Читать книгу The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now - Dmitrii Shusharin - Страница 11

Neo-totalitarian model, preceding the current system, is associated with the name of Vladislav Surkov, who served as deputy head of the presidential administration, later transferred to the government. This character, naturally demonized, is interesting, in particular, by the fact that he the one who facilitated the continuity between the nineties and Putin’s rule. The neo-totalitarian model presupposed the consolidation of the society on the basis of such principles as sovereign democracy, pragmatic patriotism, careerism and consumerism.

The turning point in the formation of a totalitarian society should be considered one from which social success can no longer be judged solely by the laws of the sphere in which it was achieved. From the outside, an external criterion is introduced: how does this success correlate with authority? Is it in service of it? Approved by it? Or the other way around?

The power began to appeal to the system of values that, not without its involvement, was introduced into society: it does not matter whether you are good or bad, mean or kind, the main difference is between losers or winners. It was a deception: losers or winners come from free competition, a competition by the rules. But the government did not allow free competition either in politics or in the economy, and the positions were allotted to the few.

Almost the entire population of the country ended up losers, being consistently alienated from power sharing, deprived of any influence on government. The structure of the labor camp community in its classic Soviet version was reproduced. The absolute majority of the population is ranked as “muzhiks”, who are not trusted, since even their statements of loyalty deemed to be a sign of disloyalty. They have no say about how to run the operation.

For a long time, the focus was on young people from several Kremlin youth movements. (MGER, “Nashi” and others). The message to the children of the city outskirts was that they are now a political elite with a promise to become the ruling elite. Later they were disbanded. The most notable and active have made careers. You can look around; see what kind of people of the new generation have come into politics with them – not in power, but in political life.

It turns out that the intellectual and moral level of the promoted upstarts is the same for public and political activists of various backgrounds. Career growth quite allowed the transition from the RNU (a nationalist group) to the Left Front, from the National Bolsheviks to the “Young Guard” and other Kremlin sponsored organizations. The current totalitarian leveling differs from the previous one. Inadmissible is not the ideological deviation, but going beyond the limits of mass culture. This applies to the level of intelligence, the quality of thinking, values and moral principles of politicians and journalists. Only secondary replication, parroting and parody are allowed. And the selection was conducted not by the power, but the society itself.

The cult of success is most firmly ingrained among the current 40-year-olds, who at the same time proved to be the most infantile generation. Therefore, they have become the most reliable allies of the regime, the main resource of support of totalitarianism. At the same time there are plenty of frondeurs among them. Often they ask me, what kind of solutions can I offer, what is my answer to the eternal Russian question “What has to be done?” Normally, I would say: “Stop asking this question and live on”. But at times I can’t stand it and say that my answer would imply rejection of their current social status leading to the loss of their source of income. They just don’t get it. That is, the situation of the sixties is having its second coming: the verbal rebelliousness (very limited one) easily coexists with pragmatic careerism.

There is a certain type of young people in Russia who wants to make a career somewhere near politics. Here is the characteristic of them: loyalty to principles and convictions is not for them; this is the lot of freaks, losers and suckers. The main thing is power over people, status in the political establishment, admission to the established nomenclature, and it does not matter, the one in power or in the opposition.

The term “pedocracy” found its way even to Wikipedia. It was coined by Father Sergei Bulgakov in Vekhi (Milestones), a collection of essays (1909), referring to the orientation of society on the opinions and values of student, community:

“The maximum claims can be made with minimal background of individuals both in the field of science and life experience with lack of self-discipline, which is so clearly expressed in the abnormal hegemony of the students in our spiritual pedocracy.”38

Pedocracy was not fully compatible with democracy, but very usable for totalitarian regimes. And it’s completely pointless to associate modernization with young people, as it was recently done by agitprop. It has never been the young people who really did the modernizations; all the great reformers who modernized their countries were people of solid experience.

Young people have never been reformers. They accept what the elders offer them, be it a revolution or a reaction. Otherwise, you have no chances to make a career. And social progress, regardless whether we want it or not, is fueled by ambition. All those who changed something for the better were middle-aged and older people, who knew very well what the subject of reform was. Pedocracy, as it bitterly pointed out in the Vekhi, is a sign of political adventurism. Be it a case of Trotsky, Mao or Surkov.

It was obvious at the very beginning of all these affairs that the creation of youth organizations by the power was based on the provincial and urban periphery populations (in the socio-cultural and socio-psychological sense), was aimed at preventing the emergence of youth groups of the 1968-type Western movements. Those in the West were the children of the bourgeoisie, a new middle class, formed in Marshall Plan Europe after WW II. The young of that time were the agents of modernization who grew up making their carriers through consociativism, i.e. integration of former oppositionists in the establishment. The first such perspective was seen by Pier Paolo Pasolini at the height of revolutionary events.39

Earlier, before the Kremlin youth emergence, I wrote that in Russia we might expect our own 1968:

“This is a struggle for the upward way outside the “brigades”, federal and regional administrations, corruption and initiation humiliations. For the multiculturalism of the establishment, if you will, for alternatives in the interpretation of success and the diversity of the very idea of “upward social mobility”.40

The 2012 Moscow standoff on Chistye Prudy was hastily likened to May-68, but it was not even a parody. The social movement, in which young people demanded the plurality of social lifts, did not work out. But even those who took part in the Kremlin games got almost nothing.

In 2010, the Center for Development of the Higher School of Economics conducted a study. To their amazement, they could not understand how the government managed to waste 450 billion rubles out of 1.2 trillion allocated to fight the crisis. Most of the funds were transferred to the authorized capital of several banks. Another part was spent to prop up the Russian Railways and the purchase of automotive equipment41. Among the benefited banks was Rosselkhozbank, the fourth in capitalization in Russia headed by the chairman of the board Dmitry Patrushev, son of Nikolai Patrushev, chief of the FSB42. And he is not the only one. At that time, the children of big bosses preferred to get their positions in the banks, the largest ones, connected with the state budget, and, therefore, with massive, not really transparent and hardly controllable financial flows.

The other bank named in the study of the Center for Development of the Higher School of Economics, was, of course, Vnesheconombank, whose board member was Peter Fradkov, the son of the then head of the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service). The sons of Sergei Ivanov, Sergei Kirienko, Valentina Matvienko were also involved in the banking business43.

By 2016, the children of senior officials have tightened up their grip on the financial and investment business, buying up Gazprom’s shares, managing the financial flows from foreign investors. Remarkably enough that the banks they lead are sometimes unprofitable, which doesn’t prevent the Kremlin leaders from getting commendations and awards from the state.44

The Kremlin youth organizations turned out to be useless as means of social mobility. At the same time, a split among young people was prevented. What the authorities and society have really managed to achieve is to unite the youth in conditions of deepening wealth disparity and, more broadly, social differentiation.

Success is achieved through socio-cultural unity. The former Komsomol mumbo-jumbo, which nevertheless gave a brilliant economic result with the sole purpose of formation an absolutely unprincipled and ambitious caste. Nowadays the thugs are not making carriers in underworld, but prefer to join security forces, since the authorities are asserting the law of might. But also the so-called majeurs (silverspooners), children who grew up in the nineties, were brought up in the families in the thugs’ mode. In fact, it was the same with the children of the Soviet nomenclature, but now this unanimity of golden youth with the children of the urban periphery has become deeper and more reliable.

Today the Russian elite children have a new goal of integrating into the world elite, which means the legalization abroad of what is acquired by the hard work of milking the Russian budget. But this goes concurrently with their promotion in state and parastatal corporations. All the talk about the “nationalization of the elites” (perfectly oxymoronic definition) has remained all talk, no walk. At the same time, the progressive public does not understand that the establishment of nomenclature dynasties is no reason for a serious concern. Quite the opposite, a reason to rejoice.

This is an obvious sign of stability, consolidation and consensus of new elites who escaped great terror, when generation of winners were eliminated together with families – a huge number of victims of vertically organized terror. So far, this is a significant difference of the current political regime, not only from the Soviet model, but from the entire Russian tradition.

It is another matter that dynasties are traced only in a dozen or two members of neocracy. But the fate of billions of estates, huge corporations, as well as the prospects for small business, are still unclear. The perpetual redistribution is more likely to go on.