Russians Prove Hannah Arendt Was Right Once Again
The Master and Margarita by Soviet writer Mikhail Bulkakov has been translated into Finnish as Satan is Coming to Moscow. I have always appreciated translators, because translating emotions, expressions, and cultural phenomena often requires the gifts of a magician.
I wish to thank the Finnish translator Ulla-Liisa Heino for her oracular foresight. She predicted what I myself began to suspect around 2014 when Crimea was annexed and what I came to know to be true around the end of February 2022. Satan is not coming to Moscow. Instead the Devil has been lurking there for years already!
I apologize for the melodramatic tone of my writing! The topic is difficult and evokes strong emotions: anger, hate, disappointment and absolute bewilderment. Maybe violence is the natural state of being and peacetime is just a glitch in the Matrix.
Picture: Depiction of Ukrainian bicycler from Bucha shot by retreating Russian soldiers in March 2022. Mass killings of civilians and war crimes were discovered after Russian forces retreated from the area. War crimes in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine are being investigated by Ukrainian law enforcement authorities and international human rights organizations and the exact identity of the soldier who shot the bicyclist is not publicly known, but investigators have attributed responsibility for war crimes in Bucha to Russian armed forces, in particular units such as the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade. The 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade is based in Khabarovsk Krai in the Russian Far East in the region of Buryatia. Buryats are a Mongolian ethnic group native to southeastern Siberia and are one of the largest indigenous groups in Russia. While the 64th Brigade is not exclusively Buryat, it did include a significant number of Buryat soldiers, reflecting broader patterns of Russian military recruitment that place ethnic minorities and poorer populations in frontline roles. After the brigade's involvement in Bucha, where it is accused of carrying out mass killings of civilians, President Putin awarded it the honorary title of “Guards”, a move widely condemned internationally.
“They are guilty. And as I told you, the guilty are different. Both those who participated and those who remained silent. Because silence is also about participating. In my opinion.”
In the very first days of the war, Zelensky felt it was incredibly important to get messages across to the Russians about the folly of the war or the need to stop the war immediately: “There were various journalists from different countries here. And they were essentially stuck. And I asked them for contacts, those who had access to Russians, Belorussians, Kazakhs who understood everything. The same information. And I spoke to them. And I spoke to them and spoke in Russian. I told them, "You must stop Putin." This is terrible. This is horror. This is war. You must stop him. And if you stand up now, if you speak out and if you go out into the streets… This was very important. I spoke to them in Russian, to show them that there was no problem. And that all of these pretexts were, were made up. This is why it's so painful to talk about the Russian language too because, look, if a person does not want to listen, they will not listen no matter what language we speak.” Zelensky feels that all Russians are guilty and that they are despised because of this: “They are guilty. And as I told you, the guilty are different. Both those who participated and those who remained silent. Because silence is also about participating. In my opinion.”. These are important insights because Zelensky knows the Russians better than anyone. His description accurately describes the Russian attitude. If a significant part of the people there had wanted to do something, it would have happened a long time ago. Desire, ability and empathy are completely absent and apathy, cynicism and indifference dominate the opinion climate.
Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge describes Hannah Arendt this way: “If you spend any time on the internet, you'll no doubt be aware of Hannah Arendt’s famous image, that young, sad woman, cigarette in her hands, staring into the mid distance. You'll no doubt be aware too of her quotations that seem to drop into social media every time we have another political outrage. “There are no dangerous thoughts,” Hannah Arendt says, “Thinking itself is dangerous”. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she also says, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds”. “The practice of violence changes the world,” she also says, “but the more likely change is into a more violent world”. If you remember the '60s, you'll also remember Hannah Arendt for her famous phrase: "The banality of evil".”
The legacy of Soviet-era totalitarianism is still visible in modern Russian institutions and political practices. Many critics argue that a routinized, bureaucratic mindset persists, where officials and citizens alike may become complicit in ethically questionable actions simply by adhering to long-established norms—mirroring Arendt’s observation that evil often flourishes when moral choices are bypassed for the sake of conformity.
“It is good to hear subjects speaking truthfully and openly to their king.”
An autocratic corrupt system does not contain those checks and balances that would prevent war in a normal democratic system. Even in the Soviet dictatorship, the Politburo was much more collegial in its decision-making than the current political system where the president, as de facto csar, decides to launch a senseless war of aggression surrounded by a few of his henchmen based on false information, because the subjects do not dare or do not want to tell the csar the truth. The Russians have been operating on the basis of these traditions for centuries as, for example, Peter the Great once complained that his subjects did not tell him the truth, as is the case in other European kingdoms such as in England: “It is good to hear subjects speaking truthfully and openly to their king.”.
It is also largely about indoctrination, hate speech, extreme cynicism, opportunism, nihilism, brutality, absurdity and a slave mentality that accepts all senseless actions from above because "what can a small person do about them". It is easy to commit atrocities if they are legitimized from above by those in power and by religious authorities. On the other hand, the action is explained by brainwashing, which every Russian is subject to as part of Russian society from cradle to grave.
During Stalin’s regime, thousands of officials and functionaries were involved in mass arrests, deportations, and executions, as seen in the Great Purge and the operation of the Gulag system. While some researchers highlight the routinized, bureaucratic nature of these atrocities—as Arendt might suggest—others emphasize that many of these individuals were fervently indoctrinated with totalitarian ideology and personal ambition. In this scenario, the actions of state functionaries cannot be attributed merely to thoughtlessness; instead, they also involved a complex interplay of ideological commitment and a culture of fear and loyalty. This intermingling demonstrates that evil can be as much a product of radical beliefs as of mechanical conformity.
Propaganda has done its job even if not everyone believes it. It is enough to confess your "faith" in a public setting, never mind what you personally think. Russia is a “great” country and a superpower despite everything, and one wants to believe in one’s country despite everything, even if one has seen abroad that many things are better there. Despite all the bad things, Russians are very patriotic people and want to be proud of their own country no matter what. This longing for pride takes on desperate aspects, especially when you have to look for reasons for pride in even the smallest of places, with a microscope.
Russia needs to commit honestly to a multi-generational denazification to get “sober”. It would be easier if it were broken up into smaller parts through some societal process of disintegration. The problem, however, is language and culture, which act as a strong connecting link and a somewhat durable glue for the tyrannical state. Another problem is the Russo-Centricity of the Western powers, who can only see Russian regions as a unified state. There are examples of this in the English-speaking world: the USA, Great Britain, Australia, Canada and other countries of the Anglosphere form a unified cultural zone, mainly united by the same language and culture, but at the same time they are all independent and sovereign states. Why could this not also be the case for societies in the Slavic cultural circle? Answer: of course it could.
Picture: Depiction of Ukrainian civilian killed by Russian troops in Bucha in March 2022, whose hands were tied behind his back at the time of execution.
Russia can likely wage war against Ukraine for one to three years at current intensity, potentially extending to 5 years with allied support and resource gains. Beyond this, economic decline, demographic strain, and political risks may force a shift to lower-intensity conflict or negotiations. Few would be sorry if the collapse came earlier. Many have been hoping for it for a long time. However, Putin’s commitment to the war and Russia’s resource wealth suggest it won’t collapse imminently. It would be great to be wrong about this analysis, however.
