Vladimir Putin's War Spreads Resignation and Despair Among Ordinary Russians

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

The government is trying hard to use this moral dilemma, blackmailing the people through their feelings of fear. “A real Russian is not ashamed of being Russian — and if he’s ashamed, he’s not Russian and not with us,” the president’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, announced.

But there is a vulnerable spot in this tenuous doublethink: it cannot be preserved for long. No draconian measures of information control can shelter the citizens from the monstrous reality. First of all, around one-third of Russians have relatives in Ukraine. No amount of censorship can prevent the millions of phone calls and messages between them.

(snip)

It’s perilous for us to discuss the number of losses sustained by the Russian military in Ukraine. It’s the most sensitive subject for the government, and they watch over such discussions carefully. The government has officially recognized that over five hundred service members have died during the operation. Even this number is monstrously large. Over ten years of war in Afghanistan, the USSR lost just over fourteen thousand soldiers and officers. Today, death enjoys a greater harvest. The veto on this information makes people seek out numbers announced by the Ukrainian side, which are quite likely exaggerated. On March 8, the Russian Ministry of Defense has admitted that there are some conscript soldiers in Ukraine — which means poorly trained eighteen-year-old boys. The words “cannon fodder” come up more often in messages and conversations. Women are afraid to let their sons go on compulsory military service — and on April 1, the new round of conscription will begin. Even in the official sociological polling, we see that middle-aged women are 15 to 20 percent less likely to approve of the “special operation” than men. And it’s precisely middle-aged women who had been considered Putin’s core loyalist electorate. But another category important for the government is also significantly influenced by the losses: military personnel.

A revealing blunder happened in a livestream of the Zvezda TV channel that belongs to the Ministry of Defense. An elderly serviceman, among the guests on a patriotic talk show, stood up and offered to hold a minute of silence for the Russian soldiers who died while carrying out their commanders’ orders. “Our guys are dying out there . . .” he began saying. But the talk show’s host blasted out from his seat and started screaming at the veteran with order bars on his chest: “No, no, no! I don’t want to hear any of that! Shut up! Don’t you understand? Stop. Our guys are crushing the fascist viper over there; it’s a triumph of Russian arms!” The urge of bureaucrats and propaganda-peddlers to sheepishly conceal events in Ukraine has already started pushing away the government’s most loyal and faithful audience — the military and the “patriots.”

(snip)

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/03/vladimir-putins-war-spreads-resignation-and-despair-among-ordinary-russians

[Walleye]

1. So now they're calling them what? "Russians in name only"?

[Uncle Joe]

2. An institutionalized "no true Scotsman" fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[Walleye]

3. That's what I was trying to remember. No true Scotsman

[Wingus Dingus]

4. Russia must be humbled, for them to be able to turn themselves around as a nation.

It would really be the best thing for them (post-Putin). The collapse of the Soviet Union obviously wasn't enough--or Putin didn't allow them to fully come to terms with their place in the world, absorb the loss in a constructive way. The vultures and thieves moved in too quickly.

[Uncle Joe]

5. One thing that I believe the West could've done better after the collapse

of the Soviet Union would've been to put more emphasis on aiding Russia in building democratic institutions and the rule of law under a Russian Constitution rather than on promoting trade and capitalism in that nation as the primary dynamic.

I believe that contributed to the current state of the Russian government.

Of course having said that, no one is more responsible that Putin, his crony oligarchs and the Russian nation in general in that order but they have to come to terms with their demons just as we had/have to come to terms with our own.

[Wingus Dingus]

6. Yes, I think you are right. They took perhaps the wrong lessons

of why western democracies were stable and prosperous.

[Gaugamela]

7. Exactly.

Neocons like John Bolton basically dragged Russia through the mud grinning and gloating, and the IMF arranged for Russia to be divvied up and auctioned off to create the oligarch class. It’s as though we learned nothing from the Treaty of Versailles and 1930s Germany. (But you have to be careful around here if you hint at chickens coming home to roost.)

[Martin68]

8. I agree Uncle Joe. I think we were all over-confident about the likelihood of democracy taking

permanent root in Russia without a lot of support. A great disappointment to our hopes at the time.