'..They had lost an empire, lost an economic system, and lost a political structure, all at once.''..His argument is rooted in the sense that the wounds inflicted by the Soviet experiment have never healed, at least partly because they’re too painful to treat.
“Russia was like a party host who awoke the morning after, started making a cursory effort to clean up the mess all around, but after a while simply gave up and slunk back to bed to nurse its hangover,” he writes, in one of the many salty metaphors that make the book great fun to read. That hangover is the long-lasting effect of the way the Soviet Union fell apart. People went to bed drunk in 1990 as citizens of a superpower, and woke up hungover in 1991 in one of 15 different squabbling republics. They had lost an empire, lost an economic system, and lost a political structure, all at once.
The last 23 years have been the story of the failure to overcome that “triple trauma”, Walker writes: witness how the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics did not even glancingly acknowledge the post-Soviet existence of the Russian Federation. At the heart of his book are multiple dichotomies – between memory and shame, money and principles, Ukraine and Russia – that appear impossible to resolve. “Almost everyone was at least partly a victim, almost everyone was at least partly a perpetrator.”
Instead of tending to these difficult cracks in society, Putin has sought to paper over them by elevating the Soviet Union’s victory in the second world war to the status of a national religion, effectively banning any criticism of it. His government has sought refuge from their failure to find a role in the modern world in a time when their country was truly heroic.
And this is a problem. As Anton Chekhov said: if you hang a rifle on a wall, it absolutely must go off. If you hang banners celebrating a military victory all over your country, then sooner or later a military victory absolutely must go off. This is where Walker finds the roots of Crimea’s annexation, the implausibly deniable invasion of eastern Ukraine, and all the tragedies that followed it. “Lies and propaganda had an unnerving tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecies. In Donbass, people took up arms against a phantom threat of fascist attack, but faced with losing yet more of the country, Ukraine’s weak army and inexperienced volunteer battalions fought back, and before long there really were innocent civilians dying.” '
- Oliver Bullough,
The Long Hangover by Shaun Walker – review, February 25, 2018
Context'If Russia is to move forward, Pivovarov says, “we must cease to be Soviet people and overcome the Soviet in us.” ''..Russia .. to expand liberties in all spheres..''..My wish that in 2018 Russia will learn what the British, the Austrians, and the Turks Learned in 1918.''..Putin’s Russia .. feudalism..' - '..The Byzantine choice was fundamental in the evolution of Russian society and state compared to Western Europe..''..the Russian Federation is facing the same problem as the Soviet Union did..'(To Heal)(Management innovation) - '..Teal Organizations to start healing the world..'Holacracy – ‘..to fully harness the power of every human sensor..’'..Peace doesn’t demand the absence of strength. It asks each side to see and understand the suffering of the other, whether that suffering is rooted in reality or misperception..'