The main motivating fear of the Russian political establishment is that the country will fall apart.
The territory is enormous and sparsely populated. It’s inhabited by people of different races, ethnicities, languages, and cultures who don’t have much in common and tend to dislike each other. People who live in the humongous greater Moscow despise everybody else and everybody else despises them. There is no discourse of shared values that would be meaningful to everybody.
None of this sounds like a working nation-state, does it?
It’s impossible to bind such a heterogeneous group together with its meaningless, recently adopted symbols of nationalism and no time or resources to manufacture a shared history and artistic legacy.
So what do such wannabe nation-states do to stay afloat? They cultivate a sense of togetherness by spilling the blood of a shared enemy. Blood ties them together but if no other means of cohesion are found, more blood will be needed.
Is it clear what I’m saying? Nobody can provoke Russia into violence right now. Russia is acting out violently in pursuit of national cohesion, i.e. a completely internal need that has nothing to do with you or anybody else.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is one of the primary reasons that Stalin has been rehabilitated. World War II not the October Revolution has been the primary legitimizing factor of the Soviet government and its successors in Russia and Central Asia since 1945. The leader of the USSR then was Stalin and not Lenin. As all the actual veterans of the war itself die off and there is a need to personify the victory of the Great Fatherland War into a single political figure it makes sense. Socialism (Lenin) failed but Stalinism succeeded in defeating Nazi Germany and conquering East Central Europe. So it becomes a crucial pillar in legitimizing current regimes that have absolutely nothing else going for them.
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These are very important points. There is such an exaltation of that war going on in Russia right now that it’s obvious there’s no other shared achievement to celebrate.
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You might like this analogy: Sort of sounds like Russia is a “racoon with rabies”. They are most dangerous and unpredictable when sick / weak and they lash out or do otherwise reckless things!
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