Russia’s Non-Material Losses from Putin’s War Far Greater than Its Material Ones, Chernyshov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 26 – “Putin has flushed down the toilet not only Russia's past and present, but also its future,” Dmitry Chernyshov says, less because of the losses of people and the basis for economic development than because of the ways that conflict has affected Russian culture and other “non-material” resources.

            The collapse of education, the worsening demographic situation, and the loss of technology and markets are all easier to measure, the Russian commentator says; but the impact on culture and related factors like the soft power Moscow had earlier are far more consequential (t.me/ResistanceRF/7614 reposted at  kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6926E8734F1BC).

            Indeed, Chernyshov continues, the negative trends in this area are multiplying ever faster because “the worse the situation becomes, the more rapidly everything gets worse.” And that means that the country is far more likely to die “not from defeats or Pyrrhic victories than from the loss of the ability to renew itself” demographically and culturally.

            In a commentary for the Resistance RF telegram channel, he says that as a result of Putin’s war, “Russia has lost an entire generation of intelligent and talented people.” Moreover, it “has lost access not only to scientific discoveries but even to the most up-to-date technologies” needed to keep it from falling further and further behind.

            But it has also lost “the soft power” Russia once had, “the ability to influence its neighbors through the attractiveness of its culture, values and way of life and not through military force.” Foreign students aren’t flocking to Russia as they once did, and those who have learned Russian in the past are forgetting it.

            Deaths from the war are leading to the depopulation of much of the country; and inside the Russian Federation, “an internal emigration” has begun with drunkenness and conversations in the kitchens coming to dominate life displacing any loyalty to or even identification with common tasks.

            As a result, Chernyshov suggests, Russia has been reduced to trying to survive rather than develop; and overcoming that will take far longer than recovering its material culture that it easier to measure but ultimately less important.