Death’s candidate for president

The myth of war with the global West is an extremely useful one for the authorities as it helps them sidestep questions about the conspicuous lack of success in the war with Ukraine. Why haven’t we won already? Why haven’t we taken Kyiv? Because we’re at war with America, and America is so powerful. But it will tear itself apart any day now as it fights us, and when that day comes we’ll show everyone. It’s also impossible to say what our Victory will look like until that day comes. We’ll either take Washington, or they’ll accept defeat and disband NATO.

The enemy-at-the-gates scenario has never seen an incumbent lose votes during an election campaign. In its excitement, the people don’t bother to ask awkward questions, and are content to postpone the solution of smaller problems — smaller when compared to protecting the Motherland anyway — such as the standard of living, health care and even social justice until “after victory”. This is especially important when, as is the case now, the authorities haven’t even attempted to improve anyone’s lives but their own for the past 20 years.

While it’s true that somehow the Russian economy hasn’t collapsed despite unprecedented sanctions, the fact that the country is on a downward trajectory is so obvious to everyone that even those working in the apparatus of government can see it.

But war with the West isn’t a mere gambit designed to help the authorities evade dodge important issues on the campaign trail, it’s the future that Vladimir Putin is promising his people.

Though the war we are fighting is existential, just who the threat is from and exactly how they are threatening us is never fully explained. The enemy is kept to a vague but omnipresent concept that rears its head first in one country, then another, then among liberals, then among the LGBT community.

Given that war enables absolute, unchecked power, impunity for Putin and his associates, and monstrous levels of embezzlement, it would ideally last forever. But there is a problem — people have started to have enough of it.

A recent poll by the Levada Centre asked citizens what question they would most like to ask the president during the upcoming Direct Line phone-in event. The most popular answer: when will the war end? Questions about pensions and social programmes came way down the list. Endless war is not wanted.

Admittedly, this answer doesn’t constitute genuine anti-war feeling. The respondents might as well have said “Capture Kyiv already” or even “Bomb Washington”. But the number of Russians who want the war to end is growing, and some are even willing to return captured Ukrainian territory to that end.

Similarly, the number of people supporting a continuation of hostilities is on the wane. Of course, within our wonderful system, you can roundly ignore public opinion, as the Kremlin has exhaustively demonstrated for years already. But in doing so, an autocrat risks losing popular support and expediting his own downfall in the long run, even if it is just to another wannabe autocrat as we witnessed during the Prigozhin mutiny.

In addition to his war against Western civilisation, Putin is increasingly being drawn into a war with his own people, who, it turns out, want to live in peace despite the best efforts of Russia’s rabid television “experts” to infect the masses with their madness.

But there is no other way for Putin — as long as he is in power, the war will continue. So he will adapt society to his own needs. You may be unable to change people — neither Hitler nor the Bolsheviks managed that — but you can change society. To do that you must limit some people’s freedom or potential for social advancement, while giving preferential treatment to others. So that’s good news for anyone who was ever in the KGB, but bad news for anyone who has ever received a grant from George Soros, can speak foreign languages or is painfully literate.

Putin will win this “election”, which means Death wins too. People will continue to die and to kill others, and the country’s resources will be pooled to ensure that there is as much war and as little peace and stability as possible in the world. What’s happening in Russia is no longer a political struggle, but a battle between life and death, between good and evil. It’s worth remembering that, so far at least, life has always triumphed in the end.