[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Exocet25fr

https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-90-p...pinion-1743061

Our most promising solution to this dilemma is likely to be some sort of diplomatic compromise.

^ Really? I beg to differ. Der Spiegel writes:
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Hardly anyone "reads" Vladimir Putin and the Russians as knowledgeably as the Russian writer Viktor Yerofeyev, who fled to Germany. Germany's chancellor should meet with him. And be prepared for some unpleasant truths.


A street thug, used to winning, cannot be appeased. Late at night, when you're going for a walk around the block, he suddenly confronts you and, with cold eyes and a calm voice, demands your watch.

If you give it to him, he demands your wallet. If you refuse, he beats you up. Putin's war asks us how to deal with a street thug.

Olaf Scholz should ask Viktor Yerofeyev for a meeting or two to let him explain the Russians and Putin. Because Jerofejew is brilliant, both as an author and as a distanced contemporary witness. Distant here means "at a distance" in a double sense.

For Yerofeyev fled Russia in the spring in his BMW X 5 with his wife Katya and his two children Maja and Marianna. It was easy for the small family to leave Russia, but all the more difficult to get past the Finnish border officials and into Europe.

Read the bitterly humorous text that Jerofejew wrote about this in the "FAZ". Olaf Scholz lives in a world in which conflicts are moderated into compromises. The method for this is permanent negotiation.

But can this method, which might suffice when dealing with Robert Habeck and Christian Lindner and Friedrich Merz, be transferred to Vladimir Putin? To someone who doesn't want to negotiate at all, but only ever wants to win?

Whose only idea of existence is precisely this, in the logic of rulership, and has always existed only as a youth, then when he acquired his black belt, in the KGB, and finally as a despot - at first against his will, because Putin would rather have become the head of Gazprom than the head of the Russians. The Russians willingly follow him. Why, actually?

The Russian people have a different idea of happiness than the European peoples, and that's where the misunderstanding about Putin begins. Europeans, compared to Russians, live around a quiet middle - in mediocrity.

Russians, on the other hand, love the intemperate, they have found happiness by whistling at every norm. Yerofeyev: "When you drink vodka, you drink until you pass out. When you party, you party until the doctor comes. If you fight, you fight until someone drops dead.

The main thing is to put yourself in a state of consciousness in which life appears as a foolish hustle and bustle and at the same time as a victory over all other forms of existence. An inferiority complex and a complex of superiority over all other peoples produce a casus belli, the prelude to a bestial war without rules."

Can Putin be more accurately described? And the fact that the Russians are carrying him? Tens of thousands have fled from him, many liberals among them. Running away is one way to escape a street thug.

In this regard, we are just being lectured about obvious differences in mentality: In Iran, at any rate, the uprising against the mullahs is far larger and louder and more powerful than in Russia the resistance to Putin, if there is one.

Russia has, once again, as so often in its history, as Yerofeyev regretfully analyzes it, "freed itself" from universally valid humanistic values, replacing them with the "half-baked ideas of the superiority of our backyard over the whole world."

The backyard, that is Putin's homeland. His semi-strong ideology and that of "his" Russians: "We are better than all others." And why? "Because!"
Yerofeyev is old, educated and of privileged origin

It is the "wisdom" of the underprivileged, criminal suburbanite, in Russian: "gopnik." That's why the novel Yerofeyev completed about Vladimir Putin, which will be published around the turn of the year, is called "The Great Gopnik."

The Russia that many Germans admire, revere, romanticize, the land of Chekhov and Dostoevsky and Pasternak, however, only appealed to the West. But not in its own country, especially not in the Russian provinces. It is from there that Putin draws his support.


Russian "values," the successful writer analyzes, are tied to social standing - nobles, peasants, officers, working class - fragmented worlds. "That is why we are not a nation, but an exceedingly archaic people." Which gives the most space to its survival and thus upholds what helps the most in that:

Strength, cunning, lack of empathy, suspicion, distrust, cynicism. Shooting missiles at hospitals is as contrary to our values as it is to Putin's values. Russians will hardly be surprised by this - they know such nefariousness from Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, finally Ukraine since 2014.

Stations of Putin's victories; a single unconscionable trail of blood. And the dictator always got away with it, even among his own people. In one of his texts, Yerofeyev says that Russia is giving Ukraine hell "with an honest heart.

The war is Putin's element, corresponds to his existence since the backyard days in Leningrad, today's Petersburg. For German ears and brains, quite conditioned to pacifism, this is a disturbing message.

So will Putin use nuclear weapons? Yes, certainly, says Yerofeyev, if he has to fear humiliation, this is his last option. Victory or downfall - we Germans know this from Hitler. When the American atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, Germany had already capitulated.

Now that nuclear weapons are in the world, can there be any hope for the West? Yes, says Yerofeyev, and it has a name: "The only person Putin listens to is Comrade Xi," the writer said yesterday on Anne Will.

For people who, used to democracy, dream of a better world, this may be a difficult idea: The only hope against the second strongest dictator in the world would then be the strongest dictator in the world. Backyard thug logic.



--- Yerofeyev is 75 years old and educated and of privileged origin. His father was Stalin's personal interpreter, then embassy counselor, which is how Yerofeyev came to Paris for years. Those who grow up at a distance from their own countrymen may understand them better. ---
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