Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Violence starts in the family with a tradition blessed by the Church of the practice of corporal punishment (‘the sensible and measured use by loving parents of physical punishment in the upbringing of their child’, as the Patriarchal Commission on Matters of the Family, Motherhood and Childhood puts it). This then continues in kindergarten, school, youth camp and hospital – in other words, all the disciplining institutions of society – as one of the principal methods of socialization. The main institution for educating by violence is the army, where dedovshchina (hazing), the humiliation of junior soldiers by their elders, is a key element for teaching soldiers, even more important than military training. [12] Dedovshchina is institutionalized violence against the new conscripts by the older ones – ‘the grandfathers’ or ‘ dedy ’ (hence the term). Every year, hundreds of young conscripts suffer permanent injury or even death as a result of this treatment. It instils in the new conscript the sense of the hierarchy in the barrack block and of the unquestioned pecking order, and it’s no surprise that no one tries seriously to do anything to stop it. It’s worth pointing out here that men are also the objects of violence, but their stories are even more deeply buried than those of the women. It is much more difficult for the so-called stronger sex to acknowledge publicly their personal traumas and humiliations, so as not to be known as a victim.

But the most widespread evil, which seems everyday and banal, is sexual violence. The flash mob uncovered the universal and routine nature of this phenomenon. According to psychologist Ludmila Petranovskaya, in Russia ‘at least one in two women has had the experience in her life of either being raped or suffering attempted rape (it was interrupted or something stopped it), and just about all of them, with very rare exceptions, have been subjected to some kind of sexual abuse (harassment, groping or sexual threats)’. What’s more, if in public there is some semblance of normality in relations between men and women, behind closed doors at home these rules do not apply and a genuine war begins: 40 per cent of all serious crimes are carried out within the family. Between 12,000 and 14,000 women die in Russia every year as a result of domestic violence – that’s one murder every forty minutes. And those are just the official statistics: how many deaths are covered up by the police as ‘serious heart problems’? How many beatings go unrecorded or simply not mentioned to anyone?

Like dedovshchina in the army, these violent practices are neither an exception nor excessive nor ‘non-statutory relations’; they are actually part of the ‘statute’, the ruling patriarchal norm, which determines that the strongest lays down the law and sets the hierarchy of people and status. For a man it is important to be the conqueror, the subjugator, to take what is yours by force – this is how you raise your self-esteem and earn the respect of others. The ability to demonstrate your strength is part of the behaviour of ‘the normal bloke’ ( muzhik ): in your speech (the ability to use threats and insults); in all-male company, especially in the way you behave on the road (this is where the cult of the big car comes from, driving like a bully, and punishing anyone who upsets you); and, of course, in relations with women. In its concentrated form, the logic of force is expressed in a prison subculture, which in contemporary Russia has moved from being on the margins to being dominant. It becomes vitally important to bend the person to your will, to humiliate sexually the object of your power relations in order to establish the social order.

But that same code of the rule of the strongest, that unspoken agreement based on violence and silence, operates in politics, too. Recognizing the ‘natural’ right of man over woman, we must also recognize the right of the state over our bodies: the right of the authorities to falsify the results of elections; the right of the police to beat and torture suspects; the right of the courts to hand down unjust sentences; the right of Russia to annex Crimea from a defenceless Ukraine and without any justification to bomb Syrian towns simply to satisfy the geopolitical ambitions of our leader. It is exactly the same mechanism of power and the re-establishment of the hierarchy: when you recognize the right of a man to take a woman by force, you should also be ready to accept that the police can do with you as they wish with a champagne bottle or the shaft of a spade; this is two sides of the same biopower.

Russian power is extremely archaic and physiological: it is based not on the mechanisms of a rational system, nor even on the faceless machines of Weberian bureaucracy, but on direct physical contact, on dealing with people’s bodies by force. In order to prove the right to power in Russia, acts of excessive violence are essential, such as the demonstrative murder of farmers by the crooks who were terrorizing them in the village of Kushchevskaya in the Krasnodar Region in 2010; the torture of suspects in the Dalny police station in Kazan, which became public in 2012; the murder of the opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, in Moscow in 2015; burning down the houses of suspected terrorists in Chechnya; the demonstrative destruction of sanctioned foodstuffs… It is no coincidence that at the head of the state stands an ‘alpha male’, who has legitimized the cult of strength, starting with physiological half-naked photo sessions, right through to the use of force against opposition and against neighbouring countries; a leader whose lexicon and arguments (‘the weak get beaten’, ‘get in the first punch’) come straight out of criminal rituals of demonstrating brute force. This is why, behind the patriarchal gender models revealed so clearly by the flash mob, there is the whole archaic matrix of Russian power, carried out by ‘blokes’.

And if male violence is not a private matter, but, rather, the universal law of the state, then the protest against it is also not a private matter, but a political one. This is about the ‘de-automatization’ of violence, about acknowledging that force is not a legitimate instrument, about breaking out of the vicious circle of violence and silence. This circle can be opened up in the first place by speaking out: by publicly announcing her pain, by speaking about her trauma, a woman can find her voice and the right to her memories. And along with it, political subjectivity.

And once again we are talking here not only about women, about their pain and fear and humiliation. The problem is that we are totally unable to speak about trauma – for example, about the legacy of Stalin’s repressions. We are unable to work through traumas in our recent history – the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the painful transition of the 1990s… The hysterical reaction to the women’s flash mob can be compared to the inability in contemporary Russia to cope with the documentary stories (not to mention the Nobel Prize awarded for them) of the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. People in Russia are unable to speak in public about the problem of cancer, or AIDS, or disability; and after the passing of homophobic laws the subject of homosexuality has become an even more taboo and repressed subject. Such forbidden topics are typical of an undeveloped mass consciousness – just as the state governs us with the help of archaic rituals of physical violence, so the mass consciousness reacts as primitive magic would have done: if you don’t talk about a problem, it simply disappears and apparently resolves itself.

But nothing will change by itself. By speaking out about their trauma, women are making the first step towards overcoming the conspiracy of silence. Russia is a country trying to catch up with modernization and, as usual, it is about forty or fifty years behind the discussions of emancipation that Western society went through in the 1970s and 1980s, when they worked out the rituals of political correctness and guarantees of the defence against sexism and harassment, which we are so used to laughing at. Russia is going to have to go through the same ‘sentimental education’, shedding the myths about the submissive ‘Russian woman’ and daring ‘real bloke’, ‘the hussar’, and the practice of gender violence, which have built up over centuries. Today this may seem unimaginable; but the ice has started to crack. In the small space of social networks and the media, the first step towards freedom has been taken – not just to liberate women from fear and the dictatorship of men, but to free us all from the practice of social and state violence that has hung over Russian history like an age-old curse. We must return the right to memory and the right to speak out: two things that distinguish the free man from the slave. As so often happens, these courageous women with their personal stories have shown themselves to be in the forefront of a social movement, and it is already too late to hide or forget their uncomfortable truth.