Great post. Jumping off, they're going to struggle with that. They're a monoculture within an authoritarian government framework.
The reason that the United States has so much influence is that we can export culture all day, every day. Creators make what they want, it gets hot here, other people want in on it.
Black Americans have a worldwide influence that is far, far beyond our numbers because we influence so much of American culture, and it gets exported, as one example.
China doesn't have that and can't get it because they're suppressing their minorities, they're basically influencing a very specific idea of Chinese art, and no one gives a fukk about the CCP's ideas of art. That's why all these Confucian schools they're setting up in Africa aren't getting traction and why Belt and Road works much better. They can entrap poorer countries economically, but they have almost ZERO cultural soft power. You can't be a true world power with ZERO cultural soft power.
They should be ashamed that a tiny country on the tip of a peninsula like South Korea has exponentially more soft power than they do. Even though South Korea is basically monocultural, they have a free market of ideas and can therefore import culture from other places, put their own spin on it, and then export it back out.
To bring it back to Russia, this is one of the reasons the USSR failed, among many. You can't have an authoritarian state with rigid controls on art and culture that makes friends. No one is out here watching Russian soap operas and feeling kinship with the Russian people as a result.
One of the major reasons that the U.S. is a super-power is because we're multicultural and export all the aspects of our different cultures to other people for entertainment. That's why people want to visit here. That's why people get mad about shyt that we get mad about. Again, Black Americans had black folks in multiple OTHER countries protesting after George Floyd was murdered because we have been able to influence others through cultural exports.
Anyway, this is way off-topic, but I enjoyed your post and wanted to run with that part of it a bit.
