6 ms·

Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now? %-/

jasonjayr 2y ago
That's easy: Russia is leaning pretty hard anti-west right now, and if any of it's citizens are doing anything to annoy anything from the west, they will cheerfully let it continue so long as it doesn't cause them problems at home.
- sampa 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    As opposed to your alternate view that is...? I feel like its objective fact that Russia is doing whatever is can to undermine the west, considering that they are currently committing industrial sabotage in Europe on a large scale.
    - sampa 2y ago
      as if industrial sabotage was invented in Russia
      - lesuorac 2y ago
        Very unclear how this is related to the previous comments about why Russia would be preserving Western culture.
        jasonvorhe 2y ago
        Because it's also part of their culture.
      - exe34 2y ago
        we should send them agile.
    - HenryBemis 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - waffleiron 2y ago
        Thats a CIA playbook you are referring to: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
      They were doing this from argentina, not russia. I think the OP's comment is meant that the view everyone aligns to a "Nationstate" is simplistic. The fact that the press release specifically mentions their russian is some kind of political doublespeak. The true lesson here is that hackers can come from every nationality and that individuals who are trying to enlighten and enrich society will be persecuted by the powers that be. It's a story as old as history itself.
      - kevinh 2y ago
        They were vacationing in Argentina, not living there.
        TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
        Heavy quotes when a hacker says that i'm sure. Proper opsec in that line of work requires alot of "Vacationing". Also, your comment still completly ignores the main point; Regardless of the local, the merits of extradition here are wild. How can you charge someone for copyright law when the infridgment was never conducted in the united states?
        themoonisachees 2y ago
        US doctrine says that the perpetrator can be anywhere, they're getting sued near the victim. Most courts in the world have similar doctrine, as that allows suing any foreign national you can extradite to you instead of having to e.g. sue in a Chinese court.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      Book piracy is an old Russian movement to evade censorship, called samizdat, and these shadow libraries have their roots in that movement. It is an anti-soviet tradition, and probably has nothing to with wanting to cause economic harm to publishers.
      - pyuser583 2y ago
        JRR Tolkein's publisher hired a lawyer to defend his copyright in the USSR. The case failed.. But what exactly did they want? The KGB to send Tolkein fans to the Gulag?
        ogurechny 2y ago
        Post-revolutionary Soviet state declared that private property was a sin, but life demanded immediate amendments that protected some rights for 5-25 years, depending on the content. That was inside the country, as international relations were broken. As USSR turned into a “normal” corporate state with a twist, and began having economic relations with other “normal” Capitalist thugs, it started having minimal bilateral agreements that allowed things to move. Post-war reforms in local laws extended copyright terms inside the Soviet Bloc, and made them more similar to the Western agreements (even though licensing deals though the Iron Curtain were exceptions). Finally, in 1973 USSR joined Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, at the latest possible moment its old terms were still in effect. As a result, everything published before 1973 could be used on old terms, — in particular, translations did not need explicit authorization. Of course, that hurt the Soviet writers in the same manner, but not a lot of people wanted to read Socialist Realist stories about imaginary workers of imaginary factories. As for everything published after 1973, All-Union Agency of Author's Rights handled and controlled all trans-border copyright transfers both ways, and dealt with the money — until the last years of Soviet Union, when free press, and private contracts with publishers made them irrelevant. A translation of “Hobbit” was published in 1976, a print run of 100 000. An abridged version of “The Fellowship of the Ring” was published in 1982 and 1983, both runs of 100 000. https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions Even with the arbitrary government-defined ruble exchange rate, they probably wanted to collect at least some money. Afterwards, post-Soviet countries joined the worldwide copyright agreements. One of the negative outcomes of those Soviet and post-Soviet copyright extensions made to align local and global law was that previously public domain content (like photos, which newspapers and archives often didn't even bother to track properly) became copyrighted once again, which usually put it into a limbo of orphan works, and prevented re-distribution of old products containing it.
  - Dudelander 2y ago
    I must admit it is rather comfortable to have an accurate view of the world. It's much more profitable than being enmeshed in a bunch of conspiracy theories.
  - jasonjayr 2y ago
    It's actually super uncomfortable realizing just how effective this is at destablizing things. As a network guy watching how much bad activity to my US-based servers comes from regions that are not friendly with the US right now, it's downright upsetting. We should be all working together and not against each other. But the world is not simple, and people have complex, and sometimes selfish motivations.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- throwup238 2y ago
  I don't think it has much to do with that. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, bootleg tapes copied from friend to friend was the only way my parents had to share banned music. After the collapse, we were priced out of Western content by a weak economy so that black market morphed into a state-tolerated industry selling pirated tapes and eventually CDs and DVDs. Any time I'd go back to visit in the last few decades, I'd buy movies, entire discographies, and video games for a few dollars a piece from market stalls and specialized stores that sold nothing but pirated content. Ignoring foreign copyright was a survival mechanism and by this point, it's almost culturally ingrained.
  - qball 2y ago
    >I don't think it has much to do with that. Sure it does; Russian police do nothing about credit card theft because (and to the point that) that money is ultimately coming out of Western pockets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk). Same as the North Koreans with their industrial-level counterfeiting of USD (to name one example), for the same reasons. Might as well be an unofficial letter of marque.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      The OP originally asked: > Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now? What do credit card thieves and counterfeiters have to do with it? Are credit card thieves preservers of Western culture now?
- nullindividual 2y ago
  Windows 95 bootlegging was extremely prevalent. Piracy in Russia is nothing new. From the AP Archive - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU
  - kelipso 2y ago
    20 years ago you could find physical bootleg markets in almost every big Asian city. Nowadays it's probably all in torrents, Telegram, etc. I think copyright stuff is only really enforced in western countries.
- generationP 2y ago
  The Eastern European (not just Russian) book scanning scene seems to have started in the early 2000s, back before the anti-Western turn. Z-Lib is newer, from the 2010s(?), definitely predating the current meaning of Z.
xnyan 2y ago
I don't have any data to back it up, but I've never seen as strong a reading culture as I did in my two years living in Russia and East Ukraine. Very strong cultural respect for books and the written word. Also, zero enforcement of western copyright law, or at least that's what I've observed.
mandmandam 2y ago
Is it because the West has been heading full-tilt into a mish-mash of every dystopia we were ever warned about for decades? Whatever reason Russians have to preserve humanities culture, it is entirely the West's fault that we are not looking after it ourselves. That wasn't Russia, or China; it was the yacht class and their hirelings in law, politics and media.
- skjoldr 2y ago
  Ironic considering the Russian oligarchs have the most blinged out yacht fleet
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    Why do you think it's ironic for another highly unequal, exploitative, racist, colonialist empire to also have a yacht class? Russia's entire GDP is less than that of New York. I highly doubt they own more stupid and planet-destroying assets than US oligarchs, or the dictators we prop up. Feel free to bring evidence of otherwise though.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Throughout the cold war, the Russians/USSR had to obtain/steal books and scientific articles from the US and its allies to keep up. This probably created the culture that copyright doesn't matter. Plus communism is about sharing with your community. It's probably still very hard for Russians to get these materials, so the culture and will of stealing and sharing is still there.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >Plus communism is about sharing with your community. Adding on to this, my impression of Russian culture, observing both historically and today, is that Might Makes Right(tm) is a core tenet. That is to say, if you can do it and get away with it you are justice. The two mentioned in the article clearly are (were) getting away with it, so as far as they are concerned they are right and everyone else is wrong. Russians don't care about ink on paper unless it can literally pickup an AK-47 and shoot them.
  - u8080 2y ago
    Whole thread is wholesome, but this is pure "Wind is generated by wind generators" rationalization.
- braincat31415 2y ago
  There is an amazing amount of nonsense posted on this thread. I cannot speak for all areas of science, but at least in math and physics the paper copies of most Western research journals were available in central public libraries. That flow of information was bidirectional as works published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR were translated and published in the US and Europe. There was a considerable effort to translate English language books into Russian and publish them. I cannot vouch for all the publishers, but I know for a fact that at least MIR publisher paid royalties on sales of translated books, although I am sure they did extra printing press runs off the books, so to speak. These days, at least before the war started... c'mon, you can't be serious.
crest 2y ago
Because Russian "offerings" are lacking in comparison, but they don't have access to a lot of it.
- toastercat 2y ago
  Yeah, especially films from that Andrei Tarkovsky guy. I mean, yawwwwwn, right?
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Russian literature is considered part of the best in the world. As for scientific papers, I don't think they're behind either.
generationP 2y ago
If I am to guess: - large academic population and high general education - a tradition of collecting banned and bootlegged content, particularly Western (samizdat, magnitizdat) - lack of resources to get things legally (e.g. university subscriptions) - a culture of hacking and tinkering (the best known book scanning middleware, like ScanTailor and ScanKromsator and various djvu tools, comes from Russian hobbyist programmers). Also applies to adjacent countries like Ukraine.
- matrix87 2y ago
  > According to a 2016 OECD estimate, 54% of Russia's adults (25- to 64-year-olds) have attained tertiary education, giving Russia the second-highest attainment of tertiary education among 35 OECD member countries. [0] Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Russia
  - krasin 2y ago
    > Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets? Before Soviets, Russian population was largely uneducated; could not read or write. Soviets immediately started a country-wide educational campaign, Likbez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez Soviets did many things, some good and some very bad. But their push for free & universal education has been good.
    - generationP 2y ago
      I consider the wide-scale and fairly high-quality scientific education system to be the only genuine upside of Soviet communism. Admittedly, part of its success was the fact that it offered many people the only way to the middle or upper class (the Soviet Union was an extreme class society, with peasants forced to stay on their collective farms and non-Muscovites banned from settling in Moscow unless they took up professions that were currently desired by the system). Another caveat is that it was STEM-only, and excluded computer science (which the Soviet system was unconducive to for various reasons) until the 80s. The SU was particularly unwilling to teach anyone foreign languages, unless one chose (and was cleared) to work for intel.
johanvts 2y ago
Russia was(is?) an important contributor to western culture.
broken-kebab 2y ago
There are plenty of unrelated factoids thrown here in attempt to answer, but the real reason is that DIY, software, engineering, scientific communities in most of former USSR countries have been depending on freely downloaded (or $3 CD compilations) stuff because few people could afford as an example even a legal installation of Windows for a long time. Even if economic difference is not as wide as it used to be, cost of many books, subscriptions, and software tools looks prohibitively high there still. It just became so commonly accepted, and up until very recent times weren't really prosecuted, so a kind of culture emerged where any attempt to uproot this practice feels like an attack against natural rights.
pyuser583 2y ago
Maybe because it's not their culture, so they don't have the self-hatred many Westerns do? There's lots of shouting about whether Russia is Western or European, but I think history shows it's really it's own thing. "Rome and Constantinople have fallen. Only Moscow remains."

That's easy: Russia is leaning pretty hard anti-west right now, and if any of it's citizens are doing anything to annoy anything from the west, they will cheerfully let it continue so long as it doesn't cause them problems at home.

sampa 2y ago
[flagged]
- daedrdev 2y ago
  As opposed to your alternate view that is...? I feel like its objective fact that Russia is doing whatever is can to undermine the west, considering that they are currently committing industrial sabotage in Europe on a large scale.
  - sampa 2y ago
    as if industrial sabotage was invented in Russia
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      Very unclear how this is related to the previous comments about why Russia would be preserving Western culture.
      - jasonvorhe 2y ago
        Because it's also part of their culture.
    - exe34 2y ago
      we should send them agile.
  - HenryBemis 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - waffleiron 2y ago
      Thats a CIA playbook you are referring to: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
    They were doing this from argentina, not russia. I think the OP's comment is meant that the view everyone aligns to a "Nationstate" is simplistic. The fact that the press release specifically mentions their russian is some kind of political doublespeak. The true lesson here is that hackers can come from every nationality and that individuals who are trying to enlighten and enrich society will be persecuted by the powers that be. It's a story as old as history itself.
    - kevinh 2y ago
      They were vacationing in Argentina, not living there.
      - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
        Heavy quotes when a hacker says that i'm sure. Proper opsec in that line of work requires alot of "Vacationing". Also, your comment still completly ignores the main point; Regardless of the local, the merits of extradition here are wild. How can you charge someone for copyright law when the infridgment was never conducted in the united states?
        themoonisachees 2y ago
        US doctrine says that the perpetrator can be anywhere, they're getting sued near the victim. Most courts in the world have similar doctrine, as that allows suing any foreign national you can extradite to you instead of having to e.g. sue in a Chinese court.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Book piracy is an old Russian movement to evade censorship, called samizdat, and these shadow libraries have their roots in that movement. It is an anti-soviet tradition, and probably has nothing to with wanting to cause economic harm to publishers.
    - pyuser583 2y ago
      JRR Tolkein's publisher hired a lawyer to defend his copyright in the USSR. The case failed.. But what exactly did they want? The KGB to send Tolkein fans to the Gulag?
      - ogurechny 2y ago
        Post-revolutionary Soviet state declared that private property was a sin, but life demanded immediate amendments that protected some rights for 5-25 years, depending on the content. That was inside the country, as international relations were broken. As USSR turned into a “normal” corporate state with a twist, and began having economic relations with other “normal” Capitalist thugs, it started having minimal bilateral agreements that allowed things to move. Post-war reforms in local laws extended copyright terms inside the Soviet Bloc, and made them more similar to the Western agreements (even though licensing deals though the Iron Curtain were exceptions). Finally, in 1973 USSR joined Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, at the latest possible moment its old terms were still in effect. As a result, everything published before 1973 could be used on old terms, — in particular, translations did not need explicit authorization. Of course, that hurt the Soviet writers in the same manner, but not a lot of people wanted to read Socialist Realist stories about imaginary workers of imaginary factories. As for everything published after 1973, All-Union Agency of Author's Rights handled and controlled all trans-border copyright transfers both ways, and dealt with the money — until the last years of Soviet Union, when free press, and private contracts with publishers made them irrelevant. A translation of “Hobbit” was published in 1976, a print run of 100 000. An abridged version of “The Fellowship of the Ring” was published in 1982 and 1983, both runs of 100 000. https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions Even with the arbitrary government-defined ruble exchange rate, they probably wanted to collect at least some money. Afterwards, post-Soviet countries joined the worldwide copyright agreements. One of the negative outcomes of those Soviet and post-Soviet copyright extensions made to align local and global law was that previously public domain content (like photos, which newspapers and archives often didn't even bother to track properly) became copyrighted once again, which usually put it into a limbo of orphan works, and prevented re-distribution of old products containing it.
- Dudelander 2y ago
  I must admit it is rather comfortable to have an accurate view of the world. It's much more profitable than being enmeshed in a bunch of conspiracy theories.
- jasonjayr 2y ago
  It's actually super uncomfortable realizing just how effective this is at destablizing things. As a network guy watching how much bad activity to my US-based servers comes from regions that are not friendly with the US right now, it's downright upsetting. We should be all working together and not against each other. But the world is not simple, and people have complex, and sometimes selfish motivations.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
throwup238 2y ago
I don't think it has much to do with that. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, bootleg tapes copied from friend to friend was the only way my parents had to share banned music. After the collapse, we were priced out of Western content by a weak economy so that black market morphed into a state-tolerated industry selling pirated tapes and eventually CDs and DVDs. Any time I'd go back to visit in the last few decades, I'd buy movies, entire discographies, and video games for a few dollars a piece from market stalls and specialized stores that sold nothing but pirated content. Ignoring foreign copyright was a survival mechanism and by this point, it's almost culturally ingrained.
- qball 2y ago
  >I don't think it has much to do with that. Sure it does; Russian police do nothing about credit card theft because (and to the point that) that money is ultimately coming out of Western pockets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk). Same as the North Koreans with their industrial-level counterfeiting of USD (to name one example), for the same reasons. Might as well be an unofficial letter of marque.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    The OP originally asked: > Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now? What do credit card thieves and counterfeiters have to do with it? Are credit card thieves preservers of Western culture now?
nullindividual 2y ago
Windows 95 bootlegging was extremely prevalent. Piracy in Russia is nothing new. From the AP Archive - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU
- kelipso 2y ago
  20 years ago you could find physical bootleg markets in almost every big Asian city. Nowadays it's probably all in torrents, Telegram, etc. I think copyright stuff is only really enforced in western countries.
generationP 2y ago
The Eastern European (not just Russian) book scanning scene seems to have started in the early 2000s, back before the anti-Western turn. Z-Lib is newer, from the 2010s(?), definitely predating the current meaning of Z.

xnyan 2y ago

I don't have any data to back it up, but I've never seen as strong a reading culture as I did in my two years living in Russia and East Ukraine. Very strong cultural respect for books and the written word. Also, zero enforcement of western copyright law, or at least that's what I've observed.

mandmandam 2y ago

Is it because the West has been heading full-tilt into a mish-mash of every dystopia we were ever warned about for decades? Whatever reason Russians have to preserve humanities culture, it is entirely the West's fault that we are not looking after it ourselves. That wasn't Russia, or China; it was the yacht class and their hirelings in law, politics and media.

skjoldr 2y ago
Ironic considering the Russian oligarchs have the most blinged out yacht fleet
- mandmandam 2y ago
  Why do you think it's ironic for another highly unequal, exploitative, racist, colonialist empire to also have a yacht class? Russia's entire GDP is less than that of New York. I highly doubt they own more stupid and planet-destroying assets than US oligarchs, or the dictators we prop up. Feel free to bring evidence of otherwise though.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

Throughout the cold war, the Russians/USSR had to obtain/steal books and scientific articles from the US and its allies to keep up. This probably created the culture that copyright doesn't matter. Plus communism is about sharing with your community. It's probably still very hard for Russians to get these materials, so the culture and will of stealing and sharing is still there.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>Plus communism is about sharing with your community. Adding on to this, my impression of Russian culture, observing both historically and today, is that Might Makes Right(tm) is a core tenet. That is to say, if you can do it and get away with it you are justice. The two mentioned in the article clearly are (were) getting away with it, so as far as they are concerned they are right and everyone else is wrong. Russians don't care about ink on paper unless it can literally pickup an AK-47 and shoot them.
- u8080 2y ago
  Whole thread is wholesome, but this is pure "Wind is generated by wind generators" rationalization.
braincat31415 2y ago
There is an amazing amount of nonsense posted on this thread. I cannot speak for all areas of science, but at least in math and physics the paper copies of most Western research journals were available in central public libraries. That flow of information was bidirectional as works published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR were translated and published in the US and Europe. There was a considerable effort to translate English language books into Russian and publish them. I cannot vouch for all the publishers, but I know for a fact that at least MIR publisher paid royalties on sales of translated books, although I am sure they did extra printing press runs off the books, so to speak. These days, at least before the war started... c'mon, you can't be serious.

crest 2y ago

Because Russian "offerings" are lacking in comparison, but they don't have access to a lot of it.

toastercat 2y ago
Yeah, especially films from that Andrei Tarkovsky guy. I mean, yawwwwwn, right?
carlosjobim 2y ago
Russian literature is considered part of the best in the world. As for scientific papers, I don't think they're behind either.

generationP 2y ago

If I am to guess: - large academic population and high general education - a tradition of collecting banned and bootlegged content, particularly Western (samizdat, magnitizdat) - lack of resources to get things legally (e.g. university subscriptions) - a culture of hacking and tinkering (the best known book scanning middleware, like ScanTailor and ScanKromsator and various djvu tools, comes from Russian hobbyist programmers). Also applies to adjacent countries like Ukraine.

matrix87 2y ago
> According to a 2016 OECD estimate, 54% of Russia's adults (25- to 64-year-olds) have attained tertiary education, giving Russia the second-highest attainment of tertiary education among 35 OECD member countries. [0] Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Russia
- krasin 2y ago
  > Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets? Before Soviets, Russian population was largely uneducated; could not read or write. Soviets immediately started a country-wide educational campaign, Likbez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez Soviets did many things, some good and some very bad. But their push for free & universal education has been good.
  - generationP 2y ago
    I consider the wide-scale and fairly high-quality scientific education system to be the only genuine upside of Soviet communism. Admittedly, part of its success was the fact that it offered many people the only way to the middle or upper class (the Soviet Union was an extreme class society, with peasants forced to stay on their collective farms and non-Muscovites banned from settling in Moscow unless they took up professions that were currently desired by the system). Another caveat is that it was STEM-only, and excluded computer science (which the Soviet system was unconducive to for various reasons) until the 80s. The SU was particularly unwilling to teach anyone foreign languages, unless one chose (and was cleared) to work for intel.

johanvts 2y ago

Russia was(is?) an important contributor to western culture.

broken-kebab 2y ago

There are plenty of unrelated factoids thrown here in attempt to answer, but the real reason is that DIY, software, engineering, scientific communities in most of former USSR countries have been depending on freely downloaded (or $3 CD compilations) stuff because few people could afford as an example even a legal installation of Windows for a long time. Even if economic difference is not as wide as it used to be, cost of many books, subscriptions, and software tools looks prohibitively high there still. It just became so commonly accepted, and up until very recent times weren't really prosecuted, so a kind of culture emerged where any attempt to uproot this practice feels like an attack against natural rights.

pyuser583 2y ago

Maybe because it's not their culture, so they don't have the self-hatred many Westerns do? There's lots of shouting about whether Russia is Western or European, but I think history shows it's really it's own thing. "Rome and Constantinople have fallen. Only Moscow remains."