How much different would Russia be if Vladimir Putin were not the president?

 To answer this, all you need is projecting on Russia what has happened in the neighboring former Soviet republics.

  • Russia as a clan-ruled, cleptocratic, chaotic democracy? Look at Ukraine.
  • Russia as a hugely profitable petroleum-extracting business run by one family? Look at Azerbaijan.
  • Russia as a populist low-key continuation of the USSR. Look at Belarus.
  • Russia as a petrostate ruled by a benign business-minded nationalist? Case Kazakhstan!

This is it. This is about all the range of what Russia could have been in the alternative reality.

We could not have become like China. We don’t have the work ethics and the tradition of the elite’s moral accountability that Confucianism has instilled in the Chinese

We could not have become like Poles. They have a tradition of civil society and self-reliance that we don’t have.

We could not have become like Balts. We like the Nordic way of life, but only as tourists. Their ideas of equality and the puritanical simplicity of their lives put us off.

(What we possibly slowly become is Italians of the Great Steppe. Kremlin and our best palaces are built by Italians, we like to wear Italian brands and luxuriate in Venetian interiors, and Putin seems to get a lot of his political ideas from the hidden vaults of Mussolini).

State, money and classes in the Soviet Union

From the outset, the Soviet Communists declared the abolition of state and classes as their ultimate objective. But it never happened. Ruling the nation without a state turned out to be impractical from day one.

A Communist revolution per definition is a very violent project, with exploitative classes resisting the arrival of new world to their dying breath. That means a dire need of police, secret police, spies, firing squads, army, navy, the full monty. All these things are the trappings of State.

As the North Korea clearly shows, even several generations after the bourgeois classes in your country had been eradicated, you can’t do without state.

Now, to the classes.

In theory, as soon as you nationalize and collectivize everything, as we did in the USSR, classes in their Marxist definition cease to exist. Somehow, in the Soviet Union, it didn’t happen!

Due to some obscure perfectionist quirk of our Communist scholars, we held to the view that collective farmers had collective rights of ownership to their land and equipment. Workers as a class didn’t have comparable ownership rights to their machines and tools. That means we continued to have two classes, and no one said when this was expected to end.

In addition, we had “a layer” (as opposed to “class”) of “working intelligentsia” who didn’t work manually as prescribed by old-school Marxists, yet anyhow had the right to exist in the new society.

This is what these guys looked like, during the late-era Soviet Union:

The suit to the right is obviously the “layer” person. A badge on his lapel has hammer and sickle in it to prove his office work is no better than toiling in the fields or at the steel furnace. The macho guy in the middle impersonates the leading role workers as a class were assigned in the Soviet Union.

How is Putin transforming Russia?

Putin is not a transformational leader. He can better be defined as a transactional autocrat. His vision of Russian greatness is not a coherent set of principles. It is an assortment of ad-hoc quotes, images, anecdotes and myths rooted in the past of our nation that he uses to communicate his strength and his grip on power.

Yet, Putin has been transforming Russia in some fundamental ways. The degree of his control, the utter weakness of civil society and the length of his rule all have resulted in a few things formerly unseen in our tradition.

  • Fusion of Orthodoxy, Stalinism and Tzarist Imperialism into a new brand of Russian nationalism
  • Creation of a quite liberal market system where ownership rights are contingent on players’ connections and alliances within state bureaucracy
  • Establishment of a secret police state where former and present operatives of KGB/FSB and other branches of secret police form a backbone of the ruling class. They control, directly or indirectly, the national economy, political and state institutions, media, culture and large parts of Russian diaspora
  • Large-scale de-industrialization, due to the dominance of hugely profitable extraction-based monopolies.
  • Shaping of a large cosmopolitan class of wealthy well-educated Russians with a pronounced long-term strategy of becoming part of the global Westernized world elite.

Why are Russian immigration officers so unsmiling?

The strict appearance of Russia’s customs and immigration officers comes from the fact that Russia has long been a deeply conservative society of Slav peasants with a rigid state hierarchy ruling over them.

Once you, being Russian, get a position with a uniform and the paycheck from the state, you are the person of power above all those more peripheral to the mighty Leviathan.

Also, once you get power, you’ll need to communicate it, clear and loud. The best way to communicate power is keeping distance. The easiest way to communicate distance is to act busy and dismissive, ask pointed questions, shake your head, never smile.

This applies equally to our fellow Russians, as well to the foreigners in never-ending lines at the immigration and custom control.

This is, by the way, not an original Russian recipe. My impression is that this is the universal code of power communication in traditional cultures.

Add to that the fact that in Russia a smile from a stranger means aggression. This starts fading away in large cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, especially among younger, well-educated people. But many still hold to the opinion that flashing your teeth to strangers is a stupid American import, at best.

Are the drills between Russia and China happening a warning to the West?

Of course it is.

The participation of Chinese guided-missile destroyer Heifei in Russian naval exercises in the Baltic sea in July 2017, as a continuation of 2015 joint naval drills in the Mediterranean and South China Sea, sends a clear and loud signal.

  1. The Baltic Sea is in many ways NATO’s internal sea, with member states plus tacitly associated (but formally non-aligned) Sweden and Finland controlling almost all of its coast, and NATO’s Denmark and Norway locking the only passage into the ocean.
  2. The Baltic naval drills follow up the past Sino-Russian drills in the Mediterranean in 2015, which is also, for all practical purposes NATO’s internal sea.
  3. The Chinese are telling the US: “You mess up in the South China sea, be prepared for us to mess up in your neighborhood”. The Chinese won’t of course pick the fight so far from home, but they signal that they can strengthen the Russian hand.
  4. The Russians are telling the US: “We may not be able to deploy 200+ ocean-going naval ships like we did in the 1970s on our own, but together with the Chinese we can try to come close”.
  5. Supporting each other militarily, if the need arises, will require a totally different level of compatibility between the naval weapon, equipment and communication systems of China and Russia. Which language to use for what purpose? How to interpret intercepted commands from friendly forces? How to tell friend from foe from neutrals etc. That’s what naval exercises are for.

How come St. Petersburg was chosen over Petrograd as the current name for Leningrad?

Petrograd was the name given to the city in the frenzy of anti-German sentiment of WWI. (Means the same in Russian, “the city of Peter”).

Even though the name change happened on Tzar Nicholas II watch in 1914, in popular mind it is imprinted in association with the Revolutionary age (“Petrograd, the cradle of Revolution”), starting in 1917.

Here is an old Bolshevik poster, seared into every Soviet school kid´s retina: “Shield Petrograd with our bodies!”

Say “Petrograd” to those born in the USSR, and it echoes in our skulls with “war”, “shooting”, “revolutionary soldiers”, “people´s tribunals” and suchlike. Not the stuff we fondly remember.

Say “St. Petersburg”, and it resounds with European sophistication, Imperial glory, spacious ballrooms and high society gossip in French, English and Italian.

“Where were you born?”

“St Petersburg”

“Where did you go to school?”


“Where did you work?”


“Where do you want to be buried?”

“St Petersburg.”

Why were Vikings so successful in Rus lands and yet disappeared?

The business of our Vikings was coastal sting operations, and they excelled at it.

Being itinerant tribal warriors from the far fringe of Europe, they didn’t get the occasion to form an orderly military structure that could deploy forces for a major battle, like the mighty Charlemagne or the Arab conquerors did. They avoided major battle on our territory so that no one had a chance to defeat them and chase out.

First when they settled in Northern France, in Kievan Rus and Sicily and blended with local elites, they started to think and act like regular kings and dukes and counts. And also at this, they were hugely successful, with at least three mighty kingdoms as their lasting legacy.

The disappearance of Vikings outside Scandinavia wasn’t due to their defeat. What happened?

Love happened.

The fierce Nordic warriors had strong preference for indigenous ladies. They had kids with them and found the entire bunch so irresistibly sweet that they didn’t mind them talking to each other in their MOTHER tongue.

In a couple of generations, assimilation left few traces of the Nordic legacy, wherever they had settled.

Love conquers all, folks!

Is there a chance of popular uprising in Russia against the oligarchs and their court prosecution?


  1. Contrary to what some may think, we don’t have a tradition of a violent overthrow of our autocrats. Our last czar abdicated of his free will long before he got killed. Gorbachev was at least partly complicit in the coup against him, and wasn’t really overthrown, he rather saw his country disappear underneath him.
  2. The Communist revolution in 1917 and everything that happened afterwards has traumatized the nation to the degree that makes even a kind of non-violent Velvet revolution very unlikely for another generation or two.
  3. Putin, despite his missteps and assumed misdeeds, has been the best ruler the country has had since the dawn of times. He may drop the ball, and everyone may turn against him, like it happened with Gorbachev, but for now he has an iron grip on power.
  4. Russians are not a legalistic nation. We think that court prosecution is something corrupt people in power do to humiliate and annihilate their enemies. Deep down inside, we ‘re sure that evil people always win. Those among us who believe in God like to think the bad guys maybe get due justice in the next life. But the truth is, most of us are atheists.

Is there something like “100% pure Russian”?

Honestly, no Russian is completely of Russian origin.

“Russian” means coming from the ranks or Rus, an ancient gang of Viking warriors living off slave trade to the old Byzantine Empire. They were few, and got assimilated by Eastern Slav tribes without leaving a trace.

Then the Slavs, wise from lessons taught by the Vikings, started to go deep in the thick of Eurasian forests hunting high and low for Ugro-Finnish people to be sold as slaves to Greeks and Arabs and Persians. Many of us got distracted in the process, and got settled as mere peaceful farmers with our blond Finnish wives.

Then the Mongols came, and showed us how to build empires and kill and maim anyone who resists like there is no tomorrow.

Then the Turks came, and gave us their delicious fatty foods and colorful clothes, and we fought together against the hoity-toity Poles and bloody-minded Crimeans, and they gave us the large slanted eyes and protruding cheekbones because they knew the future fashion model headhunters would die for these.

Then the Europeans came, and taught us how to use make-up and pick the right clothes and use the right words to become top picks on Tinder and poolside parties in Santa Monica, LA.

After that came Jews with their tasty kitchen and science brains and catchy pop tunes, and Germans with their expert knowledge of spinning tales of national greatness… you get the picture, don’t you?

And quite recently, for some unknown reason, we got some nitwits in our midst who got a strange idea of finding out the degree of Russian-ness for everyone of us, and call this nation-building. It smells and looks bad, but we’re stuck with these morons for some time.

How do Russians feel about being the “bad guys” in Western video games and films?

I remember time when we used to get our knickers in knot every time we saw a villain Russian in Hollywood movies.

Then we started to enjoy being the bad guys. Much like teenagers finding the fun part of being the baddest gang on the block. Or the Trump fans all excited to be “a bunch of deplorables”.

Right now, I think a lot of us Russians are transiting to the “Let’s take it like the British” territory. We are making attempts at cool distanced amusement whenever we see Hollywood Russians and trying to generate self-deprecating jokes with a varying degree of hilarity.