Russian imperial nationalism is destroying the Russian people “as we have known it for 30 years,” Kirill Medvedev says. It is “an anti-Russian and anti-people ideology” that seeks to bind the people and the autocracy together. But in that combination, “one of the elements inevitably perishes” and now the Russian people seems the more likely to do so.
Putin’s mobilization is destroying it even as so-called patriots celebrate what he is doing, the Moscow commentator says. “The post-Soviet Russian people with all its good and bad aspects is fading away” and with it are disappearing all the hopes that animated so many people in the late 1980s and 1990s (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/09/25/mobilizovat-i-unichtozhit).
Before Putin declared his mobilization, Medvedev continues, “one could at least understand in part the hopes of the Z public that malicious liberals and…
