cowboy_soviet

characteristic of the russian dreamer's mentality are impatience, a very particular sort of impracticality, a disdain for exactitude, and dismissal of details. How can you worry about details when humanity is faced with an urgent task_for instance, how to achieve instant immortality for all! A westerner might choose to invent some modest, marvelously conceived gadget that actually works, and then organize mass production of a multitude of identical, marvelous, working gadgets. A russian on the other hand, consumed by a fever of grandiose, porrly thought out plans, will build something huge, ambitious, and unprecedented__which fails to work. The lightbulb that edison lit is still burning, but in siberia, one "project of the century" after another lies in ruins. thousands of miles of railroad lie rusty and overgrown with weeds: they built the railway, and only later realized it had nowhere to go and nothing to transport.

the greatness of russian thought lies not in it's precision but in it's scale, not in the details but in the strength, not in the realization but in the idea