Counter-Currents
1,652 words
Let’s talk about the coming potential collapse of Russia, as I mentioned in a previous post.
When the war began, Kremlin propaganda began showing maps of Europe divided into various schizophrenic pre-twentieth century borders. There is actually a bit to say about that alone. Russia is, more than perhaps any other country on the planet, stuck in the past. It’s a recurring theme with Russia. The present in Russia is always shitty and depressing, so they like to look back to previous eras of their history, which they paint as better times in their mind, but which in fact were also shitty and depressing. Right now they miss 1970’s-80’s Russia, and in a few decades they will miss Putin’s Russia, and so on. When examining Russian propaganda, literature, and just Russian society in general, you will notice a longing for the past is always present. Just as a side effect of living in a shitty country, I think, you build a heaven in your mind to escape reality.
Anyway, in return our side started making carved-up maps of Russia, and talking about Russian collapse. Throughout this war I have never stated Russia is on the verge of collapse, and it still isn’t. However, as time has gone on I have observed various state-destabilizing trends get aggravated to the point that I have to discuss it. Here’s my central thesis, and then I’ll get into it.
The Russian state is not on the verge of collapse. However, various individual trends that each alone destabilize states like Russia are continuing to get worse and worse. They are not being addressed, and in large part they cannot even be addressed. As time goes on without change, a Russian state collapse becomes more and more likely. Even if the chance of that happening has only increased from 1% to 2%, tthe fact is the trend is going in a bad direction for the Kremlin.
The cause for alarm for the Kremlin is not that the chances of state collapse are only a few percentage points higher, it’s that the trend is against them.
The first trend I want to discuss is the demographics issue. Russia has had a terrible demographics problem for decades, honestly since 1941. During the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has lost over one million people, overwhelmingly young men and families. What do I mean by this exactly?
Putting aside the casualties suffered in the war, according to Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili over 700,000 Russians have entered Georgia since the mobilization order, with 600,000 leaving for various other countries and 100,000 staying in Georgia. That’s just one country, and does not include other countries or the actual military-aged males who have died or lost their reproductive organs in injuries suffered during the war.
As time goes on, Russia will lose more fertile young men in battle and in emigration, more families will flee, and most will not return. Of the hundreds of thousands of young men who have left Russia, I’m sure many plan to return one day. But then they meet a girl, or they get a good job, or they like the local scenery as a nice change of pace from the apocalyptic and depressing scenery known as the entirety of Russia outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow. That is an insane aggravation to the already deeply-troubled Russian demographic crises.
The big picture is this: In the midst of a terrible Russian demographic crisis, Russia has lost over one million citizens, primarily young men and families, in a matter of months, and will continue to lose young fertile men at a higher rate than it has since the Second World War.
The second trend is the loss of the reputation that Putin and the Kremlin has tried so hard to instill domestically and internationally.
Most Westerners would wave this away, because in the Western world our politicians are open whores and their reputations mean nothing. However, this is a Western perspective, not a Russian or an authoritarian one. Russia is a state built on a premise of strength. Putin is supposed to be perceived as a strong leader who brought dignity and respect to Russia after the humiliation of the 1990s. Most Russians accepted Putin’s rule becoming more and more authoritarian as it also brought on a higher standard of living (compared to the ’90s) and returned Russia to the world stage in a leading role. Now, however, Russia is being humiliated by the Western world on a level not really seen since the First World War. The allegedly second-most powerful military in the world is incapable of taking a city that is 30 minutes from their border (Kharkiv), is getting humiliated by NATO resources and logistics and being expelled from international events, and to top it off, Russian families are continuously losing their sons, brothers, fathers, husbands, and so on in exchange for . . . a sliver of eastern Ukraine.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here
This puts Putin in an extremely difficult situation, as he needs major gains to make the losses the Russian nations has suffered worth it, but in order to have a chance of making those major gains, he needs to keep taking losses by continuing a war whose initial goals clearly failed. He can’t afford to stop, but he also can’t afford to keep going.
The big picture is this: The Kremlin is stuck in a vicious feedback loop where the more losses they suffer, the more gains they need to justify it, which will result in more losses suffered, both of which undermine the very justification of Putin’s authoritarian regime.
The third trend is the looting of the Russian internal state security services for the war in Ukraine.
This goes far beyond the one example I sourced here; it’s something that has been happening for months to various segments of the internal security services establishment. Just when Russian society is becoming more rebellious than it has in decades (think Molotov cocktail attacks against recruitment centers, draft-dodging, and soldiers refusing to return to the front lines), at the same time the Kremlin is looting its security services for military-aged men to send to Ukraine. This has a snowball effect. The worse the war goes, the more discontented Russian society becomes, and the need for looting the security services to send to the frontlines increases. Russia is an authoritarian society that keeps the patchwork coalition of ethnic, cultural, and religious groups known as the Russian Federation together via a strong centralized police state and authority. Looting that police state of its experienced and trained professionals to send to the frontline is a desperate and dangerous gambit for obvious reasons. Right now the anti-war protests and sabotage are minor enough that the Kremlin can afford this, but if segments of Russian society become more rebellious and volatile, the Kremlin may rue this decision.
The big picture is this: Just as Russian society is becoming more rebellious than it has been in years, the Kremlin is looting its experienced and professional state security agents to go die in a foreign war.
The fourth trend is as old as war itself: Military defeat and the resulting economic fallout. From Roman wars to the twenty-first century, a state losing a war, badly, always destabilizes the nation. The prestige fallout is an addition to trend #2, so I will just touch on the economic fallout here.
War is expensive, and when you lose, you just pour the state treasury down the drain. According to Forbes, Russia has spent over $82 billion on the war in Ukraine — over a quarter of its annual budget, and as time goes on they will have to spend even more annually. In spring 2022, Russia made a billion euros a day from energy revenue, but they will never make that again. I won’t go into the minutiae of Russian gas and energy revenues, but after December, when the G7 price limit kicks in, Russian state revenues will take another kick from the West. Western sanctions have a ripple effect across Russian energy revenues. China and India, for example, are paying less for Russian energy products than ever before, and there’s nothing Russia can do to stop that. European sanctions equal Asian discounts, and Russia loses in both scenarios.
The big picture is this: Just as the Russian state is spending more money than ever, they are also making less money than ever.
I could list other trends, but these four major trends illustrate my point quite well. While the Kremlin is not on the verge of collapse, there are various destabilizing trends which are only getting more and more aggravated as time goes on.
Russia is not going to collapse tomorrow. It isn’t going to collapse in the next six months. But the trend of the Russian state is one of destabilization, and that should worry the Kremlin. When you want to predict the future, you never assume the future is going to be like the present. You examine the trends of the present and ask what they will look like in the future. The longer the disastrous Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, the worse things will get for the Kremlin, and at this point they have already spent too many resources to radically alter the paradigm. All they can hope to do now is grind down Ukraine before Ukraine grinds down Russia.
Russia is now in a war of attrition with the entire Western world, and they better hope their superior manpower reserves can prove victorious before even more Russian men and families flee, because a larger population that can be sent to the front is literally the only resource Russia has more of than Ukraine and the West in a long-term war of attrition. The fact that Russia has more tanks and armored vehicles at this point is no longer a factor. Ukraine can get just as many anti-armor weapons as Russia has armor.
Dark days for the Kremlin right now.
Source: https://t.me/JamesArants
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “Paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
- Third, Paywall members have the ability to edit their comments.
- Fourth, Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
- Fifth, Paywall members will have access to the Counter-Currents Telegram group.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
21 comments
absurd cartoon dog CIA astroturf ‘meme’ nonsense map (just look at the thing) you ought to be ashamed of yourself
Our side ? I thought we were white nationalists not Operatives for globo homo “NATO”
There’s a large difference between being on NATO’s side, and being on the side of the Ukrainian Nationalists.
There is no difference, because the foreign Ukranian ruling class tied themselves completely to NATO. And in return the West will impose its rule of stealing by the billions, total corruption, environmental devastation (Monsanto) and wokeness. They will get ‘our Democracy’, and they will get it good and hard.
Most likely true. Indeed, Ukraine should be preserved as an ethnostate, but that is probably not bearing on the minds of Kiev or Washington.
As for demographics in Russia, has no one ever read anything by Solzhenitsyn? He estimates (and estimates are the only way to grasp the horror) that somewhere between 75 million to 100 million, mostly White persons as himself, have perished in Russia between the “Glorious 1917 Revolution” and approximately 1991 when it all splintered, in the Russian prisons, better known as Gulags. That’s a heck of big demographic decline.
Of course, Russia is trying to jazz up its numbers by importing the beloved ‘former Cossacks’ from their Middle Eastern brethren. And how is that going for you, Mr. Putin? You can’t fight a war with troops that don’t give a care about ‘The Homeland”.
Russia does have oil, gas, gold and a vast arsenal of atomic weapons, as we’ve been told to believe, and we’d be dead if we’re wrong about that. But does Putin not see the idiocy of using those weapons? The radiation of Chernobyl is still deforming babies all over its ‘drift pattern’ over Ukraine and other parts of Northern Europe.
Well, my money is on the myriads of young White (i.e., intelligent) Russian lads abandoning their cars at the borders near airports in their intelligent rush to get the hell out of Dodge. That’s going to leave behind a lot of widows, orphans and ex-girlfriends, who are certainly not fodder for the army. Good luck, Putin, and may you soon step on a ‘misplaced’ land-mine on your way to your dazzling dacha.
I’ve researched further and am finding that all of the other ‘holocausts’ that have happened in the 20th Century have been ‘downgraded’ as to how many perished. I looked up the figures for the Armenian Genocide in 1914-17, and the “Holodomor” (which translates to ‘genocide by starvation’) in Ukraine in 1932-33, at the hands of the Soviets who controlled Ukraine at that time — and both were downgraded by the United Nations. Funny — now both have ‘death rates’ below 6 million. The 70-year ongoing imprisonment (including torture and starvation, etc. as described in gruesome detail by Solzhenitsyn) of ‘serfs’ and ‘discontents’ in Soviet Russian gulags is nowhere mentioned. I find that quite strange. But I guess no one could possibly kill more than 6 million people other than the Nazis.
Are you reading Robert Conquest, and then the more extensive and perhaps methodologically precise calculations of 20th century genocide produced by R. J. Rummel?
and the “Holodomor” (which translates to ‘genocide by starvation’) in Ukraine in 1932-33
Сomrade Roosevelt has recognized the Soviet Union and established diplomatic relations with Soviets just during and after the Famine in Qazaqstan, Ukraine and Kaflasus in 1932-33. And Comrade Duranty has written, that there was no hunger in the SU.
The author keeps referring to “fertile young men”. Good news, chap: we are still fertile as lions in winter. Fewer patriotic Russian men will the rest of the nations womanhood to itself. That’s all.
Hopefully, those wonderful fertile young Russian men who are avoiding sure death and/or serious injury by fleeing to the West, will ‘send for’ their womenfolk once they are settled in Germany, Hungary, or the Balkans, etc., and set up housekeeping and produce lovely white kids that ‘look like us’. We must encourage them any way we can.
No, they will stay in Germany, France or Italy or Spain. Or Georgia, or Qazaqstan. They will never learn languages of their new host countries. They will get social help from the governments, and they will call the population of their “adopted” countries fools and idiots. And then, later, when they establish there, they will ask Comrade Putin to bring the Russian troops there and “save them” of the oppression of bad and evil Germans, Italians, Georgians or Qazaqs.
Hadn’t Russia been at the point of collapse before — just over a century ago? I seem to recall that the ensuing events were highly unpleasant for both Russians and their neighbours. Undoubtedly there are voices in the globalising centre-left hegemony who will call for a defeated Russia to be chastened and truncated in the manner of post-war Germany, with a solid programme of consumerism, demographic enrichment and education imposed to prevent her ever raising again. We used to call such persons ‘neo-conservatives’ and we should bear in mind, in our haste to dissociate ourselves from Putin, that they remain implacably hostile to our cause as well.
The demographic consequences of draft-dodging emigration will likely be rather grim. Those with the means and desire to leave are likely disproportionately European compared to the young male Russian (in terms of passport ownership) population as a whole. Asiatics and others will stay behind and continue to grow in population share.
One might hope that the weakening of Putin’s security state would leave more breathing room for racially-concerned Russians, but I can’t allow myself to be that overly-optimistic. Even in the most extreme scenarios (in which the current regime actually falls in the near future), its successor is more likely to be worse for our race than better.
As much as I would love for someone to prove me wrong and demonstrate that the situation for our race in that region is not as bad as it seems, I just can’t help but be pessimistic.
Memes and nonsense aside (I am willfully ignorant on Russian affairs at the moment, taking in no information is better than taking in the wrong information), Russia has always occupied a niche on the world stage that seems tenuous. They’re not European, not Asian, not East or West, not really much of anything despite being such an enormous region with so many people in it. Its a smorgasbord of conquered peoples constituting what portends to be a Nation. They have this in common with China, perhaps it’s the prerequisite of the success of Communism in any given state: weakness and rootlessness, or rather an overabundance of too many different roots. Russia can’t be characterized as anything but Russia – it’s chronically isolated and will probably stay that way cause while outside forces may want regime change in Russia now and in the past, quite frankly no one wants to actually conquer or occupy it.
Hilarious article. Russia has something the west doesn’t have and needs desperately: energy. Other natural resources as well. Russia can feed itself. There’s a reason you don’t see Russian made things in your house, they don’t need to sell us any cheap, plastic junk the way China does.
As to other commentator talking about fleeing young Russians, going west? Prove it. Also, 75 million killed during Bolshevism seems a tad exaggerated, but since we’re on the subject, who did the killing?
But yeah, the Kremlin is on shaky grounds. Especially given Putin looks so sickly and all, with his purple hands and trembling arms.
Russia has something the west doesn’t have and needs desperately: energy.
Well, not RUSSIA has energy, but colonialized and oppressed NON-RUSSIAN peoples of SIberia, Edil-Ural, Kafkasus, and Far East do have. And when some Bantus, Zulus, Masai, Hottentots and other African tribes have the right for own statehood and national independence, why Siberian, Altaic, Kafkasian, Edil-Ural and other peoples do not have such right? The Sahalar (Yakutians) can sell THEIR gold and diamands directly to foreign buyers and get money for themselves, without feeding Russian imperialists, Jewish oligarchs and Armenian propgandists in Moscow. Tatars and Bashkorts can sell their oil, and Siberian peoples, incl. Siberian Russians (who hate Moscow not less than native non-Russians) will sell their (and not Muscovite) gas. Kafkasians have OIL and GAS too. But Moscow itself does not have OWN natural ressources, thus it has nothing to offer to the world, but only terror, fear and aggression.
Thanks to the author for this article. Certainly, the needless Ukraine invasion will long be studied by those interested in the history of strategic, and especially, in this instance, Grand Strategic, miscalculation. Putin gravely misread many aspects of his situation, from the minimal benefit of the invasion even if successful; to the willingness of effete Western nations to fund what is for them “war on the cheap” (we are more profligate with money than our men); to the professional options educated Russians might have via emigration.
But what does “the collapse of Russia” mean, exactly? That the Putin regime might get overthrown, either by a People’s Revolution in the streets, or a military coup d’etat? That ethnic separatist movements within Russia (who are they?) might stage successful secessionist actions? That Moscow will issue edicts that will be regionally ignored? I really don’t know. I just hope any collapse doesn’t include the “privateering” of nuclear weapons, which could easily be spirited to our Islamist enemies in the event of a true collapse of central authority.
In Ukraine the Battalion TURAN is now organized, consisting of Tuerkic peoples of Russia and other post-Soviet states.
clicked for the article,
stayed for the vatnik butthurt.
Face it Chuds; “russia’s side” is the coalition of third world losers.
Isn’t that simply a map of administrative provinces with a Un logo slapped on?
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.