Episode Details

I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsing this troll into its parts and making a play on the words.

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The title of the book is The Beast from the Abyss, and she draws the parallel between the abyss and the deep folk — the emptiness of the so-called deep folk of Russia.

The Lie That Holds the Room Together

So you have a manufactured folk defined by a manufactured enemy. Now the question Yakubova spends her hardest pages on: what holds it all together? Real people are bound by 10,000 real things — language, kin, a song your grandmother sang, the shape of a particular hill. What binds a people drained of all of those?

This is very apt, because those of us who were listening to Will earlier today heard him answer a question by Ming about when he expects the collapse to come — which many are cataloguing at the moment, including Beefeater.

Yakubova’s answer — Larysa Yakubova’s answer — is the most unsettling part of her whole book, The Beast from the Abyss. The binding agent is the lie itself. Not one lie: the lie as an atmosphere, all-pervading, the medium everyone swims in in Russia and no one is expected to believe. Everyone knows the official story is false. Everyone knows everyone else knows, and repeats it anyway. Knowingly, together, in public, that shared knowing repetition becomes the bond. You’re not asked to believe the lie. You’re asked to repeat it.

This produces what Yakubova, citing the sociologists she draws on, names as the terminal symptom: a mass so hollowed out that it denies its own subjecthood, gives up, voluntarily, being the author of its own acts. Sit with what that means. To deny your own subjecthood is to give up being an author of your own acts. “I didn’t decide. I’m not responsible. I just flow where the people flow.” It’s the abdication of the self as the price of admission. True selflessness.

“None of This Is On Me”: The Distributed Tyrant

Here is what the Russist apparatus wants us to think. None of this is on me. I’m a small person in a vast river. I didn’t start the war. I don’t make policy. I just live here. Judge the Kremlin, not me.

Register the mana. It is relief — the narcotic relief of laying down the weight of being a moral agent. No guilt, because no agency. No shame, because no choice. It feels like innocence to the Russist. It is the most dangerous counterfeit the Russist apparatus makes, because it counterfeits the very faculty you’d need in order to refuse it.

Name the archetype. This is the merciless sovereign in a mask. Not the tyrant on the dais, but the tyrant distributed — smeared so thinly across 40 million shrugging shoulders that no single shoulder feels the weight. Coercive control’s masterpiece is not the dictator who commands. It’s the population that has agreed, together, to stop being able to say no, and to call that condition peace.

Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it patient? No. It depends on never stopping to think. The river only carries you while you don’t plant your feet. Is it true? Is it right? No. The deepest lie is here, because “I have no subjecthood” is the one statement that refutes itself. Only a subject can disown its subjecthood. Is it generous? No. It’s the refusal to extend reality to anyone, oneself included. This is Disinfolklore, and it’s the engine room. Everything else runs on this drained, knowing, lie-bound consent.

The Other Half: Yakubova’s Real Deep Folk

Now the other half — because without it, everything I’ve said curdles i