The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now. Dmitrii Shusharin

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СКАЧАТЬ build-up of institutional and extra-institutional repressions is a consequence of planned, systematic and thought-out lawmaking, comparable to Hitler’s. Hitler swiftly passed laws on racial purity, Putin has been forming a system of laws securing inviolability and irremovability of power gradually and deliberately. Nuremberg’s laws isolated part of the population from politics on the basis of race. Putin’s laws isolate the entire population denying it all participation in power. This is akin racism, but racism applied socially and indiscriminately. Like Hitler’s policy, the new order is being established in the name of the nation. As a direct appeal to the masses, the new totalitarian movement is established: the All-Russian People’s Front, designed to gradually replace the party system.

      The crude interpretation of totalitarianism comes down to the total control of the state over all aspects of society. However, it is the state in its positive meaning that suffers losses. The state submits itself to a complete deterioration of its most important functions, as can be seen in today’s Russia. Totalitarianism is not the nationalization of all aspects of life, but the destruction of a democratic, new European state. Here are the Russian examples of this phenomenon:

      Cheka/KGB and the successors have always been and remain both a punitive and myth-generating bodies. The organization is busy inventing and manufacturing monsters, foes, and demons for their demonstrative punishment.

      The army is the mechanism of initiation, leveling of the individual and an institution of forced labor. This refers to the conscription part of the army. But the hired troops leading a hybrid war are difficult to call an army. The so-called “polite people” are fighting without documents and insignia, and when captured, they declare themselves retirees. And the decorated ones who wear epaulettes, are fighting for the irremovability and solid permanence of the people in power who made the state their property.

      Education is designed to prevent the development of educated people. In the past, similarly worked the campaign of the elimination of illiteracy in conditions of total censorship.

      Health care is always ready to rid society of populations deemed to be a burden, which is what is happening now. A detailed and temporarily deferred draft law on euthanasia was ready in 200723.

      It goes without saying that the courts are subservient tools. Previously they worked to replenish the number of slaves. Now they help in asset-grabbing and political terror.

      Penitentiary system is the habitat and breeding ground for replenishment of the underworld. It is used to be the economic commissariat and now one of the state corporations.

      You can go on down the list. But the main thing here is the one formulated by Hannah Arendt: the state is destroyed by totalitarianism as a representative of the interests of all social groups. “All” is the key word here.

      And it happens on the basis of consensus, I would add. This consensus leads to the conclusion that it is impossible to reduce totalitarianism to a single act of demolition. Demolition is the mopping-up of the construction site. Then a new structure is to be built. Not lack of culture, but a different culture, not immorality, but a new morality. Not lack of spirituality, but a new spirituality.

      Which means that to expect a stagnation of Putinism is a great misconception. It’s an exact opposite phenomenon. Putin does not return the country to Brezhnev era, that is, to a developed totalitarianism, but to Stalin time, to an early and very dynamic stage of totalitarianism.

      Stagnation means only where development is prohibited or stalled itself. In all other respects constant changes and innovations are happening: in the legislation, property redistribution, personnel policy. After all, the Gorbachev coined term “stagnation” is not really adequate definition. Under Brezhnev, there was social development, which gave rise to perestroika. And it is precisely this development that Putin, like Stalin, will not allow.

      The Russian public has one dream that cannot come true. Some people admit, and some do not, that most would like to live in glorious Brezhnev times. But this is hardly possible.

      Brezhnev’s stability and prosperity is the GULAG transfigured. Nobody was going to create Belle époque on the basis of petrodollars. There is no economic and, what is more important, social base for the new belle époque. Those social strata that have formed over the past thirty years are subject to elimination, if not physical, but in all other aspects of their social existence, proprietary, morally, and legally. Belle Époque is for the new generations.

      The Brezhnev era is exactly the opposite of Stalin’s, it was Khrushchev’s continuation. Contrary to the common point of view, it was Brezhnev who carried out de-Stalinization, allowing horizontal ties within the elite. He became head of the party exactly due to a horizontal conspiracy, not a palace coup. Without a hundred of benevolent governors, known then as Obkom (regional) secretaries, he would not be allowed to take the reigns. And the growth of interest and sympathy to Stalin by the end of Brezhnev’s rule was already a search for an alternative.

      Slowly and gradually it is becoming clear that what is happening in Russia requires deciphering, that the logic of the civilized world is impossible to apply to this country, that there is a certain mechanism of goings-on there that needs to be identified.

      The most important thing is understanding that the only goal of all actions of the Russian ruling elite is the securing of their lifelong irremovability in power. Part of this is Putin’s projected lifetime presidency, possibly combined with the rotation of people in the elite. Or Putin’s replacement with a more acceptable figure. There are many different options, but all within the framework of one political culture.

      This goal must be achieved at all costs. No economic, political, humanitarian catastrophes can stop the government in this determination.

      Games around the appointment/election of governors, elections based on party list or partial withdrawal from them, the emergence of a “tandemocracy” that wipes out the institution of the presidency, the revision of the Constitution for the extension of the presidential term and its direct violation by the law restricting the jurisdiction of the jury, as well as broadening the notion of “high treason” – all this and many other significant alterations did not cause any reactions of the society.

      These developments definitely look like signs of an institutional crisis. Observing them and their evaluation, one can judge about the legal self-identification of the authorities. In the public-law dimension, these actions reduce their legitimacy. But in an archaic way of thinking it looks like reinforcement. Similarly absurd is the reaction to any manifestations of independence in public and cultural life, campaigns against corruption, ban on the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans, then legal harassment of NGOs or homosexuals, the historians and even smokers.

      The destruction of civilized statehood shows the way into the stage of the formation of a totalitarian quasi-state entity, in which, like in Soviet times, the concept of “crisis” becomes quite different. In order for the crisis to become visible, serious changes are needed in the established power balance, redistribution of spheres of influence, significant personal changes in power.

      Any public manifestation of the crisis, even mass unemployment, inflation and hunger, is not considered a crisis in this political system. Moreover, all these phenomena can be provoked and even organized by the authorities themselves for the purpose of their own strengthening, tightening, and also in connection with the principles of intraspecific competition.

      It is useless to project the methods of crisis description and СКАЧАТЬ