The attempted coup that led to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the consecration of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2000, the 2004 Beslan children's massacre:Three summer anniversaries that are forcing Russians to rethink the uncertain evolution of their destiny.
Rereading its long history, the conquest of the “thousand square kilometers” of the Kursk region by the Ukrainian army also has symbolic significance, even before the military or diplomatic gains that might result. It is a way of reaffirming Kiev's historic superiority over Moscow. Just as the Russians open a grand new complex in Sevastopol in Crimea.
For the philosopher Nemtsev, a latent tendency towards violence has become a pivotal tool to regain what has been lost. Civilians become "quasi-soldiers", who engage in ad hoc individual and group training. Even everyday clothing comes with a war theme, like tactical gloves and protective knee pads. War is a key aspect of Russian literature, art and culture.
In Sevastopol, celebrations for the feast of the Baptism of Kievan Rus' have provided an opportunity to cover the unity between Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia with a Trinitarian aura. Likewise, the date has allowed Moscow to pull off a sensational exchange of political prisoners with Germany and the United States to rid Russia of its most notorious "foreign agents" who "disturbed internal peace" even from their prison cells.
While the average Russian is not in support the current state of action, neither can they counter it, imobilized by dread at the possibile outcomes of the war: defeat would result in panic, but victory could destabilise social relations. The incognito of the post war period, whatever the outcome of the current events.
For the historian of ideas Mikhail Maiatsky, Putin's Russia has "erased philosophy", replacing it with a pseudo-scientific patriotic ideology, based on the arbitrary rereading of Russian and universal history. A focus on existentialist thinker Ivan Ilyin is not meant to reflect on the meaning of ongoing tragedies. An “aesthetics of renaissance” on which Alexei Losev wrote in the 1980s is more urgent than ever.
Just as the bombing was underway on the treatment site for young Ukrainian cancer patients, the exhibition extolling 'Russia without end' closed (to reopen in permanent form) in Moscow. While internal successes are praised, external extermination is commented on with cynical indifference: 'It's war, there's nothing special about it'.
In Moscow, one can frequently hear people ask: “Are you with Biden or Trump?”, not to so much for ideological or geopolitical reasons, but for a mysterious sense of attraction and repulsion towards the great enemy, which in many respects is perceived as a Big Brother.
Against all odds, Russia's GDP is growing at a fast pace. There is no longer any need to put something aside for the 'dark times', which have already arrived. Everything is pouring into immediate consumption, and of course the main bulk of the money ends up in the war industry, around which the various groups in an endless supply chain are growing.
Like Crimea, Korea is key to destabilising Asia as well as Europe, amid permanent tensions and growing winds of war elsewhere. This seems to be the real purpose of Putin's visits, which from China and Uzbekistan to Korea and Vietnam are part of a plan for a new "world order" while trying to instil fear in both East and West.
June 12 June again this year marks the most important national holiday in post-Soviet Russia. But in order to avoid conflicting interpretations over its origins, Putin goes as far to refer to Prince Rjurik, the mythological Variegus chieftain who, according to ancient chronicles, started the history of Rus' in the year 862 in Novgorod, even before the foundation of Kiev
Many people in Russia tried to honour his memory on June 4, his birthday. His Anti-Corruption Foundation remains an important legacy, transcending the capabilities of his followers or the prestige of his wife Julia, and may still have a role to play even in a Russia now locked in neo-Soviet totalitarianism.
A series of video-documentaries circulated by Maša Pevčik, one of Naval'nyj's best-known contributors, shift all the blame and responsibility for what is happening today onto the bandits and corrupt people who prevented the development of a free and democratic society in the 1990s. Putin propagandists and opposition publicists, older and the younger generations, all cloaked in guilt and resentment, speak to those years.
An in-depth analysis by Meduza's Signal column assessed the real level of popular support for the war. The “majority of Russians” and poll respondents in polls are not the same, and the sample is becoming less and less credible. Surveys are a means of “manipulation” and “information”. The "average Russian male", who repeats patriotic slogans, is an example.
The first decree approved as soon as the ceremony for the start of his fifth term is about the ‘Fundamentals of Historical Education Policy’. The anxiety to rewrite history is the sentiment that stirs Putin's conscience most of all, as well as that of the entire generation afflicted by the resentment of the end of the Soviet Union. And it is this global and eschatological vision that Putin is now also trying to embody side by side with Xi Jinping in Tiananmen Square.
On several occasions, Putin said that he had no intention of staying in power for life, but the matter was shelved long ago. During the latest presidential inauguration, Patriarch Kirill invoked upon him God's blessing “until the end of your existence and until the end of time, as we say.”
During the Holy Thursday service, Patriarch Kirill recited a special prayer ‘for the victory of holy Rus’", which intensifies the war litanies imposed on priests, on pain of deprivation of clerical status if they refuse to pronounce them. The Easter celebrations must recompose the people of believers to show that Russia has defeated the evil within, finding the right path to sobornost.
Because of the war in Ukraine, the country is drifting into an era of denial and distancing from the "enemy", to assert spiritual, moral, political, and economic "orthodoxy". Today, new "global models" are being imposed, which are not easily digestible, not only in Russia or the East, but also in Europe and in English-speaking countries. The persona of the president now overlaps with that of the tsars of the past.
The question of post-colonialism in Russia is the great underlying theme imposed by the Russian war in Ukraine. Behind the claims of the 'Russian world' are the aspirations of the many peoples who for centuries have been subjected to the imperial domination of different ideologies, from the Tsarist to the Soviet, and today by the Kirill-Putin Eurasian vision, which by taking on Ukraine has in fact uncovered the Pandora's box of all Russian history.
According to the head of the Levada Center, Russia's leading sociological research institute, “only 10 per cent of Russians are actively interested in politics, and the war involves a super-politicisation of a minority in the face of the depoliticisation of the masses.” Only 30 per cent of Russians are willing to trust people outside their ever-shrinking circle of relatives and friends.
The reflections of the Moscow attack overshadow proclamations of victory in Ukraine. A text by the Sobordella of the Orthodox Church goes beyond the ideological motivations of the war and defends the 'purity' of the Russian people from 'invading migrants'. The fight against foreign 'ghettos' in the cities and the 'return' to the 'traditional' division between population and productive forces in the territory.
Gutted by last week’s terrorist attack, the concert venue inside a Moscow mall was a symbol of the city’s post-Soviet “reconstruction”. Russians now fear leaving their homes and getting into a taxi driven by a Tajik. In the meantime, state-sponsored public events have been halted while “different” ones have been banned.
The terrible terrorist attack on Krokus City Hall takes away the Russians' illusion of living under an unbreakable glass bell. In a Russia that 25 years after the attacks of the first war in Chechnya and a week after Putin's apotheosis finds itself once again at its year zero.
As Russians go to the polls, the outcome of the presidential election and the turnout have already been decided. The dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is virtually interred in a Siberian concentration camp, described the support for Putin's regime as nothing more than the product of “terror and apathy". The eternal tsar is but the face of a system that excludes the human soul.
Naval'nyy has once again succeeded in overcoming repression and with his death has brought a new 'flower revolution' to the streets. They bring a flower to the small grave in one of the capital's most peripheral and neglected cemeteries where the heart of Russia now stands, the counterbalance to Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square, in front of which the guns and cannons parade.
Medvedev would like to send the Zhduny to Siberian concentration camps for re-education. In Russia, attacks on "traitors" are not only attempts to instil terror in the population, which has long been accustomed to passive consent, but are also calls to "come forward", out of the restless need to identify the internal enemy, whoever they may be because, without enemies, power has no identity.
The eagerness to insert himself into global power struggles is not just a personal propensity of Putin's, but somehow a typical characteristic of Russian nature, which needs to find self-confirmation elsewhere, so as not to loose itself among the forests and steppes of its boundless territory.
A man full of life, passion, and humour, he was able to adapt to the harshest conditions. His soul, more than his ideas and programmes, counted. With death, Alexei Navalny becomes the embodiment of a defeated Russia, showing the inconsistency of its claims to domination and empire. And it lays bare the shame of Putin's Russian world.
The Ukrainian autocephalous Orthodox Church has removed the memorial of the holy Russian prince Aleksandr Nevsky from its liturgical calendar, teh saint who defeated Westerners in the 13th century and was the forerunner of the alliance with the Asian empires. While Kirill would like to canonise the great generals of Russian military history.
Internationally, 27 January is Holocaust Remembrance Day, but in Russia it also commemorates the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad. Now for Russians, the Holocaust is no longer about the extermination of the Jews, but as a Nazi crime against various peoples, starting with the Soviets. In Kirill and Putin’s version, Moscow is presented as the bastion against the "hegemonic genocide" of the West.
