Читать книгу The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now - Dmitrii Shusharin - Страница 10

Totalitarian regimes do not need support coming from a conscious choice of a person and a citizen, because they need neither a citizen nor a person. The very existence of choice, the thought of its possibility is deemed to be an offence. The social support of totalitarian power is the absence of any strength on which one could rely. Nowadays the absolute majority of Russian population is happy that their government not only does not encourage it for anything, but, on the contrary, asks not to make any effort. The population does not ask questions, and loves Putin very much. But loyalty to the regime is not limited to this.

In the course of the election campaigns, the word “puting” was coined, which meaning is a mass event in support of power, organized according to the Soviet model voluntary-compulsory gathering of participants with pre-fabricated slogans and rehearsed ovations.

Many observers were sure that the putings’ participants, after experiencing coercion and humiliation would vote against Putin. The result was exact opposite.

Putin affirmed a totalitarian solidarity in Russia, which goes back to the previous Russian version of it. People who demanded to shoot the enemies of the people in the thirties and who went to more peaceful marches and rallies in later years were not so exalted and sincere as German and Italian crowds. But, come to think of it, is there any other choice? They cursed Soviet power, but they went to those marches anyway. They cursed the power the way the wife curses her ever-drunken husband, while the husband curses his mother-in-law with whom he shares the same room of a communal flat in Khrushchev slums. But they genuinely hated those who dared to live differently even in the simplest, everyday sense.

They also hated those who dared to go out to the streets not on the government assignment. They could easily be convinced that these renegades act on the orders of the State Department and the CIA. Or for reason of their mental illness. For only the lunatics and traitors can betray the solidarity of the humiliated, on which the Soviet regime was firmly holding its ground.

Putin revived this solidarity. The people who were taken to those rallies never admit to themselves that the authorities treat them like cattle. For them, those who go to rallies against Putin’s omnipotence are mortal enemies. Which does not prevent them from hating and despising Putin.

This is the result of humiliation, not perceived as humiliation: such mental condition makes a person be able only to hatred and contempt. Putin and his team knew what they were doing when they herded people to putings. They have always been and remain masters of grassroots control that is built on the appeal to the lowest impulses of the human personality and human communities. This is also applied to the business community.

The modern Russian bourgeoisie (with all the conventionality of this term at the beginning of the 21st century) is not a victim of the foray of the nomads from various government departments. The Russian bourgeoisie itself created the system. Together with their comrades from the government agencies.

And this is not the first time for them. After all, when the time came for the Russian bourgeoisie to assert itself, it failed to go ahead with its own bourgeois revolution, willingly accepting the services of autocratic power agents in resolving conflicts at their enterprises and mines. They preferred to bribe the government officials in obtaining state contracts, without really understanding why Russia needs all this European foolishness like trade unions and parliaments. Power was always more important to them than wealth.

“Big deal – a business worth a million! A man with no extraordinary brainpower, without exceptional talents, by chance becomes a trader, and then when he has grown rich he goes on trading from day to day, with no sort of system, with no aim, without having any particular greed for money. He trades mechanically, and money comes to him by itself, without his going after money. He sits all his life at his work, likes it only because he can domineer over his clerks and get the better of his customers. He’s a churchwarden because he can domineer over the choristers and keep them under his thumb; he’s the patron of a school because he likes to feel the teacher is his subordinate and enjoys lording it over him. The merchant does not love trading, he loves dominating, and your warehouse is not so much a commercial establishment as a torture chamber! And for a business like yours, you want clerks who have been deprived of individual character and personal life – and you make them such by forcing them in childhood to lick the dust for a crust of bread, and you’ve trained them from childhood to believe that you are their benefactors.”33.

In this case, any bourgeoisie that has been accepting and keeps on accepting Russian rules should be considered Russian. Foreign capital came here for cheap labor also under the protection of the autocracy. Foreign capital (again, with all the conventionality of this term) now also accepts Russian conditions. As always.

The whole trouble of the Russian bourgeoisie is that it immediately became too adult, did not go either through the religious searches of the first bourgeois revolutions, nor through the exuberance of the Great French Revolution and the subsequent national revival of Europe. It seems the Russian bourgeoisie is much less guilty of bloodshed, it did not kill the tsar, was not responsible for the red terror. But the blame for the totalitarian development of Russia is definitely on it.

And a significant part of the responsibility for the current totalitarian restoration is also on it. It was and remains too pragmatic, too committed to its own conception of bourgeoisness, which cannot be even called class-consciousness.

The Russian bourgeoisie does not correlate its own interests with any others that require solidarity protection. These people have no “Comrades in prisons, in cold dungeons”. These lyrics from the song which was sung in Soviet demonstrations referred to the victims of tsarist repression and never meant any Gulag prisoners. The bourgeoisie can haggle with the government over specifics of their business, but defending ideals, values and principles – this is what Russian bourgeoisie will always stay away from.

The world driven by purely pecuniary interest was created on the basis of the most idealistic intentions. Max Weber in his Preliminary Remarks to Protestant Ethics warned against interpreting capitalism as a solely profit-driven system.

“Such naive ideas about the essence of capitalism belong to those notions, which should be abandoned once and for all at the very start of the study of the history of culture. Uncontrolled greed in the pursuit of profit is by no means identical to capitalism and, even less so, to its ‘spirit.’ Capitalism can be identical to curbing this irrational aspiration, in any case, be instrumental to its rational regulation.”

Bad news is that “Weber capitalism” exists only in the few countries that have begun to modernize earlier and have gone through profound transformations. What was formed and being formed under the influence of their demonstration effect, as a result of involvement in global processes, is called differently – from the world periphery to the cargo-cult capitalism. You can call it capitalism according to Marx – when not historical practice, but speculative schemes play a major role in the interpretation of social relations. National bourgeoisie in such countries, together with the foreign bourgeoisie create an extremely incongruous society.

Its main contradiction is the borrowing of world economic practices and integration into world economic structures while preserving and even strengthening national identities that are formed on the basis of opposition to the world civilizational center. The degree of economic borrowing and dependence can be different, and not always it is proportional to the degree of national-political opposition. Under the Soviet regime, especially in its last decades, the economy of the USSR was very different from that of the West one and today’s Russia. But anti-Americanism and chauvinism were not as deeply rooted in society as they are now.

The Russian bourgeoisie does not have an idealistic past, and it is impossible to borrow it. As a result, the free market emerges as its ugly parody and the very principle of human relations under so-called capitalism is deformed.

I do not like Vasily Rozanov, but, perhaps, you can not do without a long quote from the “Apocalypse of Our Time” (I wonder who came up with an almost identical name of an American film – there were always a lot of Russians in Hollywood):

“MOSCOW DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TEARS”

– and makes a stupid mistake. That’s why she is poor. It is necessary to believe, and not in tears, but – in general, always, until deception. Phoenicians in ancient time, at the beginning of history, learned to believe and made up a simple piece of paper, a special written sign they used for this purpose. It was conditional: and who produced it got the “trust”, and it was called credit. Those who had it, were the “trustworthy” people and definitely trusting, not by talk or “friendly conversation”, but in a way of business relations and for making life easier. Thus, they became the first wealthiest people in the world. No match to Russians. Who manage even at such later time still growing poor, still deceiving and keep on ruining their lives.

***

The beauty of a debt is its payment – and the Russians follow that and can not fail to do so, paying [the bill] established by the Phoenicians… But resolutely everywhere they can, they try to live at the expense of each other, cheating and pimping. And thinking of happiness fall into a greater and greater misfortune.”34

A lot of nonsense came from under the quill of Vasily Vasilyevich, and then he said something important and significant: capitalism is trust.

The logic of primitive utilitarianism, characteristic of all strata of Russian society, leaves no hopes for the conversion of Russian bourgeoisie to the principles of civil society and the rule of law. Such conversion is possible only as a result of a supra-pragmatic effort. But the Russian bourgeoisie does not see any special benefit from observing human rights, free elections and a changeability of power. Like the Russian bureaucracy (with which it partly merges in a cross-over way), it is totally demotivated in terms of modernization.

In November 2010, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs proposed amendments to the Labor Code.35 They included simplification of the dismissal procedure, a 60-hour workweek, the elimination of educational benefits, and so on. The amendments were commented on in terms of social protection, the human right to work and education. But all this is only part of a broader interpretation. The proposed changes reflected the joint position of the Russian patronage, intertwined with the state, on the ways and resources of modernization. The Masters of the Universe have been practicing and can ptactice only extensive ways of developing the economy through the degradation of the social sphere, reducing the educational level and weakening the guarantees of human rights. This is not modernization, but its direct opposite – archaization and degradation.

It was at the height of Medvedev’s “thaw”. All these phony projects like Skolkovo, innovations and other fantasies Medvedev, the same hogwash as the so-called national projects, which he curated before his move to the Kremlin. That’s what industrialists and entrepreneurs have said. There is only one reality, the one that has been practiced many times in a variety of options: to sweat the workers, giving them no opportunity to get education at their own discretion.

However, we must be aware of another aspect. The progressive public, even the younger generation, stopped in its development in 1989. All the same populism, the fight against corruption and privileges, complete misunderstanding of what is happening in the former Soviet republics, now sovereign states. And contempt for business, businessmen, “profiteers”. In general, the lumpen-intelligentsia is certain that it should be in power, that the government should listen to its advice and treat them preferentially.

The progressive public does not react at all to the systematic repression and destruction of small and medium-sized businesses, although this is the same bourgeoisie that, as the third estate, has grown to the nation, demanding equal rights of man and citizen and a democratic rule. It’s a different story with the clientele around oligarchs, even those fallen into disfavor, like Khodorkovsky Company. But the intelligentsia, even in the service and maintenance of the bourgeoisie, keeps the old contemptuous attitude. Well, what rights they can deserve! Profiteers! … Their ideal is the alliance of a progressive general secretary with the progressive intelligentsia, as in perestroika time, in order to jointly control these profiteers.

Modern Russia has no subject of democratic changes, which can constitute the essence and basis of modernization. These changes are not for the sake of profit, but for the benefit of the fatherland and humanity. To save honor, not property; soul, not comfort. The last thing is to connect the hopes for freedom and democracy with someone’s pragmatic, utilitarian, selfish ambitions.

Therefore, the search for a subject of modernization of Russia, a force that has the potential to take the lead in civilized development of the country, certainly should not be conducted on a class basis. The world’s national bourgeoisie fulfilled their historical mission only rising above their class interests, leading the movements of the whole nation, which most often grew out of resistance to power, which has always been guarding its own interests.

And the authorities don’t bother to hide their attitude to their own capitalists and the right to private property, which is reflected in the statements made by those who must protect this right. As the chairman of the Constitutional Court Zorkin said, “the myth that, despite dubious privatization, an effective class of proprietors has been created in the country, collapsed following the financial crisis.” He added: “The crisis is an occasion to conduct an inventory and identify legal defects of the privatization processes of the 1990s”, conducted along the “radical neoliberal matrix”. " After the economic crisis the age of liberal legal technologies became a thing of the past,” concluded Mr. Zorkin.36

These words did not entail a centralized nationalization, but the YUKOS affair signalized the permissibility of raiding across the entire vertical of power in accordance with the status of the raider. The main thing is to “take according to your rank” (an old Russian saying about the rules of bribery).

As for the businesses of a different level, the historic mark was “The Night of the Long Scoops” in Moscow, when hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses were destroyed, with their outdoor concession stands demolished in a one-night action, the legality of which, in most cases, was confirmed by judicial decisions. It was then, in February 2016, the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, described the relationship of power to the right of private property:

“The demolition of illegal buildings in Moscow is a clear example of the fact that the truth, heritage, history of our country is not for sale. You cannot hide behind pieces of paper about the property, acquired through obviously fraudulent means. We will return Moscow to Muscovites. Its squares, plazas, streets – open, beautiful, beloved.”37

The speechwriters of the Moscow mayor deserve credit for their skills. Their words appeal to the community’s consciousness, suggest the idea of the immorality of private property, and most importantly, indicate the non-recognition of legal acts, including court decisions, that were taken under the predecessor of the current mayor. The right of ownership must be reaffirmed every time as the new people assume the high office.

Actually, this situation is a consequence of the absence of stable power institutions and politically and economically independent social communities. Appeal to the middle class is meaningless, since the appellants themselves are not able to determine the composition and distinctive features of the class. Property characteristics are not identical with social ones, and it is useless to talk about millions of owners of apartments and small household plots.

The main value of the middle class is its political and economic independence. And here we are faced with another paradox: how can one appeal to an economically independent social group after several years of policy of destroying the political independence of the population? And, except for declarations, there are no signs of encouraging economic independence. Moreover, when we talk about property characteristics, the polarization of society is revealed.

It should be noted that the Russian population lost both political and economic independence without much resistance. The population expected to participate in the sharing of petrodollars, whether direct budget payments, or various types of private entrepreneurship opportunities. The innovative potential of the middle strata (let’s call them so) is very doubtful, and to declare them a creative class is a distortion of the truth.

The most reasonable would be to admit that there is simply no middle class in Russia. That this term, which denotes a certain second-order proprietary, and firstly an axiological community is not applicable to modern Russia, for the middle class means primarily certain models of social behavior and goal setting, rather than ways of obtaining income and ownership of properties.

But it is very difficult to part with the myth of the middle class for those who consider themselves to be opposition and are constantly trying to prove that this class is interested in democracy and a free market. Like, it is the only support of democracy, because it is profitable. And the members of this class understand this, therefore…

This is a fundamental mistake. Democracy, unlike totalitarianism, is not rationally asserted. Its advantages cannot be logically proved, because they are not identifiable. Democracy either becomes part of personal self-identification, and on this basis leads public and national identity, or not. And it was not I who came up with this notion.

Neither was I, who discovered other things. It is for this reason that democracy carries a totalitarian potential. It is rationally vulnerable at the ordinary level. And at higher levels too. As for the middle class, it was the backbone of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet. What is being observed now in Russia testifies about the conscious policy aimed at reducing the population size at the expense of unproductive social groups, lowering the educational and cultural level and the impoverishment of significant part of the population.

Putin does all this in the interests of his own middle class. Which was not invented by the ignorant but progressive intelligentsia, but a real, established over the last fifteen years around the oil and gas profit beneficiaries, law enforcement agencies, in state corporations, the civil service, in the media. This is all Putin’s middle class, a totalitarian breed.