Sarah Emminghaus schrieb:

In mehreren Studien hat Johannes die Auswirkungen bedingungsloser Geldtransfers an Menschen in extremer Armut von der NGO GiveDirectly untersucht. Außerdem ging es im Gespräch um psychologische Merkmale von Menschen in extremer Armut und um ethische Aspekte randomisierter, kontrollierter Studien.

And I think that like we forget that there’s never been a Russia. There was a Russian Empire ruled by a largely foreign elite over a population that mostly didn’t speak Russian. There was a Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was internationalist. And that wasn’t entirely a sham. And its elite was, in fact, multinational. Stalin was not a Russian. And it wasn’t built on national principles.

You know, Putin insists — and we tend to go along with him. He says like everything from the Vikings to the Soviet Union, that was Russia, right? And that’s simplifies things for us. And so maybe we kind of go along.

But there’s never been a Russia like the Russia that’s existed since 1991. There’s never been a Russia, which has had to just be Russia. And just being Russia turns out to be difficult. I mean, in a way, like that’s the challenge which Putin is not actually facing. Like what does it actually mean to just, to be Russia? He’s closed that all down by building the kind of state that he’s built.

He’s made it impossible for Russians to think about a future by the intense lawlessness and by the intense centralization of media and wealth. So the question what is Russia can’t be answered in the normal way, which is by referring to what Russia might become. It has to be answered in these other ways, by way of other people. That’s what I mean by when I say there’s an identity problem.