Putin's Counter Revolution

[Mark Kohut]

Just as the Pinkertons could start a 'commotion' and blame the anarchists after they
cracked down on them, many in Ukraine right now are fearing that Putin's forces might
start shooting (at nothing), storm something and Putin would claim their presence was obviously
needed to quell the 'uprising'..

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On Sat, 3/15/14, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Putin's Counter Revolution
 To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
 Date: Saturday, March 15, 2014, 4:37 PM
 
 Putin's Counter-Revolution
 
 James Meek reports from Ukraine
 
 
 
 
 When Putin spoke of 'chaos' in Kiev and Ukraine as a whole,
 in his
 press conference a few days after the Crimean invasion, he
 must have
 realised that his foreign audience, as well as the citizens
 of Kiev
 and all the people of Ukraine who favoured the revolution,
 knew there
 was no chaos. His audience were those who both believed and
 wanted to
 believe the 'Banderite' revolution had brought anarchy:
 neo-Soviets on
 both sides of the border who yearn for an enlarged
 Russophone space -
 socially conservative, militarily strong, inheritors of the
 cherished
 myths, martyrs and achievements of imperial and Soviet times
 - but who
 nonetheless don't feel bound by the old Soviet restrictions
 on travel,
 Orthodox Christian piety or consumerism.
 
 
 [...]
 
 The Russians and Ukrainians of the 1990s were able to temper
 regret at
 the collapse of the USSR with their own knowledge of the
 dismembered
 country's shortcomings. A generation later, this is less and
 less the
 case. Many of the most articulate and thoughtful Russians
 and
 Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the realities of
 Soviet life
 and later prospered in the post-Soviet world, have moved
 abroad, gone
 into a small business or been intimidated: in any case they
 have been
 taken out of the political arena. In Russia and Russophone
 Ukraine the
 stage is left to neo-Soviet populists who propagate the
 false notion
 of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth,
 benignly
 ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist
 empire,
 disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom 'the west' are heirs
 and the
 only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after
 1985 you have
 no remembered reality to measure against this false vision,
 just as
 you have no way to situate those charming Soviet musical
 comedies of
 the 1960s and 1970s, idyllic portrayals of an idealised
 Russophone
 socialism, brightly coloured and fun, propaganda now in a
 way they
 weren't when they were made. This is the context that has
 made it
 possible for Vladimir Putin and his government to sell
 Russia's
 opportunistic invasion of Ukraine to his own people and to
 Ukrainian
 neo-Soviets: the idea that it undoes what should never have
 been done,
 an artificial division of Russian-speaking Eurasia by
 fascists/the
 West/America/rabid Ukrainian nationalists - in neo-Soviet
 discourse,
 avatars of a single anti-Russian monster.
 
 
 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/james-meek/putins-counter-revolution
 -
 Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
 
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l