The long-delayed end of the Soviet Union is coming

Freedom from its own autocrats, tyrants, murderers in power must be won by each nation. Russia, though it pretends to be macho, boyish and tough, has not yet gone through its puberty. And that's even thirty years after a series of global anti-Soviet revolutions. The Russians have somehow half-asleep, allowed themselves to be fed a bunch of nationalist nonsense instead of a proper democracy and a proper economy, until they have reached the point where their own leader is sending them to the front to be executed. To take hundreds of thousands of inexperienced and untrained conscripts - shoemakers, cooks, managers - and send them to the battlefield as winter sets in is nothing short of mass murder.

Not only is the Russian army the laughing stock of the world, the brilliant strategist Putin will declare mobilisation without closing the borders. Already he has more fighting men escaping than have fallen on the front. Logically, whoever has two molecules in his head will not fight a losing war, moreover, against a nation that - again according to Putin - is actually a common people.

But instead of partial mobilization, Putin has arranged a pretty perfect immobilization. He has taken another extremely wrong and stupid step: this time he has given the nation guns, and as our poet Václav Hrabě once wrote: democracy is giving guns to the people. So now Putin risks finally awakening democracy in the dazed Russians, and instead of pointing his guns senselessly at Ukrainians, he points his gun where it belongs: at his own tyrant. This painful experience of shedding his Stockholm syndrome and refusing to be abused by his ruler is necessary.

Frankly, if Russia were to break up politically into smaller groups held together by greater or lesser force, it would be no harm. Russia as a state has shown nothing positive in the last decade, except a sharp rise in inequality, injustice and bourgeoisie. In China or India there has been a significant enrichment of both the theory of capitalism and technological innovation. China is also a totalitarian state which, like Russia, is facing a revolution against its own tyranny in the future, but in China, at least, it is not only the rich and the communist ultra-capitalists who are fraternising with the government who are becoming rapidly richer, but also the poor majority of the population. The same is true in India - and with a much more interesting prospect for democracy than either Russia or China.

All Russia has is oil, gas and nuclear warheads. If Russia had developed as most post-communist countries have since 1989, our world would be a much richer and freer place. Instead, Russia (Putin) has chosen to be a pest of nations. Where it could, it disrupted the European Union, influenced the course of Brexit in Britain and events in the US. It has encouraged disinformation, divisiveness, destruction, insult and cynicism.

It used to be just suspicion, but now we know that our society is more divided because of Russian influence. Russia has become the sleazy and vile Grim Reaper of the West, whose cheap gloss even two Czech presidents and one Hungarian prime minister have succumbed to. We know exactly what Putin would want: for the EU to break up, for the US to be internally divided, for Ukraine to kowtow to Russia like Belarus. We know exactly what he would want for us, the former Czechoslovakia: to bring us back under his sphere of influence. Back to power politics, back to obtuseness and lies, back to glorifying a leader who can't see the tip of his nose. Back to a system so stupid, and so confident (a common and dangerous combination), that it will not set up or protect its own opposition. So stupid that it sends hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths just to satisfy its own megalomaniacal ego.

Make no mistake, this is nothing against Russian culture, people, science, chess and family values. But everything against Russian politics, economy and system.

In short, a system based on lies and hatred can never prevail over a system that prefers the opposite. Even if it has a million-strong army of cutthroat enthusiasts. Even if it has oppressed freedom for centuries. Our system, once invented, must sooner or later break through the veneer of lies and hate war. Putin, and with him Russia, have bet on lies and hatred. But it is a system as powerless as Putin's entire glorious army.

The article was printed in the Czech daily Hospodářské noviny Oct. 7th, 2022.