Zakhar Prilepin addressing an assembly at Petersburg’s Mining University. Photo: Bumaga
Zakhar Prilepin speaks at Mining University welcome assembly
Zakhar Prilepin was introduced as a “writer and participant in the Special Military Operation,” but was mistakenly referred to as “Prigozhin,” so he corrected the master of ceremonies, our correspondent reports.
Prilepin told the students that emigrating after receiving an education at the Mining University would be an act of treason.
“If you take your knowledge beyond the borders of this country, beyond the bounds of our national science, you will betray all those who stand beside you. I hope there is no one here like this, but some of you might secretly be thinking, ‘I was born so intelligent, I am so wonderful and gorgeous, and basically I’m entitled to everything, that I’ll just pack my bags and go off somewhere where they’ll pay me more for my brains.’ Please understand that this is a treachery against those people who have conquered and cultivated this vast expanse,” Prilepin declared.
Prilepin was the third to speak, after Rector Vladimir Litvinenko and one of his vice-rectors. On stage, the writer stood next to Litvinenko.
A wave of false bomb threats triggered mass evacuations at schools, kindergartens, hospitals and museums across at least nine Russian regions, local officials and media reported Tuesday.
In the Leningrad region, Governor Alexander Drozdenko said “a dozen” schools, kindergartens and hospitals responded to bomb scares. The hoaxes came amid Day of Knowledge celebrations that mark the start of the new school year every Sept. 1.
“We can’t ignore these threats, even though we understand the enemy’s goal to… ruin the holiday for children and adults,” Drozdenko wrote on Telegram, likely a reference to Ukraine.
St. Petersburg and Leningrad region police told the Fontanka.ru news outlet that “more than 100 institutions” received false threats.
In Moscow, at least four museums, including the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, evacuated visitors or temporarily closed for what they called “technical reasons.”
A government building in the Far Eastern Zabaikalsky region and a number of hospitals in the central republic of Tatarstan were also reportedly evacuated.
Fake bomb threats were also reported across the Ural Mountains, the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district, the Orenburg region and the Krasnoyarsk region.
Mass bomb threats, which the Kremlin referred to as “telephone terrorism,” have periodically plagued Russian cities in the years before and since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Prilepin greeted the 2014 ‘Russian Spring’ with delight as the realisation of long-held hopes for a resurgence of Russian power. He hailed the Crimean annexation as a vital turning point in Russia’s post-Soviet history, marking an end to the dominance of what he called the ‘hysterical’ domestic media coverage of the Russian military campaigns in Chechnya and Georgia, and expressing the hope that ‘the Crimean story will give a kind of super-brutal revolutionary impulse inside the country, so that it undergoes a metamorphosis’. Prilepin has been actively involved in the Donbas conflict, initially as a war correspondent and as an activist organising charity rock concerts in aid of the pro-Russian side and delivering humanitarian supplies to the local population. From 2015 to mid-2018 Prilepin was employed as adviser tothe head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), Aleksandr Zakharchenko; in a move that has prompted speculation and conspiracy theorising when, Prilepin, citing health problems, left Zakharchenko’s service a few weeks before the latter was assassinated in August 2018. Apparently on commission from Kremlin ‘grey cardinal’ Vladislav Surkov, Prilepin published a popular biography of Zakharchenko in 2016.
In early 2017 Prilepin’s involvement in the war moved to another level after he announced that he was forming his own battalion to fight in the Donbas for the DNR. This led to his being hailed in the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets as not just both writer and soldier, but also ‘perhaps, a prophet’; the popular tabloid Komsomol’skaia pravda described him as a ‘hero of our time’ for the 2000s, and the‘Byron of Donetsk’. Other commentators predicted that Prilepin would write ‘the first great novel’ about the war in the Donbas, which ‘our children and grandchildren will use to study the history of the second decade of the 21st Century’. Prilepin followed up his announcement with an online videoclip in which he held up a peace sign and delivered a mock-serious speech about the writer’s duty to oppose war, before tearing up the peace sign and ordering his men to open fire on Ukrainian positions.
Source: Julie Fedor, “Spinning Russia’s 21st Century Wars: Zakhar Prilepin and His ‘Literary Spetsnaz.’” The RUSI Journal, vol. 163, no. 6 (December 2018): 20–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2018.1562015.
Far-right activists once again turn up for annual reading of Great Terror victims’ names
The annual Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Great Terror is taking place in the Sandarmokh forest tract. Among those in attendance are nationalists from the so-called Russian Community (Russkaya Obshchina) and Cossacks. One of the far-right activists, his face covered by a mask, is brandishing a Russian flag, according to our correspondent.
For the most part, the provocateurs are being ignored, and they have not played any music.
“So far, no one has been aggressive,” our correspondent reported.
Journalists from pro-government TV channels 78 and Channel One also turned up for the reading.
A monument to the Jews murdered in the area had been toppled but was later restored to its original location.
What you need to know
In 1937–1938, Sandarmokh was the site of mass executions and burials during Stalin’s Great Terror. The site was discovered by members of the Petersburg and Karelian branches of Memorial in 1997.
Every year on August 5, official memorial ceremonies are held in Sandarmokh to honor the victims.
Last year, far-right extremists also attended the ceremony: they splashed water on those who had come to the memorial event and sang “Katyusha.” The year before last, they tried to drown out the reading of the names by playing military songs over loudspeakers.
The Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Great Terror is annually held on August 5 in Sandarmokh, [a] forest area in Karelia. Thousands of people killed by Stalin’s NKVD are buried in the area.
This year’s commemoration did not proceed without trouble.
A significant number of people had traveled to the memorial site to pay their respect[s]. Among them were representatives of the Finnish Embassy in Moscow, including Ambassador Marja Liivala.
They were met by militant activists from the ultraright group Russkaya Obshchina (Russian Community).
Many of the militants had their faces covered by balaclavas. They verbally attacked the foreign diplomats, accusing them of being ‘fascists.’
The provocateurs also told the guests at the commemoration that they were ‘collaborators’ and that they should “go to Donbass.”
At one point, several of the militants began to chant the patriotic song “Katyusha.”
The Barents Observer has gotten access to photo and video footage from the event.
The provocations were carefully planned by Russkaya Obshchina and its partners. The extremist group has close links to powerful people in the Putin regime. Lately, it has become more active and visible in the Russian public space, including in north Russian regions like Murmansk.
Representatives of the Finnish Embassy in Moscow, along with diplomats from the other Nordic countries, regularly attend commemoration events like the one in Sandarmokh.
The day before the commemoration event in Sandarmokh, a memorial event for victims of political repression took place at the Krasny Bor memorial cemetery near Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia. Activists read out the names of the terror victims. An 80-year-old veteran of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Tatyana Savinkina, who had been involved in the rehabilitation of the repressed for many years, attended the event, reported SOTAvision. In December 2024, Savinkina was convicted for “discrediting the army.”
Since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Sandarmokh has repeatedly become a site for provocations. In 2022, pro-government activists stuck the symbol of the Russian invasion – the letter Z – on the cars of people who came to the site, placed leaflets with insults directed at the Ukrainian president, and attempted to distribute books by the well-known Karelian Stalinist Alexander Stepanov. In 2024, a group of Cossacks and unknown individuals arrived at the site, hiding their faces under balaclavas. They set up speakers between the pines, from which military songs played. Ukrainians holding a memorial service at their cross of sorrow were shouted at with “Glory to Russia,” and near the Holocaust monument, provocateurs shouted “Jews sponsored Hitler.”
On 25 July [2026], the Russian Cultural Heritage Festival [sic] took place at Fort Ross[State] Historic Park in California for the first time in six years, with the involvement of [Nina Abramian], cultural attaché from the Russian Embassy, whom the U.S. State Department had authorized to travel from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco for the occasion.
This revived unique celebration, designed to keep alive the historical memory of Russian America, brought together our compatriots and concerned Americans from across the United States, as well as members of Indigenous tribes.
Ninety-nine-year-old Otis Parrish, chief [sic] of the [Kashia Band of Pomo Indians], was invited as guest of honor to the celebration, which featured performances of folk songs, Russian cuisine tasting, displays of arts and crafts, and a round dance set to the music of traditional instruments.
Guests immersed themselves in an atmosphere of unity and a sense of connection to Russian history. The legendary settlement on the coast of Northern California, 140 kilometers north of San Francisco, and founded on 11 September 1812 by the Russian-American Company for fur hunting and trade, was a part of this history.
Ivan Kuskov, an explorer, merchant, and government official, was appointed commandant of the colony. Under his command were twenty-five Russian colonists and eighty Aleuts who had arrived from Russia’s colonies in Alaska. Construction, however, was only possible after Kuskov obtained permission from the indigenous people, the Kashaya Pomo tribe, to use the land for the settlement.
Despite the passage of time and the ocean winds, the fort’s original structures—the administrator’s house, outbuildings, and defensive towers—have survived to this day. In its time, Fort Ross was a hub of innovation: California’s first windmills and shipyards were built there.
These historic sites were at the heart of the plot of Alexey Rybnikov’s renowned [rock] opera Juno and Avos, and they inspired future generations to create works of art, including the famous portrait of Conchita Argüello by the Russian painter Anatoly Sokoloff, which the artist’s family donated to the State Historical Museum in Moscow in September 2001.
As Fort Ross approaches its 215th anniversary, which will be celebrated in September 2027, it remains in operation. It attracts tourists, scholars, historians, and politicians, serving as a reminder of Russia and America’s shared historical and cultural heritage and the significant contribution of our fellow countrymen to the conquest of America, while remaining a vivid example of the intersection and peaceful, harmonious coexistence of diverse cultures, beliefs, and traditions.
We are grateful to everyone who sincerely contributes to the preservation of this unique architectural landmark. Preserving the memory of the shared milestones in the history of Russia and the United States is an important element in restoring an atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding between our nations and peoples.
6 July 2017, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo by the Russian Reader
[…]
And so, on Friday night, the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump flew to South Dakota to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore in which he claimed he and his supporters are at war against an enemy here at home: communists.
Before his trip to the state, Trump posted a video showing his own likeness on a golden sculpture of Mt. Rushmore, alongside the images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, with the voiceover saying: “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The video opens with the text “Art of the vision” spelled out over an American flag, an encapsulation—although perhaps an unintentional one—of how Trump has maintained political power by selling a false image to his followers.
Trump began his speech with a series of feel-good platitudes: “These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations, everybody…. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters…. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth.” And then he tied together MAGA’s white nationalism with the claim that Trump’s political opponents want to destroy the economy.
Trump clearly thinks there is political gain in convincing his followers that his political opponents are communists, although this is a lie made up out of whole cloth after the victory of Democratic Socialists in Democratic primaries and the popularity of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Communists call for the end of private ownership of the means of production, giving the state control of private enterprises. In today’s America, it is actually Trump, himself, who is taking government stakes in private enterprises.
Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.
In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.
Nonetheless, on Friday Trump tried to convince Americans that “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.” “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” he said. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”
He went on to say: “They don’t want good. They don’t love God and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion and they won’t have it.… They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder…. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
His false vision of the U.S. is aimed at the midterm elections. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.” He went on to demand that the Senate end the filibuster and Congress pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act. If they do, he said, “we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”
On July 4, hundreds of masked white supremacists in khakis and blue shirts, carrying Confederate flags and flags with the logo of the neofascist white supremacist group Patriot Front, marched in Washington, D.C., chanting “Reclaim America.” The White House did not respond to a query from Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian about whether Trump condemns the march.
Trump continued his attacks on “communists” in a late-night speech on the National Mall after thunderstorms temporarily shut down his planned rally. “[A]ll these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance,” he told the drenched audience members, “not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country.”
Trump’s drop into an anticommunism that exaggerates even the excesses of the McCarthy era seems to indicate panic rather than confidence. Today, July 5, he began posting on social media at 1:21 AM and over the course of the day posted more than 100 times, attacking Democrats and boasting extravagantly of what he says are his own successes while demanding Congress pass the SAVE Act or lose the presidency forever.
Trump’s people appear to be trying to push Trump’s vision, but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows today, insisting that the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the work of vandals who have gashed its surface in multiple cuts that equal the 350 feet Trump claims and that there is video evidence, although the administration, which is famous for spinning everything to its own advantage, is choosing not to show it.
When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether they actually had photographs of people cutting a gash in the liner, Burgum danced away from the question after commenting, “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not…”
And so the 251st year of American democracy begins with reality reasserting itself.
Russia has prepared a new edition of its official history textbook for 11th graders. The Russian business news outlet RBC reviewed the new version and found that the section dealing with the United States had been significantly revised. Among the changes: the textbook now credits the Trump administration with playing a “positive role” in settling the war in Ukraine. Meduza summarizes what else has changed.
Russia’s unified history textbook for 11th graders has been updated and published on the “Moya Shkola” (“My School”) digital platform. The textbook, co-authored by Vladimir Medinsky — an aide to the Russian president and chairman of the Russian Military Historical Society — and Anatoly Torkunov, rector of Moscow State Institute of International Relations, has now reached its third edition.
The Russian business news outlet RBC compared the new edition with last year’s and found that the most heavily rewritten section is the one titled “Russia Today. Special Military Operation (SVO)).”
The passages dealing with the United States were substantially altered. The subsection formerly titled “U.S. Pressure on Russia” has been renamed simply “Pressure on Russia.”
The previous edition stated that Europe’s energy independence “did not suit the United States” — in the new version, the authors replaced “the United States” with “the collective West.” Also cut is the claim that “in the name of their corporations’ profits, the United States constantly resorted to military and terrorist methods — as it did in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and in many other parts of the world.” Similar edits were made to the section on the war in South Ossetia.
The new edition also drops a line about the United States’ determination to “fight to the last Ukrainian.” In its place, the textbook now credits President Donald Trump’s administration with playing a “positive role” in peace negotiations, and notes that Trump has repeatedly stated the conflict between Russia and Ukraine would not have happened had he been president in 2022. A reference to the meeting between the U.S. and Russian presidents in Anchorage in August 2025 has also been added.
The section on the war in Syria has been revised as well. The previous edition stated that the Western coalition had tried to “overthrow the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” The new version says the United States and NATO, using opposition forces and Islamic State terrorists, launched military operations against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The line “hundreds of thousands of civilians fell victim to the Islamists, and millions of refugees fled Syria” has been removed.
Assad’s government was toppled in December 2024, and Islamists led by Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power in Syria. Assad and many of his associates fled to Russia.
Other additions include a mention of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, headed by Anna Tsivileva, Putin’s cousin’s daughter, and information about a personnel program for combat veterans called “Time of Heroes.”
The new edition also references the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue and “the breakthrough of elite Ukrainian Armed Forces units toward the Kursk nuclear power plant.” Added as well are accounts of the killing of Alexander Dugin’s daughter Darya Dugina and the “war correspondent” Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, and the assassination attempt on writer Zakhar Prilepin.
RBC also noted that Apti Alaudinov, commander of the Akhmat battalion, has been dropped from the textbook’s list of “heroes of the SVO,” along with the line “fighters of the celebrated Chechen special unit ‘Akhmat’ strike terror into the Nazis.”
Vladislav Kononov, a staff member of the presidential administration’s department for state policy in the humanitarian sphere, described the new edition as “routine editing during a reprint — so-called topical revision,” in which the text is updated to reflect events that occurred after the previous edition was released. “There are no hidden meanings here,” he said.
The history textbook for 11th graders by Medinsky and Torkunov was first presented in 2023. In 2026, its third edition was released.
In recent years, “ideological diversity” has become one of the principal demands made upon American academia, not only by the yahoo right but also by many moderate conservatives and centrists. The former rarely manages to rise above crude insults of the “all professors are communists” variety, as it applauds the Trump administration’s brutal assaults on academic institutions. Unfortunately, while the latter are much more thoughtful, they often make a very misguided case. There is an argument to be made for ideological diversity—a surprisingly simple, and also limited one. But it involves giving more credence to the academic left than most critics are prepared to do.
A classic example of the case wrongly made is the report recently released by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington Universities and written by a distinguished group of academics (including two Princeton colleagues). It is nuanced and careful, takes a mostly moderate tone, and certainly doesn’t deserve the label “diabolical” that some have attached to it. But it also falls into some predictable traps.
Its basic arguments are as follows. Positions in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences today are held overwhelmingly by academics on the left. These academics, especially those who define themselves as “scholar activists,” too often let political goals drive their work, thereby betraying the core mission of academia, which is disinterested inquiry. They discriminate against people who do not share these political goals. And this politicization is both inspired and justified by “relativist” post-structuralist theories that deny the very idea of objective truth.
Let’s take these points one by one. First, yes, the report is obviously correct to state that academics lean very strongly to the left. But this fact by itself says nothing about how left-leaning scholars actually function in the academy or the work they produce.
The second point is much more complicated. What does it mean for scholarship itself to be “political,” or “politicized”? You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Foucauldian to acknowledge that the production of knowledge is always, in some senses, implicitly political. Scholars, like everyone, exist within structures of power whose operations influence their conduct in ways seen and unseen. Feminist scholars did more than simply expand the scope of scholarly inquiry by bringing new attention to women, gender and sexuality. They showed how earlier generations of scholars, by not treating these subjects as even worthy of attention, participated in largely unspoken practices of exclusion. This point should not be terribly controversial. Nor should it be controversial that many past schools of scholarship that presented themselves as disinterested and objective were clearly driven by strong political motives. Just think of the “Dunning School” of American history that celebrated the southern “Lost Cause” and sought to discredit Reconstruction.
Acknowledging these points in no way means erasing the distinction between scholarship and propaganda—and contrary to widespread views on the right, this erasure has not taken place. One can accept that scholarship is implicitly political while also insisting that its production properly requires adhering to rules of evidence, and to making logical and well-supported arguments. I have been a professor for thirty-five years and have taken part in a very (!) large number of hiring decisions, promotion and tenure decisions, editorial decisions for journals and presses, personnel decisions for scholarly societies, and the like. I have occasionally seen these decisions made badly, because of personal animus, or incompetence. For what it is worth, I have never seen them made on an explicitly political basis, and very rarely even on an implicitly political one. In almost all cases, the principal criteria invoked have been classic scholarly ones: the strength of evidence, the strength of argument, the innovative and engaging qualities of the work as a whole.
Do academic fields discriminate against conservatives? It is certainly true that conservatives will not feel welcome in many fields of the humanities and social sciences. This is particularly the case for fields born out of the liberation movements of the 1960’s, such as Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or African-American Studies, where many scholars still define themselves in relation to the goals of these movements and proudly call themselves “scholar activists.” An opponent of abortion or affirmative action will not find these fields congenial places. But in my experience, at least, the absence of conservatives in them is almost entirely the result of self-selection, not discrimination. That element of self-selection may itself be problematic, but it does not call for the same sort of response that active discrimination would.
And it is simply a mistake to attribute the “politicization” to poststructuralist philosophy and relativism. To the extent that the alleged politicization began in the 1960’s, it began well before the heyday of poststructuralism in American humanities departments, and it has continued long afterwards. Whole generations of literary scholars have now gone through the PhD to jobs and tenure without ever reading Jacques Derrida, let alone becoming his adepts (for that matter, Derrida’s work can in no way be described as a simple denial of the idea of truth). The overwhelming majority of works derided as “woke”—at least the ones I have read—do not say that one group’s claims on truth is as good as another’s. To the contrary, they say that the claims made by a “subaltern” group are stronger and more convincing than ones generated from within an oppressive structure of power. That argument might be wrong, but it is not relativist. Jonathan Kramnick made some of these points at length in an excellent rebuttal to the Vanderbilt Report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In sum, whatever the massive overrepresentation of the left in academia, and despite some undoubted excesses, this overrepresentation has not resulted in an illegitimate distortion of the academic enterprise, the suppression of free inquiry, or large-scale violations of academic freedom. It would be a violation of academic freedom, on the other hand, to censor or dismiss academics for such alleged infractions. The Vanderbilt report does not call for any such disciplinary actions, although one could imagine unscrupulous university overseers citing it as justification for them.
But there is one set of academic decisions where politics does often dictate the outcome in a much more straightforward sense than in the cases just discussed: decisions on which fields to hire in. Professors do not normally make these decisions. Deans and other high-level administrators do. They do so in consultation with professors and normally take into consideration academic judgments as to which fields of inquiry look strongest and most promising. But, of necessity, they also take into consideration finances, student interest, the likely availability of expertise—and politics. To take the most prominent recent example, after the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests in 2020, more than half of the jobs advertised in North American history the next year were specifically for specialists in African-American history and related fields such as the history of slavery. A very high proportion of jobs advertised in French were for specialists in “Francophone” literature—i.e. literature produced outside of France, mostly in colonies and former colonies. These decisions were justifiable on academic grounds, for the fields in question are vibrant ones. But they were obviously made for political reasons, above all to address concerns about the underrepresentation of people of color in university faculties. Were these concerns themselves valid? Absolutely. It can also be argued that addressing this underrepresentation brings previously neglected points of view into academic conversations. But this doesn’t change the fact that the decisions were political ones—a response to an immediate political crisis, and to political pressure.
Again, to be clear: there was nothing illegitimate about university administrators bringing political considerations to bear. Decisions on what fields to hire in are central to a university’s identity, to the sort of community it is. Politics is inescapably part of this picture.
But if there was an argument for using hiring decisions to address racial inequalities, there is an argument for using them to address ideological imbalance as well. Even if there is nothing illegitimate about the strong leftward tilt of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, it does create a large gulf between the professors and much of the American population whom they are serving. Even if there is nothing illegitimate about certain fields being dominated by self-proclaimed “scholar activists,” it discourages students who don’t share the activists’ agendas from studying those fields. A heavy concentration of academic resources in certain areas of research leaves other areas neglected, including ones that university leaders may see as central to undergraduate education. And the heavier the emphasis on shared political goals, the easier it is to generate groupthink and stifle the sort of originality universities should be placing a premium on.
Actual hiring decisions should always be made by the specialists themselves. They are the ones with the requisite expertise. Dictating whom to hire would be a violation of their academic freedom. But that freedom does not extend to faculty themselves dictating which areas to hire in.
It would not be such a bad idea if humanities and social science departments themselves took more initiatives in this direction. In recent years, much of the hiring done for reasons of ideological diversity has taken place in new academic units such as Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Attempts to create positions within existing departments, going back to the Bass Family’s attempt to endow a “Western Civilization” program at Yale in the 1990s, have sometimes ended in messy failure. But placing the new faculty in separate units leaves the original fields dangerously exposed to damaging cuts, either for brute ideological reasons, or because they do not have enough of a constituency to protest when the budget axe swings for financial ones. It should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the “Western tradition” that neither the thinkers in question, nor current specialists on them, are anything like homogenously conservative—hiring in the field does not mean hiring the next Harvey Mansfield. But would it be such a bad thing to hire a few more scholars who dissent from the prevailing politics of their fields? Robust political debate is generally preferable to groupthink, after all.
The world’s end kicks off not with explosions but with alarming news and eerie silence on the streets of Los Angeles. The world is going mad slowly, and Madison Clark (played by Kim Dickens of Gone Girl, House of Cards, and Treme), a school psychologist and mother raising two children, is the first to sense it.
Madison’s new husband, Travis Manawa (played by Cliff Curtis of Training Day, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Invincible), is a teacher trying to build a new life from the ruins of his old one, while also raising his son from a previous marriage. Their mundane problems fade into insignificance when the world order collapses and fear becomes commonplace.
“Victory will be ours” reads the banner on the Russian Embassy in Seoul. Source: Jintak Han/ZUMA/Picture Alliance
On Sunday, 22 February, a fifteen-meter-high banner in the colors of the Russian flag sporting the slogan “Victory will be ours” in Russian appeared on the Russian Embassy’s building in Seoul. The banner was unfurled ahead of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.
The South Korean Foreign Ministry “expressed concerns […] over the large banner,” according to the Yonhap News Agency. The ministry stressed that it could create “unnecessary tensions with South Korean citizens and other countries,” as it is regarded as an allusion to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Russian Embassy refuses to take down banner
Despite the concerns raised by South Korea’s Foreign Ministry, the Russian Embassy has refused to remove the banner from its building. The banner was hung on the occasion of Diplomatic Workers Day and Defender of the Fatherland Day, according to the Foreign Ministry’s Telegram channel.
“The popular expression on the banner is familiar to all Russians. It is associated with our history, including the mobilization of the Soviet people for victory over Nazi Germany and other glorious chapters of Russian history,” embassy spokespeople underscored. They also claimed that the banner “promotes patriotic consolidation among Russians, and the historical connotations mentioned should not hurt anyone’s feelings.”
Different cities. Different motives. Same profile. White. Male. Armed. Deadly.
The news pretends each act is an isolated tragedy: a troubled man, a random eruption, a community blindsided. But line them up side by side and the repetition is too precise to ignore. These aren’t anomalies; they’re a drumbeat. Churches, schools, bars, government buildings. Nothing is sacred. Nobody is immune. The perpetrators are acting out the same choreography and playing variations on a script that ends with bodies on the ground and their names immortalized in headlines.
Humiliation is the through-line.
Strip away the headlines, the manifestos, the mugshots, and what you see is white men who cannot live with being ordinary, ignored, or denied. White masculinity in America was built on the guarantee of centrality, the right to be heard, feared, and obeyed. When that illusion frays, humiliation takes its place. And humiliation, when combined with access to assault rifles and an internet full of cheerleaders becomes combustible.
Enter Donald Trump.
He is not the author of this script, but he is its loudest hype man. He takes that humiliation and translates it into a politics of grievance. He tells white men their despair isn’t failure, it’s theft. He tells them their rage isn’t weakness, it’s patriotism. He baptizes their sense of collapse as a holy war. Trump doesn’t hand them the gun, but he hands them the permission slip to kill. He turns their humiliation into a rallying cry, their despair into his campaign platform, and their death wish into applause lines.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk proves this. Here was no random eruption in a mall or classroom, but a sniper attack staged at a political rally. What we witnessed was violence designed as theater. The accused, Tyler Robinson, was reportedly obsessed with Kirk, surveilled his movements, and turned grievance into spectacle. This wasn’t just about killing one man, it was about sending a message by inscribing grievance onto the national stage. And while Robinson didn’t appear to seek his own death in the same way as other shooters, the logic still holds: collapse turned outward, humiliation converted into performance, violence as a last-ditch claim to visibility. Whether in a schoolyard or at a rally podium, the impulse is the same — make sure the world cannot look away.
That’s why so many of these killings end with the shooter’s own death. Researchers have long noted that mass shooters often carry suicidal intent. Some kill themselves on the spot, others provoke police into finishing the job. Even those who survive often admit they never planned an escape. They weren’t trying to get away with it. They were trying to make sure we all saw them on the way out.
This is suicide turned outward. Instead of a private exit, it is a public performance. It is despair weaponized into punishment. It is a white man who feels invisible deciding that if he must disappear, he will do it in a blaze that makes his enemies, his community, his whole country remember his name. The bullets are not just aimed at bodies, they are aimed at the world that he believes has betrayed him.
Son of the renowned filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, anthropology graduate and activist Andrei Khrzhanovsky moved to Israel in 2022. He almost immediately adopted a pro-Palestinian stance in the Middle East conflict, dubbing Israel’s actions genocide, and Zionism an ethnically supremacist idea. He says he is fighting for the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank due to his sense of guilt over the war in Ukraine. He spoke with Marina Berdichevskaya about his radical stance and his conflicts with his family.
Andrei Khrzhanovsky, 26, has been living in Israel since 2022. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he found himself in Tel Aviv with his entire family, including his famous father, grandfather, and grandmother. When the time came to fly home, there was nowhere to go. On February 24, Ilya Khrzhanovsky had begun circulating a petition, condemning the invasion of Ukraine, among cultural figures. Andrei flew to Georgia and applied there for Israeli citizenship.
Since March 2022, Andrei X, as he likes to be called, has enthusiastically plunged into the weeds of Israeli life and quite quickly chosen a side: he has taken up activism and, so he claims, journalism, on behalf of “the most vulnerable group on Earth at the moment,” the inhabitants of the West Bank. At the same time, Andrei has been doing battle with “the genocide in Gaza” and on this score has found himself at odds with his father, who has repeatedly said that, in the wake of 7 October 2023, he has felt himself to be Israeli first and foremost.
We talked at length and quite emotionally about how the profoundly erudite Khrzhanovsky, who has a degree in anthropology from the University of London, has decided to atone for the collective guilt of generations for world colonialism. Andrei happily juggles concepts and historical facts and is sure that this is the only way to do things: to always stand up for the downtrodden and to never succumb to propaganda. Whether he himself is suspectible to propaganda is an open question. Ah, yes. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of Republic or its editors—nor should they.
“The closer you are to the empire’s center, the greater the blame”
— Let’s begin with where you live. Your Facebook page says you live in Jericho. Is this true?
— Nowadays, I don’t stay anywhere longer than a few days in a row. I rent a flat, but I won’t divulge its location, because I get several death threats a day. I come home once every month and a half for a couple of days and then I hit the road again. Yesterday, I came from Bethlehem.
— How do people on the West Bank relate to you? Do they understand that you have an Israel passport?
— I’ve never had any problems with this because this is a political conflict, not an ethnic one. I speak with Palestinians deep in Area A (the West Bank is divided into three areas; Area A, which makes up seventeen percent of the West Bank, is wholly controlled by the Palestinian Authority — Republic) whose relatives have been killed, who have done time in prison. Israel fosters the illusion that all Palestinians want to kill all Jews. But this isn’t an ethnic conflict, and not even a religious one at the end of the day.
— In February of last year you said in an interview, “When the war in Ukraine began, I had an enormous sense of guilt that I hadn’t done more [to stop it]. That’s why I’ve thrown myself into all political activism here.” You explained your activism in terms of not wanting to “squander another country.” Where does such a young man come by a sense of personal guilt for what is happening in and with a country? After all, many Russian nationals, especially the remainers, reject the very principle of collective guilt.
Karèn Shainyan, interview with Andrei Khrzhanovsky and Artyom Nikitin (in Russian, with no subtitles)
Today’s episode of Who Am I After This? is very sensitive for me personally. The conversations with its two subjects, leftists and human rights activists, were the hardest and most emotional in the whole project because they both touch on a very painful personal conflict of loyalties for me. This is the only episode where there are two protagonists at once: journalist Andrei Khrzhanovsky and architect Artyom Nikitin. Quite handsome and young, both moved to Israel after the war in Ukraine began, and both travel to the West Bank to support the local Arab [sic] population, even and especially now, when there is a war in [sic] Israel.
— Before February 2022 we all lived in a magical reality of sorts: there was a dictatorship in Russia, seemingly, but no one was getting killed, as it were; everything was sluggish, we had to tackle corruption and so on. But there was no sense of the disaster that any dictatorship represents. This illusion personally crumbled for me on 24 February 2022. The disaster started then, and then intensified after the genocide in Gaza began. Over the past few years, the feeling has only grown in me that we are all to blame for what is happening; some more, some less. The closer you are to the empire’s center, the greater the blame.
— And when did you personally start counting down that blame?
— If we speak of the entire timeline, there were three moments. The first was 24 February 2022. The second was an article by Yuval Abraham (an Israeli journalist and co-director of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land — Republic), based on conversations with soldiers fighting in Gaza who admitted that they had been tasked with firing on civilian targets. And the third was the morning when I woke up, opened Instagram, and saw the video of a man in Gaza burning alive after an IDF strike on a hospital.
Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Source: social media
— How did you get involved in political activism in Israel?
— I had an approximate, general notion of what was happening here when I turned up here. I grew up in the Russophone media space after all. But when I arrived I realized that I had to figure out what was happening. I started reading books and talking to people. The more I researched, the more horrified I was. Suddenly, I found out about the status of Palestinians in East Jerusalem: their land was annexed, but they weren’t granted [Israeli] citizenship. To get into the Shuafat refugee camp, which the Israelis annexed and surrounded with a wall, Palestinians have to go through a security checkpoint. The sheer number of different methods for constructing a state based on ethnic supremacy is insane.
On Friday, May ninth, Treptow Park was perhaps the most heavily guarded place in Berlin. Hundreds of police officers kept the peace at Germany’s most famous memorial to Soviet soldiers on the day Russia marked the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet tradition. Because Russia has employed symbols of that earlier war in its current war against Ukraine, visitors were banned from displaying or wearing Soviet and Russian flags, military uniforms, and St George’s ribbons at the Berlin memorial this year. An exception was made for veterans and diplomats.
Soviet May ninth traditions and German pacifists
At about half past ten in the morning, a wreath was laid at the monument to the Soviet soldier by Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechayev. The day before, when Germany remembered the Wehrmacht’s surrender and the end of the war, Nechayev and the Belarusian ambassador were not invited to the memorial event at the Bundestag. In his speech, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier thanked the Allies for liberating his country and recalled the Red Army’s sacrifices, but harshly criticized Russian attempts to justify the war in Ukraine in terms of the fight against the Nazis in the Second World War.
The flood of people in Treptow Park seemed endless: hundreds were there at any one time, and thousands came and went over the course of the day. Many brought scarlet carnations, while some bore wreaths. Russian and German were heard. Most of the visitors were elderly—immigrants from the former USSR living in Germany and Germans. There were also many leftist and ultra-leftist German political activists brandishing placards opposing NATO and calling for “peace with Russia.”
German ultra-leftists rally for “peace with Russia” and Germany’s exit from NATO, 9 May 2025. Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle
Against this backdrop, the scene resembled a mixture of a traditional Russian May ninth celebration and a political protest by German pacifists, many of whom had clearly lived most of their lives in the GDR.
“I was a policeman in the GDR,” said a man in his sixties who held a placard that read “Thank you” in Russian. The policemen asked him to doff his Soviet cap, which sported a red star and a St. George’s ribbon.
“All people want peace, so the politicians should don their own military uniforms and crawl into the trenches,’ the man said.
Soviet wartime songs sounded from loudspeakers and were played live. One man, aged forty-five, climbed atop a mound to get a better view, but a policeman asked him to get off the lawn, explaining, “This is a grave.” The man cursed in Russian but climbed off the mound.
Another man played played “Arise, Great Country” on his clarinet. When he began quietly playing the melody of the Soviet and Russian national anthem, the police literally took him aside, after which he returned to the group of people who had gathered. They were outraged at the restrictions that had been adopted. From time to time, someone chanted “Russia, Russia!” and many other people would join in.
An ex-East German police office (holding a sign that says “Thanks!” in Russian): “All people want peace.” Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle
Bikers in Treptow Park
Your correspondent saw men and a woman in leather jackets who looked like bikers from the Russian motorcycle gang Night Wolves. They were in small groups and were escorted by a large number of police officers. They posed for pictures in front of the wreaths and left. They could have been someone from a local “support group.” The Berlin press had written that only a small group of bikers made the trip to Berlin to visit the Soviet memorials this year. No incidents had been reported as this article went to press.
Treptow Park, 9 May 2025. The crimson and gold banners at the back of the crowd are inscribed with the names of the various “fronts” in the Red Army’s campaign against the Wehrmacht. Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle
For the first half of the day, at least, things seemed relatively calm. Your correspondent had the impression that most people had come to Treptow Park not for political reasons, but to commemorate the war. And yet the atmosphere was tense. To the right and left of the monument to the Soviet warrior stood a dozen and a half activists holding placards and the flags of Ukraine and NATO.
Activists with placards and Ukrainian flags at the monument to Soviet soldiers in Treptow Park, 9 May 2025. Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle
They said they wanted to draw attention to the Ukrainian Red Army soldiers who had perished in the Second World War, as well as to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
“I am here to prevent this event from being turned into a Russian propaganda stunt,” said a woman, aged thirty-five. According to her, insults had been hurled at her and the pro-Ukrainian activists.
“Some people regard our presence here as a provocation,” said the woman. “We are not here to change anyone’s mind, but to make Ukraine visible.”
One of their posters read: “Russia has usurped the memory of May eighth and ninth. But it was not Russia who liberated us from the yoke of National Socialism eighty years ago in Berlin. It was the Red Army, in whose ranks many Ukrainians served.”
The poster tells the story of Ukrainian soldier Fyodor Karpenko, who left his name on the walls of the destroyed Reichstag building in May 1945.
Since the Maidan uprising and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kremlin propaganda has consistently portrayed Ukrainian leaders as Nazis or fascists. Russia also accused the Ukrainian authorities of “genocide” of the population of Donbass. On 24 February 2022, while announcing the full-scale invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine was presented as the primary goal of the war, which is itself portrayed merely as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War: a conflict embedded in a cyclical conception of time in which Russia, eternally under threat from a Western enemy, fights for its very survival — on Ukrainian soil.
On the ground, there is no evidence to support Moscow’s accusations: nobody has ever documented a “genocide” against ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. As for the Ukrainian far-right, its political influence remains minimal: in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the main ultra-nationalist parties, running together on a joint list, received just over 2% of the vote, well below the threshold required to enter Parliament. In short, the image of a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv is based on a glaring mismatch between rhetoric and reality.
So why do the Russian authorities repeatedly invoke references to the Second World War — or, in Russian parlance, the “Great Patriotic War” — when speaking about Ukraine? Understanding this memory dynamic is essential to grasp the power of a rhetoric that, despite lacking any factual basis, continues to shape the official Russian worldview.
The Soviet and Russian insistence on using the term “Great Patriotic War” to refer exclusively to the period from 1941 to 1945 erases the twenty-one months that preceded Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR. Between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, and Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Moscow and Berlin were de facto allies: they engaged in extensive economic cooperation, diplomatic coordination, jointly invaded and partitioned Poland in September 1939, and the Soviet Union proceeded to annex the Baltic countries and wage war against Finland. By reducing the war to the period 1941–1945, the USSR and Russia could deny any responsibility in the outbreak of the Second World War and present itself solely as the victim of Nazi aggression and the primary liberator of Europe.
The Great Patriotic War — and especially the victory in 1945 — became the founding event of Soviet history and the cornerstone of collective memory. Yet this memory, often portrayed as monolithic and universally shared, is anything but uniform. A Ukrainian from the west, who endured two successive occupations between 1939 and 1944, remembers a war very different from that of an eastern Ukrainian, whose experience was shaped primarily by Nazi destruction. The memory of a Russian bears little resemblance to that of a Crimean Tatar, who was deported along with his entire community and denied the right of return for decades. As for Soviet Jews, whose families and communities were annihilated in the Holocaust, they were long forced to remain silent — official narratives left no room for the specificity of their suffering.
The collective experience of the war and the official discourse surrounding it deeply reshaped the Soviet population’s understanding of “fascism” and “antifascism.” Rather than referring to a specific political doctrine of the inter-war period, the term “fascism” had become a catch-all label for the ultimate enemy. Trotsky or the British Conservatives could just as easily be branded as “fascists,” as well as domestic and international opponents after 1945 — including even the Chinese Communists. The word “Nazi” itself was rarely used. In everyday life, calling someone a “fascist” served more as the gravest possible insult rather than as a statement of ideological substance.
Under Vladimir Putin, the cult of the Great Patriotic War has been revived. Following the pro-democracy protests of 2011 and Putin’s bid for a third presidential term in 2012, the regime instituted a deliberate policy of historical narrative construction, aimed at grounding its legitimacy in a vision of the nation as under siege. The glorification of the 1945 victory also allowed the regime to purge collective memory of its specifically socialist elements: by retaining only the narrative of national triumph, the Soviet period could be seamlessly integrated into a continuous national history without any revolutionary rupture. At the same time, the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin as a legitimate victor served to validate autocracy. The mass repressions and genocidal policies that claimed millions of lives were reframed as a tragic but necessary step: they had made the USSR a global superpower, capable of defending civilization against the “brown plague.”
The Kremlin has multiplied its legal instruments to enforce this narrative. Since 2020, the Russian Constitution mandates “respect for the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland” and prohibits “diminishing the importance of the heroism” of the Soviet people. In April 2021, Putin signed a law increasing penalties for “insults” or “false claims” about the Second World War and its veterans. In December 2019, Putin himself gathered some leaders of post-Soviet states around a pile of archival documents that he said proved historical truths long ignored in the West — selectively quoting them to justify, in retrospect, the USSR’s annexation of Poland and the Baltic states. In this way, Putin has weaponized history, which has become inseparable from national interest. To challenge his interpretation is tantamount to treason.
Every year on May 9, Russians march in the Immortal Regiment carrying portraits of relatives who fought between 1941 and 1945. Increasingly, the faces of those who fought — or died — in the war against Ukraine are added to these ranks, as though both wars were part of a single, endless struggle. Past and present warfare are merged, and the victory of 1945 becomes the lens through which all events — past, present, and future — are interpreted in a continuous historical timeline. This symbolic fusion also explains the surreal images of Russian occupation forces who, in recent weeks, have placed propaganda banners in destroyed Ukrainian cities. An uninhabitable Bakhmut was transformed into a stage for celebrating the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War.”
The cult of victory is not only a central element of the Putinist imaginary — it functions as an operating system for both domestic governance and external aggression, with all of Russia’s actions on the international stage framed as part of an eternal war against fascism. A telling example of this is the installation of a giant screen on the Estonian border, broadcasting Victory Day celebrations in a loop — an attempt to remind Estonians, as well as Latvians and Lithuanians, that the Soviet victory represents an unassailable moral superiority. In the Russian collective imagination, the word “fascism” has lost all connection with a specific political ideology and now refers only to an abstract, absolute threat: the desire to destroy Russia. It has become synonymous with “enemy” or “Russophobe,” always denoting the Other, never a historically defined movement. This separation between word and meaning allows the regime to simultaneously glorify the antifascist victory and openly promote xenophobic, homophobic, or ultraconservative rhetoric, without any perceived contradiction.
The word “denazification,” used by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, to justify the invasion, initially puzzled many Russians, most of whom were unfamiliar with the term in this context. Shortly afterwards, the state news agency RIA Novosti published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev — “What Russia Should Do with Ukraine”— aimed at clarifying its meaning: “denazification” was described as a “total cleansing,” targeting not only alleged Nazi leaders but also “the popular masses who are passive Nazis,” deemed guilty of having supported the “Nazi government.” According to Sergeytsev, modern Ukraine is able to hide its Nazism behind aspirations for “independence” and “European development.” To destroy this Nazism, he argues, is to “de-Europeanise” Ukraine. In this logic, denazification becomes synonymous with eliminating all Western influence from Ukraine and dismantling the country’s existence as a nation-state and a distinct society. Incubated on official state platforms, this narrative reveals the true scope of “denazification”: a large-scale project aimed at erasing any trace of Ukrainian singularity, a blueprint for the genocide.
The article recently published on the official website of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), entitled “Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington,” strikingly illustrates the expansion of the “denazification” discourse far beyond Ukraine. The accompanying image depicts a grotesque hybrid monster: its body is shaped like a black swastika with the EU’s circle of stars in the centre, while its head is a caricature of Ursula von der Leyen. The creature, with its blood-stained claws outstretched, is caught between two bayonets — one American, the other Russian/Soviet. This grotesque image is not merely a provocation: it reflects a narrative deeply entrenched in Russian state propaganda, where “Eurofascism” becomes an operational concept encompassing all European societies.
“Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington.” Screenshot courtesy of Meduza
The 2022 tipping point revealed these discourses for what they truly are: the ideological foundation of a large-scale invasion, long prepared within the informational sphere. Today, part of European society — particularly elements of the pacifist left — is falling into the same trap: underestimating or ignoring the ongoing propaganda dynamic. But the machine is already in motion. The language of fascism is being broadened daily to include new designated enemies, and the ideological war is shifting: it is no longer stopping at Ukraine — it is now targeting all of Europe. In the face of this brutal reconfiguration of the official Russian narrative, complacency or passivity have themselves become forms of strategic blindness.
Russia’s consolidated military registration registry website, Reestrpovestok.rf, is fully operational. On Friday, 9 May 2025, the human rights project Get Lost, which helps Russians avoid conscription into the army, reported that the notifications that it was operating in test mode had disappeared from the website, and the online resource appeared to have been fully launched.
Upon arrival on the website, users can log in to their personal accounts, check summonses, and obtain copies of records. Earlier, the website indicated that it was functioning in beta mode only in three regions—Sakhalin, Ryazan, and the Republic of Mari El. This notification has now disappeared.
“So far no one who has received a summons through this site or faced automatic restrictions has contacted us,” the human rights activists added. The registry’s launch has not been officially announced.
Recipients of summonses to face restrictions if they fail to report to military recruitment center
The law establishing a consolidated registry of persons subject to conscription and introducing electronic summonses was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2023. The text of the document, in particular, states that conscripts who do not report to a military enlistment office within twenty days of receiving a summons may be prohibited from registering as an individual entrepreneur, registering vehicles and real estate, driving a vehicle, and getting a bank loan. In addition, they will not be able to leave Russia until they report to a military enlistment office.
A screenshot of the military enlistment summons website, outlining the penalties imposed on Russians who fail to respond.
The full-fledged launch of the electronic summonses registry was planned for last autumn, but was subsequently postponed.
The registry contains data on all Russian nationals who are already registered and are subject to military registration, as well as those who are not yet registered but are obliged to do so. Lawyers stress that the law and the decree apply to the delivery of any summonses, both for compulsory service and to clarify military registration status, and as part of the wartime mobilization, which Putin has not yet signed a decree to end.
This data will be collected from military enlistment offices. The decree digitizing their databases was signed by Putin back in November 2022. As Defense Ministry officials told the Federation Council, various databases are used for this purpose, including those of the Interior Ministry, the Federal Tax Service, civil registries, and pension funds.
Vladimir Putin speaking with a group of Russian war widows. English subtitles by Julia Khazagaeva
Death as the national idea. Look at the faces of these women who lost their men in the war against Ukraine. They glow with newfound meaning. “I am a mom of four children and, recently, a widow…. Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” ”I lost my brother in the SVO [special military operation], but my three sons are growing up to be future defenders. Thank you,” they say to the killer of their kin. The Russian existential vacuum has finally been filled. Life has a purpose that redeems existence’s meaninglessness. Losing your life in war confers valor and honor. Nothing in the old life, in peacetime, guaranteed it. A contract [to serve in the army] turns a man into a hero. He is no longer a bastard in the eyes of the women who matter to him.
So the million lives taken by the war do not particularly faze anyone [in Russia]. All the sacrifices and victims are worthwhile as long as they are converted into national pride in the minds of Russians. They won’t spare three million people or more if it comes to it. And it doesn’t matter who they kill, whether they are Ukrainians, Estonians, or Poles. War is a drug. As long as war is underway, the harsh comedown is postponed. This is bad news for the world, especially for those who imagine that it is Putin who is waging the war, while Russians themselves want peace.
P.S. I made English subtitles for the video. You can download it from my Telegram channel. Show it to everyone seeking to understand l’âme russe mystérieuse.
“Tatiana Sokolova will never hear her son call her ‘mom’ again. He heroically fell in the special military operation zone,” began a news broadcast in the Chelyabinsk region about International Women’s Day celebrations for the mothers of Russian soldiers.
This event, which saw flowers handed to soldiers’ mothers, was organized by the United Russia Women’s Movement, a group affiliated with the ruling party.
It was just one of many celebrations focusing on the mothers and wives of soldiers fighting in Ukraine — as well as the widows and families of those killed — ahead of International Women’s Day this year.
International Women’s Day is one of Russia’s most significant holidays, celebrating women’s contributions to society, science and the workforce. It has deep roots in Soviet history, when it was promoted as a symbol of gender equality.
But since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials and state media have upheld a different ideal: being the wife or mother of a soldier.
“With the militarization of society, the education system and the economy, and with the ‘ideal citizen’ — the male soldier — being placed at the center, authorities are actively promoting the image of the soldier’s wife as his counterpart,” gender researcher Sasha Talaver told the Moscow Times.
“The portrayal of women in times of war and state crisis always emerges as a key point for political imagination,” Talaver said.
This Women’s Day, members of the United Russia party and pro-Kremlin activists have been delivering flowers, organizing literary events and visiting military families with gifts and food.
“We are proud of the women who raised the heroes of the special operation and the young men who have signed up as contract soldiers,” Senator Daria Lantratova, co-chair of the United Russia Women’s Movement, said this week.
The movement this week launched the “Flowers for the Mothers of Heroes” campaign to deliver presents and flowers to soldiers’ relatives, which has spread to 40 regions.
A resident of the Murmansk region who lost her son in the war was given a meat grinder for March 8 by the United Russia party. Photo: social media
In perhaps the most shocking Women’s Day event, mothers of fallen soldiers were gifted meat grinders from local United Russia officials in the Murmansk region.
The news sparked a wave of criticism, as the kitchen appliance has become a grim symbol of the Russian military’s high-casualty assaults in Ukraine.
After the story went viral in Russian and Ukrainian media, one mother of a deceased soldier recorded a video statement in which she said she had been planning to buy a meat grinder herself, but United Russia “gifted it to her just in time.”
“I actually asked you for it,” the elderly woman said.
In Cheboksary, a city in the republic of Chuvashia, officials organized an event exclusively for the widows and mothers of fallen soldiers.
“May grief soon turn into pride!” declared local deputy Yevgeny Kadyshev. The women were given bouquets and gift bags labeled “Happiness and Joy.”
Russian authorities, including the United Russia party, promote the image of a military wife or mother as the ideal of femininity, gender studies researcher Ella Rossman told the Moscow Times.
The United Russia Women’s Movement was founded in the months following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 “as a clear response to feminist anti-war activism,” Rossman said, referring to groups like Feminist Anti-War Resistance and movements of mobilized soldiers’ wives and mothers.
“Right now, the most visible female archetype in the public sphere is the woman waiting for her soldier to return from the front,” Rossman said. “But this is not the only image. There are completely opposing narratives, like that of military women themselves.”
Rossman pointed to an article in a pro-Kremlin tabloid about a woman from Rostov who signed a military contract and went to war.
“She is a mother who left her daughter to fight, has already lost a leg in combat and tells journalists that as soon as she recovers, she will go back to the battlefield,” Rossman said.
Local television stations have been covering Women’s Day events for soldiers’ mothers and wives, while also highlighting women assisting the war effort or fighting on the front lines.
After these official celebrations, politicians sometimes invite the women for tea. In Stavropol, a table was set for the mothers and wives of soldiers following a concert at a veterans’ hospital.
“Some of them are waiting for their sons to return home. Others, unfortunately, have lost their defenders who gave their lives for the Motherland,” Senator Daria Lantratova, representing occupied Luhansk, wrote on social media.
United Russia activists also delivered flowers to soldiers’ mothers in occupied Donetsk.
“Your son is a hero. We congratulate you on this holiday and wish you well. We hope this war will end and peace will come,” a United Russia Women’s Movement activist told an elderly woman. After hearing the word “hero,” the woman teared up.
“Don’t cry,” the United Russia activist told the older woman as they parted.
Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine also sent video messages to military mothers and widows ahead of the holiday.
“Heroes are born in families. Women give birth to us. Women raise us in kindergartens and schools. The making of any hero is thanks to the great women in his life,” Leonid Lapin, a soldier who fought as a sniper platoon commander in Ukraine, said in a video message.
Putin meets with Olga Chebnyova, widow of ‘Hero of Russia’ Sergei Chebnyov. Photo: kremlin.ru
United Russia has even involved children with disabilities in the celebrations. In the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, mothers from a center for parents of children with mental and physical disabilities — along with their children — made greeting cards for soldiers’ relatives.
“This is not just a good initiative. Seeing how children with special needs get involved, how their eyes light up, you realize we are on the right path,” said United Russia member Alexei Komarevtsev.
In an interview with a local news channel, he described the craft project as “socialization” for children with disabilities. Some of the cards, he added, will be sent to the front lines, “because there are also girls serving there.”
In some regions, such as Tula, soldiers’ wives and mothers received a one-time payment of 10,000 rubles (about $100) for Women’s Day. Elsewhere, gifts included makeup sets or tickets to the philharmonic.
In the Moscow region, United Russia organized a makeup seminar for soldiers’ wives, saying such initiatives “help strengthen family values and improve quality of life in society.”
“War disrupts social norms and the way of life,” Rossman said. “But war also imposes constraints on the very possibility of a rigid binary between male and female roles, even though war seems to fit that binary perfectly.”
That is likely why the authorities have been working overtime to reinforce the Kremlin’s idea of “traditional” values since the start of the war, she said.
“Russian authorities are forced to declare and reinforce traditional values [because] many families that were once intact before the war have now lost their fathers,” Rossman said. “There are also military women — doctors, for example — and women who have voluntarily gone to war. Ignoring these women is impossible. They, too, are a target audience from a propaganda standpoint.”
As the war drags on and Russia’s battlefield losses mount, authorities are forced to balance different ideals of femininity in their propaganda messaging, Rossman said.
“They are constantly having to create different female archetypes for different audiences,” she said.
There is another reason why the Russian Defense Ministry recruits so many members of ethnic minorities [to fight in the war against Ukraine]: as it turns out, because it is psychologically really difficult for [ethnic] Russians to kill Ukrainians. Because we are one people. We are very close peoples, as everybody knows. We have nearly the same language, the same religion, and centuries of history in common. But if it’s someone from another culture, allegedly it’s easier [for them to kill Ukrainians]. I hadn’t really thought about it before. I thought the reasons were primarily economic. But after what [a colleague who spoke about the Buryats] said, I started thinking about it too.
A screenshot of the video Ms. Khazagaeva cites in her Facebook post
You did get that, friends? It’s so difficult, so unbearable for ethnic Russians to kill you Ukrainians that Buryats and Chechens have been doing all the work for them — because [Buryats and Chechens] are beasts and savages. That makes sense, doesn’t it?
By the way, [Kara-Murza] refers to Buryats and Chechens as “those ethnic minorities.”
In other words, all eleven years [of Russia’s war against Ukraine], the Buryats, who number under four hundred and fifty thousand people, including children and the elderly, have been attempting to kill the forty million Ukrainians. It transpires, however, that the hundred million ethnic Russians have had it “psychologically difficult” all those eleven years. They are mere victims of this war, which is something “those [other] ethnic groups” want. Don’t get them wrong: ethnic Russians love you Ukrainians like brothers!
You have explained everything so clearly, Mr. Kara-Murza. I have literally just a couple of follow-up questions. Excuse me, has it also been the Buryats who have been launching missiles at Ukrainian cities? And the creatures who on Russian television rejoice at the deaths of Ukrainian children in Kryvyi Rih, are they also members of these same ethnic minorities?
I’m sorry, but I have another question. The whole world knows what the Pskov paratroopers did in Bucha. Do you have any ideas how to repaint them as Buryats? Although it would probably be a bit difficult, since “your lads” have already been testifying.
One more question. The other day, 7 April, was the thirtieth anniversary of the Samashki massacre. Eighty people, mostly children, women and old people, were burned alive in Samashki, and hundreds of people were killed in total. This is not to mention the forty thousand Chechen children killed in the two [Chechen] wars. Excuse me, did the Chechens shell themselves? Ethnic Russians are totally incapable of that, aren’t they? To hell with what Tolstoy wrote in Hadji Murat. Tolstoy was a renegade.
Oh, I’ve gotten a little carried away. Two million people were killed in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They say that’s where the notorious practice of “mopping up” villages, leaving mass graves in their wake, originated. I’m sorry, who did the killing in Afghanistan? Was that the Buryats too?
Good Lord, where do you get so many of them?
The only thing I don’t understand is how the idea of the “Russian world” could have emerged, since you ethnic Russians live in love and friendship with all countries. It must have been the Chukchi who overdid it on that front.
I also don’t understand why it is the ethnic Russians who do ballet, but it is the non-Russians who make war.
Updated, 13 April. I have replaced the picture originally below the post with a video featuring the entire quotation by Kara-Murza. Thanks to the good people who provided the AI translation. It shows that Kara-Murza’s words, whether presented in expanded or abridged form, bear the same message: ethnic Russians don’t want to kill Ukrainians, and it’s easier for non-Russians to do it. Because we ethnic Russians and the Ukrainians are one and the same, but we’re not the same as those non-Russians. It matters not a whit that Kara-Murza referenced someone else’s observation. What matters is that he voiced this idea personally and voluntarily, and that he confirmed his commitment to it by saying that it has given him pause for thought too. Think about it. A Russian politician (as Kara-Murza fancies himself), while visiting the parliament of a major European country, says that it is mainly Buryats who want the war. He says this on the record in a place where every word uttered potentially has legal force. He said it not in a bar, not on a beach, but in the French Senate, where decisions on sanctions are made.
I have not emended the text of my original post, dated 12 April.
On 10 April 2025, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee heard the testimony of Vladimir Kara-Murza, vice-president of the Free Russia Foundation and a former Russian political prisoner. A Russian politician and opponent of Vladimir Putin, Kara-Murza survived two poisoning attempts, in 2015 and 2017. In April 2023, he was sentenced to 25 years in a penal colony by the Russian justice system after criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He was released on 1 August 2024 in a prisoner exchange. In his testimony to the senators, he stressed the autocratic and violent nature of Putin’s regime. He called on the European Union to maintain its sanctions against Russia, and to bring its weight to bear on peace negotiations in Ukraine. He maintains the hope that the country will soon become democratic.
