15 August 2025, 22:04
In the early 2020s, Russia’s mass imagination spawned its own Zombies. Their appearance coincided with the moment when the already fragile economic infrastructure of the concentration camp was threatened by the collapse of the civilian labor market and mobilization.
There was a special irony in this: human labor became redundant precisely when official propaganda promised a “rise from the knees,” a “new industrialization,” and “jobs for all.”
At the same time, in Putin’s 21st-century Russia, Zombies were never meant to be a horror genre. Zombies are a raw material that Putin, like all other colonial resources, sells for next to nothing. Not oil, not gas, but Zombies—human biomass with the function “to endure, to walk, to shoot, to dig, to suffer.”
The classic recipe for creating Zombies in Russia is simple: take an economy that has never had normal jobs and where wages have always been at rock-bottom; add sanctions, mobilization, and “import substitution” in the form of rebranding the cheapest, lowest-quality Chinese industrial “masterpieces”; add a pinch of toxic “Third Rome” ideology, and you get a sufficiently motivated army of Zombie conscripts.
It’s hard not to end up in the Zombie army in Russia. The natives of Moscow’s colonies have virtually no other social mobility.
Well—actually, there is one. Natives can skip straight to the Zombie army by first trying their hand at crime. But given the number of informers and “drums” in the “Russia” concentration camp, that always ends the same way. Our would-be gangster becomes an inmate, and then is sent to the front in exchange for a promised amnesty and a black sack of rations.
Characteristically, a Zombie’s place in Russia’s living space never stays empty for long. It is immediately taken by Zombie-migrants—mute, docile beings willing to do all the dirty work for pennies, living in basements of abandoned factories.
Since Zombie-migrants have no full-fledged “civilian” life or normal needs, they turn into pure surplus value: they can work for a minimum wage or for nothing at all. They exist, as Marx would say, by “sucking the living labor.”
In the Kremlin, this is called “returning people to the economy.” Marx, were he alive, would have appreciated the breadth of the Chekists’ thought: Zombie-migrants don’t need benefits, don’t strike, and don’t take sick leave. Their sole function is to produce surplus value—making them perfect “exporters” of the concentration camp’s economy.
Helping them acclimate are the perpetually drunk “heroic veterans of the Special Military Operation,” who miraculously returned from the meat-grinder of human-wave assaults without arms or legs, always eager to tell everyone how they “defended the Motherland” by raping Ukrainian children in Bucha.
What else is good about Zombies?
We already know Zombies have no civilian life.
Do Zombies have civil rights? — Also no!
That means they can be humiliated and exploited worse than animals.
“Jobless growth” is what officials call the situation when the concentration camp is at war, yet wages in the rear are falling. They fall because Zombies don’t protest. Zombies are afraid of losing their shackles and finding themselves on the street without their familiar penal labor!
Zombies fear that their slave labor on the concentration camp’s oil rigs and their places in the meat battalions will be taken by combat robots and artificial intelligence!
Think about it! Zombie conscripts are not worried about being killed—they are worried about being replaced by machines, with everything once again controlled by the same people who now control the flow of coffins and black body bags.
They watch with horror at army exhibitions of “combat androids” that could take away from them the chance to end their earthly path as stupidly and ingloriously as possible.
It never occurs to them that robots cost more than Zombie conscripts or Zombie-migrants. And since in Russia it is no longer humans who rule, but the logic of Zombie-capitalism—losses are nationalized, profits privatized—they still stand every chance of starving to death on the construction sites of the “Third Rome” or dying in the assault of yet another forest strip, because human life is the cheapest thing in Russia—just another expendable, a roll of toilet paper in a vast warehouse.