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Zelenskyy: We’re very close to point when Russia can be forced to end this war
(www.pravda.com.ua)
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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No, it's not any more a Russian weakness than an American one, even less than a Japanese or a Chinese one.
Especially unwise to judge Russians by American stereotypes of Russians.
How's that compatible with supporting Yeltsin in his 1993 coup and in stealing 1996 elections?
No it didn't. Yeltsin wanted that, yes, and Putin wanted that too. Both wanted to be a big, scary country accepted to NATO and with NATO weaponry. Like Turkey, but with nukes. What both didn't want is dropping the bullshit about spheres of influence and being an equal of the USA, apparently got told by NATO that beggars are not choosers. Also wanting an association with NATO has plainly nothing to do with being a democracy or not.
I think you skipped the part where I was educating you that Yeltsin made himself Czar in 1993 and just passed it on to Putin.
I don't really care that it breaks your narrative. Putin is a natural continuation of the western-supported and consulted regime in Russia installed in 1993. That Yeltsin presented himself as some liberator and Putin presented himself as ex Soviet intelligence are campaign pictures that mean nothing. All the trusted people around Putin are the same that Yeltsin had even before 1991. Including Putin himself.
Alcoholism is not a bigger weakness in the Russian society than in British ones or in Sweden or in Finland.
Russians keep gravitating towards authoritarians over and over again. Can't think of any other country that reverted back to it multiple times in a century. Weak people want strong man leaders, just how it is.
I'd hoped Russians could grow a spine and get rid of Putin, but they'll probably go on riding his dick for the rest of his life. Closest they got to ending that cunt was Prigozhin attempting a coup in a drunken rage, but he sobered up and chickened out before it was done. Just how shit goes in Russia, always on a spectrum between drunkenness and authoritarian dick riding.
No. Prigozhin was a spoiler. A demining attempt, because Putin probably got afraid enough of a coup in the military and decided to use Prigozhin to try and detect people in the high command who'd assist Prigozhin or react favorably, or at least not do enough to impede.
Russia has special services. They work all the time, work very well, and "entrapment" is not a problem for them, similar to "fruit of a poisoned tree". When you detect people likely to wish for a change early enough and neutralize them, either by silently jailing or intimidating or disrupting them, the society is much more amorphous.
It's not about gravitating anywhere, wishes or sympathies.
Gorbachev was the only rational guy they had during that period. He could have had a chance to do something if the West had supported him.
Russians don't have the "fuck the feds" grassroots rebelliousness of Americans, they don't have a honour/respectability culture like the Japanese not to mention that Russians have basically no civil society while Japan (as a stem family culture) has a very strong one, and unlike the Chinese Russians are fatalist AF, don't really have expectations about things becoming better for them. If the CCP had started this shit they would've lost the mandate of heaven quite a while ago.
But I agree, it's not so much a strong man fetish. It's an acceptance of might makes right combined with social acceptance of tyrannical behaviour on the individual level and, consequently, high distrust among individuals stopping the formation of a civil society.
Russian society hasn't fundamentally changed since the days of the Tsars, they've gone through various paint-coats while sticking to the same overarching organisational structure: Central power delegates exploitation of people, the environment etc to viceroys in exchange for loyalty, meanwhile acquisition of new colonial subjects is ongoing as, being built on terror, the imperial core can never feel safe and needs to bash something to distract itself from its vulnerability.
All wrong.
There's just one thing that Russians really lack - understanding of the importance of truth. It would seem the Orwellian amorphousness of mind is a legacy Russians have carried from the USSR, except one can see signs of it all over the Russian literature school course. Russians really love "grey morality", ambiguity and nihilism.
For an American or a German it takes belief in a propaganda device to follow it. For a Russian - just acceptance that it's likelier to be better in some way.
No. Just the belief that there's some deeper grey wisdom, a secret, and you'd be an idiot to just give yourself to some specific idea.
A whole country of cynics thinking they know better. Thus extremely skeptical about any initiative.
But that might not be wrong course of action too, Westerners don't seem to comprehend that today's Russia is not USSR, and that solving the problem of making Russians, say, rebel en masse is not going to achieve much. That rebellion will be predicted, easily disrupted and the people involved will regret they were born. It's probably perpetually happening - new and new people who'd eventually have done something finding yet another FSB trap and going to a secret jail silently before they would do anything.
It has and to the worse. Except, of course, back then the majority consisted of illiterate peasants.
No. That's not how central power functioned back then, and what happens now is a mafia group gratuitously using its vast human resources to just have fun. Their fun in this case is conquering Ukraine to feel themselves more powerful. Only it doesn't quite work out, but I think the feeling of being able to mobilize people and send them to the grinder is good enough.
Now that is a universal human trait.
Americans don't believe in, whatnot, manifest destiny, their exceptionalism, they live it. Germans certainly don't believe in classism, yet we're living it. Generally speaking: The stuff that people are actually following is not found on the propaganda level, but on a level below that, on a cultural carrier wave so to speak. Why propagandise something that people are doing, anyway? Doesn't make sense.
That's just bug-standard metamodernism collapsed into fascism, that is, regressed into modernism. Just to explains terms: Modernism is the age of grand ideas, "one true path to absolve humankind", while postmodernism is the "yo all that stuff is BS anyway we don't know shit". You see those forces oscillating throughout history, metamodernism means their co-existence.
That belief might very well what people are telling themselves, but it's a shallow analysis. The "deeper grey wisdom" (interesting that you used "grey" btw, "it must be ancient" -- why?) is Snokhachestvo, and not the practice itself but the cultural attitudes that enable(d) it. Russia made some progress overcoming that shit, e.g. normalising nuclear families instead of communal ones (the one crucial achievement of the USSR), but the underlying cultural beliefs stay uninterrogated, able to perpetuate themselves. Thus men do to their sons what their fathers did to them, think that's what being a man is all about, and if you don't use whatever power and might you have to be cruel, you're obviously gay. Like Europe.
That is what I meant with "a belief in might makes right".
Germany has 80 million national football team trainers. There seems to be a pattern here: Declaring universal human traits as specifically Russian. Those traits are true, no doubt, but they're not unique.
It didn't? The Tsar and the viceroys, plundering the country and living the good life. The General Secretariat or even Secretary and the Nomenklatura, plundering the country and living the good life. "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others". In either case, highly authoritarian societies, with varying levels of totalitarianism. Such a setup requires cruelty and ruthlessness, and there's no shortage of either because, according to Russian culture throughout the ages, good fathers make sure that their sons are strong men by raping the son's wife. Metaphorically speaking, at least: The "sons" might be subordinate soldiers, and the "wife" their pay checks and materiel. In the position of son, you're just expected to take it, otherwise you're weak, and the "father" will make sure that's an even worse fate. The Siloviki do indeed want to free Ukrainians -- so they bomb cities. Free them from their "European gayness", that is. Such is the perversity of the Russian psyche.
Or, differently put: You sure you're looking at the water you're swimming in? I'm not Russian, I only lived there, and I was able to see the water. Swimming feels quite a bit different in Russia than it does virtually everywhere else.
Snokhachestvo and the cultural approaches similar to it are prevalent in those people who are Russia's elite now, but generally seem very rare as far as I can see.
And that stuff about Europe and homosexuality seems for me a kind of "the hungry doesn't understand the full", more of jokes and separation than of really thinking that's true. It's just that there are people outside the prison and inside it, and those inside can't afford to behave freely. It's almost envy, except without even negative feelings. More like alienation - "they live so much easier that for them homosexuality is a real concern".
Also there's the criminal culture homosexuality, as a marker of status in the criminal hierarchy, which is demonstrably non-consensual, and one can see a psychological parallel between living freely in general inside a prison and being gay in a place where people get raped. A nonsensically careless behavior, something like that. And being nonsensically careless is weak.
They followed their own laws. If a law was too cumbersome to make, they didn't. It was an absolute monarchy, but if you compare today's Russia's judicial system to the imperial one - the latter seems very humane. By stats, by procedures, by stories of people who witnessed it.
The kind of peasant communes and huge families where such things happened wasn't actually natural. It was becoming the more common, the more people were becoming personal serfs. That is, there was that transition during Catherine where state serfs (which in practice meant almost a free man) were given to nobles en masse, she considered that a better arrangement. Sort of a privatization.
Nah, not that. If we make this comparison, for them it's the father's right, and you are subordinate. It's not about fear of punishment, it's about enduring for endurance's sake. Almost morality.
No, they don't. They want to kill and loot and subjugate.
People who you are maybe looking for here are not those who try to somehow explain the state's justifications for this war. It's those who think that this has to be finished anyway regardless of whether the war should have been started.
I haven't met such real people. OK, to be honest, probably I didn't realize but I have.
The point is - almost nobody really thinks that about gayness and what not, but everybody thinks it's smarter to play along, that's what I meant by the amorphousness of mind of Russians.
It does, but it's more of a culture of virtuous suffering, like doing your work the hard way instead of loosening up a bit and doing it better, but with less "honest labor" or something. And lies. The virtuous suffering thing is often stupid, but sometimes a strength. The lies however are usually stupid, yet Russians somehow always start with lies and then maybe work it up to saying the truth.
I'm talking about an underlying psychosexual current. Of course people don't believe in the literal truth of these kinds of things, it'd be like believing that dreams are literally true. But there's still a reason why you're having these particular kinds of dreams, and not different ones.
Do you think it's even constitutional for Putin to deputise people with presidential powers? That any court would challenge him? Law in Russia was, and is, subordinate to the powers that be.
That's the attitude of those considered strong, yes. You either become them or you break and end up with a tattoo saying "slave" on your forehead or something.
I'm not talking about the state's justification, but about the justification of the cultural psyche. Russia, as a psyche, doesn't want to see Ukrainians with forehead tattoos, it wants Ukraine to be part of it. Part of the same ethos, with maybe slightly different dances, clothing, and they can continue pronouncing things with h instead of g as long as they admit they're Russians, that they accept, as you put it above, the father's authority. And the only way that psyche knows how to convince the son of the father's authority is by cruelty.
It's not. It destroys social cohesion, it breeds neurosis. With true courage, it doesn't matter whether you live or die for the cause, as long as the cause is virtuous. This Russian strength, though, it only can ever make sense if you're dying for it, living for it indeed is stupid, at the same time its strength in dying for it is not stronger than that of true courage. It's precisely why Russians don't know where the fuck that cart is racing. But go, it must. Why. Why not make camp and have a party.
The reason is simple: Without the people neurotic, distrustful, and accustomed to bowing to authority, the central authority would fall, because people would actually be able to organise bottom-up. The central authority knows that, and thus does nothing to combat it, the people, well, it's Russia's only way to greatness, isn't it? Any alternatives?
Which brings me to Navalny's balls of steel, returning to Russia: Yes, that's impressive. That's strong, "virtuous suffering". But it's also accepting the status quo. You can't be a revolutionary against a system by holding onto the ethos that fuels it.
I dunno, if we are going to that level, then I see plenty people not from Russia in the interwebs having this. In case of MENA people - much stronger.
It's a problem, but not such a deep one. Even among ex-military people from older generation.
No, Putin has been logically fully described in the "Dolls" show. He just wants to torture and kill people better than him, and the law he's interested in only as long as he can call whoever he wants destroyed "state criminals".
I'm saying that the Russian empire was different, and even the USSR was different.
Yup, I'm saying it's not the only idea of morality in the whole of Russian society and not even the dominant one.
It definitely is the one emanating from the state.
In this case no, it's not the father. It's the same master. Slaves replace their own dignity with their master's importance.
So those really thinking Ukraine shouldn't be independent are the people terribly irritated by Ukrainians not willing to have a master. If Ukrainians wanted to have a master, that master would have a lower status than their master, in their opinion, so it would all be fine - Ukraine is a separate country, but Ukrainians are in the same general status. It's envy - why can they have this and we can't. A typical village thing by the way.
Like that anecdote about hell and a Jewish cauldron, guarded by three imps to throw those escaping back in and prevent them from helping others, a Ukrainian cauldron guarded by one imp to just throw those escaping back in, and a Russian cauldron unguarded.
Yep, in this regard we agree. It also breeds idiocy and cowardice with all participants certain they are being wise and brave and sacrificing.
That's where you are wrong.
As you might have guessed, one can't punish FSB for entrapment, they are the ones doing the punishing. So that's what they were doing since Soviet times. Everyone trying to "organize bottom-up" will just be detected by FSB before being visible for anyone else.
They are proactive. They have their agents of various kinds in youth groups, in hobby groups, everywhere. They even provoke such "organizing".
They literally lure teens into "political" groups. Just for everyone with potential to be under control.
It would be problematic, say, in the US, if FBI tried to put someone in jail for being a member of a group the leader and half other members of which are state agents, and which approached that someone first. In Russia it's not. They are always fishing for people willing to do something.
I've literally heard of more cases where a (say, anarchist) group had such agents, but it all became known because of some other crime (a murder in that case), than in "extremist" sense. Meaning this happens very silently.
So, about distrust. It's well-substantiated. Russians can't organize in Russia and can't, frankly, trust a Russian in such things.
Similar to Armenians TBH, it sometimes seems there are more agents of various intelligence services and oligarchs in Armenia and diaspora than people really interested in changing something.
Absolutely! That's exactly what his action communicated.
I think he was trying to send a signal to that layer of deeply skeptical people that he's one of them and not of those like Sobchak and Nemtsov and similar. And he was successful, he's seen very differently from them.
Except see my previous part about special services' work. The real problem is not in nobody willing to organize. Without it, whether Navalny would do his sacrifice or not, Russia's government would have changed around 2012.
Different, yes of course, what I'm trying to get at here is that there's still consistencies. The three systems are different coats of paint on the same dysfunction. There's also been some progress, I already mentioned the nuclear family, but the overall problem won't be fixed until the dysfunction is understood, organically, by society.
I don't think we actually disagree: The forces that I described breed the type of people the FSB needs to do its enforcement. Cynical, ruthless, eager to suppress their trauma by inflicting it on others. In Tsarist times there was more, religion and all that, a very old notion of what God's plan for society is, roles for everyone, in the USSR at least a number of them were actually ideologically convinced, by now, power is the only ideology. They're mighty so they must be right, don't they?
Russia had a revolution before, it can have one again. Bluntly put: The Kremlin guards are less well armed than Ukraine. Revolutions aren't organised, they happen once the collective psyche reaches a breaking point. No words, just people's subconsciousness noticing the mood of the people around them, assessing the chances: "Am I going to be alone, or are we going to march together?" and suddenly decades happen in weeks.
What would be important is having a couple of ideas on what will come after that. How to not lose the moment, again. Who would be the current-day Bolsheviks, opposed to the deposed-of system but also to the freedom of the people? How to convince Yuri Shevchuk to accept being crowned Tsar. I'm only half joking.