I think the problem is that there’s a Bell Curve of ages here at the BBS. I had a grandfather who was a WWI vet, born in the 19th century, and a father who was a WWII vet. But I know I’m on one end of that continuum. For most people here, WWII was at most their grandparents’ generation, and more likely their great-grandparents’. They don’t have active family memory of the time when Russia had a czar (and then a revolution).
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That has a lot to do with it. I didn’t know if we were talking about the Cold War, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Empire, or all of these.
It also surprises me how young some people are. Whenever someone makes a comment about what happened during our grandparents’ generation, it’s sobering for me to realize that I am old enough to be a grandfather. I don’t feel that old…
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I’m still worried about the expansionist policies of the Grand Duchy of Moscow!
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Same during the famine years in the 1920s after the revolution.
Hoover made his name as a technocrat, supposedly (my source was an econ history New Deal Dem professor I had, but I didn’t look into his sources), by nationalizing farm production and the railroads during WW1 and aftermath. According to this story, Hoover kept Europe/Russia from starving worse than they did. Wtf happened to him in the 20s? Misplaced remorse? I dunno.
Many Usian engineers and firms got a start developing the USSR during the 20s and 30s. Magnitogorsk was built as a model of Gary IN, itself a model corporate city laid out for the sole purpose of turning coal and ore into steel. Adam Curtis’ The Engineers Plot is a fun explication of that confused time. The whole series that film is from, Pandora’s Box, tracks the parallels between Western corporate engineering failures and the similar failures in the USSR. Even into the 80s, the antagonistic confluence of East and West continued on parallel tracks in developing nuclear power and economic planning. At least in the narrative of Pandora’s Box. It landed for me.
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Herbert Hoover was the first and only engineer to become president. It was his focus on rugged individualism that did him in eventually. The country needed more regulation and social safety nets than he wanted to provide.
And look what’s happening over there in Gary. It was all strip clubs, casinos, and ghettos last time I was in that area. Cancer rates are through the roof, and they’ve got a worse water crisis than Flint. It was designed to be a company town, with the citizens used up and spit out just like any other exploitable resource.
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I can’t/don’t want to imagine what Magnitogorsk looks like. Probably almost as bad as Gary, but colder.
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True as far as I remember.
True. He also ordered the army to clear out the Hoovervilles on the national mall, which was a PR disaster and was probably the final nail in the coffin for his re-election campaign. He tried to fix the depression through asking corporations not to fire their employees and to voluntarily regulate themselves.
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I know, right. But it’s totally true. People wanted action and he refused to employ the powers of the government to help people. FDR did.
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A polluted hellhole apparently. Plus, there’s that whole legacy of slavery.
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[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:146, topic:93115”]
Herbert Hoover was the first and only engineer to become president. It was his focus on rugged individualism that did him in eventually.
[/quote]An engineer with an inflated self worth and libertarian leanings outside pet subjects describes about one third of any I have ever met or worked with anywhere in the US, I imagine you can relate.
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Probably three quarters?
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