The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now. Dmitrii Shusharin

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СКАЧАТЬ all, it is necessary to abandon the empty hope that all what is happening in Russia is a short-lived period associated with one person. Those who control the discourse are not secret agents of the power, although sometimes they happened to be the ones. Remarkably indicative are the topics that are forbidden to be discussed, not by the power, but the society itself. It is even allowed to vilify Putin and to predict the collapse of the regime in the coming weeks. But you are not allowed to question, how a mediocrity such as Putin has been able to hold power for fifteen years and dictate his will to the world. And you can’t recognize that his power is strengthening day after day. The intellectual and cultural development means constant revision of discourse and the reassessment of hierarchies and cult figures. However, who are the ones allowed to reassess, if the commanders of the discourse don’t listen to anyone but themselves?

      Russia can be understood by logical mind. Inevitably, you must, otherwise you can’t survive along with her. This understanding begins with abandoning of democratic concepts of government and society as a yardstick inapplicable to the totalitarian Russia. The totalitarianism requires an alternative political methodology and special instruments of social observation. Most importantly, the uttering of the word itself – totalitarianism – excludes all attempts of a non-judgmental knowledge. The object of the study is the evil. This is the starting point. And it starts with the recognition that evil is never funny; it always gives rise to a tragedy, never a farce.

      Language and Knowledge

      One of the disturbing features of contemporary society is the lack of demand for self-examination, the society’s disinterest in the knowledge about itself. Mass media are supposed to function as a link between society and the fundamental science. But they are failing in fulfilling this mission. Earlier crises in the historical development of Europe turned out to be productive, when it was possible to generate a creative communication environment to connect people of knowledge with people of action, bringing political activity outside of the field of struggle for existence. Knowledge and comprehension of the modern world is born out of a combination of scientific thinking, enabling people to rise above the commonplace, with professionalism in the media, part of which is the ability to collect and analyze information. And most importantly, to facilitate the transfer of sophisticated general knowledge into accessible public language, in order to make the people see the connection of the lofty matters and general formulas with down-to-earth affairs and private lives. That was the case in Russia in the time of Perestroika. Nowadays the exact opposite is taking place, which once again confirms the absence of direct and simple connections and relationships between technological progress (in this case – the communication) and the socio-political progress.

      Sociologists talk about “non-obvious aspects” of social phenomena. It is known, at least one case where the social systems of several countries had their “non-obvious aspects.” This is totalitarianism. Closely examined, the fundamental studies about it cannot be attributed to the discourse of a certain science, and some of those studies belong in the field of literature, being an outright product of imagination, where we can find various interpretations of totalitarianism (works of Platonov, Zamyatin, Nabokov, Voinovich, Orwell and Huxley, besides the pre-totalitarian ones like Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Kafka and others.) But these works can be summed as a solid basis for the historical and social knowledge.

      Here is only one example: The Mass is the central metaphor in the classic work of Hannah Arendt, based on a post-totalitarian experience. She points out one crucial feature of totalitarianism. In particular, she pointed out such a feature of totalitarianism as the desire to establish a system in which people are absolutely not needed34

      And here is how Nikolai Erdman saw the future as he observed the formation of the new system:

      Yegorushka. By the way, under socialism there won’t be any people.

      Victor. How come they won’t be? Than what will?

      Yegorushka. Masses, masses and masses. The huge mass of the masses. ⁴

      In the case of totalitarianism the language here is completely adequate for the description of the object that often requires not a rational explanation, but intuitive understanding of cause-and-effect relationships, which are rather hard to verify in a logical manner.

      The use of the term “totalitarianism” is limited to the Judeo-Christian civilization, and those nations that have made an attempt to break off its value system. We are talking about several European countries, which for the last hundred years, since 1917, established atavistic regimes in an attempt to return not even to the Middle Ages, but rather to the primeval communal system. A variety of ideological devices were used, not necessarily consistent, but easily coexistent with the aesthetic and sometimes temporary political rapprochements.

      For the serious scholars of totalitarianism the subject of their research was external. Hannah Arendt published her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, when the Nazi regime had already collapsed. She had very vague ideas about the Soviets. Quite different was the viewpoint represented by those who lived and worked in Russia and Nazi Germany. Varlam Shalamov said:

      “In a sense, the writer must be a foreigner in the world about which he writes… It is impossible to describe things you know too closely.”5

      Nevertheless, he was able to do just that, as well as Nadezhda Mandelstam, especially in her second book. However, preserving their otherness, or foreignness was almost impossible for them being a physical part of the totalitarian organism. Most importantly, as the experience of these two people shows, one must pin absolutely no hopes on the totalitarian power. This distinguishes them from Solzhenitsyn with his Address to the Leaders and Mikhail Bulgakov, whom Nadezhda rightly called “a fool”.

      To become a “foreigner” means either to avoid identification with totalitarianism, or desidentify oneself with it completely, without exceptions or exclusions, with a clear understanding of personal incompatibility with the surrounding social environment. For starters, come to understand that totalitarianism is not something you have outside of your person. This is something that dwells in you.

      Disidentification has not always happened consciously, sometimes it was imposed on the apologists of totalitarianism, as in the case of Andrei Platonov, who left classic artistic studies of this phenomenon. In Soviet times, attempts were made to distance from the Russian totalitarianism model by studying the German model. Two names must be mentioned in this respect: Lev Kopelev and Alexandr Galkin, although one of them was a dissident, and the other a ranked Soviet scholar. But their contribution to understanding the nature of German totalitarianism was a great one, which cannot be said about Mikhail Romm’s film documentary Common Fascism.

      In the current situation, to be a foreigner, you have to pull yourself out of the space of mass culture without losing its understanding. In my opinion, such a distancing begins with understanding that mass culture is incompatible with the tragedy and the tragic worldview and the ability to perceive tragedy. The paradox is that the tragedy excludes suicidality, and only a tragic consciousness compels to action.

      But the managers of the discourse are not at all the power, it is the intellectual and media elite that calls the shots, and they won’t accept the grim simplicity that makes the tragedy a tragedy. Again and again, all is drowning in hypocrisy, moving the Russians away from what could be the basis for Russian national renewal.

      A thorough СКАЧАТЬ