Oksana Zabuzhko – Understanding the Vampirlandia: Reflections on the “Country from Which Sanctions Should Be Lifted” by Putin’s Western “Ambassadors of the Other Russia”

Oksana Zabuzhko’s essay delves into the misconceptions and oversimplifications that cloud Western perceptions of Russia and its actions, particularly in the context of the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine.

Through her incisive analysis, Zabuzhko exposes the deep-rooted cultural narratives and stereotypes that have long influenced Western attitudes towards Russia, often leading to misguided interpretations and policy decisions.

The following essay is crucial as it not only critiques the naivety and wishful thinking prevalent in Western intellectual circles but also underscores the urgent need for a more informed and realistic understanding of the “Russian world” and its implications for global security.

“A few days before a significant exchange, NV released a film where three Russians who fled to Europe shared how their own mothers urged them to join the “special military operation” (SMO).

“The reasons varied, from “You can pay off your loans, and your widow will be proud” to “Maybe you’ll even come back” – a note that I made because it struck me as a direct response to my recent work. Just before this, I had finished the preface for the new translation of “The Longest Journey,” in which I wrote:

“Undoubtedly, if Putin’s blitzkrieg had succeeded, there would have been no shortage of experts eager to fit it seamlessly into the [Western worldview], smoothing over any discomfort.

“Despite the potential challenges of a significant country with a 40-million population disappearing from the map of Europe, this worldview, prioritising good relations with the ‘millennia-old’ Russia while viewing Ukraine as some kind of breakaway region, akin to a ‘Bavaria with pretensions,’ would not have been greatly affected.

“However, the blitzkrieg failed disgracefully, leading to the inevitable and unpleasant realisation that ‘things are not what they seem’ – that both sides of this ‘conflict’ are not as the Western public has come to perceive them.

“Reality checked in brutally, threatening the West with perhaps the greatest ideological upheaval of the modern era – an educational revolution, no less, and not just in Slavic studies.

“This was an unwelcome prospect. A reasonably satisfactory ‘story’ was needed, akin to the David versus Goliath narrative, where the aggressor would be condemned, the victim sympathised with, while all other ideological constructs, beams, and rafters (which are fakes, illusions, and stereotypes) would remain intact, promising a happy ending to this grim tale (peace for all peoples and democracy for Russia).

“For the third year, I have observed how, in the absence of such a ‘story’ from either the Ukrainians or the Russian opposition in exile, European intellectuals tirelessly attempt to cobble one together from available materials, striving to keep the previous ideological structure intact.

“The fact that reality repeatedly knocks down their sandcastles as brutally as on 24 February 2022 does not deter or discourage them.

“Initially, the theory spread that this was ‘Putin’s war’ and that the problem lay solely with him, and that Russians would not want to fight because (another false premise!) NO ONE WANTS TO FIGHT. The reality that Putin understood his country better, explaining to the mothers of the fallen that it was better for their sons to die in war than in a car accident or from vodka, because now their meaningless lives had gained meaning (and death significantly improved the family’s welfare, as whole villages feasted on the payout for one killed), caught everyone off guard who imagined Russians based on Netflix adaptations of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

“The next version of this ‘story’ was an attempt to heroise the Russian anti-Putin opposition, which increased sharply in the West with the start of the mobilisation.

“However, this version crumbled when it became clear that in two years in the free world, these people had not managed to organise any significant political action or manifesto. After the death of Navalny, whom the West had seriously seen as a hope for the democratisation of Russia, it turned out that the deceased had left behind no coherent programme, other than to ‘fight better, and without corruption’ (God bless Russian corruption for saving countless lives, not only Ukrainian, with such an opposition, I’d definitely prefer Putin!).

“As I write these lines, Russians in Russia (in the South) have finally started protesting – but, contrary to the hopes of Western politicians, not against the war their country is waging, but against blackouts in their cities: it turns out that when they are genuinely dissatisfied, they are quite capable of blocking streets and making demands of the authorities, without fearing the police or repression.”

“It is clear that the media ‘noise’ of either NV’s film or my book with all its translations and prefaces is incomparable with the media noise instantly seized upon by all the leading world media outlets from the new Kremlin speakers (and I have not come across any mention of Yuri Dmitriev, imprisoned “for Sandarmokh” under a fabricated, as once under Brezhnev-Andropov, “criminal charge”: it seems no one in the West cares about his life anymore – while 40 years ago, both Bukovsky and our Valentin Moroz, and other political prisoners were of great interest, with many human rights organisations fighting for them like lions, and this alone can measure how far the Evil Empire has advanced in destroying Western liberal institutions…).

“But I am speaking about something else here. About what “Russky Mir” is up close, I remind you, I wrote two months before the invasion – in December 2021 in the article “MY WARM LAMP RASHISM,” based on the material of internet sites for the mass female audience.

“A year of observations of them (2021) allowed me to understand HOW precisely mothers can be prepared to perceive the death of a son somewhere in a foreign war as a PROFIT and, accordingly, consider his participation in such a war DESIRABLE.

“And this Great Secret of the Moscow state, even after Bucha and Mariupol, stubbornly does not fit into the heads of Westerners (a Canadian co-producer of the Ukrainian film “INTERCEPTED” even cleaned up the subtitles of intercepted conversations of Russian soldiers with their families – softened them “to suit Western tastes,” apparently not believing the Ukrainian authors about the accuracy of the literal translation, which, in my opinion, greatly spoiled the possible “educational” effect of this film for the Western audience).

“This secret is called mass culture: unlike the USSR, post-1991 Russia has bet on it. And with Russian mass culture – and, more broadly, with the Russian mass consciousness that it serves – the West is unfamiliar to an almost absolute extent: in this area, until the invasion, Western Russian studies were entirely untouched.

“The first known English-language research on this topic appeared as an X-thread by the political scientist Sergej Sumlenny in – I’m not joking! – September 2023.

“You won’t find any books, monographs, or dissertations on what the REAL Russian culture of the last 30 years is, which gave rise to Mariupol and Bucha, in the libraries of any Oxbridges. And what is not named (not described) – does not exist…”