The Russian Enigma

My knowledge of Russia is based on what I have read and more recently on people who I have come to know.
Russian literature is unsurpassable in its magnificent sweep capturing the vastness of the land and the people living in it on the one hand and on the other the forensic dissection of character and plot. Tolstoy on the one hand Dostoyevski on the other have written about the human condition from opposition ends of the social structure and yet both deal in that complex character the Russian as an individual.

Any country scopes its people according to geography and climate. Size in this case matters as does the conditions, the length of day and the suitability of producing food to live on. Harsh conditions produce self reliance but often at a cost of self-inversion. Pain and the suffering become a means in themselves, to strike a sense of character, a
sense of ones worth is measured in how tough you are.
The survivors of the gulag were both enabled and at the same time diminished by the experience since survival meant you had to be tough but often at someone else's expense. The memory of surviving was tainted by the memory of those who didn't survive, not in a nostalgic way but with some doubt of your own connivance in the end result.
The drive to survive and the character formed through living in harsh conditions made the Russian soldiers a formidable foe. The heroics of the people who took part in the defence of Stalingrad in the World War was not based on jingoism or flag allegiance but to a sense of we've been here before and our experience tells us we can live through anything which life throws at us.
The current nostalgia for a revisit to the Stalinist order and the lust for the collective strength which  the Russian, desperate to reestablish their place in history, is willing to forgo the individuals trinkets of capitalism for the strength in that strong feeling of belonging.
What is amazing is that, as the stories emerge about the conditions during Stalins time, the structural deceit by the State and the Apparatchiks, the wholesale propaganda machine which was the press this is ignored by those who would wish the Soviet time back. The nostalgia is not for a place of individual dignity but of a strong national identity that can measure its strength in kilo tons of thermo nuclear deterrent.