hardly at all anymore.
I think I can speak from knowledge when I say that they are no different than you or I in their hopes and fears, desires and disdains.
They tend to be more realistic and cheeky than Americans. For example, while the American Press reverently called Lenin’s mausoleum “Lenin’s Tomb”, the Russians I met called it, “The Mummy”.
In addition: The Russians fought a war against Western Powers during the Crimean War. The Treat of Brest-Ltovsk took Russia out of WW1 and allowed Germany to occuppy the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine. After WW1, during the Russian Civil War, parts of Russia were occuppied by the Entente Forces which included Great Britain, France, the US, and Japan.
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