Until now, the situation in our country and in Europe has been described in terms of deviation from the democratic norm, rather than a new social and political order with its systems of norms and values. Not only Russians, but Europeans as well find it hard to recognize this transformation as they evaluate events in Russia, Hungary, Belarus, and now Georgia. In Ukraine it is still different.
If democracy advocates and people who consider themselves to be opposition (regardless of their political affiliation) recognize this, their self-identification will change fundamentally: they will be forced to finally realize that they are part of the rule-and-manage system, they serve and assist it in their own way.
Analysts, political scientists and strategists, cultural scientists, and others who talk and write about the fates of the country and the world, cannot recognize it either. For the most part, it is explained by the fact that their former knowledge will fully depreciate in the international market, where there is no demand for fundamental research on the rise of neo-totalitarianism. Other things are required there: manuals on lobbying, knowledge of connections and details of relations between clans in the ruling elite. Without this, it is impossible to comprehend the prospects of Russian economic development and handling business with it in the first place. And of course, what to expect from it in terms of foreign policy. However, usually all this knowledge is the result of speculations, but it will be bought.
However, the recent actions of the US Department of State, which is shutting down the grant programs for the former Soviet countries, show that state-level purchases of such knowledge have come to an end. Now it can be said for sure that the US Department of State’s interest in Russia is a pure agitation and propaganda fiction.
Intellectuals cannot recognize the quality renewal of social and political order of Russia because the internal market demands something very different: constant promises about the nearing fall of the regime, which in reality is growing stronger by the day. The thinking reed wants to hear reassuring stories that it is worth something in this country. And meanwhile, it does not want to do anything for it: let the things arrange themselves.
This brings to mind forecasts made by the pre-war emigrant and Western democratic press. Your end is near, bolsheviks! Lenin will not last a year. Conflicts between bolsheviks after Lenin’s death will lead to the Soviet government’s collapse in a few months. Stalin has ruined agriculture, people’s uprising will tear him down in the fall. The conspiracy, disclosed during the Moscow Trials, shows the extreme weakness of Stalin’s regime, which is not going to last for more than a year. Hitler is doomed to an inevitable economic collapse. Hitler will choke on the Sudetes.
After Hitler and Stalin started the World War II by attacking Poland and sharing its territory, forecasters fell quiet.
What must happen to silence the forecasts of people, who killed Russian democracy in the 1990s (Satarov, Nemtsov, Kasianov, Kudrin, etc.), who see signs of the regime’s impending collapse in each of its victories? They are unable to comprehend that the recent recognition of Putin as the world’s most influential politician is a symptom of the global crisis of values, from which forces hostile to democracy usually benefit.
Denying the new knowledge about the new reality turns people into objects of manipulation, makes them make a wrong choice, leads to disappointment in any social reflection and activity. The main question now is on which model the new regime will base itself: Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s, paedocratic or gerontocratic, vertical or based on horizontal ties within the elite. Will the government choose a path of constant shaking up and renewing the ruling elite (and hence constant redistribution of property), or will it let the elite consolidate and regenerate?
Obviously, the second model is more humane and promising. But something else is also obvious. With such understanding of the current state of affairs (this point in time and agenda), Navalny, Nemtsov, all fighters against the corruption, the party of thieves and criminals, MPs and bureaucrats should be recognized as Stalinists. Then democracy’s only hope lies with Valentyna Matvienko, who urges to preserve bureaucracy as a class.
So far, using the term “stagnation” as a synonym of Brezhnev’s epoch while describing Putin’s model is distortion of reality, which is quite the opposite. Putin’s regime is neo-totalitarianism in its formation stage, while Brezhnev’s was late totalitarianism. That is why Putin’s regime can be compared to Stalin’s dynamic and changing rule, but not to Brezhnev’s stable one. Dynamism and stability characterize the state of elite, which was constantly refreshed until Brezhnev came, and the hitherto banned horizontal connections within the elite became an element of government, just like the power vertical. Putin’s government today is paranoically vertical, it excludes any agreements, compromises, and obligations on the part of government.
But Brezhnev’s era can be called stagnant only in terms of renewal of elites. The USSR of 1982 is a completely different country in comparison to the one in 1964. The key result is the rise of peaceful, relaxed, self-confident layer of apparatchiks and intellectuals. It is them who buried Soviet totalitarianism.
Public opinion polls by the Levada Center show that the population has shaped demand for stability and confidence in their social status. Society is looking for freedom and peace, understanding them in their own way. And Putin’s regime, which evolves according to the former schemes of the Russian and German totalitarian regimes, cannot offer any of those. Besides, neither can it offer anything that Brezhnev’s regime guaranteed until its invasion of Afghanistan: peace not only within the country.
But the main contradiction of Putin’s regime has not been registered by the intellectual elite, even though it is its real weak spot. However, Russian intellectuals are unable to overcome the stereotypes of political consciousness. They are still confident that their protest rallies really scare the government and make it weaker.
Meaningless verbal aggression is all the progressive community is capable of, which is even worse than the regime in such cases, because what it tries to present as opposition to the government, in reality only strengthens it. The government relies on meanness in all its manifestations. And above all, those in the opposition. The Russian intelligentsia is the main source, executor, and beneficiary of another cyclic 360-degree turn, which has caused the rise of neo-totalitarianism in Russia, letting it spread not only in the post-Soviet countries now, but in Europe as well. Intelligentsia is absolutely indifferent to what is going on in the former Soviet republics, it does not try to get to the core of the processes that happen there, and establish “people-to-people” connections with their communities.
The fundamentally important part of Russia’s movement towards democracy is the rejection of its superpower status, as well as unilateral disarmament and internationalization of energy resources. No one can call themselves an oppositionist or democracy supporter if they do not recognize these principles. Without them, anyone remains government’s accomplice in building a neo-totalitarian society while criticizing its individual shortcomings.
With all due respect to the classics of totalitarian studies, it should be admitted that they have not dared to take one mental step. The government and leading politicians have always been the key player for them, and they have viewed the establishment of the totalitarian regime as violence in the first place. And they have seen the essence of this regime in terror and violence.
While studying neo-totalitarianism, the Great Positive comes to the forefront, the neo-totalitarian consensus and the role of all social forces, including the radical opposition, in the establishment of the new regime.
One of the sides of this regime is the spread of social addition, the so-called “small deeds.” It is charity, the development of self-government, regional and local social activities, which, in the opinion of the many, will make the country’s development “slow and deep.”
No, it will not. And it is not even the matter of starting everything with the key points, not with small details. And not about the historical experience, which shows that all the changes in Russia until now have been caused by external influence and are the result of unrest within the ruling elite, but not in the so-called society, which does not exist (and neither exists the state). The thing is that small deeds are called like that, because they are measured in comparison to something greater. And something greater is prohibited in Russia. So, small deeds are not the conscious choice of the people who are free to determine the level and scale of their activity, but the result of humiliation and subjection to violence and tyranny.
In Russia, small deeds are the lot of the people who have accepted the limitation of freedom. They are camp initiatives, enclosed self-government, self-convoy, no matter what noble gestures are used to explain them and what results they bring forth. They will never create a free people, a free society, a free nation, a free state, since (nobody will admit this), they are incompatible with the sense of human and civic dignity. Contempt for oneself will always be the result of such small deeds.
On the scale of national governance, the ruling elite apparently must promote the increase of the number of people involved in small deeds, but at the same time it will be forced to strengthen control over them. The boundary of the permissible is evident here. Citizens can perform all the jobs for the state, but they are not allowed to make any generalizations, take problems to the level of political discussions. Moreover, the new law on parties could be viewed as an attempt to turn politics into a set of small deeds by solidifying the government’s monopoly to any generalization and conceptualization. Then people with low ambitions and low self-esteem will appear in politics, and that is what the regime needs.
Besides the small deeds, Russian intellectuals have always had another illusion: pinning hopes on the youth. However, there have never been any young people among those who can be called the leaders of modernization in any country. Nevertheless, in Russia they try to equate the notions of paedocracy and modernization (see “Milestones”). And this is one of the signs that it is bullshit, but not modernization.
The notion of generation means one thing in demography and quite another thing in social and political life. Those who are normally perceived as middle-aged and older generation, are politically younger and more promising than Putin’s “Komsomols.” It is not them who made a fool of themselves: not the people who have lived under the Soviet regime, survived it, and are curiously watching the incumbent regime’s vain attempts to imitate their predecessors. They have what they have made, and they will have what they make. They were not lied to, and they were not duped at the “victors’ congress.” It is the “victors” that are actually being duped. The young enthusiasts, who will find no place in the new (and it will be new) political system, no matter what kind of promises they have been hearing for the last decade.
So what? Should they stay beyond the fight? No, even that won’t work. They should learn to be the minority without perceiving it as being the selected few or, conversely, without developing an inferiority complex.
There is no such thing as “staying above the fight” in Russia; there has never been such a thing, and there will never be one, for there is no fight. There are no forces (and never have been) that would consciously strive for the qualitative renewal of the nation, in place of striving for power in the existing form. The current situation is new in the sense that it is developing in the framework of mass culture and communication revolution, which proved to be anything but democratic. The regime and the opposition are equally totalitarian and screen people through the language filter, on the principle of verbal cliches used by them, which replace ideology.
Personality strategy in this case is reduced to activity for society but outside society.
One must understand and realize (i.e., understand with all the causes and effects) one most basic thing: there is absolutely no practical sense in trying to figure out what other surprises the regime has up the sleeve for us. It is even more senseless to evaluate it, using criteria which are absolutely alien for it. This regime will do whatever it will to whoever it will, on all its levels. In whatever way it chooses. Negotiating with it is unthinkable. Its actions are simple and easy to forecast, but these forecasts can in no way be conducive to survival.
The most empty and senseless thing is resentment and exposure, which replace an analysis of the regime’s policy. The more so that the regime is smart, cunning, and resourceful and it manipulates the exposers, profiteering from their actions. Trying to suck it up to the regime is even more senseless, as it will only make it suspicious.
Understanding this all gives man endless freedom. He needs not expose or adapt anymore. Any minute he can be crushed, humiliated, or he can lose his family and property, no matter how he behaves and what he does. Rules, arrangements, obligations do not exist. This is the true freedom, a minute from inevitable death, physical or social – and this minute can last a lifetime.
Opposition to the incumbent Russian regime can only be idealistically liberal. It must rely not on those who want to life better, but on those who want to be better and live in a different way.
Yurii Shevchuk’s new song about freedom is a song about the new time and the new perception of freedom. “No, sorry, I cannot take root in the dead life.”
“We’re waiting for change” is now history. We are passively waiting for something to change. Shevchuk speaks of other things: the experience of freedom and the changes that are not outward. They are deeper and more serious. So far, he has not been heard. Everyone is waiting for changes without changing themselves.
Shevchuk’s song is not about an external enemy. The regime is no enemy, it is but part of the environment, just like ourselves. We are our own enemy. Enemy to our own selves and to our own freedom. This is what Shevchuk talks about. And this is no mainstream, this is forestalling your time. The older generation has not lost anything. But the next generations are the biggest problem. Their socialization is taking place under absolutely different conditions.
It would be more productive to think about this, rather than bang one’s head against the wall.
