Not sure if it is possible to translate Glazkov adequately to any other language, though...
Thank you for your efforts, by the way. I can see only a small part of them, and disagree with a few judgements, but it is a unique, credible window and invaluable for my understanding of events.
Azerbaijan was crawling with spooks in the early-mid 90s (and since) - US, Brit, Turkish, Saudi, probably Israeli. Mostly because of the oil scramble, but also Iran. So there was money to be made. Lotta funny stuff went on between Baku and the border with Dagestan.
Yes, one of the reasons I've been reading Korchinsky is because he's been compared to Limonov so much. The comparison does hold, though Korchinsky manages to be a great deal more megalomaniacal.
Having spent a lot of time with Limonov, one of the unusual (for Russian writers) things about him was how down to earth he was in person. It surprised me because his literary persona was such an over the top megalomaniac. That said, he was attracted to anyone trying to do big and crazy things in life, and to talent.
Yes, I do believe that Korchinsky is genuinely megalomaniacal in person. Unlike Limonov, he also never actually faced any punishment for his radical beliefs. He was never imprisoned. One reason why many claim he is on the payroll of every intelligence service out there, western and eastern
WACL, involvement in obscure post-soviet conflicts and efforts to destabilize the region, oil money, hmm... Sounds familiar. What is your take on Far West (the Ukrainian GRU(!?) firm supposedly connecting international narcotics smuggling, terrorism, Cheney, the Saudis, Israelis and intelligence agencies)? Sometimes the stuff I see about this topic is so outlandish and schizophrenic, and after having found some youtube videos of the supposed handler of Basayev in Abkhazia and his buddies hanging out in Finland in weird super low quality youtube clips, often with Bandera portraits in the background, I just don't know what to make of it all. Disinfo?
Far West is an interesting topic. I first heard about it on the Farm podcast, then I read the Dale Scott book with the chapter on the topic. I came out of it with the conclusion that I'd need to read some of the original Ukrainian/Russian articles on the topic to understand it better.
In general, the arms dealing of 2000s Ukraine is a very important topic. It was the leakage of Soviet military technologies from Ukraine to China (and Iraq, DPRK...) that really scared the US and convinced it something had to be done with the country. That's why I have been writing about the Motor Sich factory, a series I really need to continue https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/motor-sich-one
I believe one of the more verified rumours surrounding Far West is the smuggling of X-55 missiles to Iran and China. I think all of the sources are in Russian though. Some very shady stuff was definitely going on back then, and has probably restarted given the massive influx of new arms into Ukraine...
"Germany’s secret service, the BND, is heavily involved in the delivery of weapons to crisis areas of the world. As this documentary shows, it has - among other things - played along with arms deals made by German shipping companies. Top secret operations are carried out silently, bypassing the federal authorities by exploiting a blind spot between the Foreign Trade and the War Weapons Control Acts. The weapons are not shipped from Germany, but via a secret port in Ukraine that does not appear on any map. The trail leads to Kyiv, where a former Ukrainian president confirms the existence of the port and the "delicate” arms deals. For the first time, the chief of the country’s secret service acknowledges that German companies are involved in the shipping of military weapons via the Ukraine, and provides the film team with the first and only television pictures of the secret port. Research in the USA throws up more alarming indications. American satellite images show the port where heavy-lift carriers load tanks, howitzers and other military equipment. At least two German shipping companies are involved in the operation. The plethora of secret documents points in particular to a former world market leader in the heavy-lift cargo business, the Bremen-based in Beluga shipping company, which has since ceased trading. Four of its ships are explicitly named. Loading and stowage lists show that the shipping company repeatedly planned and shipped armaments - and one man, a BND officer with the code name "Klaus Hollmann,” was always involved. The German parliament only found out about the BND’s involvement in the arms deliveries through the makers of this film and is now trying to get to the bottom of the affair. Intelligence experts see this as an important step in averting further damage to German Democracy."
Some of the Ukrainians allegedly involved are Маломуж and Ющенко. Since 2019, the video on YouTube has been made private, but it seems that someone re-uploaded it to https://youtu.be/lOLOT4rmBx8
UP is mega-“regarded”, but “stop the war in 2022”? Are they so Americanized they too cannot recall even recent history? Like, idk…a certain meeting in Istanbul where Ukranian initiatives were agreed to, initialed by both sides? Before a bowl-cut, inbred, cuck f-slur named Boris came in to give US’s marching orders?
Or idk, Minsk I & II, that couldve preserved the precious 2022 borders, and coffee in Crimea.
Dugin is a radical cultural relativist. His position on the West isn't really that it is degenerate (it would require a transcultural standard to make this judgment), but that the imposition of the Western cultural framework on other societies, mainly by colonialism, causes THEM to deform, creating weird, pathological hybrid societies.
That said, within the standards of Western civilization itself, he DOES think that its essence in the last few hundred years has been increasingly nihilistic, in a roughly Heideggerian/Nietzschean way
Incidentally, there is a direct connection between structuralism and Eurasianism (and Russian radical conservatism generally), because Trubetskoy, one of the big figures in the Prague school of structural linguistics (and inventer of the idea of the "phoneme") was one of the leading Eurasianists, and to some extent his structuralism develops Slavophile ideas about the plurality and self-containedness of civilizations.
Yes, it all sounds rather interesting. Some day I would love to get the chance to sit down and read the eurasianist literature. I agree with them at the very least that Marxism was wrong to place so much hope on the historically progressive role of the west.
They expand on previous Slavophile ideas (themselves developing German Romanticism and German Idealism -- Schelling, not Hegel so much) about the Absolute manifesting itself differently in different civilizations, each of which has its own logic and cannot be measured by the standards of another. In this case, the belief was that Russia is not a "European" society, but is Orthosox and Mongol-Tatar in structure (personally I think this is right). There were both left and right versions of this in the 1920s.
I am currently reading Sergei Kara-Murza's Sovetskaya Tsivilizatsiya, and he seems to come close to the left-wing Eurasianist position.
I assume that Ukrainian westophiles view themselves as part of the West, and the rest of the West as falling away from the virtue that is represented by Ukrainians, whereas Eurasianism of the sort that Dugin represents sees itself as not part of the West.
He's a structuralist sociologist. In this paradigm, cultures have an internal structure and develop according to the laws of this structure, as in structuralist linguistics sentences are formed according to the structure of the language. (He thinks that this is based on different ways in which different cultures organize basic experience, coming out of a shared Jungian collective unconscious kind of thing.) When you get the structure of another culture layered onto it, it causes the society to weirdly deform, as he sees in colonial/postcolonial societies and Russia under the constant pressure of Westernizing elites.
As a matter of fact, he has a truly ambitious reading of world history based on this, in which much of the history of Eurasia has been determined by the layering of a proto-Indo-European cultural framework upon the indigenous peoples that the Indo-European nomands became the ruling classes of. This may or may not be true, but it is really interesting.
Thank you, I’m glad you liked it. I definitely plan to write a post some time about Zelensky in the 2014-19 period, the genesis of the ‘Zelensky as president’ project. First though, I’ll put out the second half of my series on Yermak, probably this week
I doubt Darya Whatsit cried for the people of Donbass when they were being shelled by her Lvov homies.
Apropos of the last line:
Блажен, кто посетил сей мир
В его минуты роковые!
Его призвали всеблагие
Как собеседника на пир.
Он их высоких зрелищ зритель,
Он в их совет допущен был -
И заживо, как небожитель,
Из чаши их бессмертье пил!
Or for English-speakers: https://allpoetry.com/poem/8537705-Cicero--Blessed-are-they...--by-Fyodor-Ivanovich-Tyutchev
Though I personally am much closer to Glazkov:
Я на мир взираю из–под столика,
Век двадцатый – век необычайный.
Чем столетье интересней для историка,
Тем для современника печальней!
Not sure if it is possible to translate Glazkov adequately to any other language, though...
Thank you for your efforts, by the way. I can see only a small part of them, and disagree with a few judgements, but it is a unique, credible window and invaluable for my understanding of events.
Great article! Any reason besides money that Korchinsky fought for the Azeris??
I've read that it was arranged through Ukrainian intelligence services. Armenia was supported more by Russia. But also Korchinsky, like many, always goes to the highest bidder. I'll try to write a more detailed article about him soon. https://antikor.info/articles/118262-dmitrij_korchinskij_gapon_ukrainskoj_revoljutsii/print
Azerbaijan was crawling with spooks in the early-mid 90s (and since) - US, Brit, Turkish, Saudi, probably Israeli. Mostly because of the oil scramble, but also Iran. So there was money to be made. Lotta funny stuff went on between Baku and the border with Dagestan.
Also, as I recall Limonov and Korchinsky were comrades and supporters of each other. I'm not sure if that held after 2014.
Yes, one of the reasons I've been reading Korchinsky is because he's been compared to Limonov so much. The comparison does hold, though Korchinsky manages to be a great deal more megalomaniacal.
Having spent a lot of time with Limonov, one of the unusual (for Russian writers) things about him was how down to earth he was in person. It surprised me because his literary persona was such an over the top megalomaniac. That said, he was attracted to anyone trying to do big and crazy things in life, and to talent.
Yes, I do believe that Korchinsky is genuinely megalomaniacal in person. Unlike Limonov, he also never actually faced any punishment for his radical beliefs. He was never imprisoned. One reason why many claim he is on the payroll of every intelligence service out there, western and eastern
E.g., https://cryptome.org/bp-mi6.htm
WACL, involvement in obscure post-soviet conflicts and efforts to destabilize the region, oil money, hmm... Sounds familiar. What is your take on Far West (the Ukrainian GRU(!?) firm supposedly connecting international narcotics smuggling, terrorism, Cheney, the Saudis, Israelis and intelligence agencies)? Sometimes the stuff I see about this topic is so outlandish and schizophrenic, and after having found some youtube videos of the supposed handler of Basayev in Abkhazia and his buddies hanging out in Finland in weird super low quality youtube clips, often with Bandera portraits in the background, I just don't know what to make of it all. Disinfo?
Also, thank you for all your high quality work!
Far West is an interesting topic. I first heard about it on the Farm podcast, then I read the Dale Scott book with the chapter on the topic. I came out of it with the conclusion that I'd need to read some of the original Ukrainian/Russian articles on the topic to understand it better.
In general, the arms dealing of 2000s Ukraine is a very important topic. It was the leakage of Soviet military technologies from Ukraine to China (and Iraq, DPRK...) that really scared the US and convinced it something had to be done with the country. That's why I have been writing about the Motor Sich factory, a series I really need to continue https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/motor-sich-one
E.g., from 2002: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/context.html
Interesting.
I believe one of the more verified rumours surrounding Far West is the smuggling of X-55 missiles to Iran and China. I think all of the sources are in Russian though. Some very shady stuff was definitely going on back then, and has probably restarted given the massive influx of new arms into Ukraine...
In 2019, Deutsche Welle uploaded a video to https://youtu.be/6X1Y0Mj7Qzc with the following description:
"Germany’s secret service, the BND, is heavily involved in the delivery of weapons to crisis areas of the world. As this documentary shows, it has - among other things - played along with arms deals made by German shipping companies. Top secret operations are carried out silently, bypassing the federal authorities by exploiting a blind spot between the Foreign Trade and the War Weapons Control Acts. The weapons are not shipped from Germany, but via a secret port in Ukraine that does not appear on any map. The trail leads to Kyiv, where a former Ukrainian president confirms the existence of the port and the "delicate” arms deals. For the first time, the chief of the country’s secret service acknowledges that German companies are involved in the shipping of military weapons via the Ukraine, and provides the film team with the first and only television pictures of the secret port. Research in the USA throws up more alarming indications. American satellite images show the port where heavy-lift carriers load tanks, howitzers and other military equipment. At least two German shipping companies are involved in the operation. The plethora of secret documents points in particular to a former world market leader in the heavy-lift cargo business, the Bremen-based in Beluga shipping company, which has since ceased trading. Four of its ships are explicitly named. Loading and stowage lists show that the shipping company repeatedly planned and shipped armaments - and one man, a BND officer with the code name "Klaus Hollmann,” was always involved. The German parliament only found out about the BND’s involvement in the arms deliveries through the makers of this film and is now trying to get to the bottom of the affair. Intelligence experts see this as an important step in averting further damage to German Democracy."
Some of the Ukrainians allegedly involved are Маломуж and Ющенко. Since 2019, the video on YouTube has been made private, but it seems that someone re-uploaded it to https://youtu.be/lOLOT4rmBx8
UP is mega-“regarded”, but “stop the war in 2022”? Are they so Americanized they too cannot recall even recent history? Like, idk…a certain meeting in Istanbul where Ukranian initiatives were agreed to, initialed by both sides? Before a bowl-cut, inbred, cuck f-slur named Boris came in to give US’s marching orders?
Or idk, Minsk I & II, that couldve preserved the precious 2022 borders, and coffee in Crimea.
Dugin is a radical cultural relativist. His position on the West isn't really that it is degenerate (it would require a transcultural standard to make this judgment), but that the imposition of the Western cultural framework on other societies, mainly by colonialism, causes THEM to deform, creating weird, pathological hybrid societies.
That said, within the standards of Western civilization itself, he DOES think that its essence in the last few hundred years has been increasingly nihilistic, in a roughly Heideggerian/Nietzschean way
That makes sense. In any case, by the standards of the reigning Ukrainian westophilia, that means a value judgment of the west as degenerate
I promise some day to actually read a Dugin book in full
This is in Социология воображения, Социология русского общества, and Хейдеггер. Возможность русской философии. And I am sure other places.
With lots of little graphs. He loves graphs. (Structuralism!)
Incidentally, there is a direct connection between structuralism and Eurasianism (and Russian radical conservatism generally), because Trubetskoy, one of the big figures in the Prague school of structural linguistics (and inventer of the idea of the "phoneme") was one of the leading Eurasianists, and to some extent his structuralism develops Slavophile ideas about the plurality and self-containedness of civilizations.
Yes, it all sounds rather interesting. Some day I would love to get the chance to sit down and read the eurasianist literature. I agree with them at the very least that Marxism was wrong to place so much hope on the historically progressive role of the west.
They expand on previous Slavophile ideas (themselves developing German Romanticism and German Idealism -- Schelling, not Hegel so much) about the Absolute manifesting itself differently in different civilizations, each of which has its own logic and cannot be measured by the standards of another. In this case, the belief was that Russia is not a "European" society, but is Orthosox and Mongol-Tatar in structure (personally I think this is right). There were both left and right versions of this in the 1920s.
I am currently reading Sergei Kara-Murza's Sovetskaya Tsivilizatsiya, and he seems to come close to the left-wing Eurasianist position.
I assume that Ukrainian westophiles view themselves as part of the West, and the rest of the West as falling away from the virtue that is represented by Ukrainians, whereas Eurasianism of the sort that Dugin represents sees itself as not part of the West.
He's a structuralist sociologist. In this paradigm, cultures have an internal structure and develop according to the laws of this structure, as in structuralist linguistics sentences are formed according to the structure of the language. (He thinks that this is based on different ways in which different cultures organize basic experience, coming out of a shared Jungian collective unconscious kind of thing.) When you get the structure of another culture layered onto it, it causes the society to weirdly deform, as he sees in colonial/postcolonial societies and Russia under the constant pressure of Westernizing elites.
As a matter of fact, he has a truly ambitious reading of world history based on this, in which much of the history of Eurasia has been determined by the layering of a proto-Indo-European cultural framework upon the indigenous peoples that the Indo-European nomands became the ruling classes of. This may or may not be true, but it is really interesting.
Great post — are you going to continue the Zelensky biography series? I found great interest in that
Thank you, I’m glad you liked it. I definitely plan to write a post some time about Zelensky in the 2014-19 period, the genesis of the ‘Zelensky as president’ project. First though, I’ll put out the second half of my series on Yermak, probably this week
Not sure if reclamation is Ukrainian statehood is with WWIII
Iron Dome and Iron Beam will be in demand soon. It'll be at least four years before the Golden Dome becomes available, and we don't have four years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEydjPeYkjI