Alexander Nevzorov: Empty Russian Trojan horse

On the Russian interference into the political process in other countries

As physics explains to us, relationships can be both positive and negative. Everybody is linked to Russia in one way or another. Without this relationship, there can be no modern politicians. And, truth to be told, I can’t understand this nonsense when everyone criticizes each other for the existence of certain connections and relationships. Politics itself implies the existence of connections between all people. Without these links, there’s no politics.

Concerns about some Mordor-ish Russian forces that penetrate some political structures and begin to manipulate them are absolutely childish and primitive. Present-day Russia doesn’t have any substance, any powerful integral part. It’s empty. We just have to be honest about that.

Its military potential is largely a wild myth. No matter how much iron and hardware a country has, a military potential is in the first place a desire of every soldier to fight. There’s no motivation to fight among Russians. Presently Russia cannot offer the West anything that could destroy or interest it. Russia doesn’t have any ideology other than megalomania, a funny delusion that has no basis in reality and defies rational explanation.

It might sound strange, but I recommend you to familiarize yourself with the works of the strongest and most dangerous author from the point of view of liberalism – Alexandr Dugin. When you read Dugin, you understand that there’s simply no secret, no ideological core. There are talks about something sublime and unattainable, mysterious and secret, but there are no specifics.

Nowadays Russia has only two real paths – the necessity of peace and the necessity of development and prosperity. Both of these things are only possible if it joins the EU or NATO. There are no other options. All toying with some special way is only a game that can’t last forever.

Authors-Slavophiles, mad philosophers, dugins and ilyins could once mislead some people that there’s some special Russian secret, a great mystery unknown to the West, deadly and beneficial at the same time, but now we’re sure that there’s no mystery. We now know that the spirituality they’ve talked about relies entirely on the well-known article of the Penal Code, but people are tired of it and it’s falling out of fashion in Russia very fast. And it means that this spirituality isn’t a legal ideological tender.

The only secrets Russia possesses right now are the secret of how a country in the XXI century can have thirty million sinkholes as toilets without sewage system or the secret of how it can be possible to successfully and quietly torture everyone in every prison and a number of other cute spicy things that aren’t really secrets to anyone.

Russia is harmless. It doesn’t pose any danger to the world. And this is the scariest thing to this country.

It doesn’t carry with it any fascinating, mind-blowing, delightful, dangerous, poisonous or any other idea because you can’t consider an idea all these funny fringe tricks of poklonskayas and milonovs who make faces telling about their spirituality and how special they are. And any agents, any agents of influence, any «Trojan horses» are dangerous only if they have some internal substance.

It’s a very Russian thing to do to spend so much effort, money, planks, nails, to hit all fingers with hammers in order to make an empty Trojan horse. Then this empty Trojan horse is brought into the next Western Troy, and everyone there are tense, they’re waiting for something deadly coming out of this cursed body, this scary Russian Trojan horse, but nothing happens. There’s nothing in this Trojan horse other than sawdust, bent nails, hay straws and a couple of bottles forgotten by builders.

The guys who still play with Communism are able to hypnotize themselves without any outside help because the Marxist and Communist idea is more purely and richly represented in the books of classic Marxists. Leninism is only an adaptation of this idea to the horrible times at the beginning of the XX century. Therefore, it’s not scary.

Is there anything with which Russia could possibly infect the West? It can’t steer the Western world away from its development, progress and normality. And it doesn't want to. It just has no purpose at all. It’s the most dramatic and unpleasant thing. That’s why I understand the West’s amazement and confusion – it’s used to dealing with the enemy who has something in mind, with the enemy who became the enemy for some fundamental, serious reasons – geographical, resource-based, economic.

But there are no reasons for modern Russia to be anyone’s enemy because it’s totally devoid of any meaningful substance. The wild ideology it fed on in the XIX century and the Communist ideology it fed on in the XX century are long dead and it doesn’t have anything to infect others with.

Russia simply moves along. People that live here are passionate and eager, so it has to move somehow. And these people don’t mind if it’s a movement of a hamster in a wheel. The main thing is that this hamster has a big, voluminous tail and tasselled ears, and it can carry out all these motions with appalling speed. Our intelligence services don’t know what they’re looking for because there’s nothing to look for. They don’t really care about traitors, and they poison them out of mere habit because an intelligence agency must participate in some sort of activity after all.

But thanks to that purposeless and harmless Russia manages to cause such a commotion that everyone turns into these hamsters as well. And the whole thing produces a certain amount of media energy that entertains a layperson quite well which must be the only meaning and purpose of all their mad contortions.

Nothing can stop our hamster – no sanctions, threats or mortal dangers. Russia feeds on sanctions. It needs them because the leadership of Russia can only offer its populace the happiness of being surrounded by enemies. Although, in theory, the aim of any government in any country is radically different – to gain friends, influence, to expand commercial, economic, political relationships, not to become isolated, Russian government boasts about its isolation, it’s proud of these sanctions like it has won the lottery.