I’ve been all over the world.
Still nothing like the USA.
“One of the most powerful human motivations is resentment. If you’ve ever been humiliated, you may bear the grudge forever. It may shape your interactions with others in daily life, as well as your politics and worldview. That would explain a lot about Russians in the era of the Ukraine War — and even more about their president, Vladimir Putin.
That, at least, is the thesis of Grigory Yudin, a Russian sociologist who was one of the few to predict Putin’s unprovoked attack against Ukraine in February of 2022. As Yudin sees it, many Russians connect with their leader at a psychological level, because both wallow in “resentment — monstrous, endless resentment.”
It’s this mental universe of bitterness and grievance that makes Putin and his Russian supporters uninterested in nurturing productive and positive relationships with other countries. In that way, Putin and the Russians Yudin has in mind resemble “a young child who gets deeply offended and then hurts those around him,” the sociologist says. “The harm grows greater and greater, and at some point, he seriously begins destroying others’ lives, as well as his own.”
Where does this resentment come from? Much has been said about the humiliation many Russians felt when the Soviet Union collapsed, the event that Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.” Seemingly overnight, their country went from one of two superpowers to something resembling a developing country.
The worst part, Yudin reckons, was that efforts by the US and Europe — “the West” — to include Russia in international institutions and help it prosper instead came across to Russians, including Putin, as lecturing. And nobody likes to be lectured, especially if you consider yourself a great power. The result was more humiliation.
Allowed to fester, this humiliation grew as Russia failed to flourish economically, and as countries formerly in Moscow’s orbit threw themselves enthusiastically into the arms of the West by joining NATO and the European Union. If Ukrainians had been allowed to go that way too, the shame in Putin’s mind would have been unbearable. So, like the surly boy in Yudin’s analogy, he began destroying. “
Me too
I say amen and amen