When the political situation becomes more or less stable, it is the hardest to correlate the particular with the general. Elections are coming to the foreground for Ukraine now, but the highly unfavorable foreign political background remains the same. And then appears a temptation to reassure oneself that the hostile external force will die out by itself. Though such people as Radoslaw Sikorski and Dalia Grybauskaite advise not to hope for that.
Even in Russia many are held captive by illusions. This is an opinion of a Russian intellectual:
“The Russian system, as it has developed here over the centuries with its ‘God-bearing’ population, is in reality incompatible with modernity, with its free people and their rules of life. It has suffered from it before and that is why it always shut down from the world, but now, with the appearance of Internet and all these gadgets, it feels like a Snow Maiden in the sun.”
Well, here goes technological fetishism again, implying that Putin got scared of gadgets. But the main point is the deepest delusion and fundamental methodological mistake: that there is some modern era and Russia, which lives in the past, is melting like a Snow Maiden under scorching sun rays. While in fact, it is the civilized world that turned out to remain in the past after a collision with Russia which shot into the future. The same two-centuries-old linear logic, where the past is dark and the future is bright. Why does everyone think it will surely be bright? Didn’t the boy from Cabaret explain everything in his song?
There is also a hope for sanctions. Sanctions and their consequences are debatable, but it is not the main point. Are there grounds to expect that Russia’s economic problem will lead to a change in its foreign policy, towards Ukraine in the first place? It is quite the contrary: a surge of aggressiveness and escalation of aggression should be expected. First and foremost, the current war was born from the needs of internal management, and its expansion will be a response to economic hardships.
There is no doubt that such a position threatens freedom and democracy in both Russia and Ukraine. But there is something much more serious.
We are extremely fond of the controversial and rather old research on the origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. A book by Brzezinski-Friedrich, which contains unpleasant opinions concerning the responsibility of democracy and mass communication technologies created by it, is far less popular. It is also about the differences between totalitarianism and the previous autocracy. Even the very first totalitarianism, the Russian one, which was closely tied to autocracy, was not its direct successor, but was established after a short period of democracy.
Putin’s totalitarianism is a reaction to the inconsistency of Russian democracy. Totalitarianism always and everywhere is not an outcome of violence, but a result of consensus between the government and the population (terms state and society are absolutely out of place here).
With all due respect to the late Yegor Gaidar, I have to admit that his intellectual heritage corresponds to the level of the mainstream. The essence consists in his ridiculous opinion that oil prices have crucial influence on political changes in Russia. But there are others, rather narrow views about “Weimar-style Russia.”
Firstly, he associated fascist prospects with marginal politicians, but not with the government, not with Putin, with whom he had old ties dating back to the Saint Petersburg period. Secondly, Gaidar possessed the same kind of primitive logic: Russians were hurt, cut to the quick, etc. Hitler was justified in the same way. Well, not really justified, his actions were explained, but in such cases it is the same thing.
In fact, neither Hitler nor Putin treated any kind of shock, and there was no deep hurt as a main motive for political choice and behavior either in Germans or in Russians. But the political demagoguery of the Fuehrer had it, and so does now that of “politest man ever.” Germans and Russian were much more motivated by their disappointment in democracy.
Hitler and Putin did something else. Not only did they release primitive instincts of Germans and Russians, but they also legitimized and institutionalized savagery, barbarism, and primitiveness.
Consent to occupation and collaborationist totalitarianism may be a reaction to the inconsistency of Ukraine’s democracy. But this reaction can also be revealed in an aspiration to national authoritarianism. The latter comes to mind more and more often with the increase of political violence in Ukraine.
Beating of Shufrych is another example of Russification of Ukrainian political culture. A bad turn, dear Ukrainians. And what is more important, it will not change a thing about the ruling elite and the decisions it makes. Actually, this is nothing more than substitution, compensation. It is very Russian-style to give boyars to the mob. Putin practices it constantly, but in a different form. While the essence is the same. And most importantly, the choice of the authoritarian model will put an end to European solidarity, the war with Russia will turn from an opposition between a democratic nation and a reviving empire into a showdown of two regimes, both equally hostile to democracy.
Of course, one could be provocative and talk about the Vichy option for Ukraine, about the national development in conditions of mass collaborationism, but it would be absolutely pointless. What Russia has organized on the de facto annexed territories since the early 1990s is absolutely incomparable with the organization of life on the territories occupied by Nazis or with the countries of tank-supported socialism.
Russian occupation is not an alternative national development. It is not development at all, it is not life. I can hardly restrain from using foul language, everything can be described in just one word. Abscesses in Abkhazia, Transnistria, South Ossetia, the Tajik drug trade, and even if we go further, the fate of Afghanistan – all this shows what Russian occupation leads to.
Collaborationism exists because it grants collaborationists some advancement: enrichment, a higher status, or is a guarantee of survival and of a more or less tolerable existence. But Russian occupation does not have any kind of positive program for the population. It used to exist before, even in Afghanistan, but it is over.
Therefore, democracy is the only way of national survival for Ukraine. As for the change of elites, I will allow myself to present Russian experience of the past century in a simplified form:
The results of October, 1917 as presented by the generation of winners:
chamberlain-janitor Mitrich, officer-and-waiter in emigration.
The struggle for the ideals of the revolution during the great Stalin’s epoch:
the generation of winners – mass graves all over the country.
A short period of modernization:
functionary (any department) – oligarch.
The restoration of Russia’s grandeur:
oligarch – prisoner.
Aspirations of the progressive community in the era of Russia’s revival:
oligarch – prisoner, functionary – prisoner.
That is the whole difference. It turns out that there was at least some progress in the blighted nineties. And only because there were no lustrations and other forms of reprisal against the former elite. And in the present-day Russia, any participation in its renewal, including the struggle against the party of crooks and thieves, and peeping through the keyhole is equal to collaboration with the government. Complicity in recreation of the old Russian model, which does not allow steady development.
Repeating this renovationist run in place can become an even deeper Russification of Ukraine than the current political violence.
Dmitry Shusharin is a Moscow-based historian and political journalist
