in fact, 4 Russias.
One is 20-25%. They're the real supporters of this.
They deserve this horror--then again, to a large extent their lives are *already* this horror. They give what they give in Bucha and Trostyanets because that's what they get back home in Shittown and Shitton and Shitville.
About 60% are too busy struggling to have stuff for the first time--mortgages, car loans, etc. They're terrified--they're barely holding on, and if things go to badly they're back to Soviet Socialist poverty. Too busy making payments and being afraid, they *can't* care--because if they did, things would go badly for them, but mostly they're afraid that the economy will tank ... them.
The upper 10-15% or so are Western-leaning and educated. They loathe the war, they know what's up, but they're privileged. They went to good schools, have good jobs. Defy Putain, and they can lose that. With the new laws, they're cowed.
Then there are the Putinistas, a small, small fraction of the population that support whoever gives them power or supports their ideology.
I ponder the US. We're stratified and polarized. When we act as one, it's because we overlook those who object and it's individual strata that aren't objecting vociferously.
As I've said before, that analysis explains my perception of Russian literature. I always wondered how I could get 10 books, read them, and not understand in the least how the same country could produce literature so self-contradictory. That analysis reconciles this.
Some lit is brutal and horrendous. It's craplit. It tells me how to understand taxi drivers screaming out their windows.
Some is tuned-out, self-centered, parochial. That's the 60%. That's most of the Russians I've known not in graduate school.
Some is Russian Booker material. That's the 10-15%. The Russian speakers in graduate school act like *that* is "real" Russian. Like the Russians in graduate school are 95% of the population?
And some is truly retrograde. That the small minority. Some is boring. But sometimes you read a sentence and stare, chilled to the core. And this isn't the "political" or "ideological" stuff.
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