Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Vladimir Putin’s thinking on foreign policy, judging by his speech at a session of the Valdai Club in Sochi on 24 October 2014, is constructed totally on the paradigm of respect and humiliation:

You may remember the wonderful saying: Whatever Jupiter is allowed, the Ox is not. We cannot agree with such an approach. The ox may not be allowed something, but the bear will not even bother to ask permission. Here we consider it the master of the taiga, and I know for sure that it does not intend to move to any other climatic zones – it will not be comfortable there. However, it will not let anyone have its taiga either…. True, the Soviet Union was referred to as ‘the Upper Volta with missiles’. Maybe so, and there were loads of missiles. Besides, we had such brilliant politicians like Nikita Khrushchev, who hammered the desk with his shoe at the UN. And the whole world, primarily the United States, and NATO thought: this Nikita is best left alone, he might just go and fire a missile, they have lots of them, we should better show some respect for them. [30] http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/46860 .

The expressive string of words such as ‘taiga’, ‘bear’, ‘shoe’ and ‘missile’ indicate how important for the Russian president are such ‘male’ concepts as ‘respect’ and ‘authority’. According to this logic, the West did not show the necessary respect; it failed to answer Russia’s openness to cooperation after 9/11, when Vladimir Putin was the first world leader to declare his support for George Bush and offered him a global partnership in the war against terror. As Igor Yurgens, an economist, lobbyist and a man with many years’ experience observing the life of the Kremlin, noted: ‘Both Putin and his close circle had a feeling of humiliation and betrayal on the part of the West (at least, that’s how it looked to them).’

The breaking point, it seems, was in autumn 2004: first there was the terrorist action in Beslan, where Chechen fighters seized a school, taking around a thousand children hostage, for which President Putin unexpectedly blamed certain forces behind the terrorists who wanted to snatch Russia’s ‘juicy morsels’, clearly meaning the West. Then there was the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in the winter of 2004, when the Kremlin directly blamed the USA for apparently aiming to weaken Russia by tearing away from it its key partner. Putin’s stubborn reluctance to see the real forces and processes that had led to Beslan and to the Maidan (the collapse of the neopatrimonial regimes in the Caucasus and in Kiev, which Moscow supported), and his desire to blame everything on the intrigues of the USA, is typical resentment: an attempt to transfer his own misfortune onto the figure of an external enemy.

On the other level, there is enormous resentment on the part of wide sections of the population who have been unable to adapt to the new reality of the market economy, or to the global flows of finance, information, images, migrants or technology, and who take out their anger on the Russian liberals and reformers. Many political parties expressed the views of these layers of society, from the Communists to ‘A Just Russia’ (a political party), but most of all over the past twenty-five years they have been represented by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, which captured this Russian resentment precisely, with its slogan, ‘For the Russians, for the Poor!’ [31] For more on Zhirinovsky and his Party, see Part I, notes 16 and 17. In this catchy slogan, postulated as an axiom, no one stops to explain why the Russians are poor and how they are poorer than, say, the Tajiks, the Moldovans and all the other fellow partners in the post-Soviet transit. Before our very eyes the discourse of offence becomes the dominant one in the social sphere and it becomes a particular genre of Russian politics.

In Brezhnev’s times, a joke did the rounds about Soviet man’s sixth sense: ‘the sense of deep satisfaction’, a cliché used in the propaganda, which he was supposed to experience when he became familiar with the details of a regular congress of the Communist Party. Now it seems that the basic instinct of post-Soviet man is a sense of the opposite kind: deep offence at the outside world.

In the public discourse, there are special groups in whose name offence is created, such as, for example, veterans. It appears that veterans (and not only war veterans, of whom there are very few left, but veterans of labour, the Communist Party or the KGB) form a group with particular reactions, in whose name it is convenient to label and to judge everything. Another offended group is the ‘Orthodox community’, which sees its role as calling out blasphemy in shows, be it Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in Konstantin Bogomolov’s production in the Moscow Arts Theatre, or Jesus Christ Superstar in Rostov. This choir of victims was recently joined by representatives of the siloviki : the security guards at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour experienced ‘moral suffering’ when they witnessed Pussy Riot’s performance.

Soviet speech practices have returned with a vengeance. The authorities have recreated the Soviet practice of orchestrating outraged public opinion: ‘Inhabitants of Tolyatti Against a Memorial to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’; ‘Veterans of Novgorod Offended by the Programmes of the Dozhd [32] Dozhd is the only TV station in Russia not controlled by the government. It broadcasts online. television channel.’ This is typical collectivization of speech, the creation of a collective body with its sacramental phrase, ‘I haven’t read Pasternak, but I’m outraged!’, which comes from the times when meetings were held attended by thousands of Soviet citizens to judge the author of Doctor Zhivago , even though they hadn’t actually read the book. This is the body of society that speaks through the mouths of veterans, guards, loyal representatives of the arts and trained journalists at President Putin’s press conferences. A whole class of professional offended people has emerged, which under the impression of ‘speaking for the people’, transmits the will of the ‘owners of the discourse’ and, in doing so, becomes an effective instrument of repression, the pervasive censor of the collective unconscious.

Spreading the discourse of offence, in practice the state cleans the public arena; like a virus, resentment is self-perpetuating in society and produces new prohibitions, taboo subjects and groups of offended citizens. Officially, the regime is not involved; it simply formulates ‘the will of the people’, expressed in various ways through hysteria, denunciations and collective letters – but in reality it moulds this will then goes on to manipulate it.

The myth about Ukrainian fascism grew out of the state’s teenage complexes, the elite’s childish disappointment with the West and the social infantilism of the population. The resentment demanded an object for symbolic revenge: after twenty years of having a go at Gaidar and Chubais, people had already tired of that; the opposition protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011–12 had already been broken up; America was a long way off; and then suddenly there was the Ukrainian Maidan, the mass protests on the Maidan (Independence Square in Kiev; ‘Maidan’ means ‘square’ in Ukrainian) in the winter of 2013–14. For the second time in ten years, Ukraine was daring to ignore its big brother and was trying to tear itself away from the paternalistic paradigm on the way to a bourgeois-democratic revolution and European development. The answer was consolidated Russian resentment, in which the frustrated ambitions of the Kremlin merged with the jealousy of the Russians. Ukraine was declared a traitor, and its treachery was even more offensive because the Ukrainians were supposed to be the Russians’ blood brothers, the closest of all in the Slav family. In accusing Ukraine of treachery, there were clear echoes of the ressentiment of the Weimar Republic and the Dolchstoss im Rücken (‘stab in the back’ theory), [33] The Dolchstoss im Rücken (‘stab in the back’ theory) was that in the First World War the German Army was ‘undefeated in the field’ and had been ‘stabbed in the back’ – i.e., had been denied support at the crucial moment by a weary and defeatist civilian population and their leaders. This idea gained popularity in Germany in the difficult postwar years of the 1920s and ’30s. which was popular in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; this time it was a European ‘stab in the back’.