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My American friends often ask me, what does the average Russian think about Ukraine.
The answer is a lot more involved than you might think. But while I should tell more people, I’ll still limit the distribution in hopes that this doesn’t get reposted, for _very obvious_ reasons. If you wish to cite this, please leave my name off it.
And the answer is… I honestly have no idea.
The important part: _Nobody_ has an idea.
Russian “government” – because to be fair, calling this a government is a misnomer, but that’s a lecture for another day, because I don’t think the term “reverse cargo cult” is well known in English – spent an entire decade destroying information. Not hiding, not obscuring, _destroying._
It’s like when you scale a JPEG down, turn the quality slider down, save, reload, and then scale it back up. The information is lost. You can draw what’s missing from memory or from general familiarity, but you can’t verify if you got it right or not. Do that just a little, and you might miss small but important details, like rank and force markings on a uniform. Do that hard enough, and you stop recognizing things on the image at all.
The first time I realized this was what was happening was the 2012 elections, which is, admittedly, pretty late in the grand scheme of things. In my defense, [refuge in audacity] is very much a real thing, so learning to recognize it took some adjustment, and I was much younger then and thought they were _just_ very corrupt.
Sociologically, elections are an expensive way to produce a truly massive opinion poll. When conducted properly, and more importantly, properly studied, it can be very revealing. You have to account for people who don’t vote on principle, for people not eligible for voting for whatever reason, people who want to vote but don’t have a candidate representing their views, and all of these and other groups not reflected in the final vote count still matter, and can be very large – but all of this is data.
Data that can be used to produce a coherent picture of what’s actually going on, regardless of whether it eventually goes into picking someone to actually be in power or not.
They falsified these elections. Strictly speaking, that wasn’t the first time they did that, that was just the first time when I had cause to think they affected the outcome enough to make a major difference, rather than just make one or another local authority look good before their superiors. I could estimate how far they were falsified, mathematically, based on published data, and I did – though if you want details on that, there are a bunch of people who are better at electoral mathematics and wrote more about it, you can still find them.
But there is no way in hell to know what was in the piece of information about the Russians that they have destroyed.
They have done this so that their lies would be the only source and thus “become the truth.”
Let me once again reiterate. Tiny morsels of truth – on average, an academic thesis contains maybe five sentences worth, the rest is connective tissue, arguments and proof – get people academic titles, because obtaining them is _actually hard._ Truth is expensive.
But once you destroy the actual truth, you’re suddenly free to present whatever bullshit you really want to be true.
I’m not sure who came up with this ideology – smart money is on Vladislav Surkov, but that, too, could have been a lie. While it was _common_ for the Soviet government to lie,¹ I doubt any government engaged in illusion-building and blatant falsehood quite as much as the post-Yeltsin Russian government. They’ve been doing this for many years, and not just with the elections. Russian TV is painful to watch, which is why almost everyone I know personally subsists on rumor, Internet-delivered news and torrents.
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1. You could basically rely on something they vehemently deny being true.
The “average Russian” could be someone like me – quietly wishing the bullshit would stop, or waiting for when it inevitably bumps into reality hard enough to collapse. In isolation, because speaking out usually results in an army of well-organized trolls² descending on you, when it isn’t the actual cops. When most of your friends have left the country behind³ and lost touch, participating in a protest is generally ill-advised until the crowd doing so gets _really_ big.
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2. With suspicious account names that look more like coded UUIDs.
3. Some, after getting visits from those cops.
The “average Russian” could be like the woman I met in line to the ATM on the first day, who wondered why is everyone standing in line? “The president promised everything will be alright.” I couldn’t help but laugh into her face, but that doesn’t change that she, _too_ could represent “the average Russian.” By the time I got to the ATM it was empty, by the way.
The “average Russian” could be that guy I saw in a comment thread, who wanted to, simultaneously, get rid of all the gays, the government officials, their entitled children and mistresses, and all the cops – he was apparently not clear just how far all those sets interpenetrate, if at all, but thought they were all at least closely related – by sending them to Ukraine.
The “average Russian” could be like some of those guys who spout anti-Ukrainian insults and drop everything to “fight the Nazi Ukrainian government” – the ones you never hear from again.
All of these represent _some_ part of the population, but their relative proportions are unknown. Anyone who says they actually do know to any degree of certainty is suspect. Some of these people lie for benign reasons, and some lie unknowingly.
It’s the ones who lie knowingly that you have to worry about, but reading this post in English, you have to worry about them for reasons entirely different from mine. You see, I don’t know just how _many_ people believe the bullshit – I suspect this is a minority, but I can’t really substantiate that suspicion – but based on the evidence of the past two days, I am quite certain that Putin himself believes every word he said.
Yes, this is insane.
I would remind you that one of the most popular Russian memes of the past decade was a large banner strung up between the towers of the Kremlin saying “Yeah, we’re fucked up in the head, so what?” but I guess that’s the first time you hear about that. Language barriers are fun.
This can’t end well, but I knew that back in 2013. The question is just how many people does it kill and how many things does it destroy or prevent before it ends, and since this is a question I can’t answer or measurably affect the answer of – nobody listens to me anyway – it’s a moot point. What worries me isn’t even that the sanctions will wreck the Russian economy and bring us back across the poverty line. Not the first time this happens in my memory, and I’m as ready for this happening as I can theoretically be while still remaining in this madhouse.
What worries me is that after this is over, chances are high, that the ones who caused it will either get away with it and live in a penthouse they _currently own_ in Miami, or quietly die in a bunker somewhere, while every single average Russian that survives will, from there on, be blamed for it as if they personally started it.
While on the other side of the border, everyone was _deeply concerned._ And quietly buying oil and gas, while selling stupidly expensive cars and yachts. And watches. Can’t forget the watches. Seriously, what is this obsession with watches…
Much, much earlier than that, Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons for guarantees of sovereignty, but I guess these guarantees weren’t worth more than “deeply concerned” either.
https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=TvgNdNxTtJ0
It’s okay if you don’t understand half the jokes.
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