Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

The present leadership’s fear of Iannucci’s comedy is twofold. On the one hand, Stalin’s myth lies at the base of Russian power as an indulgence, as the state’s ultimate monopoly of violence, deeply ingrained in the collective subconscious; however anyone in the ruling elite relates to Stalin, they know instinctively that laughing at Stalin is the most painful spot for the authorities. But on the other hand – and this is even more important – in the depth of their souls they suspect that they are just as grotesque and just as funny, and when the inevitable change of leadership happens in the Kremlin there will be exactly the same scampering around like cockroaches and tragicomic scenes. Just as it was sixty-five years ago, so now the only political institution is the body of the leader, and the question of succession is spontaneous, not predestined, and there will be just such a furious ‘bulldog fight under the rug’, as Churchill allegedly described it so accurately.

Incidentally, the local failure of the system that took place on 26 January was quickly put right. The police turned up in the Pioneer cinema and the film was hurriedly stopped. As for the young men who had had the stamps put in their passports at the registry office confirming their gay marriage: the police paid a visit to their flat. When they didn’t open the door, the director of communal services shut off their electricity and Internet, and the Interior Ministry cancelled their passports and fined the men for ‘spoiling’ them. When journalists turned up at their flat, they found miserable policemen on the staircase, who complained that they had had to sit in ambush all night, and in the morning they were having to go off and break up an opposition rally… The absurdity of these events is even stronger than the films of Armando Iannucci; and we watch these farcical comedies about ourselves every day of the week.

One of the more surprising metamorphoses of the mass Russian consciousness in recent years has been the pathological fixation with Ukraine. The average Russian knows all about the confectionery business of the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, and about the hairstyles of the politician, Yulia Timoshenko; they are better informed about the results of the parliamentary elections in Ukraine than they are about the elections for their own Duma. And they can go on for hours about ‘the Ukrainian fascists’ and ‘the Banderovites’ (followers of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist in the first half of the twentieth century), which they’ve heard all about on Russian TV. People talk about how, after watching news on Russian television about Ukraine, the middle-aged and older generations are so wound up that they rush about the house spewing out curses about ‘the Kiev junta’. It is now a sort of ‘Ukraine mania’, a mass psychosis among Russians, brought on by watching propaganda on television. Ukraine has become the mental training ground of the post-Soviet consciousness, where people work up their hate speech, techniques for making an image of ‘the Other’, and ways for mass mobilization of the population.

Such an unhealthy fixation with a neighbouring country bears witness to a deep post-imperial trauma. Ukrainians were too close to us, too much like us, for Russia to allow them simply to slip away quietly. For a quarter of a century Ukrainian independence was looked on as some sort of mistake, a bit of a joke – the very word nezalezhnost , Ukrainian for ‘independence’, was usually said in Russia with an ironic accent. Russians accept Moldovan, Tajik, even Belarusian independence perfectly calmly; but they can’t accept Ukrainian independence. And we’re not talking here about imperialists or nationalists, but about the vast bulk of the educated classes, who look on Ukraine as some sort of banana republic, while trying to conceal a deep resentment against this stupid ‘little brother’ who brazenly tore up their blood ties. Even the poet, Joseph Brodsky, failed ‘the Ukraine test’, cursing our neighbour in his famous poem, On the Independence of Ukraine . Rather like Alexander Pushkin in the nineteenth century, with his anti-Polish ode, To the Slanderers of Russia , Brodsky, the dissident and idol of the liberal intelligentsia, revealed the depth of his wounded great-power consciousness, which he took with him to America from Russia, along with his memories about the imperial greatness of St Petersburg. [23] Brodsky was expelled from the USSR in 1972 for ‘anti-Soviet activity’. He never published the poem, On the Independence of Ukraine , but he did deliver it on a few occasions at poetry readings.

Nevertheless, there is more to this jealous Russian attention towards Ukraine than simply nostalgia for the empire. Britain and France also experienced post-imperial phantom pains, but in these countries no one compared themselves to their former colonies. In Russia’s case we can talk about a much deeper psychological mechanism – about symbolic compensation, the transfer and projection of our own complexes and frustrations onto the symbolic figure of ‘the Other’. The well-known Russian sociologist, Boris Dubin, spoke about this in April 2014, just after the annexation of Crimea:

This is a very peculiar mechanism, when you transfer onto someone else your own problems and your inability to deal with them, by humiliating the other. Everything that was said in Russia about what was going on in Ukraine was not really about Ukraine but about Russia itself – that’s the whole point! [24] https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2015/07/03/599078-rossiiskoe-obschestvo-ne-vidit-sebya . Russian Society Can’t See Itself (in Russian), 2 July 2015.

Boris Dubin described here a classic condition of resentment, without actually using the word. In a state of resentment, it is usual to have a feeling of enmity towards the one whom you consider to be the cause of your misfortune (‘the enemy’), a helpless envy, an awareness of the futility of trying to improve one’s status in society. This is a continuation of an inferiority complex, which by way of compensation forms its own moral system, refusing to accept the enemy’s values and placing on him all the blame for your own misfortunes.

The understanding of resentment was first raised by Friedrich Nietzsche in his work, On the Genealogy of Morality . According to this German philosopher, ressentiment (resentment) is the defining characteristic of the morals of slaves, who are a lower race and incapable of historical activity or of altering the conditions of their own lives. According to Nietzsche, ressentiment reveals itself in the slave revolt:

The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values… slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all, – its action is basically a reaction. [25] http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf . Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality , (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, trans. Carol Diethe, First Essay, Section 10, p. 20).

In other words, resentment is the slave’s hatred for everything that looks to him like freedom.

Nietzsche was writing about ressentiment in 1887, but the word came up again a quarter of a century later, shortly before the First World War, in 1912, when Max Scheler, a German Lutheran who was converting to Catholicism, wrote a monograph about it. A man with a tragic outlook on life who committed suicide in 1928, he had a foreboding of the approaching disaster and effectively predicted the ‘Weimar ressentiment ’ in postwar Germany, which produced a figure like the unsuccessful architect and artist, Adolf Hitler. Hitler (like the unsuccessful seminarian, Stalin) is a figure from Dostoevsky, an angry and vengeful ‘underground man’ straight out of Notes from Underground , or the lackey Smerdyakov from The Brothers Karamazov , who falls greedily upon the heights of power. It is no coincidence that in his essay Scheler refers to examples from Russian literature: