Paul Goble
Staunton, July 24 – Aleksandr Arkhipova, an independent Russian social anthropologist, says that it is unlikely that Russia will liberalize when Putin’s war in Ukraine ends because the mobilization of the population has been so thorough that the rituals and attitudes it has produced will have to be directed somewhere.
“In order to continue the development of the country along the lines of an information autocracy,” she continues, “it will be necessary to strengthen all these rituals of loyalty and thus to maintain some kind of fear with random repressions” against old and new targets (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/07/24/spektakl-punktirnoi-loialnosti).
Arkhipova, who posts regularly on her telegram channel, “(Un)entertaining Anthropology,” thus delivers a message many will not be happy to hear but which is completely consistent with at least one period in Russian history, the years after 1945, when Russian expected liberalization but Stalin imposed even more brutal repression.
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