Snokhachestvo and the cultural approaches similar to it are prevalent in those people who are Russia's elite now, but generally seem very rare as far as I can see.

And that stuff about Europe and homosexuality seems for me a kind of "the hungry doesn't understand the full", more of jokes and separation than of really thinking that's true. It's just that there are people outside the prison and inside it, and those inside can't afford to behave freely. It's almost envy, except without even negative feelings. More like alienation - "they live so much easier that for them homosexuality is a real concern".

Also there's the criminal culture homosexuality, as a marker of status in the criminal hierarchy, which is demonstrably non-consensual, and one can see a psychological parallel between living freely in general inside a prison and being gay in a place where people get raped. A nonsensically careless behavior, something like that. And being nonsensically careless is weak.

The Tsar and the viceroys, plundering the country and living the good life.

They followed their own laws. If a law was too cumbersome to make, they didn't. It was an absolute monarchy, but if you compare today's Russia's judicial system to the imperial one - the latter seems very humane. By stats, by procedures, by stories of people who witnessed it.

and there’s no shortage of either because, according to Russian culture throughout the ages, good fathers make sure that their sons are strong men by raping the son’s wife

The kind of peasant communes and huge families where such things happened wasn't actually natural. It was becoming the more common, the more people were becoming personal serfs. That is, there was that transition during Catherine where state serfs (which in practice meant almost a free man) were given to nobles en masse, she considered that a better arrangement. Sort of a privatization.

In the position of son, you’re just expected to take it, otherwise you’re weak, and the “father” will make sure that’s an even worse fate.

Nah, not that. If we make this comparison, for them it's the father's right, and you are subordinate. It's not about fear of punishment, it's about enduring for endurance's sake. Almost morality.

The Siloviki do indeed want to free Ukrainians – so they bomb cities.

No, they don't. They want to kill and loot and subjugate.

People who you are maybe looking for here are not those who try to somehow explain the state's justifications for this war. It's those who think that this has to be finished anyway regardless of whether the war should have been started.

Free them from their “European gayness”, that is. Such is the perversity of the Russian psyche.

I haven't met such real people. OK, to be honest, probably I didn't realize but I have.

The point is - almost nobody really thinks that about gayness and what not, but everybody thinks it's smarter to play along, that's what I meant by the amorphousness of mind of Russians.

Or, differently put: You sure you’re looking at the water you’re swimming in? I’m not Russian, I only lived there, and I was able to see the water. Swimming feels quite a bit different in Russia than it does virtually everywhere else.

It does, but it's more of a culture of virtuous suffering, like doing your work the hard way instead of loosening up a bit and doing it better, but with less "honest labor" or something. And lies. The virtuous suffering thing is often stupid, but sometimes a strength. The lies however are usually stupid, yet Russians somehow always start with lies and then maybe work it up to saying the truth.