Many Russians in Smaller Cities Unchanged from 2000 and in Some Ways Even Worse Now than in Soviet Times, Vladimirov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 20 – Lev Vladimirov, who writes regularly on the situation in his native city of Samara, says that the people there are essentially the same people they were 20 years ago, Soviet in mindset and behavior but even more prideful, angry and aggressive because they feel that they don’t have the overseers they did in Soviet times.

            According to him, they are “mindless, dull-witted, and ill-mannered. Angrily shoving one another inside nearly empty public transport. Aggressively snapping at strangers while waiting in line at the hypermarket. Glaring with hatred at anyone simply dressed in neat clothes with clean shoes” (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=69BD4DC356442).

            Indeed, Vladimirov continues, “when it comes to boorish behavior, the residents of Samara have—since the days of the Soviet era—consistently outdone those of other cities in the Middle Volga region. Now that the smart, cultured people have fled Samara due to the war with Ukraine, the city has devolved into nothing short of a primate zoo.”

            Putin’s war in Ukraine has made the situation worse, he argues; but it is entirely possible that in places like Samara, the end of the war will only intensify things in that direction. The police there are already complaining about that all too real possibility, likely reflecting the views of more than just themselves.

            “At the start of the war,” Vladimirov says, “there was a lull in the courtyards of the country’s lumpen districts; the riffraff had gone off to fight. ‘the veterans’ are returning, and they are drinking and engaging in hooliganism even more aggressively than before. The social stratum of these vatniks remains as base as ever.”

            (A vatnik, it will be recalled is someone who wears cheap quilted clothing,who is extremely pro-government and jingoistic and who blindly follows whatever the Kremlin line may be. As such, it has become a term of abuse among those opposed to the regime and its policies.)

            “Now, it is front-line veterans who are getting drunk in the courtyards—veterans whom the police are too afraid to even fine,” Vladimirov says. “And what will happen when the "Special Military Operation" finally ends? Will these courtyards suddenly become oases of culture with a population like that?”

            His answer is damning: “Russia is like a Soviet-era dormitory. I’ve had occasion to visit them. In those dorms, the only person with a telephone was the superintendent—typically a war veteran or a former cop—who oversaw the residents on a voluntary, civic basis. His job was to ensure people didn't make a pigsty of the communal kitchen or defecate in the showers.

            “After 1991, the rooms in these dorms were privatized, and the superintendents vanished. Capitalism descended upon these former dormitories: the residents began drinking around the clock, abusing illicit substances, and undergoing a process of moral decay.” That has left Rusia “like a dormitory without a superintendent.”

            In such circumstances, it is being “overrun by ill-mannered Huns—people who are mentally unstable, addicted to alcohol and energy drinks, and seething with hostility toward others. Yet they carry themselves with the proud air of owners—the owners of a dormitory where the showers stopped working long ago, and the communal kitchen lies in filth and ruin.”