According to Mamardashvili, a human being is merely the potential to become a person. Preserving the person within the human requires constant effort. The same goes for Europe: to remain European, one must make an effort and cannot relax. A year after Mamardashvili’s passing, American philosopher Francis Fukuyama would declare the end of history, and Europe would relax. But history will return.

#internalemigration #Georgia #europe #intelligentsia #JosephBrodsky #endofstory #counterculture #MerabMamardashvili #aftertheUSSR #freedom #philosophy #FrancisFukuyama #essay

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On the walls here, you can see gigantic portraits of Putin, icons, and vinyl records of Vysotsky and Okudzhava (all in one office), lower-level employees are scolded with quotes from Pasternak and Zabolotsky, and TV host Ekaterina Andreeva gives advice on how to properly cope with the anger of superiors at a «Znanie» society lecture.

#WarinUkraine #state #women #lifeinRussia #career #Crimea #Kurskregion #mincult #patriarchy #Patriotism #aftertheUSSR #propaganda #reportage #svo #Officials

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The twenty-fifth anniversary of the tragedy of the nuclear submarine cruiser K-141 Kursk in the Barents Sea passed unnoticed. No memorial ceremonies, solemn speeches, monument unveilings, or film premieres. On the anniversary of the explosion on the Kursk (August 12), if one believes his official website, the head of state only spoke by phone with Kim Jong Un and held a meeting on economic issues. The censored segment of Runet got away with a few concise publications, and some authors described what happened in August 2000 as an «accident».

#Berezovsky #Beslan #WarinUkraine #state #money #west #historicalmemory #catastrophe #NTV #society #ort #Pavlovsky #politicaltechnologies #aftertheUSSR #Putin #Russia #Kursk

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We, Soviet children, were incredibly lucky. We went through patriotic education with books by Vasily Bykov and Boris Vasilyev, Samuil Marshak and Lev Kvitko. And our early youth was not overshadowed by works of Vladimir Medinsky, Oleg Roy, and unknown authors included in the «List of Patriotic Works Created by Contemporary Writers and Recommended for Extracurricular Reading» published last week by the Ministry of Education.

#shaman #AgniaBarto #VladimirMedinsky #VladimirPutin #children #dictatorship #ideology #literature #MinistryofEducation #OlegGazmanov #OlegRoy #aftertheUSSR #propaganda #Russia #SergeiMikhalkov #Stalinism #school

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The main condition for achieving peace in Ukraine that Vladimir Putin constantly names is the «elimination of the root causes of the crisis.» «Root causes» is a very broad, even philosophical term. But without delving into Aristotle's metaphysics, who introduced this term, the root cause of the war is not Ukraine's politics, but the imperial evolution of post-Soviet Russia.

#Analytics #AnatolySobchak #BelovezhAccords #VladimirPutin #gkchp #dictatorship #Empire #NATO #aftertheUSSR #collapseoftheUSSR #Russia #sovereignty #Ukraine #federation

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We have long been inside his endless Telluria, living within his self-fulfilling prophecy, tumbling inside the Machine of Violence he described. And it cannot be said that we were not warned; Russian literature has never before had such a clear prediction over the past decades leading up to the catastrophe.

#VladimirSorokin #war #dictatorship #Dostoevsky #catastrophe #literature #aftertheUSSR #postmodernism #Russia #thick #totalitarianism

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On August 6, a gala concert of the «SVO Ballads» festival took place in Moscow’s Zaryadye Park. It was organized by Monk Kiprian — a veteran of the Afghan war, Hero of the Soviet Union, and a fan of singer-songwriter music in civilian life. A correspondent from «Most» reports on how it all unfolded.

#WarinUkraine #cringe #Moscow #society #Patriotism #aftertheUSSR #postmodernism #reportage #Russia #church

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Today, many representatives of national-regional movements in political exile have a clear disappointment in the Russian federal project, since it has repeatedly (both after 1918 and after 1991) led only to yet another revival of a centralist empire. Therefore, they find no common ground even with the new liberal opposition, which in its dreams of a beautiful future Russia sometimes oddly repeats Kremlin unitarist ideas.

#future #decoloniality #Yeltsin #Empire #History #nation #society #aftertheUSSR #protests #Putin #republics #Russia #federalism #language

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In August 1975, in Helsinki, 35 countries from Europe and North America, from the USSR and the USA to Malta and Luxembourg, signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This treaty became the pinnacle of the détente period (a policy of easing international tensions), when the West and the Soviet bloc tried to implement the principle of «peaceful coexistence» at least on one continent.

#Brezhnev #East #democracy #dictatorship #diplomacy #west #History #aftertheUSSR #humanrightsactivists #Putin #Russia #Sakharov #HelsinkiAccords

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Boris Akunin has been sentenced in absentia in Russia to 14 years, Dmitry Bykov declared wanted: two of the most important Russian writers have been subjected to exemplary criminal repressions. This is a milestone and another signal, as they say, for the entire intelligentsia. Although what signals are there, everything is already clear. Rather, this is a milestone for the repressive apparatus itself, which is worth noting.

#akulin #bulls #dictatorship #dissidents #intelligentsia #kgb #movie #literature #aftertheUSSR #Putin #repressions #series #Sovietpower

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Recruitment of foreign youth has always been part of the KGB’s work abroad. But never before have Soviet special services had such fantastic opportunities as those now available to the Russian ones—when the Russian-speaking diaspora numbers in the tens of millions.

#agentsofinfluence #AndreyBelyeninov #East #diplomacy #west #softpower #education #aftertheUSSR #legalfund #Putin #Russianspecialservices #Russia #RussianWorldFoundation #Emigration

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The sharp and simultaneous escalation of Russian-Azerbaijani and Russian-Armenian relations that occurred recently reveals much about the Kremlin’s entire foreign policy.

#Azerbaijan #Aliyev #Armenia #foreignpolicy #diplomacy #Yerevan #migrants #Moscow #odkb #aftertheUSSR #Putin #Russia #RecepErdogan #Turkey #Shos #EmmanuelMacron

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In Soviet times, the Russian emigration was an important base for recruiting foreign agents, but after the collapse of the USSR, its numbers grew many times over – opening up inexhaustible opportunities for Russian intelligence services. The network of Russian influence agents and simple spy centers is visibly becoming denser

#agents #Analytics #antiRussiansanctions #VyacheslavNikonov #Gru #dictatorship #YevgenyPrimakov #Study #kgb #NataliaKardash #aftertheUSSR #legalfund #propaganda #Russianspecialservices #Rossotrudnichestvo #Russianworld #SVR #SergeyLavrov #compatriots #FSB

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In the center of Moscow, near Paveletsky Station, there is a kind of ghetto. In Soviet times, workers from other regions moved here, to Derbenevskaya Street — local factories needed them. Those factories have long since closed, but the workers still live in the local dormitory and communal apartments. Here they raised children, tried to build their lives in the capital, many began to abuse alcohol, and now they are waiting to be relocated under the renovation program.

#lifeinRussia #Moscow #inequality #aftertheUSSR #reportage #LaborandCapital

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