--- cgrimes at rawbw.com wrote: The point is I got the impression that Russians are a head strong and a very, as the OT says of the Jews, stiff necked people. In other words something about the naive Russian character, if there is such a thing, demands strong arm leadership, so that things don't get out of hand. Russian kids must be outrageous brats.
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I haven't noticed anything particularly bratty about Russian children.
But anyway you are on to what I think is one of the main engines of Russian history -- the dialectic between "volya" and "vlast." "Vlast" means either "government" or "power" or "authority," as in "Sovetskaya vlast," usually translated as "Soviet government" or "Soviet power," or as in "Vsya vlast Sovietam!" ("all power/government to the Soviets/councils!"). Russian has two main words for "freedom" -- "svoboda" and "volya." "Svoboda" roughly translates to the English word. "Volya" however also means "will," as in "Norodnaya Volya" (People's Will), and has connotations of irresponsibility, selfishness, and orgiastic release and violence -- peasant insurrections, pogroms, that sort of thing. ("Svobodnaya volya" -- "free will," literally -- is a contradiction in terms.)
If you may note, Russian history is mainly a swinging back and forth between the two poles of authoritarian "vlast" and anarchic "volya," or rather usually a thin veneer of authoritarianism over a deep boiling sea of "vlast." Russian daily existence is chaotic and has always been chaotic. The vlast exists as a reaction to it and to keep it under control. The trick is to achieve some kind of balance between the two (something Putin has done remarkably well BTW). You can probably see something of this in the Soviet harnessing of peasant messianism to its modernization product.
(By the way, failing to notice this is part of what dooms something like 90% of Western commentary on Russia to irrelevancy. E.g. Putin is supposed to establish something called "rule of law." How exactly is he supposed to do this? Change the entire society? "Rule of law" has never existed in Russia. Russians do not obey laws; Russians do not enforce laws, unless the Vlast really starts yelling at them to do so. Thus, Putin or whoever is in charge has to go about doing the urgent business of doing what needs to be done WITHOUT the "rule of law," which neither he nor anybody else can create.)
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