@benjamin_based: The Western romance with. Russia has become a kind of political trompe-l’œil: depth painted onto decay, strength painted onto exhaustion, tradition painted onto obedience. Andrew Tate’s praise of Russia belongs to this genre. It is Russia as mood board. Churches. Snow. Icons. Oil. Missiles. Literature. Men in uniforms. Women in dresses. A civilization arranged for the camera, severe and flattering, with the unpleasant parts kept outside the frame. Russia has greatness. That much is obvious. Its novels understand guilt, humiliation, God, hunger, pride, the private theater of the soul. Its music can make suffering sound almost orderly. Its imperial history still gives off the heat of scale. There is no need to reduce Russia to a cartoon in order to see what it has become. The bill arrives elsewhere. Europe’s largest HIV epidemic. Alcoholism at civilizational volume. Prison tuberculosis. Suicide. Men dying too young. Families broken under the weight of absence, drink, debt, conscription, silence. A state fluent in eternity, destiny, sacrifice, motherland; a kitchen table where the facts are poorer, colder, and harder to bless. This is the old Russian arrangement: the grandeur above, the grief below. The opera house and the prison transport. The cathedral and the informant. The poem and the missing son. A whole national mise-en-scène built around endurance, as if suffering became holy once enough people were made to share it. And so it goes. The foreign men buying this fantasy are not really studying Russia. They are shopping for permission. Permission to call cruelty discipline. Permission to call hierarchy order. Permission to call their own dislocation wisdom. They want a father, a flag, a punishment, a country large enough to make their loneliness seem historical. A civilization can build cathedrals and fail the kitchen table. It can write novels that understand the soul while running a state that grinds souls into paperwork, prison, conscription, drink, and silence. It can worship masculinity and destroy men. Russia’s tragedy is not a lack of greatness. The tragedy is that greatness keeps being used as camouflage for the machinery that ruins ordinary life.

Benjamin Reed

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Region: US

Wednesday 10 June 2026 04:25:53 GMT