Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

In the second group are people who consider that Russia is a part of the global community, and who react to tragedies in the world. I looked at how the avatars and cover of my Facebook profile had changed over the last few years: ‘ Je suis Paris ’ after the terrorist acts in Paris; a photo of Boris Nemtsov, after the murder of the opposition politician; ‘ Je suis Charlie ’; a black ribbon in memory of the victims of MH17; the Ukrainian flag (after the annexation of Crimea); the Boston Marathon (the terrorist act in April 2013); the crew of the submarine Kursk (on the anniversary of the tragedy in 2000); the Norwegian flag (for the terrorist act by Breivik in July 2011)… The memorial ribbon waves as a ribbon of grief, and each time my personal sorrow moves out to the wider political context; an act of sympathy becomes an act of citizenly solidarity and identity.

It is no less interesting to analyse the link between the ‘avatars of sympathy’ (with the victims of the terrorist acts in Paris, with Charlie Hebdo , with MH17) and the ‘avatars of protest’ against the ruling regime (usually a white ribbon, which has become a symbol of the opposition in Russia). Clearly, there is a strong link between those who went to the protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011–12 and on Moskvoretsky Bridge in 2015, where Boris Nemtsov was killed, and those who changed their avatars and laid flowers at the Netherlands and French Embassies after the MH17 and the Charlie Hebdo tragedies. It is basically the same 14 per cent of the population who, according to the opinion polls, do not agree with the current political regime. It is here in this opposition segment that new ways of remembrance are born: wearing the white ribbon, laying flowers on the spot where Nemtsov was shot and repainting their avatars. As opposed to the official, state forms of collective remembrance – such as the official cult of Victory Day on 9 May, or the formal celebrations like ‘Day of the City’ – this practice is deeply private; it comes from below, out of civil society.

At this point we should remember other forms of commemoration: ‘The Last Address’, in which plaques are attached to homes from which victims were taken during the Stalinist repressions; and the annual action of ‘Returning their names’, the reading aloud of the names of those who were shot, which is held at the Memorial to the Victims of Stalinist Repressions on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. [26] Lubyanka Square is where the KGB/FSB headquarters is; behind this large building is the infamous Lubyanka Prison, to which thousands of political prisoners and innocent people were taken in Stalin’s time and later. The memorial – a large stone brought from the Solovetsky Islands, the scene of a notorious prison camp – was deliberately placed on this spot and unveiled in a ceremony in the more liberal period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership in 1990. The state looks on these actions with suspicion; but they are the points where civil self-awareness crystallizes, where memory becomes an act of resistance to the machine of terror, be it Communist, Islamic or the terror of the police state. In Putin’s Russia, the civil memory becomes a challenge to power; and for those protesting, sympathy and grief become a common cause, res publica . Private emotion develops into social commotion, and as a result becomes political – which in no way detracts from the sincerity of the original personal concern.

Therefore, by painting our avatars in the colours of the French flag, many of us are grieving not only for the 130 people who died in Paris, but also for the 224 passengers who were killed in the sky over Sinai, and about whom, disgracefully, President Putin said nothing for two weeks; for the victims of Beslan and ‘Nord-Ost’; for Kenya and Beirut; and at the same time for us ourselves, who against our will were drawn into the Middle East conflict and the global war against terrorism. Paraphrasing John Donne: ‘Think not for whom your avatar grieves, it grieves for thee.’

The battle for a healthy lifestyle has reached new heights. The Interior Ministry has introduced a draft containing corrections to the Code on Administrative Infringements of the Law, according to which, as well as testing drivers, the police will be able to test pedestrians to see if they are sober and in general carry out a medical examination on anyone they want to. (Especially if that ‘anyone’ had turned up at an opposition rally.) It seems that cleaning the social space is becoming the principal task of the authorities, and the instrument they are using is punitive hygiene.

The crusade for cleanliness began fifteen years ago after the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, when the authorities spoke about the ‘orange infection’, and the main strongman in the country became the Chief Sanitary Inspector, Gennady Onishchenko, who banned the import of Moldovan wines, then of Georgian mineral water, then of American chicken legs, depending on the demands of the day. In the course of these ten years the country did not actually get any cleaner; but hygiene and the cult of the clean body grew to become a mass political campaign with military sports camps of the pro-Kremlin youth movement, Nashi (‘Our people’); with Putin meeting patriotic young athletes; and with the President visiting the ‘Pankration’ ‘no rules’ fights, with their classic male torsos on display. Not surprisingly, the heroes of the day, looking out at us from the advertising hoardings, were the Russian fighters Nikolai Valuyev and Fyodor Yemelyanenko.

At the same time, the nationalists became interested in health and social hygiene: their main topic became eugenics and demography, and they held marches with the slogan, ‘Being Russian means being sober’. Back in 2005, Dmitry Rogozin (now a deputy prime minister) put a call in an election video for his party ‘Rodina’ (‘Motherland’) ‘to clean Moscow of rubbish’ (meaning get rid of people from the Caucasus, who are known as ‘blacks’). This has now become a reality, with raids carried out by skinheads in army boots, to clear the streets of the city of ‘scum’ (as they call Asian immigrants) and the homeless; and ‘sanitary’ raids by dog hunters to destroy stray dogs.

Finally, the Russian Orthodox Church joined in the battle for hygiene, preaching sermons about celibacy outside marriage, promoting the family and the procreation of children. In response to the Western feast of St Valentine’s Day, they brought in the Orthodox feast of Peter and Veronica, sacred patrons of the family. And advertisements assure us that the best protection against AIDS is not a condom but abstinence and marital fidelity.

In Vladimir Putin’s third term, the crusade for cleanliness was formalized in a series of laws against alcohol, tobacco, swearing, ‘homosexual propaganda’, ‘foreign agents’ and other ‘evils’. Laws were passed placing age limits on television programmes and censoring the Internet, thus beginning a battle for digital hygiene. It would be naive to suggest that this was all the work of the State Duma: in reality, all these laws helped to formulate the protective sanitary line of the Kremlin. At the same time, the state’s priorities in the area of reproductive policy were clearly spelt out. One of Putin’s first decrees on the day of his inauguration for his third term in office in May 2012 was ‘On measures for the fulfilment of the demographic policy of the Russian Federation’, in which the government was ordered to ‘raise the summary coefficient of the birth rate to 1.753 by the year 2018’. And in Putin’s instruction to the Federal Assembly in December 2012, demographic policy played a key role and it was announced that, ‘in Russia the norm should become three children in a family’.