Evgenia on the third anniversary of the Z war
On this third anniversary of the war in Ukraine, I want to repost an essay Evgenia wrote a few months after it all started. I reread it today, and even now, all these years later, it provides a necessary and mostly missing background — both political and cultural and historical — to understand this conflict…well, at least from the Russian side. You won’t read anything better.
—Yasha
Welcome to the "RuZZkiy Mir"
I was shellshocked by the war like everyone else. Now after my initial panic has subsided I wanted to say a few things.
Here in America, most of the “experts” interpret Putin’s enduring rule in general and this new war of his in particular as Soviet reboot. He’s supposed to be some sort of Stalin 2.0. But that view of things is wrong on just about every level. I believe it’s actually a much worse narrative than simply “Back to the USSR.”
Despite how bad the reality of the USSR could be and how cynical its nomenclature was, at its core the Soviet Union did pursue communism — a liberatory utopian ideology. It inspired people all over the world. So on paper at least, the country did stand for something good, something to aspire to. The USSR wasn’t just a continuation of Imperial Russia under a new name and flag but with the same exploitative ideology. That’s a very simplistic Cold War lens that shows a complete lack of understanding of Russian history and politics.
But Putin’s regime — one that is finally taking a much more definitive shape — is very different. It is not rooted in any utopia. It doesn’t offer any alternative or any new inspiring way to organize society. It was pragmatic from the start and what it aimed to do was to preserve a semblance of stability in post-criminal-privatization-Russia of the early 1990s. Now it’s taking a new turn and foregoing stability. But it’s not that surprising that many people in Russia are cheering for it.
After decades of quasi-socialism and poverty in the Soviet Union, people were plunged into the quasi-capitalism, much more feudal and raw than people experience in the West. A majority of Russians became even more impoverished, a minority benefited form the privatization of state industries and the new business opportunities that opened up in a capitalist society. The entire country turned into a brothel, lacking any ideology whatsoever. Some people of course turned to the Russian Orthodox religion in a desperate attempt to have some meaning in their lives because the old paradigm was destroyed. But it’s hard to call those people truly religious, the same way there were not really Marxist-Leninists before that...
