Despite the obvious liberal, pro-Western slant and a pronounced anti-Soviet bias, this article actually does a good job of painting a vivid picture of what Russia is like these days.
It is interesting to see the various contradictions (capitalist but with socialist nostalgia, simultaneously coexisting communist sympathies with imperial Russian ones, etc.) that us Marxist-Leninists have been pointing out for some time in the abstract take concrete form in the anecdotes from the author’s month long trip.
What seems to baffle these western reporters most, even more than Russia’s resillience to sanctions, or its defiant insistence on protecting its sovereignty and its own culture, is the revival of pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin sentiments. He points out with great shock how he finds that communists are getting elected to political office and how they have busts and statues of Lenin and Stalin.
He refuses to understand this phenomenon of Soviet revivalism even when someone tells him very directly that the 90s, which the West consider the ideal period in Russia, a supposed golden age of liberalism, actually was the worst in living memory for most Russians today:
Andrei, a twenty-four-year-old electrical engineer who was visiting from Moscow with three friends, spontaneously told me of Stalin that “he was a winner.” We were in front of an original military map of the Soviet counteroffensive. “For us young people, Stalin is number one. We must fight evil like during the Great Patriotic War.” Did any negative associations come to mind? “They say a lot of things, but what matters is the results,” he said. “I think there were more deaths in the Nineties with the gang wars and alcohol. That was our first experience with democracy—the worst period of our history.”
The author is of course a bit of a drama queen and hilariously tries to make himself look like some brave undercover agent in a totalitarian dystopia, pointing out how he used VPN to hide his searches and encrypted his communications… as if anyone actually cared. But this is sort of thing is to be expected, they are writing for a western audience that wants this sort of fluff.
And if we start to analyze a bit more carefully the way he structured the article it is fairly obvious what he is trying to do. When you read the quotes he gives of the people he interviewed you get the pretty clear impression that he tries simultaneously to portray Russians as hopeless, downtrodden and oppressed (the liberal ones) but also bloodthirsty brainwashed fanatics (the nationalistic ones).
Even so i do recommend giving this a read, it’s an interesting piece.