https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/considering-national-and-personal-character-in-russias-invasion-of-ukraine
Excerpt:
I caught a brief interchange of the September 27th “Late Show” when Stephen Colbert was interviewing the well-known foreign war correspondent Clarissa Ward. She seemed to be concluding that Russia has an unusual propensity to tolerate suffering, so that a long war would not be all that psychologically difficult for the country as a whole.
Her comment reminded me of how long Russia was able to hold out, starvation common by the end, to the siege of Leningrad by the German Nazis in World War II. They ultimately shifted the whole tide of the war.
There are many jokes about Russian tolerance for suffering, and the role of vodka in coping with it. Take Woody Allen in his 1975 film “Love and Death,” when the antihero Boris Grushenko said this about human suffering, in a sort of word play like that of the psychiatrist and writer, R.D. Laing:
“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
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