New philosophy

We need to think how to protect ourselves and raise defenses instead of wasting time and effort on discussions within the boundaries of the healthy world’s logic

So, let us continue the discussion on living in one world with Russia. Perhaps, the following should be acknowledged in the beginning.

Russia is an eternal and inescapable evil, constant danger for the whole world, humankind’s chronic disease, which is very likely to prove lethal. There are relapses and remissions. The current relapse is acute, with delirium, nuclear razor in a hand, with which it can cut itself so badly that the whole world will drown in blood.

We need to think how to protect ourselves and raise defenses instead of wasting time and effort on discussions within the boundaries of the healthy world’s logic. And we should take into consideration that Russia is ruled by intelligent, realistic, sober-minded individuals, but they have their own logic, system of values, and agenda.

Such is the paradox.

Another paradox is that the present-day Russia is stronger and more dangerous than the USSR. It is not fourteen times stronger, according to the number of former Soviet Republics. The number of the Warsaw Treaty countries and some other allies should be added too. And it is not about finance or economy. It is about the liberation from political and ideological costs and risks: there is no more need to take into consideration the interests of the elites of ally republics and satellite countries. The Russian empire became openly Russian and acquired a close hostility ring, essential for internal management.

The second reason for its strengthening is the distant hostility ring. Twenty years ago, when talking about the reasons for perestroika, I wrote the following, implying the higher party nomenklatura as well: “The most educated, intellectual part of Russian society decided to abandon the Communist ideology not for ethical or moral reasons, because of its barbarianism and inhumanity, but for purely pragmatic ones, since Bolshevism in the late 20th century no longer corresponded to their own notions of respectability.” (Novy Mir, 1994, No. 7).

OLEKSANDR ALEKSIEIEV’S INSTALLATION WHO IF NOT PUTIN, DISPLAYED AT THE EXHIBIT OF PATRIOTIC POSTERS HELD AT THE KYIV-BASED M17 GALLERY / Photo by Artem SLIPACHUK, The Day

Now the notions of their own respectability are hardly associated with their status in the West. This is what a lot of Putin’s critics refuse to understand, thinking that he is worrying himself sick over Brisbane. It is nowhere close to the truth: the current ruling and intellectual elite, let alone the masses, is deeply convinced that Russia has made everyone respect it. And they are right: Putin achieved what Reagan and other leaders of the civilized world of his era refused to give to the evil empire. I will quote his speech on the Empire of Evil once more: “Only because they, just like dictators before them, ultimately demand only separate territories, some think we should accept them as they are.”

Now whole Eastern Europe became a separate territory. The only source of changes in Russia, the demonstrative effect of the civilized world, has been reduced to zero. Moreover, it is becoming a negative value.

So, there are paradoxes. Another one is that despite a popular opinion, there is no propaganda or censorship in Russia. As they say, calm down, everything is much worse.

Still, there is a widespread opinion, that the Russian people are victims of agitation propaganda. Just give them two weeks without this obscurantism, and you’ll see.

I remember answering Garry Kasparov via Radio Liberty. Kasparov had argued that these two weeks of free television would topple the regime. Denouncing is non-format, and even pathetic in the context of the current content. They would just zap to another channel, that’s all.

There is no propaganda now. There is a monopolized information market, which nevertheless has competition. There was, and could be, no competition in the Soviet time, when the agitprop was absolutely isolated from reality, formal, and served itself, while double identity was a common phenomenon.

What is at work now is no agitprop, but the information communication apparatus. It has got good market training, knows the demand of advertisement and electoral markets, and is fine-tuned to consumer demand.

Some 15 years ago Surkov was accredited with a thesis about 85 percent of audience, which should be the target for television and other mass media, whereas the 15 percent of Internet users could enjoy their intellectual superiority.

PLACARD READS: “FIGHT AND YOU WILL WIN!” / Photo replica by Artem SLIPACHUK, The Day
 

The design justified all hopes.

The present-day sentiment in Russia demonstrates the superiority of mass culture over agitprop, market over censorship. Selective use of the administrative resources in legislation, regulation, and finance, allowed the Ministry of Truth to transform into the Holding of Truth almost without the services of the Ministry of Love and other repressive structures. In the USSR all photocopiers were controlled by local police agents. Now the authorities could not care less. And that is what makes it so reliable. The people have chosen for themselves what they should be fed, and they love being fed.

Yes, everyone has understood what they love.

And once the market methods of handling the audience have been mastered in Russia, it can immensely increase the effectiveness of targeting the foreign audiences, and first of all, the Diaspora.

Paradoxically, isn’t it? But economy is even more striking.

Everyone is rejoicing at the plummeting of the oil price and the ruble. I reiterate: the dump in oil prices will be compensated at the expense of the population. The fuel price will skyrocket, the taxes will rise, and everyone will face a lot of bad things. Meanwhile, for the regime everything will be fine. The depreciation of the ruble is a slow but steady confiscation of the population’s cash. It has serious consequences for its way of life, self-appraisal, and ability to be socially active. Just take the effects of traveling less abroad.

Moreover, experts explicitly say that counter-sanctions are more dangerous for the economy than sanctions. One little correction: they are dangerous for the current economic model.

However, they are very useful for the development of a new model, which is a taboo in Russia.

Recently Mikhail Leontyev said in one television debate that should the sanctions threaten Russia’s financial system, the Kremlin has the right at least to threaten the world with a nuclear attack.

That seemed funny and was soon forgotten. And it shouldn’t have been.

They should not have laughed. They should have remembered how a vice president of a major Russian oil company called the nuclear blackmail one of the elements of Russia’s financial system.

It is clear why they preferred to forget about it.

The acknowledgement of the fact casts doubt on the correctness of the absolute majority of economy pundits’ speculations on the situation in Russia’s economy. It also challenges their intellectual integrity. However, there are hardly any doubts left: everything is clear with the people who will rather close their eyes to such financial and economic factors as the coexistence of two economies (the national and the monarch’s one), the war with Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea. Especially when they either plead the West to moderate the sanctions, or advise how to adapt to these sanctions, without removing their essential cause.

Okay, they are opportunists, this is clear. But there is also the public. There are protest actions.

Another paradox here: these actions, too, are an element of the totalitarian system.

All I recently wrote about the corporate state illustrated with the example of Moscow’s jet set, applies to the other blocks and bricks of the totalitarian edifice, which are presented as civic society. Here belong the rallying doctors and people protesting against some construction projects in the neighborhood. The protests in Novocherkassk and dozens of other towns and villages of the USSR between Stalin’s death and perestroika were exactly such components of the system.

Therefore they were different from the national liberation war led by Ukrainians and Lithuanians, or from the events of 1986 in Almaty, when the Kremlin’s right to define Kazakhstan’s national elite was contested.

Despite all the sweet dreams, to which even professional historians are given (and they of all men should understand it), civic society is no grassroots movement. It begins from the struggle for the participation in crucial nationwide decision-making. It is always moving from the major to the minor, from above, and not from below.

All this applies to Russia’s home policies. However, there is also Russia’s foreign policy, and the war, after all. Wars expose another paradox: the inability to understand the essence of victory and defeat.

Let’s remember Afghanistan. We are used to talking about the inglorious defeat in that war. But are two million deaths, five million refugees, and the devastation of one of the world’s poorest countries not a victory, in the Russian totalitarian system of values?

Of course, this is a victory, just like the perpetuation of militarism and violence in society. The criminalization of the nineties is the consequence of the Afghan war and militarist propaganda, which actually began during perestroika. Before perestroika one might not speak about Afghanistan. Until now little has been said about what was then obvious from the daily news: Afghan veterans, just like the vets of other wars later, manned the criminal underworld on all levels. They were not particularly welcome in the government, first of all, in the police or army, which caused immense frustrations. For the military and paramilitary, war has always offered social lifts.

I think that the men, who are now fighting in Donbas, will also be kept at a bay and will be banned not only from Moscow, but from any big cities. Yet they could be used for cultivating a certain atmosphere, customs and morals in society. The borderline between victory and defeat cannot be found in the reference system of the civilized society. However, total barbarization makes war an everyday phenomenon, a normal state of affairs for the nation.

All these are just fragments of my observations of Russia, which is looming above the world. But they help see that the world will have to deal with “the country upside down,” which requires a special logic.