New barbarization of Europe

Many would like to wake up tomorrow in a previous world, at least the one a year ago. So, people are trying to convince themselves that the current situation is just temporary – things are about to change and the Russian imperial machine will grind to a halt.

Do you think I don’t want to wake up like this? But I’ll fail to do so. I’ll have to go on living in this new world, when it is announced daily about another conquest, kidnapping, surrender, or disgraceful deal. And, gradually, this information will swallow all the rest and remain the only one which will determine our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

“Our” belongs to a very narrow circle of people. The absolute majority is now passing into a new world without noticing or thinking about anything. And we should not delude ourselves, above all, about this majority as well as about the possibility of making a deal with a machine.

Yet some are calling the existence of this majority into question. Russia has seen a debate – in the same narrow circle, naturally, – about the extent to which one can trust the polls conducted in the current conditions. Some political scientists tried to prove that support for the Kremlin’s policy is limited to 64 percent of the population, while the 86 percent that follow from a Levada Center’s survey is the result of the people’s intimidation.

This is again an attempt to put the blame on the thermometer, as it was done after the last presidential elections in Russia. Any person, who knows about the way votes are counted, will say: you can work up five percent at most – not 10 or 15. But even if they worked up the figure, it is still a proven fact that the absolute majority of the population is for Putin. You don’t need to have 146 percent to draw this conclusion – what Putin got, minus the likely workup, was quite enough. The root fault of that day’s protests was a demand for fair elections under unfair laws.

As for the war with Ukraine and annexation of its territories, the impact of fear cannot be verified. But this is not the main thing. From the angle of practical politics, 64 and 86       percent is the same. This shows consolidation of the population around Putin (like the consolidation of elites previously) as much as results of the presidential elections.

Here is the reason why. These results are shown in a country, where society is disconnected in all directions: property-related differentiation, real inequality, and regional differences – there is no end to this list. Some say it is a class society, but I prefer to use the term “tribalism.” Besides, people are clearly consolidated around a figure that personifies national unity, around his aggressive policy that has turned Russia into an anti-Ukraine.

As the Maidan was at its high, a research claimed that Ukrainian society showed a fifty-fifty attitude to the Maidan and association with the EU. The pro-Maidan people, whom I asked to comment on this, called me Putin’s agent. It was impossible to explain to them that, for such a heterogeneous society as Ukrainian, this is practically a sign of national unity. They only hankered for the Russian 146 percent. Now the Ukrainians are taking approximately the same attitude to the counter-terrorism operation.

There also are other judgments – this 86       percent is just a result of propaganda and all this is collective unconsciousness – once the box shows a different footage, sentiments will change.

The supporters of perestroika and then reforms spoke in exactly the same way. It seemed to them that the Party apparatus would fulfill any task, including a program of self-destruction. They were sure that the market would automatically change value preferences and behavioral patterns of the people who had received a rational explanation that democracy was beneficial.

And all this resulted from sheer ignorance: they were unaware of the fact that had been proven long ago by the global social thought – adherence to the values of democracy is formed at the level of personal self-identification and lays the basis of public and national identity. Propaganda and injunctions cannot change this.

There can be a dual response to the collapse of hopes and illusions.

In some, it is powerless malice that results in the loss of self-respect. People stamp and spit into the monitor, filling social networking sites with insults. It is a pitiful sight when these intellectuals, who have lost everything, can do nothing but compete in hurling insults at those who turned out to be smarter and stronger. Doing this, they do not and cannot understand that they humiliate themselves still more. They humiliate themselves not only by showing unbecoming conduct, but also by calling winners as nonentities. Does it mean that the wretched and despicable have got the upper hand? But who then are they, the ones who have lost?

Others begin to heed the advice of people like Gleb Pavlovsky and his underlings. They speak out a lot of nice foreign words. One must “shift the frontier” and leave the cultural niches filled by the authorities. One must not argue, object, recall Ukraine, residential building explosions, or any other things the ruling elite does not like. It turns out that one must get in touch only with the institutions that are “outside the system.”

But where can you find these institutions in an emerging totalitarian state? It is tactless on my part to say so, for I imitate participants of the Third International Congress of Fiction Translators in Moscow, who condemned Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in a rude and cynical form.

A Peace March is to be held on Sunday. It really is, but its organizers have assured the public that the seizure of Crimea will not be on the agenda – they did it at the moment when ethnic cleansing has begun on the peninsula, when a new Srebrenica is coming up, when not only has the Majlis of Crimean Tatars been smashed, but also people have begun to be taken hostage in their villages.

It is a different thing here. It is either infantile savagery or savage infantilism in understanding what politics is. Here is the way Yulia Latynina verbosely explains things on the example of Aleksei Navalny, still evading answering the question about her attitude and opinion about the behavior of this politician:

“Navalny is trying to make most of the people listen to him. Let us see. He is not speaking out on Ukraine. Why? Because 88     percent are saying ‘Crimea is ours.’ Aleksei knows that if he says what he really thinks, he will at least lose the absolute majority of his… I mean I don’t know what he really thinks, but he will either lose the absolute majority of his voters who are not in raptures over ‘Crimea is ours’ or lose a hope to gain the majority to which he undoubtedly orients.”

Briefly, adherence to principles and populism don’t mix. And the March organizers, who refuse to mention Crimea, are afraid of not so much the authorities as those in society who support the annexation. But if you are taking this attitude, you will never win a majority that can only be shaped from a hostile majority by way of witnessing rather than campaigning and propagandizing. A firm belief in being right is more convincing than anything else. Only thus can you change identity, for this is the nature of a task that cannot be fulfilled by means of propaganda.

To solve practical problems, you should first solve some fundamental ones. Changing the Russian intelligentsia is the only way to stop the Russian aggression which no one in the world can resist so far. The only European politician who admits this is Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski whom Euro bureaucrats are certain to “devour.” He calls a spade a spade. Ukraine and the European Union have really given in to the Kremlin’s military strength. And I will add that the world has radically changed. Russia has ruined all dreams about European unity and the possibility of a world where fist law does not work. For an out-of-history nation and an out-of-time country, for the Russians and Russia, this has been an absolute norm in all the times. And Russia has sent Europe back into the distant past. A new barbarization of Europe is in the offing.

The Russians who are supposed to resist this do not essentially differ from the supporters and conductors of barbarity. The main result of their activity is isolation of the current cultural process from the historical context. Everything from the scratch again… No wonder I titled one of my articles “Returning to the Context” 20 years ago. This was the main task and the object of a major blow from both the authorities and the public which had adapted the country’s and the world’s cultural and historical heritage to its level, excluding it from the inherent links.

A true, informal, public and cultural denazification of Germany occurred in the 1960s, the era of Heinrich Boell and Guenter Grass. Instead, Russia has Dmitry Bykov and Leonid Parfenov who feel nostalgia for the USSR and adapt historical heritage to mass culture, i.e., to commerce.

The main vulgarizer is, of course, Bykov who simulates Kulturtraegerism by selling such a tradable commodity as the illusion of easiness to interpret the achievements of literature (above all) without knowing the whole context of their existence. This can be called crowd-pleasing pen pushing, for his verbosity is totally devoid of the criteria inherent in literature and other arts. Yet there are a lot of words because the text is spoken and written every time without reference to the preceding ones. The plethora of words makes up for the absence of connotations, associations, and contextualization.

All the current persons of dominant influence in Russia are taking part in the cultural, literary, intellectual, as well as historical, processes as detached onlookers rather than participants. But this is exactly the position of mainstream, the position of a mass-culture person – outside the historical and cultural context – who only lives here and now, disconnected from the past and the present.

This seems to be an essential difference between the Russian and Ukrainian “narrow circles.” For this reason, Ukraine is not Russia, and Russia is not Ukraine.

Dmitry Shusharin is a Moscow-based historian and political journalist