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Igel

(37,180 posts)
14. Hardly.
Thu May 12, 2022, 08:02 PM
May 2022

The most convincing analysis I've seen claims that there are 4 prototypical groups (I use the word "prototypical" in the sense here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory.)

A small percentage are in line with Putin. They are distributed, get their power and importance from lining up behind power. #1.

A somewhat larger group are quasi-WEIRD. They're more like Westerners. Not exactly, but they're educated, urban, and 'netizens. Educated. And many of them fled Russia on 2/25/2022 and the weeks following. #2. We'd call them "anywheres", to use a rather obtuse classification--they have more in common with educated folk in India and France and Argentina and Nigeria than they do with most people in their own cultural group or country.

An even larger group, the middle group, are "middle-class" Russians. They have jobs, mortgages--and they have a standard of living unheard of in the "socialist paradise" of the USSR. Yes, mortgages and "mortgage slavery", but they aren't in a small little apt. for 30 years with promises of being able, eventually, to move to a bigger one. Or having to find ways, when parents die, of swapping two small apts. for a bigger one (Yuriy Trifonov's "The Exchange" is a soviet classic short novel). They're too busy making payments, being consumers, and afraid that either the system will shake and they'll lose everything, or they'll lose their jobs and lose everything. Think 1950s white suburbia versus American black homeowners in 2009. #3.

Then there are the "deplorables"--a group of 20-25% of Russians. They live in poor areas, they are poor, their lives are brutish. They often live in rural areas, are poorly educated, and for them, toilets may be a sign of privilege. Theft? Where I live isn't wealthy, and people go around to see what they can steal--it's not full-fledged "bars on the windows", but there are some. Go a subdivision or two over, and they're standard (we get the spill-over). I have no trouble imagining that in some parts if you leave something outside and it has any value, it's gone by morning. The claim is that for these Russians--whether ethnic Russians or just cultural Russians--Bucha is every-day life, if you're suddenly surrounded by those of a less aggressive, survivalist and triumphalist culture that aren't used to open warfare being the daily routine. (That struck me as insane. Now imagine this: Put together army units of 1500 men, where every man in the unit is MS-13 or, for a different set of *allied* units, some Chicago or LA black gang. That sounds horrifying. And the point is suddenly unreasonably reasonable.)

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