a bonobo humanity?

Mother Russia calls you to make the ultimate sacrifice!

Soviet Russia became renowned – not exactly the right word – for its five year plans, of which there were twelve, starting in the early 1920s. There was a lot of fanfare about all this death-laden slave labour, first proposed by Leon Trotsky but taken up with great bellicosity by Stalin. It would miraculously transform poor old backward agrarian Russia into the envy of Europe, a region all the Soviet leaders envied: 

The Five-Year Plans… aimed to accelerate the tempo of the whole economy.’The Five-Year-Plan in Four!’ was their slogan. The Plans reconfigured time itself along a series of strategic targets on the path towards a Communist utopia. In this sense they built upon the age-old striving of the Russian people for a higher form of existence that lay at the heart of their religious consciousness, particularly their belief in the possibility of a utopia on Russian soil. The creation of belief in the Soviet system required the replacement of religious ends with secular objectives tangible enough to motivate the people but meaningful in ways to satisfy the eschatological endeavour of the Russian collective psyche. By hailing the achievements of the Five-Year Plans, propaganda aimed to foster the belief that the utopia was imminent, that it could be reached by one last collective effort… but the utopia was never reached (Figes, p220). 

As is the habit of utopias. But speaking of such plans, Mr Pudding’s special military operation in Ukraine, envisioned as a sort of quick kill-and-grab affair, might now, after four and a half years, be worth analysing as one. AI (never lies) – quoting Wikipedia, to be fair – tells me that the Russian war dead is now around 500,000, with overall casualties approaching 1.5 million. Ukrainian losses, according to The Economist, stand at around 60,000 to 100,000 killed and 400,000 wounded. That’s overall something like a 5 to 1 ratio, and Russia has roughly four times the population of Ukraine. Not sure how meaningful any of that is, especially as the outcome of this war will not be about numbers, though of course those numbers will say everything about needless suffering. 

In any case Mr Pudding’s plan back in February 2022 was clearly for something  quick, deadly and incisive. How could it all have gone so catastrophically wrong? Could it still be turned into a Five-Year Plan? If so, time is fast running out. 

More importantly, how could he have done this in the first place? Is there any good reason for any nation to invade or declare war on, or topple the leadership of, any other nation? 

But those are different questions from each other. And of course, ‘nations’ don’t decide to do such things, their leaders do, and those decisions are mostly to do with self-promotion – though not always. Frump, who promised ‘no foreign wars’ in the run-up to one of the elections he participated in, has declared war on Iran, I’ve no idea why except that it seems to have been as a distraction from his domestic problems. 

In any case, Ukraine isn’t a real nation, don’t forget. But the trouble with that claim is that it can be made against any nation that has ever existed, or has claimed to exist. We invented nations, in the modern sense, through modern, or relatively ancient, warfare, mostly. In the piece of land now known as Australia, it was easier than it was in the lands now known as New Zealand. It took some time in the land now known as the USA, and Russia’s history is full of land-grabs, some more successful than others, over centuries. Ukraine was indeed once thought of as an indivisible part of Russia – but so what? The same might be said of Poland, Estonia or Finland – something the beady-eyed Mr Pudding is well aware of. The trouble for him is that democracies are generally kinder, if nothing else, than dictatorships. And they’re more likely to support each other. NATO is an alliance of democratic countries – some more democratic than others, clearly, but the alliance generally exerts pressure on its member states to maintain or improve their democratic credentials, and this can have economic as well as defence benefits. Compare Russia’s alliances. China is eternally self-regarding, North Korea is a tragedy inside a bad joke, and the former Soviet states are never quite sure of their independence, never fully trusting of the Kremlin. 

The invasion of Ukraine has surely turned into something of a disaster for Mr Pudding. Orlando Figes’ history shows that sacrificing humans for wars and for Five-Year Plans and such has been a regular feature of the long Russian despotism, but that has rarely stopped its despots from piling suffering upon suffering. And they have rarely suffered for their crimes. Consider Stalin, surely the worst of a bad lot, and thoroughly idolised at his death. 

Russia is a long-term tragedy, from a humanistic perspective. Millions of people have died there as a result of its leaders’ ‘experiments in power’. The same has occurred in China, under Mao in particular. And such individuals are not only never brought to justice, they’re fêted as heroes. This is why the battle most be fought, not only for democracy, but openness. I’ve not read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, but when I look at the societies and political entities around me, those that avoid anything cultish and highlight skepticism and humanism are the ones that attract my attention. Ukraine, I think, is trying to build such a society, and needs all the help we can give it. 

Reference

Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia, 2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war