If Russia was founded/by Anna Akhmatova, if/Mandelstam was the legislator/and Stalin was only a side character/from a lost Georgian epic/if Russia would take off its/studded bear fur,/if it could live by the word and not/by the fist,/when would Russia, if Russia would."
Attentive readers of the Anthology column probably recognized the great Polish poet Adam Zagajevski which communicates with these great verses something that, on the occasion of Russia, almost all of us, at least once, thought with disappointment - If Russia...
Somehow that feeling is more visible these days when Russia is showing its ugliest face to the world. A face without a trace Akhmatov i Mandeljštama, but that's why there is every wrinkle of countless tyrants, one and the other, but tyrants, who ruled this country.
The Americans were definitely right - Russia attacked Ukraine, brutally and totally. The earth is burning Gogol i Taras Shevchenko, Odessa trembles Isaac Babel and Kiev, "the mother of all Slavic cities"... Another magnum crimen on the face of Russia.
No matter how incomprehensible that urge to strike at a loved one, at the nearest, it is not unknown to us. So our empathy would have to be even greater. Ukraine, Slavic destiny: the knife of brotherhood.
The cynicism of power and the joy of lying - Russia has long mocked the international agreement of 1994. Back then, Russia, along with the USA and Great Britain, was the guarantor of Ukrainian integrity and sovereignty on the condition that Ukraine returns its part of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal. Ukraine did it, and this is what it got. It seems that it is best not to deal with Russia. Many Montenegrins realized this a long time ago, albeit the hard way.
The introduction to the entire shameful action, the fratricidal war, implied preparations - with bare lies. We have also heard the well-known rhetoric of imperial revisionism: "artificial people", "communist creation", "fake people". The more banal such a story is, the more "successful" it is. That's how you make murderers who, without any moral dilemmas, will start killing "non-humans". We, here in the Balkans, at least know that well.
Where did that come from? Why this kind of hysteria and propaganda? Why can't Putin explain things without falsifying history?
Ukraine "needs" Russia to hide its Tatar origin from the time when Moscow was a vassal of the Golden Horde, the then Tatar state. Russia historically legitimized itself as the successor of Kievan Rus, certainly more in the mythological than in the real world. It is probably the center of frustration that neither Putin nor Russia like this can hide. Everything is in vain for them: there will be Ukraine...
Putin will be tried one day for this crime. A Russian protester in a Moscow square (if Russia were in its squares and not in tanks) demanding Nuremberg for Putin hits the heart of the matter.
Another deeply disturbing moment: Putin's discursive strategy is ridiculously similar to the one we heard in documentaries about the birth of Nazism, and were convinced that we would never see such a thing in reality. (And what we have seen.) Is the world ready to react, or will some future generations have to marvel at the enigma of how (another) complex, funny man managed to set Europe on fire.
Ukrainian pictures send a message to the world that the beast has been released. And that is exactly what delights the local Putin lovers to no end. And if they were Putin's army, they would solve everything in three days. Here, every fascism is "buried" with the story that we just need to make peace, be patient, so when global conditions change, we will again, and so on. Such events can make many of them feel that theirs is coming again.
While the bloody pictures from Ukraine are coming, stick to the great poet, then say - eh, that Russia was founded by Count Tolstoy, that Rachmaninov was a lawmaker, and Putin was just a side character in a lost spy novel...
If nothing else, Ukraine would not be burning today.
Bonus video:
