‘The More Russians Fear Their Own Government and Grovel Before It, The Greater Their Urge to Take It Out on Someone Less Intimidating,’ Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 24 – Russian aggressiveness toward minorities and foreigners plays “a compensatory role,” Abbas Gallyamov says, because “the more Russians fear their own government and grovel before it, the greater their urged to take it out on someone less intimidating.”

            By displaying such negative attitudes toward others, the former Putin speech writer and now commentator critic argues, “the less insignificant and humiliated” they feel about their own situation. Consequently, should a democratic regime be established in this country, this need for compensation would vanish” (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/10305 resposted at  echofm.online/opinions/istinnoe-liczo-rossiyan).

            According to Gallyamov, “the surge in militarism and war hysteria” Russians displayed at the start of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, represented not a display of “the true face of the Russian people but rather “an attempt by ordinary, peace-loving citizens to rid themselves of the overwhelming emotions of bewilderment and fear that gripped them.”

            When peoples feel fear, they are most likely to huddle together and follow the direction of their leaders; but when they don’t feel such fears, they are far more likely to behave very differently, as surveys in Russia since the end of Soviet times have regularly shown, Gallyamov continues.

            “To understand what the Russian people are ‘truly’ like,” he suggests, “one must look back to a period when they were left, to the greatest extent possible, to their own devices—to a time when state propaganda was virtually non-existent and the administrative apparatus was not yet running roughshod over society. In short: to the 1990s.”

            During that decade, Gallyamov continues, “the inhabitants of Russia made no particular effort to meddle in the affairs of their neighbors, nor did they vote for various "patriotic" political blocs during elections” – with “the exception of brief periods immediately following terrorist attacks.”

“The prevailing sentiment was: ‘Just leave them alone; let them live however they wish.” Indeed, “in 2005, 2010, and 2014, the Levada Center surveyed Russians regarding whether the First and Second Chechen Wars were just wars for Russia. In all three instances, the majority of respondents answered in the negative.”

Moreover, “with the sole exception of the Great Patriotic War, not a single other conflict was deemed just by those surveyed—neither the Russo-Japanese War, nor World War I, nor the Winter War against Finland, nor the war in Afghanistan. And when Russians have been asked whether they want to be a great power or live well, they have routinely chosen the latter.

“Only once, in the midst of the wave of ‘Crimean euphoria’ in March 2014,” did an almost equal number favor the two. “In all other cases, the first option—the "imperial" one—consistently lost out to the second” – and typically by large margins of two to one or more “much as was the case in the 1990s.”