Cross-post from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3427923
Despite the obvious liberal, pro-Western slant and a pronounced anti-Soviet bias, this article actually does a good job of painting a vivid picture of what Russia is like these days.
It is interesting to see the various contradictions (capitalist but with socialist nostalgia, simultaneously coexisting communist sympathies with imperial Russian ones, etc.) that us Marxist-Leninists have been pointing out for some time in the abstract take concrete form in the anecdotes from the author’s month long trip.
What seems to baffle these western reporters most, even more than Russia’s resillience to sanctions, or its defiant insistence on protecting its sovereignty and its own culture, is the revival of pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin sentiments. He points out with great shock how he finds that communists are getting elected to political office and how they have busts and statues of Lenin and Stalin.
He refuses to understand this phenomenon of Soviet revivalism even when someone tells him very directly that the 90s, which the West consider the ideal period in Russia, a supposed golden age of liberalism, actually was the worst in living memory for most Russians today:
Andrei, a twenty-four-year-old electrical engineer who was visiting from Moscow with three friends, spontaneously told me of Stalin that “he was a winner.” We were in front of an original military map of the Soviet counteroffensive. “For us young people, Stalin is number one. We must fight evil like during the Great Patriotic War.” Did any negative associations come to mind? “They say a lot of things, but what matters is the results,” he said. “I think there were more deaths in the Nineties with the gang wars and alcohol. That was our first experience with democracy—the worst period of our history.”
The author is of course a bit of a drama queen and hilariously tries to make himself look like some brave undercover agent in a totalitarian dystopia, pointing out how he used VPN to hide his searches and encrypted his communications… as if anyone actually cared. But this is sort of thing is to be expected, they are writing for a western audience that wants this sort of fluff.
And if we start to analyze a bit more carefully the way he structured the article it is fairly obvious what he is trying to do. When you read the quotes he gives of the people he interviewed you get the pretty clear impression that he tries simultaneously to portray Russians as hopeless, downtrodden and oppressed (the liberal ones) but also bloodthirsty brainwashed fanatics (the nationalistic ones).
Even so i do recommend giving this a read, it’s an interesting piece.
The entrance to the management building, a stolid modernist structure, was dominated by bronze letters reading CCCP. The security guards at reception wore fatigues. I would soon realize this was one of Russia’s most successful agricultural producers, delivering tens of thousands of tons of meat and dairy to the market each year. The business, established in 1995, well after the USSR was dead and gone, identified itself as a Communist-Stalinist enterprise.
The bit about the “Communist-Stalinist enterprise” was honestly hilarious. I think they’re doing it more as a branding/marketing thing, because in Russia a lot of people like that vibe, which is something that just blows the minds of these liberal westerners. I mean the owner may have communist or “Stalinist” sympathies, but at the end of the day it’s still a private enterprise, though in the article they do quote the owners as saying something like “the profits go toward increasing the wages of the employees” which i don’t know how true that is. It may be partly accurate if the owners have the ideological inclination they claim, or it may just be corporate propaganda. I think the second is more likely, but still this shows that communism is very much still a beloved “brand” so to speak in Russia.
The whole thing is just full of gold, it’s like a time capsule of cold war propaganda. And yeah, I’m not putting much stock into the whole profits going to the employees bit. If they wanted it to be an actual communist enterprise they could’ve run it as a coop. I got a bit curious and dug into it, afaict all the shares of the company are owned by the father with the son having the rest https://zvenigov.com/upload/iblock/79e/79e48eb3d988a94c099904a0c83eae78.PDF
Размер доли (в процентах) (percentage of ownership) being the relevant section. And this is kind of the theme with the article just throwing around communism as a scary thing that’s happening in Russia again.
I very much agree that the fact that USSR is seen positively in Russia by so many people is the most relevant part. Now that Russia is breaking with the west, there could be a path towards communism again.
I never considered how fertile a farcical cordon sanitaire 2 would be for creative writing fetishists
north korea reporting is about to go global! sharpen your pencils uninformed reporters of the world!
Heh, yeah the funniest thing is that they don’t even need to go to all these lengths to report from Russia if they want to, Russia is not the DPRK, it is a pretty open society if you follow the rules. As a Westerner you may get some extra scrutiny and you should definitely not think you can do some “guerilla reporting” about Russian military secrets cause that shit will land you in a Siberian prison real fast, but in general you are basically free to travel around, talk to people, experience life in Russia and report on what you see. You don’t need to make up this sensationalist tale of how you had to talk to people in secret and hide your searches from the government or whatnot. Russia isn’t the US or the UK where government spy agencies track your online activity 24/7.
i particularly like that the extent of his internet safety measures is nordvpn or something, like please mr bond after you
