Source item

This is absolutely correct. Russians weren’t primitive. They had Mendeleev, Chebyshev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky before the revolution. That is the tragedy of communism. A growing society got first mired in war and then captured by communists. Bolsheviks seized Russian farms, destroyed functioning markets, and ruined what had previously been an ascending civilization. There’s an alternate reality where Russian cosmists — essentially the techno-optimists of Russia — lead the country rather than the Bolsheviks. It would have been a very different century. But that descent into primitivism was the tragedy of the thing. If you’d talked to a Russian engineer or noble in 1913, and asked them whether they’d die in a gulag a decade later, they’d have laughed. Then it happened. Communism didn’t advance Russia, it bankrupted it.