Mary Hall: The deployment of brutalism

There has been, since Ivan the Terrible, in Russia a philosophy of brutalism. Its justification might be understood in terms of two approaches to taking a band-aid off of a wound: A slow removal produces somewhat less pain over a longer period of time than follows from ripping it off quickly. In this way, I imagine state-sponsored brutality is not supposed to be about being cruel per se, and there may be a certain reasoning around it. While Russians are targeting civilians in Ukraine to hurt or kill, the theory would go that this is to hasten an end to the war, after which survivors will go on to have many children.

The deployment of brutalism as an instrument of state policy does have a drawback that Russian leaders typically do not see: It can lead them to be inattentive to how people think and feel. In regard to Ukraine, the folks at the Kremlin may not recognize the full ramifications for statecraft of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. The Soviet government’s strange difficulties in coping with the aftermath of this accident contributed to the subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union.

It is not something anyone would soon forget who lives in Ukraine; and, I understand that controlling interests in Russia do know this. Kremlin people have been deploying the nuclear plant that now operates near Zaporizhzhia as an instrument of instilling fear among the Ukrainian people. And, now Russians think they can ratchet up the pressure by taking the power generated from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant for Russian use only, even to the disregard of safety concerns.

It is, therefore, quite important that those controlling Kremlin interests do not prevail in their war of aggression against Ukraine. We can set aside all of the concerns over Russian territorial expansion that people have. As Serhii Plokhy wrote in his account of what happened, “if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would be left unaffected on the planet.”

Mary Hall

South Hadley