Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, described such intensive attention on the part of the government to issues of hygiene, nutrition the birth rate and sexuality as ‘biopolitics’. The state regards the population simply as a collection of bodies; it is biological capital, which it can regulate and multiply, and from which it can make a profit. Biopolitics is a higher form of sovereignty: the state appropriates the bodies of its citizens and then interferes in areas that, up until then, had been considered private matters, such as sex, choosing what to eat and drink, food, domestic life, smoking, the spoken language and social network interaction. This unceremonious interference by the state in private life, under the banner of ‘the battle for a healthy way of life’ is nothing less than repressive hygiene.

Biopolitics flourishes in totalitarian and fascist states. In the Third Reich, the idea of ‘racial hygiene’ included: sorting out the ‘genetic rubbish’, such as homosexuals, the mentally ill, the disabled and ‘lesser races’ (like the Jews, gypsies and Slavs); the fight against smoking; the cult of children and youth; and supporting the healthy Aryan family. All of this was supplemented by the simultaneous cult of the body as epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl, mass rallies and the Olympic Games. Stalin’s USSR carried out similar biopolitics: abortion and homosexuality were criminalized; having large families was made a virtue of state policy and awards were handed out for having many children; and World War Two veterans who had lost arms and legs – of which there were many – were carted off to special facilities, where they simply disappeared from view. Instead of racial hygiene and ‘the Aryan family’, there was class hygiene and ‘the Komsomol wedding’.

In today’s Russia, biopolitics is the continuation of the traditional approach to resources. The state takes and disposes of resources, labelling them ‘strategic’ (in other words, not for private use). Just as with oil and gas, the population has become a strategic resource, and the state’s biopolitics means the strategic enlargement of the population, in order to fill out Russia’s empty spaces and to increase its weight on the world stage. It is only the size of the population and not the quality of life that is the strategic argument for a resource-minded state.

Under the logic of biopolitics it is easy to understand (though in no way approve of) the ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’, which forbids US citizens from adopting Russian orphans, in practice making these children into hostages of the state. This is not just about the orphans’ right to happiness and a family, this is about the state’s right to deal with its population as it wishes. Orphans, including disabled orphans, suddenly become a strategic resource, mere biological material, which can be used as an ‘asymmetric answer’ to America. From the point of view of humanity, this law is pure cannibalism; but in terms of biopolitics it is a rational resource approach: in exactly the same way as we occasionally turn off the gas tap to Ukraine to make that country more compliant, and in the 1970s we used to turn on and off the Jewish emigration tap as a great power trade-off with America. We no longer have the Jews at our disposal; all we have left are the orphans.

Biopolitics also explains another law that has caused commotion in society: the law banning so-called ‘gay propaganda’. It’s not because of the retrograde homophobia of a large part of the Russian population; it’s because the state sees homosexuality as an infringement of its reproductive policy. Any sexual activity that does not bring about an increase in the population is considered ‘unclean’ and should be banned by law. According to this same logic, therefore, condoms are also unclean, and so conservatives are trying to restrict their sale. Should we now expect Old Testament laws forbidding masturbation?

The state’s new Orthodox hygiene policy is designed to turn the population into an obedient mass, which is loyal to the idea of the family and dutifully produces children, and which has turned its back on polygamy, contraception, homosexuality and other attractions of the devil. The most important thing here is not the quality of life; it’s the number of children you have.

The paradox and the cynicism of the situation is that modern Russian biopolitics bears no relation to biology (since it is based on wholly false assertions, such as that homosexuality is not ‘normal’), nor does it improve the health of the nation, as it is accompanied by a radical cutting back of state financing of the health system and the destruction once and for all of free Soviet healthcare. Biopolitics is above all a matter of politics and ideology, the privatization of the human resource, the disciplining of the collective body of the nation. It is the drawing up of the state’s sanitary contours, the task of which, as in times past, is to discipline and punish.

On 5 March 2015, the anniversary of the death of Stalin, Russia’s President disappeared. There was nothing unusual in this. Vladimir Putin had gone missing on other occasions, and the television audience were fed what they call ‘preserves’ – recordings of earlier business meetings and speeches. But on this occasion, in the particularly evil atmosphere surrounding the recent murder of Boris Nemtsov, when there was a seething mess of versions concerning who was responsible for this crime, the void in the Kremlin was especially keenly felt. The omnipresent journalists found out about Putin’s disappearance and the broadcasting of old recordings on TV and sounded the alarm.

Ten tension-filled days passed. Commentators talked of ‘Cheyne–Stokes respiration’, the pathological breathing pattern that often accompanies a stroke, which Soviet newspapers had written about shortly before Stalin died, and which has come to be a political term in Russia. By coincidence, it was at the same time of year, in March 1985, that Konstantin Chernenko died, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party, during the period of stagnation, [1] The later years of Leonid Brezhnev’s time as General Secretary of the Party, and thus ruler of the Soviet Union, were marked by a lack of economic and political progress. As a result, this period was dubbed ‘the era of stagnation’. Little changed after Brezhnev died in November 1982 and was replaced by Yury Andropov; nor when Andropov died and was replaced by Chernenko in February 1984. It took the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 for the era of stagnation to end. and his demise was also somewhat inopportune. After the subdued growling of the Kremlin’s ‘bulldog fight under the rug’, and after the fantastical suggestions that Putin had been taken away by aliens and the absurd rumours about helicopters over the Kremlin, a medical explanation began to emerge. There was a feeling that Putin’s absence was something pathological, as if the whole nation was writing the story of his illness: there was talk of ’flu and stroke, of back injury and pancreatic cancer; but there was even more talk of rejuvenating medicine: of plastic surgery, or scheduled Botox injections. There were even rumours about a trip to Switzerland, to Canton Ticino, where the gymnast and Duma deputy Alina Kabaeva, whom people called Putin’s common-law wife, had given birth to a son or a daughter. The life and death of Putin, his appearance, his reproductive capabilities, his facial muscles, his spine – all of this became the heart of political discussion; the sole topic of conversation.

Such close attention to the body of the sovereign is an ancient and venerable tradition, born in the late Middle Ages and at the start of the modern era. The well-known German American historian of the medieval period, Ernst Kantorowicz, devoted a book to this subject, The King’s Two Bodies . According to Kantorowicz, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian concept of the dual nature of God (Father and Son) and man (soul and body) was mixed with ancient legal tradition and produced the idea of the two bodies of the king: the physical body, which is perishable and exists in time; and the ‘political body’, which is sacred and lasts for eternity. This political body is the nation; but it is wholly linked to the physical, anatomical body of the king. The king is no longer in charge of his own body: the nation decides its fate. Kantorowicz cites as an example the English Revolution, when in January 1649 Parliament judged and executed Charles I. This was treated at the time not as a popular uprising against the monarch, but as a legal action of the political body of the king (what was known as ‘the King in Parliament’) against his physical body.