Below is a translation of a speech given by Russian political scientist and human rights activist Ekaterina Schulmann, cut and pasted in its entirety from an essay by Alexey Vlasenko who is the translator and a contributor to The Daily Kos. Schulmann has an interesting take on Putin’s motivation for the Ukraine invasion.

“Many people will ponder this question and come up with many different answers, all of which will seem logical.  Naturally, I have my own hypothesis, which I don’t claim is the one truth.  Nevertheless, since we are having such a remarkable discussion, I will share it.

He did this to halt time.  I’ll try to explain what this implies.

I think that these processes which we [political scientists] were observing, including the transformation of values, of worldviews, of public opinion [specifically in Russia], were real.  I do not think that we were all in thrall of illusions when we noted that violence in society is decreasing; that crime rates are falling; that new generations have a new value system; that video games actually reduce violence, rather than increase it; that, in general, the younger the social stratum, the more pronounced the decline in violent crime and in consumption of hard liquor; that imperial nostalgia is fading into the past.

Now, turn this picture around, and imagine yourself on the other side.  There you sit and watch as the sands of time slip through your fingers.  You will inevitably be succeeded by — let’s use his language — traitors.  Your children are traitors.  They do not share your view of life, they do not share your view of the world, they do not see that which you see with such clarity. You are the last defender of the fortress.  They will surrender it to the enemy, because they do not even consider him an enemy, and no matter how much you try to convince them, they still won’t consider.

A sizable, cultured and educated segment of the public sits around you at a safe distance, looks on and says:  “Go on, we’ll wait.  When you die, it will be our turn.  The sympathies of the future are on our side.  The youth idolizes us, not you.  But do go on, sit there for now, why not.  We will not storm the Kremlin, we only need to wait.”

A year passes, and another, then a third.  Everything continues in the same vein.  At the same time, your head is full of geopolitics, and the neighboring country is causing you unease.  It had somehow made progress, which is very disturbing.  And you realize that a little more, just a tiny bit longer, and that’s it, your historical time will end.  Your window will shut.  They will tell you: “Well, that’s enough, get down from there.  The next ones are coming.” And these next ones are unacceptable to you.  From your point of view, they are worse than useless, they will doom everything, they will ruin everything.

“He’ll smash to bits the sacred vessels, he’ll feed the dirt with royal oil, he’ll squander everything – and by what right?” [from The Covetous Knight, by Alexander Pushkin].  Read that again, and realize that this is not about money.  You will be seized with horror, at this hatred for one’s heirs, hatred for the living simply because they shall go on living.  “It’s time for me to rot, and you to blossom.”  A reasonable person can accept this, can caress a baby, understanding that “yes, I will turn to dust, but you will live on and prosper.”

But if you happen to be constituted a little bit differently, and you also happen to hold a great deal of power in your hands, then you can do this trick: onto the heads of all these future generations, you will overturn a heavy concrete slab, which will crush them forever, or least in any foreseeable perspective. That future that they wanted, they won’t get.  Instead, they will get the future your way, even after you are no longer among the living, because you will do such a thing, oh my…

You are inside, you understand?  Yes, inside this fortress that you’re guarding, you will figuratively detonate an atomic bomb.  True, there will be no life left in the fortress, but it will be radioactive and therefore unapproachable, and so it will forever remain “unconquered”, so to speak.

Not to speak of the specific culprit, with all due respect for him and his functions, but of a whole social and demographic stratum. Have you seen our average age figures?  But it’s not just age per se. It’s a certain social affiliation, a certain kind of experience, a certain world view that is formed by this experience.  Anyone who can’t accept the flow of time and come to terms with it, yet possesses power, could do this kind of thing.

This is my explanation.  It’s only a working hypothesis, but that’s how it is.  I do see confirmation from many sources, as well as in very public official pronouncements about how “we need to do this right now, tomorrow would be too late”, just another moment and everything will turn to irrevocable regret and musings of “we should have…”

This sentiment of “time flowing away” is something that I have been hearing for a long time, I think.  I speak about this whenever I discuss generational change.  The feeling that somehow history is not headed “in our direction”, this hatred and disgust for tomorrow, because “it is not what I need”, is clearly audible [in Putin’s speeches].  What was hard to grasp is that someone would go to such ends in an attempt to drown out these apparently unbearable feelings.

The trouble is, of course, that this terrible work of isolation is being done from both sides.  The wall is being built from both outside and inside.  We cannot blame the outside world for wanting to protect itself from, let’s say it out loud, an aggressive regime that is attacking and killing people.  Still, the labor of isolation is being worked by four hands.  It’s horrible.  [To repair the damage] will take a lot of work over a very long time.  Simply returning to a level that, until now, we took for granted, will require an unimaginable expenditure of effort and resources.  

It’s remarkable and tragic how humanity can squander its strength like this.”