Kirill Medvedev on the fact that the war in Ukraine is finishing off the thirty-year project of the Russian Federation, and on what chances of salvation and victory our society has
They are destroying our post-Soviet Russian people. They are destroying it right now with the ecstatic hooting of “patriots”, and somehow I am not surprised that only a few in the national patriotic milieu speak out against it. Russian imperial nationalism is an anti-Russian, anti-Russian, anti-people ideology. An ideology of self-destruction and disintegration. In an attempt to unite the people and the autocracy, one of the elements will inevitably perish. The question is who will perish this time.
The post-Soviet Russian nation with all the good and the ugly in it is going away. With all its resisters, doubters, escapists and apologists. It’s not that the percentages of the former, the latter and the latter have been exactly the same every 30 years: at one time the lion’s share was made up of Soviet grandmothers and uncles who could rip the Yeltsin and then the Putin riot police to shreds. The 2005 protests against the monetization of benefits were their last stand. Then came the angry townspeople, other people, the offspring of Putin’s normalization. Now they, too, are disappearing.
A whole post-Soviet project of the Russian Federation, based on the belief that the elements of bourgeois democracy with its local specificities (the oligarchy in the 1990s and the strong hand in the 1990s), together with a crooked but somehow market economy, the depoliticized consumption of the middle class, and the hope that everyone else would join in this consumption, will gradually return us to some sort of historical and civilizational norm. Things have gone wrong. A systemic error. The project is finished.
The most submissive, the most apathetic, the most naive patriots and all who have mistaken the motherland for Putin’s arse will be mobilised and destroyed, physically or morally.
All men who are even marginally enterprising, and with them or on their own, many women, will leave to wander abroad, endure the hassle, beg for visas, slowly adjust to the new life. Most of these people supported Putin yesterday, but this is what he has in store for them.
What options do we have if the mobilization is not halted or stalled as soon as possible but instead spins further like a maddening top?
The first option may come with some kind of peace, more or less beneficial to Putin. What awaits us then is a neo-Putin order, heavily doped, in which the elites control the intimidated country, while the people in the badly devastated territories continue to exist passively for another 10-20 years.
The second option is the military defeat of Russia after Putin’s use of nuclear weapons. A humiliating, externally imposed order that will finally destroy the morale of those who survive and by that time remain in the country, and of all the “global Russians” too.
And then there is the third variant, which at the moment seems the most naive and unlikely. An uprising against the and the wardraft An uprising of women who are already at the forefront of protests today, an uprising of peoples whose, sorry, gene pool is being sent to rot in Ukrainian soil, an uprising of workers who are being driven from production to the front. Not all workers, of course, and hardly the majority, but those who are eventually able to revolt in their personal dignity, and perhaps the vestiges of historical memory of a time when workers were not an appendage of the military and industrial machines, but marched ahead of the battles for democracy.
Is there is a force that can sweep away the perpetrators of war, break the back of the Russian fascists who will try to take over, close the hell out of the Yeltsin-Putin project, which has naturally degenerated into a stupid, aggressive “Russia!”, and establish a new republic on new foundations, with a radically new role for workers, women and peoples? There is a small chance. There will be many risks involved, and a lot can go wrong, but life and history on our beloved and bitter one-sixth of the Earth can only continue in this way.