Funny how translations of Dostoyevsky is a contentious topic in English-speaking world. In ru-speaking world, we bicker about Harry Potter and Lord of Rings translations :) There’s a particularly inflammatory translation of HP which causes people to swear that they won’t let their children read it.
There is a black market of illegally printed “proper translations”. I had to buy a full HP anthology for my younger sister off some guy’s Corolla, paying in crypto. Same guy was selling counterfeit LEGOs. It was low-quality paper and flimsy covers, but the translation was “correct” and that’s all that matters.
Dostoyevsky is one of the greatest writers who has ever lived. I think getting Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Nabokov translated well is far more important than getting Harry Potter translated well.
There are more tickets sold to Avengers than there are tickets sold to Persona. But one is a work of art that will likely be viewed 100 years from now, and the other is for mass market consumption that no one will watch 20 years from now. Aesthetics for a work of art are far more important than the numbers sold, or the quirks of the author.
That it isn’t the same translation they read as children and that was used in movies.
It is not a particularly high-brow debate, as HP, unlike Dostoyevsky in en-world, is read by everyone. People usually concentrate on proper names. Rowling uses a lot of “meaningful” names like Snape, Sprout or Ravenclaw, and translator have a choice of adapting them or leaving them be. Either choice leaves somebody unhappy. The same problem was with LotR a generation before. (LotR broke through the iron curtain only in 90s).
When I read HP in original, I realised that the “proper” translation is also extremely bad. I don’t know what I should do when/if I have children. Either I’ll start working on my own translation during the pregnancy, or I’ll teach them English from the birth.
The situation in Lord of the Rings has an added twist: many of the names are Old English, Anglo-Saxon or even Goth, and the translator faces a choice between leaving them alone and trying to translate them into Old Czech (Old Slavonic...), Old Finnish or whatever, which will nevertheless change the cultural context.
I hear Star Wars is a pain to translate because of the meaningful names.
“Darth Vader” was sometimes translated as “Dark Father”, but that his role as Luke’s father too obvious - a role the initial translators didn’t know existed.
Probably because it was simpler and less prone to political interpretation (a dark lord sitting in the east of the continent with a ton of humanoids that work like slaves to wage a war to the rest of the world).
As someone with an English "bottom" as in bottom-lands surname, I appreciate the deliberate silliness of "Longbottom" while leaning into a very traditional British sounding name.
It's silly in English too. Perhaps some British readers might be familiar with the name and its history/origins, but for most English readers, I suspect, it just sounds a bit silly, like he has a very tall butt.
I've read a few Russian novels in English, and had heard of Pevear and Volokhonsky while hunting around for translations but never landed on one by them. I'm a big fan of the Norton Critical Editions for literature, they're well edited and full of context that is hard to gather on your own.
Their edition of The Brothers Karamazov [0] (translated by Susan McReynolds) stands in my memory as being a pleasure to read and ponder...definitely a book that stays with you over time.
Cool! I've got both and consider Katz a better writer of English. His prose is just more enjoyable to read and flows much better than P&V's rather too literal translations
I read his translation of Crime and Punishment and I liked it a lot, I saw he had a new-ish translation of The Brothers Karamazov but I haven't read that yet.
I read and loved the P&V Anna Karenina, so as a gift my Mom got me War and Peace. She very consciously bought me the Maude translation, which is how I first learned how contentious translations can be.
Then I recommended Anna Karenina to a friend and I started going over the pros and cons of the various translations when he stopped me and reminded me that Russian is his first language. That's when it clicked for me. It's like people who obsesses over which cut of a movie is the best, except in this case the "true" author's vision is available and many people can access it, just not them. I understand why people fixate on finding the "best" translation.
Borges had some interesting thoughts on translation, including this great line:
"The original was unfaithful to the translation."
BORGES AFFIRMED, in earnest, that an original can be unfaithful to a translation. He vehemently objected to claims that certain translations he admired are “true to the original” and derided the presuppositions of purists for whom all translations are necessarily deceitful in one way or another. Borges would often pro- test, with various degrees of irony, against the assumption – ingrained in the Italian adage traduttore traditore – that a translator is a traitor to an original. He referred to it alternatively as a superstition or pun. For Borges the Italian expression, unfairly prejudiced in favor of the original, is an erroneous generalization that conflates differ- ence with treachery. The idea that literary translations are inherently inferior to their originals is, for Borges, based on the false assumption that some works of literature must be assumed definitive. But for Borges, no such thing as a definitive work exists, and therefore, a translator’s inevitable transformation of the original is not necessarily to the detriment of the work. Difference, for Borges, is not a sufficient criterion for the superiority of the original.
That guy had a lot of interesting thoughts. It's ironic that of all the writers who I've tried to read in the original, Borges is the only one which comes to mind.
Yeah I agree, somehow Borges's Spanish seems more accessible to English speakers, maybe because he was fluent in English as well. But my Spanish isn't good enough to tell if his writing is significantly different from other Spanish language writers.
As a Spanish native speaker, I would say he’s quite accessible. Most of the references he does are universal classics and he uses a pretty modern language most of the time. And he doesn’t do much playing with metalanguage.
I’d say.. the hardest to translate and read would probably be the most experimental just because there’s a lot of meta-references.. kind of like Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
Of course I understand the impulse, but translating Finnegans Wake strikes me as nearly impossible and worth only questionable effort. Even beyond the fact that it's often expressing non-analytic semantics that are extremely difficult to pin down, it's not even entirely English and there's a lot of cross-language wordplay.
I would add that a lot of Borges' work is written in an academic style that is highly translatable, but he also wrote a lot about the criminal underworld in Buenos Aires and those works are, unsurprisingly, full of slang and local references that are much more opaque to outsiders.
Another great line about translations is that they are like lovers, they can be faithful and they can be beautiful, but you are very lucky if they are both.
> Another great line about translations is that they are like lovers
It's a great line _if_ one hasn't had much experience with lovers or thought deeply enough about such experiences or thinks of lovers casually. :(
Basically, we love someone because we're attracted to them, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We also often love someone for their character which is why we are charmed by them.
It's really difficult to love someone who is unfaithful because our obsession with them merely affirms our own lack of character, and our lack of good judgement, and our inability to discern good character over and over.
Ah, I rant, sorry for that :), but my point is, it's a bad analogy because it doesn't tell us anything true about translations nor of lovers.
War and Peace was my first introduction to the translation debate as well. I read and loved the Anthony Briggs translation, but I also read a few samples from the Maude translation and didn't think it was much different.
In general, I think there's too much emphasis on language barriers for the layperson. It's the classic problem where passionate people introduce considerations that aren't relevant to the casual user ("Don't use that brand/thing! This brand/thing is 0.1% better!").
I'm fluent in English, but still am capable of missing subtle uses of the language. Yet, we treat foreign (to us) languages as if all of the subtly is obvious to anyone who is fluent in it. I honestly don't think that the average Russian reader is going to see much more in the language than an English person with a good translation. An expert will see it, but not me.
In my opinion the return on investment is much higher for increasing your understanding of both the culture and historical moment, not the language.
I love these two. If I ever read a Russian book I insist on using one of their translations. I can speak and read Russian on a basic level. They're able to make texts sound like Russian, but it English. It's pretty amazing really.
I sometimes tried to read in Russian, it was an interesting exercise for the brain, quite difficult at the beginning as you need to deal not just with foreign words but also a foreign script.
However, after the war started, I lost all interest in reading anything Russian. I know it's irrational, but these lost their luster instantly. Not just literature, also culture in general. I hope when the war is over and we can start having sincere, open relationships again, my interest comes back.
>However, after the war started, I lost all interest in reading anything Russian. I know it's irrational, but these lost their luster instantly.
Many share the same sentiment, and some do that more strongly than others. Interestingly, it never had that effect on me, however, though I cannot speak Russian, except read, but my vocabulary is extremely limited. I think it's important to distinguish between current events and the culture, literature, and art that spans centuries.
I would be curious to see how one could seriously argue this. People making this kind of claims tend to grasp at straws to make connections and make implications much more deterministic than they actually are.
OK, I'll try - not as a rigorous argument, but not as a strawman, either.
Events shape cultures. You can find cultural remnants of past events that impacted a group decades later (especially traumatic events).
And, cultures shape events, because cultures shape the people that cause (at least some of) the events. And cultures shape peoples' response to the events.
So when you see a pattern that looks fairly similar across centuries, then you have at least some ground for suspecting that there is a stable system there - that events keep happening that shape the culture in a consistent way, and the culture keeps shaping events in ways that will give rise to the same kinds of events happening.
I wouldn't go as far as "deterministic". I don't think that much involving humans is ever truly deterministic. But there does seem to be a pattern of history, if not repeating itself, at least rhyming.
I had a similar experience learning Chinese. Given the current geopolitical tensions, I opted to learn Japanese instead as to not raise ill will/suspicions.
I hope so too. It's great literature and there is a lot to admire about their culture, although admittedly the golden age of Russian culture is now well in the past.
> However, after the war started, I lost all interest in reading anything Russian. I know it's irrational, but these lost their luster instantly.
Russian here, living in Russia. Not surprised about this at all. Actually, I predicted that this would happen. By starting the war, Putin has wiped out multiple perceived notions about Russia (the myth of the defender nation, the second-strongest army, and the "Tolstoyesvsky"-centered culture among them).
Paraphrasing Anton Chigurh: "If your culture brought you to this, of what use was the culture?"
As a Russian living in Germany, I perceive that many of the notions surrounding Russia were never truly embraced by the general public. A significant number of people hold preconceived negative opinions and some harbor personal grievances against Russians and Russian culture.
The soft power that Russia may have once wielded in the Western mind was fragile and easily dismantled. It became an easy target for Western propaganda. Just days before the invasion, I explained to a colleague that if it were to happen, the media would likely present a simplistic narrative of the conflict, creating a classic good-versus-bad dichotomy. This would undoubtedly lead to the resurrection of old clichés and propaganda that the British, French, Germans, and more recently, the Americans have historically crafted about Russia.
“Joe Biden acknowledged in 1997 that eastward NATO expansion into the Baltic states would cause “the greatest consternation,” which could “tip the balance” and result in a “vigorous and hostile reaction” by Russia.”
Unfortunately his dementia may have erased these thoughts.
"The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance." -Kamala
When two powers think they are defending themselves, war typically breaks out.
It is quite easy to forget that there are lots of common people like you living their lives in Russia now who are similarly quite unhappy about the current situation, but mostly powerless to change anything.
“There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.” - Kurt Vonnegut
the P&V translations always give me the sensation of American actors speaking in mock Russian accents, like in the Hunt for Red October.
I don't really like them for this reason. I imagine they have merits which I am not equipped to evaluate.
I find it sort of frustrating that they have a near monopoly. It can be pretty tough to find a non-P&V translation in a bookstore these days.
I think this near monopoly, and therefore the financial/career/publishing industry implications, might be why some of the critiques and takedowns seem oddly vicious. It's not just about literary taste.
I studied Russian for only a year in college, but it was incredibly clear that P&V was the most literal translation that followed russian patterns of speech. In my russian lit class (in english, but taught by a russian) we only used their translations.
Yes you've nailed it. The P&V translations respect the way Russians construct thoughts and sentences, even if it differs from the way English speakers typically do so. This is (in my opinion) very important for showing the reader what the writer is really trying to say, and also getting the feeling that you are really immersed in the Russian culture while you're reading the book.
it's good to hear that my impressions weren't based on nothing. personally i don't like when a translation works like this, I think it's better to try to replicate the literary effect in the target language. (For example I really enjoyed Emily Wilson's choice to do her Homer translations in blank verse, as the analogue in the English poetry tradition to dactylic hexameter, rather than trying to write English in Greek meter.)
but I guess it's a valid choice and might actually be better in certain contexts (plausibly this is true for a university class about Russia and Russian literature).
They do good translation work; their translations read naturally and are an improvement over the noticeably Victorian-sounding editions which preceded them. I'm sure that, by the year 2200, their translations will be superseded too. But they are great for our time, which is what matters.
The language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sounds just as archaic to Russian readers as Victorian English does to you. In a sense, preserving this archaism is closer to the original than trying to modernise it
But it wouldn't have sounded archaic to a contemporaneous russian reader. So the translator's choice is to translate into modern english, as the original audience would have experienced it as modern russian for their time. Or to attempt to recreate a modern russian audience's sense of archaism in english. It's an artistic choice, neither is approach is inherently better than the other.
the problem is for any given Russian novel, there are often other translations from the 1960s-1990s which use sufficiently modern language. maybe these are better than P&V or maybe not (in some cases yes to my taste), but good luck finding one in a bookstore.
A few years ago, I read a slightly updated version of Constance Garnett's Anna Karenina and it was stunning.
I have been reading a copy of P&V Crime and Punishment that I found laying around, and it does not have quite the intensity that I was expecting. Will probably try another translation - deciding on which one to read is half the fun for me anyway.
Svetlana Geier, the German Dostoyevsky translator, is/was much more famous/uncontested. They even made an excellent movie about her: “The Woman With the 5 Elephants”.
> "The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.
> This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce."
I think P&V are highly overrated and tend to be marketed more aggressively than other "normal" translations. If you're reading a P&V translation, you know you're reading a P&V translation throughout the whole experience. Which is why I stay away from them if there's an alternative
Katz is more enjoyable. Would highly recommend Katz's translation of Devils. Captures the chaotic-ness of the story really well
I'm the opposite, when I first read P&V's Crime and Punishment it felt more like transported to 19th century Russia, compared to the previous version I'd read (I don't remember whom, perhaps Constance Garnett), which felt like I was in late Victorian England but with Russian names.
P&V was a harder read, and I've still not finished reading The Idiot, but it felt much richer, even if reading it required having notes at hand.
A tangent but, since AI is good enough to destroy civilization and reign over us like an evil god these days, and translation seems to be one of its strongest points, what's the state of the art with AI translations of out of copyright works of literature?
Free versions available via standard ebooks and Gutenberg are often based on the copyright of the translation and so can be dated or just considered lower quality than other, more recent, translations.
Can you run the older translations through an AI to jazz them up a bit and maybe secretly steal the IP from other translations?
Or, since we're fudging the IP issue anyway, are the underground book pirate rings issuing AI translated versions of Harry Potter (or a more recent equivalent) into niche markets yet?
Since you chose Harry Potter specifically: the official Spanish translations were always released several months behind the US. Therefore fan groups gathered to make their own versions by scanning the originals on release night, splitting the chapters among subgroups, translate them in parallel, and then merge them back together. All of this in less than a week.
So while certainly not the case for most books, if you have a pirate Harry Potter then there's a fair chance that an actual human did the translation.
Unrelated, sometimes I'd get a fake unofficial chapter and then I'd have to decide on-the-fly whether Draco undressing Harry felt in line with J.K. Rowling's universe so far.
This is also how many manga "scanlation" groups work. Some of the translations are incredible, especially of comedy manga. One, called Grand Blue, is ostensibly a manga about a young man joining a scuba diving club while in uni. In reality, it's a drinking gag manga with an incredibly funny and absurd sense of humor. I can't read Japanese, but apparently the main scanlation group is incredibly good at translating the japanese jokes into english, even going so far to completely rewrite the jokes but keeping the core idea of the joke intact with quite in-depth footnotes explaining and justifying their changes. The translation notes are fascinating in their own right.
HP is an interesting example. Due to the book's whimsical nature, the international translators had to come up with very creative translations for certain terms. Any new "unclean" translation should be extremely easy to recognize.
> since AI is good enough to destroy civilization and reign over us like an evil god these days
While I find AI impressive, I think the demonstration proof that it isn't yet at that level is that ChaosGPT etc. have not already destroyed civilisation.
(OTOH, that someone made ChaosGPT and set it running, is reason to try to stop anyone publishing any better models until they can be proven safe: we don't want to find out something has passed this threshold, whatever that means, via it ending civilisation).
Hating on P&V has become a meme. I thought the translations were competent and enjoyable. There is far, far worse out there. I read one "modernized" version of the Gambler that was so butchered it was like reading a YA novel.
I don't think it's a meme, there's something there. I've read P&V (underground), Katz (demons), Garnett (brothers), and McDuff (house)
I get that underground is supposed to sound more erratic, but there's this sort of clunkiness behind P&V that other translations don't have. I usually compare translations before buying and I notice it there too
Katz and McDuff were good. Garnett not bad. But P&V is just feels god awful to read, prose is just too unnatural sounding
I can't relate to that feeling, but then again I had no issues reading Pynchon or DeLillo. I appreciate the difference in cadence and don't believe prose has to conform to the same beats every time. It's true some books are easier to read (I'm reading a Murakami right now) and that is pleasant in its own way, but once you get into a flow I find it opens up and becomes enjoyable, in a particular way.
I would not want that all the time, but one doesn't read Russian lit all the time either. Becomes part of the experience for me.
Has it? Using P&V-fueled/-inspired superiority to hate on Victorian translations (or anything non-P&V, really—including e.g. Magarshack) seems to have a lot more meme energy than the reverse.
Weird reaction, because redundancy is implied (even while "completely redundant" it is not), and the support is definitely there:
> People say, for example, you can't read The Count of Monte Cristo unless it's Buss's translation published by Penguin, or you can't read Garnett's Dostoyevsky. Well, okay, but when pressed about what the purportedly less faithful versions [...] get wrong, I've only ever heard mimetic regurgitation of nonspecific claims (on par with "don't read K&R; it's awful") or when someone actually articulates something concrete and falsifiable, it doesn't hold up—"That actually was in the 19th century translation that I read, so..."
If that's not "something to support your pov", I'm not sure what you want. It's a comment that (a) antedates yours on the same topic (literally using the phrase "mimetic regurgitation"), and (b) explains exactly the issue of nonspecific claims that I've run into with people who offer criticisms of the earliest translations into English. Aside from all that, even at worst—if you're not satisfied by any of this, for whatever reason—it contains no less support for my position than the support you provided for yours.
Terrible translations by people who do not have a firm grasp of the language they're translating from, nor the language they are translating to, nor any literary understanding of either languages, or the context the works were written in, or the context of the verbiage used in english, or any knowledge of what translations should be.
> When writing of a couple getting married, it is more common to use the plural form ("the couple are to be wed"). When writing of an established couple, it is more common to use a singular verb ("the couple has six puppies, each more destructive than the next").
So according to MW we're a bit more right than NYT.
I'd expect the former in British English, because in that standard, grammatically singular nouns that refer to multiple people are conjugated in the plural. The latter would be typical for American English. It's a bit surprising to see the former used by an American author in an American publication, however.
Yep. And that Wikipedia article explains, collective nouns are normally taken to be singular in American English:
> In American English, collective nouns almost always take singular verb forms (formal agreement). In cases that a metonymic shift would be revealed nearby, the whole sentence should be recast to avoid the metonymy. (For example, "The team are fighting among themselves" may become "the team members are fighting among themselves" or simply "The team is infighting.") Collective proper nouns are usually taken as singular ("Apple is expected to release a new phone this year"), unless the plural is explicit in the proper noun itself, in which case it is taken as plural ("The Green Bay Packers are scheduled to play the Minnesota Vikings this weekend").
No more than the Clash's "I'm so bored with the USA" was bigoted.
It's a perfectly natural and reasonable reaction to have to the culture of a country that has repeatedly engaged in (and currently threatens) extreme territorial aggression against one's own country. Which is infinitely more serious than the cultural imperialism that the Clash were railing against, in any case.
Again, the reaction is to the culture (not the people); and it is not one of disgust but rather -- indifference.
I was born and raised in Eastern Europe when it was controlled by Russia. My ancestors fled Ukraine during Holdomor. A large number of cultural and art artifacts belonging to Eastern Europeans have been looted by Russians during WWII "libertion" and are still stored in their museums. They carried out mass murders of people with secondary and higher education. I have friends and family in Eastern Europe and today I learned that they fired a Shahed drone into Poland. I could not give a crap about Russian culture. There is none.
> Parties in control of a government are not the people of that country
The war against Ukraine has overwhelming support among the population, as do the underlying cultural narratives about Russian superiority that make the population turn blind eye to and even take pride in the suffering they cause to others.
You can kill the entire Russian leadership, and the population will just fill their empty seats with another batch of similar people. They have been doing so for the past five centuries. The creative class that perpetuates the narratives of exceptionalism (like Moscow being the Third Rome[1]) have a large role in setting up the environment for the looting, raping and murdering that takes place downstream. This is similar to how German naturalism directly fed into Nazism: idealization of "simple peasant life" led to the invasion of Poland, murder of Jews and enslavement of Poles, to fill Poland with farms where every German could have their piece of paradise.
> The war against Ukraine has overwhelming support among the population
I may be an outlier, and this is obviously an anecdote, but in my entire social circle there are literally two people supporting the war. One is a hardcore Z fanatic living with his parents at almost 50, and the second one is an alcoholic (formerly a talented architect).
> The war against Ukraine has overwhelming support among the population
Let me give some armchair analytics about "overwhelming support". In the beginning Putin promised that there will be no mobilization, yet later he mobilized an unknown amount of people. Also, he passed the laws allowing to recruit convicts from prisons and people under investigation (they are sent to most dangerous and deadly missions, often without proper cover and evacuation). Also the government raised a reward for signing a contract from somewhere around $4 500 to $20 000, and the recruitment posters are literally on every bus stop. All of this means only one thing - there is not enough volunteers.
So if you make a street interview maybe most of the people will express their wholehearted support for special operation (especially given that expressing disagreement might put you in trouble), and maybe they will even give you strong arguments why it was inevitable and justified. After all, over 80% of voters voted for Putin. But why those 80% do not want to join the military and help their brothers and support their leader in the frontline?
But on the other hand, there are no significant protests against the war. There were some protests in the first days, but they were not numerous and after approximately 15,000 people were arrested, they stopped.
So while there might be many people expressing the support for the war, they prefer to support it from the safe distance. War is necessary but can we please send someone else there?
> The war against Ukraine has overwhelming support among the population
That's not true. There's about 15-20% of the population that supports the war, about 15-20% of the population that opposes it, and the rest is completely demotivated and doesn't care.
They have been demotivated for a while. That does not stop them wanting to be seen as cultured intellectuals contributing to the world's heritage while enjoying the looting of other cultures and not caring for the destruction of cultural heritage abroad. They can keep their Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and their Russian soul. There is nothing a Russian can teach the world about joy, freedom, or love because they know none.
That's incorrect. When you ask question: "Do you support the war or do you want to get 8 years?" most people will answer accordingly.
More detailed surveys that measure the level of support for the war effort result in the numbers that I quoted. Researchers asked questions like: "Do you think the state should prioritize social spending or the war spending?" and "Do you think that Russia should enter peace talks?"
You'll need to provide reliable polling data (i.e. not originating or influenced by the Russian government) to support this assertion, please.
Also:
They have been doing so for the past five centuries.
And yet the Germans seem to have genuinely changed, and all of the other European powers gave up their hyperfixations with their respective colonialist adventures. Even the U.S. public seems to have, by and large, lost its taste for the sorts of quasicolonial adventures (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) it readily accepted just a few decades ago.
There's no reason the Russian population (which I do agree continues to tolerate these adventures; though it does not "overwhelmingly support" them) cannot change their attitudes within a generation or two as well.
Given the proper arrangement of facts on the ground, that is.
Specifically: a clear strategic defeat of its current adventure (probably the most farcical of all in its history).
And this changes things how exactly? The Russian population is not going to replace their rulers. Think about it, Romanians, generally regarded as one of the most oppressed and backwards population in the Soviet block--they were so desperate that they stopped tourists passing through Romania and begged them for contraceptives (banned under the Ceausescu regime); they were as demoralised and impoverished as you can imagine. Ownership of typewriters was controlled by the state and you had to register your machine with the local police station. And yet, they finally rebelled and got rid of the dictator. There is nothing that makes me think Russians are willing to do the same, ever. At the core of it is total disregard for human life and freedom. The state teaches the people that they do not matter and the people do not care for each other and for what will happen to them.
Fair enough, and food for thought. Though one has to wonder how many people refused to respond (they apparently don't publish these numbers), or adjusted their response in accord with what they thought was expected of them.
In short, insignificant number of people refuse to answer, and answers cannot be discarded with "that's not what they really think" because surveys measure how people act in the public. One may very well be against the war in their thoughts, but if they go to a munitions factory every morning and fill shells with explosives all day and in the evenings cheer with neighbors over another strike at Ukrainian cities, then their innermost thoughts matter very little.
Russians have always been reminded that it is better to eat white bread on the shores of the Black Sea than the other way round (black bread on the shores of the White Sea) so I wouldn't trust their answers.
I think it would be better to look at number of volunteers signing a contract with military (there is not enough of them). Because one thing is to support the war in a phone poll and another thing is to take a gun and a bulletproof vest and go support it in real life.
> And yet the Germans seem to have genuinely changed, and all of the other European powers gave up their hyperfixations with their respective colonialist adventures.
Germans suffered TWO humiliating defeats in world wars and had to go through painful transformation processes for decades. On top of that they’ve had support of western world.
Russians revel in numbers they’ve lost.
20 millions dead across Soviet Union? Who gives a shit? Можем повторить! (We can do it again!).
So long as kleptocracy is alive in Russia - it will never change. And this won’t happen in our lifetime.
US had to withdraw from Vietnam after humiliating defeat against Vietcong and Chinese/Soviet supplied Vietnam army after huge backlash from general population, as far as I know.
> Germans suffered TWO humiliating defeats in world wars and had to go through painful transformation processes for decades.
Looks like it hasn't worked. As soon as Germans were allowed to reunite they ran towards Russian without noticing the countries between Berlin and Moscow. Their foreign policy is as imperial as ever only this time they figured out that it's better to let the Russians do the killing. The NordStream pipelines were designed to bypass the already existing pipelines running through Poland so that Germany could have access to Russian energy resources while Russia could roll tanks across Eastern Europe.
They are free to come up with a way to oppose those parties and change their country. They just haven't bothered for the last 700+ years and absolutely love their tzars whoever they may be. They also have no desire to face their country's past and work with their neighbours to understand why they are so despised. Maybe they could start with asking Poles how they feel about renaming the Königsberg enclave to Kaliningrad, because that name translates into "the city of Kalinin". Who was Kalinin?
"On 5 March 1940, six members of the Politburo – Kalinin, Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyan – signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" (Polish intelligentsia, priests, and military officers) kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus,[15][16] ultimately leading to the Katyn massacre."
I don't believe it's true at all. I frequent some Russian forums to get a general sentiment and although people are quite careful to be not too open so that they don't get in trouble, it's pretty clear that Putin is hated for getting the country in this deep shit.
I also frequent some Russian forums. I have an impression that on average, Russians don’t blame Putin for starting the war against Ukraine. They hate him for being unable to win the war he started.
They don’t seem to oppose crimes committed by their government. They believe the main reason their country in deep shit is western military aid to Ukraine, and international sanctions against Russia.
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of which country you have a problem with, regardless of how legitimate your reasons are.
The same goes for any other commenter and any other country.
You posted a ton of these comments in this thread—that is seriously not ok. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. No more of this, please.
Seeing this post on the the of the most massive combined missiles + drones attack on Ukrainian power grid, resulting in millions of people having no electricity and water...
