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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2880 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 2025

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I’m sure people can still tell, but Former People by Douglas Smith makes the case that by the slow opening up of Soviet society in the 1970s the actual, titled aristocracy had been so totally destroyed as an identity by so many successive periods of purges, internal transfers, re-education, the gulag, the war and intermarriage that it didn’t really exist any more outside of maybe some early emigrant families who left in 1917-1921 that keep or kept a vague recollection of it as a cultural thing. Kulaks and gentry (and to some extent minor urban and provincial bourgeoisie) were obviously much greater in number and their descendants are still relatively powerful and disproportionately overrepresented in the Russian and Chinese elite. And Smith does end with an anecdote about the descendant of one princely family whom he meets in early 2010s Moscow making a fortune in the oil business or something like that.

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