Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

The decidedly game-like, cartoon nature of this information is matched by the sheer impossibility of believing it. They bombed a workshop or an empty shed, and five hundred, or maybe just fifty, people gave themselves up? Or did they just pop off to a wedding in a neighbouring village? These reports contain no pain; no blood; no information about the dozens of casualties suffered by the peaceful population – the sorts of things reported by the international media and human rights organizations every day. All we hear about is the hi-tech operation, in which a couple of dozen Russian aeroplanes jokingly sorted out the enemy who could not be defeated by an international coalition headed by the USA using hundreds of aircraft and flying some seven thousand bombing sorties over the course of a year.

The apotheosis of this show came when Russia launched twenty-six cruise missiles from ships of the Caspian Sea flotilla as a celebratory salute in honour of Vladimir Putin’s birthday on 7 October 2015. They flew 1,500 kilometres over Iran and Iraq at a height of just fifty metres (and it was shown that four of them fell on Iranian territory), struck unidentified targets and made an indelible impression on the outside world, principally because their launch was totally pointless. Given that the so-called ‘Islamic State’ has no serious air-defence weapons, Russia could have hit the same targets using air-dropped bombs, which are infinitely cheaper than missiles, which cost one million dollars each; but, as they say, putting on a good show is priceless.

In the same celebratory tone, like in the Stalinist propaganda film Cossacks of the Kuban , television describes the daily life of Russian soldiers in Syria: they show ruddy-faced cooks serving up borshch and pancakes (everything made from Russian products, even the fruit juice, the correspondent stresses); prefabricated dormitories with air-conditioning; a bath-house with eucalyptus branches provided. [32] In the classic Russian bath-house – the banya – while in the steam room people beat each other with eucalyptus or birch branches to stimulate circulation. Eucalyptus is supposed to be a sign of better quality. The Zvezda television channel of the Ministry of Defence enthusiastically describes daily life at the Russian air force base in Latakia as ‘destroying Islamic State in comfort’. Once again, this reminded me of an incident during the war in Kosovo, when an American pilot of a B2 stealth bomber, which had flown from its base in Missouri to bomb Yugoslavia, said: ‘The great thing about this plane is that you take off from base, carry out your mission, and return to wife, and children, and a cold beer.’

The question about the effectiveness of the military operation becomes lost behind the aesthetics of war porn and the simulacra of the virtual war. The fact was that three months of Russian bombardment did not bring about any change to the situation on the ground: but the opposition counterattacking on all fronts plainly did not tie in with the reports from the General Staff about the destruction of workshops and the Jihadists fleeing to Odessa. However, who needs military effectiveness when you have media effectiveness, and when Russia has got the whole world talking about its aircraft and cruise missiles?

Reality unexpectedly exploded upon this virtual story on 31 October 2015, with the crash of a Russian Airbus over Sinai and the death of 224 people – just as it came back to haunt America in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Jean Baudrillard wrote about all this in 2002 in his essay The Violence of the Global . In his opinion, the answer to the technological and information domination of the new world order is apocalyptic terrorism, as a return to physical reality. In its pursuit of illusory geopolitical bonuses and cheap media effects, Russia voluntarily stepped into a war with widespread international terrorism. Suddenly we became hostages in a game of noughts and crosses, which had seemed so far away and harmless when it was on our television screens and in the General Staff’s briefings. Now it has come into our homes; and it is no longer clear who or where will be wiped out.

In July 2016, on Ilyinka Square in Moscow, by the Kitai-Gorod metro station and just a stone’s throw from the holiest of holies of Russian power – the complex of buildings that make up the Presidential Administration on Staraya Square – a spontaneous, unsanctioned rally occurred. Every day, especially as dusk fell, hundreds of people began to gather in the square. Sitting on the benches and on the grass, they became engrossed in their smartphones. They introduced themselves to each other, quietly chatted, and went off for a drink and a bite to eat, before once again taking up their positions. In the darkness among the trees and bushes, hundreds of screens glowed.

No, this was not an opposition rally called ‘Occupy Kitai-Gorod’; it was the hunt for Pokémon. On Ilyinka Square there were four PokeStops [33] Places in Pokémon Go that allow players to collect items such as eggs and more Poke Balls to capture more Pokémon. with constantly activated ‘lures’ (bait to catch Pokémon). The creatures were appearing roughly every couple of minutes, including rare examples, such as Vaporeon, who caused a well-publicized crush in New York’s Central Park. He was chased by dozens of people, all trying to catch him on their smartphones. All night in the square a life understood only by the initiated went on; a few vehicles rushed past on Ilyinka Lane; while in the windows of the buildings of the Presidential Administration lights burned behind the white blinds, which, it seems, had remained there from the time when the buildings housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Divided by a fence under the watchful eye of the Federal Protection Service, two civilizations met, two concepts of space: the world of the state and the world of Pokémon. And the question arose as to whether these two worlds could live peacefully side by side in the consciousness of the citizens and on the streets of the city. The second Pokémon invasion of Russia began in the summer of 2016 when the new Pokémon Go game, with its added realistic features, was released. (The first invasion was way back in 1996, when Pokémon for Game Boy, the first version, appeared on the scene. It was accompanied by a franchise with cards and souvenirs, and mainly captured fans of computer games and the younger members of the population.) In the new version, characters are linked to Google Maps and actual places on the planet, and players move out of the virtual space into real places: on the streets of cities, in woods and parks.

This time, as opposed to the politically innocuous year of 1996, when the very idea of bringing in legal restraints on a computer game would have seemed funny, the Russian authorities saw in Pokémon a threat to national security. Denis Voronenkov, a Duma deputy from the Communist Party, [34] The State Duma is the lower house of the Russian Parliament. The upper house is the Federation Council, members of which are referred to as ‘senators’. The two houses together are called the Federal Assembly. asked the FSB and the Communications Ministry to ban the game in Russia; he believed that it had been developed by the US special services in order to carry out reconnaissance and gain access to places otherwise difficult to reach. The deputy was convinced that ‘the USA is trying through this video game to formulate the image of the next war, which will exactly suit the aims and the interests of Washington’. Senator Franz Klintsevich agreed with the Communist deputy, suggesting that playing the game should be banned in churches, prisons, hospitals and in cemeteries and at memorials. Predictably, the Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky, waded in, declaring that ‘culture and Pokémon have nothing in common’. He compared the game with the Langoliers – creatures from the novels of Stephen King, which destroy reality. ‘There was a time when I played. I played at the start of the 1990s when “Tetris” appeared, and I immediately understood that this is evil. These are creatures that devour everything, like in Stephen King’s books; they devour space and time’, said Medinsky. [35] https://www.interfax.ru/russia/519453 . ‘Medinsky says computer games are evil’ (in Russian), 19 July 2016.