A Year Into the War, Russia Finally Has an Ideology
And it’s what keeps Putin in power.
Back in 2012, during the Bolotnaya protests — which I was too young to attend or understand — my father, then in his late thirties, joked that if the ‘fascists took over Moscow’ (how or why is not of importance here), he’d want to be on the beach somewhere in Asia, sip on his coconut with a straw, watch CNN show rows of Nazi soldiers march across Red Square, and go, ‘Blyat…’ (literally: fuck).
Later, when I talked to older people about that time, they told me that while Russia enjoyed its fatty years of high oil prices and conspicuous consumption in the roaring 2010s, there was a sense that these luxuries are fragile and fleeting and as if someone could pull the plug at any moment.
Looking at my country today through the news prism, I wonder whether my father’s joke has come true. Whether after so many years of playing a democracy, Putin got tired of pretending.
And the fascists really did take over.
It won’t be news to you if I say my country failed to reinvent itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether the ‘largest geo-political catastrophe of the 21st century’ was indeed that is hard to say. But what’s clear is that while Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other post-Soviet countries…
