Comment by Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov:
Will Ukraine become the new Afghanistan? Putin's state relies on military spending and wants to become a new USSR. But after the new oil sanctions, it is possible that it will fail economically in the same way as the Soviet empire. In other words, with the almost four-year-old war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin may torpedo and kill the Soviet imperial "legacy" instead of reviving it, as he thinks, urged on by the whole host of neo-Stalinist "fodder", including their uncritical agreement with his every move.
Is Russia heading towards the collapse of the USSR of the 1980s
This will hardly surprise you. Some time ago, the disgraced dissident film director Kirill Serebrennikov suggested something along similar lines: that Putin, vocally or not, considers himself the new Stalin/Rurik/Alexander II etc. - and the parallels with the late "evil empire" are not far from the mind.
Only with the proviso that the context and times are different - Gorbachev and later Yeltsin believed that the path should be middle (between "The West is not our enemy" and "Let's preserve Russian greatness"), i.e. to go through a kind of specific "repair section" of liberalization and a functioning market economy.
But today's tsar-father in the Kremlin is building a dark reactionary-conservative semi-satrapy with siege thinking, in which the aforementioned leaders are declared traitors. Remember: authoritarianism, bordering on dictatorship, cannot exist without several types of enemies - from internal "with party ticket", through the opposition émigré community, to geopolitical hysteria towards the collective West (and without a drop of gratitude to this same Anglo-Saxon West for its decisive help of any kind during the Patriotic War).
It also seems to me that Putin has set himself a nationalist-expansionist trap, from which he cannot get out, even if he wanted to, except with his feet forward and funeral marches. The concept of "saving face in the world" is Confucian, i.e. Chinese (what an irony!); Today Vladimir Vladimirovich can project platonic cave USSR-shadows on the politically serf majority petrified by fear of the regime, but there is no way he can get out of the military situation, saving face (not that he wants to, well, we are skimming over the anthropological analysis based on relatively scarce information).
By the way, on the subject of saving face: don't you remember another tragic situation in history, in which the cyclophrenia and "saving face" of the leader threw the old and the children, almost without weapons, into the approaches to Berlin against Zhukov's victorious Red Army? The context is different, I am not making a parallel, but the obsession of the sole leader to save face has brought all sorts of horrors. Remember the no less tragic king Pyrrhus of Epirus, who fought with the Roman Republic, barely won at Asculum and bequeathed to us the expression "Pyrrhic victory" - just to save face, i.e. some dignity, although he is aware that it is a matter of time before Magna Graecia falls under Roman rule.
However, these quick references should not distract us from Putin's state, which wants its own in more than one sense - it de facto deifies Nevsky and Suvorov, I have already said about Stalin. Until recently, it was like this: we know that Eastern cunning takes advantage of Western worship of rules, i.e. Putin, with a wink, leaves the impression that he can sit at the negotiating table. And here the centuries-old, power-oriented Eastern anthropology intervenes - we will do whatever we want externally, while we kick the ball in front of the West, because the East, in general, originates thought, and those there with their nonsense about rights and freedoms will sooner or later "land" on us.
This, of course, is only part of Putin's thinking. Yes, it will make the most of the new indecisive Trumpism and the kind eyes towards China, slowing down the ball, but at most by the end of the decade it may collapse on its own.
Because it is based on the wrong premise, i.e. on a wrong a priori argument - that Russia can be autarkic, self-sufficient (despite the 19 types of sanctions), while in fact it is advancing towards the economic collapse of the USSR in the 1980s, when the war in Afghanistan de facto brought down the system mainly due to the unbearable military costs.
I will also add a few more anthropological touches - the love and aspiration of the Russian masses towards bureaucracy (not to mention Chekhov or Gogol), the fear of landlordism, etc. And that the experience of the USSR, albeit in a different context, teaches us that today's Ukrainian war is of the "Afghan" type, i.e. a road to nowhere.
A very important clarification and parallel: in Russia, just like in the time with Afghanistan, only mothers and the Ministry of War know about the soldiers' victims. Everything is official, like in their joke about the exploded Chinese nuclear power plant - victims, to put it bluntly, no. That is, everyone "fell for the homeland", and the average Russian, irradiated by the depleted uranium of the official media, does not know and will not learn the number of victims in Ukraine.
Putin has set himself a super task
Let me remind you: for any objective observer of the processes in Putin's Russia, it has long been mercilessly clear that today's father, fed with the unsweetened milk of the KGB during the collapse of the Soviet empire, has set himself something like a super task - to restore the military and geopolitical power of the USSR, as he dreams of it. And to acquire - as far as possible - parts of its territory that it considers "primordial" (among them Bulgaria, spokesman Solovyov has already said so once).
However: this is also the unconscious projection of an older kind of geo-nostalgia, to earlier imperial times, turning Orthodoxy into a kind of pneumatic cultural hammer, so that this, in my opinion, statist and "Third Rome"-delusion can be realized in reality. Hardly, but it is good to understand.
Today's Russian internal propaganda relies on the almost universal trauma in the Russian "psyche" due to the collapse of the multinational Soviet "mega-basilica" (projection of all-tsarist power over the peoples); Putin's Russia, as we said, did not hesitate to declare Gorbachev and Yeltsin traitors and agents of the a priori enemy (the West), ergo - a future new USSR. But without taking into account those who, in a way, treacherously demolished the great construct to help establish a unipolar, American-centric world.
And now here he is, Putin - the "legitimate heir" of the Ruriks, Alexander II "the Liberator" and above all Stalin, who will once again turn this world into a Russian one.
It won't happen, even he knows it. The small details that today the context is completely different (there are such "realities" as China, BRICS, India and the EU, why not Japan), are omitted or the mass opinion is instilled that those on the southeastern border (who in turn rave about a new Celestial Empire) can be our military-economic friends (after all, in 1949 we helped the future bloodthirsty Mao and his Chinese comrades to win the civil war and practically take power to this day), while the EU are some weaklings who follow incomprehensible self-imposed protocols and babble about horizontal authority and the rule of law.
While "the law" in Russia, as we know, there is one and it is written in pure Russian - from here to that fence it is ours and it is our historical right, accordingly we have the task of the authorities to collect it.
Naturally, no one officially in today's Russia views the war in Afghanistan as a pure late communist adventure and de facto failure, which thinkers like Akunin have long reminded us of as one of the main factors in the collapse of the USSR.
Here is an amusing cultural parallel of mine - while the West, with all its social and other problems, after the Second World War wanted to develop like a kind of Athens (with democracy, culture as a priority and only then a shield and sword), the USSR seemed to choose to be Sparta - everything went to the military-industrial complex and the space race, at the expense of the little man in the "wide homeland", who was barely putting together some invisible personal budget for vodka, soft "doctoral" salami and cucumbers. And when the unwinnable war against the Western-armed mujahideen collapsed like a house of cards, the Soviet system logically followed suit. In this sense (I emphasize for the third time, in a different context), Putin's invasion of Ukraine is somewhat similar to that of the late 1980s.
Of course, one of the most shocking things today is that the religious element with the Afghans is missing, but the atrocities are no less, even though nominally we are talking about "Orthodox cousins" (or immanently their own, even more disgusting). Here is one of the most perfidious aspects of Putin's project-empire - the Ukrainian is both historically "ours", "Little Russian" (at the moment in the Russian media you will hardly find the phrase "Kievskaya Rus"), and it is the dehumanized enemy number one.
Why? Well, simply because it defends itself. That is, we also have a collective unconscious quasi-Jungian element in the naughty child Ukraine, who chose to run away from home and oppose Russian paternalism.
Nothing new under the Russian sun
Despite today's ubiquitous access to information (also spurred by artificial intelligence), let's take into account that we don't live there, in the Russian Chekhov or Gogol village, thank God, and someone would doubt our objectivity. Still, in Russia, despite the actually ridiculous and ineffective sanctions, including the new ones, people live well in the larger cities, and in the countryside they simply survive, as with the supposedly abolished serfdom; overheads and food are relatively affordable, unlike services and the opportunities to aim for good added value. But in general, the broad poor mass has long been indoctrinated and somehow desensitized by daily vodka and incessant propaganda. That is, nothing new under the pale Russian sun.
Still, freedom in Russia has never been part of their basic (mental) consumer basket.
Yes, we don't live there, but fortunately we can read in depth, at least some of us. And here I am, reading and reading all sorts of smart Russian de facto emigrants like historian Vladislav Zubok, a professor at the London School of Economics. And he, in one of his latest books ("Collapse: The Fall Of The Soviet Union") seems to agree with me in absentia - the majority today is projected with the Soviet dream, because they didn't live in queues for elementary things like bad beer and sheets of hash (when they exist at all), and Putin's government is making the most of the media, including restoring the cult of Stalin and the victory in the Patriotic War.
Zubok is right about something else: Russia, mentally, culturally, "software" and anyway, it was not ready for the attempt at democracy in the 1990s; this, logically, turned into something of a "Latino"-doomed experiment, in which market forces swept away both incomes and the post-Soviet space. Ergo, a false start to the cherished Russian democracy.
Is there a wonderfully educated minority there today? Is it a great nation, after all? Of course it is. But the poverty-stricken majority still feels as if the socio-economic rug has been pulled out from under the party. Imagine about 100 million people, even without having seen Zvyagintsev's films, who feel unprotected, vulnerable and humiliated. And tell me if it is difficult to sell them the Putin idea through national propaganda.
The economic catastrophe and social traumas from the collapse of the Soviet Union do not explain, much less justify, what is happening now. However, they point to the possibility of a major turnaround and historical surprises. One of them is the idea of a coup - be it by the rejected oligarchs or a "military court". Honestly, however, I do not count on this. The history of coups in Russia traditionally leads to chaos and destruction: from the pro-Polish against Vasily in 1610, through the White Guard of Lavr Kornilov in 1917, to the "putsch" against Gorbachev in 1991.
I mean, I don't know, I'm not a fortune teller, even Vanga is silent from the grave on this issue. Will Ukraine become the new Afghanistan and Putin collapse under the pressure of the amazing military spending? Will China and the BRICS be his "friends" in the doomed campaign against the democratic West?
And what are Trump and Vance, who recently refused a meeting in Hungary with "Voldemort", doing or not doing? My explanation: even they realize that Putin, quite benignly and cynically, is playing them; he somehow Slavicly believes that Americans are stupid and easy to deceive.
However, he is about to learn that he is negotiating with a man who, for a number of cultural reasons, plays the fool while testing all kinds of democratic boundaries, including sending "hoods" to protesters in his own country. And he is difficult to guess psychologically, because he is unpredictable.
Putin is making a huge mistake that will probably cost him a lot - that he considers his comrade Xi a friend. Otherwise, it is very clear - while we are supposedly negotiating with Trump, the war is going on, I will take everything from Donbas to Mariupol.
While, I wink, everyone is still buying Russian oil and gas, bypassing sanctions. The hope, without much hope, is that this should stop, but it cannot stop; as is the Trumpist "we will give him Eastern Ukraine so that he can calm down".
Finally, if there is anything funny here at all: Putin's is "hamskaya vlast" ("rude", "simple"), as the former noble valet Khvorobyev shouted in "The Golden Calf", dreaming of communists.
The fact that in Ukrainian "khvoroba" means "disease" (with the then wink from Ilf and Petrov), today it somehow makes it even more symbolic.
And we and you sit and hope that the next one will not be, for example, the former USSR-republic of Moldova.