One consequence of Russia's war on Ukraine may turn out to be a long-overdue self-examination of Russian society's acceptance of brutal crimes against humanity.
In discussing the lack of more vigorous anti-war protest in Russia and civil society's support for Russia's war on Ukraine (Is Russian Civil Society Dead?)--despite the barbaric conduct of Russia's military--I had written that Russians' readiness to lie and to be lied to is symptomatic of acquiescence and avoidance. That,
"The real problem is Russian society’s fragility–the flipside of a belligerent Russia–due to a lack of social institutions that protect the individual; that belligerence is Russian society’s impotent rage at their awareness that the world is not what they are told and they are not who they believe themselves to be."
Individual Russians are confronting that same fragility in Russian society as they watch the barbarism of the Russian military unfold in Ukraine.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Foreign Affairs (Putin's Aggression Has Turned a Nation Against Itself), writes,
"Today, the dominant response of ordinary Russians to the war is aggression. It is undergirded by what seems to be an almost subconscious effort to block out any bad news, and with it, any sense that the nation might be in the wrong. Fear of authority not only prevents people from protesting against a barbaric war; it also makes them unable to admit even to themselves that Putin’s Russia has committed something dreadful. It is frightening to be on the side of evil."
And, Natalia Sindeyeva, former head of Russian independent media TVRain, in an interview with the Financial Times (FT's interview: Russia's Unlikely Media Revolutionary), "thinks the problem has deeper roots in Russia's failure to hold a truth and reconciliation process in the way Germany did after the second world war...'We didn't get together as a country, as a society, to recognise the mistakes that were made. It all went unsaid.''
..."It's not just collective guilt but collective complicity. What Putin's done is smear everyone, so you become part of it even without doing anything." She describes a"cognitive dissonance" of complicity; "You can't imagine that your government, which you believed in, could have done something like that. You start convincing yourself and everyone around you that it's all lies and you know the truth..."At some point you have to convince yourself, because otherwise you just lose your mind."
Russia has launched a war without a rationale. A war that is simply an eruption of violence. As a consequence, Russian society is racing toward an abyss of self-recognition of its own complicity.
