What Russia says about ourselves
One of the pleasures of writing for an old-school blog is not being assigned a boring end-of-year review or best-of piece. Plenty of those this week elsewhere.
These two reports by BBC News Russia editor Steve Rosenberg are more relective. The first examines how Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed Russia.
“Special Military Operation” Russia feels different from both communist Russia and independent Russia. “The economy and industry here have been virtually put on a war footing,” says Rosenberg, since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Not every Russian supports the war, Rosenburg finds, but “many Russians do buy into the Kremlin’s alternative reality, according to which in Ukraine Russia is fighting Nazis and NATO and fighting to defend Russia.”
It is an eerie window into a culture other than our own in which the person beside you on the tram exists in a separate reality of alternative facts. It is a reminder, and not a comforting one, that in some ways MAGA Republicans, for all their chest-thumping claims to patriotism, are more Russian than American. Some might even agree.
Rosenburg’s conversation about the war in Ukraine with a Russian woman from that other reality could be a Good Liars interview with a MAGA Republican. Here, except for sporadic mass shootings, the war is cultural. Bet you didn’t know the Nazis won World War II. They left Germany and emigrated to the U.S. The government is full of them, says a man outside an event featuring Eric Trump and retired general Mike Flynn.
Ask Flynn, “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?” and he responds “the Fifth.” Ask a guy wearing a Confederate flag tee shirt if he is pro- or anti-slavery, and he replies, “No comment.”
Ghosts of the past
Rosenberg visits an abandoned Russian base near Berlin. “The Forbidden City” in Wünsdorf, Germany was built by the Nazis and occupied by the Soviets after WWII. Russia once had 800 garrisons and half a million Soviet troops in East Germany. Now the base is a ghost town. Again, eerie. Moscow once believed its presence in Germany was a permanent expression of Russian empire.
Now it is gone. It is what Putin’s push into Ukraine is about reclaiming. He hopes to Make Russia Great Again.