I forget where I first heard the saying, “Moscow doesn’t believe in tears,” but I understood it right away. An old Russian proverb, it fit with the intense pessimism of 19th century Russian nihilism, and it fit with the willingness of Trotsky and Lenin to kill millions in what they called a Civil War after the October (1917) Revolution, but what really was a consolidation of power after their successful coup d’état against the Social Democrats who had earlier succeeded the Tsarist government.
Add in World War 2, when between 10 and 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died (in a war precipitated by the cynical Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), as well as so many prisoners who died in Stalin’s “Gulags,” or remote prison camps, and it’s quite easy to believe that “Moscow doesn’t believe in tears.”
These insights inform my opinion of what Putin and Russia is up to today. Putin is willing to kill thousands and thousands of Ukrainians (including Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East of that country whom he has pretended to be protecting). Why not – people always die in war, don’t they? People have died in war before, and will die in war in the future, but “Russia World,” as it’s sometimes called, will last a long time (maybe Putin’s own version of a thousand-year Reich, or maybe it’s just Russian exceptionalism).
Young, rural and poor (and poorly trained) Russian soldiers are dying, just being thrown into battle with no more value attached to them than to an artillery shell. Sounds cruel, but remember the battle of Stalingrad in World War 2 when Soviet intelligence agents would shoot and kill any soldiers who retreated in the face of a seemingly unsurmountable enemy – soldiers have long been expendable in Russia. Remember, also, that Soviet Red Army soldiers who were captured by the Germans in other battles during that war were often imprisoned for ‘letting themselves’ be captured.
Well, “Moscow doesn’t believe in tears.”
Russia World
Now, for “Russia World.” What’s that? Russia World is a belief in a kind of Russian exceptionalism, that Russia is different and better than Europe, not merely that it doesn’t want to be part of Europe. I’d argue that we should be wary of anyone or any ideology that claims to be exceptional.
I mentioned the “thousand-year Reich” above, which admittedly was an overt comparison of Putin to Adolph Hitler. There may not be the same level of race superiority, but maybe the same level of cultural and political supremacism, as well as a belief in some imagined future that would justify any tragedy in the present. This is not a simple case of “the ends justify the means,” which is a rationalization that everyone makes, but it is a belief in an imagined future with no proof whatsoever that the imagined future will come to pass. People are being sacrificed for what is a chimera, a figment of imagination. It is this aspect of what Russia is doing today, sacrificing people today for “Russia World,” that I think is almost a psychosis, not merely an ideology.
The above represents what I think is the philosophical basis for what Putin is doing today. It certainly represents the kind of thinking advanced by far-Right Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, whose Right-wing daughter was murdered in a car bomb last week. (Russia is being mocked for saying Ukrainian intelligence or security services were behind the bombing, but I wouldn’t dismiss the circumstantial evidence they’ve presented just yet.)
Russia’s Military Strategy
I’ve also become concerned by our own narcissism in thinking the Russian military is crap, and that we in the West are somehow being vindicated by how well the Ukrainian resistance seems to be doing. We should consider the possibility that Putin has held back his best units and best equipment in the battle against Ukraine, in part because he would need the best equipment and units to fight NATO countries if it comes to that, and in part because of a plausible scenario in which he’s tasked his military to subjugate Ukraine with lesser units and lesser equipment and may still be demanding the same thing – you will win with what I’ve given you! “No tears” for the foot soldiers, and no tears for the commanders, either.
And it’s truly arrogant to think that “we” somehow are standing up to Putin in any case. No – it’s Ukrainians who are standing up to Putin. Having good equipment is important, but the willingness to die seems to be the key factor here – lots of Ukrainians are willing to die for their cause. But the Ukrainians are not “us,” and “we” in the West have not shown that “we” are willing to die for the cause of democracy in any great numbers. This is largely what I mean by using the word “narcissism” here. “We” should not be so taken with ourselves.
Still, we’re not as delusional as Putin, or Dugin, or others who believe in “Russia World.” I sometimes think of “the immortality of the psychosis,” a phrase I’ve coined. Belief in some kind of ordained future of a country, or belief in anything for which there is no empirical evidence, is a psychosis. The basic definition of a psychosis, if you work it through, is not merely a belief in something that is untrue, but that it is an unchanging belief and that nothing can ever change that belief. That’s what I mean by the immortality of the psychosis – it never changes. So, when does a psychosis end?
When the host organism dies.