Anyone who’s studied Russia seriously and visited there knows about the ruthless corruption inherent in the workplace and “beeznus” cultures. Cutting corners and screwing over others is a peasant-mentality survival mechanism going back to Tsarist times. Consistently incompetent and brutal leadership, whatever the ideological label, leads to this sort of thing, and with a few very brief exceptions Russia has had nothing but that.
What interests me is that, in every ideological era, there have been people in the West eager to lick the arses of whatever tyrant was in power there – and not even get paid for it. These days, it’s mainly the white nationalists, who have obvious affinities with Uncle Vlad’s regime.
The Russians, by contrast, have learned to drink less vodka. Their birthrate has even popped up a little. Physically, they’re improving, and I’m glad at that news Yes, the Russians are diligently waging all kinds of asymmetrical warfare, they have built their own domestic Splinternet to subvert, repel and destroy the Internet, and they will pitch any dreadful thing over their firewall from nerve-gas to barrel-bombs, but I feel happier about them. They scared me, because I thought they would die en masse of sheer disillusionment, hapless spite, weltschmerz and morbid despair.
Probably the Russians will manage. They’re a great nation which is not suicidal. Their fearless leader will dump the wife of the children for a sexy gymnast, but they aren’t kamikazes, and they don’t need belt-bombs. The Russians in MMXX are Putin-Czarist hick fundies whose ultra-illusory worldview make literally no sense, and deliberately so, but at least they’re not dead on their feet. Even a dopey GRU assassin from the backwoods of Siberia is less scary than a hollow-eyed zombie.
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The world in MMXX is not in Crisis like it was in 2008, because it’s become Oligarchic. It’s a nascent oligarchy that is global in scope, but is unsure of itself and hasn’t written any rules. It lacks the palace etiquette of functional aristocracies. They’re like the rude-and-crude Oligarchs in the post-Soviet Transition, and who went to the same sauna bath-houses and knew the same call-girls,
but lacked a rule-of-law to protect them from murdering one another.
But they did have Putin, who got it about them and their issues, could out-murder anybody else because he was wrapped in the national flag. The siloviki clique of the Petersburg FSB set up a stable spy-based deep-state, which is now becoming Russian Sovereign Cyberspace. It’s not “rule of law,” but it is a stable surveillance state and a stable media-control state. Managed democracy.
Also, Russians don’t mind it that much. They’re upset if they’re intelligentsia or ideaiistic, but if you’re Ivan Sixpack, daily life seems doable, if not exactly truthful or reasonable. Moscow looks clean and shiny, your country is grabbing chunks of Ukraine in the teeth of the former international order and getting away with it, while Drumpf does whatever Putin says, mostly… So there are valid reasons for patriotic national enthusiasm, because the world is coming to look like you — much more than you have to conform to the world.
So, yes, Putin is an oligarch spy autocrat and secret multi-billionaire, but compared to cheap upstarts like Erdogan, Muhammed bin Sultan, Drumpf, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban in Hungary,Modi in India, Putin is visibly a seasoned statesman. He’s, by comparison, a classy, on-top-of-it guy. He poisons traitors, sure, but he’s KGB, so they’re suppose to do that. If you’re Russian, it’s actually fun to watch Putin joke about murder in public. Also, if you’re Russian and you imagine yourself being Putin, and wondering, well, what would I do in his place — yeah. They’d do what he does. They’d have to get a little narrow-eyed and cold at heart, but hey, James Bond. Enough said.
Even the Central Asian gymnast mistress doesn’t bother them. Why that chick isn’t world-famous, I’ll never know. She’s like an Ivanka Drumpf who can twist herself into a pretzel. A more fantastic court-mistress even than Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and that’s saying something.
So in MMXX I don’t think Russians are “depressed.” If so, less depressed than normal for them. They may be getting a little spooked about Siberia being on fire and those springlike winters in Moscow, but since a lot of that is their fault, they’re especially motivated to lie about it. After all, they don’t burn all that much carbon themselves, they just sell it to other people who burn it.
The world is remaking itself in their image, and after decades of abject moral, political, economic and military defeat they are a vanguard state in 02020. If you know a lot about them, you can kinda outguess how things are likely to go in this decade – or, at least, the beginning of it.
