Despair has been a trendy mood recently.
Like, Putin’s chained his elites with blood on their hands, bypassed the sanctions, survived the election,
and now bathes in money, while the West bogged down in contradictions and has no clue how to deal
with Putin and his war.
Public sentiment is gloomy over the eternity of Putin’s regime.
Paradoxically, after a short consideration its end is much nearer than it may seem.
Let me explain what true despair is and who was justified to experience it.
Let’s look at history in hindsight and try to see the events
from the perspective of those who lived back then.
I was born in 1984. In retrospect, it’s widely considered the beginning of the USSR’s end.
The poster child of the impending doom was Chernenko,
the country’s leader, Brezhnev’s successor and an offensive parody on him.
The country verged on bankruptcy. People survived through daily humiliation.
The level of discontent was so high that no one was surprised about the dissolution
of the USSR only 7 years later.
Living conditions grew more unbearable by day, people lost their patience and anticipated the upcoming end
of the regime.
That’s how it looks from today.
But back in 1984, it was different. Soviet Everyman had all the reasons to consider the situation perpetual.
From the modern perspective, life in the USSR was insufferable and the country was beginning
to come apart at the seams.
Imagine, people of ⅙ of Earth’s surface had only notion in mind: to obtain something.
Food was impossible to get, and the stock was thinning out.
The same went for clothes: the entire country wore patched coats and taped boots.
Each item was worn until it became tattered, but had its uses afterwards.
There were no paper towels and dish sponges available, so every rag mattered.
One of the episodes of the Russian The Boy’s Word series depicts a situation that may seem weird
for those under 40: a school teacher’s hat was stolen.
She recognized her hat on the main character’s mother, because a decent fur hat is conspicuous,
there’s only one such hat in the entire neighborhood.
She’d been saving for a year and finally got her hands on it through personal connections.
Losing this hat was akin to losing a relative.
A modern person can’t physically imagine the extent of poverty and the majority’s obsession
with fulfilling basic needs like food and clothing.
Boots falling apart in winter was a disaster: you wouldn’t be able to obtain new ones in time.
A few pounds of buckwheat, butter, or anything resembling meat were reasons for celebration.
It’s hard to imagine the world where a retired grandma is a family’s MVP.
Without a job, she can afford standing in lines all day getting her hands on scarce commodities,
therefore feeding the entire family.
In this world, your nominal salary doesn’t matter much.
Access to supply chains, distribution centers, and upper-class stores is much more relevant.
In this world, the social hierarchy is based on access to basic goods.
A butcher shop stock controller or a car repair shop manager have more influence
than a prominent ballistic missile engineer.
From today, it seems like the end was near.
This couldn’t last forever: a senior researcher had no choice but substituted butter with margarine,
and spent all day at work covering a hole in his jacket.
However, it didn’t seem like it back in the 1980s.
People struggled to survive and had no idea life could be different.
Stories of meat widely available in the West were met with fluoride stares
like legends of El Dorado or yeti encounters reports.
Food situation in 1984 was severely worse than in 1974, but the idea was similar.
Well alright, now we have to queue for eggs, too.
Well, fine, now we need food stamps for butter.
Well, okay, now I have to give good grades to a store manager’s son in order to have
a decent New Year meal
The situation gradually deteriorated, but remained within the familiar framework.
When you spend your childhood lining up for goods, you aren’t surprised by another line.
I experienced those queues myself as a kid: children joined them alongside adults.
Each person was granted 10 eggs, and a child counted as a person, too.
A Soviet person was adept at survival.
Subsistence farming provided potatoes, raspberries and apples for jams,
and cabbage and cucumbers for pickles.
A Soviet person knew a hole in the factory’s fence to sneak a paint bucket through.
Grocery store shelves were empty, but a Soviet housewife managed to cook dinner somehow.
This art has long been lost.
Also, people born in 1920-1940s made up a sizable part of the population.
They grew up on thin soup and picked up rotten crops from the fields.
They’d seen real famine that drove some villages to cannibalism.
Try telling them the horrors of leaving a warm apartment with water supply
and sewerage just to wait a few hours to get milk.
REGIME’S IMMUTABILITY
An average Soviet person circa 1984 had no idea their lifestyle was about to change.
Everyone grew up in the same system and hadn’t seen anything beyond it.
It was a fair assumption that it’d remain the same: that was the only way of living.
The same goes for any political system. We'll discuss this after a non-profit announcement.
non-profit announcement
Let’s keep rolling. We discussed that an average Soviet person in 1984 considered
the system and regime to be perpetual.
The same goes for any political system.
The Soviet regime was a stable party dictatorship.
It encompassed everything from the top party committee to an elementary school.
It didn’t depend on the leader: when one kicked the bucket, it was always obvious who’d succeed him.
It was impossible to say, “There’s no USSR without Chernenko.”
Because when they pay their last respects to Chernenko,
the future supreme leader of 2040 is having his first day at school.
In 1984, no one, even the USSR’s most fierce critics in the West,
didn’t expect the regime and the country to collapse in just 7 years.
True, the USSR was Reagan’s axis of evil, but that was the evil that made the good possible,
like Yin & Yang or heaven and hell.
Now we know that Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985,
will begin the reforms that’d destroy the Soviet system.
But why would his contemporaries expect that? Quite the opposite, Gorbachev’s image was rather daunting.
Because a 55-year-old General Secretary would easily last for 20+ years.
After seemingly immortal Brezhnev, equally permanent Gorbachev would sound like a bad joke.
Most likely, a 20-something Soviet person in the 1980s expected to retire under the same leader.
If we could tell them that Gorbachev would die in 2022 omitting any other details,
they’d likely assume Gorbachev ruled for 37 years.
True, the country waged a war, but it was a colonial war in faraway lands.
Over the course of 10 years, right up to the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 1989, about 800,000
personnel went through it, about the same as the number of Russian troops in Ukraine at once.
Let’s not forget that the USSR had a population almost twice as big as Russia.
The Afghan war was conducted, as far as such terms are applicable to hostilities, in a civilized manner.
Like, no one pardoned convicted murderers and robbers to replenish troops.
The Soviet regime didn’t organize mercenary units that’d result in a petty jerk publicly cussing
military authorities out and leading battle tanks to Moscow.
There was a lot of wrongdoing in the USSR, but the Soviet authorities remained authorities until their end.
They understood the monopoly on violence concept, and didn’t share it.
Lawlessness accrued behind closed doors, it was kept under wraps and covered with cheerful slogans
and announcements read from a piece of paper.
Try to imagine that: a plastered general hijacks a car and tries to run over traffic police
in the neighboring region.
The incident gets leaked to the press, but the government reacts by condoning the general
and condemning the police officers. That’d be out-and-out impossible in the USSR.
I assume that despotic local authorities in the USSR’s south-western regions could’ve committed atrocities
of Kadyrov scale and beyond, but they couldn’t brag about it.
In the Soviet system it was unthinkable that someone could publicly degrade the government,
therefore showing its impotence and inability to maintain at least an illusion of order,
and the government would just swallow it.
In the Soviet elites, there were old-timers who could physically pass away
while reading a party report on a food program’s success.
But there were no permanently hungover coots.
No leader, even with progressing dementia, cracked ribald jokes at party meetings.
A top party official couldn’t afford writing a newspaper column using ethnic slur
and F-words as articles while threatening the entire world with annihilation.
The Soviet regime’s speech became progressively less intelligible, but that was the nature
of the authorities represented by gray-haired elders.
They could barely maintain the power and their own postures, but still looked like proper authorities
to be reckoned with.
They didn’t resemble a drove of local winos that somehow make daily appearances on TV.
All of that should’ve stirred a true despair in the Soviet people:
it was only fair to assume life would remain the same in 2024, 40 years later.
Perhaps even unpopular seaweed and tomato juice would become scarce too,
but the country would remain the same.
So it made sense to teach your kindergartener to befriend a shoe store manager’s kid not
to end up barefoot later in life.
A Soviet person tried to adapt to the system, join the party or whatnot, because there was no alternative.
REGIME’S END
Now, let’s get back to today.
First, Putin’s regime is doubtfully a system, an entity that sustains itself with its institutions and procedures.
16 years ago, at the 2008 election, Putin’s regime asked itself, “Can I be a non-Putin regime?”
Can I replace my leader in a controlled manner and remain myself?
The leader is a living being that’ll inevitably die one day. Do I have a future after it happens?
Medvedev’s experimental tenure answered this question. There’s no future.
There’re no institutions, party, and controlling organs that’d assure a power transition
and secure the guarantees, assets, and statuses of those involved.
In retrospect, the Medvedev-Putin tandemocracy is considered a global deception.
But the main victim is the regime itself.
He gave himself a death sentence.
Everyone who was about 20 in 2012 when Putin became the president again should’ve
understood one thing.
No matter how long Putin lasts, you’ll witness his regime’s collapse before you retire,
because this regime won’t outlive its creator.
Putin’s United Russia isn’t a new ruling Communist party.
Just like other Putin’s institutions, it’s bogus and sham.
One can’t build a career within it hoping to get in line for supreme authority.
It’s just a tool Putin uses to mark his accomplices.
The system proved to itself: everything in it is based on informal agreements and personal relationships.
While Putin is alive and more or less spry, he can maintain the balance.
Two oligarchs can meet with him to discuss an oil rig dispute.
He can resolve a Chechnya-Dagestan conflict and prevent hostilities between them.
He’s still able to distribute power and assets in a way that won’t let anyone get stronger than others
and eat them all.
But when the day comes and Putin for whatever reason loses this ability, it’ll all end.
No one will be capable of preventing the war of all against all.
After Putin, no one will be able to say, “I’m the power now.”
The parliament?
A bunch of useless nameless schmucks elected by no one and appointed for their ability
to withstand public humiliation without any shame.
Courts? Right, the Constitutional Court chairman, submissive Zorkin who was forced
to amend the constitution in 2020 on his day off,
will resolve a Sechin-Miller dispute without being flipped off. Hard to imagine.
Perhaps the Security Council will take over?
Some call it a new Politburo (the USSR highest political organ).
But it’s not Politburo, not a collective organ where the General Secretary is first among equals.
General Secretaries come and go, but Politburo lives on.
Meanwhile, the Security Council is Putin’s servants, and he’s not shy to publicly remind them of their place
in the food chain. Bortnikov or Naryshkin aren’t Andropov, who was the second man in the country.
They’re deprived of the ability to have their own opinion.
Their job is to approve any Putin’s decision while stuttering in fear.
Let's do a thought experiment. Putin loses power, life, or control over the situation, falls out of his own regime
for whatever reason.
Hungover Medvedev and dementing Beglov meet up and declare,
“Dear friends, we’ve decided that Gen.
Sidorov will be the new boss. Mr. Kadyrov, Mr. Sechin, for any questions regarding your
oil rig feud contact him. You’re his henchmen now.”
Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?
Unlike people in 1984, we don’t have a question whether we’ll see the end of Putinism,
it’s only a matter of time.
We aren’t in a situation when there’re no survivors who remembers the country in a normal state
we should aim for. Everyone over 30 remembers that Russia can exist without Putin.
Even now, when Putin seems healthy and functional, the regime deteriorated to the point that an armed rebellion
in Russia can only be stopped by personal agreements with a neighboring dictator of Belarus.
Putin’s regime is in manual flight control.
There’s no institution that reads instructions, operates according to law,
and acts to prevent a crime without the green light from the top dog.
We see no consistent authority, we see the rule by spontaneous decisions and each one contradicts
the previous and the following ones.
First, they start a war with no reason or plan, and then they sort out the mess that decision triggered.
In Putin’s system, there’s no link between actions and consequences.
Because consequences will come tomorrow. Some day 100,000s of soldiers with PTSD will come home.
Some day, labor shortage will give way to unemployment,
because there’ll be no need for guns and ammo.
Some day, not today, something will have to be done about Kadyrov driven into insanity by impunity.
Some day, the oil prices will fall, rendering this gigantic bloodbath unaffordable.
But none of this will happen today, so the consequences are negligible.
When you’re ready to pay a cop or an emergency serviceman an annual salary per month to fight the war,
soon enough you’ll see there’s no one left to deal with dam breaks and floods.
And the police are so understaffed that the soaring youth crime is likely
to be delegated to school teacher patrols.
But they’re all tomorrow’s problems, and Putin’s regime doesn’t live by tomorrow, it survives day after day.
Its length is strictly limited by Putin’s earthly life.
It may end sooner, but it won’t last much longer after its eponym’s demise.
When people from 1984 looked at the functional and ideologically balanced Soviet system,
they had no reasons for optimism.
Best they could hope for was living the same life as their parents and grandparents did.
Unlike the Soviet people, we have no reasons for pessimism, let alone despair.
Putin’s regime is a temporary deviation from normality, and it fully understands it.
Its savagery isn’t a result of careful planning, it’s committed ad hoc.
The war has to start today with the ill-equipped army going proverbial commando,
because tomorrow is too late. The power has to be kept now, and who knows what’ll happen in 5 years.
There’s no need for difficult decisions at the election, the result doesn’t have to look plausible,
because the goal is to hop over the election day and forget about it ASAP.
We’ll see Russia without Putin, it’s a given.
Our children will live in a world where Putin is forgotten, just like infamous Moscow mayor Luzhkov
was forgotten in a week.
It makes sense to do one’s utmost to make this moment come sooner,
but there’s no question if Putin’s regime will survive without him.
Those who're destined to win by either their efforts or with the course of time have no reasons for despair.
Quite the opposite, despair should be the ordeal of those who invested their lives, security, status,
and children’s future into a senile man who’ll disappear sooner or later, but definitely in their lifetime.
See you tomorrow!