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Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colours to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colours from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colours, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act.
the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free-market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism
Whenever I ask my Russian bosses, the older TV producers and media types who run the system, what it was like growing up in the late Soviet Union, whether they believed in the communist ideology that surrounded them, they always laugh at me. ‘Don’t be silly,’ most answer. ‘But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?’ ‘Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them. And then straight after we would listen to Deep Purple and the BBC.’ ‘So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?’ ‘No. It’s not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There’s like several “you”s.’
the great drama of Russia is not the ‘transition’ between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations
It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you’re always split into little bits, and can never quite commit to changing things. And a result is the somewhat aggressive apathy you can encounter here so often. That’s the underlying mindset that supported the USSR and supports the new Russia now, even though the USSR might officially be long gone