Understanding Vampireland

A few days before that loud exchange, NV showed a film in which three Russians who had fled to Europe recounted how their own mothers (!) persuaded them to join the 'special military operation' with arguments ranging from "you'll pay off your loans, and your widow will be proud" to "and what if you come back." I noted this down because it resonated with me at the time, as I had just finished writing the preface for a new translated edition of "The Longest Journey," in which I wrote the following:

"There is no doubt that if Putin's blitzkrieg had succeeded, there would be no shortage of experts eager to smoothly and gently fit it into the [Western worldview] so that it wouldn't be too uncomfortable <...>, and despite all the potential complications associated with the disappearance of a sizable country with a 40-million population from the map of Europe, that very picture (in which good relations with “millennia-old” Russia are prioritized, and Ukraine is seen as some breakaway region, a kind of “Bavaria with ambitions”) wouldn't have suffered much. However, the blitzkrieg failed disgracefully, leading to the inevitable and unpleasant conclusion that "things are not what they seem"—that both sides of this “conflict” <...> are not what the Western public is accustomed to perceiving them as.”

Fact-checking through reality turned out to be too brutal and threatened the West with possibly the greatest ideological collapse of the modern era – without exaggeration, an educational revolution, and not just in Slavic studies. Who would like that... A more or less satisfactory "story" was needed, something like the battle of David and Goliath, where the aggressor would be condemned, the victim would elicit sympathy, but all other conceptual frameworks, beams, and rafters (which are fakes, illusions, and stereotypes) would remain in place, promising a happy ending to the terrifying tale (peace for all nations, and democracy for Russia).

And so, for the third year, I have been observing how—having received no such "story" from either the Ukrainians or the Russian opposition in exile—European intellectuals tirelessly attempt to piece it together from available materials, just to keep the entire previous structure intact. The fact that reality repeatedly and brutally collapses their sandcastles, as it did on February 24, 2022, does not stop or discourage them. Initially, there was the widespread version that this was "Putin's war" and the problem was solely him, and that Russians would not want to fight because (another false assumption!) no one wants to fight. That Putin knew his country far better when he explained to the mothers of the dead how wonderful it was that their sons died in war rather than in a car accident or from vodka, for now their meaningless lives had gained meaning (and their death, we should add, significantly improved family welfare, with villages feasting on the compensation for one killed soldier) genuinely shocked everyone who imagined Russians through Netflix adaptations of Tolstoy and Chekhov. The next version of that same "story" was the attempt to heroize the Russian anti-Putin opposition, which had sharply increased in the West with the start of the mobilization. But this castle also collapsed when it turned out that in two years in the free world, these people had not managed to organize any political demonstration or manifesto. After Navalny's death, in whom the West had seriously seen hope for Russia's democratization, it became clear that the deceased had left behind no coherent program other than to fight better and without corruption (God bless Russian corruption, which has saved countless lives, not just Ukrainian ones; with such an “opposition,” I unequivocally prefer Putin!). On the days I am writing these lines, Russians in Russia (in the south) have finally started to protest—not against the war their country is waging, as Western politicians had hoped, but against blackouts in their cities. It turns out, when they are truly dissatisfied with something, they are quite capable of blocking streets and making demands to officials, fearing neither the police nor repression…”

***

Of course, the informational "volume" of either NV's film or my book with all its translations and prefaces is incomparable to the informational volume of the newly arrived Kremlin speakers, instantly picked up by all the leading media in the world. Meanwhile, I haven't come across a single mention of Yuri Dmitriev, imprisoned "for Sandarmokh" on an artificially fabricated "criminal charge," reminiscent of the fabricated charges against political prisoners during the Brezhnev-Andropov era. It seems his life no longer interests anyone in the West—40 years ago, both Bukovsky and our Valentyn Moroz, and other political prisoners, were of great interest, with many human rights organizations fighting for them fiercely. This fact alone measures how much the Evil Empire has advanced over these years in the destruction of Western liberal institutions...

But I am talking about something else here. I remind you that I wrote about what the "Russian world" is up close two months before the invasion—in December 2021 in the article "My Warm Lamp Rashism," based on materials from internet sites for a mass female audience. A year of observations (2021) allowed me to understand how mothers could be prepared to perceive the death of their sons somewhere in a foreign war as a profit and, accordingly, consider their participation in such a war desirable. This Great Secret of the Moscow state, even after Bucha and Mariupol, stubbornly doesn't make sense to Westerners (the Canadian co-producer of the Ukrainian film "INTERCEPTED" even edited the subtitles of intercepted conversations between Russian soldiers and their families to "soften" them to "Western taste," apparently not believing the Ukrainian authors about the accuracy of the literal translation, which, in my opinion, significantly spoiled the potential "educational" effect of this film for the Western audience).

This secret is called mass culture: unlike the USSR, the Russian Federation after 1991 focused on it. And the West is almost entirely unfamiliar with Russian mass culture—and, more broadly, with the Russian mass consciousness that it serves. In this area, Western Russian studies were completely untouched until the invasion. The first known English-language study on this topic appeared as an X-thread by political scientist Sergey Sumlenny only in—I'm not joking!—September 2023. There are no books, monographs, or dissertations about what true Russian culture has been in the last 30 years, which gave rise to Mariupol and Bucha, in any Oxbridge libraries. And what isn't named (or described) doesn't exist...

Until this gap is filled, Putin (or his successors) will be able to feed the West the same old "Andropov" playbook without fear that the speakers will be driven away. Meanwhile, we will continue to be angry about why Westerners are such unshakeable believers in the Bolshoi Theatre and Tolstoevsky.

* Published with the author's style preserved

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About the author. Oksana Zabuzhko, writer.

The editors don't always share the opinions expressed by the authors of the blogs.