Jonathon P Sine

The Soviet reform experience is a repository of ostensible lessons. But are we learning the right ones?

My new essay assesses one debate: the role of "entrenched interests" in the failure of Soviet economic reform and the USSR's ultimate demise.

The intra Marxism debates are pretty funny

"the monolithic transvestite that Marxism-Leninism presented as the history of Marxism. It has to be clearly stated: the lasting theoretical effect of Leninism has been an appalling impoverishment of the field of Marxian diversity"

Kant, better known for his Project for Perpetual Peace, wrote that "the sublime needs violence.... War itself has something sublime in it,... while a long peace generally brings...low selfishness, cowardice, and effeminacy."

Every intellectual wants to talk about Soviet literary culture...but hardly anyone talks about the circus!

But the Soviet Circus was one of the foremost communal experiences in the USSR: circus attendance far, far outpaced opera and ballet, and also outsold football many times over.

By the lates 1960 the Soviet Union's 65 circuses were selling 40 million tickets a year.

All "theatres" by comparison sold 111 million tickets in 1970. But that includes 547 venues: 363 drama, comedy, musical theatres; 144 children and youth theatres; and 40 opera and ballet houses.

In all my years reading books and articles on political, economic, and social aspects of the Soviet Union, I don't think I once came across substantive mention of the circus. (I had claude search through my 100+ digitized books on Soviet history, roughly zero substantive mentions).

There is one little known english language history of the topic: Miriam Neirick's When Pigs Could Fly and Bears Could Dance: A History of the Soviet Circus. Published in 2012, it's garnered a mere 33 citations.

By utter happenstance I came across this topic and book today and have now spent several hours of my life learning about the history of the Soviet Circus. I regret nothing.

Interestingly, Neirick was a PhD student of Yuri Slezkine, who wrote House of Government, an intimate portrait of the Bolshevik elite in the 1920s/30s. That book is intensely focused on the literary, artistic, and cultural habits of these elites -- yet it never once substantively talks about the circus! Perhaps we can consider his mentorship of Neirick as recompense, and useful balancing.

This mug is a nice detail.

At 1,350 pages (700,000 words) The Power Broker is equivalent to 7-10 typical nonfiction books. If you dedicate an hour per day, it takes 3 months to read.