>>17944706
Yeah probably. Well at least for awhile until the USSR collapsed. But there's this Russian glowie habit of trying to make friends with schizo separatist groups in the U.S. like Texan nationalists or the Free State of Jefferson or whatever, which are clown groups, but it makes more sense when I considered that they're projecting their own experiences and fears of what could happen to Russia. They think America can split up like that like how Americans think other countries are really just like U.S. with a funny sounding language. There are twin tendencies that are centrifugal and centripedal because it expanded over a massive part of the world with unclear natural borders, and they overran various non-Russian tribes in the process. It's not really clear where Russia ends, it kind of peters out on the edges. But what does Vladivostok have in common with Moscow.
The Russian government now is still probably less repressive than the Soviet Union (which was highly repressive) but since the war started they've been passing all kinds of crazy laws that can get people in trouble for anything, but it gives the police the power to arrest people who cause trouble or because they simply don't like that person. And while the war involves geopolitics and beef and everything people talk about, at least part of it must also be for internal reasons as it helps accelerate this centralizing tendency, which isn't new. It's like the government figures it's the only way they can make it "work" and compensate for the tendency for Russia to divide up.
>>17944660
The Orthodox Church never had a reformation and the Tsar was held up like a God. A false God, but given the situation, the job of tearing that down fell to the iconoclastic Bolsheviks.
