“The orchestra ‘W’ is waiting for you,” says this advertising poster for the Russian private army “Wagner”, which was also deployed in the Ukraine war, in a residential area in the Altai region in southern Siberia. It is aimed at men aged 24 and over. A particularly large number of volunteers in the campaign come from depressive regions like this one, because for them the pay and – in the event of their death – the compensation payments to the family mean real social advancement.
Image: Meduza
Suicide and sabotage in a repressive bandit state: The Russian home front in the Ukraine war cuts across nations and families. People prepare for jail, mysterious arson attacks increase. A guest post.
Dhe Russia of today is often compared to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, but Putin’s dictatorship has not quite reached the scale of its predecessors, although that is small consolation. It is a completely perverted, at the same time cynical, totalitarian regime without any ideology. The regime doesn’t care what nationality you are, what beliefs you have or what political views you have – as long as you are loyal. This also applies to foreign policy: whoever is loyal is a friend, whoever is not is an enemy. And the Russian government is physically eliminating disloyals, both inside and outside the country.
Putin’s gangster regime is a horror amalgam of the Soviet security apparatus and organized crime groups from the 1990s. In the last two decades, the Kremlin’s rhetoric has radicalized into a kind of gangster jargon, including at the diplomatic level. The people in power don’t care about human life or humanitarian values, they consider the pursuit of civilized solutions to be an expression of weakness, and they infect the people with this simple idea. In Putin’s formative years as a politician, thousands of people were killed in a constantly escalating spiral of violence – in conflicts between various mafia structures and by state violence, which was often indistinguishable. In retrospect, Putin’s rise to power reads like a re-enactment of Bert Brecht’s “Career of Arturo Ui”, as the Russian title of the play is called, which shows the rise of a gangster clique through terror and “legal” connections with business to attain political power.
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