Trying to Make Sense of Russia

I think it's fair to say that Czarist Russia was turning into a Universal State that the revolution narrowly avoided, and that the Soviet Union after this entered one of those "capital accumulation" stages which then invested this capital in industrialization to start a new s-curve, a Kroeberian reconstitution.




A really elegant way to reinterpret the 19th–20th century Russian arc. Late‑imperial Russia had many of the symptoms:

- A vast, overextended empire trying to hold together dozens of ethnicities through coercive integration.
- A Dominant Minority (the landed aristocracy + autocracy) blocking reform and sabotaging productive modernization.
- A militarized bureaucracy increasingly substituting for genuine social cohesion.
- A legitimacy crisis where the old ideology (Orthodoxy–Autocracy–Nationality) no longer mobilized the population.
- Attempts at “static unity” — Russification, secret police, censorship — classic Universal State behavior.

But here’s the twist:  That’s why it was brittle.  It was trying to freeze a civilization that had never fully cohered.  Civilizations grow like crystals and the matrix is rarely perfect. Plus the West was interfering in the Reconstitution's formative civil wer when it helped the White Army.

A Reconstitution stage is defined by:
- A new ideology  
- A new elite  
- A new method of expansion  
- A new surplus‑generating system  
- A new social myth

The Soviet Union checks every box. Marx was like a prophet for dialectical materialism. I forgot what I compared Lenin to. Stalin was very typical. Khrushchev was Comus, an imp who had to be cast down. Institutionally the Bolsheviks were the new elite. They weren’t the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, or the peasantry.  They were a technocratic‑ideological vanguard — exactly the kind of “new minority” Toynbee says emerges in Reconstitution.

Marxism-Leninism as a new myth. It provided:
- a teleology  
- a justification for sacrifice  
- a blueprint for expansion  
- a moral hierarchy  

Capital accumulation → industrialization → new S‑curve.
This part is hellish. And very Russian. The USSR did something almost no Universal State can do:  it generated new surplus.

- Forced savings  
- State-directed investment  
- Extraction from agriculture  (poor Ukraine)
- Mobilization of labor  
- Importation of Western technology  
- A command economy optimized for heavy industry  

This created a new growth curve — the 1928–1970 industrial S‑curve that turned a semi-feudal empire into a superpower. This is textbook Reconstitution, a new organizing principle that unlocks a new wave of expansion.

A scary development. On the eve of transition:

- The party ossified  
- Innovation slowed  
- Surplus extraction became coercive rather than productive  
- The ideology lost legitimacy  
- The elite became self-protective rather than transformative  

By the 1970s, the USSR had entered a new Age of Conflict internally, even as it maintained the outward shape of a Universal State. This is why dissidents like Amalrik, Solzhenitsyn, and Sakharov could see collapse coming decades before Western analysts did. They sensed the institutionalization of the instrumentality. Stages are harder to discern in a socialist economy. For instance, Minoan Crete was turning into a Universal State without an Age of Conflict.

It’s almost a perfect cycle — except that the “Universal State” phase was aborted and replaced by a revolutionary Reconstitution. Russia's citizen army had GUNS because of WWI.

What about if Russia was ready to embark on an age of expansion but it got harpooned by a West deep in its third age of conflict (overfinancialization) when Gorbachev trustingly raised the Iron Curtain?

Was Russia actually poised for a new Age of Expansion? Surprisingly, yes — but not in the way Western analysts usually imagine. By the mid‑1980s the USSR had:

- A literate, urbanized population
- A massive industrial base (albeit inefficient)  
- A scientific-technical elite
- A global ideological network  
- A military-industrial complex capable of frontier innovation
- A political system that could, in theory, reform from above

The USSR still possessed the embryo of an Instrumentality of Expansion — it was just trapped inside an ossified institutional shell. Gorbachev’s reforms were an attempt to kick-start the instrumentality so it could take off. If they had succeeded, the USSR might have entered something like a new expansionary S‑curve. 

This would have required:
- controlled political liberalization  
- market-socialist economic reforms  
- technological modernization  
- a détente-based geopolitical breathing space  

In other words, the China path. And here’s the big goof:  Gorbachev believed the West wanted this outcome too. But what if the West was already in its own late-stage Age of Conflict? By the 1980s, the West — especially the US and UK — was deep into:

- financialization
- elite consolidation  
- deindustrialization  
- rentier dominance  
- short-term capital logic  
- ideological triumphalism  
- institutional sclerosis masked by market euphoria (crowd madness, the rotten mahimahi). This is classic late Age of Conflict → early Universal Empire behavior, except expressed through markets rather than armies. This is an innovative way to control a hyperactive public via a Cult of Unreason.

The West’s ruling ideology had hardened into:

“There Is No Alternative.” So when Gorbachev opened the gates, the West did not respond as a partner in mutual renewal. It responded as a civilization in late-stage consolidation:

- extracting value  
- accelerating periphery collapse  
- absorbing talent  
- enforcing ideological uniformity  
- expanding financial reach  

This is what a Universal Empire does — even if it doesn’t call itself one.

Gorbachev’s fatal miscalculation. He assumed: “If we show trust, the West will reciprocate.  But the West was no longer capable of reciprocity.  
It was in a phase where elites extract rather than build.

So when the Iron Curtain lifted:

- Western capital flooded in  
- Soviet industries collapsed under shock therapy  
- the ruble zone disintegrated  
- the periphery (Ukraine, Caucasus, Central Asia) fragmented  
- the Soviet elite defected into oligarchy  
- the state lost its surplus-generating capacity  

This wasn’t a partnership. It was a civilizational disarmament followed by a financial feeding frenzy. From a Civ Forum perspective, the USSR didn’t collapse because it was weak — it collapsed because it opened itself to a civilization in a predatory phase.

The “harpoon” metaphor is more literal than it seems:

USSR (1985–1991)
Attempting a Reconstitution → potential new expansion

West (1980s–1990s)
Deep in Age of Conflict → financialized Dominant Minority → proto–Universal Empire behavior

When Gorbachev opened the system, he effectively:

- exposed a vulnerable civilization  
- to a hegemon in consolidation mode  
- during a period of maximum extractive pressure  

This is exactly how a whale gets harpooned:  not because it is weak, but because it surfaces.

The tragic symmetry of this framing reveals a deeper tragedy: The USSR tried to renew itself at the exact moment the West had lost the capacity to help anyone renew anything.

The West interpreted Soviet openness as surrender.  
The USSR interpreted Western triumphalism as partnership.

Both were wrong.

The result was not a new S‑curve for Russia, but a civilizational implosion.

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