RUSSIAN WORLD The return to the USSR

The long months of Putin’s war are rapidly changing the perception of time, turning back the clocks several decades. Russia invokes the glories of Stalin and evokes the dreams of previous centuries, but in reality it is returning to the grayest dress of its history, that of the Brezhnev stagnation, a period of twenty years (1964-1985) that seemed eternal, but without a future. .

The first sensation of immobility, paradoxical as it may seem, comes precisely from the course of war events, with all the tragedies and massacres that follow one another – the latest, in the absolutely absurd bombing of the city of Vinnitsa, which claimed dozens of lives . The resounding “special military operation” inaugurated on February 24, with the invasion of Ukraine – from all possible flanks, even from Belarus – seemed at first like an earthquake, almost a displacement of the earth’s axis. However, five months later, it looks like a crumbling rock, similar to the Marmolada glacier, burying towns and cities, but also dreams and hopes.

The Putinian apocalypse has not conferred any real advantage on Russia from the military and territorial point of view, it has simply made explicit a domain that has been claimed for years and disputed for centuries, that of the Donbass region and some offshoots of the coast and of the south, no man’s land of the former Cossacks, which Khrushchev and Brezhnev exchanged and shuffled again like cards in an aimless game.

It looks like a reissue of a famous Russian novel: The Queen of Spades, by Alexander Pushkin. The frustrated officer receives the revelation of the winning cards in a dream, but when he releases the decisive ace, the card turns into a queen of spades, wearing the smirk of the old woman who died because of the officer. Gambling is one of the keys to Russian literature, pointing precisely to the fatuity of great dreams of power and wealth, and war is the catastrophic game of history’s losers.

Putin refloats the rhetoric and contradictions of the Cold War, the “struggle for peace” that led the USSR to impose its aggressiveness for high moral reasons: the duty to prevent US imperialism from taking over the world. The nuclear threat was the “old lady’s ace” that could never appear on the gaming table, and he revealed his deception in the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, Brezhnev’s last gamble that led to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

Moscow’s armies were bogged down in the Asian mountains, attacked by the mujahideen who were emerging as heroes of freedom – before becoming Islamic State terrorists – and got great strategic and military support from the West. Today, the Ukrainian “neo-Nazis”, whom Europe despised for decades, are the new heroes of the armed resistance celebrated throughout the West, and thanks to Putin they have finally made Ukraine a respected nation in all international forums.

Even in the Russian-occupied cities, from Kharkiv to Donetsk, the new Free Ukraine partisan squads are forming in the underground and among the rubble. Therefore, in the coming decades, life on the land denazified promises to be very tough, provided the Russians are able to control them in the coming months. In short, the end of the war is not in sight, which for a long time will continue to be for Russia a paralysis of the body that blocks all its movements and thoughts.

This is, in effect, the internal consequence in the life of the Russian people, the feeling of having entered a dead end, a new iron curtain much more impassable than the Berlin wall. To sustain the war, the repressive measures, the “Putin purges” that are not limited to eliminating opponents -from Aleksej Navalny to Ilya Jashin, recently arrested– but seek to actually prevent any form of thought. With them it is a matter of delving into people’s minds to capture the slightest discrepancy with official proclamations, imposing a single reading of events, closing all access to information, instilling mandatory veils from history manuals, taught by heart from the first grade of primary school. The only thing missing is psychiatric asylums for those “who think differently”, but they may soon appear again.

Political opponents now take on the stature of dissidents from the Brezhnev era, rediscovering the principle Solzhenitsyn enunciated in 1972, shortly before he was expelled from the USSR: “live without lies”, resisting the falsehoods of the regime before affirming any own idea. For this reason, new dissidents are not only sent to concentration camps, but are preferably poisoned, a classic Soviet method to combat alternative thinking: they tried it with Navalny, with the politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza and with many other activists. , in Moscow and in the provinces. We can remember the journalist and collaborator of Memorial Timur Kuashev, who was poisoned in Kabardino-Balkaria in 2014, and found dead a few kilometers from his home.

Since the war began, more than 16,000 people have been arrested, fined, imprisoned or deprived of numerous rights for simple phrases said between friends, or for asking for peace through explicit gestures. The third infraction goes directly to a concentration camp, to the gulag. And this is the feeling of utter helplessness and isolation felt by Russians today, even when they would like to express an opinion, but fear the consequences, as in the days of stagnation. In Brezhnev’s first year, after Khrushchev’s openings, nearly 20,000 people were arrested.

In addition to frustration over an unfinished war and depression over a newly totalitarian system, another feature of the return to the Soviet dimensions of everyday life is the sinking into autarchy, the loss of any connection to the material achievements of the contemporary world. So far, Western sanctions have not had much influence on the course of the war, not least because Putin continues to use oil and gas blackmail, which Westerners cannot give up, to his advantage. Precisely daily life has acquired the medieval dyes of the scarcity of means of transport, medicines and food, clothing and furniture.

Shopping centers have become gloomy and huge due to the feeling of emptiness. This brings to mind the Gum stores in Red Square of yesteryear, when endless queues would form as soon as a different color jumper appeared. McDonald’s outlets have become “Tasty, that’s all!”, like the Soviet stall food of yesteryear, where one was almost forced to consume without protest. Crowds flock to the new patriotic fast food outlets to show their pride at the world’s contempt, even as they then toss the moldy burgers on the floor and forgo the fries, which have disappeared due to lack of production and distribution.

And more than the war, the gulag and food, what makes the past come alive is the unbearable illusion of moral and religious superiority, which would like to celebrate the ability of Russians to unite in solidarity and support with the country’s leaders, proclaiming the end of libertarian individualism that ruins the soul of the depraved Westerners. It is the “party line” today, entrusted to the Orthodox Church and representatives of “patriotic” religions, especially Islam. It is solemnly described by Tatar and Chechen patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops and muftis, just as it was in the Brezhnev era, when representatives of the clergy were recommended to act in this way to unite the older and backward population.

Patriarch Kirill looks more and more like the Soviet ideologue Mikhail Suslov, in a lesser version. Like Foreign Minister Lavrov, he tries to imitate the legendary “mister niet” Andrej Gromyko, but to sad parody effect. Around the increasingly audacious and isolated dictator, who only comes out of the bunker to sit at huge tables and unleash crazy threats to the universe, there is a caste of anonymous hierarchs. There are those who are more fiery and intoxicated by alcohol, but each of them could become the successor without anyone realizing it, as happened with Andropov and Chernenko in the eighties.

The whole world rightly supports and supports Ukraine, to defend the freedom and autonomy of the peoples, the very principles of civilization. But who can save the Russians from themselves and prevent the demise of a great people in the prison of their past?