Recent searches
Search options
After a year of silence, another old acquaintance from #Russia wrote to me, this time from the Caucasus 
He too is absolutely convinced that soon #Ukraine will ‘give back the four oblasts and there will be peace’ (maybe that’s why there is such a mass awakening among my old Russian contacts recently).
He, unlike everyone else, doesn’t have chat deletion enabled after 24hrs, so he must have seen the previous discussions and didn’t even try the ‘denazification’ fairy tales just wrote straight ‘we have lost so much resources and people that now we can’t back down’. This is a popular argument with them, a kind of the last line of defence. People from the military or the government sometimes add ‘…because we will end up in The Hague’.
I asked if he was aware that he too was a ‘resource’ for his country and could also be ‘lost’. He didn’t answer directly, he just goes on in this line of argument - ‘I know one thing, if my state loses now it will be pizdec for my family’ (pizdec=swear word meaning a terrible disaster). So I ask him, in all honesty, to explain to me, a simpleton - how exactly is his family going to face ‘pizdec’ if the Russian military withdraws from Ukraine? What exactly will happen to his family?
Sadly, he then disappeared. He needs to think for himself, I guess.
My apologies to you T. for shattering your peace of mind despite the mattress of sophisms you have surrounded yourself with to keep your spirits up while living in a country that is heading towards a demographic and economic abyss. It will only get harder further down the line. Your grandparents and parents built themselves this mattress for 70 years and that is why it was so difficult for them in 1991.
Here another one who wrote to me the day before yesterday. It’s a Russian I know from expeditions in the mountains - he blocked me in 2022 and now suddenly as if nothing ever happened ‘all the best, what’s up’ etc.
I politely wrote him back - life, children, work, war. ‘But no politics,’ he stipulated. Then he complained a little about the interest rates on mortgages (‘we fortunately took at 8% but now it’s 24%’). Then he wrote that in the summer they wanted to go somewhere by the sea. For Muscovites, ‘by the sea’ means Gelendzyk, Anapa and the like (because Crimea has got a bad name lately, with something burning and exploding there).
I say to him ‘well, I guess you like mazut medicinal baths’ because it’s is already all over the Azov and Black Sea coasts on the Russian side.
He replies that ‘it’s nothing, they will clean it up’. This is the kind of first-level message that every Russian keeps on the surface of consciousness for retorts in passing. I responded with this. He understood.
Then there was silence for a while, he must have searched in Yandex that they won’t ‘clean it up’ after all, because what’s on the coast is a trifle that only volunteers clean up and the administration makes theatre of, while most of the mazut has sunk to the bottom. And it will surface as it warms up.
Then he wrote without conviction: ‘there is hydrogen sulphide at the bottom, it will decompose it out’, which must be some surreal theory of the “reach over your right shoulder with your left hand and scratch your ear” (the so-called “mnogochodovki”) genre that the Russians love so much.
A few moments passed again and before I could close my mouth, open in astonishment, he wrote, ‘I think we’ll go to the Caspian after all’. And then he added, ‘I’ve always wanted to see Derbent’.
@kravietz yeah, and "no politics" is the stupidest thing I hear from them. Fucking politics is when people do fucking elections. Here's just war, a massacre, a genocide. It's not politics.
That’s the argument I like most, because I’m using it when talking to “let’s no politics” Poles, Ukrainians and Russians alike. This is nothing but cheap escapism, but but it doesn’t work - politics will always come after you, and then you can only complain you ignored it before.
But this one guy is also a declared Muslim (as most people in Caucasus), which gives me an added bonus of being able to poke him with inconsistencies between Russian imperial policies and the general ethics of Islam which, except for some extreme fractions like salafites (who he’s not), is generally peaceful.
Of course it’s the same with Christianity, but with most Russians the argument is useless because vast majority of them don’t give a shit about religion so I could just as well poke them with reference to Siberian shamanism.