Thread by @russophiliac

Having to explain to a Russian professor in Russia (about the Dozhd' skandal) that said professor doesn't have to use phrase 'our army', and that I would never say 'our army' about British or NATO troops. His incredulous response: 'Are you some kind of communist?' 😍😍😍

To be fair to him, we eventually got a a point where he realised he had started repeating a load of Putin tropes. "про армию и наших - это сидит на подсознании."

And then we had a fruitful discussion that reveals how hard it will be to grow true anti-war consensus because of the 'protective', for want of a better word, attitude towards the abstract institution of Russian armed forces.

Everyone hates the officer class, the high command, yet there is high 'trust' (completely lacking analytic definition) in 'the army' as an imagined institution.

I still recall my shock that the one thing many Russians still don't believe is the kind of war crimes like Bucha and rape. Even people totally against Putin and the war can't bring themselves to believe these things because of their image of 'poor little conscript Ivan'.

And even this, you see, is a form of 'defensive consolidation' even while revealing their class distance from the Russian army troops (none of my middle-class interlocutors have served or children who have served).

While the 'red-neck' average people my research is full of DO know more about the conduct of the war than people in Moscow or St Petersburg who are 'protected' by intellectual work to produce such ignorance.

Back to #Rain and #Latvia: Broadcaster tried to stay with a part of the domestic Russian audience, hence the easy slippage into these unconscious forms of 'imperialist' thinking.

Given mutant forms of civil society in Russia, myceliums of micro-connections - classmates, neighbors, relatives, work colleagues, there's always a "znakomyi or priyatel'"at the front. Hence the Freudian slip, a very specifically Russian one.

In this sense, the "siloviki" and the "army" are still "narodnye". That is, Dozhd's Dzyadko or Sindeeva are unlikely to have anyone in the army and so on in their circle, but many ordinary people have people. Like relatives in Ukraine, of course, many have plenty...

My interlocutor: 'And there is a dilemma - to die for some "ours", or it turns out, for the "grain" or "ammonia" deal of Shoigu the oligarch. But after all, we ourselves know that in the First World War for four years ordinary soldiers fought for it is not clear what...

'in the First World War for four years ordinary soldiers fought for, it is not clear what, except for the rare Christmas trench truces. Nationalism and imperialism are too strong "religions" - Ukrainians now have nationalism, and we have retro-imperialism.' /ends