Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Early on the morning of 19 August 1991, I was woken by the ground shaking. The cups in the sideboard were ringing as they knocked against each other, and the glass in the windows was vibrating. Along the Kiev Highway, not far from our dacha, a column of tanks was heading at full speed for Moscow. Every television channel was showing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ; then they started to show the press conference of the Emergency Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP), which had seized power in the country. I quickly finished my breakfast and hurried into town.

Tanks were drawn up on Manezh Square, outside the Kremlin. The sun was shining, people stood around gawping, the militiamen looked bored; alongside the old building of Moscow University, the tanks did not look at all frightening. I went up to one, climbed on it and knocked on the hatch. To my surprise, it opened and, blinking against the sunlight, a puny blonde lad of about nineteen climbed out. ‘Have you got a fag?’ he asked uncertainly. I gave him a packet of cigarettes and one of the leaflets signed by the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, which called on the people to oppose the coup. Having thought about it, the tankman took the leaflet, climbed back into the tank and closed the hatch behind him.

One of those who helped with the defence of the White House, the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet (or Parliament), and who set up the headquarters of the protest, organized the radio link and prepared a possible escape route for Boris Yeltsin, was Reserve Lieutenant Sergei Shoigu. For this he received the medal, ‘Defender of a Free Russia’. How times have changed. Now Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu commissions research on how to oppose ‘colour revolutions’. In his words: ‘We do not have the right to repeat the situation of the collapse of 1991’ and ‘We must not allow the army to stand to the side, as happened in 1991.’ [13] https://ria.ru/20150619/1079035580.html . ‘Russian Defence Ministry Orders Research on ‘Colour Revolutions’ (in Russian), 19 June 2015. Apparently, the best guarantee against ‘the orange threat’ of revolution is to bring the tanks onto the square; in other words, create a Russian version of Tiananmen Square.

I think about how quickly time flies and the world changes. Since that moment in 1991, the USSR has collapsed, as has Yugoslavia; the USA has elected a black President; in the West they have defeated AIDS; the fourth industrial revolution is under way; Elon Musk is building electric cars and private spacecraft; Google is preparing to spread the Internet to the four corners of the world by satellite; and Russia… what of Russia? We are still sitting in the same old tank, playing at war and fighting with imaginary fascists.

Until someone knocks on the armour from the outside.

It was in our Basic Military Preparation classes in school that I first heard from our military teacher, a major of the reserve, the phrase, ‘the threat period’. It was at this point in our training sessions for nuclear war that we were supposed to grab our gas masks and march to the Civil Defence Headquarters.

It seems that we have reached that point now in Russia. From all sides we hear cries about threats: the Motherland is in danger! We are threatened in turn by all sorts of things: paedophiles, homosexuals, Westerners who adopt Russian children, ‘foreign agents’, ‘the fifth column’ of the Russian opposition and the US Sixth Fleet, Western ecologists and Russian separatists, the Kiev junta and the American State Department – even, in recent times, Western food products, against which Russia has introduced sanctions: beware Italian parmesan, Spanish ham, Polish apples and Norwegian salmon!

Every threat has its own lifecycle, its sell-by date. A couple of years ago none of these threats was even on the horizon. As a rule, threats appear out of nowhere (such as ‘foreign agents’ or Russian separatists). Suddenly there’s a concentrated attack in the media and the degree of public hysteria is raised. On a wave of popular anger, a draft bill is introduced into the State Duma, is instantly approved in three readings (sometimes without even the approval of the appropriate committee or a call from the government) and straightaway is signed by the President. After this, the hysteria immediately dies down and everyone quietly forgets about the threat. Who now remembers the ‘separatists’ whom we were fighting against at the end of 2013: Karelian, Siberian, on the Kurile Islands, North Caucasian, or in the enclave of Kaliningrad? Now, the separatists are held in high esteem – in Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk – but these are the ‘right’ separatists in neighbouring Ukraine. From time to time we even forget about ‘foreign agents’, as a warning closing down a few NGOs. What remains on the battlefield are sick Russian orphans, some of whom have already died because foreigners were not allowed to adopt them; discriminatory, indeed fascist, anti-gay laws; blocked websites and banished media outlets. But no one remembers this now, because Russia has new enemies: Barack Obama, the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel…

The majority of these threats, when looked at rationally, have been completely dreamt up, from the foreign child adopters to ‘the homosexual lobby’. However, it would be naive to suggest that this is simply because of the paranoia of members of the State Duma. The precise mechanism for marking out these threats, amplifying them in the media and drawing up the legal process leads one to suggest that behind this endless flow there is a unified guiding logic. Threats are sought from the outside, but they are formulated within the system. What’s more, threats are a key element of the functioning of the Russian state.

The scientific description of the role and place of threats in the state system was given by the sociologist Simon Kordonsky. For him, the very structure of the state, with its role of providing for survival, security and social stability, creates the conditions for apparent threats. Each department comes up with a particular type of threat – natural, military, social and so on – and accordingly this hierarchy of threats requires its own share of resources. The more dangerous the particular threat (be it real or imagined), the greater the flow of state resources dealt out to the various services and departments responsible for dealing with it. In such circumstances, Kordonsky writes, ‘services become ever more interested in increasing the number of the threats for which they are responsible, as well as making them appear bigger and more dangerous’. [14] http://www.strana-oz.ru/2013/2/klassifikaciya-i-ranzhirovanie-ugroz (in Russian).

One method for gaining extra resources from the state is to invent new threats on different levels, from the state level down to the municipal level. One example of such an invention was the creation of the myth about the ‘orange threat’ after the revolution in Ukraine in 2004. This led to the formation of new organizational structures (such as the infamous Directorate E of the Interior Ministry, responsible for tackling extremism) and a variety of ‘patriotic’ youth organizations. The state set aside for certain agencies the appropriate resources to fight the ‘orange threat’, which became a particular type of corporation, interested in continuing the funding of its activity and using any means possible to reactivate the ‘orange’ myth.

In 2011 the League for a Safe Internet was launched by Konstantin Malofeyev, to combat the threat of ‘paedophiles and extremism on the Internet’. This organization was given a budget of tens of millions of dollars. It is still managing to cope with ‘its own’ threat, while trying to introduce ever more restrictive laws and receiving ever more administrative and financial resources. Sometimes, combatting a threat can bring direct commercial benefits, as happened with the Russian Sea ( Russkoe morye ) group of companies, belonging to the oligarch Gennady Timchenko, which benefited from the embargo on the import of Norwegian salmon. After it was announced that there would be Russian sanctions, the purchase price of salmon doubled, and Russian Sea shares rose by 34 per cent.