Back to the glory days of WWII

Apr 4 2023 The Guardian

Putin doesn’t want the war to end – he wants to blast us back to the 40s Soviet era

Georgi Gospodinov is the author of Time Shelter, which has been longlisted for the 2023 Booker International prize.

“What Putin wants is not to win this war, but to make it chronic, to force us all to live in that regime. His goal is to bombard and raze the present (and the future) with all its infrastructure and everydayness – so that there is no water, no warmth, no light. To destroy everyday life, and from there existence as well, to literally an-nihil-ate the Ukrainian nation.

An aggressive project to revive the past, especially an unprocessed, forgotten or rewritten past, is the perfect breeding ground for populism and nationalism. We saw this under Trump, and now it is coming true in an even more sinister guise under Putin.”