The common wisdom is that the West owns some share of the blame for what happened to Russia in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, however small. I reject this in its totality. It’s a fairy-tale Russians tell themselves and have infected the rest of the world with. Colonizers v. Colonized is a false dichotomy, of little help to the colonized while rehabilitating authoritarians and colonizers of all stripes. Russia is not a downtrodden power bereft of agency, nor was its natural path to democracy was ruined by Western capitalist negligence. The Soviet Union was an authoritarian, obscurantist regime dominated by chekist and criminal elements. The USSR’s demise did nothing to cleanse the country of these or its deep imperialism. It is no surprise that this bloc immediately captured its rump state with passive popular ratification. That should have been the null hypothesis from the start.

In this soil, proto-Putinism bloomed and dominated the zeitgeist, even the small liberal elements of Yeltsin’s interregnum confined to the upper classes of St. Petersburg and Moscow, which never cracked a combined 10% in the Duma in the handful of free parliamentary elections Russia ever saw. The common problem for everyone–from the masses to the dissidents and intelligentsia to the chekists and security state–was the lowering of Russia’s status, the dispossession of its divine privileges at the hands of perfidy, a stab in the back. Putinism, organically, became the new core of society, and all parties arranged themselves around it, consciously or no. Nothing exemplifies this better than what four separate Russian authors converged on in the 1990s: “deconstructing” Tolkien.

You may have stumbled upon one or more of these in your journey across the Internet. One has had several fawning articles about it written in the West by, among others, Salon (of course). But there are two more, written earlier.

Spoilers, by the way, for Russian-language fan-fiction that’s been out for 30 years:

1. Ring of Darkness (Кольцо́ Тьмы), written in the 1980s and early 90s by Nikoláy Perúmov.
2. The Black Book of Arda (Чёрная кни́га А́рды), written by Nataliya Vasílyeva and Nataliya Nekrásova, first circulated in the 1990s, then heavily rewritten.
3. The Last Ringbearer (После́дний Кольцено́сец) by Kiríll Yeskóv, published in 1999.

These are childish imitations of a work whose virtues and essence they cannot grasp. Russian literature is despicably overrated: verbose, pretentious, and infested with masturbatory curly-cues. Its habits have not been subjected to serious refinement for several unbroken centuries, despite every other Russian’s boasts about adoring Hemingway. But bad writing is the norm across humanity. It is the thinking that separates this strain from the forgivable cringe of fan-fiction. Each rejects the concept of Good v. Evil, impeaching Tolkien and his “simplistic worldview” as pretext. Beneath that reactionary framing lies only the Putinist, Sovietological, fascist narrative we and millions of Ukrainians are now intimately familiar with, its mountains of ash and bone:

There is no good and evil, nor principles nor ideals. They’re all pretense, nobody believes in anything, so you should believe in nothing and do nothing while we do whatever the hell we want.

Four separate normies converged on and advanced this line of attack long before anyone had ever heard of Putin. Each attempts and fails to “retell” the narratives of The Lord of the Rings (#1 & #3) or The Silmarillion (#2), *deep sigh*, “from the point of view of the forces of evil.” And lo and behold, in each, the Forces of Evil are normal people with legitimate world views acting merely in what they see as their own interests, viciously demonized by the other side. “Deconstruction” and “critique” are pretexts. The point is not to add to the discussion or forward human thought. They’re a propagandist counterattack against the legitimacy of Tolkien’s–and thereby the West’s–cultural, political, social, and moral legitimacy, hasty attempts to reassert Russian’s literary credibility in the face of cataclysmic encroachment, as Putinism writ large has been for Russia’s geopolitical credibility.

The authors declare this openly. They miss the point of Tolkien on purpose, a point so simple a child can understand it: a geek nerding out about a world he created. He wrote for an audience of one, himself, and invented modern fantasy in the process. That innocence and good faith are the exact target of assault, for if such things exist, then politics, culture, society and government cease to be games. Moral judgment enters the picture and retreating to your home team in the corner becomes subject to judgment. Nations become actors that can be praised or condemned. The verdict of the Cold War becomes valid. Russians’ fall and dispossession becomes warranted, regardless of the West’s flaws. And Russians do not want that. They hate it. It is a miserable place to be on this imperfect earth. So they felt out a rebuttal through cunning: those very concepts, “the dogma of good and evil”, must be overthrown.

Óркская (“Orcish Song”) by Mikhaíl Yelizárov, 2014

The thought behind this overthrow is bankrupt. It does not apply to Tolkien. The distinction between the manifestation of influence and explicit intent has been known for thousands of years. The monarchist and Catholic elements are secondary, nay, tertiary, as Tolkien himself said over and over, and never meant to distract from that basic innocence. At no point in the critical history of Tolkien’s publications has anyone in the West ever mistaken these things for tracts or statements. The message of this fanfiction is not just cynical for its own sake: it’s primitive, delusional, and wrong. This seeps out into their writing. To see, we must go down into the depths of Angband Russian writing and deconstruct these Deconstructors, taking each of these works in turn. Against my better judgment.

I – Birthing Fire

Of no help is the fatal Russian tendency to overrate their own linguistic prowess. Russian culture is supremacist, conservative, and reactionary. “Hierarchy is the natural order of things. Life is an unceasing struggle for dominance.” Again, primitive. It infects all their attitudes–social, cultural, linguistic. Russian, by nature, is a superior language among a few peers, but secretly Russian is the bestest. Others, by nature, are in their grasp, trivialities, undeserving of respect–meaning they’ve not the faintest idea of what they’re actually daring. Tolkien’s writing within the context of the English language is sublime in a very peculiar way that is very difficult for Russian (or any other tongue) to capture, evidenced by the 10-or-so different Russian translations of Rings that have circulated over a mere 40 years. Worse, Tolkien was a linguist who put in a daunting amount of care into his world-building. Attempting to imitate his skill, let alone match it, is not for the faint of heart. If you come at the king, you’d best not miss.

On those terms, The Ring of Shadow is a disaster. Perumov makes many amateurish mistakes that stick out like a sore thumb to any Tolkien nerd. His trilogy takes place 300 years after Rings. The protagonist’s name is Folko Brandybuck. Whatever “Folko” is intended to mean, I have no idea. Tolkien chose “Frodo” as a translation of his actual name, Maura, which means “wise, experienced”, using an Old Norse name “Frodo”, which means “wise by experience”. “Folko” is, as far as I can tell, a Dutch-ish name that draws roots from “folk”, or something. Whatever flaws Tolkien might have had, he did not just throw out names that sound good like the rest of us. Then there’s the antagonist, Olmer, which is a variant of Elmer, which means “noble and famous”. This is relevant to the story. Here’s some more stuff, for fun:

• Eärendil is translated as “Рожда́ющая Ого́нь”, “[The Star] That Births Fire”. The name means “Devoted to the Sea”, or more literally, “Sea-lover”.
• Oromё is misspelled “Oreme”.
• Cuivienen is misspelled as “Куививиен” (“Cuivivien”) and translated on the map as “Во́ды Пробужде́ния”, “Waters of Arousal”. The word пробужде́ние shares the meaning of “awakening” and “arousal” and yes, it lands exactly as it sounds. Transliterating the name was the play, idiot.
• The Riddermark is translated as the Rohannic Mark.
• Two new Istari (Wizards), never before heard of, are “Redbor” and “Fandar/Thandar”. (Russian does not have a “th” sound. Perhaps it should add a few letters to better transcribe foreign sounds, you know, like countless other languages do.)

Am I being a little nitpicky? Yes. This is the game Perumov wants to play. Try to storm Kyiv and someone will shoot back, :pikachuface:. Perumov claims he wrote the rough draft in 1991 and he seems to have read The Silmarillion before hitting the post button, but it’s clear he missed the decades-old corpus of translating Tolkien already available at the time. Some haste drives his pen. How helpful, then, that Perumov said what it was in an interview in 2000:

– Где-то в середине 70-х я прочитал “Хоббита”. и так мне эта книга запала в душу, я никогда не читал ничего подобного. Был только Волков, и иногда Софья Прокофьева писала что-то в этом стиле. Прочитав, я понял – это мое, это то, чего мне не хватает. И заболел этим.

Perumov: Sometime in the mid-1970s I read The Hobbit, and that book imprinted myself in my mind. I had never read anything like it. There was only [Alexander] Volkov. Sometimes Sofia Prokofieva [both children’s fantasy writers] would write something in that style. I read it and I knew: this is my thing, this is what I had been missing, and it possessed me.

     – Нет, ну понятно, Толкиен понравился, его книги до сих пор в каком-то роде можно назвать культовыми. Но почему вам пришло в голову дописать Профессора? Что-то не устраивало?

Interviewer: Well, I get it, you found Tolkien to your liking, you can still call his books “cult classics” in some sense. But why made you want to outdo the Professor? Was something not to your liking?

     – За державу обидно, 45-й год. Война в Европе кончается. Русские солдаты штурмуют Берлин, американцы трепыхаются на Рейне, немцы на восточном фронте дерутся насмерть. В тихой, мирной Англии господин Толкиен сидит в Оксфорде и пишет “Властелина колец”. Как ни открещивался Профессор от того, что “Властелин” – это не аналогия, что это не имеет никакого отношения к войне, это рвалось, рвалось, лезло. Для того чтобы после войны изображать Зло, идущее в бой под красным флагом, нужно было очень сильно его ненавидеть. Потому что тогда это было больше, чем символ, это было гораздо больше, чем просто боевое знамя, чем даже флаг страны, это было Знамя Победы. Эта одна из многих, многих, многих причин…

P: I was insulted on behalf of my country. It’s 1945. The war in Europe is ending. Russian soldiers are storming Berlin, American soldiers are flapping about on the Rhine, German soldiers on the Eastern Front are in their death throes. And Mr. Tolkien is sitting in Oxford, in quiet and peaceful England, writing The Lord of the Rings. The Professor can protest all he likes – ‘Rings is not an analogy, that it has no relation to the war’, I just had to, I had to, I couldn’t let it go. In the aftermath of that war, to depict Evil Itself going to war under a red flag, Tolkien had to have been driven by hate. Because then, that flag was something more than a symbol, it was much more, more than just a banner of battle, or even the flag of a country, it was The Banner of Victory. That was one of the many, many, many reasons…

     – Но при чтении вашей трилогии о Средиземье трудно отделаться от мысли, что и у вас прослеживаются параллели с нашим миром.

I: But, when reading your trilogy, the reader can’t help but see you drawing parallels with our world.

     – В отличие от Профессора я этого никогда не скрывал, более того, названия некоторых глав являются прямыми отсылками – “Исенская дуга” и “Прорыв” – к культовым фильмам эпопеи “Освобождение”.

P: Unlike the Professor, I never concealed this, and what’s more, several chapter titles (The Isen Salient, Breakthrough) are direct references to classic films from the Liberation series.

     – Кто-то даже умудряется углядеть Гитлера в фигуре Олмера, восставшего против эльфов, которые-де символизируют ясно кого… Насколько верны эти подозрения?

I: Some might even see Hitler in your character Olmer, rising up against the elves, who clearly symbolize you-know-who. How valid would you say those suspicions are?

     – Олмер, конечно, не Гитлер. Во всяком случае, мне хочется верить, что мой герой действует несколько умнее. По крайней мере, ему хватило соображения не вести войну на два фронта. Но аналогии с реальностью, бесспорно, есть. Главы, посвященные вторжению Олмера и гибели западных держав, – в какой-то степени отражение катастрофы сорок первого года. Однако при этом следует помнить, что силы Олмера и его самого я отнюдь не ассоциирую с силами Третьего рейха.

P: Of course Olmer isn’t Hitler. In any case, I would like to believe my character is a little smarter. At least he didn’t decide to fight a war on two fronts. But there are analogies, yes, that is true. The chapters dedicated to Olmer’s invasion and the destruction of the Western Powers do, to some extent, reflect the disasters of 1941 [when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union]. But you have to understand that I do not at all associate Olmer and his forces with those of the Third Reich.

Or…you could be wrong, Nicholas. Tolkien didn’t hide anything .You imagined it. You got triggered by Tolkien using the words “red banner”, which got rendered into Russian as “Крáсное знáмя” in the samizdat versions that circulated underground in the Soviet Union (the only ones available in the mid-1970s–there’s a fascinating history behind the various translations of Tolkien’s works in the Soviet Union and later Russia), and you let your mind run amok. This is fucking absurd. The word means red. It’s used in contexts throughout Russian without grown-ass adults losing their shit over associations that your neurons might throw up. It takes five seconds of effort to move past that and go “oh wait, it’s just a color, maybe it’s just a coincidence” a emotional capacity beyond the educated of the Great Nation of Russia, its Own Peculiar Civilization. Later translations tend to use “crimson” or some more poetic synonym to avoid this, as if it’s reasonable to accommodate Americans freaking out about a Chinese author using “stars and stripes” to describe a banner in a fantasy battle set in a vaguely Chinese historical setting. The irony is that further in that interview, Perumov is well aware he’s poking a giant’s feet and bashfully dismisses any impulse to hold up his writing to Tolkien’s. But he doesn’t categorically disown it either. Weird. I wonder why that is.

False Yeomanship

Perumov’s “offended on behalf of my country” (“За держа́ву оби́дно”) is a line from the classic Soviet film The White Sun of the Desert (Бе́лое Со́лнце Пусты́ни) by grizzled former Tsarist customs officer and Russian-Civil-War veteran Vereschágin, mocking the savage-coded antagonist for attempting to bribe him. Vereschagin embodies a salt-of-the-earth civic and moral archetype within Soviet-Russian culture, flawed and vice-prone but virtuous where it counts:

Верещагин не случайно стал одним из любимых народных героев. Тут совпали редкое актерское обаяние самого Павла Борисовича и национальный архетип, видимо, восходящий к Илье Муромцу. Верещагин сидит сиднем, хлещет водку, берёт мзду, но только до тех пор, пока не задевают его глубинные чувства. Тут он просыпается, выходит из берлоги и восстанавливает попранную справедливость.

It was no accident that Vereschagin became one of our most beloved popular heroes. Pavel’s [Luspekáyev] rare charm as an actor combined with a national archetype that seems to go back to Ilyá Múromets. Vereschagin is lazy, guzzles vodka, takes bribes, but only as his heart permits. Then he awakens, comes out from his lair, and restores justice trampled.

–Vladimir Mirzóyev, Soviet/Russian director

В фильме, и особенно в характере Верещагина, — наше подлинное представление о самих себе. Мы мощные, снисходительные и несуетливые. Пьём много, но от грусти и несовершенства мира. Мы уверены, что образ наш искажают враги или обстоятельства. Зла мы никому не желаем, а уж когда всё напрочь выходит за рамки, молча, но довольно решительно устраняем неправду и зло.

The film, and especially Vereschagin’s character, contain our authentic self-conception. We are mighty, condescending in all senses of the word, and do not fuss. We drink a lot, but out of sorrow and the imperfection of the world. We are confident that our enemies and circumstances warp how we are seen. We wish no ill on anyone, but should all go out of joint, we silently, yet resolutely, eliminate evil and untruths.

–Vladimir Shárov, Soviet/Russian writer

This is the delusional self-image Russians pride themselves on, somehow more embarrassing than ‘Murica-screaming evangelicals, a comical mishmash of traits that Russians could not exemplify less. White Sun is a deeply imperialistic and colonialist film from 1970. Pretty much every Russian has seen it. It is set to the backdrop of the Central Asian revolts of the 1910s and 20s against Tsarist and then Bolshevik rule, both of whom carried the imperialist cause without a second thought. The protagonist, Súhov, is an idealized civilizing Bolshevik of stoic temper who longs for his wife back home on an idyllic homestead that definitely hasn’t been looted or destroyed by the apocalypse raging in Russia proper. The antagonist whom Vereschagin rebukes is Abdullah, a stereotypical Muslim savage of the Basmáchi movement that at times threatened control over parts of Central Asia. The Basmachi movement was many dubious things and had little hope of success, but the Bolsheviks had no interest in portraying them with any truth or nuance, nor did they have any qualms about accommodating reactionary Islamic impulses, including Sharia Law, whenever politically expedient in that region. In true patriarchal fashion, Vereschagin’s wife dissuades him from helping Súhov get Abdullah’s harem to safety. He then sits by until Abdullah brutally kills Suhov’s idealized Red Army child soldier sidekick, who reminded him of his dead son. By this point, several of Abdullah’s young wives have also been brutally murdered and Vereschagin knows the antagonist plans to murder the rest–because Suhov came to him asking for help in protecting them in the first place. Had his heart permitted, this could have all been prevented. But no, a mustache-twirling southron wanting to tie up the loose end that is his harem of helpless women before fleeing Bolshevik civilization doesn’t count as “out of joint”.

Vereschagin’s quip comes when Abdullah tries to bribe him to turn over the ship the bandit wants to escape on–after having succumbed to insidious feminine pressure and failing some very basic moral obligations. Vereschagin sucks. He is neither mighty nor condescending in a positive sense, and he fusses to the death of several women and a child soldier. At best, he’s a tragic character who only dies due to not knowing that Suhov had booby-trapped the ship’s motor. Nor does this idolizing of him make sense outside of the Russian imperialist messiah complex, which preaches that Russia has rescued Europe from chaos (Napoleon and Hitler) many times over, yet oh! how the meanie Europe and the West refuse to give longsuffering Russia its due. That Russians might try to do something about the imperfection of the world and prevent justice from being trampled, which is infinitely preferable to trying to salvage it, does not come into their inebriated heads. Any criticism of Russia is unacceptable, “foes warping how we are seen”. Any affront to its God-given imperial rights, geographic or cultural, cannot be born.

Tolkien affronted, so Perumov “had no choice” but to write a lame plot about how Boromir’s secret descendant comes back from the East 300 years later at the head of an army of Quite Normal Orcs and Easterlings, forges a new Ring of Power out of the Nine, almost transforms into a new Dark Lord, and destroys what’s left of the West…because Aragorn’s line stole the kingship. Wow, what a biting critique of Tolkien’s simplistic worldview, finally given a dose of cold water. And yet, it is the sanest of this triune dumpsterfire, in that it has a plot with good guys, bad guys, and a recognizable sense of morality. Olmer does bad things, and Folko stops him, but not before the smug Elven West finally knows what it feels like to be bowled over by Notzi Eastmany and left standing in the ashes. Take that, Professor.

II – Endless Void

Further we go into the dungeons of Morgoth, though not yet unto his nethermost hall. The Black Book of Arda spawned its own sub-genre of the Russian Tolkien fandom, “Niennism”, which, as an expression of identity, philosophically and cynically rejects the legendarium’s dualistic moral framing as mere history-is-written-by-the-victors, openly attempting to “overthrow Tolkien’s dogma”. Oh joy. Let’s start again with the literary. Here is the translation of the opening of the Ainulindalë at the beginning of the Black Book:

Был Эру, Единый, которого в Арде называют Илуватаром, Отцом Всего Сущего; и первыми создал он Айнур, Божественных, что были порождением мысли его, и были они с ним прежде, чем было создано что-либо иное. И говорил он с ними, и давал им темы музыки, и пели они перед ним, и радовался он. Но долго пели они поодиночке или немногие — вместе, в то время как прочие внимали, ибо каждый из них постиг лишь ту часть разума Илуватара, которой был рожден, и медленно росло в них понимание собратьев своих. И все же чем больше слушали они, тем больше постигали, и увеличивались согласие и гармония в музыке их…»

There was Eru, the Unified, whom in Arda is called Ilúvatar, Father of All That Is; and as the first ones made he the Ainur, the Divine Ones, that were the product of the thought of him, and they were with him before anything else was created. And he spoke with them, and gave to them themes of music, and they sang before him, and glad was he. But long they sang alone or a few together, while the rest hearkened, for each of them comprehended only that part of the Reason of Ilúvatar from which he was born, and slowly grew their understanding of their brethren. Yet the more they listened, the more they comprehended, and the agreement and harmony in the music of theirs increased.

Compared to the original English:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.

Now, my translation of The Black Book’s rendering is deliberately unsparing compared to the rest of mine in this post, because it’s a good example of the subtlety of Tolkien’s writing that escaped Vasilyeva and Nekrasova despite Russian having many direct translations of the vocabulary Tolkien used:

• Rendering “мы́сли его́” as “the thought of him” reflects a conscious stylistic choice by the authors to put the possessive pronoun “его́” (“his”) after its object instead of before, which creates a distinctly Biblical register and makes the passage sound more archaic in Russian. The Old Church Slavonic translations of the New Testament from Greek deliberately copied that language’s grammar, which puts possessive pronouns after their object (normal Russian puts them before), in order to ape its prestige. Tolkien’s grammar, however, is unmistakably modern. The archaicness of the work is expressed through careful word choice and clause arrangement. This choice is unnecessary and tips the authors’ hands: they understand it is high speech, but not how.
• Rendering “the One” as “Еди́ный”, as in the “One God”, is as common as it is wrong. The modern connotation of “еди́ный” is that of “unified” or “united”. It’s the same word used in “United Russia” (“Еди́ная Росси́я”), Putin’s political party. It meaning “one” or “the one and only” without an explicit negative is a very archaic use. Here “the One” is a translation of “Eru”, which means “He that is Alone” in Quenya, i.e., there is only one and none like him. It’s a noun, not an adjective, which are quite separate things in English, and for that, they could have just capitalized “оди́н” (“one”) and effortlessly translate it, instead of once again invoking unnecessary feelings of arousal. Or you could have gone with “еди́нственный” (“one, singular”), a direct equivalent adjective. Others have done that, but no, we have to go Super Duper Pushkin Literary, even though the very majesty of Tolkien’s prose is how he synthesizes high, medium, and low registers.
  • To be perfectly fair, almost everyone fails to pick up on how Tolkien is caught between his desire to write a pagan story with gods and tragedies and his need to avoid 1) openly apostatizing himself and 2) triggering his ruthless allergy to Allegory. Instead, they misdiagnose this as him “harmonizing” this, something he never achieved. The tension in his legendarium, its imperfection and chaos, is a feature, not a bug, even as Tolkien himself was never able to make peace with that. Russians come at Tolkien with a 19th-century classical education that thinks this is all elementary, so “еди́ный” is the obvious choice: Eru is the transcendent Yahweh, the Еди́ное (One) of Neoplatonism, but Tolkien 101 is that if you see explicit allegory in Tolkien’s work, you have made a mistake. Start over. But they can’t. In their haste to classify and put these things under their fingers, thus dominating them (as Melkor would), they do not let Eru stand on his own terms, impose qualities on him that he does not possess, and ignore qualities he does.
• “Father of All That Is” is superfluous. I don’t know why it’s here.
• “Боже́ственный” is a terrible choice. It means “divine” or “godlike”, not “holy”. The authors did not catch the meaning of “holy” here as “set apart” or “hallowed”, as contained in “sanctified” or “consecrated”. For that, “свяще́нный” was right there. This is the only meaning Tolkien intends throughout his work, especially The Silmarillion, e.g., when Varda hallows the Lamps or Silmarils: she sanctifies them; she does not make them “divine”. Tolkien was, infamously, very careful to use words that did not invoke allegory or cross over into explicit Christian imagery. He would disqualify the entire work off this one translation choice.
• “Offspring” is an exemplar of the limits of how well Russian can capture English. Though it most often does mean “children” or “progeny”, the Germanic schema of word formation allows concrete and abstract meanings to coexist, the abstract proceeding plainly from the concrete, both remaining neutral. “Offspring” therefore conveys how the Ainur literally “spring off” from Ilúvatar, conveying that they are both his progeny and of similar being. There are calques of offspring in Russian, such as “о́тпрыск” or “отро́дье”, but they have archaic, ironic, mean, or contrived rings to them, so Vasilyeva and Nekrasova chose “порожде́ние” (“result, outcome, product of”), the same word used in the phrase “product of one’s time”. It’s…fine? But something has been lost.
• “Дава́л” means “gave”, not “propounded”, which specifically means presenting for consideration, expressing the sense of respect and independence Ilúvatar has for his creations. He does not merely bequeath them themes of music from on high. He wants the Ainur themselves to muse on them. There isn’t a good direct equivalent of “propound” in Russian, but a better rendition would be something like “предлага́я пе́ред ни́ми”, “offering before them”, capturing the edification in mind.
• “Ра́зум” I translated as “Reason” because, like “еди́ный”, that’s the modern connotation, and it is very strong. In English, “mind” emphasizes the aspect of reason while including other facets of one’s conscious state, including emotion.

You get the point. Russian shares some strengths with English. It has a broader phonetic range and cross-linguistic pollination to draw from, which allows even Shakespeare (through generations of work) to translate spectacularly. This is insufficient for Tolkien and the English he wields. English has managed to unite its disparate threads into a mighty gestalt, while Russian remains gangly. It pulls much of its vocabulary and style from Turkic and Semitic languages, which is just a different mixture than English, producing a different texture that could be really awesome if Russians would fucking let it. Properly translating Tolkien into Russian was going to take time and careful study, not eyeballing it in the early 1990s. That said, this imperfect rendition of the Ainulindalë is masterful to compared to the actual opening paragraph of The Black Book, at least of one version I could find, as there have been many over the years and English translations have a propagandistic sheen to them, dressed up to be more palatable to a Western reader:

…Темно. И тихо.
Но ни тьма, ни тишина не несут тревоги или угрозы. Просто, спокойно и буднично — свет не зажгли, вот и темно…
А вот уже и не темно. Чья-то рука зажгла свечу, и на кончике фитиля парит язычок пламени. В круге света, впрочем, оказывается немногое: сама свеча, поставленная прямо на стол безо всякого подсвечника, просто в застывшую лужицу воска; поверхность стола — темное, затертое дерево, кое-где в царапинах и щербинках… Старый стол. Ну и что же? Бывает. Блики света скользят по спинкам двух стульев, тоже старых, деревянных. И это бывает… Эка невидаль! Стоило ли ради такого зрелища зажигать свечу?
А вот человека, который ее зажег, становится видно далеко не сразу. Точнее, его не видно вообще, только слышны где-то в темноте спокойные шаги. Ближе. Ближе. Пламя чуть вздрагивает любопытно, и свет быстро скользит по рукам человека — по книге, в его руках… Книга ложится на стол, и отблески быстро обегают название:

Черная Книга Арды

Тихо — только потрескивает иногда свечной фитиль. Свеча на столе, книга рядом со свечой, человек у стола — листает книгу, читает ли, нет — не поймешь. Наверное, все-таки нет — слишком быстро перелистывает страницы. Слишком быстро — и свет скользит летящим взглядом по буквам, по строкам, между строк…
Но вот пламя вздрагивает, клонясь к свече, от мимолетной горячей ласки к столу стекает несколько быстро стынущих капель, вслед за огнем вздрагивает темнота, на миг отступая и впуская еще один луч слабого рассеянного света. Кажется, вот-вот что-то изменится — но тихий стук закрывающейся двери расставляет все по местам: просто в комнату вошел еще один человек. И снова — стол, свеча, книга… Больше ничего не видно. Всеостальное — драпировка на стене (или занавешенное окно?), угол шкафа, узор мозаики, а может, ковра на полу — опять тонет в темноте.
Человек у стола закрывает книгу. Гость подходит и садится на второй стул. Берет книгу, открывает наудачу, прочитывает несколько строк…
— И все-таки что это? Хроника? — спрашивает он.
— Не совсем, — отвечает его Собеседник и повторяет задумчиво: — Не совсем…

English

It was dark. And quiet. But neither the dark nor quiet bore alarm nor threat. It was just…calm, mundane: no light had been lit, therefore, it was dark…

And already it was no longer dark. Someone’s hand lit a candle, and at the end of the wick a tongue of flame hovered. Its ring of light, by the way, contained little: the candle itself, no candlestick, set on the table in a hardened pool of wax. The table’s surface was dark, of worn wood, scratched and nicked in places. An old table. But what of it? Unremarkable. The light crept along the backs of two chairs, old and wooden as well. Also unremarkable. Such wonders never before seen! Why light a candle to see all this?

And the person who lit it did not become visible right away. More precisely, they were not visible at all: only quiet steps could be heard somewhere in the darkness. Closer. Closer. The flame flinched a little, curiously, and the light quickly crept along a person’s hands, and the book in their hands, which lay on the table. The gleam ran swiftly along its title:

The Black Book of Arda

It was quiet, the only sound the occasional crackling of the wick. The candle on the table, the book next to it, the person leafing through it–reading it?–you cannot tell. Most likely not, they’re leafing through the pages too quickly. Too quickly, and the light glided, a hasty glance, across the letters, the lines, between the lines…

But then the flame flinched, bending towards the candle, a fleeting hot caress flicking several droplets onto the table, solidifying quickly, and the darkness flinched at the flame, retreating for a moment and allowing forth another ray of weak, soft light. Perhaps something was about to change, but the soft shutting of a closing door put everything in its place: another person simply entered the room. And again the table, the candle, the book…nothing more was visible. All else–the draping on the wall (or a curtained window?), the edge of a cabinet, the design of a mosaic, and maybe a carpet on the floor–sank back into the darkness.

The person at the table closed the book. The guest went over and sat in the other chair. The person opened the book to a random page, and read several lines.

“What is this? A chronicle?” he asked.
“Not quiet,” his Interlocutor, saying again pensively: “Not quiet.”

300-400 goddamn words to establish an unnecessary framing device of two guys talking about a book in a dark room. The prose never rises above this interminable adolescent drivel. It reads terribly in Russian, checking off the greatest hits. Superfluous details flood the page. Extremely archaic words are favored over modern ones for no reason [рёк (ryok, “quoth”)–a word that is less Russian and more Old Church Slavonic–whenever Eru speaks instead of cказа́л (“said”)]. The word order gets fucked with constantly just because you can do that in Russian even when it adds nothing of value. Native Russian speakers have not been kind to it. But enough about that, let’s get to the “substance”.

The Black Book’s cogitations have the depth of a 12-year-old boy that’s discovered their pastor lied to them. I can picture Vasilyeva or Nekrasova reading this and scoffing, because only Russians should be able to get away with lazily regurgitating Soviet invectives against religion or philosophy and lovebombed for it. Don’t steal our grift! Melkor is recast as Lucifer, explicitly calls himself “The Morning Star”, and acts as angsty Promethean figure who Akshually created Men, because he didn’t want a world filled with mindless slaves, unlike Ilúvatar the Tyrant, oh, and he named everything too. Yes, the book is stuffed full of shitty pantomimes of Tolkien’s conlanging. The vibe is that naked “SEE? WE CAN DO THIS TOO?!! WE DON’T SUCK!!!” that’s emblematic of Putinism. Instead of looking within Russia’s own wells out of inspiration inspired, they ape, trying to prove they’re just as good before an audience that doesn’t exist, doesn’t care, and isn’t watching. And they failed.

That failure extends to the critical and philosophical. Even on its own terms, The Black Book‘s is empty and void. Setting ≠ Dogma. Wild West settings do not posit a dogma of libertarianism. Sci-fi settings do not posit a dogma of scientism. Cyberpunk settings do not posit a dogma of amoralism. This is such an elemental taxonomic distinction that it gives the game away. Tolkien’s actual job was navigating textual and oral tradition across many cultures. This was all 101 to him. He never failed to keep legendary transmission, the nuances of myth, the wild seas of translation and interpretation, archetypes, tropes, etc., at the forefront of his mind. He knew of no other way. His love for that is what inspired him to make his own.

Philosophically, Tolkien’s work does not posit an elementary or spiritual binary of Black v. White. The stark cosmic lines between good and evil are why it’s fantastical: the further you go back in time, the more these things appear in stark, incarnate form as conveyed in myth and legend; conversely, the further you go forward in time, the more these things blend together as storytelling becomes more coherent and society grows more developed, leading to a banal present and uncertain future. He never denies the shades between: they comprise the profundity of the work. You can be “good” and still be evil, as with Middle-Earth itself. Tolkien writes of Arda Marred, to which no salvation is promised. Melkor succeeds in tainting creation in a fundamental way. No one knows how this ends. No one understands the mind of Eru and his intent, and that sucks. Manwë gives the whole consolation speech about how “greater good comes out of evil permitted!” and Mandos claps back dispassionately with “yeah dude, but it’s still evil and this blows.” Frodo does not meet a happy fate. Sam questions the “evil” of a dead Haradrim soldier. Orcs are intelligent and rational, a fact with implications that Tolkien failed to solve, but he didn’t take it out. The Valar make mistakes and cause unnecessary harm. Fёanor is a genius who brings unthinkable evil into the world that could only be brought about by people on the side of good being evil, and his sons follow in his footsteps. The Children of Húrin centers around an anti-hero who ruins several kingdoms and does far more harm than good. The High Elven presence in Middle-Earth is explicitly colonial and unambiguously doomed, however wondrous it might seem to those below them. Even Gollum is not depicted as irredeemably evil. Gandalf chastises Frodo for failing to see it out of immediate convenience, an act that literally ends up saving the world, as Frodo Being Good means fuck all: the Ring overpowers him, and it is mere chance (providence) that wins the day. The struggle is real, and what is good in one moment can be evil in another. It describes reality through a lens of fantasy for fun and profit.

Vasilyeva and Nekrasova mean “dogma” in a propagandistic sense. As with Perumov, they are attempting to reverse-uno the implications of a shocking appearance of an entire new genre of literature that’s really fucking good holy shit this is fire we have nothing like this no wonder we lost the Cold War for a domestic audience that’s seething with imperial dispossession. “Dogma” denies the basic existence of good and evil as emergent properties that people and societies should act upon. It’s a political statement masquerading as philosophy. The goal is to confuse, paralyze, or sap the will of pro-social actors so that they do nothing in the face of anti-social ones. That’s why the taxonomy is the entry point. “Have you considered Good v. Evil might be a false dichotomy?” is Baby’s First Thought about morality. It’s an easy hook that can resonate with the educated masses, most of whom will never investigate or push back on being told they’re Super Wrinkled Brains. A language barrier is a superb tool for camouflage. Nobody’s gonna look at this book in Russian. They’ll read a polished English translation and take the authors’ word for it. You don’t want to be Russophobic, do you?

That’s because you haven’t read #3.

III – Troll Brainrot

The Last Ringbearer is the work of one Kirill Yeskov, a walking stereotype of the worker-bee intellectual who deduced early in life that vast swathes of human variance are easily flattered by turns of phrase and a bit of cheek sprinkled on top. His writing style exemplifies Russian’s centuries-old dearth of pruning and how Russia cannot be trusted with the divine gift of nemesis, for it will never learn. A proper Olog-hai. Without further ado, the opening of The Last Ringbearer:

Мы слабы, но будет знак
Всем ордам за вашей Стеной —
Мы их соберем в кулак,
Чтоб рухнуть на вас войной.
Неволя нас не смутит.
Нам век вековать в рабах,
Но когда вас задушит стыд,
Мы спляшем на ваших гробах.

No indeed! We are not strong,
But we know Peoples that are.   
Yes, and we’ll guide them along
To smash and destroy you in War!
We shall be slaves just the same?
Yes, we have always been slaves,
But you—you will die of the shame,
And then we shall dance on your graves!
R. Kipling

Никогда еще на полях войны не случалось, чтоб столь многие были столь сильно обязаны столь немногим.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
W. Churchill

Part I: Vae Victis

Золото — хозяйке, серебро — слуге,
Медяки — ремесленной всякой мелюзге.
“Верно, — отрубил барон, нахлобучив шлем,–
Но Хладное Железо властвует над всем!”

“Gold is for the mistress–silver for the maid”–
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade!”
“Good!” said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
“But Iron–Cold Iron–is master of them all.”
R. Kipling

Chapter 1

Mordor, the sands of Khutel-Khara
The 6th of April, TA 3019

Есть ли на свете картина прекраснее, чем закат в пустыне, когда солнце, будто бы устыдившись вдруг за свою белесую полдневную ярость, начинает задаривать гостя пригоршнями красок немыслимой чистоты и нежности! Особенно хороши неисчислимые оттенки сиреневого, в мгновение ока обращающие гряды барханов в зачарованное море — смотрите не упустите эту пару минут, они никогда уже не повторятся… А предрассветный миг, когда первый проблеск зари обрывает на полутакте чопорный менуэт лунных теней на вощеном паркете такыров — ибо эти балы навечно сокрыты от непосвященных, предпочитающих день ночи… А неизбывная трагедия того часа, когда могущество тьмы начинает клониться к упадку и пушистые гроздья вечерних созвездий внезапно обращаются в колкое льдистое крошево — то самое, что под утро осядет изморозью на вороненом щебне хаммадов…

Is there aught more beautiful a picture upon the earth than a sunset in the desert, when the sun, as if suddenly ashamed of Her whitish midday fury, begins to grace a guest with Her handfuls of paint of unthinkable purity and loveliness! Especially goodly are Her countless hues of lilac that, in the winking of an eye, paint beds of velvet upon the charmed sea–gaze, if you would, upon this moment, for never shall it repeat… And that predawn flash, when the first glimpse of Her rays break upon the half-measure of the prim minuet of the lunar shadows upon the wax parquet of the takirs — for these balls are forever concealed from the uninitiated, who prefer day to night… And the indelible tragedy of that hour when the might of shadow begins to wane, and the airy truss of the evening constellations suddenly turn to biting, icy medley–the very same that in the morn settles as rime upon the crushed, blued stone of the hammads…

Alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll right.

Let’s compare the opening of The Lord of the Rings, which this fucker dared to дописа́ть upon:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and he had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure. And if that was not enough for fame, there was also his prolonged vigour to marvel at. Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins. At ninety he was much the same as at fifty. At ninety-nine they began to call him well-preserved; but unchanged would have been nearer the mark. There were some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anybody should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth.

‘It will have to be paid for,’ they said. ‘It isn’t natural, and trouble will come for it!’

Or this excerpt from The Two Towers, from a chapter that is all of 35 pages long and is chock-full of worldbuilding, character development, and moves the plot forward but everyone pretends is boring and nothing happens and he just talks about trees like Martin about sand in Dorne:

The day waned, and dusk was twined about the boles of the trees. At last the hobbits saw, rising dimply before them, a steep dark land: they had come to the feet of the mountains, and to the green roots of tall Methedras. Down the hillside the young Entwash, leaping from its springs high above, ran noisily from step to step to meet them. On the right of the stream there was a long slope, clad with grass, now grey in the twilight. No trees grew there and it was open to the sky; stars were shining already in lakes between shores of cloud.

Down. To. Fucking. Business. Tolkien’s writing is sharp, clean, tight, punchy, heavy, and better than 99% of all fantasy that’s come after. He even knows how to fit in some curly-cues well as opposed to writing as if from the goddamn mid-19th century, like every other Russian ever. Two Kipling poems before your prose has even started? CHURCHILL? YOUR PART HEADING IS IN LATIN?! IN THIS BOOK SET IN MIDDLE-EARTH?

This book is a shitpost. It has two purposes: 1) compensate Cyril over here for public masturbation and 2) trigger anyone with the slightest respect for Tolkien and/or the written word. As for the why…do we have to? Fine. Yeskov is a legit biologist who was miffed that Tolkien’s fantasy novel with elves, wizards, magic rings, telepathy orbs, and witch kings was not geographically realistic, so he “corrected” Tolkien by writing a plodding mess that tosses in elements from all across history while denying the existence of hobbits as a conceit of Gondorian propaganda. What the fuck? How fucking lame. Hobbits are great, why would you do that? Why? Does he hate fun? No, he’s a fucking coward compared to Perumov, who at least had the West in ruins at the end of his book. All that actually happens is the Elves leave after having their magic destroyed by *checks Wikipedia* dropping a palantír into Mount Doom. No, I am not wading any further into that shit to ascertain whether that makes any sense.

Don’t worry, this sucks in other ways: Mordor is Moscow, a city of rationalists and scientists at the forefront of progress, but it’s still named “Mordor”, which…shouldn’t you be using an endonym to reclaim your identity from these imperialists? Oh wait a Russian would never think of that, lmao. There’s an elf named Eloar, who has a brother named Elandar and a mother named Eornis, crossing language streams like an amateur. The Elves in general are maniacal hippies corrupting the impressionable youth of Umbar with New-Age woo, because that’s Yeskov’s attitude towards the West that destroyed his shitty country that deserved to die. There’s a Gondorian noble, Tangorn, which sounds like an Ent’s name. The protagonist’s name is Haladdin, aka, Saladin. The West ultimately still wins, but Mordor’s “occupation” is ended when the Elves leave for no reason. The Lord of the Rings is the Official United-States-of-Amanyar-Approved History that gets passed down. Nobody knows the real story, because History Is Written By the Victors.

No, it’s not. History is written by people. “Victor” and “conquered” are contextual. Victors often sympathize with the defeated and tell their story even if none have survived. We have Roman historians castigating their leadership for being perfidious towards Carthage. The defeated can be the most effective mouthpiece for the victors, as with Josephus. The defeated can easily subvert a victor’s narrative and turn it to their advantage. See Putinism. There are no final victories in this world, no narratives carved in everlasting adamant, as Tolkien observed. The entire history of the historical profession has been one of dismantling Official Histories using data and rigorous methodology. “History Is Written By the Victors” is the dogma that needs to be abandoned, but it tickles the brain of a rando with some amount of education. More importantly, the country that came up with the New Chronology, a psychotic conspirological retelling of history where the West faked all of history up to 1600 in order to deny Russia its proper contributions to human legacy, has no right to talk. If anybody believes stupid lies written by The Victors, it’s Russians.

Russians are taught and believe that Russia’s history somehow begins in Ukraine in the 800s, when some group of “Varangians” in Scandinavia, led by some guy called Rurik, got summoned by the prince of Kyiv to come rule them because they couldn’t get their shit together, or something. This is based almost entirely on the Primary Chronicle, an obvious piece of propaganda that pulls large amounts of content from the Bible and Byzantine historiography to legitimize the patron who paid for it. It’s written generations after the events. It contradicts itself. It even opens with a major calendar error and doesn’t even get the year of Constantine’s ascension right. The sad thing is, it’s the best thing we’ve got. The scholarly consensus is it’s largely bullshit with a few grains of truth, but that doesn’t stop Putin himself from just ranting at Tucker Carlson and Trump about Rurik as if the history was dictated by God.

Hey, Yeskov, why is your fucking president constantly trapping world leaders in rooms for three hours and talking about people probably who never existed and have no connection to Russia? Among other stupid things that Russians take as gospel about their history:

• The Kyivan Rus’ has something to do with Russia. No, it does not. “Rus’” means “rower”. It’s just a name. The vague statelets of AD 1000 have nothing to do with a polity that did not exist then and only became dominant four centuries later. All the accounts about it are from centuries later and are tainted by hagiography, a problem that bedevils Russian history, root and branch. Based on external contemporary sources, we can be pretty confident about Vladimir the Great being the Prince of Kyiv around that time, but whatever the Kyivan Rus’ was as a political entity, it was loose and dynamic, the title of Grand Prince of Kyiv meaning little for most of it.
• Alexander Nevsky beat back the Teutonic Knights on a frozen lake. No, he did not. The primary sources explicitly say the battle took place on land, bodies falling on the grass. That image of the battle is from a 1938 Soviet propaganda film that they pulled from theaters after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact because, yes, the Soviets happily got into bed with the Nazis, and then rereleased after Hitler invaded the USSR.
• Russia endured over two centuries of oppressive and barbaric Mongol rule–the Tatar Yoke. No, it did not. Mongol dominion of the area orbited around tribute and tended to be hands off. Moscow built itself up into the dominant power of the area by collaborating with the Mongols and used the legitimacy the Mongols granted them to crush its rivals.

Of course, we already know what’s up: Yeskov doesn’t object to Victors writing history. He’s only interested in cheerleading his preferred Victors. As long as those have points on the board, he’s content to sit in his corner, suck himself off, and murder anyone who tries to stop him or hold his team accountable.

Beyond Comprehension

You can draw a straight line from these three screeds to Russians proudly assuming the entire branding of Mordor over their genocidal war against Ukraine: the very emotion Perumov first expressed 25 years before, metastasized into bloodthirsty national psychosis. Accuse the enemy of that which you are guilty of and embrace their own depiction of you in order to strengthen in-group solidarity. Prey on the ignorance and illiteracy of the uninitiated and make it seem to an idiot or casual reader that they’re doing the hard, cold, brutal thinking that we softy Westerners shy away from–when their analysis is inferior to young-earth creationists’, grown adults presenting a shitty fingerpainting to a Renaissance master as an “improvement” to their work and demanding they be taken seriously. DARVO. Not that I would expect Yeskov to know the first thing about sociology and psychology, considering the Soviet Union, where he was educated, branded those fields of science as bourgeouis degeneracy counter to Marxist-Leninism. Grr, those damn Elven hippies corrupting the teens of Umbar with their weird nonsense about freedom, rights, drama, the arts, and FEELINGS. I’ll teach them a thing or two.

This fan-fiction exhibits this pouting rage. The West’s cultural superiority struck Soviet normies in its latter decades like an orbital nuke and broke their minds. That superiority unraveled the legitimacy of the Soviet state and catalyzed a satellite revolt that culminated in the USSR voting itself out of existence, because nobody wanted to bother anymore. Some random British professor had invented an entire new literary genre a generation before and this was the first the citizens of the Other Superpower were hearing of it. There was no way for them to process the innocence of Tolkien’s work with any accuracy in their hyper-politicized and -propagandized environment. Russians have fetishized the West for centuries and can only view its cultural output through that crooked telescope. Within it roost generations of internal Russian discourse, of simultaneous worship and burning hatred for Western culture and its mysterious power, tidally locked to the black hole of Russian supremacism, presenting us with a model:

1. Rando stumbles across Tolkien in the shitty twilight of the Soviet Union / horrific dawn of modern Russia and is captivated.
2. Cannot process the work on its own terms, reinterprets it through the Sovietology and latent Russian imperialism that’s in the air.
3. Produces a sad counter-work poo-pooing it and presenting one’s own 2nd-grade thoughts as equal.

Tolkien had nailed these guys and this psychology long before they were born. The exchange between Saruman and Gandalf at the end of The Two Towers summarizes the long dialog between the West and Russia with more accuracy and insight than the thousands upon thousands of papers written about it:

“’Saruman, Saruman!’ said Gandalf still laughing. ‘Saruman, you missed your path in life. You should have been the king’s jester and earned your bread, and stripes too, by mimicking his counsellors. Ah me!’ he paused, getting the better of his mirth. ‘Understand one another? I fear I am beyond your comprehension. But you, Saruman, I understand now too well. I keep a clearer memory of your arguments, and deeds, than you suppose. When last I visited you, you were the jailor of Mordor, and there I was to be sent. Nay, the guest who has escaped from the roof, will think twice before he comes back in by the door. Nay, I do not think I will come up. But listen, Saruman, for the last time! Will you not come down? Isengard has proved less strong than your hope and fancy made it. So may other things in which you still have trust. Would it not be well to leave it for a while? To turn to new things, perhaps? Think well, Saruman! Will you not come down?’

“A shadow passed over Saruman’s face; then it went deathly white. Before he could conceal it, they saw through the mask the anguish of a mind in doubt, loathing to stay and dreading to leave its refuge. For a second he hesitated, and no one breathed. Then he spoke, and his voice was shrill and cold. Pride and hate were conquering him.

“’Will I come down?’ he mocked. ‘Does an unarmed man come down to speak with robbers out of doors? I can hear you well enough here. I am no fool, and I do not trust you, Gandalf. They do not stand openly on my stairs, but I know where the wild wood-demons are lurking, at your command.’

“’The treacherous are ever distrustful,’ answered Gandalf wearily. ‘But you need not fear for your skin. I do not wish to kill you, or hurt you, as you would know, if you really understood me. And I have the power to protect you. I am giving you a last chance. You can leave Orthanc, free – if you choose.’”

“’That sounds well,’ sneered Saruman. ‘Very much in the manner of Gandalf the Grey: so condescending, and so very kind. I do not doubt that you would find Orthanc commodious, and my departure convenient. But why should I wish to leave? And what do you mean by ‘free’? There are conditions, I presume?’

“’Reasons for leaving you can see from your windows.’ answered Gandalf. ‘Others will occur to your thought. Your servants are destroyed and scattered; your neighbours you have made your enemies; and you have cheated your new master. or tried to do so. When his eye turns hither, it will be the red eye of wrath. But when I say ‘free’, I mean ‘free’: free from bond, of chain or command: to go where you will, even, even to Mordor, Saruman, if you desire. But you will first surrender to me the Key of Orthanc, and your staff. They shall be pledges of your conduct, to be returned later, if you merit them.’

“Saruman’s face grew livid, twisted with rage, and a red light was kindled in his eyes. He laughed wildly. ‘Later!’ he cried, and his voice rose to a scream. ‘Later! Yes, when you also have the Keys of Barad-dur itself, I suppose; and the crowns of seven kings; and the rods of the Five Wizards, and have purchased yourself a pair of boots many sizes larger than those that you wear now. A modest plan. Hardly one in which my help is needed! I have other things to do. Do not be a fool. If you wish to treat with me, while you have a chance, go away, and come back when you are sober! And leave behind these cut-throats and small rag-tag that dangle at your tail! Good day!’ He turned and left the balcony.”

Saruman cannot comprehend that Gandalf is being sincere, because that’s the only way Saruman can bring himself to think now. A part of him knows it, but has no power or will to assert itself. It is not that he cannot comprehend it in theory, it’s that he does not want to. Not hard enough. His pride and hate are more important to him, even as he knows the path he’s chosen will objectively suck.

In the same vein, Russia as a country had very little hope of becoming democratic or liberal in the 1990s, no matter what the West could have done midst the rapid shifts in the epoch. Russians liberals misinterpreted the fall of the Soviet Union, moving themselves and their peripheral countercultural movement to the center of the story over the many peoples of Eastern Europe who’d sat well below them in the hierarchy, and sat back, reading Fukuyama, thinking the hard work was done and they just had to wait for democracy to kick in. Soon, they’d be back in European capitals giving lectures and doing statecraft with their peers. And…it didn’t happen. They encountered the same ignorant, proud, stupid populace that their predecessors had two centuries before. More crucially, after years of disappointment and dismissal from the West, they found common cause with their once arch-rival, the Russian security state, for the first time. The chekists and army too had suffered profound humiliation and dispossession in front of the West, their hated object of affection, which had committed the worst offense: pitying them.

They were eager to give the young regime headed by a former KGB agent a fair shake. He got them results: attention, credibility, clout, jobs with the title “Russia Watcher” to decode the mysterious logic of this Mr. Putin. They reveled in Putin’s tut-tutting about Western hypocrisy and emotionality, did nothing when journalists started getting murdered in the streets again for exposing Russian war crimes, and smothered their consciences with whataboutism and the improving urban quality of Moscow. When Putin first raped Ukraine in 2014, liberals overwhelmingly supported the act, at least on behalf of the nation, as it finally put them at the center of Western attention again. By this point they had internalized and ratified the logic that first drove Perumov to vomit over the page. The West doth protest too much. It’s all propaganda, and isn’t this what the US did in Iraq?

Perumov et al were doomed to reject Tolkien; Russia was doomed to reject the West. Like Gollum and his obsession with the Ring, they had no will in the matter. It was terrible, incontrovertible evidence of the inadequacy of their own crumbling cultural idol, fawning over works from the 19th century while Westerners had long moved on to bigger and better things. Russian culture abuses innocence and earnestness–the exact source of this vexing power–until beaten down into slaves for sinister ends. To accept this on its own terms would be a cardinal defeat, requiring ego death, so they have no choice, like a MAGA Nazi, but to become orcs, to not merely embrace the branding but bring Mordor itself into reality and prove Tolkien’s instincts right. At least then they would keep themselves on the stage, maybe even in the spotlight, for a little while longer.

The scales would only fall from their eyes in February 2022, far too late. The jaws snapped shut, and all the vaunted influence and clout, the countless diatribes on Echo Moscow and in other independent media venues, meant nothing. With one swift stroke, the Kremlin swept them away. Here, at the grim end of 2025, the Russian opposition is broken and impotent, while Russia is consumed by its hate and envy, burning its marrow to take ruined meters of eastern Ukraine, any “interests” gone beyond all recall or desire. Russian dissidents can do naught but whine on European Russian-language channels, every now and again taking a bite at their favorite morsel: needling the West at the edges, sniping at unproductive policies that end up with some innocent Russians exiles caught in the crossfire, pining for the days when they could deconstruct the naivete of Western literature from a cozy, modern Moscow cafe and bring some good Russian common sense to the table.

At home, Russia has resuccumbed to madness. Propagandistic fantasies dominate book sales, Russian cultural output has imploded, society and economy are enslaved to the security state, provocative social media posts garner jail time, and nobody cares. They never cared. The incalculable loss of life, the damage Putinism has done to Russia’s body, mind, and soul, the justice of Ukraine trampled into mud–none of it will heal. Russia spurned its one fair offer to join the West, and no second is coming. Gnawed by his grievances, Putin keeps rejecting a reelected Trump administration’s overtures of surrender, unable to grasp the opportunity. His brain is too rotted to win. He has to make the West lose.

Evil exists after all, stupid, mean, and ravenous. Orcs walk the earth. Elves fight to defend the West. The fantasy has come to life, and Tolkien was its prophet.