You have to love Russia very much to like it

To my subscribers and other readers of this WordPress platform, I say you are more fortunate for the coming 3 weeks or so than my subscribers and other readers of my Substack account, who will likely be cut off from my observations on the ground in Russia, where I will be staying during this period. Cut off, because it appears that the Substack site is rejected by the Petersburg service providers just as LinkedIn and youtube have long been. Why? As they say in Brooklyn: don’t ask. No rational reason comes to mind. However, my Substack access here may come back one of these days, just as WhatsApp works here one day and then goes black for a spell.

The situation with respect to the internet has moved from bad to worse in the nearly 6 months since my last visit here when I complained of intermittent mobile internet blackouts. Now it appears that hard wired internet by cable to private residences is also performing bizarrely. If you think this is just a nuisance without financial and life-style implications, then you are ignoring how engrained instant internet communications were to the daily lives of Russians, just as they are to all of us in the West: And the harm is entirely self-inflicted by the powers that be.

In a moment, I will turn from these smaller irritations to big picture issues. But first let me share a couple of offsetting positive points felt in the 24 hours since I set foot on Petersburg soil. First there is the weather. It is now and tomorrow will remain sunny, with cloudless skies and an ambient temperature of 29 degrees. So in meteorological terms, we are enjoying far more summer like days than in Western Europe. More to the point, was my experience in a visit to the local farmers’ market in the center of Pushkin, this outlying district of Petersburg. The fruits, vegetables and other produce from Iran; Serbia, and other locations that none of you see as suppliers to Europe or farther afield were fantastic: The enormous dried, brilliantly white boletes, the highly aromatic porcini as most of you better know these mushrooms, were extraordinary, all the more so because they were unavailable at what should have been the peak season, November, when I was last here. In short, the temptations of visiting the many vendors’ stands were as striking and picturesque as what my wife Larisa Zalesova described in passages of her recently published novel Nadine’s Story. Those scenes in her book were from the late 1970s. But the impossibility of leaving the market stands and their remarkable vendors without purchasing many treats that were not on your shopping list is as striking today. Very colorful. Very different, say from French or Italian street markets.

I balance out this enthusiasm with the less positive observation from my visit to the Economy Class supermarket just across from my apartment complex in Pushkin. Clearly there has been continuing churn in the suppliers and products on the store shelves, with a downward trend in terms of honesty of recipes in the prepared foods section, which amounts to hidden inflation. Indeed, my first impression from Day One, is that in various goods and services, prices in Russia are truly on the rise and in some categories are approaching the highly inflationary prices I see now in Western Europe. Also there is a narrowing of choice in some areas, like yoghurts, where Danone and other Western brands that now have left the market created demand and took a lot of shelf space. Of course; in some other product areas, like hard cheeses, what I see of Russian production is continuing expansion of product lines that do make dining more interesting.

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Now let us turn to the higher issues of politics, where I have some observations to share coming from my watching and comparing the latest broadcasts of Russia’s two most serious and widely watched programs of commentary that we call ‘talk shows’: the Evening broadcasts of Vladimir Solovyov and The Great Game hosted by Dmitry Simes. These two shows are headed in very different, indeed contradictory directions in terms of respect for the broad Russian public:

To my surprise and shock, in his Sunday evening show Solovyov was simply awful: he has stopped all pretense at neutral analysis and has become a vicious propagandist for Vladimir Putin and venomous denouncer of anyone who does not speak of the Commander in Chief in glowing terms: Specifically, Solovyov told his audience that Deep Russia supports the war, understands that its leaders have no obligation to make public their plans for its further prosecution; for any offensives or attacks they may be pondering. He denounced those who say that the war should be ended quickly, calling them agents of the enemy, defeatists. My, my our Putin cheerleaders in the West must have been heartened to see their view of things validated by a leading personality on Russian state television, which they have repeatedly denied as having any relevance to Russian political life.

In that same show, one panelist, a member of the State Duma objected to Solovyov’s denunciation of Russia’s own deplorables, noting that he receives a great many letters from constituents asking why the war is being dragged out and not ended quickly with the weapons at Russia’s disposal that have been held back. He added that these letter writers appear to be highly patriotic and well wishers of their country’s future. To all of this, Solovyov replied that he and the Duma member would remain on different sides of the issue.

I contrast this Politburo like position of Solovyov to the far more serious words that I heard a day ago from Dmitry Simes and a Senator (member of the upper house of the Russian bicameral legislature) on The Great Game. They were in agreement that the latest developments in the Ukrainian drone attacks were posing an unacceptable threat to state security of Russia, and that the Europeans are now openly at war with Russia. The reasonable conclusion they both drew is that the conduct of the war by Russia must be greatly altered now, that all self-imposed restrictions on use of its weapons arsenal against Kiev must be dropped. And in saying this they also say that it is not a criticism of how the war has been fought till now; it is merely recognition that the war has changed in nature and so a different response is required from Russia. This different response must begin with real destruction of the decision making centers in Ukraine, destruction of their bridges across the Dnieper and other major rivers, putting an end to ‘political tourism’ of Western leaders to Kiev, and so on. Beyond that, Simes and his panelist were saying that it is time to consider direct attacks on Europe, beginning with attacks on the Baltic States, which have been especially obnoxious in their provocations and calls to other European states to bring Russia to its knees in a humiliating defeat.

All of this brings us to the question of what may be the issues driving the accelerated timing of President Putin;s two day visit to Beijing this week for talks with President Xi. Surely it is not to hear from the source what Xi may have discussed privately with Donald Trump last week, as some of our Western media are suggesting. I venture the guess that it is to discuss the coming Russian change from war of attrition to an “escalate to de-escalate’ scenario that analysts like geopolitical expert Sergei Karaganov have been urging on Vladimir Putin for more than two years.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026