The Fortune Teller’s Vision — A Russia Without End

The Kremlin has a vision for the future. It should make everyone very worried.

By Gabrielė Klimaitė-Želvienė 

A palm reader examines a woman’s hand and shakes her head. Something terrible and dark lurks in her future. The client sees the palmist’s frowns and becomes frightened.  

“Will I get sick?” 

“No,” says the palm reader.  

“Will I die then?”  

The old woman again shakes her head.  

“So what will happen?” 

“Nothing at all,” the palm reader says. “Nothing will ever change.”   

The exchange comes from a Lithuanian movie made in the days of the Soviet dictatorship, and conveys a message familiar to all those who ever lived in countries paralyzed by the Kremlin’s frigid grip. 

So, why is it still topical? 

Because, depressingly, the Russian state once again offers the palmist’s future to the world, to self-interested autocratic elites that might cooperate with it, and especially to its neighbors. What we see today — Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, malicious shadow war attacks on Europe, and disruption around the world – stems from a deep belief in Russia’s right to attack, to dominate and to interfere. It gives itself the freedom to construct a model of society and statehood, and to impose it on non-consenting others.  

“We are fighting absolute evil, embodied in  Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism. We were created for this mission,” said the neo-Stalinist theorist Aleksandr Dugin in 2022, as he urged Russians to mobilize for the invasion of Ukraine.  

Sounding eerily like a blut und eisen (blood and iron) 19^th century aggressor, angrily complaining about the supposed injustice of his country’s borders, or indeed like his Soviet predecessors, Dugin openly stated: “We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other people’s, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!” 

Of course, Russia is not USSR. Russia is different today — communism is out; crony capitalism is in. But the idea that the Kremlin knows best? That still remains. What sort of life should you lead? Russia will decide.  

Lenin, a man disdainful of brevity, wrote 54 volumes of 650 pages each to promote the idea of a New Soviet Man, free from exploitation and “tradition”. Communism would eliminate the need for families and households — the country, in the end, would become “one whole family”. Such free men and women would dedicate all their lives to the socialist state with no classes and no ownership. The world, inevitably, would fall to a socialist revolution.  

Then Communism would prevail. And no one, ever, would contradict it. 

There is a man. He’s a writer but he doesn’t write. He digs coal in a mine. He is a prisoner in the Siberian region of Kolyma, a place called “white death”. He gets his daily soup in a tin with no spoon. His clothes are rags. When he asks for something to wear, he’s given clothing taken from a dead British soldier.  

“I can’t wear those,” he objects.   

“You bloody nazi!” the warden explodes.  

The man is thrown into solitary confinement. 

This is a moment in life of Varlam Shalamov, the Russian writer who spent 17 years in the Gulag for complimenting his colleague, Ivan Bunin. Bunin, unfortunately, was an émigré in France, a Nobel prize laureate, and his literary triumph in the USSR was vilified as “an imperialist intrigue”. Shalamov, having called Bunin a “great Russian writer”, ended up in a forced-labor prison, surviving punishment, torture, and typhus. With the wrong worldview, he, and millions like him, was an obstacle to the greatness of the USSR.  

After his release, Shalamov wrote a masterpiece memoir, Kolyma Tales, which was only published in 1987, more than 30 years after it was written.  

“Don’t be a nazi,” a Russian co-worker once barked at my Lithuanian grandma after she put down the phone. “Next time you call your mother, speak Russian so that I can understand!” 

It was never difficult to be judged a nazi by the Russians, be it in the 1940s or 1980s. Be it Moscow or Vilnius; Russians demanded obedience, certain of their superiority. 

After the World War II, having occupied and bludgeoned all nearby nations for decades, the Soviets regarded themselves as winners, liberators, and builders of the greatest order known to man. Russia’s 20th century history can reasonably be seen as a vast experiment with human life in which tens of millions were killed and impoverished. Why not? 

Human life had little value. You don’t become the largest country in the world by cherishing life. As Henry Kissinger estimated in his book, World Order, Russia added an average of 100,000 sq km (about 40,000 sq miles) a year to its territory from 1552 to 1917. There was no issue that couldn’t be solved by aggression. 

My country, Lithuania, became free again in 1918. It had been ruled by tsarist Russia for centuries, but having preserved its own language and hope for freedom, Lithuanians took the opportunity offered by the end of the war. Engulfed in the socialist revolution, the Russians lost the Baltic states. The Germans were pushed out. Lithuania signed a treaty of mutual respect and peace with the USSR. Statehood was restored.  

But in 1940 the treaty was proved meaningless. Having decided to expand, the Soviets swallowed their neighbors. 

And then the terror began. Private property was confiscated, farmers and the intelligentsia exiled, dissidents shot. One third of the nation was killed. The system of surveillance, control, and subordination was set.  

Heavy, mostly military-oriented, industry expanded. Without private businesses, there was no competition and almost no retail market. Poverty dragged everyone down. Prices were set by the state. A winter coat cost two months’ salary, a set of furniture, seven. It took years to save. You could afford potatoes, cabbage and bread, but forget new shoes. We used newspapers as insulation.  

My grandma aspired to be a seamstress. She couldn’t afford a knife, so she cut the bread with the seamstress’ scissors. She spent long hours in lines for flour, sugar, and other basics.  

Fast forward 50 years. Communism is “mature” and victorious. We, a family of three, live in a single room. It’s our 10th year of waiting for a bigger home. (The government determines who lives where, for how long, and with whom.)  

Sometimes we are thrown out of bed by burst pipes and scorching hot water showering all over us. The school, however, is dead cold. Every kid must help insulate the windows by sticking wet paper gunk to the window frames. There are cockroaches everywhere, and the pervasive smell of lung and kidney meatballs, though a raw egg is tossed into your porridge to fight anemia. It is illegal to use the term “poor”. 

Worse than that is the air of doom. Nothing is possible and never will be. The more the state resembles a prison, the better. The air is heavy with humiliation.  

You’ve dreamed about Jamaica? You’ll never go there. The band you illegally catch on radio will never play in your country. You’ll never dream big. In all likelihood, you’ll work for a military industry, as does every fourth citizen, and drink four times more alcohol than the rest of the world. This is the new society — one part scared, hypocritical and unable to achieve self-realization, and the other insolent and aggressive.  

Your greatest ambitions are not to fall out of grace with your superiors and get a decent set of curtains. 

Once my grandma took me to a “posh” cafe. We ordered a meatloaf with potatoes and peas. It should have come with a sauce, but it didn’t. The waitress shrugged. My grandma started to cry: I am an orphan of World War II, a socialist labor champion, bring us a plate with the sauce! I was drowning in shame, suspecting that’s not how dignity works. (The sauce came, though). 

There was no client-manager relationship, but a superior-inferior dynamic. A Party member versus a teacher. A Russian versus a Lithuanian. A clerk, a doctor, a woman at the cashier or a shoe-repair man — all against you. They could scold, dismiss or lecture you, as they had the upper hand. Every day you engaged in a petty struggle of pleasing, begging, bribing or, if nothing worked, of wailing. There was no justice, just the occasional and accidental mercy.  

Try to criticize it and you’ll end up jailed or medicated. Discontent equaled schizophrenia.  

In the end? The USSR collapsed. So much for humanity’s Grand Project. So much for a new society. 

Independence for Lithuanians not only meant the return to freedom and market economy. It also meant that we, as humans, were valued again. Lithuania did everything to rid itself of the communist legacy – oppression, surveillance, and the centrality of power. The vetting and decommunization process ensured that former Soviet army officers and the secret service agents came clear about their past. 

But that never happened in Russia.  

There was no vetting and decommunization process. Soviet security archives were never declassified. They still serve as the textbooks for FSB, SVR and GRU. It is believed that a cache of KGB files that were abandoned in Ukraine by mistake, would stretch 7km if arranged in a single row.  

Russian propagandists claim that Russians are a special race with “an additional gene” and a mission to bring civilization to the world. Russia’s imperial mission must transcend the Russian Federation’s borders — only Russia can decide where it stops. You think the Kremlin’s mouthpieces were joking as they mused that Alaska was really Russian? They really weren’t. There is no equal partnership or parity. No peaceful co-habitation side by side with other nations. Russia must dominate. It is Russia or the West. If Russia loses, the West wins. 

The USSR is gone, but the empire remains. The country that offered a masterclass in failure keeps returning with solutions. They talk about “security guarantees for Europe”. They demand we address the “root causes” of the disaster they made. They seem to struggle what to believe: either that Ukrainians are nazis, or that both nations are the same, and are “one whole family”.  

With disdain for Western “human rights”, freedoms and liberties stifled, with domestic violence legalized, with a murder rate 17 times higher than that of the EU, and a market run by state-mafia, Russians today are doing what they always did – choosing violence as a solution. Monuments to Stalin are rising again. 

It is estimated that Russian sabotage and subversion attacks against Europe tripled from 2023 to 2024, following a quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Sabotage, explosions, arson, cyber-attacks, murder plots, airspace violations, aviation disruption, and weaponized flows of migrants go hand-in-hand with the relentless attacks on Ukraine. 

Russians simply fail to understand that violating the other does not make you a winner. It makes you a criminal. The list is long enough. Enough of these ghastly experiments with human life. Russia must be resisted, and made to pay for its crimes.  

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By Gabrielė Klimaitė-Želvienė. Gabrielė Klimaitė-Želvienė is a Lithuanian diplomat, working on security policy, arms control and non-proliferation issues. Previously, she headed the Middle East and North Africa Division at the Global Affairs Group, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania. During her diplomatic career, Mrs Želvienė worked in Washington DC, Moscow, Stockholm, Dublin, and Brussels. She graduated from Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science, and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2003.  Article first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.