Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

But today, looking at the masses rejoicing over the annexation of Crimea, seeing the flags on the balconies and the celebratory fireworks over Moscow (as if this were May 1944, as if Sevastopol had been liberated from actual – rather than imaginary – fascists); and watching how the Politika talk show on Channel One finishes with a collective rendition of the Russian national anthem, I once again hear the theme tune to Pioneer Dawn . And when I read the note which the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, [17] The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia was the first political party to register after the Communist Party’s monopoly on power was removed from the Soviet Constitution in February 1990. Led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a fanatical Russian nationalist, the party was reportedly created by the secret police, the KGB, with the express aim of discrediting in the eyes of the Russian people the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. The party was and remains neither liberal nor democratic. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, sent to the Polish foreign ministry suggesting that Russia and Poland should divide Ukraine between them, and I see the plan he drew up for the suggested occupation of Ukraine, showing Russia extending across the whole of the Black Sea coast from Adzharia in the east to Bessarabia in the west (and the jester, as everyone knows, comes out with things that the king would never dare say out loud), I once again see the red map of my childhood on the wall and remember the joke about the Soviet schoolchild who went into a shop and asked for a globe of the Soviet Union.

All this reminds me of the novel by Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (and the superb film of the book, directed by Volker Schlöndorff). The hero of the story is a small boy, Oskar Matzerath, who is living in Danzig in the 1930s. Oskar is appalled by the adult world around him and decides not to grow up. It is only thanks to the cheap tin drum which his mother has given him that he is able to cope with reality. The little lad beats his drum day and night as he watches the storm clouds of history gather, and the adults around him turn into heartless children, smashing up the Jews’ shops and greeting the nascent fascism, as the Third Reich annexes the Free City of Danzig and the Second World War begins.

This phenomenon might be dubbed the mass infantilization of public consciousness, when childish romantic dreams burst forth along with ideas of historical justice. People want some sort of gift here and now . The adult world, with all its ideas of norms and laws and procedures, seems unbearably boring and dull, and those who constantly bang on about the need to observe the rules are so irritating. Why do we need routine when it’s springtime and we’re enjoying a holiday? When the drum beats and history is being created?

The infantilism of the Russian consciousness has been treated at length by the Soviet Georgian philosopher, Merab Mamardashvili, who understood it to mean the weakness of both individuals and social institutions; avoidance of accepted behaviour; the intrinsic nature of Russian culture and Orthodoxy as a whole. His wise voice resounds today as a warning:

As for anger, this is linked to the underdevelopment of the social fabric of the country; it is linked to infantilism. This is a powder keg. We have no intellective tradition that would afford us an awareness of our own states of being, that would enable us to ponder lucidly: What are my feelings? Why do I hate? Why do I suffer? And failing to understand this, we create imaginary enemies. In a word, this anger arises in large measure from infantilism. [18] http://www.kph.npu.edu.ua/!e-book/clasik/data/mmk/cathedra.html .

For a quarter of a century we have attempted to integrate ourselves into an adult world, where there are limits on the individual’s desires; a world where we must learn to overcome childish traumas and fears, reworking them into politics, philosophy, culture and art. This is what Germans have done for half a century, sitting at their school desks and agonizingly working their way through their neuroses. ( The Tin Drum itself reopened many unhealed wounds. Günter Grass was hounded, accused of being unpatriotic and of indulging in pornography.) Now all our efforts have gone down the drain. The teenage complexes of the ‘Russian boys’, as Dostoevsky called them, have slipped out from behind their desks and are raising hell. The adults have gone out, so the boys can smoke, swear, scoff unlimited amounts of ice-cream, and steal the long-coveted bicycle from the boy next door. The Russian spirit is taking a holiday, and, having pulled up our pants, we’re ready to chase after the Komsomol, [19] ‘Pulling up their pants and chasing the Komsomol’ is a line from the Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, as he tried to reconcile himself with the new Soviet life in the early 1920s. The Komsomol – the Young Communist League – was the next stage after the Pioneers. It encouraged social activism and further indoctrinated Soviet youth. wave our flags, and march in step.

Until the parents come back.

At the end of 2014, Russia could be congratulated on a foreign policy victory: in the wake of Forbes magazine naming Vladimir Putin ‘the most influential man in the world’, the Foreign Policy journal included him in its list of ‘The One Hundred Global Thinkers’, under the category ‘Agitators’. In a footnote to the list of nominees, the journal explained that, for Putin, ‘Russia’ is defined not by its present-day borders, but by the common culture, language and history of the Russian people. And that the manifest destiny of the state is to unite all these people, even if that means spitting on the territorial sovereignty of other countries.

However, the joy of receiving this award was somewhat overshadowed by the fact that the Russian President shared it with some rather dubious characters: the pro-Eurasian philosopher, Alexander Dugin (‘for expounding the ideology of Russia’s expansion’); the political strategist and former prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), [20] Sometimes known as the DNR, from the Russian original, Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika . It should be noted that neither this designation nor the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR/LNR) are recognized internationally as separate republics. Alexander Borodai; the leader of ISIS, Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi; the leader of the Boko Haram sect, Abubakar Shekau; the British Islamist known by the nickname of ‘Jihadi John’, who was ‘famous’ for a video put out by ISIS in which he is seen beheading an American journalist; and two Kuwaiti citizens who organized the funding of ISIS and units of Al-Qaeda. So here we have an alternative G8: three Russians and five Islamists, who in the previous year had sent out a challenge to the existing world order.

Did Vladimir Putin dream about achieving such status on 11 September 2001, when he telephoned George Bush to offer him his support in the battle against the world’s evil? Now the American President [at the time of writing, Barack Obama] officially names Russia on the list of the three greatest threats to the security of the USA, along with ISIS and the Ebola virus. Separatists in Eastern Ukraine who are supported by Russia are put on a par with Islamic terrorists. And the President of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaitė, has publicly labelled Russia ‘a terrorist state’.

One could, of course, simply say that such comparisons are tendentious and provocative; just another part of the West’s information war against Russia. But the real problem is that the ‘hybrid war’ which has been unleashed in Eastern Ukraine with Russia’s active participation has demonstrated just the sort of social chaos, uncontrolled violence and archaic practices that are in many ways similar to the actions of Islamic fundamentalists in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and other countries in Africa and the Middle East.