Russian history is incredibly rich in disasters. We have seen turmoil, bloody carnages, the collapse of empires, and millions shot for insane utopias. But all these tragedies had at least scale. The shadows of Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, or Stalin, despite their demonic, inhuman monstrosities, are frightening. They had a distorted but global idea. The shadows of the current Kremlin riffraff do not frighten. They only cause disgust.
What we have observed over the last twenty-five years is not just a bad historical period. It is the era of the most monumental disgrace in the entire millennial history of Russian statehood.
No monarch, general secretary, or president had such a warm start.
The early 2000s. The West sincerely opens its arms. The world is ready to be friends, trade, and integrate. An unprecedented golden rain in human history pours down on the country. In twenty years, around five trillion dollars of raw material dollars were pumped into the Russian economy. Five. Trillion. Dollars. With this money, Siberia could have been built up with futuristic megacities. Every freezing regional center could have been connected by magnetic levitation, and mammoths could have been cloned. The most advanced European high-tech could have been bought wholesale, turning the country into a second Norway or South Korea. Only with a nuclear bomb, endless resources, and territory on two continents.
And what did they do?
They built a palace with an aqua-disco. Bought hundred-meter-long yachts. And re-laid the tiles in Moscow.
The tragedy of this regime is that it is infinitely petty. It is woven from the complexes of a Petersburg back alley and the paranoia of a club manager in Dresden. Great empires are not built by people whose limit of ambition is grabbing someone else’s business through a pocketed Basmanny court and splitting contracts for road construction. This is a dictatorship of total, triumphant mediocrity. An elite that seriously thinks about the messianic role of Rus’ and the geopolitical confrontation with the Anglo-Saxons, while their own children are born in Miami, and the money lies in Swiss trusts.
They wanted to enter history as great land unifiers. But they will enter as collectors of golden toilet brushes.
Historical impotence. Here is the most accurate diagnosis.
For twenty years, this power fed the population the myth of a sovereign superpower. “We got up from our knees.” “We dictate our will.” In fact, the country willingly put a collar with hieroglyphs around its neck. To please one old man’s ego and punish mythical Nazis, Russia destroyed its main geopolitical trump card with its own hands – balancing between the West and the East.
Now there is no balance. There is a pose of obedience in front of Beijing.
The proud empire that once threatened to turn the world into radioactive ash has become a powerless gas station for China. It surrenders resources at a humiliating discount and begs to buy any microchips for its economy plunging into the abyss. The Chinese don’t even think about conquering this territory. Why bother? These fools have handed over the keys to Siberia and the Far East on a silver platter, obediently wagging their tails. The sovereignty they screamed about from the TV has ended in complete capitulation to the Asian dragon. Without a single shot.
But the main, final chord of this historical disgrace was the war. A war envisioned as a lightning triumph turned into a bloody striptease exposing the system’s absolute emptiness.
The second army in the world. Hypersonic missiles. “No analogs.” The Iskanders laugh.
All of this turned out to be a cheap cardboard decoration, acquired at the price of pure gold. To Kyiv in three days? No. To the ruins of Avdiivka in three years. Great Russia, heir to Zhukov, a victorious country, today bows to Comrade Kim, begging for rusty artillery shells. It pleads with Iran for mopeds with lawnmower engines to battle a former Soviet republic.
This is no longer frightening. It’s universal Spanish shame.
They buried hundreds of thousands of men in the black soil. For what? To seize a piece of scorched land with radioactive flooded mines? For Sweden and Finland to join NATO, turning the Baltic Sea into an internal lake of the Alliance and pushing missiles close to St. Petersburg? A brilliant move. Bismarck gives a standing ovation.
This government has committed the most terrible crime—it destroyed not only the present but also amputated the future.
In the 21st century, in the age of high technology, the main resource is not oil. The main resource is intellect. Human capital. What did the system do? It squeezed out millions of the smartest and most enterprising people. Those who could build space ships, write code, and create a complex economy. The intelligent have left. The obedient remain. And these obedient ones now assemble Iranian drones in workshops where satellites were once designed. Regression has become the state ideology. Archaicism has become the religion.
This regime will not fall in a heroic battle of good versus evil. It lacks the breed for it. It will rot. It will choke on its own lies, corruption, and bile.
When the dust settles, nothing will remain of this era—no great architectural monuments, no groundbreaking ideas, no great literature. Only a scorched demographic hole, technological medievalism, neighborly hatred, and the stigma of a cannibalistic country for several generations to come.
The Romanovs left behind St. Petersburg and the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Bolsheviks left DniproHES and Gagarin.
Putinism will leave behind only endless rows of fresh graves, a destroyed, useless Crimean Bridge, and total emptiness.
