Good morning, Vietnam · 10:29am Mar 1st, 2022
My foreign friends often ask me – the very few that know I’m Russian – what does the average Russian think about Ukraine.
You can see why I have always kept this private now.
I’m probably losing net access soon-ish – even if the nukes don’t fly, someone will eventually cut me off. Just who cuts Russia off the net in the end, I couldn’t tell you, and while for historical reasons, it will be hard, they’ll manage.
Might as well come clean.
The answer to the “average Russian” question is a lot more involved than you might think, and people abroad seem to have a very strange picture of what’s going on in Russia, mostly due to the language barrier. The answer is…
I honestly have no idea.
The important part: Nobody has an idea.
Russian government spent an entire decade destroying information, this and other information, but this in particular.
Not hiding, not obscuring, destroying.
It’s like when you scale a JPEG down, turn the quality slider down, save, reload, and then scale it back up. The information is lost. You can draw what’s missing from memory or from general familiarity, – that’s what an AI upscaler does, really – but you can’t verify if you got it right or not. Do that just a little, and you might miss small but important details, like rank and force markings on a uniform. Do that hard enough, and you stop recognizing things on the image at all.
The first time I realized this was what was happening was the 2012 elections, which is, admittedly, pretty late in the grand scheme of things. In my defense, refuge in audacity is very much a real thing, so learning to recognize it took some adjustment. I was a decade younger then, and thought they were just very corrupt.
I mean, it’s Russia, a certain level of corruption is kind of normalized.
Sociologically, elections are an expensive way to produce a truly massive opinion poll. When conducted properly, and more importantly, properly studied, it can be very revealing. You have to account for people who don’t vote on principle, for people not eligible for voting for whatever reason, people who want to vote but don’t have a candidate representing their views, and all of these and other groups not reflected in the final vote count still matter, and can be very large – but all of this is data.
Data that can be used to produce a coherent picture of what’s actually going on, regardless of whether it eventually goes into getting someone into actual power or not.
They falsified these elections. Strictly speaking, that wasn’t the first time they did that, that was just the first time when I had immediate cause to think they affected the outcome enough to make a major difference, rather than just make one or another local authority look good before their superiors. I could estimate how far they were falsified, mathematically, based on published data, and I did – though if you want details on that, there are a bunch of people who are better at electoral mathematics and wrote more about it, you can still find their conclusions and check their work if you try.
But there is no way in hell to know what was in the piece of information about the Russians that they have destroyed.
They have done this so that their lies would be the only source and thus “become the truth.”
Let me once again reiterate. Tiny morsels of truth – on average, a doctoral thesis contains maybe five sentences worth, the rest is connective tissue, arguments and proof – get people academic titles, because obtaining them is actually hard.
Truth is expensive.
But once you destroy the actual truth, you’re suddenly free to present whatever bullshit you really want to be true. If you want to see a sample of the bullshit, check the speeches of Russia’s representatives in the UN, but then multiply by a million or two and remove all contradicting sources of information.
1. You could basically rely on something they vehemently deny being true.
I’m not sure who came up with this ideology – smart money is on Vladislav Surkov, but that, too, could have been a lie. While it was common for the Soviet government to lie,1 I doubt any government engaged in illusion-building and blatant falsehood quite as much as the post-Yeltsin Russian government. They’ve been doing this for many years, and not just with the elections. Russian TV is painful to watch, which is why almost everyone I know personally subsists on rumor, Internet-delivered news collected by the progressively more scarce and constantly persecuted free journalists, and torrents.
2. With suspicious account names that look more like coded UUIDs.
3. Some, after getting visits from those cops.
The “average Russian” could be someone like me – quietly wishing the bullshit would stop, or waiting for when it inevitably bumps into reality hard enough to collapse. In isolation, because speaking out usually results in an army of well-organized trolls2 or happy and active volunteers descending on you, when it isn’t the actual cops. When most of your friends have left the country behind3 and lost touch, participating in a protest is generally ill-advised until the crowd doing so gets really big. Kudos to the Ukrainians, but it’s so much easier to protest when you have friends who will fight the cops with you.
The “average Russian” could be like the woman I met in line to the ATM on the first day, who wondered why is everyone standing in line? “The president promised everything will be alright.” I couldn’t help but laugh into her face, – I lost count of the things the man promised – but that doesn’t change that she, too could represent “the average Russian.” She is, in fact, the most likely candidate. By the time I got to the ATM it was empty, by the way.
The “average Russian” could be that guy I saw in a comment thread, who wanted to, simultaneously, get rid of all the gays, the government officials, their entitled children and mistresses, and all the cops – he was apparently not clear just how far all those sets interpenetrate, if at all, but thought they were all at least closely related – by sending them to Ukraine.
The “average Russian” could be like some of those guys who spout anti-Ukrainian insults and drop everything to “fight the Nazi Ukrainian government” – the ones you usually never hear from again.
All of these represent some part of the population, but their relative proportions are unknown, and there are classes I can’t really summarize in a paragraph.
Anyone who says they actually do know to any degree of certainty is suspect. Some of these people lie for benign reasons, and some lie unknowingly. It’s the ones who lie knowingly that you have to worry about, but reading this post in English, you have to worry about them for reasons entirely different from mine.
You see, I don’t know just how many people believe the bullshit – I suspect this is a minority, but I can’t really substantiate that suspicion, and in fact, the ways Russians believe and disbelieve the bullshit are complex to start with – but based on the evidence of the past few days, I am quite certain that at the very least, Putin himself believes every word he said, because that is the only explanation I have that fits all the facts available.
Yes, about the nukes too.
Yes, this is insane.
I would remind you that one of the most popular Russian memes of the past decade was a large banner strung up between the towers of the Kremlin saying “Yeah, we’re fucked up in the head, so what?” but I guess that’s the first time you hear about that.
Language barriers are fun.
4. I also happen to have extended family in Ukraine.
This can’t end well, but I knew that back in 2013. The question is just how many people does it kill and how many things does it destroy or prevent before it ends,4 and since this is a question I can’t answer or measurably affect the answer of – nobody listens to me anyway, not anymore – it’s a moot point.
What worries me is that after this is over, every single average Russian that survives will, from there on, be blamed for it as if they personally started it. It’s already happening.
While on the other side of the border, everyone was deeply concerned. And quietly buying oil and gas, while selling stupidly expensive cars and yachts. And watches. Can’t forget the watches. Every single government official has a watch worth more than a car. Seriously, what is this obsession with watches…
We might be culpable, even considering the fact that, unlike the Germans, we didn’t vote our dictator in. He bought some, deluded others, chased off yet others, and cowed those that remained, but that wasn’t enough to vote him in. Some have simply grown up under him, and now don’t even have an idea what normal even is.
But all of you are just as culpable, just as indirectly. While he was selling Russia off to get control over the rest of it, someone was buying.
And if you think that you can wall up the border, leave us alone with this monster and his army of zombies, and consider the problem solved, you’re wrong.
…or we might all just die, and then nobody will have to worry about anything.
Sometimes, this feels like a viable option.
Lucky me, I know all this already, because I've had Oliver these past several years to explain to me in exacting detail what a surreal dystopian nightmare modern Russia is.
Now the rest of you get to learn too!
As long as communications are still up, we're here for you. Please stay safe.
If there is one thing my 40+ years of life have taught me (many of them spent online chatting with people from other nations/cultures), it's that there is never an "average <nationality>".
The best I can do is be friends with those who want to be friends, vote for the saner governments in my country, and keep writing words until my joints stop working altogether.
Be safe, please, and let us know if there is anything we can do to help.
5640538
Thoughts and prayers aren’t going to change things, sorry. :)
In fact, remember how everyone was amazed how Russians don’t give a fuck when the Chelyabinsk meteor fell? This is also the reason why we’re not protesting enough. People who gave a fuck are too demoralized to give a fuck anymore. People who were happy with the situation never had any fucks in the first place. We have a nationwide shortage of fucks.
Please send more fucks.
Well. I see why you've spent so much time dissecting the minutae of Equestria over the past decade. Goodness knows it was preferable to the real world.
I know happy thoughts won't change things, but I'm still hoping things work out well for the non-oligarchs in the long run. Especially little to no victim-blaming on an international scale.
5640540
Okay, but counterpoint:
The shaman.
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/337980406760734730/732335703454646396/shaman.jpg
#ExorcisePutin
I didn't know you were Russian, because you didn't seem to want us to know or speculate, and I went with it. In retrospect, I guess it was fairly obvious.
I'm sorry like hell that this is happening to you. Be safe, hoard what you need.
5640542
That is a good point.
…I suppose breaking him out is an option, in theory. Not something I could accomplish myself or with the resources of any people who would listen to me, though.
5640540
Please send more fucks.
My center's been full of fucks recently. But I don't think you'd want them. They do things like vomit in the back of trucks and run into other customers' cars in the parking lots of vendors.
I mean, they might accidentally run over somebody important by sheer happenstance, but seems unlikely.
I specifically bring up the taking of Chernobyl here. The land is worthless, but it was rendered that way by Soviet hands.
I don't have much to add here but to thank you for writing this. I've kept tabs on the situation, but reading a first-hand account from a familiar face (relatively speaking) is always different. My best wishes won't help the situation as you say, but again, just thank you for getting this out there.
That is astonishingly like what a lot of us in the US feel, also. Stay safe.
I genuinely feel very bad for you. I hope you remain safe. No one is responsible for the evil their government inflicts. And the conditions you describe sounds like they'd drive someone insane. Writing a blog critical of Putin and this situation took a lot of courage.
Be safe, friend.
Damn. This sucks for everyone involved...
You were the one who got me into more comprehensive world building, and even though I've largely moved on from MLP it helps my writing to this day.
Others have said this already, but I agree in that there is no true 'average' of a culture. The geometric and colorimetric average of a bunch of blue cubes and red pyramids would be a purple truncated square pyramid, but what does that really tell you about the blue cubes or the red pyramids?
Hope you make it through this. I'd send help if I knew how, but all my usual methods (PayPal, etc.) might be blocked due to the economic circumstances. But you'd know more about that than I would.
5640555
I think Georg is trying to say that we, too, are familiar with the effect of Russian disinformation campaigns. ;V
Joqes aside, though, the spread of misinformation is sadly something the US has a harder time with than authoritarian regimes like China and (to an extent) Russia. Y'all may not know what's going on over there when it comes to the state, but authoritarian states that can clamp down on unflattering information about the state (which leads to corruption and suffering) at least also have the ability to clamp down on info that is wildly incorrect. Freedom of speech is wonderful but trying to balance that with all the bullshit out there puts free societies at a marked disadvantage, especially since most people are not competent at separating truth from fiction.
5640575
I’ll be fine in that respect, I kind of expected some bullshit like that. Not quite on this level quite so fast, but I couldn’t get ready better than I did anyway.
Send money to Ukraine.
Good day. I am Russain too - but looks like we are on the different sides by the political views. Yes, Russia is not some kind of magical utopia and Putin is not Princess Celestia. But most Russians in Russia think about it like Churchill about democracy - it is bad but others are even worse. The view of Russia on the West as some kind of Evil Empire (even when we wanted to be friends with the West), NATO troops and bases closing to our borders, any kind of international laws that were stomped by the US and their lackeys agressions against Serbia, Iraq and so on, colour revolutions inspired by the West and much more - did not help either. Who can blame us for being scared?
Good luck Oliver, hope you stay safe.
5640607
Don’t tell me about “most.” You don’t have the numbers. Nobody has the numbers. (VCIOM? Pardon me, I am a sociologist, I know how the numbers are fudged.)
That, actually, was the entire point of this post, which I don’t think you actually read.
5640618
There are Yours point of view. Here are mine. I respect Your - hope You respect mine too.
Thank you for this insight, horrifying as it is. Wishing you all the best from the UK, please stay safe.
5640576 Well, instead of just Russian disinformation, I'd be broad enough to include *everybody* worldwide in that category. Particularly the media, because they are in a position where their jobs depend on getting people to pay attention to them, so "If it bleeds, it leads" is a considerable understatement, because they are more than willing to take a knife to the truth. And everybody with a Twitter account, who gets clicks by retweeting the most spectacular (and least probable) stories. So stay safe Oliver and everybody else in the mess, and try not to get too tied up in the constant flow of wild nuttiness from nuts.
"You can't believe everything you read on the internet."
--Abraham Lincoln
Things are the same in the US, my friend. It may be more "clumpy," but it's still standard operating procedure in most places, and it's becoming more naked all the time.
My only view of the "average" Russian comes from a friend who teaches at the university in Tyumen, and of course, his take is influenced largely by the subset of young university students. Not a good window onto the whole, but they seem to have a pretty realistic (if bleak) appraisal of the the situation. (Not unlike yours.)
Being the age that I am, and having lived through as much history as I have, I have run out of fucks to give for governments and nations, but I still have plenty for people. No populace of any nation is a monolithic block, but there will always be people who believe and act as if they are, because learning and thinking are hard. I don't think there is much that anyone can do about that.
They are merely a puff of wind, but you have my good wishes, anyway. If you find yourself in real need, and there is anything a person half the world away can do, please contact me.
удачи.
Vibes and sympathies, Oliver.
Thanks for writing this. That's a pile of insights I didn't have before.
You might want to read this article:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/03/the-universal-boosting-of-putin/
It is a very clear-sighted view of the situation by an British ex-diplomat, and comforting in that it proves that not everyone is taking a propaganda-based stance on this war. I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts on it.
I don't really know what to say. I wish you, personally, the best, for no greater attachment than having given me nice comments. Especially since Russia's economy is looking really really bad, and I cannot bring myself to consider this a bad thing for your sake. I am sorry.
The internet is so strange. In most ways we are enemies. But here we are.
5641009
The man says a lot of sensible things.
This phrase catches the eye:
Believing he actually did influence the 2016 US election would be ludicrous. What I believe actually happened, though, is that he ordered it to be done, ordered the waters to be muddied as far as possible, and when the dice rolled the right way, declared victory, Russians are very good at that.
More in general.
Some of these observations are to be taken with a grain of salt, but actually, they reinforce what I finished the post with. Maybe rendered a bit too emotionally. Or not emotionally enough. Nobody seems to have noticed it, nobody commented on it, everyone just wanted me to be safe.
The other, very important point:
While Putin was selling Russia off piece by piece to gain control over what remains, someone was buying.
While there may be no question Putin is the villain here, it’s not even the Russian population that enabled him, nor his “western masters”. (As some people I know actually say!) The notion of “people are the new oil” (yes, they really say that) only came about relatively recently as the 2014-2017 oil glut set in. Before that, it was enough to keep us slightly more sated than we were in the 90s and we were, largely, happy to pretend nothing was happening.
What enabled him for the entire time since 1998 was simply powerful people on the other side of the border who found profit in doing so, kept finding profit in doing so, and will now find profit in what is happening today, too.
And people like me will be left holding the bag in the end.
5641130
Sadly, that's true. I wish there was something I, or any of the people under the heel of the oligarchs could do about it.
Thanks for the feedback.
Thank you for the information, and good luck.
5640540
Damn. Your description makes me realize, this is what awful people are trying to turn America into too. Like you though, I don't know how to affect any of it...
5641130
Could you go into more specifics about who on the other side of the border was enabling Putin and how? Like, who he sold Russia off to in order to gain his level of power? I wouldn’t be surprised if he did - even dictators need to derive power from SOMEWHERE - but I’m just not sure what you’re referring to specifically.
5642890
I am not sure either, not in terms of names. I am, however, sure that there are well researched books written about it and quietly forgotten, and it’s obviously not any single individual, but a substantial number of people. Even Putin started small. The very earliest news article mentioning him, from 1992, details an accusation of receiving bribes to procure the licenses for export of raw materials that resulted in Petersburg (he worked for the mayor of Petersburg at the time) losing revenue to the tune of $122 million. It was all downhill from there.
You could ask Bill Browder, I’m sure the man has a list.