When I was a budding writer in the humiliated Moscow of the 1990s, I remember admiring in Russians what seemed to me, as to many other writers before me, an infinite endurance in suffering. On my young mind, their melancholy nourished with poetry and vodka had a much greater effect than the cheerful American optimism. Since then, Moscow has changed a lot. The city is much more like America, and a new middle class is relishing its recent metamorphosis into a chic and refined European metropolis.
Or at least was that true until a few weeks ago, and Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine – since then everything changed, in a flash. Overnight, the city went from grayness to greyness. The smiles have faded, and everywhere Muscovites are dazed, weighed down by a sadness and fear heavy as despair.
Most Russians have Ukrainian blood
There is some wisdom in this despair. Across the country, police brutally arrested hundreds of protesters during courageous anti-war rallies. By its brutality, the aggression served as a reminder that the regime will stop at nothing to achieve its goals, and by its tactics, that the Russians do indeed live in a police state, unlike their freer Ukrainian neighbors.
Russians and Ukrainians share a long common history. Most Russians have Ukrainian blood, and vice versa, and the two nations were very closely linked until recently. It is certainly tragic in the eyes of some Russians that Ukraine has chosen to turn to the West, but this divorce is a source of regret and disappointment – not anger. Enlightened Muscovites even admire Ukraine for its courage in breaking free from its Soviet past.
But it is not the Russians who write this history.
Putin did not consult the population before launching his invasion. Most of the Russians paid no attention to his grand maneuvers.