By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, Website, 2/15/24

Lindemann-Komarova has lived in Siberia since 1992. Was a community development activist for 20 years. Currently, focuses on research and writing.

Russia made it through year two of the SMO intact and with a new sense of confidence. 2023 was the year of moving on. The geopolitical dimensions of this have been well documented. Equally notable is how the year required people in Russia to move on within the context of the SMO that is never really out of sight or out of mind regardless of its relationship to an individual.

In a December 28 article, Denis Volkov of the Levada Center quantified this mood, “More than half (57%) are looking at their own future “with confidence” for the first time in 10 years.” He provided two options for the root of this confidence, “self-hypnosis and complacency or signs that people are gradually learning to navigate even in a poorly predictable situation.” Out here in a Siberia, the Village of Manzherok and Novosibirsk, the third largest City in Russia, with an added glimpse of Kaliningrad, the farthest Western tip of Russia, all evidence points towards the latter, improved navigation. Once again in Russia, the boom has come crashing overhead and it is “ready about hard a’ lee!”.

The last time there was such a wholesale transition was in the 90s. Back then, most people were incapable of thinking, assessing, and adapting. They settled into a crash position waiting for the next hit. This transition was the kick in the ass people needed to challenge themselves and move on to the next phase of their lives. Life during SMO time, everything is different and still in motion. Moving on went in a myriad of directions from leaving or returning to Russia (done quietly this year without any social media fanfare), a career change, stopping drinking etc. This was the year of committing and taking responsibility for your choices.

Thus, the long Russian New Year/Christmas holiday (December 31-January 9) ended with a sigh of relief in the Village of Manzherok for everything except the weird weather and ongoing bloodshed. A neighbor praised the new Sber Bank 5 star ski resort opening festivities raving about how beautiful it was and how great it was to see so many families enjoying it, “but then there is Belgorod, AWFUL!!! Not Russki this or Ukrainski that, just awful for mankind”.

The next day several posts on the Village chat criticized the dazzling drone show as an “excess during active hostilities”. The drones were of particular offense considering a local Soldier’s Mothers group recently raised 15,400 rubles for drone parts and honey containers to support the SMO. The discussion went on to consider what is an appropriate way to celebrate the upcoming New Year landing on, “This is a matter of everyone’s conscience, we are on the side of modesty”. There were no official fireworks or drone displays.

The SMO is part of the background for everyday life with soldiers at the airport, recruitment posters dotting the roads, Z’s on cars and walls. There are school bake sales and other fundraisers soliciting money or home-grown canned goods. Women in various villages in the Republic meet for a couple of hours a day to make camouflage netting. One village documented the smooth shift from the spring, summer, fall khaki/green netting to winter white. In my village, the volunteers celebrated the New Year with their 11th net while another neighbor was busy making bed mats out of donated coats and other garments. RIA News posted a story about a medical soldier from another district who requested a van to evacuate the wounded where he is serving. The Regional Dermatological Dispensary responded by sending an UAZ van.

Social networks, What’s App group chats, Telegram, VK etc. play an important role in information exchange. Two types of videos appear on the chats. The first is forwarded patriotic messages or songs. Less often are videos targeted at people in Altai, sending thanks for donations or just saying “hi”. Our Village has not suffered a loss but occasionally memorials to those lost in other villages are posted on our chats. Deaths are covered in Telegram news channels and in the regional press often with photos and heart-breaking detail: village, family, education, interests etc. In October, one year after the mobilized soldiers departed, an article appeared covering the opening of a Memorial Book at the Polytechnical College to memorialize 21 of their graduates killed in the SMO.

As we neared the end of year two there was freakishly little snow, temperatures even reaching +10 and rain. This turned the bi-annual Katun River ice parade into a majestic daily event. Non-Siberian winter weather slowed down the construction of the ice sculpture exhibition, but overall the virtues of the new ski resort were not thwarted as snow making machines blanketed the 30 km of downhill trails.

The only thing everyone wants is an end to the killing but that sentiment, even when colored with a desire for negotiations, is still rooted for most in the belief that “something had to be done” after 8 years of fighting in the Donbass. You don’t get a sense of war weariness, just a desire for it to be over.

Thanks to the unexpected success on the economic front government, “to do” lists have morphed into action plans yielding such things as long promised bicycle paths in Akademgorodok. This does not diminish the anguish associated with the kinetic aspect of the conflict with the West. What it has done is provide economic opportunities that go beyond what would have been available if the SMO had not happened. Some of this is related to the enhanced salaries offered to volunteers and military factories working overtime. More notable where I live, is the impact of investments turned inward now that they are no longer welcomed in the West. Whether or not government and the people will take full advantage of these opportunities is not clear but among those opportunities is the possibility of renegotiating the social contract.

Stay tuned for Part Two: “It’s the economy stupid”

By Jack Matlock, Website, 2/23/24

Yesterday President Biden announced extensive economic sanctions against firms and individuals in Russia and in countries trading with them. The cited reason was Alexei Navalny’s death in prison. As of yesterday 29,708 persons have been killed in Gaza with munitions supplied by the United States and the United States has repeatedly vetoed calls by the vast majority of UN members for a cease-fire in Gaza.

Stalin once remarked that a single death is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic. Apparently, President Biden shares that view.

By Gordon M. Hahn, Landmarks, 2/19/24

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin was a tour de force of both journalism and political communication, with a few caveats. Here I will address the issue of Putin’s long historical preamble to Carlson’s first question as to why he chose to invade Ukraine precisely on February 24, 2024, escalating the Ukrainian civil war to a NATO-Russia Ukrainian War.

This was not one of Putin’s communication successes during the interview. Many Americans were perplexed, consternated, and/or irritated by Putin’s long introductory exegesis on Russian history in response to a question regarding the reasons he chose to invade Ukraine when he did. But Putin did not do this to filibuster or avoid answering the question. He gave us a review of more than a thousand years of mostly Russian but also Ukrainian history and relations between Russia and the West for several very Russian reasons.

First, in that part of the world and particularly in Russia, history is the root of all existence: past, present, and future. The past explains the present and may foretell the future. History is sacred, not just because it is powerful but because, for many Russians, it has a larger, even religious meaning. Many Russians’ interpretation or view of history is defined directly or indirectly by the teleology of Orthodox Christian eschatology regarding the second coming of Christ and the advent of the Kingdom at the end of time. History is a phenomenon often guided by God and with a meaning defined by God’s world-historical project.

None of the above means that all Russians, or even all those Russians who have an Orthodox view of the meaning of Russian and/or world history, apply an Orthodox Christian model to their views on various historical or contemporary issues. On the other hand, this kind of thinking influences the culture and thus even the thinking of Russian non-believers and even atheists. For example, Soviet communists developed a proletarian model of a coming communist utopia that replaced the Orthodox utopian vision of their forebears.

Second, the teleological approach to history and Russian history—that they have meaning and even a predetermined outcome of one kind or another—conveys to Russians’ vision of world and/or Russian history as being integral or whole. Russians prefer and in good part aspire to the unity of their history, and this follows from their habit of viewing history as having a single meaning, goal, or outcome, whether under or aside from God. The single, predetermined end unites the historical process. As I have written elsewhere, Putin himself has called for preserving the unity of Russian history by respecting all its different periods as a single history that belongs to each and every Russian.

I wrote in my book Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture Thought, History, and Politics that Russians have a general tendency to aspire to, or to assume, the existence of wholeness or the condition of wholeness (tselostnost’ in Russian). Russian tselostnost’ includes monist tselostnost’ or simply monism (a unity between God and Man, the Divine and the material, spirit and matter), universalism (the wholeness of the world or parts of the world), communalism (social unity), and solidarism (political, national, and identity wholeness). Across Russian history, numerous Russian writers, theologians, philosophers, political, religious, and opinion leaders have articulated these five (historical, monist, universalist, communalist, and solidarist) kinds of wholeness in their work.

The desire for historical wholeness has particular resonance in the Russian mind when considering Ukraine, or, more precisely, Kiev. As Putin emphasized in his opening monologue to Tucker Carlson, the Russian state and Russian Orthodox Church were founded in Kiev. He reviewed the continuity between Kievan Rus and Muscovite, then Imperial Russia, and the interconnections between Russia and Ukraine across history, up through the Soviet period into today’s post-Soviet Russia. Thus, if one takes Kiev and thus Ukraine as well out of Russia and its history, then this leaves shattered: the integrality of Russian history and of the Russian state (having implications for political solidarist tselostnost’ and identity), as well as the integrality of the Russian Church (having implications for Russian monist tselostnost’). But Russians would deny this is possible: all these form a single whole.

With regard to Ukraine, historical tselostnost’ is intertwined with universalist and solidarist tselostnost’. Universalism presumes and might logically be preceded by smaller, narrower unifications. Semi-universalisms popular among Russians are pan-Eurasianism, pan-Orthodoxy, and pan-Slavism. Many Russians are enamored by the idea of, and support the unity of, the eastern Slavic peoples: the Great Russians (Rusians), the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the White Russians (Belorussians). In this view, this ‘triune’ of peoples forms a united Russian nation with overlapping cultures, languages, and familial ties, as Putin himself has argued. If the Russian triune is a single nation, formed albeit by a trinity or troika of essentially Russian nationalities, then Russian solidarism, which is the most politically relevant of the Russian tselostnosts, would lend Russians a preference for some form of at least minimal ‘national’ political and ontological (identity) unity. In these ways, with regard to Ukraine, historical tselostnost—historicism, if you will—is closely tied to and supports the values of universalism, solidarism, and corresponding popular feelings.

None of this means necessarily that any particular Russian or even a majority of Russians requires that Ukraine or Kiev remain part of territorial Russia of the Russian state. However, it does mean that Ukraine’s and Kiev’s turn against Russia, so encouraged and cultivated by the West, is a blow to Russian national identity. Many Russians would be quite happy if Ukraine were to join the Russia-Belarus Union, strengthening the interconnectedness of the Russian triune. In lieu of all this, Kiev’s turn against Russia by seeking NATO membership and attacking ethnic Russians, and more recently, the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, is a harsh blow to Russian honor, an aspect of international relations that has been unduly ignored, as Andrei Tsygankov has pointed out.

All the above does not by itself explain why Putin decided to invade Ukraine on February 22, 2024. The main cause of that decision was national security: the threat posed by the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, being armed by NATO, and then, in our post-2014 world, attempting to seize back Crimea and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. However, turning Ukraine, in particular Kiev and historically Russian and Russian-populated eastern Ukrainian lands, against Russia added insult to injury, perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back, bringing Putin’s invasion earlier than it might have come otherwise as NATO expansion continued. Thus, Putin’s history lesson was intended to explain why, beyond security, Ukraine is such a sensitive issue for Russia. Ukraine’s break with Russia and movement toward the West is an offense to Russian honor and sense of wholeness, adding insult to injury, as it were. For the same reason, Putin mentioned twice that a large portion of Russian families have Ukrainian roots, relatives, and other ties.

What is regrettable and disappointing is that Putin’s historical discourse will have little to no influence on average Americans, who have a very limited interest in history, even their own history, much less that of a distant people or at least that of a political figure whom they have been trained to be suspicious of, if not to despise. Russians live in the past and future. For the present, Americans live in the present.

YouTube link here.

YouTube link here.

Video description:

Nicolai N. Petro, author of “The Tragedy of Ukraine” explains how the latest development on the battle field combined with the history of Ukrainian nationalism will lead to a process in which even the “Banderites” will want to strike a peace deal with Russia to preserve what is left of motherland—even against the will of the western neocon warmongers who have been wreaking havoc on Ukraine for the sole purpose of fighting a proxy-war with Russia. The great Ukrainian awakening is only a matter of time, and Russia knows it. The only question is how many more Ukrainian soldiers the nationalists are still willing to throw into their early graves before doing what should have been done in April 2022: a neutrality agreement and a true process of reconciliation. This tragedy must end and will end because at the end of the day, the neocons are willing to “fight to the last Ukrainian” but they have made it utterly clear that sacrificing their own is not on the menu. So wake up, Ukraine, and build a new future already without this poison that is the NATO neocon crowd.