What do you think of Dima Vorobiev?

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Dima Vorobiev is someone I am very grateful has managed to find Quora and is sharing his perspective. It is through his perspective I’ve been able to laser in on just how most people are, and couldn’t ever be anything but, so impossibly ignorant about the world that even their suspicions are wildly off the mark.

He’s inflamed my curiosity about recent history. The manner in which he deals with questions taught me many things, not just about world affairs, but how societies that aren’t the Great Land of Wonder and Plenty that is the Anglosphere operate. And in the process, the seams and breaking points of our society, the actual ones, not the ones imagined by politicos.

And so running into him online has been one of those “sea changes” in how I view the world. You can read old musty books and journals all day long and work out how one person managed to view the world at one point in time and what occasioned them to write about it, and come to a certain kind of understanding.

It’s quite another to witness someone with a background so utterly different than yours, who also manages to speak the same language and is very interested in your culture, willing to explain his, for months to years on end. As someone who is very interested in the quality of information sourcing, Dima is an absolute treasure.

If Soviet Russia were Roman Israel during the time of Jesus, it would be as if one of Paul’s friends of a friend were sent through a time warp. Enough to blow the whole door open on that period of the world. It’s not the big questions that are the treasure trove here, it’s the little ones. There are countless little things about other cultures, other ways of looking at the world that are absolutely critical to building a full understanding. Things you can only start to gain an appreciation of through much time spent in contemplation and study, but can be instantly revealed if you just had someone who was there.

That’s what Dima offers to those who are wise enough to see the value.

Before joining Quora, I’d had the privilege of reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, and Anglo-centric geopolitical resources such as Stratfor. The Anglo-centrism of these resources was made abundantly after reading like six of Dima’s posts. It’s not that these are bad resources or that nobody should read them, it’s just that they could have never offered the whole picture and you’d never really know where or how they were off.

Dima has simultaneously made my world a bigger and a smaller place. And for that I’ll be eternally grateful.