The Gun Counter

Cobar wrote:

Netpackrat wrote:Just watched Ian and Karl's latest video, and I would recommend everybody else do so as well...

Dangerous Things Are Dangerous

Yup, that is a good one. I need to take their advice.

Something a lot of Americans don’t realize when talking about Russia is that they’ve never had a conception of private property. In Tsarist times, all the property in the Empire belonged, personally to the Tsar, who would distribute it as he or she saw fit. The nobility’s money was measured not in land, but in souls. The Russian peasantry, going back to Prechristian times, ran communal farms known as mir that became the standard farming unit in Tsarist times. Private property didn’t exist in full in Russia until 2001. So when people talk about Russia in the 1990′s as “adapting to Capitalism for the first time”, they’re not talking about “for the first time since 1917.” They mean, quite literally, that Russia transitioned from feudal slavery to Communism, with a minor break to a hybrid Feudalistic-Capitalistic system that existed for roughly 40 years.

Jericho941 wrote:

Something a lot of Americans don’t realize when talking about Russia is that they’ve never had a conception of private property. In Tsarist times, all the property in the Empire belonged, personally to the Tsar, who would distribute it as he or she saw fit. The nobility’s money was measured not in land, but in souls. The Russian peasantry, going back to Prechristian times, ran communal farms known as mir that became the standard farming unit in Tsarist times. Private property didn’t exist in full in Russia until 2001. So when people talk about Russia in the 1990′s as “adapting to Capitalism for the first time”, they’re not talking about “for the first time since 1917.” They mean, quite literally, that Russia transitioned from feudal slavery to Communism, with a minor break to a hybrid Feudalistic-Capitalistic system that existed for roughly 40 years.

BDK wrote:Vonz: Did the Kulaks actually have a freehold, or just a tenancy?

Were there corporations, etc owned by people other than the aristocracy?

I realize there had to be some form of property rights, as the courts of Peter I, and Catherine attracted people from all over Europe.

Vonz90 wrote:

Jericho941 wrote:

Something a lot of Americans don’t realize when talking about Russia is that they’ve never had a conception of private property. In Tsarist times, all the property in the Empire belonged, personally to the Tsar, who would distribute it as he or she saw fit. The nobility’s money was measured not in land, but in souls. The Russian peasantry, going back to Prechristian times, ran communal farms known as mir that became the standard farming unit in Tsarist times. Private property didn’t exist in full in Russia until 2001. So when people talk about Russia in the 1990′s as “adapting to Capitalism for the first time”, they’re not talking about “for the first time since 1917.” They mean, quite literally, that Russia transitioned from feudal slavery to Communism, with a minor break to a hybrid Feudalistic-Capitalistic system that existed for roughly 40 years.

This is factually incorrect. The idea of owning serfs was true but not since 1861 when Alexander II freed them. The part of the Tsar owning all of the land is also incorrec and was forver going back to the powerful boyers who were at one time very powerful and obviously controlled their own properties. My own family had estates in several provinces, my great grandfather's estate having been purchased by him shortly before the war (he was a younger son so would not have inherited his father's). Likewise there were corporate interests that owned factories and other businesses. This goes back to at least Peter the Great.

The whole deal with the kulaks was that they were peasants who owned their own land.

The state was ususally corrupt, overly powerful and overly centralized and owned a buch of stuff they had no business in, but saying that there there was no private property in Tsarist Russia is just wrong.