Once again N has been going on and on about how hard it was to work at their dacha when he was a kid. This time, the story of hardship included planting, fertilizing and weeding dill.
“Oh, come on!” I exclaimed. “You are so exaggerating. Nobody plants or fertilizes dill. It’s a weed. It grows on its own. It’s not that hard to grow things at all.”
“I’m from Russia,” N said grimly. “Nothing grows. Not even dill.”
And just like that, the whole Russian history suddenly became crystal clear.
I’ve planted dill!
Granted, I worked at a garden center. :p It’s not a weed where I am, either.
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Ukraine has some of the most fertile soils on the continent, and I keep forgetting that things are different elsewhere. 🤗
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“the whole Russian history suddenly became crystal clear”
For me this article on property rights (which have never existed in Russia) did more to explain Russia than anything else
http://archives.financialservices.house.gov/banking/92199wil.shtml
esp:
“The Russians’ failure to accept the Roman concept of private property has compelled them to suffer the coercive powers of the state so that at the very least a civil order, if not a civil society, might be established and sustained.
The hackneyed idea that Russians have some special longing for tyranny is a pernicious myth. Rather, they share the common human need for predictable event undergirded by civil and state institutions and their difficult history is the result of their struggle to achieve both in the absence of private property.”
and
“Since only the Tsar or the Party had property, no individual Russian could be sure of long-term usage of anything upon which to create wealth. ….
In the absence of property, it was access – the opportunity to seek opportunity – and favor in which the Russians began to traffic. The connections one achieved, in turn, became the most essential tools a human being could grasp, employ and, over time, in which he might trade.
Where relationships, not laws, are used to define society’s boundaries, tribute must be paid. Bribery, extortion and subterfuge have been the inevitable result. What marks the Russian condition in particular is the scale of these activities, which is colossal. Russia, then, is a negotiated culture, the opposite of the openly competitive culture productive markets require. “
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This is a very good analysis. When Russians tried to export this system of property relations to Ukraine, the clash of cultures was enormous. We all know who won but what people often don’t know is how outlandish both cultures found each other’s way of organizing property relations.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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