Читать книгу The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now - Dmitrii Shusharin - Страница 8

In 1999, an economic recovery began in Russia. This is what made the then “saviors of the fatherland” alike with all their totalitarian predecessors, who came to power not at the most difficult moment, but when the situation was already beginning to improve. The rest was completed by the prices of oil and gas.

Going back to my article published two years after Putin came to power15, I think now it makes sense to recall its main points, because it was then that the expectations of the change of people in power were replaced by alarms.

“The results of Putin’s biennium are obvious. Relative economic stabilization makes it possible to move to more consistent right-liberal reforms, but in the political life, right-populist trends are clearly prevailing. The watchmen came to power. Not guards and gate-keepers, but people with Soviet watchmen mentality. The stabilization perceived as a risk factor: the danger of the fact that the watchmen will want to realize their main dream – the establishment of a totalitarian regime in Russia – is growing. As before, this has not happened at the peak of the crisis, but at the first signs of stabilization, when there is already something to profit from.

Speaking of the “biennium”, we are ready to evaluate the current state of affairs historically. However, it is not always productive. When it comes to what has been happening in Russia in the last two years, the clichés most used are “the post-Yeltsin era,” or “the Putin system.” That is, the situation is described in relation to the past, and not on a par with what is happening now in countries whose political system is emulated by Russia in its post-Soviet development. The political processes taking place now in Europe are for the most part ignored.

Meanwhile, some changes in the traditional political structure can be observed over there, primarily on the right flank. More and more visible and influential are those who are called new rightists, and their ideology and political practice is assessed as right-wing populism, which is seriously different from right-wing liberalism. Most accurately, perhaps, The most famous and influential right-wing populist of Europe Jean-Marie Le Pen is identified as the” right in the economy, left in social policy”. To a certain extent this concept, term or cliché can be called anything, but the “right populism” is the best characterization of the current Russian government’s practices.

We can happily conclude that Russia finds its way to Europe through populism; only the points of departure are quite different. The European New Right finds itself in a rigid framework of constitutional norms, institutional and public restrictions. In our country the situation is quite dissimilar. First of all, in Russia there is no clear understanding that there must be a direct link between the proclaimed constitutional order and its real institutional embodiment.

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Two years ago, it seemed as if the movement was clearly forward along the path of liberal reforms. Now everything turned another way. And it is not the vector of movement that has changed. The movement itself is no more.

Actually, this is the ideal of the totalitarianism.

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The explicit orientation of certain power groups to a totalitarian experience is obvious. If such an undertaking is realized, the degeneration of state institutions, the acceleration of the erosion of the constitutional order that has already begun, is inevitable. For society, this means the following.

The system in the making and its growing political culture are hostile to the basic principles of a market economy, since it sees any private, unauthorized success as a disloyal act.

In its actions the governing class is guided by the firm belief that the behavior of the governed is driven mainly by base motives. Not honor and dignity, but fear and greed, not a desire for self-affirmation, but a desire to survive at any cost, not strength, but weakness. Make no mistake thinking that those actions are typical for the local “down management” concerned with “a narrow circle of limited persons.” The lower level model of governance is totalitarian and it covers all public spheres. Including the economy. Self-censorship exists not only in the editorial offices of newspapers, but also in any person of any walk of life, be it a scientist, a businessman, a politician. But it would be too simple and innocuous if it were merely a manifestation of loyalty. Those who spend a lot of their energy on the passionate denunciation of the “new regime”, I would like to say: “Calm down. Everything is much worse.”

“The change of epochs” can be reduced to the next drop-out of the Russian nation from history. We are at a point of social development, after which there may not be any events. Because the thing called an event is something that has a subject of action and entails a change in reality. If, as in the last two years, there is the same tendency or several interdependent ones are observed, granted that the personification of these manifestations is indifferent and irrelevant, then they are not events, but merely the reproductions of the static state of society.

Information sources can be flooded with reports of criminal cases, trials, state visits and statements, but these are all not events. As far as “here and now” is concerned, what is needed are radical institutional reforms aimed at creating a free market (taxes, de-bureaucratization of medium-sized businesses, etc.), a new system of civil service, fundamental changes in the army, law enforcement structures, and the education system – those things could have been called events.

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The opposition has the same congenital features as the government, and the word “has” here is ambiguous, since all those who operate in the current political space are united not by the existence of certain values, principles and goals, but the absence of such. Everything is clear about the authority: the declarations and the principles are two unrelated separate things. But those wishing to be opposition (constructive or irreconcilable, principled or situational – it does not matter) find themselves in a situation of a Soviet canteen where only flies and patties are together. There are many declarations, but none of them are system forming, while the main factor is relations with the authorities, with which all are trying to bargain.

The qualitative changes in a society can occur only with the affirmation of a private life, the status of the private person as the basis of public and state structure. It sounds trivial, but only in the civilized world. In Russia, the conscious desire to build a private space, autonomous from the government or the opposition, is an unprecedented thing. And the public institutions are no less circumspect to privacy as the institutions of power. Sometimes even more.

Precisely because the private person is not represented in either the political or the public space, there is that strange situation that cannot be called other than institutional crisis. Signs of it are not only the appropriation of power and judicial structures by certain power groups, but also the extreme complexity of the legal system in the spheres of economic, finance and taxation. The growing demands of security services and the military. The complete unconcern of the leaders of political parties to their own electorate, which they remember only on the eve of the elections.

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From time to time, attempts are being made to create a new civic cult, a new style of public behavior for those who consider themselves to be the establishment. It’s vulgar, mediocre, with no emotional content and even without much pathos – such is the new Moscow style. The first manifestation of this style took place a year ago with the re-establishment of old Stalinist national anthem.

The subjects of a totalitarian state differ from citizens of free countries by their self-alienation from historical events, that is, estrangement from history. They see power as an undisputed given, simply because it is power, which by its nature should generate events just in order to keep functioning by deciding something, doing something, producing something. Therefore, in a society that preserves the elements of a totalitarian political culture, it often turns out to be the object of irrational criticism and aggressive rejection. This is not a political attitude – it is an attitude toward history. Totalitarianism has developed a special type of people – an extra-historic man, who could be as well called prehistoric, since some primeval traits are present in his behavior. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the desire to protect their offspring characteristic of all animals, is not developed enough in such type of persons, who are convinced that anything bad can’t happen neither to them, nor to their loved ones. This mental position is caused not by a lack of interest in political and public life, but quite another – the lack of personal life and conscious private interests. But politics do interest them, and in a planetary scale.

People with no private space and private time have neither a sense of history, nor a civil position, which, in essence are one and the same thing. The most accurate description of such a type of person is offered by Anatoly Naiman in his reflections about the position of a private (and therefore unpleasant) person in a totalitarian state: “Don’t go away from the history that does not pay attention to you, escaping into the confines of private life: this is exactly what the history wants you to do, but, on the contrary, impose the patterns of your life on it, use the same attitude to the events of your private life as to military campaigns and rebellions.”

But this reasoning applies only to people experiencing their lives as a series of events, that is, able to see cause-effect relationships, capable of reflection and conscious choice, of being accountable to themselves. Only such people make up historical nations. In Russia, the end of the last century is characterized by a very different principle – the institutionalization of eventlessness and protest against historical authorship, and therefore against privacy.

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In Russian ordinary perception the concept of civil society is associated with a confrontation with the power of the state, and only this holds it together. But such is the nature of the Russian intelligentsia (again in the ordinary perception): it has no other way of self-affirmation but being a Fronde (not even the opposition). So, it turns out that the Russian intelligentsia has been and still is trying to be a substitute for civil society.

However, such is the nature of civil society that the power for it has a meaning of an external application. Civil society arose not in the opposition to power and is not constituted as an opposition to it. The private, not the common is the priority of the civil society’s concerns. Actually, the individual, private values are the highest concern of it and this is what makes the society civil. The protection of the private is that common cause, which the Russian thinkers so much yearned for, both revolutionaries and conservatives, the borderline between which in Russia has always been blurred.

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Civil society does not need power, more precisely, it comes as a result of alienation from power. But the government, if it pretends to legitimacy and social creativity, on the contrary, needs to make the society civil. And this interest is purely applicative, for only civil society is manageable, transparent and capable of negotiating with the authorities.

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Actually, what is there to rack your brains over, guessing who and what for launches now and then in the media the horror stories about the imminent change of government, the transition of control over the economy into the hands of security services. Their only means and purpose is to bring the situation in the country to the state that we see in and around Chechnya. The greatest danger is the possibility of an armed conflict with Georgia which could be initiated by the insecure people in security forces and politicians close to them.”

That was the situation in the country as seen by 2002, at the moment of the final farewell with the right-liberal hopes. It was marked by the actions of the government sponsored youth movement “Coming Along” whose rally, which in many respects copied the Nazi burning of books, although it was directed only against one writer, Vladimir Sorokin. Instead of an embarrassment, the historical parallels served more like inspiration for the organizers. It was at that point in time when it became clear that the liberal illusions are thing of the past and the new completely different political regime was taking over. The affirmation followed very soon: the Yukos affair and the post-Beslan reform. The persecution of Khodorkovsky opened the era of raider seizures and redistribution of property, which made it clear that there was no private property and free market in Russia. As for the reforms after the terrorist attack in Beslan and the rhetoric that accompanied them, it became evident that the state was rearranged in order to indefinitely retain power in the hands of one group and one person. It was accompanied by imperial rhetoric. All in all this can be called the privatization of the state.