A thousand years almost. As a Pole I have no faith in Russia ever becoming anything other than a savage hostile wart on this planet. It's not just their leadership. It's the nation. More accurately their culture. Their malice is a result of a rare combination of ineptitude and megalomania all in one package.
Your enemy is not the people of the country you hate, it’s the government. If you believe it’s the people then you are a victim to propaganda, or some other source of highly biased information.
Think about what war really is, it’s almost always a bunch of powerful people who have a disagreement with a bunch of other powerful people, who then have to trick a bunch of less powerful people to fight on their behalf. If you feel like fighting you’ve been tricked.
When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
It's a combination. Here in the US, a large chunk of the population supported Trump, knowing full well what kind of things he would do. And another large chunk of the population are trying to stop him.
You can't blame the population as a whole. But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
> But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
However, that sentiment is shaped by the media available to the citizens, and in places like Russia, that means primarily by the government itself. So it's not so clear cut what the sentiment would have been had it not been for the governments propaganda.
In a democracy, "We The People" is the sovereign. It is in the hands of the voters, and it is their responsibility to choose leaders wisely and shape their overall legal system. In democracies, the population doesn't get to use the "but its just our evil leaders" excuse. Only in other less democratic forms of government.
And yes, this means that in a democracy, the opposition's voters are screwed because they share in the responsibility, even if they were right. Why? Because they were unable to convince the majority of the wrongness of the majority vote.
I'm baffled, this is one of the worst comments i've read on HN. It's hard to answer without using insults. Seems i'm really triggered by Blaming The Victim.
Is supposed to be the sovereign/source of all legitimate authority.
But it's not as a practical matter in the US, or even in legalistic practice. Most legalistic factions in the US plainly treat the constitution itself (and/or its authors) as the source of its own authority.
> We the People of the United States [, in Order to ...,] do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
That is the literal first paragraph of the US constitution. I cannot imagine a valid legalistic argument that ignores that. When first establishing the constitution, it also didn't appear in a vacuum, the pre-existing states and confederation were already democratic for some time. So all authority/validity/legitimacy the US constitution has comes from the population, back then. And through continuing use, participation and broad acceptance until present.
And of course, as a practical matter in a representative democracy, between elections, the people do have far less of an influence. They can basically only voice their opinions, threaten to vote differently in the next election, or start a revolution. But that doesn't absolve them of their responsibility on election day.
Russia has behaved the same way under 4 radically different forms of government.
I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.
I'm not sure what part of Russian history, or contemporary Russian society, gives people confidence in this idea?
I'm not being anti-Russian here either. I feel the same way about our nation here in the US. Even if we were to rid ourselves of Trump for instance, we would still have serious issues with a large body of people who support Trump-like policies. A wise Europe would still be obliged to be on guard against us.
Every nation has belligerent elements. Russia is no different. While, say, Putin, may be an expression of that belligerent element, I'm unconvinced that he is the belligerent element itself. I think it's foolish, potentially fatal, to make that assumption.
> I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.
I’m mangling a quote from someone, but extreme environments breed extreme leaders.
To rise, Putin had to be better than his rivals. Presumably they were ruthless, clever, calculating etc.
I’m not sure we want to hear from his successor.
My learning experience was when Idi Amin was overthrown people thought that now he was gone things would get better for Uganda.
Did not.
10mo ago
No, it can be both the government, and the people.
The government for all of the reasons you say.
The people because they have fallen for and accepted propaganda. Thereby leading them to support the government and its toxic narratives.
I base this opinion mostly on seeing how Russian propaganda has poisoned my mother-in-law's mind. Many media reports and various other sources have verified that she is not an isolated example, most Russians accept the same propaganda narratives.
There's plenty of propaganda on our side as well. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war. We would never know about it. The organizations in the west that handle geopolitical issues are not that different from those of Russia. They're not transparent or democratic, yet we rely on them for our information. They can probably steer us the way they want as easily as they do in Russia. The free media does not have access to the information it would need to truly inform the public.
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You're missing my point. I'm not saying the west did anything wrong. I'm saying that if it did do those things, nothing would be different, and therefore we are just as much pawns of our leaders as the russians are.
People living in Ukraine now clearly don't like that Zelenskiy cancelled the elections and don't want to sign peace agreement. Why they don't go to the streets and protest?
To add to this, culture can be changed significantly in a short period. See how the USA has changed in the past 20 years, the culture has changed 2 or 3 times now with vastly different values & attitudes between each. What does each period have in common? Thick gobs of propaganda being push in every nook & cranny. And lack of critical thinking on the individual level. If country X wants to change, it is very possible, its just a matter of time, persistence & brain washing. Brain washing the youth is the easiest path, especially if in the opposite direction than what their parents/elderly want.
As a German, I must insist that your statement is absolutely wrong. The people of a country can be your enemy. A Government like Nazi-Germany or current day Russia cannot exist without plenty of support by its people in the first place.
Interesting thought. In the end, this is an ethical question: How much pressure is justified to put on the general population for supporting their leaders?
My feeling is that your perspective, likely shared by people like Bomber Harris or Netanyahu, does not match most peoples intuition nowadays.
I beg to differ. Accepting that tens of millions in Germany supported Hitler frenetically, thus declaring themselves enemies of everyone who was a Jew, a Democrat, a Citizen of any neighbouring country etc.pp., doesn’t mean that bombing cities to the ground is morally or legally justified, as long as there are other alternatives (and there have been, both for Harris, and for Netanyahu). The point really is: most Germans saw themselves as enemies of Freedom, Equality, and Peace. Both inside and outside of Germany. You cannot treat someone as a friend who’s violently proving the see you as the enemy.
I don't for a moment believe that German people as a group, or Russian people as a group, or British people as a group etc. are morally superior to any of the others. If one can, through specific circumstances, end up supporting bad things, then so would the others in that circumstance.
So it doesn't matter if the Russian people is the enemy in the sense of supporting their mafia government. They're not doing anything you wouldn't have done. Condemning them is condemning yourself and does no one any good.
I don't agree with that.
There were good Germans. There were also Germans that pretended not to notice and then there were bad Germans. The ones in the middle are collectively just as guilty because they allowed the bad ones to do their thing. You don't get to stand by while such stuff unfolds and then claim innocence.
Right now, inside Russia there are Russians who are putting their lives on the line to help stop this war before it consumes their country. Their the 'Good Russians'. And then there are those in the middle - and plenty who have fled abroad - who pretend this isn't their problem. But they're enabling the rest and should be rightly condemned for it.
It took Germany a generation or more to really get it (and even now, some don't get it but that seems to be a factor just about everywhere, the bad will always attempt to take root again).
The country that I'm from still hasn't properly accepted the mountain of skulls and the rivers of blood that our wealth is founded on. In that sense Germany is now ahead, but with the afd it remains to be seen whether they can maintain that lead for much longer.
Ask any Russian if Crimea belongs to Ukraine. None of them will give you the internationally accepted answer.
So yea, it's not just the government.
Things can be more complicated than that.
Crimea is a special situation. I won't reiterate its complex history here since there is plenty of written here, but I'd like to point out that one could have a view where Crimea is Russian and yet decry the invasion of Ukraine as illegitimate.
If anything for practical reasons: only 7% of its population is Ukrainian. It would be very a source of continuous ethnic tensions.
Hard Russian nationalism is much more than that
Such people claim that the entirety of Ukraine is just Russia and they mock them for otherwise being Polish. This narrative is an explicit outcome of an Imperial mindset
It can be both, I think? Politicians/powerful people take advantage of divisions in society, but often those divisions do exist in a fully-fledged or nascent form for them to exploit.
Whether people become my enemy through choice or through effective propaganda makes no difference to me, they're still my enemy.
In the last 125 years Russia has been through monarchy, liberal communism (Kerensky), dictatorial communism (Lenin, Stalin), bureaucratic communism (Khrushchev to Gorbachev), liberal capitalism, oligarchy, and now dictatorship. None of them worked very well.
Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader. When one arises, the strong leader soon becomes the trouble.
> Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader.
By ‘strong’, do you mean violent dictator?
Maybe some of the provinces that are held by force should be allowed self determination. Maybe less violence would then be ‘needed’.
The problem with that last paragraph is that through almost all those regime changes (I guess the time between the Soviet collapse and Putin's rise may have been an exception), Russia has continued a strategy of systematic displacement for accelerated "russification". Those provinces effectively do not exist, they don't have enough population that identifies with the region more than with the empire.
If you force a Tatar to somewhere close to the Chinese border he will be perceived as "Russian" by the indigenous community, and their rejection will eventually make him identify as "Russian" himself, to bond with his peer displacees from other corners of the empire, and with locals who accept the empire. The exact same mechanism works in all directions, e.g. when some of those locals are displaced to somewhere near the Finnish border. The most important weapon of the Russian empire isn't the tank or the AK-47 or hard winters or sheer distance or vast amounts of mineral resources, it's industrial scale deportation for eradication of regional identity.
France had almost a thousand years of autocratic and aggressive tradition. Prussia/Germany too. There’s many more examples.
These things can and do change.
Not anymore. Marie Antoinette literally had to lose her head for this to happen. Mustache man too, suffering humiliating total defeat. What happened to Russia? They killed their czar and got soviets that destroyed most of the legacy of Russian empire. They live in a constant dissonance ever since because their fake red empire was never a system to last, but it introduced enough destruction to kill religion and their ability to perceive world through a rational lens.
Russia needs to find a new identity. Someone like Navalny might have led it out of the blind alley it was in. I still hope after Putin dies there is some good changes as young people, at least the educated ones, don't share Putin's twisted worldview at all.
No, Navalny was never “the guy”, he’s literally jokingly referred to as “the buterbrod” (sandwich) because of his comments about Crimea (“Crimea is not a sandwich to be passed around” in the context of “returning” Crimea to Ukraine).
“Russian liberalism stops at the border of Ukraine”
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> It's not just their leadership. It's the nation.
I completely disagree. I know anecdata is useless but since you are generalizing I can as well add that all Russians I met, without exception, are normal people who just want to live a normal life, not to kill. And then there is the smaller violent part that is happy to mug, beat, and kill others, including their own people. What I can agree is that Russia has quite a problem with this "pat B" of their population because of systemic issues. But generalizing it like this, on the whole nation, is just like saying that violence has gender, rich people are bad and so on.
The issue with Russians as a nation comes from the fact that they dream of their great great empire. Collapse of Soviet Union was a mistake. Their mindset is similar to MAGA in that sense. Make Russia great again.
Next time you meet a Russian again ask about what they think about Russian Empire. Or who gets to keep Crimea.
This is the nature of polarization. Of course you will find many Russians that are hard nationalists and you will also find many that prefer open societies and chances are that the likelihood of you encountering one or the other depends on your social bubble
The right question isn't "do you want your country to be greater", it is "do you think it's something worth starting a war over".
Have a look what normal Russians are saying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuZEvNlpKxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuZEvNlpKxg
It's by a guy who works for BBC and basically translates bits of Russian papers on his channel everyday.
Nations have a tipping point where the violent minority can take power if there are enough of them. "Enough" might be only 10%. So a nation with 10% violent people is violent, while a nation with 9% violent people is peaceful.
It would be very hard to notice the difference between 10% and 9% by just meeting people. You'd have to meet and evaluate 1000s to measure it accurately enough. But you sure do notice the difference as a neighboring country when the tanks roll in.
So you do sometimes have to say things about nations despite it only reflecting a statistically small difference in people.
Considering Western countries have kept a lot of regions of the world controlled economically and resource-wise exploiting the populations, I'd say Westerners do understand - Russia is their biggest problem
I've met a few Poles in my life and they were friendly, positive and inquiring, and not contemptuous, inflammatory or nationalistically prejudiced like you, so I have faith your nation and culture are ok.