From the very moment the war started, we’ve found ourselves discussing Russians’ collective guilt and responsibility.
Numerous public speakers are particularly worried when they hear someone mention “Putin’s army,”
“Putin’s war,” and “Putin’s regime.”
Instead, they argue: it’s the people of Russia who’ve been enabling Putin.
There is no regime per se — this regime is an extension of Russia.
Once Russia loses this war and once Putin is overthrown, the whole country will be held responsible for his crimes.
It will happen through external administration, through fundamental changes to daily life,
through disintegration, and through blood and pain.
They tend to interpret Putin's defeat as the defeat of Russia as a whole. Woe to the conquered awaits Russia.
From an emotional standpoint, these statements are reasonable:
Armed Russians are walking around on foreign soil and killing people every day.
Cursing them for eternity and wishing for them to live under the external rule of
a foreign government is a completely natural human reaction.
But let’s not even mull the fundamental unfeasibility of plans to Balkanize Russia and bring Russians to collective punishment.
Let’s bracket the simple fact that to say “everyone is guilty” is a way of saying that no one is to blame.
One should always keep in mind that any discussions about sudden changes in the lives
of citizens along with the collapse of Putin’s regime only keep the regime going.
Before we begin, I want to remind you that I’ve had a book out, and it’s available.
Here it is, a book on Russian history. Some of you may know it.
Furthermore, I'll be in Berlin on Saturday,and we're holding our traditional auction.
You can donate money to our channel, and we will have dinner in Berlin with the person
who donates the most where I will sign my book for them.
So far, I have personally signed only 16 books, so this one will be the seventeenth.
I'm numbering them like that. So far, a handful of signed books.
Having made a donation, contact our manager via Telegram. You'll find the link in the description.
Message us about your donation, and if you're the highest bidder, you'll be notified, and we'll catch up.
If your donation far exceeds the official price of the book, but you don't win, we'll ship it to you unsigned.
Let's begin!
CHANGES ARE SCARY
To start with, the first thing you need to know about people — be they Russians, Ukrainians, or Americans
Swedes, Finns, Australians, and the French
— is that people don't like changes (even for the better) and are anxious about uncertainty.
Each of us has experienced this firsthand. People go on working for years for tyrant bosses, in toxic workplaces,
and with wages that are below the market.
Many complain about life to their friends and acquaintances, but they don't bother to do the most obvious thing
in such a situation — switch jobs, that is — even fully aware that it would be a change for the better.
Because life will become uncomfortable for a while. You will have to be unemployed.
You won't get your paycheck on a particular day, as you're used to it.
Not only that, but you will have to go to job interviews, while squandering your savings and getting into debt.
And at the new job, you will have to get along with a new team and get used to a new boss.
For a couple of short months, your life routine will be somewhat different.
But this is what hinders a person from not suffering horrible working conditions over years.
Let's take the beautiful country of Venezuela, which lives under the regime of Nicolás Maduro.
The country is a complete social and economic disaster, with an acute shortage of basic goods,
and a completely dysfunctional state.
Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet,
where kidnapping for ransom occurs every so often.
According to some reports, up to a quarter of the population has left Venezuela.
But this goes the other way around, too: three-quarters stayed in a place where people don't shop for groceries
but do dumpster-diving instead.
And that's despite the fact that Venezuela is a Spanish-speaking country,
and there are eight other Spanish-speaking countries in South America,
meaning there are many destinations to relocate quite comfortably to a familiar linguistic environment.
But for at least three-quarters of the population, the current state of affairs is better than change.
All destructive authoritarian regimes follow this principle. Neither Putin nor Lukashenko says:
the country is getting richer, more affluent and vibrant, and soon crowds of migrant workers from Norway
will be busting their chops to land a job as a cashier at our grocery stores.
Instead, both of them are delivering entirely different messages: at least you know us, monsters,
because we've been here for years. And God knows who's succeeding us.
We're the reason you go to work every day, the reason your kids go to school.
And our rule will be followed by boundless uncertainty: you'll either be dekulakized
and sent to work for communism or split into same-sex couples.
Do you remember those crazy Putin campaign clips in 2018? What were they about?
About the great and beautiful country we were going to build? How everyone would get rich?
Or at least how we would take over all our neighbors and build a Russian world from the Kamchatka peninsula
in the north to Lisbon in the south?
Not even close. In those clips, people were frightened of terrible changes in their way of life,
should a different guy be elected.
They were told they would be forced to pay for a gay man’s social benefits, all orphans would be shipped to “wrong”
and “malevolent” foster homes, and they would be conscripted into the army after the age of 40 (define irony).
Good morning, Sir!
U-m, morning! Can I help you?
Yes, General Boyko here. We've got orders to draft you.
Me? Come on, at 52, aren't I too old?
That's perfect! The enlistmenta ge has just been raised to 60.
Who did it?
The president did.
You voted for him.
No, I didn't. Adieu, dude!
People were never told that everything was hunky-dory; they were not promised a better future.
People were told that the future might only have worse things in store.
Whenever someone associates Putin's regime with Russia; whenever one asserts that Putin
is a by-product of the imperial issues all Russians have;
whenever they claim that dismantling an autocracy will lead to fundamental changes in the life of the nation,
up to and resulting in its collapse;
whenever someone thoroughly depicts that collapse; and whenever they threaten Russians with collective punishment,
they do exactly the same thing as these campaign videos.
Like, dear Russians, your whole way of life is guaranteed as long as Putin is in power.
Thereafter, it's all darkness and uncertainty.
Next thing you know, we're going to put you under foreign administration, Balkanize your country,
and send you to concentration camps to make amends for your collective guilt.
And what response will it trigger from any individual regardless of their worldview or social background,
from Putin's topmost oligarch down to the very last small-town janitor?
They'll say, “Go to hell. I might even be against Putin, against war, corruption, repression,
against everything that's being undertaken and done to my country.
And if it's only Putin preventing you from ruining my life, inflicting damage to my family,
and sending us all to another Gulag to work on our reparations, then let him stay and rule.
At the very least, I somehow eked out a living under his rule for almost 24 years.”
Are you trying to say that by removing this one person, the state will no longer exist?
The roads will cease to be repaired, documents will no longer be issued, and thieves will be running loose?
No more food in the stores, and robbers would roam the streets?
I am strongly against the war and opposed to Putin, but my mother suffers from arrhythmia,
and I don’t want a scenario where, with Putin gone, I cannot count on the arrival of an ambulance.
All the discourse about Russia being indissociable from Putinism and being doomed to pain and suffering
with the defeat of Putinism is a paraphrase of Vyacheslav Volodin (Speaker of the State Duma) saying
“No Putin means no Russia.”
This is the narrative the Russian propaganda perpetuates. In fact, Putin is not the norm.
Let's continue!
The truth is that Putin is not some kind of norm, not some kind of extension of Russia, and not an inseparable thereof.
What he does is use the resources of a large country with an almost advanced economy —
natural, human, technical, and financial resources 一 so that he and his immediate circle could accumulate wealth,
so that he could fulfill his bloody ambitions and maintain his grip on power.
Yet, he does not produce any of the resources that he uses.
In Russia, the developed IT industry that supports the Russian economy’s infrastructure amid the ongoing sanctions
and Western companies ceasing operations was only possible because the government has overlooked it for a long time,
and private companies have cropped up have had a chance to thrive.
The free oil-and-gas currency exists only because Russia has tremendous fossil fuel reserves and the mostly
still-Soviet infrastructure for their production and transportation.
The import of electronics, spare parts, and equipment has not entirely collapsed because Putin’s regime has come up
with a crafty plan. Each private company simply seeks a solution and finds it on its own.
And Putin is able to continue war not because the nationalized industry is capable of a large-scale operation,
which it is not.
He can continue it because the Soviet armored and firing legacy has been around in such quantities that could,
for the time being, cover even the record-high losses in the 21st century.
Neither Putin nor his regime produces any self-sufficient benefit.
None of the things that are familiar to us and important in our life will vanish together with it.
Unless your name is Vladimir Solovyov, Gennady Timchenko, Sergei Shoigu, or Yevgeny Prigozhin,
not a single thing will change for the worse for you.
In an interview she gave three years ago, economist Ekaterina Schulmann spoke of a phenomenon of our time.
A phenomenon when everything seems terrible, whereas we are merely a few steps away from being a healthy
country and a healthy society.
Neither our population nor even our government system is abnormal, the latter actually being quite functional.
It is our administration that is abnormal.
Quoting talking points from the 2019 interview today doesn’t seem like a sane thing to do.
That life is ancient history. But in actuality, nothing has changed in this regard.
The blood and terror that we witness every day and the infraction of even a rough idea of law
and morality are the doings of the deranged administration.
Yes, it’ll take us many decades to deal with the “legacy” that Putin’s left us since February 24, 2022.
We must accept the reality that an echo of this war persists beyond our century.
A five-year-old who witnessed his parents being murdered will be eligible to vote in 13 years,
will be elected a corporation leader in 25 years, and president of Ukraine in 30 years.
Until the complete change of the generations, whose life was ruined by Putin’s regime,
there can be no complete recovery of the relationship between the two largest Slavic states.
Putin’s legacy is already our legacy.
The longer he stays in charge, the worse it gets, but the repercussions of his rule have nothing
to do with him leaving office.
Of course, the war will spur a spate of violent crime domestically — in fact, it already has.
Of course, we will get a sizable demographic of war veterans, their loved ones, and their children,
who will hold a grudge against the whole world. They will become a powerful destabilizing factor.
But we already have such people, there’s nothing we can do about it, and each day of Putin’s rule only
jacks up the numbers.
Of course, we will have to restore Ukraine at our own expense. But that’s not a problem, that’s just an expenditure.
This petty trillion dollars that we will have to pay over the course of about a decade is nothing compared
to the losses we’re sustaining from the war, corruption, and effects of the sanctions.
It will be much cheaper to restore Ukraine than to uphold Putin’s regime.
Putin’s legacy can be split into two parts.
One is the unresolvable problems, which would only be sorted with time and generational change.
The other comprises problems that can be solved with money. The former is already here.
The latter is a lot cheaper than the current bloody state of affairs.
But that’s the extent of it. It is in nobody’s interest to back a nuclear-weapon state into a corner,
humiliating it, forcing a scenario where it would want to arm itself to the teeth and repeat the war.
Nobody wants to see Russia Balkanized.
Imagine Yugoslavia times five.
There will be an all-out civil war, with artillery, missiles, fighter jets, and warlords splitting the country.
That is a recipe for a world war.
Nobody seeks to relive the 1920s German scenario with sky-high and unmanageable reparations.
That is, when a population is living off gelatin and baked onions, the economy is in shock,
and the winners grab everything that’s loose.
There will be no military defeat for Russia in the traditional military sense,
with its capital captured and foreign administration taking over. That won’t happen, Putin or no Putin.
There will be no demands from the “victors.”
Russia itself will be the most interested party in paying off the reparations to end the global isolation,
patch up its reputation, and make far more money.
Russia loses nothing from dismantling Putin’s regime and ending the war.
Quite the opposite, it has all the chances to get even richer, more prosperous, and freer than ever before.
There will be no Abrams tanks running victory laps on Red Square, with a NATO banner and some fervent
Ukrainian freedom fighter on it.
There will be no filtration camps for Russians to make sure they are loyal to the new regime.
There will be no economy-wide shutdowns causing you to lose your job.
The same is true of governmental branches, the ones that have survived Putin’s reign.
To use medical jargon, Putin is a malignant tumor, but it hasn’t metastasized far enough to render it inoperable
without affecting the rest of the country and people's lifestyles.
Barring the already inflicted damage, of course.
The scenario of a great misfortune that would befall Russia should Putin
be removed is the narrative being peddled by state-run TV.
The narrative which sees every Kremlin street sweeper being charged is merely a daydream of Margarita Simonyan,
one of Putin’s talking heads.
That narrative has unfortunately seeped into some anti-war rhetoric, too.
Nope, ain’t going to happen. That street sweeper will still be keeping Red Square clean.
Designers will be back to creating logos, without the additional hassles of not being able to find foreign customers,
or paying for an Adobe subscription with a Russian credit card. Pilots would continue to fly, and this time around the world.
Yeah, Putin’s TV army would probably need to flee through Mongolia, Iran, or the UAE.
But those are their troubles and won’t concern anyone outside of that tight circle.
I doubt the VGTRK cameramen will have anything to worry about.
They will just be filming some liberal news anchors instead of the ones who fled.
We need to keep on saying that to our countrymen: only the wicked will have their fill of trouble.
Those who committed or supported war crimes, those who made that regime possible.
There is a 99.9% likelihood that it won’t affect you at all. There won’t be any “horrible” changes in your lifestyle.
It will be just another day in the same city, same subway, same workplace, only without a looming mobilization drive, war,
and deaths.
Without people in high places spewing bloodthirsty nonsense. Without a constant threat of being caught by them.
Putin leaving is not a revolution — it is returning to the norm.
See you tomorrow!