As longtime Corriere della Sera editor Mian writes, the 2,000-mile-long Volga river has long played a central role in Russians\u2019 sense of national identity past. It does so today in Vladimir Putin\u2019s world, where Russkiy mir is \u201cnot a philosophy, but a creed encompassing everything pertaining to Great Russia, where Orthodox Christianity, Fascist impulses, traditionalism, and a certain \u2018Asiatic\u2019 Soviet despotism coexist.\u201d Traveling from town to town and city to city along the Volga, Mian, with photographer Cosmelli, teases out several related themes. One is the Russian people\u2019s self-professed indifference to death. At the site of one vast World War II battle overshadowed by that of Stalingrad, a local historian reckons that the fight consumed \u201ceighty-five tons of human flesh.\u201d She asks, meaningfully, \u201cWho else would give their lives for their country like that?\u201d And that, she suggests, is what will restore Russian greatness, a motif sounded by young and old alike. Yet, Mian points out, Russian greatness seems a far distant possibility in so many places along the great river, where drugs, alcohol, despair, and roving Clockwork Orange\u2013ish youth gangs rule, and where death is everywhere: not just the incalculable deaths in battle in Ukraine, but also death by vodka, car crashes (with death rates a staggering 60 times higher than in Britain), suicide, and industrial pollution in a heartland \u201cwhere smokestacks, apartment blocks, daycares, warehouses, and churches exist together along the Volga in a suffocating cloud of ammonia.\u201d It\u2019s not a pretty picture, nor is the overall view of life under Putin\u2019s rule, where dissidents, gay men and women, and minorities are oppressed, where right-wing Christianity dominates, and where, one priest confides, no one seems especially afraid of being incinerated in an atomic war.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As longtime Corriere della Sera editor Mian writes, the 2,000-mile-long Volga river has long played a central role in Russians\u2019 sense of national identity past. It does so today in Vladimir Putin\u2019s world, where Russkiy mir is \u201cnot a philosophy, but a creed encompassing everything pertaining to Great Russia, where Orthodox Christianity, Fascist impulses, traditionalism, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}