Putinism has triumphed not because the majority of Russians have become convinced “Putinists,” whatever that would mean, or have been persuaded by the man’s notorious “power vertical” system of governance, which in reality is an inefficient, irresponsible literal disaster waiting to happen somewhere nearly every single day (witness the fires in Rostov-on-Don).

It has triumphed because people have, seemingly, lost the will to eject, by whatever means would work best under the circumstances, the entire noxious, corrupt, incredibly expensive, and utterly futureless non-system that Putin and his clique have erected over eighteen long years of conspicuous consumption in a few happy oases, mixed with criminal wars, “legal nihilism,” an incredible gap between the super wealthy and the super poor, the destruction of all the things the Soviet Union did right or, at least, not terribly badly, in terms of education, social provision, healthcare, and housing, and the most inconsistent, frighteningly hilarious “national ideology” ever devised anywhere, which pretends to be “conservative” and “authentically Russian,” but mostly looks as if it had been dreamed up one night by three or four Kremlin spin doctors on a bender, as a bad-spirited practical joke.

At worst, people either pretend, especially in the two capitals, to be incredibly busy and content with their lives. At best, they argue about the particulars—say, about the details of the trumped-up case against director Kirill Serebrennikov, arrested in Petersburg yesterday, and temporarily sentenced to house arrest pending trial on embezzlement charges today in Moscow—as if the system didn’t have the power to turn literally anyone except the members of Putin’s inner circle (and maybe even them) into a “vicious criminal” literally overnight, as if Serebrennikov has made some particular fatal mistake that nearly everyone else would never be so stupid to make. Or that they would never be so stupid to get close to so much money or power and end up in the pickle the feckless Serebrennikov got himself into.

The idea that the country could go on being itself, that is, being mostly messed up and weird and not like any other country, because you cannot be like any other country when you’re the biggest country in the world, but a billion times more productive and easier to live in simply by ditching the crappy, greedy junta that will certainly kill it off in the next few years is a thought that either literally everyone is thinking right now or everyone has forbidden themselves to think at all.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid it’s the latter.

So it doesn’t matter whether you call the reactionary regime currently in power authoritarian, post-authoritarian, fascist, post-fascist, post-truth or pre-truth because, eventually, it will go down in flames, taking with it, alas, the magnificent country that has had the misfortune to engender it. TRR

Photo by the Russian Reader