pervocracy

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy

@pervocracy

i'm cliffy

  • he/him

massachusetts

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pervocracy
@pervocracy

my other historical hobby horses are medieval torture (obviously real but the elaborate methods and apparatus are mostly Victorian fantasies) and Sparta (WHY DOES NOBODY TALK ABOUT THE HELOTS, NOTHING ABOUT SPARTA MAKES SENSE UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND THAT HELOTS DID ALL THE WORK AND "SPARTANS" WERE THE DECADENT ELITE)

(seriously, remember learning that Spartan boys were sent off to military school? and they stayed in that school system full time for years? do you think people who had to grow their own food would be okay with their teenage sons being away playing soldier during harvest season???)

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hexiv
@hexiv

My historical hobby horse is Soviet history which generally has better sources than ancient history, but has the downside that every other person who shares this hobby horse is, um, not fun to hang out with.

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hexiv
@hexiv

Now I wish I had a book specifically dedicated to that era that I could recommend like I do for the 30s, 20s, or 80s. You'd think I would, that's smack bang in the middle of my era! I got a lot of my impressions of that era from the memoirs of KGB defectors (Cold War intelligence history is my other historical hobby horse) - though that's necessarily skewed by the fact that they're not "everyday people" but, you know, the secret police. Still, it's enlightening.

I think the 60s might have been the best time to live in the USSR; no Great Purges, no war, no famine, but before the decline really set in. The 50s were . . . complicated, because the USSR, I think, was still recovering from WWII, and then Stalin lost his mind and seemed perilously close to enacting another Holocaust before he, thankfully, kicked the bucket. And then there was the power struggle about who would be in charge after that, and then Kruschchev won the power struggle and ignited a whole national debate about the Stalin years and how to feel about them.

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