Peter Pomerantsev uses the words “postmodern, fluid, shape-shifting, changeable, and in flux” to describe Russia. He spent years there, and he really figured it out. Russia is not an unwieldy, outdated, Soviet-style empire. It’s the highly fluid, very postmodern society of the future. Hopefully, not our future because it’s a bad place to be.
Everything there is completely fluid and nothing really means anything. Here’s an example. The occupied territories of Ukraine have been officially accepted into the Russian Federation. The Constitution of Russia was changed to reflect that.
But then everybody kind of forgot about it all and moved on. The Russian government never took charge or responsibility for these terrories. Putin keeps referring to them as Ukraine, which goes against the constitutional process he himself oversaw and signed off on.
That’s not how less fluid and postmodern countries behave. Do you want to know how a real nation-state acts? A nation-state takes the constitution and the citizenship seriously. For instance, who do you think has been paying social security to the people in the territories Russia occupied back in 2014? Ukraine, obviously. The logic is: they are our citizens, so we are responsible for them. You can see how this approach makes everything a lot more complicated. Responsibility and being grounded in reality are hard. It’s so much easier not to bother with these complexities. Pick up some citizens today, dump them tomorrow, and move on. Nothing is real, anyway. It’s all a game.
No, this is not like anything that happens in America. But it will be if we aren’t doing anything to prevent things from ending up in that exact place.
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