A long time ago, I studied the behaviors of young people and the elderly at various workplaces. From the perspective of violence alone, young people possess an inherent, passionate violent drive, while the elderly—especially older men—possess an inherent violence aimed at replenishing the physical and mental energy they had been depleting. Especially in Korea, the divided situation and the military culture only added to that aspect.
The problem is Russia’s elderly, who have not stopped even after completely crushing Ukraine and Russia. There are statistics that more than 500,000 young people in Russia have already been killed. The elderly Russians, who think of the glory of the former Soviet Union, do not spare the young. Some people think it is merely a disaster caused by President Putin, but what became the political backdrop behind it is the consciousness of the Russian elderly, shaped through their experience of World War II and the communist superpowers. They were writing their own Legend of the Galactic Heroes without sparing the lives of the young people who would bring the nation to life in the future.
With the lament, “If only the old folks would come to their senses, there wouldn’t be war...,” I began a discussion with the AI. Artificial intelligence tells me not to lump an entire generation together and blame it.So soon the conversation connected to the works of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and Dostoevsky, which I like. Even in high school, I secretly read The Brothers Karamazov in class and longed for Russia, but now it seems to have become a country full of bad people.
Russia's Ivan the Fool
— The War in Ukraine, the Psychology of Old Age, and What Russian Literature Already Warned Us About
Lee Hyung-chun · A conversation with Claude · August 2026
Foreword: Why "Ivan the Fool"
In Tolstoy's folk tale Ivan the Fool, a kingdom with no weapons and no money — ruled only by honest labor and simplicity — ends up prospering. The kingdoms of Ivan's clever brothers, built on swords and gold and the drive to conquer, destroy themselves. Tolstoy's point was unambiguous: greatness built on force and conquest ends in self-destruction.
Today's Russia looks like it is walking the very road the fable rejected — the brothers' road. This piece began as a look at the current state of the war in Ukraine, and grew, over conversation, into an inquiry that reaches from the psychology of Russia's aging hardliners all the way back to a diagnosis Russian literature itself made a hundred years ago.
1. The Front: Stalemate and Escalation at Once
As of August 2026, the front line itself is close to stalemate. Russian forces continue offensives in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Donetsk, but confirmed territorial gains remain minimal, while Ukrainian forces have managed small counterattacks near Sloviansk. What has escalated sharply, instead, is the missile and drone campaign against the rear. July was the deadliest month for civilians since May 2022, and the July 2 strike — 31 killed, over 100 wounded — was the single largest attack of the war. Reports that North Korea has deployed missile troops and ballistic missiles to Russia coincide with this intensification.
On the diplomatic track, the Trump–Zelenskyy relationship has visibly warmed, with talk of jointly producing Patriot interceptors and reviving negotiations — but this has not translated into an actual ceasefire or peace agreement.
2. Putin: Between an Intelligence Officer's Caution and Hardliner Pressure
Putin's thinking is not simple. The information control and threat-assessment instincts of a career KGB/FSB officer run through his entire governing style. At the same time, he shows clear signs of military and economic weakening: an estimated half a million casualties, domestic discontent over fuel shortages, the loss of allies like Venezuela and Hungary, and a scaled-down Victory Day parade. In May, he even paired conciliatory language — "the matter is coming to an end" — with agreement to a temporary ceasefire.
The most recent trend, however, points the other way. Seeing a gap in Ukraine's air defenses as an opportunity, Russia has intensified missile strikes rather than negotiating. Compounding this, hardliners — ultranationalist oligarchs like Konstantin Malofeev and siloviki factions — are pressing Putin to halt talks, order full mobilization, and even prepare tactical nuclear options. Observers note that if Putin were to visibly back down, this hardline bloc could brand him a traitor. In other words, Putin's range of choices is constrained less by his own caution than by how tightly the power blocs around him are bound to Soviet nostalgia and imperial narrative.
3. The Psychology of Old Age: The Gap Between Textbook Serenity and Reality
Textbook accounts often portray old age as a natural convergence toward wisdom and detachment. Clinical and field observation frequently shows the opposite: as people become aware of declining physical and cognitive capacity, they often grow more rigid about retaining control, or display "compensatory dominance behavior" — ostentatiously exercising whatever authority remains to them.
This drive toward dominance tends to split into two paths. One is overt — pushing through physical presence or hierarchy, strongly seen among older men from military backgrounds such as the Marines. The other is covert manipulation — leveraging guilt, disguised concern, or a sense of relational obligation, a path chosen by those without the physical force to push through directly. The methods are opposite; the goal is the same — drawing a fading sense of significance and control from someone else. Call it, as this conversation did, "energy vampirism."
Rather than generalizing this as a universal feature of aging, it is more precise to see it as most pronounced in people whose identity has compressed into a single narrative of past glory. Russia's hardline older men fit this condition almost exactly: for the generation that lived through the Soviet collapse and the humiliations of the 1990s, the myth of victory in the "Great Patriotic War" and the memory of superpower status are the last remaining proof of their own significance.
4. Why Kill the Young: Russkiy Mir and the Problem of Legitimacy
Friendly exchange with Ukraine alone could produce something functionally close to reunification — yet the Kremlin's hardliners insist on forced annexation. Their logic isn't framed as naked conquest but wrapped in the self-narrative of "Russkiy Mir" (the Russian World) — the idea that Russian speakers, Orthodox culture, and former Soviet territory form a single civilization whose defense is inherently defensive, not offensive. A security narrative casting NATO's eastward expansion as encirclement is layered on top. Even overt conquest gets repackaged, in its own telling, as survival.
The historical answer is cold: a leadership that believes abandoning this narrative would collapse its own legitimacy has, in practice, paid for that belief with hundreds of thousands of lives. Nostalgia is only the raw material; forging it, again and again, into a weapon for holding power is a choice made by those unwilling to let go of power.
5. How Lives Are Spent: A Structural Problem, Not Just Materialist Ideology
Russia's "meat assault" tactics lay bare a practice of treating soldiers as expendable. But tracing this only to Communist materialism doesn't hold up well. Imperial Russian forces were already notorious for mass frontal assaults in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I — well before the Bolshevik Revolution. Communism, if anything, simply added an ideological gloss — sacrifice of the individual for the collective — on top of a pattern that already existed.
More structural causes are usually cited: a long history of treating a vast population as a strategic asset; an extremely centralized command culture that grants junior officers almost no latitude (in contrast to Western "mission command" doctrine); an information-controlled system where mass casualties struggle to generate opinion strong enough to threaten the regime; and a corruption-riddled procurement system where cheap manpower is, in practice, cheaper than investment in precision weapons and training. Even the recent shift — sending small infantry teams on foot instead of expensive armor, now that drones dominate the battlefield — is simply an adaptation within the same calculus: machines are spared, and people remain the cheapest resource.
6. Russian Literature Already Warned Us
Remarkably, Russian literature diagnosed this entire pattern a century ago. Raskolnikov's "Napoleon theory" in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment — the division of humanity into ordinary people and "extraordinary" individuals entitled to transcend moral law — nearly mirrors the self-justification of today's Kremlin hardliners. The narrator of Notes from Underground shows how a man with no real power but an inflated sense of pride vents his unrecognized self-regard in twisted ways — an exact portrait of the "small heroes" psychology this conversation kept circling back to.
Tolstoy offered the opposite voice. In War and Peace, he relentlessly dismantled the great-man theory of history itself, portraying even Napoleon as a single point swept along by history's vast currents. Late in life he moved toward a Christian anarchism that rejected state violence outright — a stance that would later influence Gandhi. In other words, Russian culture has, from the start, contained both a sharp critique of the person intoxicated by a small heroic narrative, and the very narrative the Kremlin is now enacting at national scale.
The question posed by Legend of the Galactic Heroes — is it justified for the nameless many to be consumed so that one man's heroic story can be completed? — compresses all of this into a single sentence. The work's answer is unambiguous: however compelling the hero, a structure in which the many are sacrificed for that story is itself the problem.
7. Closing
Ivan the Fool's kingdom prospered with no sword, no gold — only working hands. His brothers' kingdoms, built on conquest and display, destroyed themselves. What Russia's hardline elders are holding onto today is not Ivan's wisdom, but the road his brothers walked — the road of finishing one generation's unfinished heroic story with the lives of the next.
References
Al Jazeera, "Putin's 'illusion of victory:' Russia ramps up missile attacks on Ukraine" (Aug 18, 2026). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/18/putins-illusion-of-victory-russia-ramps-up-missile-attacks-on-ukraine
Al Jazeera, "Zelenskyy and Trump discuss Patriot deal and reviving Russian peace talks" (Jul 28, 2026). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/28/ukraines-zelenskyy-hails-good-meeting-with-trump-at-white-house
Al Jazeera, "Putin suggests Russia's war on Ukraine 'coming to an end'" (May 10, 2026). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/10/putin-suggests-russias-war-on-ukraine-coming-to-an-end
Atlantic Council, "With Putin visibly weakened, now is the time to back Ukraine." https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/with-putin-visibly-weakened-now-is-the-time-to-back-ukraine/
Critical Threats (ISW), "Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 5, 2026." https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-5-2026
National Security Journal, "Putin Is Being Cornered by His Own Hardliners — and the Plan They're Pushing Him Toward Crosses the One Line Left." https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/putin-is-being-cornered-by-his-own-hardliners-and-the-plan-theyre-pushing-him-toward-crosses-the-one-line-left/
SOFREP, "Russia's 'Wave-Style' Assault Tactics in Kursk: A Brutal Nod to History." https://sofrep.com/news/russias-wave-style-assault-tactics-in-kursk-a-brutal-nod-to-history/
Newsweek, "Russian soldier describes Russia's use of 'meat assault' tactic." https://www.newsweek.com/russian-soldier-describes-moscows-use-meat-assault-tactic-1839375
Al Jazeera, "Russian weapons, tactics seen in Ukraine are shaping Myanmar's civil war" (Mar 24, 2026). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/24/russian-weapons-tactics-seen-in-ukraine-are-shaping-myanmars-civil-war
Leo Tolstoy, Ivan the Fool (Иван-дурак, 1885)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Война и мир, 1869)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание, 1866)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864)
Yoshiki Tanaka, Legend of the Galactic Heroes (銀河英雄伝説, 1982–1987)
Compiled from a conversation between Lee Hyung-chun and Claude, August 2026.
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