It’s a little commented fact, but one that is true nonetheless, that Russian relations with Israel are better than with almost any Western country.

• Open visa regime.
• No sanctions over Crimea, an attitude largely of mutual studied indifference as regards Ukraine and Palestine, respectively.
• Open to Sputnik V vaccine.
• Criticized Biden’s comments about Putin as a killer as “bizarre and extreme.”

Many more such examples can be brought up.

Now many of the Jew obsessed people here have this strange idea that Russia has some kind of duty or obligation to denounce and attack Israel to satisfy their personal fantasies. But by their own arguments, ZOG runs the US, so this is really asking Russia to put itself in the position of Iran, magnified tenfold (because most Americans hate Russia as it is already).

This is why official Russian statements on the Gaza conflict are quite anodyne and boil down to calls for a ceasefire. The Chinese also have good relations with Israel (why not? It has even transferred them American military technology) and the more “anti-Zionist activist” types tend to get slapped down. And why shouldn’t they? It’s not like it’s the Israelis who are pushing the Uyghur Genocide black legend.

These are normal, practical state-to-state relations. It is the US, of course, that behaves highly abnormally with respect to Israel, sending it billions of dollars and providing diplomatic cover for behavior that would get a country like Russia sanctioned to hell and high water. But that’s the problem of Americans (to the extent that Americans see it as a problem, most don’t, AFAIK), not of Russians or Chinese.

Results of the 2020 Census have been released. Some links:

• Reuters summary
• Chinese state statistics service communique (in Chinese)

Here’s a table of the regional change:

Key highlights:

Population has grown by 5.4% from 1.340B to 1.412B. Its population was 10M higher than projected, entirely due to Guangdong (which has 126M, not 115M). This is obviously a case of internal migrants not being tracked.

North-East China (Dongbei), as expected, is in the throes of severe depopulation. Heilongjiang, which borders Russia, falls from 38.2M in 2010 to 31.9M now. For comparison, this is a faster rate of decline than what the Russian Far East experienced in the 1990s. This is the region from where the neocons and East European Russophobes were telling you that the Chinese would mount their demographic takeover of Siberia from. Meanwhile, Jilin with 24.1M people now has fewer people than North Korea which is creeping up to 26M.

What seems to be happening is that the entire region, only really settled in 19C, is emptying out towards the sunnier south, especially Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta, in a reflection of what is happening in many other countries. On the bright side, I suppose, this suggests that the stagnation in wages and GDP per capita and the ultra-low fertility rates in Dongbei are somewhat exaggerated if the underlying population base has been bleeding out so rapidly.

I was surprised myself… but even as China continued surging in 2010s, Dongbei's GDPcc has barely budged in the past decade even in absolute terms. Even Tianjin plummeted relatively, going from China's richest region, above even Beijing/Shanghai, to <60% of their level. https://t.co/Q270e0JCH9

— 🇷🇺 ANATê™®LY 🤔 KARLIN (👻⛓ï¸�ðŸ�¶ðŸª™ maximalist) (@akarlin88) January 2, 2021

NBS statistics head says number of births fell 18% to 12M in 2020, for a total TFR of 1.3 children per woman. China seems to be plummeting to South Korea-tier fertility with a time lag of 20 years. This probably doesn’t have much to do with coronavirus. After all, China only had a short but sharp lockdown which successfully suppressed the epidemic and has since been living in normality. Desired TFR is 1.8 children per woman, and realized TFR is usually at least 0.5 children less than desired, so a recovery in this indicator cannot be expected any time soon. Probably not for decades.

Urbanization rate is at 64%. This is relatively low for a country at China’s level of development and its future rise will be a further dampener on fertility.

So it seems pretty clear that China’s population is close to its all time peak and will start to decline in the early 2020s.

The average age of the population is 38.8 years. For the first time in modern history, it is higher than that in the US.

I visited the Central Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, just slightly less than a year after its consecration.

It is quite rare that reality exceeds visual media.

But the Fortress-Monastery does so, in spades, and that despite its already superlative neo-Byzantine steampunk aesthetics on screen, which are like something out of a Maxim Bedulenko painting.

Unfortunately, my cell phone battery expired with freakish rapidity when I came to the Fortress Monastery, as did my reserve bank. Presumably, the machine spirits within them were unsatiated with my lack of prayers to them. (Hence, most of these photos will be from travel companion VV, who was luckier at appeasing the machine spirits).

The references to Warhammer 40K are not even whimsical. All around the complex, both inside and out, liturgical chants percolate through the air. The only things missing are the Cherubim fluttering amidst the Cathedral’s vaults.

Brass cremation urns bear contain the remains of Russian soldiers from different WW2 battlefields.

They are arraigned in a semi-circle around a monument to the Mother of the Victor, within which burns an eternal flame.

The steps up to the gate, as well as the floor within the Cathedral, are made out of melted down German armor and weaponry.

Upon the main gates is an engraving of angels striking down the Reichsadler.

The dimensions of the Cathedral are symbolic. The diameter of the main dome is 19.45 meters, while the height of the small dome is 14.18 meters (the number of days in the Great Patriotic War).

The central apse features a metallic relief dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ. More than anywhere else, photos fail to do justice to what in real life looks like a divine being in 3D, a God-Emperor if you will, irradiating into the infinite blue, star-studded heavens.

The glass mosaics feature Red Army orders and ribbons. One of them contains a hammer and sickle. When the Cathedral was being constructed, there was a minor scandal about one of the murals depicting Stalin. It was later removed, his status as a persecutor of Christians being incompatible with being so honored.

The main dome is dominated by an image of the Savior Not Made by Hands. It is the largest mosaic of Christ’s visage in the world.

Most of the main murals on the ground floor are dedicated to the Great Patriotic War…

… as well as one that honors the heroes of post-WW2 conflicts up to the liberation of Crimea in 2014. Commenter Serg6499 points out that two of the soldiers here may have a resemblance to Givi and Motorola, two heroes of the War in Donbass.

FWIW, I didn’t see empty space for future conflicts. I wonder how that problem will be solved if/when the need arises.

The four murals above the main murals feature the the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. My one critique is that I would have devoted more attention to World War I, this being, after all, a larger and more consequential conflict than the others. But it’s a minor one at that.

The underground crypt really gives off those Dwemer vibes.

One minor thing that you hardly notice – and that’s by design – is the painstaking attention to make everything fit congruently. The ornamental grillwork of the park benches corresponds to the patterns of the friezes on the Cathedral’s exterior.

Even the cafes and souvenir shops outside are painted green and don’t agree obtrusive advertisements.

***

The building encircling the Fortress-Monastery is a WW2 museum called the 1,418 Steps of Victory (=the number of days in the GPW) and is packed with highly immersive and interactive displays that obviously took a lot of money and effort to assemble.

As a visual and auditory experience, it is on a level with the Jewish Museum. The rooms are thematic and cleverly use light, sound, and in one case temperature (ice level air conditioning in the section on the Road of Life) to create an immersive experience.

There are two rooms showing short films, one of them featuring the history of the Night Witches, the other one something else (we didn’t stay to watch the it because the museum was closing soon).

One room off to the side from the main exhibition had graphic images and artifacts of Nazi atrocities.

One interesting room had small scale models of many of the monuments to Red Army soldiers in various European countries from Norway to Bulgaria. AFAIK some of them, e.g. in Warsaw, have been removed. It would be a nice additional touch to mark them out so.

Another room of the museum contained Hitler’s tattered uniform.

The final corridor has images of dead and surviving soldiers floating like a river of souls above candles in honor of them.

The screen at the end goes through the 27 million casualties suffered by the USSR across the 1,418 days of the war. The count does not go up linearly over time, so it seems that they took care to calculate casualties over precise time intervals.

***

The Military Cathedral and the Road of 1,418 Steps are just part of an entire complex that is run by the Ministry of Defense, which also includes a couple of military museums, a huge tank museum, a partisan village, a tank demonstration yard, a shooting range, and a huge expo center for exhibiting modern Russian weapons to foreign buyers (names like US-sanctioned Rosoboronexport are prominently featured).

Russian flags everywhere. It is, all in all, an unabashed festival of militarism.

And there are huge new buildings still under construction.

The military museum has a large collection of Soviet, German, Axis-aligned, Allied (mostly Lend-Lease), and even some Japanese tanks. There are also many other types of WW2 weaponry, as well as variants from the Cold War and even the modern era.

One section of the museum, pristine clinical white, is devoted to NBC warfare. These anti-gas masks for dogs were developed in 1932.

There is a massive outdoor section with a wide variety of modern weaponry, including…

… a Su-33…

… as well as an S-400 (sic!) system, and a a truck that carries the A-135 nuclear-tipped missile defense system which defends Moscow.

Hangar belonging to the United Aircraft Corporation. I happen to own a (purely symbolic) amount of their shares.

***

The complex can also be said to include the Tank Museum at Kubinka, which I visited a couple of years ago. It is about 5 km away and has literally hundreds of tanks in six huge hangars, making it one of the largest tank museums in the world.

The first hangar contains early Soviet tank forces starting from their germination in August 19, 1914 (when the world’s first automobile machine gun brigade was formed), through to the 1930s.

The three main hangars are devoted to Soviet, German/Axis, and Western Allied tanks of World War II.

The last two hangars include Soviet tanks of the early Cold War, and of the late Cold War and modern era.

Here is a Hungarian 38M Toldi just for reiner Tor.

Mobile siege mortar “Adam”.

A special German anti-mine tank that looks like a ball.

Perhaps the most unique part of the collection is the world’s only surviving example of a Maus. Clocking in at 188 tons, it was the heaviest tank ever built. It crawled at 7 km/h and was too heavy for bridges.

***

I would say that at this point, Patriot Park is already well worth a visit if you are in Moscow for a week or so, especially if you are interested in military history, or more broadly the ideology of modern Russia: https://akarlin.com/travel/moscow/

As a religious institution, I would say that the Military Cathedral is my second favorite religious center in Russia after the St. Joseph of Volokolamsk Monastery (and ahead of the overly touristic New Jerusalem Monastery, and even the St. Sergius Lavra in Sergiev Posad). As a comprehensive military museum complex – in between the Museum of 1,418 Steps, the Patriot Park military museum, and the Kubinka Team Museum – it is, I think, ahead of anything in Moscow proper. If you want to comprehensively explore all of it, including the Cathedral and the three main museum, as well as the shooting range, the partisan museum, and other exhibitions, you will need at least two days, probably three.

Egor Ligachev, leader of the “conservative” wing of the CPSU under Gorbachev, died yesterday at the age of 100. He was a teetotaller who took good care of his health. The cause of death was bilateral pneumonia, though his son says it wasn’t COVID-19.

By all accounts, he was a decent and uncorrupt man, e.g. see this in a blog post by elections blogger and oppositionist Alexander Kireev, in which he imagines the outcome of a Soviet election in 1990 (coincidentally written just a few days ago):

I met Ligachev in Moscow not far from the State Duma building in 2004. He was already a former deputy at that time, but he walked towards her even at a surprisingly vigorous step for an 84-year-old man. I greeted him politely, because no one paid any attention to him. We talked a little: he was even glad that a young man like me knows him well. He gave me his book and wrote. Let me draw your attention: a member of the top leadership of the USSR, the former head of the Tomsk region (besides, under him at that time oil fields were developed in the region!) Went to the State Duma on foot. Maybe he lived within walking distance, I’m not sure. Yes, and it was in the summer, the weather was good. Of course, he must have had enough money for a taxi, but he still walked on foot. He was dressed simply, one might say in the Soviet way: an ordinary shirt and trousers. So it would have come out in 1980, not in 2004: no one would have paid attention. It seems to me that it was clear from everything that he was living the life of an ordinary Moscow pensioner, and not some kind of millionaire. Can you imagine this for the current leaders of Russia?

Yes, that’s quite hard to imagine. But it didn’t exactly do Ligachev or the classical Marxist-Leninist ideals he espoused a lot of good. He did always come across as a damp rag to me. He played a crucial role in promoting Gorbachev as the successor to Andropov, and supported him until he felt that perestroika had gone too far in the direction of Social Democracy; then he settled for writing complaints to Gorbachev, which were “ignored” and eventually led to his dismissal from the Politburo in July 1990. The author of the famous phrase “Boris, you are wrong” had also played a central role in promoting him into the Party’s Central Committee in the first place.

So, just as clueless on judging people as he was on understanding market economics:

One of the most memorable anecdotes from Stephen Cohen’s Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives is where he recounts a visit by Egor Ligachev, probably the second man after Gorbachev in the late 1980s USSR, to New York, in which he amazed his interlocutors by repeatedly asking who was responsible for organizing the food supply to the city.

Nor did he have the spine to support the August coup against Gorbachev. With limp-wristed “hardliners” like this, it is not as much of a surprise that the USSR fell apart.

Well, not limp-wristed except as concerns Russians and their self-determination, at any rate. He hated expressions of Russian nationalism, criticizing the KPRF’s turn to a populist pro-ethnic Russian position during the 2010s.

The blogger denalt has gathered some quotes he said on this matter from 2012:

The Pskov regional committee of the Communist Party, headed by him in the New Year’s address to the residents of the region, called on“ Russian to the Russian – help! â€�. If this is not a manifestation of nationalism, so what is it, where is the “fierce struggle against the vulgarization of the Russian idea by nationalism?”

The divided Russian people arose as a result of the destruction of the Soviet Union, the dismemberment of the Soviet people. By and large, it should be primarily about the divided Soviet people. The reunification of the Russian people, like any other fraternal people, can be resolved only when the Soviet people are restored on the basis of the alliance of Russians with other nationalities, in the process of building socialism, eradicating nationalism and chauvinism. ”
… only Union 2.0. No Russia!

As for the labor migrants, which are referred to in the Party’s Address to the Russian people in a very unfriendly manner, without any “caution and prudence â€�, then it is time to stop all kinds of vilification against them, accuse them of “settling in primordially Russian territories â€�. After all, this is a part of the divided Soviet people, moreover, mainly the most disadvantaged … Apparently, it is necessary to thoroughly deal with migrants, their organization and political education.

They continue to insist that the Russian people are a state-forming people, thereby imposing the idea of ​​its unity. Although it is known that the state in a class-antagonistic society is formed not by the people, but by classes. After all, these are the basics of Marxism-Leninism.

Tsarism suppressed non-Russian peoples, sowed mistrust, discord between them, and equally instilled alienation among the Russians towards them. Native languages ​​were in the corral, to the point that it was forbidden to publish newspapers in them, and to teach in their native language in schools. The peoples of Russia were In a word, as it was said: in tsarist Russia there were two misfortunes: below – the power of darkness, and above – the darkness of power.
… In a word, if the tsarist autocracy was not, in the full sense, a prison of peoples, then, according to V.I. Lenin, it included “a bloody past, when the Russia of the capitalist oppressors played the role of an executioner over other peoples.

So no wonder that multi-national liberals (“noviops”) tend to have a bit of a soft spot for this sovok fossil.

Conversely, I suspect, this hints at a reason for a significant part of the revulsion against the “conservative” wing of the Soviet establishment on the part of ethnic Russians in the late 1980s.

This week’s Open Thread.

~ Emil Kirkegaard – Meta-compilation of HBD related materials. Very useful link. Also dug up this Blast from the Past: Who’s afraid of the big bad data?

~ NEW PAPER. Rieger, M. O., Wang, M., & Hens, T. (2021). Universal time preference. PloS One, 16(2), e0245692. (h/t @whyvert)

~ XENOS. Pop Mech: Scientists Believe These Photos Show Mushrooms on Mars—and Proof of Life. One of the authors seems a bit kooky. Still, there seems to have been a sharp increase in observations suggestive of alien life over previous years: Oumuamua; Phosphine gas on Venus; USAF releasing UFO vids; now these Martian shrooms.

~ Redditor writes about the gradations of wealth, which largely backs what I intuited here: Note that even this elite hobnobber, with his very fine grasp on social status associated with various wealth gradations, acknowledges that nothing much changes in the run up from ~$100M to $1B. Soppy conclusion.

~ Pro-Ukrainian band of white supremacists arrested in Russia (h/t Insomniac Resurrected). Backs my oft made point that the most passionarny champions of Ukraine are not actual Ukrainians but Russian Neo-Nazis. Worth bearing in mind that when commenters like “LatW” complain about Putin “repressing” Russian nationalists these days, it’s mainly people like these they have in mind.

~ Razib Khan: Our Three-Body Problem. I really think he overdoes this model of a tripartite cultural division (West/India/China), but worth reading anyway.

~ CRYPTO. PocketNet ($PKOIN) looks like a kind of Gab on blockchain. Laura Loomer recently joined – would be interesting if the deplatformed MAGA people start converging there. Anyhow, I am @akarlin there. I suspect decentralized social media will largely revolve around Holochain and Urbit, but it’s probably not a bad idea to snap up an account there too.

This is Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s assessment of global excess mortality from COVID-19 from the beginning until May 3, 2021. (h/t Ron Unz)

You can read about the methodology here.

All in all, this sadly comports with the “millions” prediction I made in February 24, 2020. While at the end of last year I thought we would top out at 10 million, the spread of more infectious variants and vaccine distribution snafus means that we will almost certainly exceed that cumulatively by the end of this year. I also think it likely that even these excess mortality estimates substantially undercount India and Indonesia, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa (though the latter is insulated by its very low median age). Remember that statistics are often substandard outside the industrialized world, and more speculative than real in much of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Here are the top 20 countries by Corona mortality from March 2020 to this May:

And here are the top per capita “performers” (deaths per 100,000):

In the end, there seems to have been very little difference in outcomes amongst the East Europeans, despite significant policy differences (e.g. Belarus never had a lockdown, Lukashenko being an outspoken floomer, while Ukraine had the strongest lockdowns). Russia, which didn’t have real lockdowns after the first one, is around the same ballpark as Poland, and Ukraine is catching up fast. If you’re not serious about suppressing Corona and then keeping it that way through centralized quarantines and technological means, then it’s best not to bother with lockdowns at all to at least keep the GDP pumped. This is why I refrained from endorsing the second round of lockdowns.

Anyhow, by and large, vaccines are now accessible to anybody who wants them. So I can’t say I actually care about deaths at this point, if elderly anti-vaxxers want to croak, then good on them for reducing the pensions burden.

Amusingly, the world leader in Corona deaths seems to be Azerbaijan. These are the Chads would marched through the streets of Baku, demanding “end the lockdown, start the war.” Azerbaijan had a good year, its territory expanded.

Serbia is conspicuous by its absence. Vucic has handled things extremely well. Its politicians might be more rational than in most of Europe.

Also highest vaccination rate in Europe after the UK, with option of choosing between vaccines (Sputnik, Sinopharm, AstraZeneca), so Russophiles/Sinophiles get former and Atlantoids get latter.

Serbia's Corona response has been consistently impressive, but poorly covered. https://t.co/jPh3fISWhw

— 🇷🇺 ANATê™®LY 🤔 KARLIN (👻⛓ï¸�ðŸ�¶ðŸª™ maximalist) (@akarlin88) April 4, 2021

You missed the Big Tech explosion because you didn’t understand what de facto monopolies wedded to economies of scale can do. You have been deplatformed by Zuck and @jack for being a racist and a white supremacist, and you don’t even have their stonks for consolation. You didn’t hop aboard the Tesla train because you thought it was going to zero. You didn’t buy and hodl Bitcoin in 2013, Ethereum in 2017, or Chainlink in 2019. You kept your savings as certificates of deposit. You listened to Peter Schiff and plowed all your money into a shiny bauble that has been devaluing for centuries because the hyperinflation was going to take off any day now. You rushed into the GME squeeze just as the music stopped. You belated bought Coinbase to get crypto exposure against my advice and were dumped on by the founders.

You are now seething, coping, and on the verge of roping. (You, visualized, see right).

But opportunities come time and time again, and crypto aside, I think that one of the best candidates for OOM-tier increases this decade is Russian tech*.

First things first. Russian nominal GDP was just 7% of the US level in 2020. Russia has had a pretty bad 7 years since 2014, in which its prior one and half decades of convergence to developed world income per capita stalled. But national economic fortunes tend to come in cycles, so there’s good reason to believe that the 2020s will be one of resumed fast growth in Russia. There has been adjustment to the negative external shocks of the 2014 oil price collapse and the Crimea sanctions, infrastructure has been upgraded, zombie banks closed down, business regulations liberalized, the threat of further sanctions downgraded thanks to lesser reliance on foreign financing and more trade shifting to China.

The current capitalization of the Russian stock market is at 55% of its GDP, which is lower than its ten year mean of 62%. Meanwhile, the US at 190% is similar to that in 1929 and 2008 and by some measures is the single most overvalued stock market in the world. This does not necessarily mean that the American stock market is in a bubble and that a collapse is imminent. Unprecedented low interest rates, the increased prominence of tech stocks with their high p/e ratios (justified by their quasi-monopoly status), and broader market participation (i.e. zoomers plowing their Bidenbux into stonks and $DOGE on Robinhood) may mean that the US has simply become permanently more “financialized”. But, whether or not a crash is on the cards, it’s hard to believe that further rapid growth in US stocks this decade is possible, at least relative to opportunities in less pumped markets.

This is not the case in Russia, which is modestly below its historic average and which is now seeing a phenomenal increase in the amount of small time traders on the Moscow stock exchange. Thanks to the spread of cheap mobile brokerage services, the number of individual investors on the Moscow stock exchange has exploded in recent years, going from 417,000 in 2008 to 1 million in 2015, 2 million in 2019, 4 million in 2020, and 9.5 million this January. It is currently increasing by close to a million per month and now stands at 11.2 million. (In per capita terms, this is now not that far off from the $10M shareholders of Germany). This is driven by what seems to be a sharp change amongst the younger segments of Russian society to investment. While the Soviet generations are financially illiterate, some pensioners even preferring the mattress over bank deposits, zoomers are using mobile apps from companies like Tinkoff and VTB to play about with stocks, ETFs, and bonds just like the Robinhood degenerates in the US.

So what we have in Russia right from the get go is a virtuous trifecta in which GDP (PPP) is on the cusp of resuming upwards convergence to developed world levels, nominal GDP is poised to rebound even harder (Russia is literally the world’s cheapest country at this moment after Lebanon, as proxied by the Big Mac Index – more so than the likes of Ukraine and Vietnam), while the stock market in turn is poised to ramp up as a share of this GDP as the fintech revolution and fading sovok mores make Russia into a stock owning society again. (Incidentally, this would not be a novelty but a return to historic normality – Russia before 1917 had one of the world’s biggest stock markets, accounting for ~10% of world capitalization). This alone has a reasonable likelihood of eking out a doubling or a tripling during this decade and one that it’s possible to gain exposure to from some ETF that tracks the MOEX.

However, I believe that the real promise lies in Russian tech stocks. In contrast to Europe, whose native attempts to set up a tech ecosystem have failed/were brain drained away to Silicon Valley (only one of note is Sweden’s Spotify), Russia has its own, significantly self-contained IT ecosystem covering the broad range of search, e-commerce, social networks, car-hailing and ride-sharing, and fintech. But unlike American Big Tech, which has seen epochal increases in market cap over the past decade, the process is only in its incipient stages in Russia. They are ridiculous undervalued – but only so long as both Russians and foreigners don’t notice it.

That said, this isn’t an absolutely guaranteed money-making play. There are structural reasons why these prices will probably remain much lower than those of their American equivalents, even if the gap narrows. Hence, I’ll provision a “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, doubt) section to each stock.

Yandex (YNDX) is the biggest tech company in Eastern Europe. It has consistently accounted for 60% of the Russian search market (most of the rest accrues to Google), but it has its fingers in many other pies:

• It not only owns Yandex.Taxi (Russia’s Uber), but has a dominant stake in Uber Russia. Accounting for ~60% and ~30% of the mobile ride-hailing market, this makes it a near monopoly in the sector.
• It is working on self-driving cars and the results have looked promising from as early as 2018.
• Yandex.Drive carsharing service.
• Expanding into e-commerce sector with Yandex.Market, previously the dominant price aggregator/comparison site – now developing own capabilities to compete with main rivals Ozon and Wildberries.
• Has a broad presence in various IT services in general: Personal assistant (Alice), cloud storage (Yandex.Disk), food delivery (Yandex.Food), and seems to be actively developing a YouTube replacement of late (Yandex.Efir).
• Has the most advanced AI labs in Russia (though it pales besides Google, which controls two of the world’s top three, DeepMind and Google AI).

Market cap: $23B (60x lower than Alphabet’s $1,360).

FUD: Google dominates not just US search but global search, whereas Yandex only dominates 60% of the Russian market (though it also has a substantial presence across the CIS and even a minor one in Turkey).

Ozon (OZON) is Russia’s biggest publicly listed retailer, third biggest online store, and biggest multi-category online store.

Market cap: $12B (125x lower than Amazon’s $1,540B)

Its stock prices have gone up by 50% since it IPO’ed in December 2020. (I am very happy to have jumped on that train from the start). Even so, it remains a bargain basement buy in the long run.

To find out why, I would recommend Gleb Krivosheev’s article about Ozon at Seeking Alpha. But I will recount the main points in short here. The Russian e-commerce market was only worth $30B in 2019 (or just 6% of the Russian retail market), but has increased at a rapid clip over the past few years and CAGR for the next 4-5 years is projected to be 40%. Corona has helped this sector along as has a breakdown of hangups originating from the low-trust Soviet era and 1990s about paying for a product before it’s delivered. This will put the size of the Russian e-commerce market at $100B by 2024.

But another critical consideration is that the Russian e-commerce market, being in an earlier historical stage, remains highly fragmented relative to most other countries. The competition is likely to focus around Ozon (6% of the market in 2020), Wildberries (13%), Ali Express (8%), and Yandex.Market (2%). Wildberries is run by Tatyana Bakalchuk, who at $11B net worth is Russia’s richest woman (and probably the richest self-made woman outside China). It has branched out from specializing in women’s clothing and become Russia’s leading e-commerce store, with a very good distribution network but mediocre website. Yandex.Market represents Yandex’s foray into e-commerce and enjoys access to its parent’s technical expertise, but its distribution network is close to non-existent, it is starting from a very low base, and it will find it hard to muscle in at this stage (Beru, its prior e-commerce venture with state bank Sberbank, was folded up in 2020). Ali Express is a joint venture between mail.ru and AliBaba. Ozon has a very nice website – it is explicitly modeled on Amazon – but its distribution network and volumes remain inferior to Wildberries. Still, the money from the IPO has helped it grow and in my opinion it is in the best position to become Russia’s Amazon.

FUD: Ozon will never have the global reach of Amazon, it will not account for as big a share of the (much smaller) Russian market, and it also doesn’t have Amazon’s cloud services division.

mail.ru (MLRYY) is mainly known for its 100% ownership of VK (Vkontakte), the largest social network in Russia (43% of people on some social network use it), as well as the more boomer/prole Odnoklassniki (31%). This is the dominant social network in Russia and, confounding some predictions, has increased market share against Facebook (9%).

VK’s user experience is often considered to be superior to Facebook’s. It runs faster and more smoothly, has fewer weird bugs (Facebook’s codebase is atrocious), and doesn’t need add ons like Facebook Purity to restore some semblance of sanity to all the clutter.

It has its fingers in some other pies as well, such as cloud services, online games, and its own email and search engine. That said, Vkontakte is without a doubt the crown jewel in its portfolio.

Market cap: $6B (120x lower than Facebook’s $730B)

FUD: However, so far as social media goes, network effects are key and Facebook dominates the social network landscape not just in the US but across most of Europe as well as India. Meanwhile, VK has a merely preeminent position within Russia and the post-Soviet countries (even in Ukraine, despite VK being ostensibly banned).

TCS Group (TCS), more commonly known as Tinkoff Bank, is the largest digital bank not just in Russia but in the world by number of customers, who number 10 million.

Market cap: $11B

No obvious American analogues, but it’s an very clean and user-friendly product that dominates Russian fintech. Added bonus: Neo-Tsarist aesthetics.

FUD: Has already doubled in the past half a year, so will probably take a pause in further growth.

Another fintech company of note is payments processor Qiwi. However, it’s quite dated and much of its recent price movements are driven by rumors over an imminent buyout by Yandex (which has failed to materialize).

PREDICTION. Huge #FOMO into Russian “Big Tech” in next few years driven by increasing numbers of Russian investors and cheap American money migrating to emerging market for cheaper assets. This will replicate what happened in the US during 2010s. Yandex worth $250B by 2030, Ozon worth $100B. OOM-tier increase across this sector producing gainz rarely seen outside crypto.

Perhaps the very best thing about this is that the two most common and obvious objections FUDs against Russian Tech should in fact turbocharge it even further.

Sanctions Risk – In the short-term, increased American sanctions – should they actually happen – could drive out American investors, who despite poor US-Russian intergovernmental relations account for a stunning 50% of all foreign ownership of Russian stocks (the Brits account for another 20%… despite high trade flows, Europeans only accounted for 26%, probably due to continental aversion to stock investment). OTOH, this also increases the risk of significant Russian restrictions on American tech within Russia. There are already moves towards this that I have covered on this blog due to American Big Tech censorship of state-affiliated Russians – and this isn’t just happening in Russia, but in some other countries concerned with American tech pushing a culturally SJW and bluntly pro-American regime geopolitical agenda. Restrictions or outright blocks on American social media will unequivocally benefit their Russian competitors by opening up their market share to them. Restrictions on Google-YouTube and Facebook/Twitter will directly benefit Yandex and Mail Group in a sector that naturally tends to winner takes all. While those Russians who really need it for work or are heavily invested into Western networks will get around them via VPNs, the normies are unlikely to bother with it. Meanwhile, those Russian companies are insulated from counter-reactions by virtue of having very little presence in Western markets in the first place. Consequently, the trend towards national fragmentation of the Internet that Balaji S. Srinivasan often talks about constitutes a major downside risk for American Big Tech but an upside one for Russian Big Tech. (While being largely irrelevant to Chinese Big Tech, which completely dominates the Chinese online ecosystem thanks to American Big Tech having been barred from there from the start).

Rule of Law – Many Russian stocks trade at a discount relative to earnings on account of the perception (not on the whole unjustified) that Russia has inferior rule of law and property rights protections. (Though this disproportionately affects state-owned companies like Gazprom and Rosneft). However, this also happens to be a “fixed” factor and as such, irrelevant – it is, after all, the dynamics that are important so far as changes in valuation are concerned. At worst, perceptions on the Russian business environment will remain constant, which will keep the p/e ratio steady – you’ll still make tons of money when Yandex and Ozon earnings increase fivefold and they start paying dividends. However, should perceptions of Russia improve to the point that it becomes perceived as a “normal” developed country to do business in, then default p/e ratios could double and you could be looking at crypto-tier returns for Russian tech during the 2020s. Moreover, this should be set against the possibility of Western and especially American corporations being hamstrung by increasing inane social justice-driven ESG requirements.

***

* Necessary boorish disclaimer that this is entertainment not financial advice, invest at own risk, DYOR, etc, etc.

~ Fake News. Final unraveling of the Russian Bounties “story.” As I said from the beginning, if you believe that the Taliban need Russian rubles to kill Americans, you’re either a neocon or a moron.

Glenn Greenwald on this topic.

~ Scott Alexander – Prospectus On Próspera. Think of the flies. (Or, why I’m not a fan of “solarpunk”).

FWIW, I think it’s a cool experiment, but I don’t think much will come out of it. It’s just downshifting on a very large & organized scale, but one that strips much of the benefits from it. Would you want to live in this ghastly modernist architectural ensemble, paying US-tier prices for property? What exactly is the point when you could go to, like, Puerto Rico – which I gather has become a playground for Bitcoin millionaires who don’t want to pay taxes? So Prospera will select for weird libertarian American ideologues, culturally insular ones at that (wanting to create their own bubble in the Third World) plus equally weird Hondurans with high % of confidence tricksters, etc. (more normal/talented ones can just go to the US). Doesn’t sound like a recipe for success.

~ Coinbase. Clown market values a CEX that’s 10x smaller and crappier than Binance at more than a third of that of the world computer (which I told you not to invest in). But imagine what happens when this boomer money goes into crypto directly.

~ Crypto bans don’t work.

~ Paul Robinson (RT) – Biden’s Russia policy ludicrous, unbelievable, contradictory & unprecedented: First offers Putin summit & then imposes sanctions

~ Moscow Procurator threatens to recognize Navalny’s organizations – the FBK, and the regional Navalny HQs – as extremist. Not illogical, it seems hardly wise to maintain a de facto network of soviets-in-waiting that answer to an increasingly hostile foreign Power.

~ Woke Spooks. I suppose it was the inevitable that the CIA would eventually drink its own Kool-Aid. This is good for the world.

~ Ukraine now says it believes Iran intentionally shot down Flight 752. What level of ass-kissing is this?

~ Guillaume Durocher – Bumbling Towards the Biosingularity. The contradictions of biopolitics: Leftoids often de facto pro-eugenic while decrying it, while populist rightoids de facto pro-dysgenic even while many of their brighter elements recognize its importance.

~ Twitter creates a #MilkTeaAlliance emoji. China is correct to block access to it as a tool of a foreign Power intent on its dissolution. Russia needs to follow suite.

~ RT: Our two mortal enemies are Russia & ISIS, says explosive new report on ‘existential threats’ from Georgia’s top security agency

Georgian: “You are worse than ISIS.”

Russian: “That is an interesting opinion, but I’m waiting for you to weigh the tomatoes.”

Since attending President Trump’s rally on the Ellipse on January 6th I’ve been:

-Banned from AirBnB, Facebook, Instagram, DLive, and Coinbase
-Banned from every payment processor
-Had a bank account frozen
-Put on the no-fly list

And I haven’t even done anything wrong!

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) April 27, 2021

Society 282 in action!

But actually, it’s not just a “society” (as in “social pressure”, no matter how artificial) by now. No flight lists are compiled by the federal government. All that because Fuentes turned out to a (legal) protest for Orange Man.

You have Ricky Vaughn railroaded for literally posting memes on Twitter in 2016.

And now, thanks to the last bastion of free journalism in the form of tabloids like The Daily Mail, we now learn that the Feds had no intention of letting Derek Chauvin walk free even in the event that the jury voted him innocent of murder for failing to correctly diagnose a fentanyl overdose when arresting a violent repeat criminal.

Overall, it’s hard to dispute Fuentes’ own assessment of the situation:

I have not been CHARGED or CONVICTED of a crime… I haven’t committed a crime. Yet this is how I am treated as private American citizen, without due process. We are no different than Russia or China, except our tyrannical leaders are BLM and LGBT.

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) April 28, 2021

PS. I warned you against buying Coinbase for purely technical reasons – if you want exposure to cryptos, get the real thing, as opposed to an overvalued cex that augments crypto exposure and with a vastly inferior instrument to boot that gives none of the actual benefits of crypto. (Correctly, as it turns out, as it was promptly dumped upon by its own execs). That Fuentes was kicked from Coinbase further reinforces this point: “Not your keys, not your coins.” Nobody can take your Metamask wallet from you for being an anti-USG dissident. Don’t use wallets that you don’t control for dissident fundraising! Especially not ones with strong KYC and in bed with the IRS like Coinbase. That sort of defeats the entire point of crypto as it pertains to censorship resistance!

US Embassy in Moscow:

Reduction of Consular Services – Effective May 12, U.S. Embassy Moscow will reduce consular services offered to include only emergency U.S. citizen services and a very limited number of age-out and life or death emergency immigrant visas. These service reductions are necessary due to the Russian government’s April 23 notification of its intention to prohibit U.S. Mission Russia from employing foreign nationals in any capacity. Non-immigrant visa processing for non-diplomatic travel will cease.

Trump – Muslim travel ban.

Biden – Russian travel ban.

Anyhow, as I keep saying, this “social distancing” from the US and the West in general is a good idea. It blunts the impact of bad Western memes and tars their promoters within Russia by association.

Meanwhile, it’s not as if Russians have much to do in the US.

Tourism? You can fly to well nigh anywhere in European Russia from Moscow for $50-$75. Why do Russians need the US when they have this at home?

Business? Trade with the US is something like 5% of Russia’s trade balance. The only “physical” American things I can think off from the top of my head that I use are Tabasco sauce and the garbage disposal unit (pretty exotic in Europe).

Education? So far as 98% of Russians who send their children abroad are concerned, a Western education is needed to signal their social superiority to vatniks, as opposed to human capital accumulation. There are edge cases where this might still be useful (e.g. grad work with specific specialists in some STEM fields), but otherwise, there is no meaningful difference between undergraduate or graduate courses as taught in Russia or the US. Barring voluntary-mandatory extracurriculars on white privilege – but somehow, I think Russians can do without it.

Birth tourism? Something that 1,000 Russians do per year. A drop in the ocean. Inconveniencing the type of people who do this can only be to Russia’s benefit.

That said, this is a significant development on two accounts. First, it means that restrictions on travel will probably ramp up in parallel between Russia and the EU, because Europe follows America’s lead (indeed, former Estonian President Toomas Ilves has suggested as much), and between China and the US, because much of what has been implemented against Russia is also getting copied over with respect to China as the cold war between them ramps up. Such a severing between China and the US will be much more significant, given the much more intensive people flows and economic links between them, than between Russia and the US.

Second, it constitutes an ironic contrast to the situation during the Cold War, when the USSR prevented its people from traveling abroad. Now it does not such thing, and it is, in contrast, the Americans who are now blocking Russians from visiting the US. Ironically, this most inconveniences money pro-American fifth columnists within Russia, not the vatniks who constitute the Putin base.