A couple of weeks ago, I started a new series, and this is going to be the third episode of it, where I am going through what I call the Luhansk archive, the Luhansk corpus, which was the data set from which I generated the Disinfolklore analysis. I am going through the different archetypal identities in each of these stories.
This is a core part of the analytical method: this idea I have of mobile armies of archetypes — really, archetypal identities. You have the signifier, you have the surface, the phenomenon. You have the gold in Donald’s office in the White House — that is surface. That is an archetypal identifier. Then you have the identity associated with it, which is what it is supposed to signify on the surface level, but also subconsciously.
I talk in all my work about archetypes and archetypal identities and archetyping, but this mode of analysis was generated from this corpus, which I gathered, collected, and analysed, and tried to understand what on earth was going on when I first encountered it in eastern Ukraine.
Why This Is Relevant to Ukraine: A War of Symbols
Why is this relevant to Ukraine? We are all here for Ukraine. We obviously have the connection between Donald and America and Ukraine, which has just been spoken about. We also have, on the level of the war itself, that it is a war of symbols. It is a war of archetypes.
When we see Russia sending a thousand humans to their doom each day, they are trying to affect and project archetypal identities into the minds of the decision-makers and the non-decision-makers like normal people like us. They are trying to impact the minds of humanity and to persuade us that they are strong. That sacrifice is being made — despite us knowing in this space that they are not strong — to try to convince people that they are strong. Strength and strongman is an archetype, and the archetypal identity is between Putler and a strongman, or between Donald and a strongman. Of course, we understand the true archetypal identity there is between, say, President Zelenskyy with the Ukrainian people and strength. That is also why it is relevant.
The Ballroom: Folkloric Motif Before Architecture
This week, we saw the obsession with the so-called ballroom. This is the relevance of the Disinfolklore analytical method. As far as I am aware, nobody else has noticed this phenomenon yet, despite it being so obvious. You can get your eye in because you have been reading me or listening to me.
The ballroom. The repetition of the ballroom — that phrase, that archetype, which we all remember from children’s stories, from Cinderella: you will not go to the ball, you will go to the ball, the slipper, Disney. That is the payload. It is everywhere in our information space, whether you want the ballroom built or whether you do not want the ballroom built. People this afternoon are sharing photographs of the gold in the Oval Office. By sharing a photograph of this gold in the Oval Office, we are actually participating in the embedding of an archetypal identity that we may or may not agree with. From the standpoint of the intelligence and the people who are trying to affect our moods, our intentions, and our motivations by using these archetypes, this idea of the ballroom — they do not care, because the energy is being continued, and the picture is being continued.
What I try to do in all my work is just give us a bit of a guide, because I see it. I see the same energy, the same tactics that were used in eastern Ukraine, and it can help us understand what is going on in today’s world.
I wrote a piece this week — I have been meaning to write it for a very long time — because of this obsession and this repetition, this mantra, like Hunter Biden. This is the point of it: whether you are for or against it — ballroom, ballroom. Yes, I could fall into that trap, but I am claiming a special exemption. I can use the archetype ballroom, ballroom, ballroom here, because I am trying to explain a perspective on what it means and its impact, and why suddenly this is in everyone’s minds — everyone who is tuned into the American infospace.
The ballroom is a folkloric motif before it is an architectural one. We have to understand that. A lot of the debate is showing pictures of the destruction of the East Wing, which is one archetype: destroy the heart of American identity. Yes, if you want to destroy that, then you physically destroy the building. That is one element, one archetype. I am not focusing on that. I am focusing on this idea that a Republican Party — whose moniker, whose archetype is as a Republican — will be banging on about a ballroom.
Three Inflections of the Ballroom: King’s Hall, Mead Hall, Cinderella
It is a folkloric motif. Three of its inflections are doing the work here.
The first is the King’s Hall. Some of you know my Finding Manuland project, the exchange of mana. Part of my motivation to look for that was reading in Irish mythological tales. So many of them are set in the King’s Hall. It is a table replete with food, and it is about the exchange of what I call mana. Homer — the composite individual, Homer who toured, and the different other people who toured the coast, the western coast of Anatolia, of today’s Turkey — and spoke at certain festivals where food was exchanged. The king, the monarch, would pay for these huge feasts, and these tales — a bit like I am regaling you with a tale now — would be told. Those eventually were written down, and that is the Iliad and the Odyssey. We see it also in Indian culture. It was just a curiosity to me, because it is quite alien from most of our lives. I think it is important to sit down in a room — but for some people who went to older universities, or old boys, or Rotary Club, there is all this thing about food and the exchange of energy in those rooms, so there is part of that.
The gilded Oval Office, his gold card, his own face engraved on it, his Mar-a-Lago, Rococo mirrors, and now his East Wing ballroom — they are all operating in the same gift economy of sovereign favour, in the same idiom of polished gold.
I went once to the mansion that Yanukovych — who was president of Ukraine until he ran away in February 2014 — owned. I was expecting this mythical place that had been built. I think it cost maybe 100, 150 million dollars. It had a Spanish galleon on it. I do not think it had any zebras, but they were not there when I went to visit it. I was expecting to hate it, but actually I had never been anywhere like it. It was just every detail: from the gold loo brushes to the underground corridors, to the perfectly sculpted rooms to resemble the Holy Grail and suits of armour, brand-new suits of armour, all done — and then you move into modernity and John Lennon, a Steinway piano, and just beauty, and birds fluttering around, singing songbirds. It was one of the most beautiful houses I have ever been in. On the face of it, it seemed gaudy.
I draw that in because, while many people advertise this gold and this royal stuff, we think we are making a point by saying it is gauche. There is a semiotic and archetypal reason why this is being done, and why it has the effect it has. Whether he understands it on the level I am talking about now or not, he does understand the effect of it on people. This is why he is where he is today.
The second inflection is the Mead Hall, the room in which the king becomes the king. Many of us have perhaps wondered about Mar-a-Lago. It is just so sad. It is such a weird thing. Many of us would just prefer to be at home or be with our family and our pets, yet he wants to reside in this public space, because that is where the king becomes the king. It is Versailles. He is quoting, he is representing, Louis XIV in 2026. That is the antithesis. It is the reversal of the Republic. It is the reversal of 300 years of history. It is completely consistent with the idea to destroy and eradicate every memory of the post-World War II legal order, and indeed even the constitutional order before it. The reference is not generic luxury. It is the particular memory of a court that danced while the country starved. That is the citation by an administration whose Project 2025 and DOGE and all of that is about producing disequilibrium, and disequilibrium-analysing the entire globe all the time, while supposedly running a fake blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, except letting through — and this is where the axis of misogyny operating on the level of oligarchy let through this big Russian yacht the other day. Iran, Oman, and the United States colluded to allow through this oligarch’s yacht. That is the props.
The third inflection is the Cinderella ballroom, the room in which status is confirmed. The whole passport thing is also part of this — the room in which the door closes at midnight on those whose invitation has expired. The presidential ballroom is by its nature a guest list. A Republican space by its nature is not.
The Law of Similarity and the Gilded Monarchy Set
I have talked a bit before about the law of similarity: things that look alike are treated alike. This is why we fall for trolls, why we look at photographs of people and think we are looking at something real. It is very important in disinformation. The gold leaf, the crystal, the Rococo mirroring produce similarity by association. It is the archetype of monarchical sovereignty.
I posted this yesterday morning. The eye reads the whole, and the unconscious reads the king, the monarch. Read alongside the long-link “to the King” Truth Social post, where he is archetyping himself as king; the AI-generated crown portraits; the Mar-a-Lago oval; the gold card; the military parade — the ballroom is not an ornament. It is the missing room in a coherent set. The set’s archetypal payload is gilded monarchy.
Adjudicated against the Code of Positive Trolls, the ballroom fails generosity, because it is exclusionary by definition. It fails right, because it inverts the meaning of the White House, the building it is bolted onto. It fails patronisation. A folktale is being installed where a constitution used to stand.
Archetyping and the R-CH Element: The Sovereign’s Rod
About an hour later I posted this bit, and this was the essence of my fourth-anniversary speech and the move I made, which is very important to my work and the idea of archetyping. You have that R-IC, that R-CH element in archetyping. Monarchy at the end of it: R-C-H. Right, writ, rule — all from the early Indo-European root to stretch a rod, straight, a straight rod, which symbolised sovereignty.
When President Zelenskyy was inaugurated, there is a picture I often share of him. In his right hand — always in his right hand — he holds a mace, a right rod with an orb at the top of it: the symbol of sovereignty. When Charles became king, likewise, in his right hand. These are the accoutrements of Indo-European sovereignty. They go back 6,000 years. Why is this relevant? They go back 6,000 years to Ukraine, to Zaporizhzhia, to Mykolaivka village on the right bank.
We now know this because these symbols are used to manifest kingship in every Indo-European culture, from Celtic Ireland through now Germanic Britain — formerly Celtic Britain — to India and to Iran. We know this because we have the seals, the writing, the language, the rit; our “right” sound is in there.
The rik, the rich element — it is also in rich, rich person. The rik element performs the same function as the rik element in archetype. It is also in archetype. It is in monarchy, an archetype. It installs the rik encoded in the archetype being used. This is one of my big insights over the past year. The ballroom archetype is the folkloric trope of the monarch — the rach in archetype and in monarch, right, Reich. This is what is going on here.
Disinfolklore works through deeply encoded archetypes that penetrate our minds and recode what we perceive as right, as Reich. We begin our political career as a Republican. We believe in the rule of law. We think the best thing ever was the American Revolution. We call our party the Republican Party. Then 30, 40, 50 years later, if you are Lindsey Graham, you spend the whole day banging on about a ballroom. What you are doing by banging on about that ballroom is installing a new idea of what is right. You are not saying that out loud. The clue is, if you use the word archetyping. If you say: what is he doing? Well, he is archetyping American democracy now as needing a ballroom. What is really going on underneath there is this same change which I saw going on in eastern Ukraine.
The Russians are not letting up in current Ukraine. They are still trying to convince people that what is right is that Ukraine should capitulate, and that somehow, if they capitulate, Russia will stop bombing Dnipro or stop eviscerating Ukraine and killing people. I have reason to believe President Zelenskyy and others see this and understand it and are not going to let it happen. This is why this is relevant. It all, for me, originates on this journey that I began in Luhansk.
The Eighth Archetype: The Grammar of Passive Victimhood
I wanted to talk about the grammar of passive victimhood. This is the eighth archetype that I have been talking about. I have done two episodes on this. One did the first to fourth, and then last time, two weeks ago, did fifth to seventh.
From September 2014, when the first Minsk Protocol was signed in the wake of MH17, until the full-scale invasion of February 2022, Russian outlets in Russia-occupied Luhansk used one sentence in variation every single working day. In my corpus of over 10,000 documents, the formula appears 511 times, to be precise. It is the most repeated formula I have ever catalogued, and the formula is this: “Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.”
Why is this relevant to today? Or, on the other hand, why is talking about fake ceasefires in Iran relevant here? Because it is the same trick. These are the same linguistic tricks. It is the same strategy. In some cases it is the same people — Paul Manafort, for instance — providing the content, the strategy, for Donald, for America.
“Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.” Five words. Let me take them apart one at a time, because each word is doing Disinfolklore work. Kyiv — not Ukraine, not the Ukrainian armed forces, not the Ukrainian state. Reducing Ukraine to its capital city performs a geographic demotion. It archetypes the real state as a single belligerent municipality, the way a medieval chronicle might speak of Prague or Novgorod.
The purpose is not to report the war. The purpose is to install in the occupied population a stable emotional identity: we are the ones attacked, they are the ones who attack. Once that identity is stable, any Ukrainian counter-offensive is self-evidently criminal. Any Russian expansion is self-evidently defensive. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of the rest of Ukraine was not a new story to the people of occupied Luhansk. It was the eighth year of the same sentence.
The counter is a different sentence: “Russian forces in occupied Luhansk shelled Ukrainian positions today, as they have done almost every day since 2014.” The agent is named, the violation is stated, the duration is marked. The listener’s mind is offered a different grammar and begins to build a different story.
The Invented Cossack: Kazachi Vestnik and the Factory Masquerade
The next is the invented Cossack: Kazachi Vestnik and the factory masquerade. In November 2015, I picked up a four-rouble newspaper from a kiosk. They were using roubles there — they changed between November and December 2015 from hryvnia back to Russian roubles in occupied territory while I was there. I picked it up from a kiosk in Stakhanov, which it was called. It was Kazachi Vestnik.
It is important to note that Stakhanov itself was a rebranding, a re-archetyping. Most of us may not know very much about Russia, but we will remember this mythological Stakhanov guy who did a lot of work in one day. Kadiivka was the Ukrainian city, and that was rebranded, re-archetyped as Stakhanov. The archetypal identity there is to make it very familiar to people, to remind them, to re-encode their minds, and to provoke in their minds this memory of the past, of the Soviet past. It is the attachment of a new name to an existing place, to a modern European city, and then to identify with that the past and the present of the terror. That is what I mean by archetypal identities.
It was called Kazachi Vestnik, the Cossack Herald, edition 5,500 copies weekly, published since November 2014. Russia started their occupation in February 2014, according to the European Court of Human Rights, and of Luhansk in April 2014. In November 2014, it established this newspaper. That was three months before I arrived there and encountered this ever-intensifying information space, which looks very familiar now when you look at the American information space.
5,500 copies weekly. Again, this is November 2014, not November 1814 or 1890. It was just really curious to me that they would use newspapers even then. Its masthead described it as the official printed source of the First Regiment named after Platov of the Cossack National Guards. Platov, if the name does not immediately surface in your mind, was a 19th-century Don Cossack ataman, a hero of the 1812 campaign against Napoleon. He was picked out deliberately from the deep well of Russian folk memory and hung above the masthead of a small-town occupation newspaper 200 years later.
Why? Because Stakhanov, the town itself, is named after a Soviet coal miner, Alexei Stakhanov, who in 1935 was turned into a Stalin-era labour hero for mining 14 times his quota in a single shift. Stakhanov, the name, was a Soviet propaganda fiction layered onto a real miner. The town was built on factories, coach-building, mines. The men who lived there were, for three Soviet generations, industrial proletarians, not Cossacks. There were no Cossack stanitsas in Stakhanov. There was no Platov lineage. There was a coach-building plant.
This is the invented Cossack in action — one of the most documented archetypes in my corpus, 444 items tagged, and one of the most brazen. Russia’s occupation did not just seize the territory, it rebranded the inhabitants. The welder became a Cossack. The pensioner became a stanitsa elder. The miner’s son became a Cossack — a warrior of the warrior caste that had never existed in that place. The newspaper handed him his new identity in four-rouble weekly instalments.
This is the classical move that historians of nationalism call the invented tradition. Scottish kilts, as we know, were Victorian. The German folk songbook was assembled by Herder and the Grimms, who I have spoken about previously. The Welsh Eisteddfod, which my niece participated in, was largely an 18th-century theatre. None of these inventions were unique to Russia. What is distinctive about the Russian case is the analogy with people we know who went MAGA. This is not a case of organic or inorganic positive nationalism, which most European countries went through following Herder — this model which was invented by Herder, or the original piece of Disinfolklore, the faked Ossian tales, which were created in Scotland and which I have talked about before, and which became a phenomenon across the whole of Europe and inspired these movements that then led to the creation of the first nation states.
It is all right for Eric Hobsbawm to be a bit sniffy about this, but this is how we create a community through stories. What I realised — and this is the power of Disinfolklore and the Disinfolklore analytical method — is that the apple doesn’t lie. No one is above the law. Every single one of these elements of our identity as Americans is in the open air being assaulted, and a new Reich is being installed in our minds, a new idea of what it means to be American. This is precisely the modus operandi in Russia-occupied Ukraine.
Why did they choose the Cossack? They chose it because the Cossack is a deep archetypal character in Russian folk memory. He is the frontier warrior, the border guardian, the man of the Don and the Dnipro. He is, in Russian iconography, the one who stands between the motherland and the outer realm. To dress the men in Stakhanov as Cossacks is to cast them, without their consent, in a role. It primes them for the role’s next scene: to defend, to fight, to participate in meat assaults, to be sent across a river — the Donetsk River — with a rifle, to go and kill their fellow Ukrainians, as they did in their hundreds in Kreminna on the 11th of March 2022.
I did not know that in 2015. In 2015, this was just a weird phenomenon that I noticed was unusual, and I did not understand it, but I understood something rum was going on — just as I understand something rum is going on when a US president tweets, as he did about eight hours after I wrote about how the ballroom is about to re-archetype the Republic as a monarchy. He wrote that “Two Kings” tweet — and again, everyone shares it, and this is problematic. They share it with a moan, but they keep it going. This primes them for the next scene.
In 2022, the invented Cossack is also a changeling archetype. It swaps the identity in the cradle. It is also a merciful sovereign archetype: the occupier claims to be restoring something that was stolen. It is a fake state liturgy archetype, because the First Regiment named after Platov of the Cossack National Guard is a paper institution — with a uniform and a newspaper and no legitimate lineage whatsoever.
The counter, as with all invented traditions, is to name the factory. When a man in uniform claims his grandfather was a Cossack, ask what his grandfather actually did for a living. Ask him what the name of the town means. It is not Stakhanov; it is Kadiivka, and it will be Kadiivka again. Ask him where the coach-building plant went. It is now destroyed by Ukraine, by HIMARS strikes. The invented Cossack dissolves when the actual grandfather is summoned back into the room.
Water as a Fertility Weapon: Dumézil’s Third Function Under Threat
The next one I wanted to talk about was water as a fertility weapon, and Dumézil’s third function under threat. I have talked before about this amazing French comparativist who, in the 1930s, suddenly worked out that at the foundation of all Indo-European traditions is a tripartite split of our communities into sovereignty, security, and fertility. The monarch or the priest; then security, the warrior; then fertility, the farmer, the woman, prosperity. Those three. It is always those three. Manifest, for instance, in the Indian caste system.
The third aspect of it is the fertility function. This is what Russia is doing when it steals children. It is deliberately subverting the fertility function. It is attempting to destroy the reproduction of Ukraine, of the community. This is an age-old weapon.
Georges Dumézil, the French Indo-Europeanist, argued that every Indo-European culture organises its self-image around three functions: sovereignty, which is the legal-magical authority — magical authority, Donald is a magician in this sense, a magus. He gets millions of people to share his memes about a ballroom and to talk about a ballroom yesterday. That is as magical as you get. Security, the warrior. And fertility, prosperity, the provider.
Russia’s propaganda in occupied Luhansk performs all three. The function I want to speak about today is the third: fertility, prosperity, the water and the grain. Very apt today, given the second ship apparently delivering grain to Israel, Haifa — stolen Ukrainian grain — because the corpus shows something distinctive. Russia mobilises water as a weapon and then positions itself as the only hydraulic saviour.
I know this myself, because we spent about a year in eastern Ukraine in the early years of the occupation trying to solve water shortage problems. The story we were operating on was that the water shortage problems had occurred as a result of the occupation. Then through accident, basically, the diplomatic mission I was a part of discovered it had always had water problems. As I got to know Ukraine better and the Soviet legacy better, especially going to visit the elected hromada leaders in southern Zaporizhzhia, in areas which are now temporarily occupied, the stories I would hear from the elected officials were striking. Literally, if you wanted to get water, in many places it came in tankers. That whole area around southern Zaporizhzhia, for instance, is extremely dry.
One of the big things which these new decentralised communities had to solve after they were established in 2014 — which I loved going to meet them and hear about, these heroic plans, all funded by USAID, the European Union, and the central government in Ukraine — were the result of leaders in all of these communities trying to solve problems which had been embedded structurally in them. For instance, access to water.
We discovered in Luhansk that actually these water problems were historical. The Russian story coming from the Russian side was constantly trying to get us, me as a diplomat, to engage and solve problems and pay for water pumping stations. The water pumping stations were on one side of the river, the occupiers on the other side, and they were always being blown up. There were always these stories to do with water.
What Russia was doing there, I now understand, was hammering away at this third function, the fertility function, which is a perennial function. 306 items in my Luhansk well — which I call “the well,” the corpus. There is a photograph of me by a well in Luhansk, a really old-school kind of well, which any of us who have been to Ukraine and travelled around will remember seeing everywhere — all around Chernobyl, all of those villages. Every house has a well. It is exactly the kind of well we would have seen as children reading folktales in New York or London. 306 items are tagged by water infrastructure, and most come from occupier-aligned outlets — luginfo.com and dninews.com.
Let me walk you through the plot arc they collectively tell. While I was reading and collecting all of this, I was also participating in many of these stories, going to see pumping stations when, say, people from the World Bank or from aid agencies were visiting. We might be asked to be there too, and to guarantee what we called windows of silence, under which the Russians would not shell. I spent a lot of time standing around helping with these windows of silence, or going to pumping stations, talking to the heads of the pumping stations, just trying to understand these really complex systems. Actually, it was pretty simple what was going on in the end.
Three Acts of the Hydraulic Saviour
This is a really typical story; I participated in so many of these.
Act 1, November 2015. A group of European experts is brought to inspect the water infrastructure of the self-declared LFR, Luhansk Folk’s Republic. The spokesperson framing the visit is Vladislav Deynego — whose hand I once had to shake, and at the time it really fascinated me that he, if you Google him, has the appearance of Trotsky in the 1890s, or of a ragged Russian intellectual from a Tolstoy book. The whole aesthetic — I now understand — was a flex. It was a style. It was an act of archetyping, like Melania wearing gangster moll chic to archetype herself as Alphonse Capone’s moll. I did not understand that then. It was just a real matter of curiosity to me.
He was the occupier’s envoy to the Minsk trilateral contact group. The subtext was: the international community is here, looking at the plumbing, finding it acceptable; Russia is a responsible hydraulic custodian. This is a mirror of what I was doing on the other side of the river, because none of this really ever happened on their side of the river — no one in their right mind would go there, and could not go there. There were no guarantees of safety. If you read the media, they were trying to archetype themselves as a normal republic, like Kosovo — a group of people who had managed to achieve statehood and were just, with the help of the international community, developing — whereas in fact this was a military occupation masquerading as an organic republic, like Ireland establishing itself or like the United States establishing itself.
Act 2, February 2017. Plotnitsky — who was the Russian-occupier leader, and both of whose parents died from picking poisonous mushrooms (again, one of my early intimations that something folkloric was going on) — and Zakharchenko, who was the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, issued a joint statement, which was pretty rare, because they all hated each other. There was a lot of stuff about them joining together and uniting and all this nonsense, which was trying to make them seem like organic entities. They issued a joint statement in February 2017 demanding that Kyiv let the republics’ — again archetyping as republics — observers carry out inspections of industrial facilities on the Ukrainian-controlled side. The chutzpah of that. Notice the grammatical reversal: the occupier demands inspection rights over territory it does not control. Where have we heard that before? It is the same chutzpah we are still getting now.
Act 3. The republics are now in hydraulic guardianship. The Minsk envoy of both Russian-backed statelets insists on ecological inspection of mines in the Kyiv-controlled Donbas area. The language has escalated from “demands” to “insists.” Each repetition is a ratchet. I am just choosing at random, but there are hundreds of these, day after day.
The Wound and the Bandage as a Single Gesture
What is happening here? Russia is weaponising Dumézil’s third function. Water, pensions, mines, gas, grain, the fertility of the land are being moved onto the propaganda stage, and Russia is auditioning for the role of the provider. Not just the warrior — these were the daily briefings, the shelling count I talked about two weeks ago. Not just the sovereign — the people’s, the folk’s republic liturgy, where they talk about establishing courts and banks. But the father of the land, the hydraulic monarch who ensures the harvest.
What did Donald do in California? He ordered them to release billions of gallons of water, which then caused havoc, not only because they should not have been released then, but also because farmers could not — the water was not available when they needed it this season. This is, again, Donald using the same old tricks.
This is classical Indo-European propaganda. The Vedic king was responsible for the monsoon. The Roman emperor was responsible for the grain ships from Egypt. This is, again, the Disinfolkloric element of what the Russian-mafia-run government of Israel is now participating in: this Russian mafia installation of these same archetypal stories. It is really horrific to see the grain — this whole grain thing — but it is the same tale. It is the same story. The Tsar was father because he stood between his people and the famine. Russia in 2015, 2017 is writing itself into this oldest script. It creates the problem, then it offers itself as the merciful sovereign. This is, again, what Donald does. It is the same game, the same trick, day after day.
Every European expert who inspects LFR pipelines is a certificate of hydraulic legitimacy. Every demand to inspect Ukrainian mines is a bid for fatherly custody of the river. Meanwhile — this is the dark cemetery — in 2014, Russia blew up the water pipeline at Petrovske with its own artillery. In 2015, it shelled the Donets River filter station 13 times. This is the place I spent a lot of time in, trying to sort out the aftermath of these shellings. After February 2022, it occupied the Kakhovka dam, as we all know, and destroyed it, flooding a whole province, killing billions of sentient beings — but archetyping itself as the father in this.
Meanwhile, the hand that plays the hydraulic saviour is the hand that is causing the problem, that breaks the pipe. This is the single most important thing to understand about Russian Disinfolklore. On the third function, Russia performs the wound and the bandage as a single gesture. The water crisis is manufactured so that the water saviour can claim custody of the manufacture.
The counter is specificity. Name the pipe. Name the shell that hit it. Name the date, the coordinates, the brigade. Disinfolklore thrives in abstraction: “the ecological situation,” “the infrastructure,” “the republic’s observers.” Every specific pipe you can name is a counter-liturgy.
The Soviet Revenant: The Great Patriotic War Square
The perennial one: the Soviet revenant, the Great Patriotic War Square.
In European folklore, the revenants are the dead who will not stay dead — the walking corpse, the ghost with unfinished business, the ancestor who shows up at the door, dirty, uninvited, demanding the bread from the hearth. In Russia-occupied Luhansk, there is a revenant in every public square, and his name is the Soviet Union. It is a “his.” In my corpus, 285 items are tagged Lenin, Soviet memory.
Let me read you one of the smallest and most revealing. 7th of August 2015, luginfo.com. “Press conference announcement. At midday, the official representative of the LFR People’s Militia, Taras Kolotkov, on the situation along the contact line. Address: Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square 9. Ploshchad Geroyev VOV 9.”
Read the address again: Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square. This is the address the occupation uses to send correspondence to a briefing on shelling. The address itself is a Disinfolklore item. It is doing the work here before a single word in the briefing is spoken.
The Great Patriotic War — this itself, this is the Russian name for what the West calls the Second World War. It is the Eastern Front. 27 million Soviet dead — and I think most of us who have been watching their military tactics in eastern Ukraine understand why so many people died, and unnecessarily. The most sacred memory in Russian public life, the memory that the Soviet state and then the Putin Federation curated for 70 years, is the ultimate moral foundation: we defeated Nazism, we saved the world, we paid in blood, we are the good side of history. Most of us will understand. The United States provided, what was it, like 14,000 ships, 20,000 aeroplanes, et cetera — and that is why they were able to hold the line.
When Russia occupies Luhansk in 2014 and summons journalists to a briefing, it does not use a neutral address. It uses Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square, because the address does three things at once.
First, it archetypes the occupation as the spiritual continuation of the Soviet victory. The men standing at the podium in 2015 are, by spatial association, the grandsons of the men who took Berlin. To attend their briefing is to attend a memorial service.
Second, it casts Ukraine, the enemy of the briefing, in the only remaining role left by the liturgy. If the LFR is standing on Great Patriotic War Square, then Ukraine, grammatically and spatially, is cast as the Nazi. The square makes the bogeyman. The bogeyman makes the invasion.
Third, it summons the revenant. The Soviet Union is officially dead. It expired on the 25th of December 1991. But in Luhansk’s Ploshchad Geroyev, it is not dead. It is walking. It has an address. You can post a letter to it. This is why in my corpus you will find Victory Day parades, Immortal Regiment processions, St George ribbons, Stalin-era Young Guard imagery, and Komsomol-style youth formations all persisting in occupied Luhansk, as if the clock had not turned.
The Soviet revenant — who for me is personified by this guy, Vladislav Deynego — is the spine of the occupation’s emotional architecture. It is how the occupation persuades its captive population that they have not been conquered, but returned. The cognitive move is brutal. Most residents of Luhansk lived a substantial part of their lives in the USSR. Many grieve its loss. The Russian occupation offers them, in the form of public squares, parades, flags, and vocabularies, the feelings of the lost thing. It sells them a ghost, and the ghost is warm.
The counter is to remember what the USSR actually did. The Holodomor. The gulag. The suppression of Ukrainian language. The deportations. The stagnation. The queues. The revenant is sentimental. The real dead are not. Name the ghost. Ask what year it died. Ask why it is walking.
The connection there I would make with Donald, and this attempt to install monarchy just at the time he is at 33 per cent in the polls — that is the ghost which is walking through the White House. Next time you see someone posting all that gold in the Oval Office and going snobbily, “Oh, this is so gauche” — reflect for a second, or as you look into the Rococo mirror, reflect in its reflection for a second, and see: this is what the Russians did after the Second World War, and what they did in Luhansk.
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