“How is that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
I am not sure that is what happened in the case of the Russian people. Two years ago I would pass this statement up as a reasonable idealization of the events of 1990's in Russia. But the aggression in Ukraine and rise of the popular neo-Soviet, even Stalinist sentiment showed that the Russian nation has shrunk to insignificance in Russia, and the new Soviet man is as in charge now as he was since the Bolshevik revolution; that man sees no value in freedom and sees his historical duty in destroying the freedom of others.
Putin and putinism will be destroyed; but the potential of what remains of Russia to "rise up and free itself", I think, has been spent.