Russians Against Politics
Since we’ve had a lot of new subscribers lately, I wanted to repost the very first podcast episode Evgenia and I recorded back in 2020. It was still just the start of the Covid Era, everyone was in isolation, and Black Lives Matter was in full swing, with protests and riots breaking out across the country.
Watching it all, what we found interesting was that the Russian government — and most of Russian society — was firmly against the protesters. At least on the surface, that seemed unlikely. You’d think that Russian gov would heartily support any political movement that went against the US establishment…if for no other reason than to destabilize its main, much more powerful rival. And indeed, that’s what various US security state-adjacent sources were telling the American public: that BLM was not organic…that Putin was behind it, fanning the flames. Strange as it was, though, in reality the actual establishment in Russia, Putin included, was abhorred by the protests…it sided with the American cops…with the American establishment.
We talked about why that is, the history of how Russians got there, and how it is rooted in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the negation of the Russian Revolution.
The reason I want to repost it now is that it fits with the general theme of nihilism we’ve been talking about. It illustrates Evgenia’s point about the deep political nihilism of Russian society post-Soviet society…a similar kind of nihilism that seems to be taking root here in America.
Give it a listen.
—Yasha
