80 years of victory in Europe
On the 8th and 9th of May, Russia celebrated the Victory Day in Europe, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II on the continent. I happened to be in Vienna at the time. The celebrations took place at Maria-Theresien-Platz and Schwarzenbergplatz.
It was the year 2025. The Soviet Victory songs on stage were accompanied by the sounds coming from a demonstration on the opposite side of the road, this one younger, louder, more certain of its place on the right side of history. They had slogans instead of songs.
RUSSLAND IST EIN TERRORSTAAT, was one of the slogans.
On the Russian side, the event reeked of resentment, of bitterness, of offence. There was talk of Russian representatives being excluded from a memorial ceremony marking the liberation of an Austrian concentration camp near Linz. A story of some Red Army monument vandalized in Teplice by unspecified ‘enemies’, one more in a growing list of Soviet memorials removed or defaced since 2022.
A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offence, Dostoevsky wrote.
I stood on the side watching, I found it amusing in a sense – a masterful fit of deliberate unwillingness to comprehend the relationship of cause and effect, to connect past and present. The past is no longer something to be linked to the present, only something to be curated – displayed when convenient, discarded when not. And somehow, everyone agrees not to notice.
The siege of Sarajevo
Sarajevo is a lovely little town at the foothills of Dinaric Alps. It combines best elements of Slavic and Ottoman cultures: relics of 1984 Olympic Games, Yugoslavian modernism, courtyards with sebil-fountains, and minarets of old mosques. But no city would ever be so fascinating if it didn’t carry remnants and reminiscences of past tragedies in its streets. The most interesting part of Prague history is the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and London’s Cheapside wouldn’t feel same without the Blitz. Something about the superimposed layers of history where the total sum of accumulated human suffering lived through and bled through the same houses and streets, still lingering somewhere in them.
Especially if it’s recent history. Sarajevo was at the heart of bloody events throughout the 20th century – from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. And from 1992 to 1996, only 30 years ago, Sarajevo withstood 1,425 days of a devastating siege by the Serbian army.
It’s open to debate whether war is a rule-based activity, but one principle that’s at least universally recognized is that civilians shouldn’t be the primary target of military action.
During the siege of Sarajevo, it was mostly civilians that were a target of military action.
Can a worker be happy?
Can a slave be happy? A toiler of coal mines? A peasant cultivating the fields? (Alright, a peasant could be happy, as Christian holidays celebrated in Middle Ages apparently totaled up to 200 days per year). An Animal Laborans who does life maintenance for a living, ‘a beast of burden, a drudge condemned to routine’. A Homo Faber who merely reproduces artifacts of material world. Was a worker ever supposed to be happy?
Aristotle wrote that human happiness is thought to depend on leisure, because the most supreme virtue and pleasure are attained through contemplative activity. In order to cultivate virtue we need free time (that’s why the poor or farmers cannot attain true happiness). Leisure is the most serious activity in human life, the freedom from occupation, what we do when we’re free of necessity to work. It tells much more about us as human beings than our occupation or how we earn money. War is bad, and peace is only needed to make sure citizens have leisure. A truly good political regime should allow its citizens to contemplate and philosophize – by ensuring they have enough of free time.
We learn about happiness from the great books. Books are written by those who have time. Gentleman scientists, intellectuals, aristocrats, wealthy amateurs, inheritors of generational property and family wealth. The class of aristocracy. Some bloody duke sitting in his estate passed on by ten family generations, occupying free time by hunting ducks and maintaining correspondence with ladies from neighboring estates. How come we started to accept that their thoughts on happiness could be considered even vaguely applicable to the dismal subsistence of the laboring class?
Rethinking the institutions of reproduction
‘Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men’ wrote Borges. Alas, the number of men needs to be multiplied sometimes in order for the population not to die out. What’s more, after reading Dawkins, it’s difficult not to view reproduction as the only truly objective goal of human life (because a human-centered viewpoint is myopic and hardly objective, while a gene-centered perspective on human life is broad and impartial).
As a civilization, we’re at the beginning of exciting times. The future is bright, and what science already allows us is a fascinating progress in the quest of liberating man from the dictate of obsolete nature. Challenging mainstream views on reproduction is still a taboo because many family-related institutions are considered sacred. But excessive attachment to customs is just a traditionalist legacy. I’m certain that in the next decades we’ll see radical changes related to the following spheres of reproduction: from fertilization and gestation, to the social arrangements of childcare and family life in general.
Why don’t Russians just overthrow Putin?
In the previous post, I described five conditions that need to be in place in order for a revolution to happen. It’s not just about masses of people coming to streets. It’s an intricate combination of numerous complex factors.
Now let’s analyze the current situation in Russia through the lens of these factors. Why don’t Russians just overthrow Putin? Well, we’ve been trying for 10 years!* Alas, it’s not that easy. Here’s why. And most importantly – what to do about it.
The oil prevents large economic crisis
Historically, most revolutions are triggered by at least some sort of an economic crisis.
It’s not easy to admit it, but the present-day Russia is following the development path of Gulf monarchies, not European nations. It shares way more similarities with countries of Arabian peninsula than I wished to admit. Dictators sitting on large stockpiles of oil deposits have almost infinite resources to invest into reinforcement of their military, as well as to maintain an okay-ish level of population’s wellbeing – so that people don’t get hopelessly desperate.
It’s obvious that Putin’s regime was carefully watching the unfolding of Arab spring revolts of 2010s. During those times, 4 presidents were overthrown, and political regimes in 6 more countries underwent significant changes. Alas, none of the oil-rich countries of the Arabian peninsula were shaken by revolutions. Massive uprisings in Bahrain and Oman were quickly suppressed thanks to the oil-financed troops of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Any emerging revolts in Saudi Arabia and UAE were shut down before even being able to unfold properly. Oil was also the reason why revolution went so horribly wrong in Libya, the only country in the region that had oil out of the neighboring Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, etc.
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