by Stefano Caprio

Russian economists insist on the prevalence of ‘locality’: a marketing strategy common to all sovereignisms, but one that works in a very limited way in Russia, being a country that is not exactly advantaged in its agricultural and industrial production capacities. And which - from gastronomy to so many aspects of social development - has historically always assimilated elements from abroad.

The epoch-making change that began with the invasion of Ukraine is forcing Russia to review various aspects of its own social organisation, starting with the difficulties of the wartime economy and the breakdown of trade relations with the West, with the serious demographic and labour shortages, having to sacrifice new generations at the front and suffering the flight of so many people abroad to escape the tragedy of war.

Beyond the budgetary and funding issues of the main economic spheres, there is an even broader issue that is difficult to define, which concerns the Russian production of the most distinctive elements of the population's life.

For years now, well before the ‘special military operation’ itself, there has been talk of Runet, the Russian variant of the Internet that never manages to establish itself, and with the cyber aspects of the conflict, this need becomes increasingly specific and pressing.

Attempts are being made to impose patriotic services in place of YouTube, a Ruwiki to replace Wikipedia, for which the Great Russian Encyclopaedia itself has been closed down, lacking the funds to publish it, and there are hundreds of other projects that are to become the ‘Russian answer to the West’.

National identity certainly depends on many factors, starting with basic necessities such as foodstuffs and utilities (queues in front of lifts in buildings of twenty floors and more, which lack spare parts, are becoming increasingly frequent), but in today's society, the platforms and applications of the virtual world, including video-games that consume the fee time of most young people, and adults too, seem to be of greater importance.

It is no coincidence that one of the most intense campaigns run by Russian state bodies in recent weeks has been launching and promoting the patriotic computer game Smuta, ‘The Torbids’, praised by all propagandists as ‘our answer to The Witcher’, the Polish-American TV series about civilised peoples forced to live with the monsters that threaten them, and for this mutant warriors are created, the witcher precisely, in a kind of fantasy transposition of the reality of war, in which the Russians represent the monsters to be put down.

After all, comparisons with Tolkien's stories are used a lot to describe the current war, with Putin-Sauron hurling the orcs of Mordor against Middle-earth and the Ukrainian Shire of men, elves and dwarves, while the Russian Smuta recalls the Russian popular uprisings that drove out the Polish invaders at the beginning of the 17th century.

Far more than industry and technology, Russians seek effective symbolism with which to identify, as is the case in all contemporary societies, which are more dependent on virtual projections than on real-life elements.

Buying cars in Russia has become more and more a luxury for the few, Russian-made cars are expensive and shoddy, at most you can travel in Chinese cars, but you need the worlds that appear on the screens of houses and telephones to truly feel at home.

Once upon a time, Russia prided itself on the superiority of its literature, its dominant language in a world of diverse peoples, the architecture of St. Petersburg uniting East and West, and so much more, which is nowadays definitely put on the back burner, and which is in danger of losing meaning in the face of an increasingly less real ‘Russian world’.

Even only in the expenses of everyday life, Russians affirm their patriotic devotion by buying ‘our’ products instead of the less and less readily available foreign ones, and official surveys emphasise the importance of ‘patriotic consumption’, reminiscent of Soviet times, when the only Western drink allowed was Pepsi-Cola, and friendship between peoples was highlighted by bananas from Cuba.

This trend is not limited to articles for sale, but extends mainly to culture in its contemporary sense, film productions, TV series, music, and of course video games. It is no longer the time of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, but of Šaman's patriotic hymns and digital fantasies.

It is the second ‘cultural revolution’ within the last thirty years; after the ‘Soviet golden age’, today Russians have to do without all the Western production and culture that has ‘invaded’ Russia since the 1990s, creating new habits and contradictory feelings.

Mature and older generations are reverting to nostalgia for the films of the Brezhnev years and to toasts with sovetskoe šampanskoe, the carbonated champagne to be accompanied by patriotic vodka, and the recent Russian ‘substitutions’ of products and services are looked upon with suspicion, because now ‘the art of yesteryear has been lost’.

Russian economists insist on the prevalence of ‘locality’, another theme very common to sovereignisms around the world, which want to exalt ‘local production’, a marketing strategy that works in Russia in a very limited way, being a country not exactly advantaged in agricultural and industrial production capacities.

Russia's problem goes back to earlier times, when even in the most widespread productions of gastronomy and many aspects of social development it has always taken elements from abroad.

The so-called ‘Russian salad’ is a remake of a French recipe, which is in fact called Olivier in Russia; the cabbage and meat soup, Boršč, comes from the Polish-Ukrainian world, and vodka itself was introduced by Peter the Great from the Baltic areas, as a less heavy drink than the Russian peasant-made spirits (the Samogon); vodka was in fact called ‘acquetta’ from voda, the transparent liquid of ‘only’ 40 degrees compared to the 60-80 of the usual Russian honey- or lemon-flavoured spirits. Moreover, even the sweetish red wine of the Russian Eucharistic liturgy, Kagor, is a derivation of the French Cahors.

Russia is accustomed to living off foreign productions: French wine, German cars, Japanese electronics, only arms are supposed to be predominantly Russian, but today they are also largely Iranian or North Korean.

Today, Georgian wine and Armenian cognac are imported again, although as Armenia is nowadays very unfriendly to Moscow, its batches of Ararat brandy are often very unhealthy, creating further Caucasian tensions with Yerevan.

The fact is that one of the most significant factors of post-twentieth-century globalism is precisely the international free market, while the new ‘multipolar’ Russian world finds itself in the dilemma of impossible autarky in the face of the interchangeability of living systems and popular cultures.

In the economic, social and cultural world, ‘great powers’ no longer exist to impose their own models and production, and Russia's ambitions are increasingly frustrated by a global reality that no longer admits the exclusivity of local characteristics.

Free international trade works if everyone is admitted on an equal footing and with the same rights, a dimension that the Russians today renounce as a matter of principle, placing themselves in a critical condition that cannot be remedied by presidential decrees or the hysterical legislative initiatives of the Moscow Duma, which tries in every way to affirm ‘traditional Russian values’ that have never existed in history, neither on a theoretical level nor in practical realisation, having always been imported and re-proposed at all levels.

Ever since ancient Rus', everything has come from outside, from the West and the East, such as Byzantine Christianity itself, revisited by the Russians in very expressive ways, as in the novelty of the “national” patriarchate (before that of Moscow, there were no ethnic patriarchates), or in the intensity of the monasticism of the startsy, capable of proposing a spirituality at once Eastern and Western.

The state structure of an endless empire, run by a few autocrats, is surely the main legacy of the Asian domination of the Tatar-Mongols. Today, all this is recycled in Russian-made Playstations, the last chance to achieve Russia's longed-for victory in the world.

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