Gleb Pavlovsky, 2012:

Putin belongs to a very extensive, but politically opaque, unrepresented, unseen layer of people, who after the end of the 1980s were looking for revanche in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union. I was also one of them. My friends and I were people who couldn’t accept what had happened: who said we can’t let it continue to happen. There were hundreds, thousands of people like that in the elite, who were not communists—I, for example, was never a member of the Communist Party. They were people who just didn’t like how things had been done in 1991. This group consisted of very disparate people, with very different ideas of freedom. Putin was one of those who were passively waiting for the moment for revanche up till the end of the 90s. By revanche, I mean the resurrection of the great state in which we had lived, and to which we had become accustomed. We didn’t want another totalitarian state, of course, but we did want one that could be respected. The state of the 1990s was impossible to respect. You could think well of Yeltsin, feel sorry for him. But for me, it was important to see Yeltsin in a different light: on the one hand, it was necessary to protect him from punishment; on the other, Yeltsin was important as the last hope for the state, because it was clear that if the governors came to power they would agree another Belovezhsky Accord, after which Russia would no longer exist.

Putin is a Soviet person who did not draw lessons from the collapse of Russia. That is to say, he did learn lessons, but very pragmatic ones. He understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands big money, and behind that, a military machine which aspires to control the whole world. It’s a very clear, simple picture which I think Putin had in his head—not as an official ideology, but as a form of common sense. His thinking was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. If we had made more money than the western capitalists, we could have just bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t have. That’s all there is to it. It was a game and we lost, because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs.

I don’t think Putin’s thinking has changed significantly since then. He sees them as common sense. That’s why he feels comfortable and assured in his position; he’s not afraid of arguing his corner. He thinks: look at those people in the West, here’s what they say, and here’s what they do in reality. There is a wonderful system with two parties, one passes power to the other, and behind them stands one and the same thing: capital. Now it’s one fraction of capital, now another. And with this money they’ve bought up all the intelligentsia and they organize whatever politics they need. Let’s do the same! Putin is a Soviet person who set himself the task of revanche, not in a stupid, military sense, but in a historical sense. He set it for himself in Soviet language, in the language of geopolitics, that of a harsh pragmatism that was close to cynicism, but was not ultimately cynical. Putin is not a cynic. He thinks that man is a sinful being, that it is pointless to try to improve him. He believes the Bolsheviks who tried to create fair, right-thinking people were simply idiots, and we should not have done that. We wasted a lot of money and energy on it, and at the same time tried to free other nations. Why do that? We don’t need to.

Ω Ω Ω

The idea of a presidential power that stands higher than the other three powers is in our constitution. The President has a special kind of power which does not relate to executive power: executive power ends with the Prime Minister. The President is above them all, like a tsar. For Putin that is dogma. He thinks that in old societies and states there is a sense of order—people don’t aspire to destroy their opponent when they are victorious at the elections—and we don’t have that sense of order. He also thinks that all forms of power in Russia so far have been unperfected: he wants to build a strong, durable form of government.

Ω Ω Ω

Yes, we are talking about managed democracy, but maybe you in the West have forgotten that this concept was widespread in the 1950s in European countries where there had been fascism. In Germany, for example, there was the same idea: Germans have a tendency to totalitarianism so they must not be allowed near politics. They should have the possibility to vote freely, but the people who control real politics must stay the same, they must not yield. A strict system of control has to be created. Everything in Russia—the high vote barrier to get into the State Duma, the one-and-a-half party system—is taken from the German experience. It’s just that in Russia it hasn’t been completely successful, with the breaking up of finance and politics. Is it cynical from the point of view of the theory of democracy? Probably, yes, but here it doesn’t look like cynicism.

21. (SBU) According to Aleksandr Dugin, a friend of Limonov, the name of the party made no difference to Limonov. „He wanted to call it ‚National Socialism,‘ ‚National Fascism,‘ ‚National Communism‘ – whatever. Ideology was never his thing. The scream in the wilderness – that was his goal.“ Limonov, Dugin went on, is like „a clown in a little traveling circus. The better he performs, the more attention he wins, the happier he is.“

—WikiLeaks Cables (thank you, Julian Assange)

Dugin leaned over and said: ‘Eduard, your task as a warrior and kshatriya is to lead people; and I am but a priest, magician, Merlin, I have a woman’s role to explain and console.’

In fact, the party was arguably Dugin’s brainchild – the name was his idea, as was the flag: a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red background, evoking the Nazi swastika. It was not going to win them any elections, in a country that lost 20 million to Hitler’s fascism; but that was not the NBP’s goal. The official NBP salute was a straight arm raised with a fist, alongside a cry of ‘Da, Smert!’ (Yes! Death!). Inside the group’s headquarters, the highest-ranking party member present was always referred to as the Bunkerführer. The veneer of fascism was very much calculated – it was a bohemian ‘political art project’, in Dugin’s words. He, according to Limonov, ‘seemed to have deciphered and translated the bright shock that Soviet youth experience when they pronounce the initials “SS”’.

The NBP’s ironic stance towards fascism, though, was also a carefully calculated ploy. The salutes, the slogans (‘Stalin, Beria, Gulag!’ was one) were so odd and over the top that they verged on parody. Equating their party with fascist symbols, however, was a pose – pioneered by Dugin – that would come to define Russia’s image of authoritarian rule under Putin in the coming decade. The NBP was a ‘sight gag’ that undercut criticism by making it seem – ever so slightly – as though it was missing the point. Calling the swastika-waving, goose-stepping NBP members ‘fascists’ frankly sounded so odd that no one ever did it, for fear of looking ridiculous. Both men were instinctive haters of conventional wisdom. They loved to shock. And the movement they founded was a mélange of each man’s upbringing: Dugin a product of the overly intellectual Moscow bohemia of the 1980s; Limonov, the pre-AIDS Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s transplanted to central Moscow.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 225.

The events of September–October 1993 would lead to armed conflict in the centre of Moscow, the worst fighting there since 1917, and very nearly to full-scale civil war. The motives and behaviour of both sides remain extremely puzzling to this day. After the conflict was over, US President Bill Clinton said Yeltsin had ‘bent over backwards’ to avoid bloodshed; however, there is accumulating evidence that bloodshed is exactly what he wanted – to do militarily what he could not do politically: destroy the opposition, suspend the constitution, and unilaterally redress the balance between executive and legislative powers to create a super-presidency. That is exactly what he got.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 214.

Andreas Ross, FAZ:

In der Konfrontation gegen eine erschütternd große Gruppe verhärteter Rechtsradikaler und eine noch größere Gruppe von Unzufriedenen in deren Windschatten hat Macron sein Heil nicht in taktischer Europaskepsis gesucht, wie es so viele europäische Politiker in ähnlicher Bedrängnis taten. Vielmehr hat er den Schneid besessen, für die EU als Lösung der Globalisierungsprobleme zu werben, sowohl der materiellen als auch der identitätspolitischen.

Nun muss er „liefern“. Also muss die EU liefern, und das geht nicht ohne Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz. Darum hängt auch für Macron viel von der Berliner „Zeitenwende“ ab. Wenn Scholz es schaffen sollte, dass sich Deutschland militärisch und politisch zu einer Säule europäischer Souveränität entwickelt, dann gewönne der deutsch-französische Motor einige Zugkraft.

Ω Ω Ω

Berlin findet in Paris einen Partner mit fünf Jahren Erfahrung, aber so viel Energie wie nach dem ersten Sieg.

Eine Krankenschwester
Die Jungs haben immer »Mama!« geschrien, wenn’s zu schlimm war, wenn die Schmerzen zu groß waren. Andere Namen hab ich nicht gehört.

—Swetlana Alexijewitsch, »Zinkjungen: Afghanistan und die Folgen«, (Berlin: Hanser, 2014), 42.

Wenn ich heimkehre, werde ich in kein einziges Militärmuseum mehr gehen …

—Swetlana Alexijewitsch, »Zinkjungen: Afghanistan und die Folgen«, (Berlin: Hanser, 2014), 29.

Alexander Neubacher, Spiegel:

Isar 2, Emsland und Neckarwestheim 2 helfen nicht nur dem Klima, sondern auch gegen den Krieg in der Ukraine. Noch ist es nicht zu spät, den Atomausstieg zu stoppen.

Atomkraftwerk Isar 2 bei Landshut Foto: Armin Weigel / picture alliance/dpa

Luke Harding (yes, that Luke Harding), Guardian:

The historian Anne Applebaum said the Russian government’s methods in Ukraine were darkly familiar. Today’s Moscow is replicating what Soviet forces did in occupied Poland, the Baltic states and the rest of central Europe in 1939, as well as at the end of the second world war. It was an “eerily precise repeat of the NKVD [Soviet secret police] and Red Army’s behaviour,” she said.

She added: “They have lists of people to arrest – mayors, museum directors, local leaders of all kinds. They systematically rape and murder civilians, in order to create terror. They deport other people en masse to Russia, to enhance their own depleted population. They eradicate local symbols – statues, flags, monuments – and put up their own.”

Applebaum said there was “one new twist” in Russia’s takeover of southern and eastern Ukraine, now the scene of a brutal battle for the Donbas. “Because modern Russia stands for nothing except corruption, nihilism, and Putin’s personal power, they have brought back Soviet flags as well as Lenin statues to symbolise Russian victory,” she said.

If in 2022 Ukraine Russia is eerily repeating the Red Army’s 1939 precise behaviour in the Baltic, does this mean Russia will soon be giving Lwów back to Poland? 🤔