Insight into the Russian soul: the endless violence robs people of empathy Activists and state media: 53 dead after IS attack in Syria

The girl designed her poster colorfully. The edges are emphasized with black felt-tip pen, each letter colored differently. It stands there nervously, several passengers hurry past it. It doesn’t pay attention to people, it pays attention to the poster being held high enough. “Uncle Petya, welcome back,” says the newspaper. In the center is a large black and orange Z, the symbol for Russia’s “military special operation” in Ukraine. For the war of destruction of Russia.

“Uncle Petya, you are our hero!!!!!” the girl wrote in scribbled children’s handwriting. His eyes now scan the crowd for “Uncle Petya”. To the soldier who returned from battle, lied and cheated as much as the ten-year-old at the Irkutsk airport in Siberia. Blinded like millions of people in Russia who, knowingly or unknowingly, have fallen into a lie.

For a year now – and eventually longer – they have believed in the story of Russia’s first attack, the external threat, the struggle for their own sovereignty, the continuation of their heroic World War II epic. Her fight against fascism presented as sacred. You want to believe it, with all your might.

They push aside doubts and say to themselves, “The politicians must know better.” They have been taught from an early age not to even trust themselves. Have been fed with humiliation, not to think, to question anything. Parents, teachers, the entire state apparatus have taught them to submit, just not to stick their heads out. Danger!

Fatalism linked to fear

Many have adopted this attitude, it is comfortable, it is seemingly harmless. She pushes the responsibility far away from each individual. After all, what is the choice in a country that has never faced its totalitarian past, which also rejects its totalitarian present? tomb or prison. Or the complete withdrawal in silence, in acceptance, in undisputed approval.

The majority of the people of Russia adhere to the version that the Kremlin’s propagandists instill in their viewers, it has become their truth, which little can shake. Not even the death of your own father, brother, son. It is better to die fighting for the fatherland than in a road accident, President Vladimir Putin explains to them from the television screens.

The men belonged to the state, says a governor in Siberia, and gave the widows woven cloths. Some of the relatives are pacified with a few sacks of potatoes, others are given fur coats or enough money to buy a Lada. That’s what the dead son is worth. “Fate,” say the people softly, surrendering to the forced fatalism that has never left the land.

The eternal fear of the state machine was instilled in their ancestors in Soviet times. It was passed on, as was the arrogance that as a Russian you carry the truth within you, the imperial idea that you know better what is good for everyone else – and use violence if necessary to achieve this “good”.

Living with the cynical ideology of death

There is nothing more manly, the rioters shout on state television, than to lose your life on the battlefield. People have to die anyway, the 20 or 30 years they could live longer are nothing compared to the “right cause” for which Russia – “certain of its rights”, as Putin recently stated – is committed. People hear that day in and day out, living with the increasingly repulsive cynicism, with the ideology of death, because the state has nothing else to offer.

War has long since become a habit, something that runs alongside it, even if the next one is gone, in battle, fallen, hidden, fled. Even if equipment is bought for all “Uncle Petyas”, thermal underwear, boots, food packages. After all, people say that they do not abandon “his”. May his “his” return in zinc coffins, if they return at all.

The families are left with an order, awarded posthumously. And often also the conviction that we have to keep fighting. Even harder, even bloodier. The inhuman takes on meaning for them. A human life was hardly worth anything even in Soviet times. The individual counts for little to this day. The nation only exists as a mass, if one breaks out, exclusion follows. Open protest is thus stifled.

The sledgehammer as a political message

Those who question all officially announced distortions are threatened with a sledgehammer by the hardened proponents of war. A few months ago, followers of Wagner’s ruthless private army used such a device to torture and kill a defector from their own ranks in front of cell phone cameras. The Russian immediately came up with a word for such an approach: «otkuwaldit», to hit with a sledgehammer.

The radical patriots now use this method to threaten every spark of criticism. There is no public outrage against it, even party leaders praise “Wagner’s sledgehammer”. The instrument of torture has become a symbol of modern Russia, and brutality has long set the political tone.

Society, impoverished, frightened, submissive, has largely turned off its feelings. Ilya, an expert from the gold mining industry in Siberia, can say very precisely what Russia is losing economically and developmentally as a result of the war, but he does not address the people of Ukraine with all his criticism of the Russian state. You seem distant to him. No pity, no empathy.

The war has entered many people’s stories, even those who ask “why?” questions, just something technical. The human – the suffering, the destruction, the trauma for years to come – it hardly gets any space in our minds. People stand there helpless and say to themselves, “What can I do?” In a country where the police can do anything and the courts accept it, it is indeed a challenge to counter the repression apparatus with something legal.

Sometimes it’s just impossible to go to jail for years without doing it. For convictions about Russian crimes in Bucha, for asking whether children’s drawing competitions are appropriate in times of war, for his “No to war” stance. For people who often struggle to survive, protest is not a question of life.

Deprived of humanity

The state has robbed its citizens of their rights, it has robbed them of their humanity. Turned them into cynics who often do what he pays them for: kill in Ukraine. For silence on this murder in Russia.

The remnants of humanity appear quietly, almost invisibly. They appear in the form of flowers that some intrepid people place at monuments across Russia after a residential building in Dnipro was shelled. On Ukrainsky Boulevard in Moscow, not far from the White House, the seat of the Russian government, people look nervously as they walk towards the monument to the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka. In the flower shop around the corner they are surprised by the question. People continue to flock to the granite statue for weeks after the missile strike. Carnations, roses and chrysanthemums have become a personal protest here.

Such spontaneous memorials have been created in more than 60 Russian cities. “I can do little, but I can do nothing,” say the people who put down teddy bears, apples, flowers, make crosses and even kneel. They grieve even when the state forbids them to grieve and tries to extract their empathy from them. He sends police cars and makes the police officers stand guard on shifts.

The municipal workers clean up the flowers every evening and there are new ones the next morning. They are few, but they publicly show that people are not alone. The flower demonstrators break the imposed silence and show the passive passers-by: “Something is not right here.”