Episode Details

My new Historical versus Real Russia lens has been tested before.

In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border.

“…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…”

The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.”

That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real Russia of the future.

If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real Russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the Russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real Russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical Russia discourse, we can help correct it.

The question to put to every voice in Future Russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final?

For their own good, and within the law

If Russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come.

So unless Future Russia learns what the Real Russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical Russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time Russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical Russian troll.

What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law.

Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022.

Why we need to start now

The reason to learn the difference now, before Future Russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes.

The archetype of Russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical Russia.

The Historical Russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable Russi