Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Of course, our political elite is hardly likely to learn any lessons from little Finland. In their dreams they put themselves on a par either with the Roman Empire or with the USA; but behind these global illusions they are sinking ever deeper into the bog of cultural and linguistic isolationism.

Russia is a unique country, always managing to find its own particular way of doing things. While the whole world (or the Western part at least) was declaring its solidarity with the victims of the terrorist act in Paris on 13 November 2015, when in one evening hundreds of people were shot in restaurants and in the Bataclan Concert Hall, yet another massive scandal exploded on social media in Russia. Tens of thousands of Russian Facebook users coloured their avatars in the red, white and blue of the French tricolour as a sign of mourning for those who had died in the Paris attacks; and then other, patriotic, users started to reproach them for the fact that they hadn’t mourned the 200 Russians who had perished when their aircraft exploded over Sinai on 31 October 2015, two weeks earlier. A ‘holy war’ erupted, a sacred Internet-war, about the right way to mourn, about what colours you should use for your avatar and where you should lay your flowers. Thousands of friendships, subscriptions and reputations fell victim to this war. In answer to the French flag, a Russian emblem was put forward: the silhouette of an aeroplane against a background of the Russian tricolour, stylized under the pacifist sign. Tens of thousands of users adopted this as their avatar. Some tried to act as peacemakers, colouring their profile photo horizontally in the Russian colours and vertically in the French.

In the nervous reactions of the Russian domestic networks to the terrorist attacks, substituting sympathy and solidarity for internal squabbles and blame, we could see the agonies of the Russian mass consciousness. The first diagnosis was one of resentment, a sense of being deeply wounded, a readiness to mourn for any reason, to search everywhere for Russophobia and a worldwide conspiracy against Russia. Indicative in this sense was the unanimous insult felt by Russian politicians and media at the cartoons published in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo , and which in their own peculiar way they immediately linked to the Sinai terrorist act (parts of the Russian aircraft fell on the Islamic fighters and it was deemed to be a ‘continuation of the bombing’). On the day the cartoons were published, according to the magazine’s own analysis of hits on its website, there were more viewings from Russia by a long way than from any other country – 42.5 per cent, two and a half times greater than from France itself. It looks as if Charlie Hebdo is much more popular in Russia (where hardly anyone can read French) than in France. So Russian ‘worldly sensitivity’ ( vsemirnaya otzyvchivost ), exalted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quickly turns into international touchiness. It could be in Kiev, in Paris, or on the Internet; and a lack of attention is taken as an insult: they didn’t notice us! They didn’t appreciate us! They didn’t take account of us! This is true Lust am Leidenschaft , passion for suffering, as the Germans say who are familiar with this feeling; they lived through such a period of resentment during the Weimar Republic, which led, as we well know, to fascism. The American Slavist, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, described this characteristic of Russian culture as ‘moral masochism and the cult of suffering’; a desire to be humiliated and insulted.

The second diagnosis one could make about the discussion on avatars is that this is hypocrisy. Those who had painted their avatars in the French colours were accused of being insensitive to people suffering in the Third World. A Facebook user from Krasnoyarsk, Dan Nazarov, published a horrible photograph of a terrorist act in Kenya, where, on 2 April 2015, Islamic terrorists blew up a university building in the city of Harris and shot 147 Christian students. He posed the rhetorical questions: ‘Did you hear about this in the media? Did people lay flowers outside the Embassy? Why are we so selective in our sympathy? One group are people; who are the others?’ (This received 13,000 likes and 20,000 re-postings.) The author’s reproach is, of course, justified – only not in our country. Russia is one of those places where such indifference to suffering in the Third World has become a virtue of the state; where federal television channels scare viewers with fables about refugees flooding Europe, where the terrorist acts in Paris were accompanied by malicious commentaries in the spirit of ‘they got what they deserved, messing around with their ideas of tolerance and openness’; but we’re not going to show any compassion for the Third World.

And we have a third problem here: the deepening split in the Russian mass consciousness. For many countries, days of celebration and days of sorrow become causes for national solidarity; but for us they have exactly the opposite effect. Victory Day on 9 May and the Day of National Unity on 4 November; the terrorist actions at ‘Nord-Ost’ (when terrorists seized a theatre in Moscow in 2003) and Beslan (the seizure of a school in Ingushetia in 2004); the terrorist acts in the Charlie Hebdo editorial offices and on the streets of Paris: these all become causes for social division. In fact, Russia has witnessed these divisions for the past hundred years, since the time of the 1917 Revolution and the unfinished Civil War of 1918–21; and perhaps even from the time of Peter the Great’s reforms at the start of the eighteenth century. Our mass consciousness is deeply and painfully politicized, and precisely in the way that Carl Schmitt understood politics: as a search for enemies. If anyone is expressing sympathy with MH17, Charlie Hebdo , Paris or the West in general, our propaganda castigates it as ‘a fifth column’. The very act of laying flowers, if it hasn’t been sanctioned by the state – for example, outside the Embassy of the Netherlands – is considered suspicious and potentially an enemy action.

This is why the Russian Internet bursts into a holy war at the slightest provocation; no kind act can pass without some reproach: you grieved over the victims of the Paris attacks, but for some reason you didn’t grieve over the Russians who perished in the Sinai, which means you’re a Russophobe; you expressed sympathy for the victims of MH17, but not for the miners in the Donbass, which means you’re a traitor; you help stray dogs, but you don’t help children, which means you hate people; you plant trees, but you don’t think about people, which means you’re an eco-fascist – and so on. Our public space has become a territory of hatred and mutual accusations; our society has been atomized and struck by social anomie, deprived of any moral guidance or authority, incapable of showing solidarity or uniting in protest. Such a shattered society is very convenient for authoritarian powers, and is the ideal object for manipulation by the media and propaganda.

All this shows that this disunited social sphere can be divided into two groups: the first is convinced that the whole world is against Russia; and the second, that Russia is a part of the world. These two groups are the party of post-imperial resentment and the party of globalization. The former blames the outside world for all the country’s ills, from terrorist acts in the North Caucasus to the loss of Ukraine, from the fall in the oil price to Russia’s social problems: ‘Obama, hands off our pensions!’ as the signs read at the official celebration of the Day of National Unity. It is worth recalling what Yevgeny Fyodorov, the deputy from the ruling party ‘United Russia’, suggested: that the protests by the long-distance lorry drivers against the outrageously high road tariffs were directed by the USA to bring about the collapse of the state in Russia.