From an article in the NYTIMES, I gathered that some naive folks actually expected somebody in Russia to give a damn about the so-called doping scandal. That, of course, didn’t happen.
Russian – speaking people are extremely jaded about things like lying, cheating, stealing, sexual violence, domestic violence, corruption, bribery. None of these acts are considered to be a big deal. Ukrainians are now painfully and slowly trying to extricate themselves from this way of thinking. Russians are yet to see anything wrong with it.
This is all a legacy of the Soviet Union, of course. There, the greatest sin was not having enough money or consumer goods. This bleak, soulless materialism was only reinforced during the bandit wars of the 1990s. Morality could only stand in the way of personal enrichment, so there was no space for it.
In Russia’s war with Ukraine, we have seen mothers and wives (fathers are always absent either physically or in any way that matters) agree to pretend that their sons and husbands never existed for either a payout or a promise of one. More recently we’ve seen complete indifference in Russia to the crash of a Russian plane in Egypt. We’ve seen so many horrible things, and now we are to believe that somebody is going to have anything to say about a sports doping scandal?
The biggest reaction to the scandal will be a flaccid condemnation of the evil West for, once again, scheming against Russia, and that will be it. Once again, Russia will descend into a soporific admiration of its own uncontested greatness.
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