After a year of silence, another old acquaintance from #Russia wrote to me, this time from the Caucasus 🤔
He too is absolutely convinced that soon #Ukraine will ‘give back the four oblasts and there will be peace’ (maybe that’s why there is such a mass awakening among my old Russian contacts recently).
He, unlike everyone else, doesn’t have chat deletion enabled after 24hrs, so he must have seen the previous discussions and didn’t even try the ‘denazification’ fairy tales just wrote straight ‘we have lost so much resources and people that now we can’t back down’. This is a popular argument with them, a kind of the last line of defence. People from the military or the government sometimes add ‘…because we will end up in The Hague’.
I asked if he was aware that he too was a ‘resource’ for his country and could also be ‘lost’. He didn’t answer directly, he just goes on in this line of argument - ‘I know one thing, if my state loses now it will be pizdec for my family’ (pizdec=swear word meaning a terrible disaster). So I ask him, in all honesty, to explain to me, a simpleton - how exactly is his family going to face ‘pizdec’ if the Russian military withdraws from Ukraine? What exactly will happen to his family?
Sadly, he then disappeared. He needs to think for himself, I guess.
My apologies to you T. for shattering your peace of mind despite the mattress of sophisms you have surrounded yourself with to keep your spirits up while living in a country that is heading towards a demographic and economic abyss. It will only get harder further down the line. Your grandparents and parents built themselves this mattress for 70 years and that is why it was so difficult for them in 1991.
kravietz 🦇
in reply to kravietz 🦇 • • •Here another one who wrote to me the day before yesterday. It’s a Russian I know from expeditions in the mountains - he blocked me in 2022 and now suddenly as if nothing ever happened ‘all the best, what’s up’ etc.
I politely wrote him back - life, children, work, war. ‘But no politics,’ he stipulated. Then he complained a little about the interest rates on mortgages (‘we fortunately took at 8% but now it’s 24%’). Then he wrote that in the summer they wanted to go somewhere by the sea. For Muscovites, ‘by the sea’ means Gelendzyk, Anapa and the like (because Crimea has got a bad name lately, with something burning and exploding there).
I say to him ‘well, I guess you like mazut medicinal baths’ because it’s is already all over the Azov and Black Sea coasts on the Russian side.
He replies that ‘it’s nothing, they will clean it up’. This is the kind of first-level message that every Russian keeps on the surface of consciousness for retorts in passing. I responded with this. He understood.
Then there was silence for a while, he must have searched in Yandex that they won’t ‘clean it up’ after all, because what’s on the coast is a trifle that only volunteers clean up and the administration makes theatre of, while most of the mazut has sunk to the bottom. And it will surface as it warms up.
Then he wrote without conviction: ‘there is hydrogen sulphide at the bottom, it will decompose it out’, which must be some surreal theory of the “reach over your right shoulder with your left hand and scratch your ear” (the so-called “mnogochodovki”) genre that the Russians love so much.
A few moments passed again and before I could close my mouth, open in astonishment, he wrote, ‘I think we’ll go to the Caspian after all’. And then he added, ‘I’ve always wanted to see Derbent’.
tivasyk
in reply to kravietz 🦇 • • •«He replies that ‘it’s nothing, they will clean it up’» — and that, folks, is basically what your typical #russian mr. «dostoyevsky» thinks about the war, the crimes commited in chechnya, moldova, georgia, syria, ukraine, all the murders, rape, bombed hospitals and ultimately the shame of being the fascist nation in 21st century:
it's nothing, we'll clean it up.
the only kind of peace negotiation russians want is the kind where the whole world just shrugs and goes on as if nothing happened. their own consciousness? #russia will just clean up.
kravietz 🦇 likes this.
kravietz 🦇
in reply to tivasyk • • •@tivasyk
Oh, this “we’ll clean up” is like the ultimate argument that solves everything. They turned whole towns into a pile of rubble? “We’ll rebuild”. I’ve seen this one used many times by real people, actually.
Killed millions of people? “Females will spawn more” (бабы нарожают ещё). Haven’t used this by real people - yet. Probably because they’re still in the phase of denying losses.
Bonkers
in reply to kravietz 🦇 • • •kravietz 🦇 likes this.
kravietz 🦇
in reply to Bonkers • • •@bonkers
That’s the argument I like most, because I’m using it when talking to “let’s no politics” Poles, Ukrainians and Russians alike. This is nothing but cheap escapism, but but it doesn’t work - politics will always come after you, and then you can only complain you ignored it before.
But this one guy is also a declared Muslim (as most people in Caucasus), which gives me an added bonus of being able to poke him with inconsistencies between Russian imperial policies and the general ethics of Islam which, except for some extreme fractions like salafites (who he’s not), is generally peaceful.
Of course it’s the same with Christianity, but with most Russians the argument is useless because vast majority of them don’t give a shit about religion so I could just as well poke them with reference to Siberian shamanism.
Bonkers
in reply to kravietz 🦇 • • •kravietz 🦇
in reply to Bonkers • • •@bonkers
I talk to them because I’m genuinely curious how they explain the war to themselves. There’s a significant share of Russian society who is simply in the “kill, kill, kill” mode and these are not interesting.
But there’s also a certain share of intellectuals - and these make me curious because their ways of thinking display some extraordinary features of human mind plasticity.
It intrigued me since the Soviet times, because my brain simply rejects Marxism-Leninism due to its logical inconsistency and vagueness, but I can’t deny that there were thousands of people who made their PhD specifically in the style of “dialectical materialism” and I’m curious how their minds worked when they wrote it.
Bonkers
in reply to kravietz 🦇 • • •kravietz 🦇 likes this.
Bonkers
in reply to Bonkers • • •kravietz 🦇 likes this.
kravietz 🦇
in reply to Bonkers • • •@bonkers
There’s also one guy like that I know in Russia. Interestingly, he’s 70+ and former border guard (=KGB) but all his life he’s been going to Europe for various sport events which was abruptly closed by the war, his son lives in France and he’s got many reasons in general to hate Putinism.
Bonkers
in reply to kravietz 🦇 • • •kravietz 🦇
in reply to Bonkers • • •@bonkers
No, I was not very precise here - he started going to Europe on military pension, which was in his early 40’s or something. Before that he served on some God forgotten border with China, then for a while in border force communications unit in Moscow. He finished service in 1990’s and moved to business which involved many trips to Europe, so he was quite cosmopolitan already. But he may be not representative because he’s got Ukrainian origins, has still some relatives in Ukraine and - unlike many Russians - did not take the Russian bullshit about “we are not targeting civilians” for granted.