Speaking as a witness to degeneration in the Russian Federation, as opposed to late 1970s in the USSR: A dowdy twilight (1970s) versus murder today

As a person who interacted with Russians and Soviet Union citizens before 1990, I will attest that as strange as some people may find it, that there was less mendacious behavior in the Brezhnev. era than what we are seeing from afar in 2022. The USSR was mendacious and deceptive, but after the fall of Stalin, that there was ON average less brutality done for the hell of it, or for sport as to what we are seeing in 2022, in Ukraine and in Russia today. Frankly if I were in a detention center in Russia today I would be resigned to being murdered.

This is in tandem with Russia being now a Mafioso state. The brutality we see now in Russia is what I would expect from made men mobsters

The worst of it is, that the head of the Russian Orthodox church is for all intensive purposes giving his blessing for murder.

The unfortunate parallel I have to that in history, as to the Russian church today is in the First Crusade, 1097 - 1099, where Jerusalem was taken at a cost of over 90% of the inhabitants, with the Catholic church blessing the slaughter.

We see now in Ukraine and other places pseudo religious justification for rapine and murder

Now in Putin's Russia it's call kill for the glory of "God", Not attractive

I am putting this in, on the basis of what interaction I had, in various ways with the global "problem child" of the late 1970s to 1980s, i.e. the USSR

I am in NO sense idealizing what happened at the time. 1970s, but here is a level of brutality in a general social sense emerging in Russia today which pays NO lip service to Brezhnev "stability" but is an expression of brutality for its own sake

See what is in this article

https://jacobin.com/2022/07/russia-ukraine-war-media-public-apolitical-vladimir-putin

quote

The economic situation is deteriorating and we will begin feeling that seriously by late August or September. It’s a gradual process. One company closes, people have to look for new jobs, then another closes, and so on. Certain goods are disappearing, but not everything.

Like I said, most Russians are apolitical. They care about their jobs, their families, their closest friends, and maybe their houses and pets. Russians are not very religious, either, even though the church plays an important role as a political institution. What’s important is having your family life intact, then you can tolerate the rest.

The problem is, it’s not going to continue like that indefinitely. The war is going to affect your family, your work, and even your pets. And once it begins affecting people’s private lives, things can change immediately. I think resistance could start mounting very fast once the government does something that affects the lives of families. That’s why they haven’t openly declared war.

end of quote

And that is where the real fault lines will emerge. I.e. families will be destroyed, and the regime will use pseudo religious justification for turning military weapons on protesting civilians

In the 1970s, which was NOT the Black Maria time of the 1930s-40s, the KGB would come for you and you would be whisked away for being slowly being ground into powder, if you did not pay ball. Even so, the interrogations had definite rules, and many accused KGB agents knew enough to avoid, by the quasi legalistic format how to avoid self incrimination. They would loose their jobs, be cashiered, but if willing to melt back into the shadows, at times allowed to live. Yes people were killed, but there were limits to that, whereas we will see in the spiral to collapse in Russia today , outright murder incorporated

Today ? You raise a stink in Russia, you stand a chance of being offed, in a "special operations" but done in a way as to terrify neighbors into becoming outwardly good little Putin automatons.

Again, the 1970s were in many ways a dowdy twilight, with at times extreme brutality being meted out, but nothing like what we are seeing in the aftermath of Bucha, where the Russian services went totally APE S***.

That is how this new fusion between a corrupt tyrant, Putin, and the head of the Orthodox Church is turning the Russian federation into a hell hole.

quote

This might shock you, but until very recently, most Russians didn’t know there was a war in Ukraine. On TV they use the term “special operation,” which suggests special forces engaging in some kind of limited action somewhere. It was not associated with real hostilities, with tanks and artillery and so on, and they didn’t report Ukrainian civilian casualties.

That brings me to my second point: most people don’t watch political programs on TV, nor do they watch oppositional media on the Internet. They are not interested in any kind of politics whatsoever. The whole spectrum of political opinion — including both loyalists and the opposition, whether leftist or fascist, liberal or conservative —?represents maybe 15 to 20 percent of the population, probably less than 10 percent. The rest are totally apolitical.

On the one hand, that’s a great advantage for the regime, but it’s also its biggest problem. Nobody moves against the government, but nobody moves in favor of it,

end of quote

In a word, civic society is being crushed out of existence in Putin's Russia. The number of political prisoners is sky rocketing, the population wishes to be out of it, i.e. NOT affected as the enormity of violence, but there is in many respects a soul deadening quality , as to rule after rule of what is NOT allowed, with mindless incantation of NONSENSE being required

A dying nation. That is Putin's Russia today

Andrew Beckwith, PhD