Remember, they’ve been a thugocracy for a hundred years. It’s not survival of the smartest, it’s survival of the strongest. And anybody who believes they can think their way out of this situation is likely to be “flight tested” before getting the chance.
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This is likely what’s going on. Since it’s a sudden fall, it sounds more like he did something to displease the siloviki faction. The military faction prefers car bombs, the warlord faction likes mafia-style shootings, and Putin himself has a fondness for poisons.
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Any porthole in a storm.
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Loosely based on Class 124 Italian submarines
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I have actually driven a Yugo, my then tight-wad boss needed to replace our Fiesta company cars and chose Yugos. Bloody terrifying things! Remember those old movies where someone is ‘driving’ a car with a moving backdrop, and they move the steering wheel from side to side a bit? Yeah, like that, there seemed to be a flexible joint between steering wheel and front wheels. Brakes? Well, you’d press the pedal with your foot, a bit harder, a bit harder still, with as much pressure as you could AND IT’S NOT ST… oh, it’s sort of slowingthankgodnothing’sinfront! Gearbox, a stick in a bowl of thick porridge would be more effective.
Truly fucking awful piece of crap. That was back in the 80’s. Thankfully, having driven hundreds of different vehicles over the last seven years or so, there really aren’t any truly awful cars, just those that have annoying idiosyncratic features or are just uncomfortable for me to drive.
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I think what puzzles me isn’t an expectation that they are running some kind of meritocracy, since that’s obviously not the case; but that the mysterious deaths appear to be crossing over into people who are actually useful in themselves more often than seems optimal from the perspective of the dominant thugs.
Killing people in, say, the oil and gas sector isn’t surprising or obviously irrational: that’s a fairly straightforward dispute over who gets to control the rents; and one oligarch or another doesn’t make much difference in terms of the amount of money to be had(at least in the short to medium term; I’ve read that efforts to develop more technically demanding deposits have been going less well, especially now that foreign expertise is harder to buy, because the demand for spoils is high and the supply of managerial and technical talent is tepid).
Killing people in submarine design or aeronautical engineering, though, seems like evidence of either poorly organized crime or atypical upheaval: I wouldn’t expect the thugs to treat the nerds and technicians as equals, much less countenance them as potential superiors; but they are a case where you can get cool toys if you are able to encourage them to work hard and not ask stupid questions in exchange for a mostly ceremonial sliver of respect and a relatively tiny cut of the take; but you can only really fight over margins with them: most of the value disappears if you try to move things over to outright plunder.
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Unless the real purpose of the project is to extract money, like other military projects where they’ve been short-changing on results.
- Perhaps Alexander Buzakov refused to build tin-can deathtraps to maximize the profits?
- Or he was skimming, but the military rather wanted working subs?
- Longshot: he was fucking someone else’s wife or husband?
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In post-Soviet Russia, windows shut down YOU.
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This is all reading like some early script for The Death of Stalin… but rejected due to the absurd numbers and circumstances.
An important and dangerous guy involved in improving attack subs armed with 200+ mph supercavitating torpedoes. Just a coincidence that the Ukraine and the West wouldn’t have minded seeing him taken out of the picture. Quite a message to send.
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is that the real or fake cat and the moose game …no…
I would point out that a lot of the post-Soviet oligarchs were/are nerds and technicians. Nerds and technicians who made billions by grabbing what they could and disposing of all rivals they could dispose of and making accomodations with those they couldn’t.
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Exotic Poisons.
@Michele71 Guidalo come se l’avessi rubato!
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It might be that his peers have been expressing themselves as being a little too indispensable. This could be a simple message that “everyone can be replaced.”
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Did you pick up a Putin’s Advent Calendar for 2022? Every day when you open a door, a tiny little oligarch plummets to the floor.
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