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Normal or “Sovok”?
The fate of Russia lies in this choice
Empires fall, but cultures remain. One need only peruse the words and images coming out of the pro-war rally Russian president Vladimir Putin convened at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium last week to prove this hypothesis. The event summoned some 100,000+ attendees and featured a slate of state-sponsored performers interspersed with speech after spine-strengthening speech.
And while I took comfort in the assurances of Western journalists who asserted that a number of attendees had been bused in or came because their employers gave them a free day off work, the Sovietologist in me, the one that had lived and worked in Russia before and after the fall of the USSR, could not shake the suspicion that a lot of people at Luzhinski were there in earnest. They were there because they had chosen to be a sovok rather than a “normal person.”
Herein lies maybe a key for debunking the entire Putin project. Somehow, someway the war, the repression of independent media, the villainization of whole segments of Russian society has to be reframed
What is a sovok exactly? It’s a little hard to render in English since it is basically the word “Soviet” modified to…
