Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Maybe in Donetsk there haven’t yet been manifest executions such as the theatrical punishments carried out by ISIS, where, in the middle of the desert, hostages with orange hoods over their heads have had their throats cut. But ‘people’s’ courts and military field courts are already held in the Donbass, in which, with no due judicial process, death sentences are handed down to alleged rapists and looters. Lynch mobbings happen, such as the one against Irina Dovgan, a resident of the Donetsk Oblast who was accused of having links with the Ukrainian Army. She was tied up for hours in the centre of Donetsk and subjected to beatings and insults from passers-by. Then there’s the infamous Donetsk ‘Pit’ (in the military prison of the former Ukrainian Security Service), where mass torture and rape are carried out. Maybe the Donetsk militias haven’t forbidden children to go to school, or kidnapped more than two hundred schoolgirls, as militants from Boko Haram did in Chibok, Nigeria, in April 2014; but in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), by order of the field commander Alexei Mozgovoi, women are forbidden from going to clubs, cafés and restaurants, because they should ‘sit at home and sew cross-stitch’. Mozgovoi declared: ‘She should sit at home, cook pies and celebrate 8 March. [21] 8 March was always marked in the USSR as International Women’s Day. It is now celebrated more widely around the world. It was one of the dates of the ‘Red Calendar’, introduced by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution as a replacement for the church calendar, with its feast days and saints’ days. The Red Calendar devoted specific days to workers in different areas of society, such as ‘Miners’ Day’, referred to a little later. It’s time that she remembered that she’s Russian! It’s time that she remembered her spirituality!’ At the same time, there’s a video on the Internet showing a Cossack beating a girl who has apparently broken this ban.

On the territories controlled by the separatists, total de-modernization has taken place. Archaic tribal practices rule; the strong hold all the rights; there’s the law of the Kalashnikov – indeed, all the characteristics that we have come to associate with conflict zones in Africa. It’s not surprising that the Lugansk and Donetsk Peoples’ Republics have together earned the nickname on the Internet of ‘Luganda’. Vladimir Maksakov, a journalist for the website Colta, who spent twenty-two days in the Donetsk People’s Republic as a volunteer, and was then locked up in ‘the Pit’, witnessed the primitive behaviour in Donetsk in 2014:

Sunday was one of the main holidays in Donetsk, ‘Miners’ Day’. That evening we saw two men by the lift. One of them had been brutally beaten, the other was lying on a stretcher and had been shot in the legs. I took them for Ukrainian prisoners of war. But no: they were miners who had carried on celebrating after the curfew came into effect.

One of the militia came in. He had a broken nose and a battered and bruised face. He told us what had happened. He was seeing a girl home when he saw some guys on the staircase doing something with the switchboard. He took them for fighters and opened fire on them. It turned out that they were from the Internet provider; but he understood that too late. [22] https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/5329-22-dnya-v-dnr . ‘22 Days in the DNR’ (in Russian), 11 November 2014.

The militarized regimes in Donetsk and Lugansk try to hide behind a fig leaf of legitimacy and democracy by holding elections and referenda. In reality, these pirate republics have far less in common with modern states than with the free lands of the Cossacks, to which runaway peasants and convicts fled from all over Russia, because ‘the Don doesn’t give up escapees’. They are like the bands of robber Cossacks who gathered around Stepan Razin in the seventeenth century, and Yemelyan Pugachev in the eighteenth; [23] Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev led peasant revolts. In Soviet times these were idealized into early examples of uprisings of the common people. like the insurrections of Nestor Makhno and Alexander Antonov during the Civil War of 1919–21. [24] Nestor Makhno was commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, which fought for an independent Ukraine during the Civil War. Alexander Antonov led an insurrection in the Tambov Province in Russia against the Bolsheviks. The separatism which Russia encouraged in the depressed region of the Donbass brought to the fore the archaic strata of the Russian psyche, which, it seemed, had already been destroyed by Soviet modernization. Few even guessed that it existed, apart from the ingenious screenwriters of the 1990s, Pyotr Lutsik and Alexei Samoyardov in their films, Children of Iron Gods and The Outskirts , who touched on these chthonic depths, as well as the blood and soil of the ‘Wild East’. The prophet of Putin’s Russia, the film director Alexei Balabanov, also worked with these archaic strata, predicting the annexation of Crimea, war with the West and Russian fascism.

And if we look further afield, then one can compare the DPR and the LPR with the partisan republics in Latin America, such as the narco-guerrillas of the FARC in Colombia; the Maoist ‘Sendero Luminoso’ (Shining Path) and ‘Túpac Amaru’ in Peru; the Túpac Katari guerrilla army in Bolivia; and the Red Sun in Ecuador (the Communist Party, also known as Puka Inti). All these groups also love left-wing rhetoric, ‘people’s justice’ and racketeering under the guise of ‘revolutionary justice’; and they have a passion for black balaclava masks. And it is no coincidence that one of the heroes of the ‘Russian spring’, the field commander Arseny Pavlov, who went under the nickname of Motorola, used to wear a bracelet with a portrait of Che Guevara. [25] Pavlov was assassinated in 2016.

What do the fighters of the FARC, ISIS and the DPR have in common? First and foremost, traditionalist anti-globalist ideas. Their ideologues are inspired by examples from the past, be it Islamist theocracy in the Middle East; the bizarre mix of Maoism, Trotskyism and Bolivarianism in Latin America; or the crazy cocktail of monarchism, Stalinism and ‘Orthodox civilization’ in the minds of the separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Their enemy is not governments, but contemporary society itself, with its free market, the emancipation of women, its temptations and permissiveness, and its social inequality, liberal values and domination by America. They proclaim the armed struggle under the flag of national, territorial or religious liberation; but in reality they are fighting against the anonymous tide of globalization, which erodes everything. They are trying to put up dams, having taken the local population hostage.

Twenty-five years ago, at the start of the 1990s, when the whole world was expecting ‘the end of history’ as predicted by Francis Fukuyama, the American political theorist Benjamin Barber wrote a book called Jihad vs. McWorld . In it, he foresaw the basic type of conflicts that would follow the fall of the Berlin Wall: fundamentalists rising up against globalization. And under the term ‘jihad’, he meant not only the Islamist movement for the purity of the faith, but the wider protests by the remnants of traditional society against the global tide, from Osama bin Laden to Subcomandante Marcos. In this sense, the leaders of Donetsk and Lugansk also have their own local jihad. These are depressed industrial regions with high levels of unemployment and a poorly reformed mining sector with barbaric mining technology (including mines that they have dug out themselves), which does not fit the post-industrial world. Under the banner of Orthodox sharia law, these leaders are standing up to the advance of Western civilization and its agents, ‘the Kiev junta’. This is why, in its listing of ‘Agitators’, Foreign Policy puts these men on a par with the Islamic terrorists of ISIS and Boko Haram.