Status Update

Scrungle Gungle is 11% done

The author is beginning to irritate me with some of his stylistic choices and how he often utilizes the phrasing of “the future Stalin” to indicate a sort of conspiratorial foreshadowing.

“The future Stalin” doesn’t exist at the point in time these chapters cover. To imply otherwise is to project backwards future historical events, which is dishonest.

— Jan 07, 2026 09:36PM

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Scrungle’s Previous Updates

Scrungle Gungle is 18% done

— Jan 10, 2026 10:50AM

Scrungle Gungle is 14% done

With some odd shots at Lenin’s work on Imperialism, Kotkin does an otherwise great job at navigating the formulation of the Great War and the subsequent February Revolution

— Jan 09, 2026 11:09AM

Scrungle Gungle is 7% done

Onto Chapter 4: Constitutional Autocracy

— Dec 30, 2025 09:40AM

Scrungle Gungle is 5% done

Tsar Nicholas II’s need for autocratic power reveals its dire consequences for the first time.

“Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process - moving from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ society - but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them.

Also Kotkin dabbles in light “what-if” on the final page, which I dislike.

— Dec 30, 2025 09:39AM

Scrungle Gungle is 5% done

— Dec 25, 2025 08:55PM

Scrungle Gungle is 3% done

Kotkin so far does an excellent job at setting the stage in which young Stalin (Koba) was to be born into. The industrialization of Germany, the increasing size of American industry following the civil war, and the Meiji Restoration all begin to influence global power whilst relatively local changes in the Russian Empire brought in an unimaginable swath of people into its operations.

— Dec 25, 2025 10:27AM