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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

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Carlson's historically relevant examples from Wrangel's memoir alone make the piece worth reading -- middle class Russians sitting in the cinema watching movies ignoring the revolution on the streets + red ribbons in support of Bolsheviks worn on the dresses of Romanov's royal family females... And evergreen Orwell stories. Carlson is a master storyteller.

Dmitri,

Glad you liked it. I've heard it said that the Beatles played a role in bringing down the USSR: the youth saw the freedom (and license) in the West and were attracted by it. Agree?

Hi Bill

Beatles were indeed popular in the seventies and a few other Western rock groups as well. But their music was extremely hard to get a hand on and only young people from so called "intelligentsia" circles in large and mostly well educated cities like Moscow and Leningrad had access to some Beatles songs which were distributed in Russia in some music store. Never on radio or TV to the best of my recollection. Plus the language barrier... So I wouldn't attribute much influence to them. If we are looking for the biggest causes, USSR imploded mostly because of the failed socialist central planning, lack of incentives for the entrepreneurially minded and US-led economic and propaganda push (especially Reagan administration's).

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