The Russia of today is meaningfully a different place to the one that it was before in the Soviet Union, but it’s still got a long way to go if it’s to understand itself and to change its own ways.
This is clear in its current trajectory, which is a futile, shameful conflict that doesn’t make sense to international observers and can’t be if it’s the means of a decline of a legitimate European democracy.
Its ideas need working on, and this notion is coming through in its familiar refrain that still heats up discussions, leading to tensions.
It believes it can return to old lands. It can resume old ways. It isn’t practical, but it’s a temptation to do more than is required of itself.
It’s believed that Russia previously toyed with an idea of pushing back with a counter-invasion against Hitler in the Second World War.
This is not the unfolding of it as it was, but it’s a completely separate idea to the one that’s in our school history textbooks.
It was apparently based off a concept called “Popular Will”, or a study in the way people welcome particular outcomes if their leaders look familiar, or have ways and modes similar to theirs.
This isn’t the truth, but it’s thought to be a problem in Russian trains of thought. It comes up – often by surprise – because it’s more of a feeling than a reality.
The update to Russian thinking is to realise that it has limits to its acceptability elsewhere. It isn’t pride that’s a problem, but a restraint on its endeavour to move outward.
