World War ZA new book by historian Ian Garner investigates how the war in Ukraine is transforming Russia into a fascist society.
John Lloyd
10 May 2023
A review of Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth by Ian Garner, 256 pages, C Hurst & Co. (May 2023)
Russia’s fear of invasion is not quite senseless paranoia. The country has been invaded many times since the wave of onslaughts in the 13th and 14th centuries by the Mongol empire. These invasions came from the east and the south and were successful in subduing the Russians, who were then still stateless. More recent attacks, from the 16th century on, came from the Swedes, the Poles, the French, the Ottomans, and—most bloodily—the Germans. All of these left mountains of dead, but still failed.
An all-out invasion of that kind is very unlikely to happen today. If it did, Russia would likely retaliate by going nuclear. According to most estimations, Russia has more nuclear warheads—nearly 6,000—than any other country in the world, including the United States. The invasion Russia now fears is less tangible. It is more like an infection—an infection of democracy, of civil society, of the rule of law, of clean and accountable government. The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, fears institutions like these above all else. He needs protection from them, and to prevent their influence and appeal from seeping into the minds of his country’s youth.
One of these protections—or so Putin believes—is Ukraine. Putin sees that country as a crucial physical bulwark against Western influence, but it has been a centre of the very influences he most fears for more than a decade. If Ukraine is to protect Russia from the West, the country as it presently stands must be destroyed. And for that, new generations of Russia must be persuaded of both its future importance and its present danger.
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That war’s ebb and flow still commands our news and our fears. We know much less about how the conflict has been transforming Russia itself. And according to a new book of close reporting by historian Ian Garner, Russia is using every device of the modern media to create a fascist society, developed and deepened by young men and women, teenagers, and even children, who are having a whale of a time.
Garner’s book is titled Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth. The “Z” in the title refers to a symbol that has become something like an equivalent of the Nazi swastika since the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Today, it represents a sign of support for the Russian army, displayed everywhere and employed prominently in Russian war propaganda.
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Alina, a young woman Garner had known as a student, grew up in Nizhny Tagil, a city on the doorstep of Siberia famed for its tank factories and for metalworking of all kinds. It too had boomed in the 2000s, but by the mid-2010s, orders were reduced, and workers—who had once promised to come to Moscow to deal with the city types protesting against Putin—found themselves attending protest demonstrations instead. But Alina chose her side in adolescence. Born into a comfortable middle-class family, she studied for a degree in graphic design and longed for Moscow. Addicted to her phone, she developed an increasingly violent antipathy to the West and to Ukraine.
In her social-media posts, she now refers to Ukrainians as “Ukrofascists.” She had, Garner observed, “learned to speak a language of violence—a language of Russian Fascism.” Once open and friendly, she will have nothing to do with Garner now. Her last message to him was a photograph of a nuclear explosion with the caption: “Your children were born to be killed by Russians. And nothing more.” Alina, like Ivan Kondakov, is confident in her educated intelligence and they both look forward to a generation purged of Western materialism. “Kondakov,” Garner writes, “speaks fluently in the language of a fascism that subjugates the individual will to the national spirit.”
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/05/10/world-war-z/
