If I didn’t know it would get me into big trouble with the law, I would devote the rest of my life to physically assaulting Russian fascists until they finally cried, “Uncle!” and let this country breathe again. As it is, they and their supreme leader are quickly suffocating it.
By “Russian fascists” I don’t mean people who celebrate Hitler’s birthday and march around in silly outfits. I mean Putin’s mainly middle-class, fairly well-off, professionally educated supporters, without whom he would never have got anywhere in his ascent to immortality.
A particularly ugly encounter this evening at a shindig persuaded me once again that these people, who live mostly in the two capitals [Petersburg and Moscow], are Putin’s real base, not the mostly poor, disempowered, and utterly disabused people who live in the completely imaginary “Russian heartlands.”
What surprises me is how savvier folk than me haven’t been writing more and more often about this fact of life in Russia, which has been staring at us in the face for years.
Russia doesn’t need a proper bourgeois revolution. It needs a revolution to unseat the reflexively nationalist, increasingly fascistic bourgeoisie generated by the Putinist counterrevolution and, of course, the Putinist elite that manages and cultivates this fairly tiny nationalist bourgeoisie. Otherwise, the richest country on earth is doomed to collapse. ||| TRR, 13 May 2018, Petrograd. Photo by the Russian Reader
The Russian Reader 