The Russia That Wouldn’t Die
They’ve buried Russia many times.
Each year a new coffin, a new diagnosis.
The ruble collapses. Dead.
The refineries burn. Dead.
Putin coughs. Terminal.
Yet the body walks on.
The West cannot stand unfinished stories.
It must turn decay into closure.
Every model predicts death, every graph whispers certainty.
But life is rarely statistical.
Russia doesn’t move by the logic of Think Tank spreadsheets.
It runs on rot, memory, and frost.
It doesn’t heal; it hardens.
Each sanction is another scar, each obituary another act of endurance.
Zombie narratives thrive because we confuse discomfort with death.
We expect the world to collapse when it stops resembling us.
But civilizations don’t vanish on cue.
They fade, mutate, reappear in another mask.
Putin’s illness, like Russia’s decline, has become a genre,
a recurring episode in the Western imagination.
He dies every spring, resurrects every autumn,
and outlives another generation of pundits.
Russia isn’t immortal, only practiced in winter.
Where others chase progress, it endures
and waits for the thaw that always comes.