来源
《纽约时报》
发布时间
Aug 6, 2023
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- As I traveled from Siberia to Belgorod on Russia’s western border with Ukraine, across the vertigo-inducing vastness that informs Russian assertiveness, I found a country uncertain of its direction or meaning, torn between the glorious myths that Mr. Putin has cultivated and everyday struggle.
这就像是托尔斯泰所写的那样。
- Yet, after 23 years leading Russia, Mr. Putin’s hold on power is still firm as fighting intensifies in southern and eastern Ukraine. He learned long ago, indeed from the outset of his rule in 2000, that, as the author Masha Gessen has put it, “wars were almost as good as crackdowns because they discredited anyone who wanted to complicate things.”He has always used war — in Chechnya, in Georgia and in Ukraine — to unite Russians in the simplistic myths of nationalism and to usher them to the simplistic conclusion that his increasingly repressive rule is so essential that it must be eternal.
- Still, as far as possible, the war must be invisible, banished to places like Ulan-Ude, near Lake Baikal, not far from the Mongolian border. That is done, in part, by paying recruits about $2,500 a month, a huge sum in a region where a monthly salary of $500 is more typical.
“Money is the main reason people go to fight,” Ms. Rolikova said. “The contracts being offered volunteers are crazy by our standards.”But all of the money that Mr. Putin showers on remotest Russia only brings the war into sharper relief. It is etched in the fearful faces of young recruits lining up at the airport for flights to Moscow, and from there overland to Rostov-on-Don and into Ukraine. It is in the freshly turned soil of cemeteries where young men are laid to rest. It is in the air, a pall of dread.
- “We are told one truth, they are told another truth,” she said. “But why do we need to kill each other like in World War I?”
- For all of Mr. Putin’s efforts to vilify the West, it still lives in the Russian imagination as a chimera of cool.
- “Our values are different,” Mr. Tolstoy said. “For Russians, freedom and economic factors are secondary to the integrity of our state and the safeguarding of the Russian world.”
Mr. Putin’s rule is all about the reconstitution of this imagined Russian world, or “Russkiy mir,” a revanchist myth built around the idea of an eternal Russian cultural and imperial sphere of which Ukraine — its decision to become an independent state never forgiven — is an integral part.
- Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families, ferocious attacks on a “unipolar” American world with revived Russian imperialist aggression — all held together by the ruthless suppression of dissident voices and recourse to violence when necessary.
普京主义是后现代矛盾的集合体。它既有对苏联的乏味怀旧，又有黑手党资本主义；既有对东正教的虔诚，又有破碎家庭的蔓延；既有对美国 "单极 "世界的猛烈抨击，又有俄罗斯帝国主义侵略的死灰复燃。
- Outside, the mood was less exultant.Salaries averaging a few hundred dollars a month mean a hardscrabble existence for many.
朱门酒肉臭，路有冻死骨
- The past 17 months have resembled a funeral march. The government closed down Novaya, along with most independent media, soon after the war began. A branch of the paper, Novaya Gazeta Europe, now publishes in Riga, Latvia. Mr. Muratov stayed on in Russia, a country “where truth is now a crime,” as he put it.
The truth speakers — Mr. Navalny, the outspoken Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, the war critic Ilya Yashin, the theater director Yevgeniya Berkovich, the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and countless other writers and poets — are all in prison.
“We are the suffocated society,” Mr. Muratov says. “Russia has become a tower of silence.”Nobody, he argues, knows what the country really thinks. All that is known is that the older generation believes in Mr. Putin with a religious passion.
As for the young, up to one million of the best and the brightest have left since the war began. These young Russians, Mr. Muratov tells me, did not want to kill or be killed. They did not think that glory was attained through bloodshed. If anything, they believe glory lies in art and intellect. To replace them will take a generation or more, he believes.
过去的 17 个月就像一场葬礼。战争开始后不久，政府就关闭了《新报》和大多数独立媒体。新报》的一个分社，即《欧洲新报》，现在拉脱维亚的里加出版。穆拉托夫先生留在了俄罗斯，正如他所说的那样，"在这个国家，真相现在是一种犯罪"。
真理的代言人--纳瓦尔尼先生、直言不讳的克里姆林宫评论家弗拉基米尔-卡拉-穆尔扎、战争评论家伊利亚-雅辛、戏剧导演叶夫根尼娅-别尔科维奇、剧作家斯韦特兰娜-彼得里丘克以及无数其他作家和诗人--都被关进了监狱。
"穆拉托夫先生说："我们是窒息的社会。"俄罗斯已成为一座沉默之塔"。他认为，没有人知道这个国家的真实想法。人们只知道，老一代人以宗教般的热情信仰普京先生。
至于年轻人，自战争开始以来，多达一百万最优秀和最聪明的人已经离开。穆拉托夫先生告诉我，这些俄罗斯年轻人不想杀人，也不想被杀。他们不认为荣耀是通过流血获得的。如果说有的话，他们认为荣耀在于艺术和智慧。他认为，要取代他们需要一代人甚至更多的时间。
- For Mr. Putin, the war has expanded in character, becoming the culmination of a civilizational war against the West. It may unfold in Ukraine, but Moscow’s enemies lie beyond.
The United States, Europe and NATO are now consistently identified as sources of “outright Satanism,” in the recent words of Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service.
Being ideological, the war is doubly intractable. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told me. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”
Anti-Western invective has attained phantasmagorical proportions. It is part of an emergent state ideology that is setting a course for possibly decades of confrontation.
Thirty years after Russia — in the midst of the ardent liberal hopes of the 1990s — adopted a Constitution whose Article 13 said, “No ideology shall be proclaimed as State ideology,” Mr. Putin’s Russia is hurtling toward a new official ideology of conservative values.
对普京先生来说，这场战争的性质已经扩大，成为针对西方的文明战争的高潮。战争可能在乌克兰展开，但莫斯科的敌人却在乌克兰之外。
用俄罗斯对外情报局局长谢尔盖-纳里什金最近的话说，美国、欧洲和北约现在一直被认定为 "赤裸裸的撒旦主义 "的源头。
由于意识形态的原因，这场战争加倍棘手。"克里姆林宫发言人德米特里-佩斯科夫告诉我："目前没有达成协议的理由。"在可预见的未来，我们将继续行动"。
反西方的谩骂已经达到了幻象的程度。这是一种新兴国家意识形态的一部分，它为可能长达数十年的对抗设定了方向。
俄罗斯在 20 世纪 90 年代热衷于自由主义的希望中通过了一部宪法，其中第 13 条规定 "任何意识形态都不得宣布为国家意识形态"，30 年后，普京先生的俄罗斯正朝着保守价值观的新官方意识形态迈进。
- By insisting, against all evidence, that Ukraine is a nation run by Fascists and Nazis, and by suggesting that the West wants Ukraine to be another home of gender-transitioning moral decay, Mr. Putin has successfully turned a war of aggression into a defensive war, essential to save Russia from those intent on ripping apart its physical and moral fabric.
普京先生违背所有证据，坚称乌克兰是一个由法西斯主义者和纳粹统治的国家，并暗示西方希望乌克兰成为另一个性别转换的道德败坏的家园，他成功地将一场侵略战争转变成了一场防御战，这场战争对于将俄罗斯从那些意图撕裂其物质和道德结构的人手中拯救出来至关重要。
- Nationalism is not fascism, but it is an essential component of it. Its perennial essence is a promise to change the present in the name of an illusory past in order to forge a future vague in all respects except its glory.
“History for Putin is an instrument to shape current events. He is absolutely uninterested in historical truth,” said Oleg Orlov, a leading human rights activist for more than three decades at the head of Memorial, which was shut down in 2021.
民族主义不是法西斯主义，但却是法西斯主义的重要组成部分。其永恒的本质是承诺以虚幻的过去之名改变现在，以打造一个除了荣耀之外各方面都模糊不清的未来。
"对普京来说，历史是塑造当前事件的工具。奥列格-奥尔洛夫（Oleg Orlov）说，"他对历史真相绝对不感兴趣"。
- He told me that there were now two options. The first was that Mr. Putin would be replaced somehow, and that a period of reform would start, as under Khrushchev after Stalin.“The second option, which is more realistic, is that the regime stays in place and Russia will be slowly dying,” Mr. Orlov said. “It will fall behind other countries, and to make this regime stable, the level of repression will rise
- “Nobody came and asked us: Do we want this war or do we not?” Ms. Rolikova said.
- There was a big TV in his room. On it, playing over and over, were images of bombings and explosions in Ukraine. As Mr. Muratov left the room, he heard Mr. Gorbachev say: “Who could be happy because of this?”
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