I think that just these days Putin clearly understood what a nation in the state he has.
On the one hand, submissive, passive, brainwashed Ostankino - walking televisions. "Russia abandoned Orthodoxy and adopted television." These will not betray and will go with him to the end into the abyss. And then they will be told that the party made a mistake - and they will agree. The 20th Congress of the Central Committee of the CPSU and Khrushchev's report on the shortcomings of the cult of Stalin did not change anything in this part of the people. They agreed. And when the new avatar of Stalin came, they just as easily returned to the fold. You can spin them as you like and keep them in the black body, throwing dice from the king's table. In 1917, it was easy for them to wash the Christ away - as if they were going to a bathhouse. Just as easily they reverted to their leafy version of Orthodoxy after the collapse of the “sovok” (Soviet Union - ed.), a version behind which there is nothing but bare ideology and service to the regime.
"Imam Shamil, the experience of decades of struggle, received in centuries of pain and humiliation, which did not go anywhere. They are also thrown a bone from the king's table. But it is always a price for loyalty".
On the other hand, all these sons of mountains, steppes, and forests with domestic ideas about the divine in the world and man, some old and never fully understood customs and concepts about honor and dignity, their hierarchies, moral imperatives, and - oh, yes! - stereotypes. Allegedly safely asleep, but not completely. Never to the end. Because there is such a thing as the persistence of tradition. Both father's strength and mother's fairy tale (c). Imam Shamil, experience decades of struggle, received in centuries of pain and humiliation, which did not go anywhere. They are also thrown a bone from the king's table. But it is always a price for loyalty. Because at some level, neither the several-hundred-year-old resentment, nor a kind of ambivalent feeling of humiliating superiority, nor simply ordinary nationalism, nor religious exclusivity has gone anywhere.
Another matter is the war situation. The situation is different when you have a weapon in your hands. When 50% are mentally ill, and 50% are offended by something or someone (the figures are conditional, but there are definitely no normal ones).
"Transition of Russia's imperialist war into a civil war, and the civil war into a national liberation war, is the general program".
And here this different "pain threshold" lies between two rather conditional and yet expressive groups. And this is our chance. As Hanna Malyar said, "the critical limit of the loss ratio." It is different in these groups. We already see today - a spark. And it's already burning somewhere. This is one of our few chances to really catch fire there. This chance is big, fat, bloody and dark, like the unrepentant soul of Patrice Lumumba, shot and buried somewhere in the forests of the Congo. But his case lives on. Therefore, the transition of the imperialist war into a civil war, and the civil war into a national liberation war, is the general program that must work and will work in our favor. I want it quickly.
About the author: Andriy Bondar, writer.
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