A feature by two journalists travelling through Russia for a month on the changing cultural landscape inside Russia as the war in Ukraine continues without a clear end in sight. The article has...
A feature by two journalists travelling through Russia for a month on the changing cultural landscape inside Russia as the war in Ukraine continues without a clear end in sight. The article has lots of pictures of regular people, both supporters and critics of Putin's efforts to reshape the country's identity and national narrative. I've gift-linked the article so there's no paywall, also while it is related to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I figured the article itself and subject matter was distinct enough to earn its own post.
Weekly Ukraine war megathread is found here though:
Still, as far as possible, the war must be invisible, banished to places like Ulan-Ude, near Lake Baikal, not far from the Mongolian border. That is done, in part, by paying recruits about $2,500 a month, a huge sum in a region where a monthly salary of $500 is more typical.
“Money is the main reason people go to fight,” Ms. Rolikova said. “The contracts being offered volunteers are crazy by our standards.”
But all of the money that Mr. Putin showers on remotest Russia only brings the war into sharper relief. It is etched in the fearful faces of young recruits lining up at the airport for flights to Moscow, and from there overland to Rostov-on-Don and into Ukraine. It is in the freshly turned soil of cemeteries where young men are laid to rest. It is in the air, a pall of dread.
In Moscow, a world away from Ulan-Ude, Western sanctions appear to have had little effect beyond stores like Dior that have signs saying, “Closed for technical reasons,” and the comical renaming of departed Western businesses, like “Stars,” for Starbucks.
The subway is spotless; restaurants offering a popular Japanese-Russian fusion cuisine overflow; people make contactless payments for most things using their phones; there is a ridiculous concentration of luxury cars; the internet functions impeccably, as it does in all of Russia.
The war is nowhere to be seen, other than in the billboards from the Ministry of Defense and, until recently, Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group (now of uncertain future) that try to lure recruits with slogans like, “Heroes are not born, they become heroes.”
“The body has a tumor — it is in Ukraine, and we have to cure it,” he told me. “The tumor comes from Americans who go places they have no need to go. Our task is clear and will be accomplished, justice restored, fascism defeated.”
I asked him about Mr. Putin. “He was sent to Russia by God,” he said.
“Putin was obsessed with justice, as he saw it,” said Aleksei A. Venediktov, whose popular Echo of Moscow radio station was shut down soon after the war began. “He told me in 2014, ‘You might not like the annexation of Crimea, but it’s just.’”
“We did not see the Putin who was on a historical mission of revenge,” he told me. “We thought he was a corrupt guy from a poor family who wanted yachts and palaces and girls and money. We did not see the K.G.B. officer who thought the loss of the Soviet Union was unjust. We thought he was a cynic. In fact, he was a romantic.”
The article covers all kinds of topics and a wide range of vignette interviews with different people with widely different perspectives and views. I pulled the above quotes as interesting, but don't do the article justice alone. One thing that struck me was the rehabilitation of Soviet style cultural artifacts. Parades with Communist Youth groups, school trips to visit statues of Lenin or Stalin, flag pins with the hammer and sickle, a sort of deification of the Russian (and Soviet) military that the current conflict is a continuation of the battle against fascism.
It's not entirely clear to me how to interpret all this -- but it was well worth the read.
Reminds me of "we've always been at war with Eurasia". A war effort mobilization is the time where people agree to give up some of their rights and freedoms for the greater good. If you keep the...
Reminds me of "we've always been at war with Eurasia".
A war effort mobilization is the time where people agree to give up some of their rights and freedoms for the greater good. If you keep the war going forever, it's always crisis time and in a crisis there's no time to waste on 'minor' complaints.
I mean, you can't seriously think that Putin intentionally started a war he knew he wouldn't win for the purpose of creating an excuse to suppress dissent. He was perfectly stable in his rule...
I mean, you can't seriously think that Putin intentionally started a war he knew he wouldn't win for the purpose of creating an excuse to suppress dissent.
He was perfectly stable in his rule prior to February 2022, and there's every reason to believe he thought the war would be over in days or weeks. Everyone thought the war would be over in days or weeks.
If anything Putin's decisions recently have had the opposite goal in mind, for most Russians he wants it to seem like everything is normal and there is no crisis.
This—he may be doing his best to make use of what happened, but acting like he ever controlled it and everything is following a plan is just rewriting history—Putin's job. For a decade his clear...
This—he may be doing his best to make use of what happened, but acting like he ever controlled it and everything is following a plan is just rewriting history—Putin's job.
For a decade his clear end goal was to take over Ukraine, period.
In 2014, he tried a coup, didn't quite work. He made use of it still, held Crimea hostage against Ukraine NATO. He hoped for Trump 2020 to prevent any military support, but that didn't work out either, not fully. He rolled out tanks, expecting his army to be ready, but that hit bumps, too. And now this.
In the end, people forget authoritarians don't need a crisis to squeeze the people. They can make one, or just lie about it. I mean, just look at the US right's obsession with trans people, a subpopulation so small it's hard to measure.
I think he probably thought the invasion would go a lot like taking Crimea, and people would complain but ultimately let him get away with it. But now that it's clear the whole thing has gone to...
I think he probably thought the invasion would go a lot like taking Crimea, and people would complain but ultimately let him get away with it.
But now that it's clear the whole thing has gone to shit and is just making Russia look bad, that option has been off the table for a while. So somewhere along the line they need to have pivoted to a new strategy to salvage a situation with no good exit strategy.
That pivot is most likely to keep the land bridge to Crimea intact, which sucks for those Ukrainians. They'll continue to fortify the line, dig in, and if we stop fighting them for it, 5 years...
That pivot is most likely to keep the land bridge to Crimea intact, which sucks for those Ukrainians.
They'll continue to fortify the line, dig in, and if we stop fighting them for it, 5 years later they'll attack again.
Can't stop fighting. Have to take it back. Easy for me to say though, I'm not at risk. I wish Russia would stop, Ukraine could take back everything, and the fighting would all be over.
I think your analysis here is more correct, but that OP's comment has a grain of truth in it. Considering the reignited nationalism out of the bones of the Soviet era, suppression of independant...
I think your analysis here is more correct, but that OP's comment has a grain of truth in it. Considering the reignited nationalism out of the bones of the Soviet era, suppression of independant media (such as it was), and coupling religion to the military, Putin is doing the whole "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" thing. The war clearly wasn't supposed to be a drawn-out brawl, but now that it is, he's remaking Russian society in the way he sees fit using the war as license to do so.
A feature by two journalists travelling through Russia for a month on the changing cultural landscape inside Russia as the war in Ukraine continues without a clear end in sight. The article has lots of pictures of regular people, both supporters and critics of Putin's efforts to reshape the country's identity and national narrative. I've gift-linked the article so there's no paywall, also while it is related to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I figured the article itself and subject matter was distinct enough to earn its own post.
Weekly Ukraine war megathread is found here though:
Some choice quotes from the NYT article:
The article covers all kinds of topics and a wide range of vignette interviews with different people with widely different perspectives and views. I pulled the above quotes as interesting, but don't do the article justice alone. One thing that struck me was the rehabilitation of Soviet style cultural artifacts. Parades with Communist Youth groups, school trips to visit statues of Lenin or Stalin, flag pins with the hammer and sickle, a sort of deification of the Russian (and Soviet) military that the current conflict is a continuation of the battle against fascism.
It's not entirely clear to me how to interpret all this -- but it was well worth the read.
Reminds me of "we've always been at war with Eurasia".
A war effort mobilization is the time where people agree to give up some of their rights and freedoms for the greater good. If you keep the war going forever, it's always crisis time and in a crisis there's no time to waste on 'minor' complaints.
I mean, you can't seriously think that Putin intentionally started a war he knew he wouldn't win for the purpose of creating an excuse to suppress dissent.
He was perfectly stable in his rule prior to February 2022, and there's every reason to believe he thought the war would be over in days or weeks. Everyone thought the war would be over in days or weeks.
If anything Putin's decisions recently have had the opposite goal in mind, for most Russians he wants it to seem like everything is normal and there is no crisis.
This—he may be doing his best to make use of what happened, but acting like he ever controlled it and everything is following a plan is just rewriting history—Putin's job.
For a decade his clear end goal was to take over Ukraine, period.
In 2014, he tried a coup, didn't quite work. He made use of it still, held Crimea hostage against Ukraine NATO. He hoped for Trump 2020 to prevent any military support, but that didn't work out either, not fully. He rolled out tanks, expecting his army to be ready, but that hit bumps, too. And now this.
In the end, people forget authoritarians don't need a crisis to squeeze the people. They can make one, or just lie about it. I mean, just look at the US right's obsession with trans people, a subpopulation so small it's hard to measure.
I think he probably thought the invasion would go a lot like taking Crimea, and people would complain but ultimately let him get away with it.
But now that it's clear the whole thing has gone to shit and is just making Russia look bad, that option has been off the table for a while. So somewhere along the line they need to have pivoted to a new strategy to salvage a situation with no good exit strategy.
That pivot is most likely to keep the land bridge to Crimea intact, which sucks for those Ukrainians.
They'll continue to fortify the line, dig in, and if we stop fighting them for it, 5 years later they'll attack again.
Can't stop fighting. Have to take it back. Easy for me to say though, I'm not at risk. I wish Russia would stop, Ukraine could take back everything, and the fighting would all be over.
I think your analysis here is more correct, but that OP's comment has a grain of truth in it. Considering the reignited nationalism out of the bones of the Soviet era, suppression of independant media (such as it was), and coupling religion to the military, Putin is doing the whole "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" thing. The war clearly wasn't supposed to be a drawn-out brawl, but now that it is, he's remaking Russian society in the way he sees fit using the war as license to do so.