The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now. Dmitrii Shusharin

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      No stagnation at all

      Political analyst Igor Zhordan identifies the following stages in the formation of a new political system since September 2004 (the terrorist attack in Beslan) until March 2007 (Putin’s Munich speech)16:

      • Reform of the electoral system, elimination of the minimum turnout threshold, prohibition of criticism of opponents, imitation of democratic institutions.

      • Adoption of laws on extremism that equate criticism of power institutions and people in power with extremism and terrorism, as well as a law authorizing Russian special services to liquidate terrorists and extremists regardless of their whereabouts.

      • The emergence of national projects, which were reduced to increasing the financing of a number of socially significant industries and the increase of corruption. Actual bribery of employees in the budgetary sphere.

      • Creation of state corporations СКАЧАТЬ