Written for Hospodářské noviny on October 7, 2022
The long-delayed end of the Soviet Union is coming
Freedom from its own autocrats, tyrants, murderers in power must be won by each nation. Russia, although it looks macho, boyish and rough, has not yet gone through puberty. And this not even thirty years after a series of global anti-Soviet revolutions. The Russians somehow fell asleep, instead of a proper democracy and a proper economy, they let themselves be fed with loads of nationalist nonsense, until they reached the point where their own ruler sends them to the front to be executed. To take hundreds of thousands of inexperienced and untrained conscripts - shoemakers, cooks, managers - and send them to the battlefield with the onset of winter is nothing short of mass murder.
Not only is the Russian army a laughing stock for the whole world, the brilliant strategist Putin will declare mobilization and not close the borders. Already more fighting men have escaped from him than have fallen at the front. Logically, someone who has two molecules in his head will not fight a losing war, moreover, against a nation that - again according to Putin - is actually a common nation.
But instead of a partial mobilization, Putin arranged a perfect immobilization. He made another extremely wrong and stupid step: this time he gave weapons to the nation, and as our poet Václav Hrabé once wrote: democracy is giving weapons to the people. So now Putin risks that democracy will finally wake up in the dazed Russians, and instead of aimlessly aiming weapons at the Ukrainians, he will point his weapon where it belongs: against his own tyrant. This painful experience of getting rid of your Stockholm syndrome and rejecting the abuse of your ruler is necessary.
Frankly speaking, if Russia were to break up politically into smaller groupings held together by more or less force, it wouldn't be a bad thing. Russia as a state has not shown anything positive over the last decade, except for the sharp growth of inequality, injustice and chaos. Both the theory of capitalism and technological innovation have been significantly enriched in China or India. China is also a totalitarian state, which in the future awaits a revolution against its own tyranny, just like Russia, but in China at least not only the rich and the communist ultra-capitalists who are fraternizing with the government, but also the poor majority of the population are getting rich. The same is true in India - and with a much more interesting prospect for democracy than Russia or China.
All Russia has is oil, gas and nuclear warheads. If Russia developed like most post-communist countries since 1989, our world would be much richer and freer. Instead, Russia (Putin) chose to be a pest of nations. Wherever possible, it disrupted the European Union, influencing the course of Brexit in Britain and events in the USA. It promoted misinformation, divided, destroyed, insulted and appeared cynical.
Once it was just suspicions, now we know our society is more divided because of Russian influence. Russia has become the slimy and vile Grim Worm of the West, to whose cheap luster two Czech presidents and one Hungarian prime minister have succumbed. We know exactly what Putin would like: for the EU to break up, for the US to fall apart internally, for Ukraine to bow to Russia like Belarus. We know exactly what he would want for us, the former Czechoslovakia: to bring us back under his sphere of influence. Back to power politics, back to stupidity and lies, back to glorifying a leader who can't even see the tip of his nose. Back to a system so stupid, and so self-confident (a frequent and dangerous combination) that it neither establishes nor protects its own opposition. So stupid that he sends hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths just to satisfy his own megalomaniac ego.
Make no mistake, this is nothing against Russian culture, people, science, chess and family values. But everything against Russian politics, economy and system.
In short, a system based on lies and hate can never win over a system that prefers the opposite. Even if he had a million dollar army of cutthroat enthusiasts. Even if he oppressed freedom for centuries. Our system, once invented, must sooner or later bubble through the sediment of lies and hate wars. Putin and with him Russia bet precisely on lies and hatred. But it is a system as powerless as the entire famous Putin army.
2024 ©