Letter From the Editors

Shockingly, given its talking animals and tongue-in-cheek allegory, Orwell’s “Animal Farm” still strikes the reader as a great work of political realism: It captures how revolutionary movements often first appeal to people’s valid fears and desires, but then eventually melt into the leaders’ drives for power and legitimacy until they become indistinguishable from reactionary institutions. It is not the cynicism of politicians and diplomats that shocks us, but rather the fact that, after assuming the pretense of a popular revolt, a leader would merely stand up on his hind legs and start dividing the spoils with his erstwhile oppressors – like Stalin at Potsdam or Napoleon in the farmhouse.

So when Putin, at the BRICS summit in Kazan this week, explained that the invasion of Ukraine was necessary (We reached out to Western countries, offering to normalize our relations, but they kept treating us like a second-rate country), he should not have been surprised that most of the other leaders present balked at his most ambitious plans to overthrow the current world order. As Republic’s Tatyana Rybakova observed, “The plan was for BRICS to create its own payment system. . . . to undermine the monopoly of the US dollar. But the whole idea turned out to be a castle in the air. It was extremely humiliating for Putin.”

Scholar Brahma Chellaney explained: “Whereas China and Russia want to spearhead a direct challenge to the US-led world order, Brazil and India seek reforms of existing international institutions and appear uneasy about any anti-Western orientation.” And, despite Iranian President Pezeshkian claiming that with the rise of BRICS, “the period of unilateralism in the world is coming to an end,” the bulk of new member states are firmly siding with Brazil and India.

The theme of revolutionary/reactionary ambiguity also plays in Duma speaker Volodin’s recent “childfree propaganda” initiative, which Yabloko’s Sergei Mitrokhin calls “part of the general effort to produce a state ideology.” The Russian people’s valid fears – war, poverty, cultural erosion, demographic crisis – do indeed make an ideology of revolt against Western dominance attractive. But, Mitrokhin points out with regard to Kremlin ideologues, “the adversaries they come up with do not look authentic.” This is because the elites are themselves deeply enmeshed in Western consumer culture and rely on it – alongside vilification of troublesome nonconformists – to maintain the status quo.

To help identify which fears will (safely) motivate the public, Russian politicians can look to the recent National Index of Anxieties. In it, CROS communications company concluded from social media analytics that what Russians have feared the most in the last three months is Ukrainian counterattacks. Access to YouTube has been the second-highest anxiety since it was throttled earlier in 2024. Volodin would be interested to know that “childfree” issues were a significant worry, but many of those who listed it were more concerned that the Duma bill would either lead to infringement on personal rights, or “reverse psychology could come into play” and encourage childlessness. So, with foreign policy, economics, consumerism and private lives off the table, what can the Squealers of this revolution say Russia is revolting against? Some have apparently picked up on an item further down on the anxiety index, quadrobics – a youth subculture that encourages exercise using animal forms of locomotion, sometimes in costume. Mitrokhin points out that it “certainly” meets the Kremlin’s key criteria of “Western influence and open nonconformism” for a useful moral panic. It is also one of the few cultural phenomena growing in popularity on both the Russian and Ukrainian home fronts. Who can blame the kids, though? With sabers rattling and North Korea sending troops into the fray, are they supposed to emulate their human leaders? As the Kinks once sang: “I don’t feel safe in this world no more / I don’t want to die in a nuclear war / I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an apeman!”