Meanwhile on Russian state TV, military experts are concerned that Russia's current economy is unfit to meet the needs of its Armed Forces. One expert advocated the urgent need to move on to "military socialism" and a "wartime economy," with government in charge of everything. pic.twitter.com/vQf9uSV4Pr
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) May 7, 2022
There's a terrible thing to note, which is that everything old is a little bit new again in Russia, and "Zed" seems to stand for what once was deemed dead. It might be to encourage confidence in the Soviet surplus materiel being dispensed to the folks who have been deployed to what is starting to look like a meat-grinder for under-prepared and over-enthused youths. But the understanding that Putin's sockpuppets are now suggesting that people get onboard with a reality their grandparents/great-grandparents well understood suggests a kind of bottoming out.
We seldom refer to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact I think in the US education system in high school history because our education system seldom advances US history students past the Gilded Age and laissez-faire economics (and never really talks about the labor movement except as a sidebar--the schools are full of the descendants of wage slavery and actual slavery, and we all know who doesn't want people to get ideas about that) and we like to think Yalta wasn't another cynical turkey-carving exercise. The detritus of colonialism, the fallout of fuckups.
I believe, because I am not a dumbass, that people learning from history is an improvement because we are building upon what came before when we take these lessons to heart. However, strongmen, because they are dumbasses, try to use history as an exercise they would very much like to repeat because if it happened before it could work for them again, and they never learn from downfalls. Putin is living this lie. He thinks he can rectify Stalin. He can be the ultimate patriot if he makes Russia Great Again.
He is destroying what is good, though. The Russia of Sakharov and Shostakovich should tell us that great Russian people were held back from what they might have been. And I tremble to think what Putin and his trembling hand has in store because it is easier to destroy than build anything. And Putin wants a legacy, and he has built so little. And there is so much he could destroy--just to make a mark,
He won't prosper. But failures are also a kind of mark. And can be most terrible.
