“Super Express”: – Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, many people in modern Russia have noticed the new incarnation of the aggressive Soviet Union. One major ideological difference was that the Soviet Union promised a bright future. Putin’s Russia, on the other hand, is mired in the past, and the only promise he can make to his citizens is death in the Ukrainian mud.

Dr Jakub Benedczak: – Comparisons with the Soviet Union are sometimes justified. Today, for example, as in the war in Afghanistan, we have an aging leader who understands little of the world around him. And if so, he made a disastrous decision. Looking at the decaying contemporary Russia, it resembles the Soviet Union of the 1980s, whose decay process was already in full swing.

– In your text for “New Eastern Europe” about Vladimir Putin’s necropolitics, you refer to the shocking film “Cargo 200” by Russian director Alexei Balabanov, which takes place in the mid-1980s – a period of total moral decline and social atrophy in the Soviet Union.

– I particularly remember the scene where a militia captain in a Soviet city kidnaps a girl, imprisons her, tortures her, gives her liquor, brings a hideous vagabond who raped her, and the final act of cruelty is that he takes away the body of his fiancé. from Afghanistan and threw him on his bed. At the same time, in the next room, the captain’s mother was constantly watching the Soviet song festival, as if nothing had happened behind the walls. I remembered this scene while watching New Year’s Eve on Kremlin TV. The Putin elite enjoys pop hits from the depths of the Soviet Union, while their country is decaying from within, Russian life is accompanied by everyday brutality, and a barbaric war is raging in Ukraine. For years I have heard from Russian friends that Balabanov predicted Russia’s future with this film, but I had no idea that it would actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

– The brutality of life in Russia and the decay that accompanies it is perhaps best expressed in how Putin turned the war and death therein into tools of social progress for the families of those who died in Ukraine.

– Indeed, Putin is offering a lot of money to the families of soldiers who are about to die. The minimum salary in Russia is approximately PLN 1,200 per month. This amount is received by novice nurses or novice teachers for their work. This is very hard money to live in Russia, especially in Russian cities. When a family sends their husband, son or father to war and he dies, he receives the equivalent of 700,000 zlotys. PLN, then we can imagine how much money that is and how well spent it can be used to get out of poverty. Today, this is basically all that Putin has to offer the public. This is the pathology of a strong society.

– In what sense?

– What Vladimir Putin basically said to Russians: The only way to rise above my corrupt Darwinist capitalism is to compensate for the death of your family members in a war that Russia cannot win and which Russians cannot understand alone. Can a state that puts its citizens before such a choice not be a worse pathology than the Soviet Union? I will point out one more element of Putin’s deep pathology in Russia.

– What?

– The war against Ukraine was another Russian war that caused massive post-traumatic shocks in society. It goes through a war once every 10-20 years, so this post-traumatic shock reproduces itself. This is a mass trauma that affects the entire Russian society. Putin could have capitalized on the economic boom early in his reign and given Russia 20-30 years of peace. After all, the millions of people who fled in recent months were the same people who wanted to live in a normal country that didn’t regularly send its citizens to be slaughtered and gave them a chance to earn something. Perhaps these 20-30 years will provide an opportunity to establish a relatively normalcy in Russia. Sure, a country with its interests, which occasionally swings a sword from time to time, but it doesn’t have to be the walking pathology it is today. Moreover, this war pathological Russia for decades to come.

– What Russia was like after its colonial war and what social effects it had was shown by Balabanov who has already been mentioned in his other film “Brat”, the action of which takes place in the Russian underworld, and the main character is a veteran of the war in Chechnya, struggling to find place in the real world.

“It’s good that this film has come up in our conversations. When it premiered in 1997, many Russians said it was a very dangerous prediction. The main character, after fighting in Chechnya, returns, takes up arms, and brings order. How is it different from a man with epaulets? , a former KGB officer, who will soon appear in Russia and use anti-democratic methods to bring order after the chaos of the 1990s and the Yeltsin era?The second part of the film, shot in 2000, shows the same hero going to the United States , in which he states that Russia not only does not want to be friendly with America, but also claims that Crimea will be reclaimed for Russia. Both films are chronicles of all of Russia’s trauma and predictions of what awaits their country. He also expresses hope that it will come a man who will bring order to Russia, which is sinking into decline, with my hands at. Even Putin succeeded in the short term, but in the long term he led to an even bigger pathology. Because in the long term, power cannot bring anything good to the country. It can only demoralize them and in the second decade of the 21st century we can see the fruits of this.

– We sometimes laugh when we see Kremlin ads promoting trips to war, where the main incentive for doing so is promises of peace for the families of the fallen. We laugh at the material in the Kremlin news when happy families accept such a deal. But there is something very tragic and frightening about it.

“It’s scary on two levels. It’s probably the first time this family has had their own car in their life. When you have someone in your family who has cancer, and there isn’t even a hospital in the city where they live, a car like that is an opportunity to go home sick. Even if you have to pay a bribe to join it. It’s also not funny because with the money the family received after the death of the father, the children could get more expensive toys for the first time in their life. I understand that this might be funny, but it is a bit like the Polish “Day of the Mad”. This film entertains us until we peek behind the veil of laughter and see a frightened man on the other side. Life in Russia is a similar tragic farce. We have people there who, on the one hand, wanting something from the state, but at the same time being afraid of it.They were happy with the new order, but a few days previously they buried their loved ones who died in Ukraine.

– Once, Putin built his support on economic revival after the 1990 period of trouble. After 2014, he looked for it in Great Russian Nationalism. Today, as you pointed out, he is trying to find support in the powerful promises of compensation for deaths in senseless wars. Efficient? And will he be able to fulfill his promise of a “ruble for a corpse”?

“It seems to be effective so far.” But in the face of Russia’s collapsing economy, will the budget be able to sustain such generous compensation for the tens of thousands of Russians who died in Ukraine? This may not be possible. It is interesting what the Russian Ministry of Defense has done – the compensation money will not come from the state budget, but from private insurance companies that have signed contracts with the ministry. It is as outsourcing as in the case of the notorious Wagner group. In his case, we have outsourced the military, and in terms of compensation, responsibility is shifted to private entities. In the wild Russian capitalism, where there are no legal rules and norms, such entities are open to deception. However, for now, it seems that Putin will not allow it. Especially if he really was preparing for a big attack in the spring. It just needs a credible incentive to fight back. I suspect that in the long term, however, countries could use various evasions.

– We mentioned the Wagner group, which sent freed criminals from penal colonies – murderers, rapists and pedophiles – to the Ukrainian front. There are already reports of their funeral, which Kremlin propagandists embellished with great grace in honor of the heroes of Russia. If a pedophile can become a “special ops” hero, as the Kremlin officially calls the war, then something is very wrong with this country.

– Well, it perfectly shows how Russia has become a country of overlapping pathologies. Of course, Putin did not find gunpowder here, as a similar desperate measure was taken by Stalin during World War II. At that time, the biggest thugs were recruited into the Red Army for promises of exoneration. There is a story that the guys from the GRU who designed the Wagner group – having not found it by Prigozhin, who was too stupid for that – assumed that it would be cannon fodder: they would throw 200-300 people from this unit to check what the real strength of the opponent was . Again, copy-paste from the Stalin era: we took people from the fringes of society and dumped them to death. Something like this was unthinkable for European or American soldiers. And here you recruit a pedophile, send him to certain death, so that by death he can stake out the battlefield in a senseless war – after all, this is another level of state decline.

Interviewed by Tomasz Walczak