Caught in a game of extremes along the Russophile-Russophobes axis, spurred on by Putin's aggression in Ukraine, both camps in Bulgaria know next to nothing about today's Russia. And more precisely, for the two Russias. By Ivaylo Noisey Tsvetkov.
They are not necessarily and entirely urban versus rural Russia, although there is that too. Urbanization in our country along the Sotsa, orchestrated or not, copied theirs, albeit on a microscopic scale, accordingly, the original severe cultural rifts of the “Moscow vs. the countryside”, and Peter looks down, reads Akhmatova and Brodsky, listens to “Cinema” and considers everyone else on the broad side to be slightly simpletons. In the endless countryside, they have exactly the same offensive expression as ours – that Moscow (and Peter) are not Russia.
But both economically and civilizationally there are actually two Russias. My kind of guide in this huge cultural quagmire is an old acquaintance from the exchange in international magazines, Ilya (the name has been changed at his express wish – b.a.). Ilya is a determined representative of the covertly or overtly oppressed urban intelligentsia, for whom dangerous times have come since Putin's invasion of Ukraine. About two years ago, he was even quite seriously questioning me about what and how he was here, because, not jokingly, he had been scared that he might have to emigrate. His hobby, apart from subtly satirizing the regime in his accessible (and still alive progressive) media, including magazine “Maxim”, whose Russian edition remains the best in the world, is to correct me in the style of “in Russian you have to say edi-how are you, you speak like old times”. I listen and record, which makes him laugh even more.
No one, in any of the available Russias, thinks for a second about Bulgaria
Ilya is around 42-43, lives in Moscow for rent (somewhere near “Turgenevskaya”, which doesn't mean anything to me, but apparently it is good there), is a partner in several companies, including a small advertising agency, while father in an international one (I don't know how and I didn't ask); can afford a relatively “light“ life, because he is divorced and has no children, but he often and eloquently complains about the expensive things in the Russian capital. He means restaurants and clubs. Sometimes I joke with him that if he is alive at all and even waving his flag among the fashionable Moscow crowd in the bars, then Putin is not such a monster; in 1936, it must have been taken away with a truck a long time ago. He, in turn, swears colorfully (alas, I can't quote him), but he taught me the most important thing from our point of view, which I also knew from my cultural studies before – no one in Russia, neither from the first, nor from the second, nor from the seventh, thinks for a second about Bulgaria. Ergo, our struggles here and storms in a glass of water seem, to say the least, comical.
I know, I know: the suspicion is that Putin's Russia invests in several types of propaganda in Bulgaria, and we brag to each other about how important we are and even divide politically on the issue. Nothing like it, friends and neighbors – insulting or not, the people of Smolenskaya-Sennaya Ploshchad on the Sadovom koltse do not care about us at all (since they are concerned with various trifles such as the USA, China, Africa, the former Soviet Muslim republics, etc.). Ilya himself even laughs and shouts that the new generations simply do not know where and what Bulgaria is. Payetamu, stop overestimating both "Vazrazhdane" and Radev, and whoever you think is fed by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As well as the infamous dream Russian outlet to the Straits, for which we exist as a nation. Putin's Russia thinks globally and only occasionally locally (for example, if NATO deploys nuclear weapons in our country).
The regime is anything but stupid
One more cultural touch: when I speak to him in Bulgarian, since, right, supposedly Slavic languages, etc., Ilya understands absolutely nothing. So much for the Slavophilism of a century or so ago. We speak Russian, although we can also speak English. I shout, hello, that's how I thank you in part for the Liberation, and he grins and shouts, yes, I think I heard that we freed you. He is kind, he doesn't say a word.
It is time to shock not only the “Rusorobian“, but also the Euro-Atlantic community: from the point of view of the urban middle class, as far as we can assume that there is one (not quite stratified), living in urban Russia is not bad. Of course, metrics are infinite and infinitely relative, but let's say the regime keeps utilities relatively cheap, especially heating; there is also logic, given that Putin's Russia is still an energy giant, despite the half-hearted sanctions. The average monthly income in the city (with all its economic conditions) is about 600 euros, but not only overheads, but also food and basic services, are far more affordable in terms of prices than in our country – the regime is anything but stupid, and the broad support for it, especially among the masses, is also due to the fact that it reaches, and only it knows how, in a militarized, partly sanctioned economy, it manages to maintain a fairly tolerable “level“ of life. (Ilya: “The thing about sanctions is a complete joke. Western companies find ways to circumvent them.“)
In short, today's Putin's Russia looks a lot like a relatively successful quasi-USSR for its citizens and especially peasants, but here comes the big propaganda fault – while the urban and “metropolitan“-side is relatively free, the rest of the infinite is firmly stuck in the Third World.
It turns out to be the reverse of Achilles and the tortoise: Achilles has long outstripped her, and there is nothing paradoxical about that. The Achilles are the minority elites in Moscow and Peter, plus some larger cities in general, while the tortoise is impenetrably poor rural Russia. As under “rural“ we must also include a huge part of the smaller cities, because simple statistics show that only 36-something percent live outside cities (imagine how depopulated the endless expanses of the Urals to the east are). Against the background of this problem, consider our otherwise fair cry for Northwestern Bulgaria.
But enough about who eats more soft sausages and who - Italian salami. It was about the small, cultured, normal, pro-Western, “first“ Russia, and on the other hand the masses, drained of any "second" thought of their own, indoctrinated by the new Putin totalitarianism, in whose historical “mental software” it is recorded that they are God's nation, threatened on all sides by the enemy (capitalist) West. And that only “the father” can keep them.
Stalinism still thrives today
What is scientifically interesting about the second Russia is that, despite the preserved traumatic memory of the terrible violence of Stalin's power, Putin's neo-Stalinism finds terribly fertile ground even in the minds of young people. While central-city Russia is aware of the monstrous crimes of the mustachioed man against his own people, the masses are eating the poisoned patriotic cake of the Patriotic War. They are presented with the deceptively compelling argument that Stalin is a symbol of great self-sacrifice; no one anywhere says that the Georgian freak thrashed millions of his own in peacetime before throwing millions more against the brown plague. And that this is truly an unthinkable achievement of the great Red Army, aided logistically by the much-hated West today. The second is not written in the textbooks. In them there is mostly the inhuman heroism at Stalingrad, for example, and nothing about the thrown Badev manpower by the Zhukovites.
Putin's Russia teaches and reprograms the minds of its own people through rudimentary quasi-Stalinist propaganda – we defeated Nazism. Yes, you defeated him, chapeau, with incomparably the most casualties and the great effort of the Soviet peoples, led by the Russian one, but it is good to know also about the stupidity of the warned Stalin, about “Molotov-Ribbentrop”, about the partition of Poland , for the logistical help from the West, etc. I know – without Stalingrad today Europe could look much different, there could even be no EU; but this is super convenient for Putin's current concept that Europe owes its freedom solely to the USSR.
Bread, soft salami and propaganda
And now for the second Russia, which is largely barely making ends meet, especially in the current war effort: confused ordinary people, brought up in Soviet values, who mainly consume bread, soft beef salami and propaganda. They are the ideal social basis for the Kremlin's war. Speaking against the war in Ukraine is criminalized, that is, if you are any kind of awake citizen from, for example, Omsk, with an anti-war attitude, nothing good awaits you – not from the cops, not from your own community. And here something very important – only educated and globalized Russians can afford to openly express their views. The majority of people in the second Russia have never left the country and do not even possess a document to travel abroad. Plus, as per Gogol, there is a huge army of officials in places who are responsible for the smooth functioning of the Kremlin's military-political machine.
At the same time, the Russian business community has taken up import substitution and is busy devising ways to circumvent Western sanctions. The upper middle class and the leadership of the state-funded structures are pushed by the higher-ups to show loyalty to the war and do so as if they were dealing with some new state regulation. Therefore, we are talking about a real totalitarian state that masks mild violence through national propaganda. Everyone, in any public office, without necessarily being forced, must “swear“ in the invasion war in Ukraine. Yes, Putin no longer sends people from "Lyubianka" to "pick up" people (or who knows, we have no information), but is building anew a kind of Russian empire – with official speaking, which, according to Ilya, doesn't go well with most people, but they don't dare to call. And this is the tragedy of the Russian people of the second Russia – they just don't dare to call.
In this sense, there is a new “king”, who, however, has both "Oreshnik" missiles and nuclear weapons. There's more: the majority of current Russian officials and Kremlin-connected businessmen have direct or family ties to Soviet-era elites. About 60% of those ruling the country in various leadership positions originate from the middle and lower levels of the Soviet nomenclature. That is, the USSR has not completely collapsed and this, disgusting or not, is a fact.
What is the second Russia
This is the second Russia. She, although drunk most of the time, is confident in Putin's brutally propagandized new Russian empire.
If the variable nature of polling results in an authoritarian society means that we do not know the exact degree of mass support for aggression in Ukraine, we do know that the informed and globalized elites in Russia itself, who see to it that the Russian state functions without special difficulties, support the war. Because war is money.
Ilya calls me a “hopeless cynic”. He knows this and that, about philosophy and various things, we even talk about a de facto third Russia – that of Russian emigration, forced or not (this is also a heterogeneous group, but there – due to the tactile enlightenment of the encounter with the world, especially the First, the sentiment is mostly progressive or at least relatively liberal.) But for this third Russia – other times, with the help of other bright minds.
OK, it's just Ilya, you say. Well, he is more of an elite, but also somewhat epitome of today's Russian, because as a sociologist and lawyer by education, he knows well the processes in the Second Russia as well. This is how Solomon's wisdom in “Ecclesiastes” and in this case it works great – he who gathers knowledge (about Putin's Russia) gathers grief. So, Det calls Mayakovsky, forgive me, Comrade Kostrov. With all the breadth and sincerity inherent in me.
This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and DV as a whole.