- April 7, 2026
- 9:52 pm
- World News
While some try to measure reality by the price of pizza with “black caviar,” others increasingly see how the old disease of imperial consciousness emerges from the ostentatious metropolitan gloss. This is precisely the essence of the latest debate around Moscow: it’s long been not about restaurants, emigration, or taste preferences. It’s about arrogance that masks fear, propaganda that replaces history, and a city that still tries to sell itself as the “center of the world” when the crunch of a collapsing structure is already heard around.
For the Israeli audience, this plot is important not as a domestic squabble on social networks and not as a private family scene.
It is interesting as a vivid slice of what a significant part of Russian society lives by in 2026: a mix of consumer smugness, aggressive ignorance, and almost religious confidence that a criminal war can be justified by talks about “Satan,” “NATO,” and “historical Russia.” These are the sentiments that explain why Russian aggression against Ukraine still receives internal support.
Pizza, show-offs, and the cult of metropolitan superiority
Why the debate is not really about food
When in response to criticism of Moscow someone starts boasting that “any Muscovite can afford pizza with black caviar,” it sounds almost caricatured.
But in this caricature lies an important detail.
Imperial consciousness very often relies not on strength but on display. It loves to demonstrate consumption, external comfort, internet speed, restaurants, shopping centers, and other symbols of “civilized life” to overlook the main thing: the system it relies on devours both the country and the future, and normalcy itself.
Such logic is well known to history. Capital centers of authoritarian regimes almost always try to portray brilliance, stability, and even cultural superiority until the very end. This has happened more than once, and each time there were people convinced that if restaurants are open, theaters are operating, and expensive food is served, then no catastrophe exists. But the problem is that the display does not negate the decay. Sometimes it only makes it even more humiliating.
Where does the contempt for the “European backwater” come from
Particularly telling here is the contempt for life outside the Moscow bubble. For some smug residents of the Russian capital, the very thought of moving to a small European country or city seems almost insulting. They have been instilled with the idea that the metropolis of a “great country” is already in itself a sign of historical correctness, cultural significance, and civilizational superiority.
In reality, this is ordinary psychological compensation. The less stable the reality, the louder the declarations of greatness. The stronger the fear of the future, the more actively a person convinces themselves that there is no need to leave because supposedly nothing is better than Moscow.
And the deeper the internal understanding of the impending deadlock, the more viciously those who managed to make a different choice are mocked.
Propaganda at the family table and in the mind of the “ordinary person”
When myth is stronger than facts
Even more expressive is the part of this story where a domestic conversation suddenly turns into a concentrate of all Russian propaganda of recent years.
Formulas that Russia supposedly “opposes not Ukraine, but Satan,” that “NATO started the war,” that “Luhansk is Russian,” and that “Ukraine was invented by Lenin and Stalin” have long ceased to be just marginal phrases. This is already a ready set of pseudo-historical and pseudo-religious clichés with which mass consciousness explains to itself the war, killings, destruction, and its own moral participation in what is happening.
This is what makes such monologues especially dangerous. They are not just funny or absurd. They work as an indulgence. A person who sincerely repeats these constructions absolves themselves of responsibility for supporting aggression. They no longer need to think about who started the war, who invaded, who destroys Ukrainian cities, and who kills peaceful people daily. It is enough for them to believe in a magical scheme where there is a “great Russia,” an “external conspiracy,” and an “incorrect Ukraine.”
Why it is important to understand this in Israel
For the Israeli reader, there is a fundamentally familiar motif here. When hatred for a neighboring people is justified by myths, when the right of another people to exist is declared a fiction, when war is wrapped in the language of a “sacred mission,” it is no longer just state propaganda.
It is the moral preparation of society for endless violence.
That is why such texts and such domestic scenes cannot be read as exotic. They show not a separate crazy relative and not one aggressive Muscovite from the comments. They show the internal climate of a country that has lived too long in the lie of its own exclusivity and now turns this lie into political fuel. NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency in this context helps to see not only the emotional side of such statements but also their real political meaning for Israel, Ukraine, and the entire space where imperial myths are still trying to be passed off as historical truth.
Why the imperial metropolis always has the same ending
History does not spare those who laugh last too early
The comparison with Berlin in 1943 sounds harsh here, but the logic is clear.
Large capitals of aggressive regimes often maintain a sense of luxury, cultural life, and almost cynical normalcy until the very end. People eat in restaurants, argue about status, laugh at the “province,” go to theaters, and convince themselves that everything is under control. But then history suddenly reminds that no metropolis can live indefinitely apart from the crimes of a state that considers itself eternal.
Moscow today also tries to live precisely in this illusion. It wants to be both a center of comfort, a headquarters of war, a source of contempt for the rest of the world, and a victim of its own propaganda. This cannot last long. Economic, historical, and moral laws work slowly but consistently. And when the reckoning comes, it turns out that no expensive pizza and no best internet in the world can protect from the consequences of societal stupidity elevated to a norm.
What lies behind the ostentatious confidence
The most important thing in this text is not the sarcasm and not the domestic anger of the author.
The most important thing here is how easily the entire essence of modern Moscow’s self-confidence emerges through an ordinary argument. Behind it stands not strength, but anxiety. Not civilizational superiority, but dependence on myths. Not real stability, but fear of the day when the familiar scenery begins to crumble without the possibility of pretending that it still impresses anyone.
Therefore, the story here is not about pizza. And not even just about Moscow. It’s about how a society that has chosen lies over conscience gradually begins to consider arrogance a sign of sanity, and hatred a form of patriotism. And the longer it lives in this state, the more painful the encounter with reality becomes.