• cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Honestly no, not on such a broad topic as just "modern Russia" as a whole. I could maybe recommend videos on individual topics related to Russia if you narrow it down, but for this sort of general overview most videos i've seen have glaring weaknesses one of two ways - either they get the geopolitics wrong because they don't like Russia's reactionary social tendencies and this makes them susceptible to the liberal geopolitical narrative, or they get the geopolitics right but they fall into reactionary garbage on the social issues either due to their own conservative biases or out of pure contrarianism. In both cases you see black and white thinking that is incapable of dealing with the existence of contradictions.

    • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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      edit-2
      7 months ago

      For instance Marxist economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson have repeatedly discussed the nature of Russia's economy and its relationship to the Global Majority (Global South) and to the imperialist West on Ben Norton's excellent Geopolitical Economy Report channel. I would advise regularly listening to their discussions.

      Secondly, concerning Russia's supposed "imperialism", this article from back when the new phase of the Ukraine conflict started in 2022 does a good job of succinctly summarizing the issues with that accusation, one of the most important of which is that modern Russia's economy in reality resembles much more that of a neocolony exploited by the imperial core than that of an imperialist nation.

      The only thing that has changed since then which is no longer valid in their analysis is that Russia, as a result of the fortuitous sanctions imposed by the West which acted as a protectionist barrier for the Russian economy, has actually finally started to reindustrialize, something which Putin's fundamentally liberal government would otherwise never have done.