Doom, Ever Closer

The madness spreads. The longstanding and well-respected editor of Lenta.ru, one of the few remaining independent websites in Russia, has been fired effectively immediately. Her replacement is a dismal Putinist hack. This isn't my reading of the story, this is the collective judgement of Lenta.ru's editors (link currently here - when this link gets taken down, which it most surely will, I'll provide a link to a copy of the original text). Lenta.ru will now turn into a cesspool of the most vile gay-bashing, revanchist, paranoid Russo-imperialism imaginable. The remaining spaces of online dissent will be crushed and sequestered.

It will get infinitely worse. I urge any Russian readers of this blog to seriously think about personal survival strategies. The lights are going out in your country and will not be lit again for a generation or more. (There are complex geopolitical reasons for this, can't provide more detail just yet. But I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I didn't give you the warning.)

Still writing the 18th Brumaire article, but here's a hint of what's to come: Putinism was the ideology of state-security siloviks who used gangster techniques to take back Russia's energy-rents from the Yeltsin-era oligarchs. That's fine if you're trying to rebuild your own country, but not OK when you start to attack other countries. In fact, the campaign to annex the Crimea is modeled pixel for pixel on the campaign against the oligarchs: sleazy PR, bald-faced lies, rabid ultranationalism, bribes of local officials. While we won't shed any tears for the oligarchs, the annexation of the Crimea is a dreadful disaster for Russia and Ukraine.

Putinism's inability to diversify the Russian economy away from energy-rents has triggered a deep and permanent economic and political crisis. While it is the richest member of the BRICs in per capita terms, it has the least diversified economy, and is in many ways the most vulnerable to the impending end of the petrocarbon age. Thus the authoritarian hurrah-patriotism of the regime: Putinism has nothing else to sell other than faded memories of WW II. If the US invasion of Iraq was motivated by the chimera of boundless oil-rents and subservient client-states, the Russian invasion of Crimea is motivated by the chimera of boundless Slavophoria and subservient client-regions.

What the Putinites cannot understand is that the Ukraine is no longer run by gangsters like themselves. I'm 100% certain that when the siloviki look at images of Ukrainian people protesting at Maidan, they can only see foreign intelligence services and CIA agents. They genuinely think that only specially-trained troops could possibly have endured the sniper fire on the Maidan as calmly as they did.

In reality, there were no troops among the demonstrators. They were all just ordinary people (see the casualty list here). The siloviki cannot imagine that in every ordinary human being there is extraordinary potential, and that on the Maidan, ordinary Ukrainians rose up to demand accountability from their government. In short, they cannot imagine people like this (click on the English subtitles for translation).