Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

When the leadership travels along Kutuzovsky it is not just the central lane that is closed off, but all traffic. The Prospekt freezes in a ninety-minute-long court ritual, and the cortège of dozens of cars screams past on the wrong side of the road under the silent gaze of the people sitting in the traffic jam: the patient bosses who are a rank lower; ambulances with their blue lights flashing; and the common people in their cars. Once in the summer I became fed up waiting in the left-hand lane, turned off my engine and got out of my car, stepping into the central lane. In the distance I could see a swarm of coloured flashing lights, and when the cortège drew close I fell to my knees and crossed myself with a sweeping gesture. [8] This is what the peasants had to do in tsarist times if the Tsar’s carriage went past. This earned me a couple of approving beeps on the horn and thumbs-up from some of my fellow sufferers. The reality is that Kutuzovsky Prospekt reveals the whole reality of the Middle Ages in which our oil monarchy lives; its hypocrisy, and its disdain for the law and for the ordinary people. Here horsepower multiplied by power and money allow any excesses; here the right of the powerful to break the law is taken to the extreme, sanctified by flashing lights and elite passes. And all of this is protected by a special police department.

But this permissiveness leaks into the lower orders of society; many of them start to travel at speeds of 100, 120, or 150 kilometres per hour, taking advantage of the width of the lanes, the perfectly smooth asphalt and the almost total absence of any speed control. And the offspring of the wealthy consider it their duty to go tearing along Kutuzovsky at night at speeds of more than 200 kilometres an hour, and bikers go at more than 250. What begins as the imposing procession along the central lane of the boss with the blue light flashing ends with nighttime races along this prestigious Prospekt and horrific traffic accidents.

At some time in the future, they will grass over the central lane along Kutuzovsky Prospekt and construct a central reservation. They will place a number of speed cameras along it, and it will be possible to travel past these shiny windows and impressive façades without fearing for one’s life. But that will happen in a different, parallel and more human Russia. Until then, the elite highway, which was built not for the people but for the powerful ones who live in their world, will continue to maim and to kill, turning power and oil into death in this ruthlessly accurate model of the Russian state.

If Igor Ivanovich Shuvalov didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. With his name, which makes him sound like a count, and his castle in Austria; with his London apartment on Whitehall in the former home of MI6, and his ancestral estate on the site of the dacha of the chief ideologue of the Soviet regime, Mikhail Suslov; with his million-dollar Rolls-Royce and his pair of Corgis (the same breed of dog as the Queen has!), which he whisks around the world in his private jet to take part in dog shows. He is a walking cargo-cult, [9] A cargo cult is a belief system among members of a relatively undeveloped society in which adherents practice superstitious rituals hoping to bring modern goods supplied by a more technologically advanced society. a distillation of the post-Soviet transit.

Sometimes it seems as if the Shuvalov project is some kind of PR provocation, a bomb underneath the existing authorities, a modern Russian Marie-Antoinette with her ‘Let them eat cake’ – a catalyst for the people’s wrath. In actual fact, of course, it is not like that at all. There will be no revolution; no heads will roll off the block; and instead of the people’s wrath there are humorous posts on the Internet. All the exposure of corruption by the opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, disappears into the quicksand of Russian society, which is both cynical and apathetic, respecting strength and power over the law and morality. Memes and cartoons about Shuvalov’s dogs are posted and shared by hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook, while the rest of the country looks on with indifference, ruled by the inescapable saying among the people, ‘He does it because he can’.

As the political commentator, Vladimir Gelman, has noted, this is strikingly different from the ‘battle against privilege’ campaign in the late Soviet period. This was one of the main slogans of perestroika . Political commentators called for a return to the Leninist norm of modesty for those in the Communist Party, and the popular rumour did the rounds of the apocryphal tale of Boris Yeltsin travelling to work by trolleybus when he was First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Party. Where has all this gone? Why does society fail to react to information about corruption or about the excesses of state officials? Gelman speaks of weariness and apathy: needs must when the devil drives. ‘The unsuccessful experience of the battle against privileges of the time of perestroika and the subsequent events in which the Russian public (with rare exceptions) played the role of bystanders, convinced Russians that speaking out against the overbearing leadership was both useless and possibly dangerous.’

On the other hand, there exists a wide social contract under the title, ‘everyone steals’. Evidence of corruption and the blatant use and abuse of luxuries by the political and business elites gives people at all levels of society permission to behave in similar fashion. When they look upwards, people feel that they have the moral right to hide their income, take and give bribes and live beyond their means. The example given from on high creates an atmosphere in society that everything is permissible: if the Deputy Prime Minister’s dogs can fly around in private jets, why shouldn’t the whole leadership of the Volgograd Region fly off to Toscana to celebrate Governor Bozhenov’s birthday? If a car with a flashing light can tear along the central lane, why can’t an ordinary driver avoid traffic jams by driving on the hard-shoulder?

But besides the traditional cover-up between the various strata of society, there is a deeper reason why this ostentatious display by Shuvalov not only does not discredit, but actually legitimizes the regime. In Russia, power is based not on elections but on strength; on the affirmation of your status; on the symbolic effectiveness of the master of the discourse. Excess is essential to legitimize power: a blatant spanking of the serfs, demonstrative luxury, disdain for the law and moral norms.

In this sense, all of the examples of the demonstration of wealth – Putin’s palaces, Patriarch Kirill’s thirty-thousand-dollar Breguet watch, Shuvalov’s dogs on a business jet, lions in the private zoo of the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov – are the attributes of patriarchal power and important arguments in the hierarchy of the state; and the only people to protest about them are Facebook users and a few other active citizens. The majority of the population accept them silently as inevitable peculiarities of their socially favoured lords and masters. As a powerfully effective symbol, Corgi dogs on a private jet not only do not compromise their owner, they underline his right to power and his standing in the system.

The essence of the modern era of the evolution of society in Russia can be defined as the ruling elite irrevocably separating themselves from ‘the people’. They no longer care about creating an image of propriety; on the contrary, they have turned their privileges and personal whims into the norm. All of these lordly mega-projects – from the Winter Olympics and the World Cup to superfast trains and improvements on the streets of Moscow, all taking place at the same time as the dismantling of the social infrastructure and disdain for the needs of the common people which runs through the pronouncements of the higher leadership and deputies – all of this speaks of the final loss of social solidarity and the catastrophic stratification of Russian society as one of the main results of Putin’s counter-reforms.