Russia from the Right

A conversation with Rolo Slavskiy

Today I have the great pleasure of sharing an interview with Mr. Rolo Slavskiy conducted via Telegram chat. (We are constantly typing messages to each other, but this particular internet conversation was intended for public consumption.)

Slavskiy needs no introduction. Since launching his blog last year, he’s been dropping payloads of mischievous and inconvenient musings on the unsuspecting heads of doe-eyed Western Russia Watchers.

I first met Rolo in Moscow—I think in 2016. We reconnected during the Virus Scam, and like Captain Renault and Rick Blaine, but with blogs, we soon embarked on a beautiful friendship (I am Rick in this metaphor, obviously).

In many respects we are polar opposites (and just to be clear: his views are his alone), but our Multipolar Blog World is unstoppable, and it would be futile to resist us.

Sorry Rolo, you have to be the French perv. It’s a nice Instagram photo, though.

Now for the main event!

---

Mr. Rolo, warm greetings. Thank you for taking the time to answer my queries. Prigozhin launched his own “SMO” on June 24. Who came out on top? And can you address this idea that it was a psyop? A lot of people seem to think it was a psyop.

Prigozhin’s SMO was, thankfully, short and relatively bloodless. I think that there is a sliding scale of success to all things. Did he topple Shoigu? No. Is it even possible to topple Shoigu without toppling everyone else that he is connected to? I think not. Was Prigozhin seriously convinced that he could storm Moscow with his skeleton crew? Doubtful.

I use this criteria to evaluate the situation: Is Wagner better or worse off now after their 24h SMO? People who were not following the developing drama between them and the MoD think that this came out of nowhere, and that it was an ambitious, vainglorious attempt to take power that failed. However, the truth is that Wagner was ordered to subordinate themselves to Shoigu when the new decree regarding PMCs was announced. Also, negotiations had broken down by the time that Prigozhin made his fateful decision. Wagner was facing an ultimatum.

Shoigu's New Anti-PMC Declaration Is Yet Another Deliberate Sabotage of the Not-War Effort

Now, even though they didn’t take Moscow, of course, the negotiations have been resumed. The charges against them have been dropped [UPDATE: Russian media reports Prigozhin is still under investigation by the FSB]. Lukashenko has effectively intervened on their side, so they now have a new backer in their corner. All of this is progress and a W in my book. However, I also believe, like you do, that the Kremlin is plotting to get their revenge against Wagner and that these agreements, whatever they may be, are not going to be honored should the Kremlin be able to recover, consolidate and send a force against Wagner. Probably the Chechen janissaries that they have bought for this very purpose many years ago.

As for psyops, well, I don’t know what that means. People use this term rather strangely. Do they mean that they think that Wagner didn’t take Rostov or move on Moscow? Or do they mean that this happened, but it was part of a plan by Putin to checkmate the black hat pedophiles lurking in the tunnels under Moscow with Oprah Winfrey? Or do they mean that Prigozhin lied about the threats leveled at him by the MoD? Do they mean that Prigozhin is a CIA agent? If so, for how long? Weren’t these people praising and defending Wagner literally 48 hours ago? Where is the new information that has come to light?

Sorry, I can’t answer a question that I don’t understand. But, clearly, the critics can’t either.

Okay, I’ll be more specific: Some people who understand that Western mainstream media are constantly lying to them have a tendency to go a bit too far—they end up clinging to the same kind of emotion-driven, illogical and poorly conceived theories that are shoved down their gullets by CNN and the BBC. And they’re very stubborn. They won’t budge, or they move the goalposts. Even when observable reality directly contradicts their Unimpregnable Truth. I have to say that some seem to be motivated by firmly held religious convictions. [FULL DISCLOSURE: I was raised as an Episcopalian WASP, and converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 2021—just a few months before I started the Edward Slavsquat Substack, actually. I don’t write about religious matters because I am a total novice. But maybe if there is interest I can tell the story of my baptism, which is a touching and uplifting tale. —Edward] Look, I understand it’s a very sensitive subject for some people, but speaking personally, I think it’s important to face the facts, whatever they may be, and not let religious beliefs (which can take many different forms) impede this often painful process. Care to comment? I can already anticipate your answer, and thank you in advance for losing me subscribers.

Look, in the early days I really tried to wrap my head around the various “5D Chess” or “Z-Anon” theories and understand them in and out so I could better explain to my readers why they were being misled. All I can say now is that logic cannot beat religious-type thinking. I have been banging my head against this wall for a year now. You have to understand: these people believe that if Russia loses, Christianity or whatever their chosen secular religion is (anti-Globalism) is proven false. So, clearly, Russia can’t be losing.

Now, the normal, rational person would have already admitted that Christianity is largely a hoax from top to bottom and has little to no explanatory power on wars or geopolitics. Or at the very least, the rational person can compartmentalize his faith and keep it in a box that he only brings out on Sunday mornings or on special holidays.

But what we are seeing in the West is a full-blown schizophrenic meltdown.

We have tranny shock-soldiers storming capitals and molesting children at pride events in broad daylight with jack-booted janissaries of the state standing on the flanks, protecting them. Formerly normal people who see this happening are literally losing their minds. “How can this be happening? Where are our morals? Where are our values? Where is God?” I am sure that the Russian peasants asked themselves the same thing as they were shipped off in railcars to the camps to be tortured and murdered by the millions. When faced with monstrous evil, people start asking the big, metaphysical questions.

But the answers that we come up with are quite different, clearly.

Christians have adopted a paradigm in which there are only two options for explaining away evil. So, the first one, is to cope by pretending that evil isn’t occurring. That what we see is actually good in disguise. And this delusion can take on many forms. For example, a retreat becomes a “strategic regrouping” that will allow the good guys to checkmate Kiev easier. No, really, the Z-Anoners say that the Wagner mutiny was an elaborate attempt to position Wagner in Belarus. Why Wagner couldn't just move there without doing their mutiny they leave unexplained. “To own the liberals,” probably. No more questions!

The other option is that evil is a punishment for sin. This is what the Moscow Patriarchate says about the destruction and closure of the canonic Orthodox Church in Ukraine that was in communion with Moscow. Yahweh is punishing them for being sinful by allowing atheist Jews like Zelensky to send them to prisons again, just like what happened a century ago. This is all just proof of how much Yahweh loves the Russian Orthodox now. He bothers to punish them more than any other group because of his higher expectations for them. The more he beats the Russian people, the more he loves them. Also, the church literally is Yahweh’s bridegroom in Orthodox theology. Textbook battered wife syndrome.

With the second option in mind, it becomes clear that as soon as Russia starts losing, the Christians will turn on Russia. You understand why, yes? It is because their god punishes evil and the wicked in this world. So, if someone is losing something or being destroyed, this is proof that God hates/loves them and is unleashing his corrective wrath on them.

Christian understanding of geopolitics is basically indistinguishable from the “might makes right” maxim. They will bleat and protest that this is not so, that God’s will or adherence to his law is what “makes right”. However, when trying to figure out who is “right”, they look for visible proof of God’s blessings to make that determination (might). A lost war, a revolution, hunger, famine, disease—all proof of some moral failing or another. Therefore, de facto, the winners are right in the eyes of God and the losers are not. Or, if this is a bridge too far even for the faithful, they can always fall back on option 1 again, and claim that what is happening is actually a blessing in disguise to get Satan to let down his guard, and set up a 5D checkmate of evil down the line.

So, you see, all possibilities are accounted for in the average “faithful” mind.

What’s most remarkable is that even people who do not go to Church still think this way. This model of understanding reality is very deep in people’s minds. And yes, it is unfalsifiable. You can take the peasant out of church, but it is another matter entirely to take the church out of the peasant.

Has the Original SMO reshaped your perception of the inner workings of the Russian State? During our first podcast-collaboration (with badly missed Marko M.—he will be back soon I hope; I will continue to pester him until he returns) in August 2022, there was general agreement that things had gone awry for Russia. However, there were still many uncertainties. How do you feel about the situation today?

Yes, I remember the good old days. I like to remind my readers that I had no illusions about the Russian government going into the SMO. I thought it was broken, pro-Western and heading in a bad direction. I thought that an existential crisis would force much-needed reform and national soul-searching.

On a grassroots level, this is undoubtedly occurring. People are taking an interest in geopolitics, the army, and their government. Russians are largely apolitical because of the widely-held sentiment that their opinions and actions have no effect on the government, which does what it wants, and usually that entails stealing lots of money and sending it to the West. So, on that level, society has indeed started to change, and for the better.

Russians are starting to reengage with society again. They are asking many difficult questions of their government. This was what the Kremlin feared the most and why they resisted involving the Russian people in the Not-War for so long. They didn’t want to stir them from their apathetic slumber.

But, on a political level, the best indicator for how little has changed is the fact that literally no high level person has lost their job despite the fact that they clearly messed up the SMO/the import substitution/diplomacy/intelligence and other existential things. In that sense, despite me thinking that I was a jaded realist when it came to the Kremlin, I was still too optimistic. I suppose I underestimated how deeply entrenched the elite were and how enmeshed they were within the patronage network extending to and out from the Kremlin.

The government seems to believe that to fire even one bigwig like Shoigu would lead to an unraveling of the system that they have built. It appears that there is no political will to begin reforms. This means that the crisis will only worsen and then when something does eventually break, it will have a worse effect on the country.

The Kremlin has revealed itself to be totally outcome-independent. I am forced to concede that the elites do not concern themselves with results or success, only maintaining stability i.e., the internal power balance system that they have built.

At the very least, I thought Putin would take the threat seriously, because his head is on the chopping block. Apparently he fears the consequences of firing some of his people more than he does the consequences of losing the war and being treated to the same fate as Saddam or Ghadaffi.

Either that or he is largely a powerless figurehead and the country is ruled by an alliance of spooks and oligarchs that doesn’t mind losing because in the end, they will always end up winning regardless.

You provide your readers with many enlightening observations about various political movements and factions inside Russia, particularly the Russian Nationalists. What do you think is the biggest misconception that Westerners have about Russia’s nationalist movement (which I suppose is a rather loose and general term)?

The first misconception that Westerners have is that Russian society is a monolith. Most people everywhere hate their own governments and rightly regard them as being corrupt, incompetent or maybe even downright malicious to the well-being of the people they rule over. People may like a popular figurehead like Trump in America, or Putin in Russia, but still hate the larger political/economic system that they preside over.

So, within Russian society, the government is critiqued from different angles. And here we run into the problem of epistemology or basically in figuring out what words and terms mean. What does it mean to be a Russian nationalist? Me, I think I have a pretty solid grasp of the idea and consider myself the best living Russian nationalist thinker out there spreading his ideas. But other people beg to disagree. Even within nationalist circles, there are different strains of thought.

You have classical liberals who want more free market economics, more social freedoms, and more integration with the West. Yes, really. You also have monarchists who want to go back to the principles of national self-determination, Orthodoxy, and the Tsar. Then you have the National-Socialists. And the Social-Nationalists. The Neo-Pagans. Libertarians. Also, many rank-and-file Communists have views on politics and economics that would be considered nationalistic in any other country.

The problem is that they have an unfortunate misunderstanding of what the USSR was. Most of these people worship Stalin because they think he was an Orthodox Russian patriot. This is not historically accurate, but you can see why they might feel this way if only because all the people in power that they hate tell them that Stalin was bad. It is a huge topic for another time, so it is enough for the Westerner to just keep the diversity of opinions in Russia in mind.

So, take Strelkov. He is a monarchist, but does not go all the way into Russian ethno-nationalism. His economic views could be described as socialist. In America, the Republicans would tar and feather him for being pro-king and advocating for social welfare and big government. And yet, I am sure that the average MAGA voter would get along with Strelkov and the patriotic communities in both countries would find that they have a lot in common with one another, share the same gripes, believe the same conspiracy theories and so on.

There is no real point in learning about all these different groups though, because they are all powerless. There are no nationalist politicians or media figures in Russia. Instead we are given neoliberals and leftover cosmopolitan Communists, and not of the Stalin variety. Sure, there are some run-of-the-mill politicians that will talk about the Russian people in a positive way when campaigning, but that is about it. Not one serving politician is well-regarded by any of the nationalists. Not one.

I try to give patriotic voices within Russia a voice with my writings. Other bloggers hate me for this. They prefer to give Kremlin talking points to Westerners while claiming to be alternative news. What they are doing is driving a wedge between patriotic Russians and patriotic Westerners. Worse, they accuse these patriots within Russia of being traitors for not supporting the Kremlin even though they would never apply this same standard to their own Western dissidents.

I have come to believe that some of the more egregious Kremlin shills must be being paid for their services, either by Western or Eastern spooks with the goal of misinforming and preventing solidarity among the peasantry.

You are quite critical of the so-called “5D pundits” (a slightly derogatory and vague term, but for me a 5D pundit is defined as “someone who thinks Moscow has everything under control, Trust the Plan”). I readily admit these types also test my patience BUT allow me to play devil’s advocate: Probably five years ago, I could have been labeled a 5Der. Not because I saw Moscow as omnipotent, but rather because I was a disaffected Westerner who thought Russia was being badly mistreated by Washington, and overlooking the Russian government’s faults, in favor of a “big picture” approach to geopolitics, seemed pragmatic. I believed this even though I was living in Russia, and was well-aware of the country’s many problems. On the geopolitical front, I even knew about some very worrying realities in Donbass that were not being discussed in Western “alt media”. But I shrugged them off—again, as part of my belief in “big picture” pragmatism. My point is: Should we show more understanding for these adherents of 5D chess? Or have I gone soft? (Very possible.)

So I kind of touched on this in my previous reply (should have read all the questions before typing out my answers!) Look, on a basic level the West is indeed bullying Russia and acting “unfairly”. But this is the world of geopolitics and such moral categories don’t really apply, nor do they affect real-world outcomes, so they shouldn’t factor into our analysis.

The only “moral” criteria that exists is strength and the ability to defend oneself and one’s own interests. The Kremlin likes to portray themselves as being super moral, which is how they explain away all the times that they got “tricked” by the West and also how they justify their unwillingness to fight the West seriously. This is nothing but a con for rubes. Russia’s ruling class are all gangsters with blood on their hands.

The ruling class of every other nation is basically the same, only it was their grandparents or great-grandparents who did the killing to get them to where they are now. Their descendants are only allowed to be more “moral” because others did the killing for them, and now they reap the rewards of the bloodbath without having to get their hands as dirty. They’re getting soft.

Unfortunately, bloggers like you and I do not have the option of being soft, Riley. You see, the 5Ders that we butt heads with are the inheritors of 10+ years of “5D Judo Chess Putin” blogging, which gushed about Putin’s grand machinations to save the world from the Western oligarchy.

And so this narrative had already seeped into many peoples’ minds as the SMO kicked off, and it was the prism through which these “alternative” thinkers were evaluating things. The work had already been done before idiots like Simpletonius or Fat Serge or Gonzalo Lira and Scott Ritter showed up on the scene, and so they coast along the track of an already established narrative. They don’t have to be as harsh as we do, because we are trying to break an existing narrative by telling people something new and discomforting. So, no, we can’t afford to be soft on them, simply because of the huge advantage they already enjoy in terms of pre-established narrative.

Speaking for myself, I want to connect the patriots of Russia to their counterparts in the West. I want there to be a worldwide patriot network of like-minded people who are able to resist getting pulled into the next planned crisis or fake war or moral outrage du jour. The day we realize that we, as patriots, have more in common with each other than our occupation, NWO-style governments, the better chances we have of resisting the absolute Hell on earth that they are working so hard to foist on us.

You are a blogger, like me. I am sorry about that. Tell us one positive thing about your experience as a blogger, and one thing that makes you want to quit blogging forever. What advice would you give to a young whippersnapper writer, who dreams of blog-glory?

I actually was asked this a couple of months ago by a young man who wanted to start writing. My advice to him was to give up on the idea, for which he badmouthed me to his friends. Ungrateful little bastard.

But seriously, there isn’t any money in it unless you literally spread fake news or work for someone else, and even then, it is miserly. If I hadn’t made the decision to “downshift” by leaving the West ten years ago I would not be able to make enough money to even feed myself. Mostly though, I write because I see it as a form of therapy. I like to get my thoughts out of my head and onto virtual paper—it makes me feel better and gives me peace of mind, if only temporarily.

I think that writing has to be understood for what it is and what it can do for the writer in question.

For better or for worse, some feel a compulsion to write. Others want to teach and inform with their writing. And some like to hone their craft, to strive for mastery of the written word. I think I have a mix of these motivations within me. But to someone who wants to write to make money, well, that ship sailed away almost a century ago at this point.

My advice is to not write if one is not a writer. Sure, some elements of writing can be picked up with time and practice, like speed and clarity and that sort of thing. But if you find yourself forcing yourself to write though, my advice to you is to stop forcing yourself to do something that isn't congruous to your character. Seriously, there are many better ways to make money. Crypto-scamming for example. Many young men have already gotten involved in this burgeoning new field. The current bear market is the best time to learn how to run these pump and dump rug-pulling scams so that you are ready for when the next big upturn comes along.

I want to transition to writing fiction eventually and hope to get around to finishing up my half-finished sci-fi epic once people lose interest in the Not-War. I spend too much time staring at screens as things stand now. That's another bad thing about blogging by the way. Posture problems, deteriorating eyesight, tech addiction—all these things creep up on you. When I am not writing, I spend all my time trying to recover the health I am losing by continuing to tap away at my keyboard. I’d much rather spend my days engaging in my favorite hobbies of martial arts, yacht sailing or drunk driving.

But, alas, I am in too deep now. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Save yourself while you still can.

---

The weekly news roundup & open thread will be published tomorrow! For reasons that should be obvious, it was not prudent to post it on Sunday.

NOTE TO MY LOVELY, INTELLIGENT COMMENTERS: I would like to remind you all of Edward Slavsquat’s commenting policy, which strongly encourages readers to discuss issues is an open, thoughtful way, and also strongly discourages readers from resorting to personal swipes, which are pointless and uncouth. All of my interviewees are honored guests on this blog. Please treat them as such. Of course, you are allowed to disagree with their views, or offer different perspectives, but please keep things civil and constructive. Personal attacks against my honored guests will be severely and ruthlessly punished. You have been warned, thank you, I love you. — Riley

Don’t forget to upgrade to the Paid Sub Club. ($38 for 12 months of Non-Stop Blog Fun.) Do you really want to deprive yourself of award-winning internet content? What are you, a self-flagellating Spartan?