Russia has no place to return to

It is now the time when any concrete information needs to be considered in a global context. One of such pieces of information last week were reports on the Russian troops in the Donbas – some saw them, some did not. The Donbas paradox stands every chance of going down in history as one of the grandiose informational tragedies in the era of information society and communication technologies. Another tragedy of this kind was the Crimea paradox, when the world shut its eyes to preparations for an invasion and the invasion itself. Even the resignation of the US military intelligence chief caused nobody to ponder over the event.

It is not enough to have access to information. Nor is it enough to be able to spread it. It is also necessary that this information be adequately perceived, that people know what is exactly going on in the world. It is customary in mass culture to refuse to perceive information, for each has the right not to know. But this applies to ordinary consumers, not to decision-makers. It is not the latter who pay for the information they receive – it is taxpayers and those who gain it sometimes at the cost of their own life, health, and freedom.

In other words, the ruling elite of civilized states is now ruining informational society, and the Russian elite is doing this in its own way. CNN is leaving Russia, while RT is being ousted from Britain. It has turned out that it is easy and simple to slam the door of the worldwide village, i.e., the global informational space. No new “over the barriers” has come out, and the borders of nation states are not being erased. Another illusion dispelled…

Ukraine turns out to be an area the adequate information about which is not interesting to those who decide the destiny of the world and, hence, of Ukraine. However, what is going on in Ukraine is not only important for its own self – it also shows what the world can await in the near future.

Putin’s forte is that he attacks the neighboring countries in good time and intervenes into the nation genesis at a critical moment. And this does not lead to any consolidation of nations. Just the contrary, as it was in Georgia and is now in Ukraine, where there are more and more questions about what is in fact going on, what kind a phony war the Ukrainian state is waging if Crimean stores are well-stocked with fresh, i.e. always renewable, Ukrainian foodstuffs, if it is not at all clear about social benefits in the occupied Donbas as well as about the whole mechanism of financial and economic ties with this region. Meanwhile, this uncertainty is the main weapon of the Kremlin which disarms the peoples it attacks by imposing this kind of commonplace, routine, and businesslike collaborationism.

But Russia maintains its relations with the West in the same way – it claims that sanctions come from politicians, whereas the broad masses of billionaires and the countless multitudes of smaller-scale businesspeople are standing a chance to become the best friends of the Russian authorities on which the destiny of their businesses in Russia depends.

Likewise, the part of Russian society that seems to be resisting Putin’s policy is also ruining and eroding. Yet, in reality, they are more and more integrating into the emerging system, even though they continue to prophesy its early decline and fall. These prophets’ messages are almost the same. They boil down to the following: Putin is bluffing and cheating, Russia has no powerful potential, so its boss will not succeed. The late Deng Xiaoping, a poker aficionado, would have shaken his head if he had read this, for he knew that bluffing could sometimes be very successful. If one is a cheat and a swindler, this does not mean that he will be a loser. Putin and Russia are a real threat to humankind. This is what the authors and users of these messages do not want to know and speak about. This threat is in fact based on the weakness rather than strength of many positions.

Even the most terrible times enrich the knowledge of people about themselves, other people, and the world. The Russian intelligentsia has always had a cliche about two Russias. In the past century, this was presented in Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about the funeral of Anna Akhmatova. In these verses he showed complete ignorance of her poetry and life, but it was still a mass-scale mainstream interpretation.

This cliche is also applied in connection with some other matter. A renowned poet said recently that the public reading of the lists of the repressed, most of which were the so-called ordinary people, was bringing back to him the other, killed, Russia.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But if you also read a shorter but a bit more detailed list of those who killed and denounced, you will find the same kind of ordinary people there. Among them are not only NKVD agents and informants, but also next-door shared apartment tenants who would write denunciations in order to have their floorage enlarged. They lived in the same shared room and barrack hell as the killed ones. And the rank-and-file prison guards, too, would come back to the same hell after executions.

But now there cannot possibly be two Russias. The country is now united in a confrontation with the outside world. People swallow everything they are being told about Ukraine and will do the same with respect to any other country and nation. Such is the Russian “el pueblo unido” which remains invincible and staunch in its perception of itself and the world.

But there still are some adherents to the concept of two Russias. No wonder at all – the Russian intelligentsia must feel itself as a class apart which is called upon to lead and enlighten. These people and their like quite often claim that the current state of affairs is just a trifle. Everything can be solved easily: people can be reprogrammed within two weeks and the current cliches can give way to the lofty ideals of democracy and tolerance.

So, are they any better than the ones they are accusing of zombiefying?

They are worse because they are stupider. Their own experience of the late 1980s and the 1990s showed that lofty ideals could not be brought into society by even the most powerful and ingenious propaganda. And this was clear even in the century before last after the Russian populist movement had failed. But what we really excelled in was manipulation of a part of the people, outright deception of them (decrees on peace and land), a coup staged by a minority and followed by repressions against the opponents (first of all), and a deliberately unleashed civil war. This is a road to a true unity of Russia based on the idea that butchers and victims constantly change places. Nothing new, incidentally, since the times of the Byzantine Empire and Russian autocracy… So those who hope to re-propagandize the people are striving to take part in this rotation, i.e., reproduction of the same system.

And those who are going to enlighten people, giving them access to culture and art but avoiding any conversations about the annexation of Crimea and wars against Ukraine and Georgia, are ignoring the fact that a totalitarian esthetic system has already been established in Russia. You should either adapt to it or enlighten people in a real way, without being afraid or hushing up anything. Inexistent quite recently, this system is now holding sway in mass culture, where a soap opera substitutes a news bulletin or a news bulletin is presented like a soap opera.

The knowledge of Schiller, Goethe, Duerer, and great music did not bar their admirers from creating the Third Reich. On the contrary, German culture (with some quite clear exceptions) hallowed the German nation’s grand projects. One should not reduce the Nazi cultural policy only to book burning, fighting against degenerative art, and monumental officialism. So, as the crew commander in the splendid film The Chronicle of a Dive Bomber said, they have a fuehrer, not Duerer, now. And any enlightenment that eschews mentioning the Fuehrer, the Sudeten, and the racial theory, is a major help to the leader of a united, as never before, nation.

And one should not labor under the delusion of criticism leveled against the government. I presume there may be dismissals, high-profile accusations, and other punitive and propagandistic actions, including resignation of the government, in the near future. Moreover, Putin himself may head the Cabinet, as Yeltsin did when Gaidar was in his team. This hypothesis is based on the campaign now underway in the media and social websites with participation of economists, financial analysts, and even the showman Zadornov who has already demanded that the government resign.

The objective of this campaign is to blame the hired managers-ministers for what is going on and try to prove that it is the result of their poor performance rather than part of a strategic plan of their hirers who are deliberately creating an autarchic and mobilization-style model of the economy to meet the needs of a totalitarian system of government. They are saying either nothing or in contemptuous terms about sanctions – it is a trifle, you know. The aggression against Ukraine and the confrontation with the entire world has nothing to do at all with the economy.

The goal of this campaign and the probable repressions is not at all “to let off steam.” There is no steam, and even if there was some, this would not worry the topmost echelons. The goal is more serious – to adjust the economy to the needs of these echelons in a changed situation (to be more exact, in a situation they are changing by themselves).

I have been emphasizing for twenty years or so that Russia has no place to return to. Germany had one. Poland had one. Ukraine, as well as Georgia, did and do have one. But Russia has none. Only forward to a new totalitarianism, new wars and upheavals – and it is the will and historical choice of the Russian people.

Dmitry Shusharin is a Moscow-based historian and political journalist