Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Death is a Photograph Culture at the End of History. I am your co-host, Chase, here with my co-host, Sam. Sam, how are you? I'm good. I'm drinking some vodka, eating some raw red onion, guzzling some beetroot.
Speaker: Just having a good time. All around good time. Well, you know, Sam is unfortunately making fun of my people, so I do feel a little targeted here, but that's okay. Hey, i'm ah I'm a late convert to Eastern European food, but I've i've fully embraced it.
Speaker: I've delved behind what I like to call the dill wall. is a term I don't know if this is a real term or not, but ah I like to imagine there is like ah a sort of iron corridor, but like purely gastronomical. There's like dill versus no dill.
Speaker: I mean, it's definitely true. It's the sort of like rye, dill, sour cream sort of side of things. Greeks, dill. Bulgarians, dill. East Germans, dill. Polish, dill. Russians, dill. Estonians, dill. Finnish, dill.
Speaker: I'm imagining spice traders, but they're just bringing back like dill and buckwheat. Yeah. They're like, we've got the most amazing spice in the world. It's like putting dill on smoked herring. Oh, yes. Yes. Give me some vodka. Give me some like flavored elder blurry vodka or something or like gooseberry vodka.
Speaker: All of that is is incredibly heartwarming. And you need it to be heartwarming because you know you're living in the snow. there are no Buildings are falling down. There's mafia all around you. It's 1990. Yes, so this was your you know sort of choice this week. So what did you choose?
Speaker: i chose the 1997 film Brother, or in Russian, Brat. It's by Alexekty Babalinov, who is... If you look up his Wikipedia page, just looks like a kind of guy you'd find in GameStop.
Speaker: Yeah, he looks amazing. He's great. He's like incredibly round-faced, ultra-dark prescription sunglasses, like a little like felt cap. Yeah, it looks like a you know a little bit of a sexual harassing chipmunk. That's the kind of vibe I'm getting.
Speaker: I mean, it looks like the kind of guy who, I don't know, wouldn't make a hard-boiled Russian noir sort of mafia film. But there we go, he did. Brat is, yeah, it's ah it's a ah sort of film about a, i don't know, how old is the boy? I mean, ah somewhere between 18 and 21. Yeah, he's i mean, he's young, regardless. yeah Old enough to be in the army. So it's about a recently discharged, you know, Narodnik. Not in the political term. Not in the political term, but it's of the people, I suppose.
Speaker: off the land. He's a sort of peasant, you know, sort of Soviet, somewhere from the countryside. It's a left SR. Yeah, sure. Why not? I mean, he's kind of got that vibe. It's just like kind of kill people, chaos, whatever. But yeah, he's enlisted in the first Chechen war, which is sort of fought after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Speaker: um So obviously you have the the major republics, which were, in scare quotes, autonomous republics of the Soviet Union. Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. All obviously leave between sort of...
Speaker: 1989 and 1991, 1992. But there were these sort of smaller units in the Caucasus that the Russian Federation, which is the sort of successor state to the majority of the Soviet Union, doesn't want to see go, right? And so Dagestan is one of them, Ossetia, Chechya. And yes, our main character, our protagonist, whose name is Danilia Baglov.
Speaker: ah he's He's just got back we think traumatized, but maybe not, perhaps not traumatized from the First Chechen War. He insists that he was merely a sort of humble military clerk in headquarters. Hasn't got any military experience, but the film sort of maybe makes you question that.
Speaker: Well, yes, his his ability to use firearms suggests that he is not just a guy at a desk. Yeah, but he he continuously insists that he was but a military clerk. He makes his way back to his mother, presumably somewhere in sort of central, in Siberia or maybe central Russia, somewhere in the countryside. And his mother sort of hasn't got anything for him, which is, well, why don't I don't know, go see your brother. hes's He's done very well in St. Petersburg.
Speaker: So he travels to St. Petersburg, this sort of mere country bumpkin who's only ever been in Siberia and in Chechnya, to the big city, country mouse. And yeah, finds his brother has done very well out of the fall of the Soviet Union and the transition from communism to capitalism.
Speaker: Yes, and it's worth saying two things here, I think. One is that the Chechens win the first Chechen war, right? So Russia in this period, notoriously economically depressed due to um shock therapy, which we mentioned in our Goodbye Lenin episode, where you know um more or less a set of American financiers, including former president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, among many others, um basically privatized all of the Soviet Union's public assets.
Speaker: And even though there was some kind of scheme, this is such a classic scheme, because the U.S. government did this after the revolution too, where you get these, like I forget what you call them, but basically like tickets that represent buy-in to these socialized things. Yes, John Major did exactly the same thing in the early 90s when we privatized most of our industries.
Speaker: You give the people these ah these tickets basically meant to represent their ownership. But the problem is the economy is taking so bad that everyone sells them before the actual like payout for the thing. And so by the time that the assets are actually sold...
Speaker: sold All of it is owned by a group of people who become basically the first generation of post-Soviet oligarchs, many of whom had like you know inside knowledge and were working with the Americans. So the average Russian has now become totally economically destitute, and we have a war of secession that they lose eventually.
Speaker: to a group of people who, you know, what the entirety of Chechnya in the period probably has like a million people. like You know, the entire, you know, ex-Soviet army is unable to defeat one breakaway republic. So it's a period of like economic, national, cycle ah basically just ah ah a line trending down in every conceivable sense, right? Yes. And we should say that 1997 is, if I'm not wrong, the last year of the Boris Yeltsin administration,
Speaker: um I'm pretty sure. and it's, Putin is elected for the first time in 98. So we're really at a turning point. Well, let me just double check that this is true. But I'm pretty sure 99.7 is not just a turning point for... So he gets out in 99.
Speaker: i so I guess we've got few years, but it's very, very close to the transition from the first sort of phase, shall we say, of post-communist Russia to the ongoing second phase that we're currently still in. Because goddamn Russians, they they are consistent. yes They like their long periods, um uninterrupted periods of sort of hegemony. So yeah, we're we're sort of like approaching the end of the Eltsan era, which is, you know, characterized by chaos, don't know, walking around supermarkets, pissed off your head.
Speaker: Well, to put this in context, I mean, I remember being in grade school in the late ninety s here in New Jersey and having like like a random Russian orphan just show up one day who had just been adopted by like a local family. So I feel like in this period in the US s at least,
Speaker: The Russian orphan took on something of the, kind of the Romanian orphan of a slightly earlier period as an idea, like a group of people who are being sort of mass exported out of the country due to the kind of grinding poverty that the country found itself in. Second, thank you for mentioning Putin, which, don't clip that, um because Putin is from St. Petersburg, as is Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ah kind of head of the Wagner group who met.
Speaker: a mysterious helicopter-based end a couple of years ago. um And the reason that that's significant is because Petersburg in this period, you know previously Leningrad up until like basically the moment the movie starts, um is a mob city, a real mob city, like notorious even compared to Moscow for its, ah let's say, vibrant black market and control by non-state actors. And that's the world that a KGB agent like Putin comes out of, right? Because obviously the security services are very involved with these kinds of groups. And then where a guy like Purgosian, where everyone says, oh, wasn't he a hot dog seller? It's like, yeah, he was probably a mobbed up hot dog seller who then fights his way through the ranks to then end up being a very important person. So it's a moment of, in a sort of really perverse way, a moment of economic mobility. You you can actually do rags to riches. You just have to do it by being the most sort of brutal, horrifying person possible. yeah I mean, it's also the era that sort of produces Vladimir Surkov, Putin's sort of very short-lived right-hand man. um
Speaker: He's once as, my three idols are Napoleon, Edward Lamonoff, and Biggie Smalls. Which may as well come from the main character of this movie. like He wouldn't talk in those terms, but that's basically how he operates. yes We should also foreground this is the era of Edward Lamonoff coming back from yes America and his sort of exile in America back to...
Speaker: Russia, you know, as someone who, Edward Menloff is this is sort very punk rock Gen X, um well, late boomer, early Gen X author, who fled the US s as a kind of trot slash then into a libertarian, comes up to the USSR, Russia, from the US, and regrets the fall of communism. Suddenly, know he's had this 20-year stance of being a libertarian and anti-Soviet, comes back and suddenly sees the hollowness of the sort of new Russian state, right? And it's in this context that you also get exile, which I know you're a big fan of. Yes. And shout out John Dolan and Mark Ames. We had John Dolan on the podcast a while ago.
Speaker: Yeah. So this is the the context that Matt Taibbi comes from. it's you know And Glenn Greenwald, an inheritor of this era in some ways. right So it's, yeah, it's a confusing, messed up time. It's a postmodern time where the sign in the 6th or are 7th and everyone is sort of, no one knows really what's going on. And, you know, men in their early 20s, all they want to do is listen to the...
Speaker: Prog rock. melody Melodies. of Nautilus. Nautilus, yeah. It's worth mentioning Lamonov here, though, also, um because he comes back and founds what becomes known as National Bolshevism, which is a kind of, like, fusion of Nazism and Bolshevism. And I've always been very confused by this because, like,
Speaker: Lamonov himself, as far as I can tell, was never like a fascist in that sense. I don't know all the details. like It might be that that's just true. But I have always seen it as kind of of a piece with that rearrangement of kind of like symbols to piss off those in power that we've come to associate with Gen X very strongly, especially World War II symbols, like symbols of the Third Reich, more or less. We saw that.
Speaker: We've seen that actually a couple times over the course of the season. So he literally acts as like an avatar yeah for a lot of this kind of postmodern ah play of the signifier that seems to dominate.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it's like, what's that, the quote? It's like, Hegelianism split into left and right in the 1820s and then resolved itself on a battlefield in Stalingrad, you know, 100 years later, right?
Speaker: So if that's like the sort of total, when symbols have meaning, where things like the hammer and sickle and the Nazis was to go really have meaning. Like they have ideologies and systems behind them.
Speaker: Yes. you know and they they find the resolution that stalingrad yeah in ninety s russia thirty forty fifty years later they find their complete dissillution in the sense that yeah um nothing really has any hinge or meaning beyond sort of superfluous symbol at this point ah in time and like Yeah, Lomonov was like hanging out with Garry Kasparov. He became like an ardent anti-Putinist in the late 90s, early 2000s. He was with Navalny. Yeah. He was out there with Navalny. Gary Kasparov, the famous chess player, who was like the most centrist dad of centrist dads. Yeah. It's like friends with Francis Fukuyama and you know like the Clintons. So yeah, there was no... And Limonov and him were like, yeah, we we sort of we were we're cool with each other. Yeah, none of that none nothing made sense.
Speaker: Well, we yeah, one of the reasons I've always been confused by the national Bolshevism thing with Limonov, like as an ideology, fine. like I mean, not fine. I don't agree with it. I just mean fine in the sense that, okay, that can exist. But there's a story i I've heard Mark Ames tell where Limonov is drinking with a bunch of Cossacks.
Speaker: And he's you know trying to drink them under the table or whatever. And they start to get very anti-Semitic, as Cossacks do on occasion. And Lamonov basically said, i think they're saying, like, oh, Jews can't really drink or something. And Lamonov says, you know, i don't I don't really see why that would be the case. And the Cossacks sort of look at him, you know, just staring into his soul and say,
Speaker: perhaps you, Limonov, are a Jew. you know like like In other words, like who would defend them but another another sort of Jewish person, right? And so you hear that story about Limonov you're like, well, this doesn't exactly sound like something I expect from you know Herman Goering. So i don't you know you kind of then have to be like, okay, so why does this appeal? And in my mind, it's like, well, it must just be because like what would piss off the post-Soviet state more than like laying claim to these symbols? But I don't i don't actually know.
Speaker: Yeah, and there's something of, Louonov represents something of the sort of contrarianism the era, right? Like, him he is really a contrarian in the sense that he was sort of anti-Russian imperialism in the 80s and 90s. And then at some point in the sort of mid-2000s, like 2000s, switches and sort of becomes ardently sort of irredentist towards Ukraine and backs Putin over Ukraine.
Speaker: And yeah, you could kind of see the the main character of brother, Dan Ulyv, as a similar sort of, albeit younger and less educated version of Limonov in the sense that he's sort of within the flow, but he's not, he has no anchor.
Speaker: The real version of him, you know, who would now be maybe like what, let's say about 45, 46 years old something like this. Yeah. or maybe a little older than that, he he's either like an officer in the Russian military, probably not, working for what was once the Wagner Group in like Africa, like fighting on the side of you know some some dictator, or he's running cigarettes like through Belarus. in the ukraine like He's like supplying Ukrainian soldiers with cigarettes while like also giving intelligence to the military of Russia. like he's He's an operator of some kind, I feel. But I could see him being the kind of guy who would also like, sell intelligence to the Ukrainians, because he wants that Ukrainian guy he quite liked.
Speaker: Well, and actually, that's a good segue into the movie itself, because once he gets to St. Petersburg, so we've covered the beginning, he goes over there, and one of the first people he meets, and actually, this is very of a piece with the Lamonov story I just told, I'm realizing, he meets a guy um who goes by the name just German, like the German. And you mits and he says to him, he's like, are you Jewish? And he's like, no. no, but what's wrong with that? And he's like, I just don't like Jews very much. at like Jesus Christ. yes so Yeah, in the first five minutes, you kind of like realize how anti-Semitic the main character is. Yes, and it's it's kind of a
Speaker: I was about to call it a nice touch, but that maybe sounds wrong. What I mean is, it's a nice touch because the movie is very good at kind of developing these points of characterization that don't need to be revisited, but give you kind of a broader picture of who the person is.
Speaker: So it's not that he's ever like going around doing pogroms, unless you count killing Chechen ah mobsters. But like, you get a better sense of what it is that a young man in this period would have been like, and the sorts of weird ideas that would have been kind of knocking around.
Speaker: Yeah. ah So I ah presume the Germans are Baltic Germans, the left over. That was my reading of. Yeah, I think he would have to be. no he's a He's a former DDR guy who just, was as communism receded, he kept going further east until unfortunately, you know. And it's important to note that the German in this context is, they meet because he's a peddler, right? He sort of just sells random supplies in the street. And Danila,
Speaker: defends him by beating the crap out of a mobster who tries to extort him and then taking that mobster's gun, which is how he's able to get his start kind of in the world of violence because now he has a weapon.
Speaker: And that is sort of, i think, an important moment because in these, I don't want to call it war-torn, but let's say, Wild West kind of environments, your ability to be an operator is sort of dependent on your ability to have a weapon.
Speaker: So once he gets the gun, he can sort of enter a new class of person, you know, sort of the aggressor instead of the the bullied. Yeah, it's very Hobbesian. Like, it's a nasty British in short, right? There's no sort of sovereign to enforce a social contract. i mean, there is a sovereign. There is a literal sovereign in the in Boris Yeltsin, but he's too pissed. He's sort of like too pissed to...
Speaker: Yeah, really actually have a monopoly on violence in this situation. He's just like staring at cabbages. You've given me an image of um the the famous cover of Leviathan, but it's Yeltsin's face on Leviathan.
Speaker: but It's just like loads of vodka bottles. like Everywhere. Everywhere. But so the the German, he saves him and they become friends and he sort of helps him. The German becomes useful, right? Because he's a guide to the city. And he even says to him, like, the city swallows people up. Like, you know, you must be, no one can come through here and not be fundamentally transformed. Some people are destroyed totally. Some people are destroyed psychologically. And you kind of see the reality of this when you realize that the German lives in a cemetery with a bunch of other homeless people.
Speaker: Yeah, so we should we should say it is catastrophic. like um If you watch Adam Curtis's Trauma Zone, right like um the claims that people were literally living in tunnels and like manhole covers and sewers, this is yeah this is the reality right that is depicted in Brotherhood.
Speaker: Yes, but it seems also important to me that our main character seems totally unfazed by all of this, right? That like, he just kind of, right this is the soup that he lives in. If he's been to Chechnya, he's seen God knows how much violence. And so he's just sort of like, oh, okay, my new friend drinks vodka out of a paper bag in a cemetery, and that's fine. Yeah. That's normal.
Speaker: And the other thing he's completely unfazed by is globalization, right? So yes presumably he's not experienced a great deal of globalization being sort of first in Siberia somewhere and then in Chechnya.
Speaker: And he comes to St. Petersburg. of the first things he's confronted with are a kind of like couple like straight out of the beach. Like this gap year couple of Americans who have got Kangol hats on and those great late 90s wraparound shades. And they're like... ah do you know where the metro station is? He's like, I don't know the what, what? Yeah, he's just he doesn't even know English. So this this other woman has to come up who's kind of, i i guess, an important character. I mean, she's someone who comes in and out of the movie in different ways. Her name is Cat, I think, if I remember correctly. And she's like...
Speaker: So obviously transactional. She is sort of like neoliberalism incarnate in the sense that her whole thing is... The first thing she says to him after helping that American couple is, well, if you get any money, I can get us some stuff and we can go to the club and have a good time. And that's it. There's no pretending to romance. There's no pretending to anything. It's just like, you provide me with money and the service I will give you is going party, basically. Yeah.
Speaker: basically Yeah, but i he i mean he's just like completely unfazed by meeting Americans, right? There's no yeah there's no sort of internal hierarchy or apparatus like passing social change for Dan Ulymph. It's just kind of... ah like he Yeah, he's very much like a a kind of Camus-style, sort of an estranger, sort of existentialist hero, in the sense that he's almost like completely flat and affect.
Speaker: Yes. like a He's not surprised by this like sort of monumental social change that's going on around him St. Petersburg. It's it's so all taken in stride. It's an interesting point because it makes me realize that he's sort of like an actually characterized action hero, meaning like the normal action hero of a movie has a similar vibe of being unfazed by violence, but there's never an attempt to account for it. It's just sort of like, that's who Arnold Schwarzenegger is. That's who Steven Seagal is, right? That's who Chuck Norris is.
Speaker: um I don't know why I just went with Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal for the other two, but whatever. Yeah. Another man who's very friendly to post-Soviet Russia, Steven Seagal. But basically, in this movie, you get the feeling that he is a product of the environment and therefore comfortable in it.
Speaker: Like, yes, he's not from Petersburg, but... the shock of the fall of the Soviet Union has produced a kind of person who is at home in the kind of fallout kind of wasteland that exists in post-Soviet Russia. So he's just doesn he doesn't need to be phased because it's it's life. It just is what it is.
Speaker: And we should say, because so so he is, what, 20 1997, he's probably, what, 13, 12, 13 when the Soviet Union collapses? Yeah. So, it' ah yeah, like, he's not a creature of the Soviet Union in the sense that his sort of prime years have been spent growing up outside of the Soviet Union.
Speaker: And it's kind of made, actually, quite explicit, because his older brother is, you someone who really is a creature of the Soviet Union. He's probably, what, in his late 30s? Yes. So someone who's lived most of his life in the Soviet Union. And, um...
Speaker: he Initially, his older brother, whose name is... Victor. ah Victor, yes. Yeah. ah Victor's like adapted very well initially right to the the new conditions. He's this kind of hitman, minor gangster, living in quite a nice apartment in s st Petersburg.
Speaker: But by the end of the film, you realize that actually... it's It's this new generation coming up. It's Gen X Russians who sort of yeah actually spent more time in the new Russia, like Dan Ulyv, are really the ones suited to this new sort of situation.
Speaker: Yes. the So the brother's a minor hitman and basically is like, hey we can make a little business here. mean, it's very like, we hey, we could be the the brothers Bogdanov or Bogrov or whatever their names are and we can work together. The problem is his brother Victor is working for a syndicate that kind of wants to get rid of him.
Speaker: So it becomes this classic sort of mafia situation where they're doing contracts for a group of people who also want to eliminate them at the same time. And most of the movie is just, it feels weird to call it like a quiet drama because it's not, there's like lots of shooting and comedy But it is a quiet drama insofar as the rest of it is kind of just him carrying out these contracts and then eventually having to deal with the fact there are guys who want to kill his brother.
Speaker: But there's not a whole lot else that like happens. Yeah, then the B plot is sort of a willy-won'ty between two Russian women. you know There's a younger Russian woman who's about his age, who we've discussed.
Speaker: Cat. Yeah, and then there's a slightly older Russian woman who's a tram driver. Yes, Sveta. Yeah. Yeah, so they that, who is married to this sort of like abusive, drunken, semi-absent husband, ah who lives in this like weird sort of apartment where like it's all one-rooms and all these old people. Yes.
Speaker: In tiny sort of pocket rooms. It's a little bit like um like the project house in um House Party. Like in the sense that there's just, like it's instead it being one bigger, like it's the little individual rooms, but it's just sort of like they're random people kind of just around at different times. It's just like keep appearing like out of like corners. It's like, yeah, there's like an old man with a big walrus mustache. He gives Daniel like a shotgun. Yeah. Oh, that guy. I love that guy.
Speaker: I think at one point he says like, if I had seen you at Stalingrad in 43, like I would have killed you or something like this. To the Germans. No, no, he's talking to... It might be one of the gang... I can't remember who it is, but it becomes clear that he you know served in the ah the Great Patriotic War, so to speak. um So there is this kind of overt generational thing going on where it's like older Soviet people kind of completely out of touch and insane, like you like have been driven mad by the circumstances. Then you've got the older brother character, Victor, who's like operating and kind of has a leg up
Speaker: because he was already an adult when this happened, but ultimately is not prepared for the the sort of fullness of the changes happening to society. And then you've got our main character, Danila, who is, it turns out, a psychopath. but But the weird thing is, he's not a psychopath. He's sort of like a Bushido warrior, is his own self-conception. like He always keeps his word.
Speaker: He's very much like a mafia hero in quotation marks from a film in that way, where he's like, And it's it's very interesting that the younger just generation... i mean, Daniela stands between these two women, one of whom is older, about his brother's age, who he's having sex with, and then this younger woman.
Speaker: And the older woman is similar to Daniela's brother in that she's adapted to this new world. She's sort of ready to throw off the shackles of... communist virtues. like know She's cheating on her husband with a younger man. she doesn't really care about the marriage.
Speaker: But ultimately, when Danny Elif shoots her husband in the leg with a shotgun, her response is, what the fuck, man? you can't like This is my husband. You can't do that. yes This is against the rules. And she reverts to kind of an older form of ah virtue and ah sort of a moral system.
Speaker: Whereas the younger woman who Danny Elif is also interested in is Some more similar to Danny Eliv in that she is fully within this new world that is transactional. To the extent that the romance they do have is sort of preceded with her basically being like, do you have condoms? I want to sex with you.
Speaker: That's even giving her too much credit. it's They go out partying because he's got money from carrying out these like hitman contracts. And they're at the end of this party. We should return to the scene with the French guy in a second because that's significant here.
Speaker: But you know they're just hanging out and she goes, do you have condoms? And he's like, why? and she's like, well, I don't have any money. I can't pay you. So this is this is how I'm going to pay you back you know for all of the stuff we did tonight. And it's like...
Speaker: it's interesting because it's not immediately clear whether he believes she is anything more than basically just like a party girl for lack of a better, not telling him from the fifties, but like, how else do you talk about her? Um, where, yeah, it's totally transactional. Like she just wants to have fun.
Speaker: She's in a way I would describe her as people who come a couple of years after the events of goodbye Lenin in East Germany, if that makes sense. Like, where they want to have fun, and maybe at the initial moment of change, there's excitement.
Speaker: But a few years later, it's kind of just like, well, things are really shitty, but I still want to have fun, and so I'm going to do whatever I have to do to make that fun a reality. Yeah. I mean, and that that that transactionism is only reasserted at the end of the film, where Danielia...
Speaker: I think very sort of ominously decides to leave St. Petersburg for Moscow, which could only mean one thing, right? He's leaving Moscow in 1997, 1998.
Speaker: What's to come? And he he meets up with the younger female character called Kat again. And she's just sort of, he's like, I need to say goodbye to you because I am leaving for Moscow. And she goes, can you buy me Burger King?
Speaker: They're in McDonald's. And that's where she's she's already hanging out there. she he goes to like the little park where she's always hanging out. And he talks to these like other kind of I would describe them as almost like cyber goths is probably the closest way to describe these people. And he's like, do you know where she is? they're like, check McDonald's. And she's just in there eating. And that's where they have this final emotional... It's like Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial shit. Yeah, except it's entirely unemotional. They're both just like, see you later. Okay, whatever happens. It is a profoundly anti-romantic film. And I do think if we want to talk about...
Speaker: cultural distinction between gen X, you know, or among Gen X across the world. Like, there are some things that remain kind of similar, right? We've talked about a lot of the economic changes remaining the same across the world, even if in severity they differ. We've talked about an obsession with music because we kind of touched on earlier that he's constantly trying to get the newest Nautilus CD. um But one of the biggest differences is that here...
Speaker: It's almost the most similar to lake kids or streetwise. you know It's not a house party. You're not out there like having fun all the time. it's it's It's almost like Russia is necessarily on the front line of the end of history and therefore gets sort of like the concentrated effect in a way that is delayed for those living in the imperial core you know in this period. That's how i would describe it.
Speaker: Yeah, i think the most interesting part of the film where we actually sort of get, it sort of opens, the aperture opens from merely being a sort of gangster film into something a bit more sociopolitical. There's this sort of house party that happens, which I think Kat brings them to, you which is the kind of like scene that you'd imagine that sort Matt Taibbi or Yasha Levine and the Exile crew were going to in the ninety s it's It's sort of very cosmopolitan. it's um It's American and French and sort of Russian. What's left or war of the sort of Russian upper middle class, I suppose, Bohemian middle class, sort of at play in this apartment block.
Speaker: And what I think is interesting about it is he there's a part where this party's going on and then he's like holding people hostage downstairs. and ah oh this yeah, so Kat does not bring him. This party is... No, it's a separate party. Yeah, this is the party where...
Speaker: Their job is to kill a guy in this apartment, but he's not home. He's gone out to get alcohol. And different people just keep showing Keep stumbling up accidentally.
Speaker: They think that the party is in this apartment. And at a certain point, he has a really bad headache from being out partying with Kat the previous night. And so he really wants aspirin. So he wanders to the party upstairs to get aspirin.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's like you wander up and there's like people playing guitar and there's like people in turtlenecks. And yeah, it's this very like sort of like bohemian bourgeois milieu. And then he wanders back downstairs there's like five people tied up and he's with these two like two like cronies. And it's like, yeah, these two worlds, dropp the world of the autogarques, the world of like brutal Hobbesian sort of darwinist social Darwinistic struggle. And then this kind of like bubble of like culture going on on the same staircase. And it's really rammed home when um the last person to accidentally come through the door is this director. Yes, yeah. He was, I suppose, maybe a stand-in for the actual director of the um Brother, perhaps. And he's, like, really pathetic. um
Speaker: He's just, like, shit scared. And he's, like, quite mid- he looks like guy he could be, like, a graduate student in the US, right? He does, yeah. He's quite, like, bourgeois coded. And Daniela is just, like, very nice to him. Yes, yeah. Like after he's killed the people he needs to kill, he sort of like drags him around St. Petersburg drinking.
Speaker: And this director character is like, his constant refrain is, can I leave? Like, are we finished? Like, can I go now? And he's like, no, we have to bury bodies. Then we got to see my drumming friend. do we drink vodka? And he's like constantly drags through the snow, doing these chores. And eventually he's like, right, you can go. And I found that lack of agency on the part of the sort of um creative, you know, bourgeois, whatever, bohemian characters to be quite funny.
Speaker: that all the agency is with Danny Olive, and none of it is with the sort of creative class of St. Petersburg. No. And I think he actually sees Nautilus at that party. like playing They're the ones playing the guitar, I think, on the couch. Oh, okay. So it's like, because the guy who's the director, i think works at, I'm not positive, but something kind of like MTV almost. like He knows the musicians and things.
Speaker: I think he might be a music video director. And yeah, importantly, he takes him to the graveyard with German and drinks with him there. And the guy's like shitting himself. Yeah. entire of time. it's just But like again, Danilo seems like totally unaware of this. like To him, it's all the same thing. so he's like Just like he's telling German, he's like there's a guy over there, you he's in this plot, you need to bury him over here. and you know But he saves the director because he tells him when he accidentally comes into the apartment,
Speaker: I'm not going to harm you. And he actually kills the other two goons to avoid them killing the director so that he can keep his word. You know what I mean? And then, of course, then he takes him out to the the graveyard and all that stuff. But it's a I find it very strange because it seems to me like his personal sense of honor...
Speaker: is any he I don't even know if it's in his mind is what's getting him through this because they almost seem like separate realities, the honor and the fact that everything is total shit. But it is important to him to have a code, which is kind of interesting to me. Like that classic kind of like, well, it was better when the mob controlled it because then at least you know they had principles you know as opposed to these private equity firms. yeah There's a little bit of that to his kind of subjectivity.
Speaker: I mean, it's him almost sort of trying to reimpose the social contract. Yeah, yeah. In ah in a very individualistic way, right? Like, um there's a vignette where he gets on a tram and these two sort of chumps refuse to pay the the conductor.
Speaker: And like you suddenly realize, well, it's not explicitly stated, but there's a sort of implicit realization that there is no enforcement mechanism here, right? Like, the two chumps just go, we're not paying the ticket. And the enforcer kind of goes...
Speaker: ah, like, more but please pay the ticket. and And they're like, no, we're not paying the ticket. And there's no Russia at this point has been a state for, what, 30, 40 years where there was a very strong executive function that would have enforced that, both through the sort of implicit social contract, ah but also through, you know, like just the police beating the shit of you if you didn't do the thing. And now there's none of that.
Speaker: And yeah, Danny Ulliv pulls a gun on these two chumps and kind of goes, you need to pay the ticket. Yeah. and forces them to to to pay the conductor, right? And yeah, so the only thing really behind any of this is this sort implicit threat of force.
Speaker: And that force is now not located with the state or sort of society as an aggregate. It's like one 20-year-old guy who's just like bored. It's very revealing, I suppose. Yeah, it is. I mean, I think that's one of the main benefits of the movie so far as our podcast is concerned. and i i was kind of trying to touch on this earlier, but there's a it kind of lays bare a lot of what is under the surface of many of the other movies that we have watched, but have not yet sort of come to a head in the way that they will after the 2008 financial crisis in like the West, you know whether in Western Europe or the United States, such that like
Speaker: How different is what you're describing from how everyone talks about the lack of social cohesion now with like, if I get on the subway one more time and there's a person just watching TikToks at full volume and somehow the TikTok, it it never shuts it down. It's like somehow they're actually able to just keep the algorithm moving even though you know my phone has zero bars. like That's not the same as the skipping the fare exactly, but it is this kind of similar problem of like,
Speaker: There is no longer whatever implicit social bond held things together. Everyone is economically devastated. And there's no enforcement mechanism really, even when that bond is broken. You know, it's the, um for any true anon heads out there, this is why ah Brace Belden and has continued, he keeps calling himself a law and order person, by which he basically just means like,
Speaker: We shouldn't exist in a society where you know lawlessness is constant. And by lawlessness, he doesn't mean like squatters. He means just like the fact that everyone now seems to think that they can just do whatever the fuck they want all the time, no matter how damaging it is to the social fabric and to like other people's ability to exist and prosper economically and socially.
Speaker: Yeah, and and in that sense, actually, maybe i I think you're completely right in that sense. i i Daniliev is not, in every way, the harbinger of ah the Russia of tomorrow, right? Like, he's more adjusted to it than his brother is. But he's still clearly got a nostalgia for the way things were before.
Speaker: Because otherwise, if if he was this kind of pure transactional archetype of sort the pure coming of capitalism into Russia, he wouldn't have like held up those two fair dodgers. No. He'd just go, well, it's none of my business. Like, a truly sort of, like, transactional figure would just go, I don't care. No, well, he would be Kat, basically, right? I mean, because that's that's who she is. Her whole thing is just...
Speaker: i have desire I have a desire. That desire is to party. And I will do anything to accomplish that desire, whether it's having sex with Danila, whether it's like just getting guys to buy me McDonald's, but whether it's getting American tourists to their destinations that maybe they like give me a tip or something, you know just some extra money, whatever it takes. It's also important that the killing contracts are always paid in American dollars.
Speaker: know you noticed this. It's never paid no i in the totally worthless Rupal. It's always paid in in the petrodollar. I mean, if you want to think about it that way, right? Like paid it in what is actual hard currency, like the equivalent of like a gold bar for a previous generation, except now the hard currency is the fiat currency of the United States rather than you know a commodity.
Speaker: And I think that's very telling. Did you notice the recurrent ah Three Slavic Brothers tapestry? No. Oh, yes, in the bedrooms. Yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a weird obsession, almost a prescient of you know ah Ukraine and Russia in 2022, 2023. So the three Slavic brothers, ah it's ah I think it's like a late Victorian sort of nationalist Slavic trope of these three mounted Slavic warriors. One of whom is, what's the technical term? It's a Molinskirusha, Belovskirusha.
Speaker: What's big in Russian? Molinki is small. I'm not sure. But yeah, it's basically Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia as these kind of like three trip triplets on horseback. And this was the eternal union of Slavic brotherhood. And I just find it quite interesting that that appeared sort of throughout the film. Yeah, apparently the technical advert is lek, check, and russe, standing in for the Poles, the Checks, and the Russe.
Speaker: Yes, I think in some other ones it's it's it's less the the Western Slavs, and there' there's some of them that depict sort of just the Eastern Slavs. But yeah, this effective sort of Victorian nostalgia that's playing out in the background of a sort hyper-modern film, I thought it was quite interesting. Yeah, I mean, pan-slavism is more or less you know what you're talking about. And it's funny. I mean, this is a thing that is a problem, a quote-unquote problem now, because Russian far, far right people, like Russian Nazis, some of them or on the Ukrainian side of the war, some are on the Russian side of the war. And a lot of...
Speaker: the guys who are pro-Ukraine are pro-Ukraine because they see Russia as like a quote-unquote mongrel state. Because it has Chechens, it has Dagestanis, it has like all of these... Tatars, yeah. Yes. It's not just like a pure Slavic, you know, white state, whereas they see Ukraine as being that, although I'm not really sure that's true of Ukraine either, but, you know, because there are Ukrainian Tatars and things like this. But um it's interesting to see the movie as a don't want to call a moment of hope for like a stable Russia because it's definitely not that, but where you can still afford to have that imagination. You know what I mean about, like I don't know, ah in the background, the idea of a stable Russia that we once believed in or something like that that no longer could possibly be the case.
Speaker: We also should touch on at the party he goes to with Kat, there's a Frenchman who's just like hanging out and he and Daniela have this like bizarre conversation where because the guy doesn't understand Russian, because of course the expats you know don't know Russian. I think that's the reasons Mark Ames is like so proud of having become pretty proficient in Russian in his time there because so many expats don't do that.
Speaker: And the French guy, I think, is like just getting a cigarette or a drink or something from him. But Daniela is just insulting him, but he thinks he's American. Yes, but the argument starts because Daniela wants to play Northwest. Of course. The French guy wants to play some kind of like Euro trash, like house music or whatever.
Speaker: Right? So there's a clash of culture there initially. And then... And he's just like, we're going to eviscerate you, you American dogs. And like the French guy's just nodding and like shaking his head. And then of course, Cat comes up and is like, why are you talking to him? He's French. He has no idea what you're saying. You Yeah, and then Danilo responds and goes, what's the difference? Yeah, they're all the same.
Speaker: A good sort of like Russia as the as on the margins of Europe once again. you know And there's also a very symbolic scene just before that where there's an African-American guy in like an Oxford shirt, like Perraud Preppy, who's like literally tearing up like nineteenth century like Russian furniture and just like feeding it into a fire.
Speaker: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. like Just prior to this point, right? He's just like smashing up like sort of like antique chairs and just throwing them in the fire. Yeah, if if i ever if I ever need to teach you know symbolism in class, maybe I'll just show that scene. It's a little bit on the nose, yeah. but ah but it's it But it plays in the background. like Do you know what I mean it's You have to notice it, so I kind of am willing to give it um you know the the benefit of the doubt there, so to speak, because it it is not foregrounded.
Speaker: So what do you make... I've been obsessed by, i guess, the way that rock music represents the sort of passage into the end of history for anyone who used to live... Well, really for everybody, if you think about you know grunge in the US, but specifically for East Germany and Russia here... And I was looking it up, and Nautilus, they were just like friends with the director, so that seems to be why they in particular are the band in the movie. But what do you make of his like obsession with music? like He's always walking around with his head is kind of Walkman, right? like That's very important. The Walkman actually saves him from being shot at one point in the movie, where the the Walkman gets shot sort of... um
Speaker: I think one of the presidential assassinations, something like that happened, was like a cigarette case or something, blocked a bullet. But he's obsessed with rock music and sort of what it seems to represent. i mean, maybe for him, it's just, oh, it's the new kind of music. But like we know from Scorpions and Radio Free Europe and stuff that rock music was very important to the idea of becoming a liberal Westerner. you know, if you wanted to be Navalny, you had to listen to rock music.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like of that Yankee blue jeans moment, then isn't it? um I think there's also a scene where he he gets new clothes. Yes, he does. Because they say you're you're you can't possibly be a gangster with how you're dressed, you know? Which, like to me, his first pair of clothing like wasn't that different. that Sort of the these these little kind of um ways in which a culture you're unfamiliar with can have these kind of tiny status markers that you just don't notice. Yeah, the man rocks a chunky, quarters a cardigan the entire time. That's the uniform, I guess, of being in um in the Russian mob? I don't know. it's ah ah Yeah, I mean, it's almost played for laughs, right? He's he's so obsessed with this. I think there's like a letterboxd review that's like it's like, bro just wants to listen to Nautilus and kill people. Which is facts. Well, we' we've kind short-sold him on one thing that I do think is important for this kind of Leviathan situation he finds himself in, which is that he's actually, he he has a lot of ingenuity.
Speaker: So early in the film, they need to kill this like hilariously small-time mobster called the Chechen who just spends all day walking around this kind of outdoor market that he controls, like talking to a bunch of his goons, like presumably like telling you know raunchy stories or something. like i don't know what they're actually talking about, And the way that he goes about killing him is quite fascinating because he's living in this like decrepit tiny room with a big walrus mustache, you know World War II vet. And in that room, he kind of modifies a bunch of matchsticks and puts them into like a soda bottle to make...
Speaker: At first, I thought it was some kind of malt of cocktail, but it turns out to be kind of like a like a firecracker, more or less. Oh, it's like a silencer, isn't it? Oh, I'm mixing up two different things. the bottle you like There's two prep montages. The first prep montage is he puts a plastic bottle around the pistol, and then he puts the pistol in like a shopping bag.
Speaker: So, yes, he uses the matches to make, I forget what he puts them in, but he basically puts them into this little kind of, it's a bomb, I guess, but it's so small that it's not meant for actual effect. It's meant for distraction. And then he makes a silencer with a shopping bag. Well, he needs the shopping bag to hide the gun, right? Because he's walking around this market. But then the bottle serves as a silencer. And he basically passes by...
Speaker: The Chechen throws the firecracker down to create a distraction that just guns him down and runs away and changes clothes out of a garbage can. And it is chased down by assassins sent to kill his brother, but he's been sent in lieu of his brother because I think his brother seems to be aware that they're trying to kill him or something like this.
Speaker: um But he's able to succeed so much, not just because he's tough and he's good with guns, but he's also quite smart, you know, in ah in a particular kind of street smarts way. Like, he knows what he's doing, how to had to kind of MacGyver his way to a solution to a problem.
Speaker: And there is, in that sense, a kind of, like, libertarian fantasy about the movie, or maybe a libertarian reality, which is to say that, like, in the Hobbesian environment without the sovereign, yeah, the people who are the most brutal and capable do succeed because they're willing to do things in a way no one else is.
Speaker: Yeah, he he's incredible he's like a fantasy of self-sufficiency, right? He's like 20 years old and he's yeah nothing particularly phases him. He's like able to like assemble shotgun pellets from nail clippings in his bedroom.
Speaker: And yeah, he's he's he's he's entrepreneurial. he sort of takes over his brother's business and sort of the end of the film is him walking through the snow away from St. Petersburg towards Moscow. And he's also, he's got no preconceptions, right? So i think someone asked him, is it the the German perhaps? Asked him, ah who do you want to be?
Speaker: And he goes, me, I but i don't know. ah He's not constrained by any sort of like concrete identity. You've made me realize something I think is kind of interesting.
Speaker: I can't help but think of the right-wing meme of um hard men, strong men create, like, you know, whatever. Soft men create hard times. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create soft men.
Speaker: And, you know, if you think about this kind of anarcho-capitalist, which, i mean, let's be honest, what was produced in Russia in this period, but like the slightly more neoliberalized version of, you know, Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism?
Speaker: Just because there is still a state that like pretends to exist and funds things in ah kind of inconsistent ways and to benefit itself. um But that set of policies, the way to succeed in that world is to be like a piece of shit.
Speaker: right like that that day It's true, right? And so there is a way in which the movie demonstrates why it is that that kind of guy would want that kind of state to exist. Right? Because the fantasy is that I would succeed because I'm like a hard ass and I could do whatever and I'm smart. When in reality, I mean, most of these chuds would be just like immediately executed by Danila because Danila is not showy. He doesn't have like a Deus volt tattoo. You know, he's not interested in those sort of external signifiers. He just actually is like an automatic killing machine who happens to also be pretty smart. Right.
Speaker: But, That fantasy is itself the kind of ultimate end of history fantasy of like, I would survive in the Wild West. I would be the hard man.
Speaker: um i would have something of a moral code that would actually make me more effective rather than less. Because, you know, there's a ah more kind of like hard-nosed version of this movie where actually his honor code is what gets him killed.
Speaker: Like the real truth is that no honor is the answer, right? You can't have philosophy or connection. um So the movie is sort of still... And it's it's quite Russian in that sense, I think. that it won't it It will go so far, but no further.
Speaker: In the sense that it's it's it's brutal and nihilistic and transactional, but it's still got that kind of very Russian sense of like, yeah, like we're not Americans. yeah There's got to be a line somewhere. you know like i'm i'm going to You've got to pay the fair ticket on the goddamn tram.
Speaker: Exactly. No, and that that I think that those touches, like when we find out he's anti-Semitic or when when he thinks the French guy's American and is like shitting on him, he doesn't seem to notice that he's being turned into an American, right? Like that's sort of what the process that's happening here is. He's being John Wayne-ified, whether he wants to be or not.
Speaker: But there is that part of him that still seems to um doubt. And to be honest, that's probably what pissed Lamona about when he came back, pissed him off. Because he came back and he's like, well, no, but I just left it. The whole reason I left America was, you know, take it away from this. And I'm back and now they've just turned, you know, my my country into the United States. Yeah, the USSR was awful and restrictive and sort of petty bourgeois in its morality. But...
Speaker: This is worse. What? In a way, this is this this void is or is is worse than... That is, in a way, I think, the the precipice on which Gen X exists. And I don't know that for them as a generation, this has tended to emerge as a question in the same way, you know, in ah in a large sense for a lot of people. But it became a bigger deal with millennials.
Speaker: It's like, all right, we all think that the society of the 50s is restrictive. We all think the Soviet Union is restrictive. We don't like these things. And we sort of put forward this more libertine or libertarian idea as an alternative.
Speaker: And, you know, in a lot of ways that was, you know, very effective and positive. But when that wheel doesn't stop turning and eventually, you know, finds itself in the world of like the the truly like Hobbesian, you know, like everyone has the freedom to do whatever they want. then it Then you start to get this nostalgia for something that's a little bit more structured and moral.
Speaker: Yeah, right the world of brat is is a world where the horizon, sort of the paradigm whatever has been blown right open because the people who are sort of, you know, distant of against the Soviet Union beginning in the 1940s all the way up to 1989, 1990 are of two brands really, right? They're either like sort of conservative liberal Democrats, um people like Isaiah Berlin or Solzhenitsyn, you know, that they're Yeah, they're anti the Soviet regime, they're pro-liberal democracy, but I don't think there any of those people would have been pro a kind of meaningless kleptocratic free-for-all.
Speaker: And then you have the kind of dissidents who are sort of pro-socialism of a human face, right? You have people from Hungary in 1956, Czech Republic and then obviously ultimately Gorbachev, um which is ah yeah is a vision of reformed socialism, right? It's moving Soviet-style socialism and towards something closer to social democracy, in a way. Like, let's have some markets, yeah but we'll yeah we'll we'll have some civil liberties. um We're going to reform socialism towards something that is is is more modern and closer to the market. But it's not... Yeah, but neither of these two visions, the sort of maybe the right-wing anti-Soviet vision and the left-wing anti-Soviet vision, are...
Speaker: anything like like in accordance with what actually happened. And I can't help but contrast this just in terms of vibe with the the famous Deng Xiaoping quote, it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, it matters if the cat catches mice, which is like... Yeah, does it work? Yeah. Yeah, which is is funny because it's it's kind of the same idea as the socialism with a human face you know side of things, but it's so much more... um like kind of cutthroat about it. Like it's like, no, no, no, no.
Speaker: The power is going to stay here. You know what I mean? we're That's still happening. It's just we are going to control and deploy what we have to control and deploy to make this work. Whereas the the kind of version that we're talking about here, because it's the, you know, if I can turn it, put on my English teacher hat, it's phrased in terms of the human face rather than the color of the cat, right? It's about the humanism of that efficacy, so to speak, right? it's Is it working for people?
Speaker: rather than is it working to continue propping up the state? And i I got to say, we do have kind of a clear winner in that respect if we're talking about reforming socialism um on on one side of that divide. But it it is... yeah, i was also like, sorry, just I mean, China has some shock doctrine, right? Like it it under Deng Xiaoping, there are liberal reforms. And yet yeah, like China is the sort of counter... ah countermeasure or sort of counter history to conjectural history to the Soviet Union in the sense that it manages to maintain itself and to reform and to allow sort of a level of capitalism to flourish but it doesn't completely bathe its own like social apparatus in like like hy hydrochloric acid right in the way that Russia does
Speaker: Oh, man. You've just given me like a vision, and it's a really evil vision. But like if Chung Kai-shek had won, do you think it would just be like South Korea? like what would What would China be like?
Speaker: That's such an interesting counterfactual. I mean, like, obviously in Japan and Korea, you had effectively like right-wing capitalist dictatorships up until the 80s, right? Yeah. nine I mean, the Liberal Democratic Party are effectively still like almost, they're still basically ah a one-party dictatorship in a lot of ways and in Japan. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I guess, I think if you had that that and that in combination with some kind of US occupation, right? Like, I think that that the the outside factor for Korea and Japan was that they were both, had that sort of anti-communist, sta're quote, liberal democratic dictatorship, but it was also, like, under the sort strategic age of America. And I, yeah, I don't and don' see what the sort of um eventuality would have been where America was occupying the entirety of China, but...
Speaker: Well, and also the Kuomintang was kind of like a warlord criminal party. So like they that you know what I mean? like it's not If they had taken power, you're talking about a situation where they owe a bunch of stuff to a bunch of like local gangsters, essentially. So you have to imagine that that would have produced deep instability. It may have looked like a little bit more like what we see in Brother, but with the caveat that... like having that happen in the 50s is a much better time for the global economy to have that happen than, you know, in the I think that...
Speaker: i do think that um The movie is helpful in a lot of ways for like, this is sounds mean, but but bear with me. If you want, like, I'm not a Russia expert, but I do know it at a decent amount about contemporary Russia. Not as like someone who speaks the language or is super knowledgeable at the ground, but it feels like I've read a decent amount about what goes on over there. And the movie is actually, I think, helpful at understanding why Russia is the way that it is today, by which I specifically mean This is a moment of severe trauma that obviously produces a different kind of Russian like 10 years later, both in terms of the kind of relative passivity of the populace, you know their respect for the existing regime, the fact that a lot of the people who came to power, ah even from behind the scenes, came from these kind of mob environments, including Putin and Prigozhin and these kind of people.
Speaker: it helps us to see that maybe we do still live in Fukuyama's version of the end of history, where we do have a liberal Russian state that is essentially a reformed version of um what we see in the movie Brother. And that a lot of it's irredentism, lot of it's kind of like frightenedness or aggression at the West, a lot of it's um seemingly kind of dour character.
Speaker: is is a result. Because this the Second Chechen War is going to come not much later, and that's when they're going to do some some real war crimes to the Chechens and reassert themselves, right? It's going to be the next thing. But also, say they're going to they're going to co-opt the Chechen chechen elites, right? like the ah Is it Karamazov? Um...
Speaker: The guy with the sort of like small gym owner beard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The kind of guy you can meet in like a gym. Yeah, it's um ah it's killing me because I know his name. It's Kadyrov.
Speaker: Kadyrov, yeah. like i mean, he's the younger son. or He's the least son of the guy. yeah He runs the sort of first Chessian war against Putin and Yeltsin. um And yeah, they're completely sort of co-opted into the Russian state. And they're they're like, well, i don't know how realistic this actually is, but they're presented at least in Russian media as the kind of stormtroopers of the ah Ukrainian offensive against the Ukrainians, right?
Speaker: And there's all these ridiculous videos of them shirtless, like oiled up on like massive trucks in like human pyramids and stuff. I don't know how much fighting they're actually doing, but that they're at least presented as the kind of spearhead of Russia's efforts in Ukraine. So that's a very interesting about 180 turn, right, from the period we're in, rather.
Speaker: Well, because the from the perspective of the Russian state, it restabilizes. You know, that's why it was kind of fun to think about where would Danila end up. Because, like, this mob thing is not going to be allowed to fester forever. Like, Putin is going to come to power and sort of, like...
Speaker: bring a certain degree of order and function to the Russian state. It's going to have all sorts of negative consequences as well. I'm not trying to like gas him up, but it's going to put an end to this true period of like absolute lawlessness.
Speaker: Yeah, and but it's what is replaced with this kind of non-ideological in a very concerning sense. And it is very post-end of... I mean, people say that Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a kind of like a real sort of closure for the end of the end of history. it's and It is in and of itself an end of the end of history. But if you look at the sort of ideology of um United Russia, right? at The Putin's party.
Speaker: It's like, on Wikipedia, it's listed as conservatism, Russian, centrism, official, statism, and Russian nationalism. i mean, like, and then like, political position, big tent. it's Yeah, it's just like, entirely diffuse.
Speaker: You know, it's sort of a there is no sort of like, external objective sort of, um political pursuit. It's just like, in and for itself. It's like, our politics are the persistence of power, persistence of like, the state really sort of, But that is the end of history. like that that's That's why when we talk about, like you know and ah and there's the wonderful Anton Jaeger interview people can listen to, but and I actually i really like his book and I agree with much of his sort of sociological lens, let's call it there.
Speaker: But I think people tend to say, oh, well, the end of history is over because we have the financial crisis, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is like the states are still broadly non-ideological. They still require elections. We still have a globalized world. Those things are fraying in certain ways. But the the kind of political structure, the the the ambiance is not the word I want, but that's what i'm going to say, remains the same. And the sort of economic spokes and remain the same. So, you know... Yeah, everyone's still pretending to have elections, right, in these in these sort of clepto states.
Speaker: Yeah, or like look at Hungary recently with Orban losing. like I was, okay, we had multicultural day recently at school. And of course, where did they stick me for the breakout groups to observe the students but Polish club and Hungarian club? Because they didn't know where else to put me. And um one of the students is Hungarian, like speaks Hungarian. And as part of her side, she was super excited about Orban losing and and Peter Mayer coming in.
Speaker: And listen, how could you not be? I mean, Orban has been you know in in ensconced in his little fiefdom for a bajillion years, but it's not like he was beaten by a, um you know, like a Bella Kuhn or something. You know what I mean? No, Magyar is like a right populist, effectively like a Hungarian nationalist. The only real difference between them is that he is pro-EU.
Speaker: Yeah, like, which, you know, if if that's your vibe, then yeah, sure, that's a victory, I suppose. But it's, it's this the state's ideology is like functionally the same. They're just they're just with a different geopolitical block, but it's not. yeah it's It's exactly the same with Navalny, right, in Russia. Like, Putin and Navalny, what's the actual ideological gap between them beyond like a sort of like very vague alignment with the West or not with the West?
Speaker: Yeah. Well, and I mean, Navalny is a ah great example in that sense because he, i think early in his career, um I think he disavowed a lot of this stuff, but like in this period around Brother and a bit earlier, he's like saying all sorts of crazy like xenophobic shit about everybody. like he's like He's leaning into a lot of the stuff that we would associate now with like you know, I mean, Nazis more or less, or at least like severe xenophobic Russian nationalists.
Speaker: And again, i think as the end of history came along further and he realized he needed to kind of de-ideologize some of that stuff, he he walked away from it. But that makes him a good avatar for the end of history because he's quite pliable.
Speaker: Let's not forget that Orban got started as like a reformist liberal in the aftermath of the Soviet Union. right That's where he started. yeah The opposite of Navalny. They sort of swapped sides. But like, you know, i mean, come on. And you've also got the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia as well, who are they are like far-right nationalists, right?
Speaker: who are they Who are they led by again? I'm i'm trying to remember. av ah Vladimir Zirinovsky, right? um Well, I accidentally Googled the the Liberal Democrats and I got, of course, the British political party. Oh, you know what? I'm sorry. Pause here.
Speaker: I would like a moment of silence. I think we know why Comrade Keir, things did not go as expected or as desired in the recent council elections.
Speaker: And I saw that his snake of a healthcare minister resigned. And I just want to say that he should be hanging his head in shame for defecting from this government at this time.
Speaker: um Mr. Streeting. this says that i and and And you know what? Another thing, the Murdoch media, these right-wing freaks taking a picture of Comrade Starmer in the back of his vehicle when he's not looking.
Speaker: Nobody looks good in the back of a car like that. you know what kind of zoom they're putting on that camera to get that? Come on. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Yeah. it ah Britain is looking to go the way of Russia, I think. and i guess say there's going to be there There will be no sovereign.
Speaker: for but No, no, it's going to be even better. It's going to be that there is a sovereign and it's Charles III, but there's like nothing under that. Like, you know what I mean? It's sort of just a purely formal sovereign. Yeah, he can we can just all just like, you know, get really into like organic gardening and crypto Russian orthodoxy. Yeah, hes he really is the perfect British king in a certain sense because he's just, he's got his little sausage fingers. He loves the Orient, you know, more than anything on earth. he Apparently he talks to his plants. He talks to like plants, you know, so. That's, oh man, he's... He's the Hobbit king. He would have done so well in like the 18th century. Like if, you know what I mean? Like if if he just could have been like George V, you know, on that straight line of George's. I feel like there is mike my granddad was ah organic. This is so off topic. We'll end here. I promise you this is like, my grandfather was briefly an organic, like a pioneering organic farmer. Okay. In the 70s and 80s. And I think he might, he met Charles through a shared love of organic farming. so So there you go.
Speaker: That must have been so cool for for Charles III. Getting to meet like a satrap, probably, from his perspective, you know sort of ah a guy who's in charge of the major city in what he probably still thinks of as the colonies. That's just got to be... What a great time he must have had with that. you know Yeah, would have been very interesting to to to hear their conversations. sure fly I'm sure that they they they faced East and they got down to business. I do love that right-wing British conspiracy theory that he's a crypto-Muslim.
Speaker: No, I know. and was the react The reality is he's actually a crypto. We brush an orthodox. Yes. yeah All right. All right. we should ah You should like, subscribe, rate, listen.
Speaker: Not in that order. but um And here's the other thing. Honestly, from the bottom of my heart, more people have been entering the paid subscription tiers. That really does like warm my heart. And we really do appreciate um everyone who subscribes, ah paid or not. And your comments. Please do feel free to comment. Shoot us an email, deathphotopod at gmail.com. We would love to hear from you. What's Russian for goodbye?
Speaker: This is apparently the most polite one, according to the AI overview at the top of Google search. Svokavroschvyevov.
