The Russian State of Mind in Stormy Weather

A State of Mind in Windy Weather
Galina Mursaliyeva
October 1, 2014
Novaya Gazeta

A conversation with psychologists about hatred, aggression, the Russian mentality, cognitive breakdown, the loss of social sensitivity, and society’s lack of self-confidence

The side mirror showed that the cars in the next lane were a safe distance from me. I switched on my turn signal and merged. I realized right away the mirror had deceived me. My car was almost a millimeter away from the front bumper of a black jeep: I had rudely cut off this “stealth” car. It was clear in a situation like this that no one would try and figure out whether this had been done purposely or accidentally. I was ready, or so I thought, for anything. I knew the other driver might deliberately overtake me and brake abruptly right in front of me. And yet, I wasn’t expecting what happened next. When the person in the car I had cut off drove his jeep in front of me for the second time, I deftly avoided a collision by moving into the far left lane, meaning he simply had no way to pursue me. But he found a way: he drove down the oncoming lane and once again put his jeep in front of me. This time I turned on the emergency lights and stopped. He walked up to my car.

“Well?”

“Well what? Yes, I made a mistake. Yes, I could have caused an accident. But do you realize that after this you did something that could have got us killed?”

“So what? Maybe I would have kicked the bucket, but I would have taken you down with me.”

There was not a shadow of doubt in his eyes, whitened with anger: one could “kick the bucket” for the sake of punishing one’s offender.

It is not that I recall this incident often, but that I have never forgotten it. Because I saw in a highly condensed form what has been happening with people everywhere—on roads, in supermarkets, on social networks.

“She was the godmother of my son, who is now twenty years old. I was very fond of her, and we were very close, but now that she supports all these Makareviches, I am forced to unfriend her. She has turned into a reptile,” writes a woman on a social network.

Those who call themselves liberals are no better. There is a new photo of a famous person who has more or less spoken out in favor of “Crimea is ours” posted several times a day on Facebook. People batter and pelt the photo with words like stones. “Another one has caved in.” “Creep.” “He used to be my favorite actor. Burn in hell.”

There is an amazing trait that unites everyone these days—their means of expressing hatred. “Fascists,” “traitors”: that is what everyone calls each other. And the verbs are also the same: everyone has “sold out,” either to the Americans or Putin.

You have to kill someone and eat them to take their power. Well, or poison yourself.

Dmitry Leontiev (head of the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Motivation and Personality at the Higher School of Economics, doctor of psychology, professor in the psychology department at Moscow State University, and Viktor Frankl Prize winner): It reminds me of an essay by Hegel, published two hundred years ago, “Who Thinks Abstractly?” He gives an example: you go to the market, and a market woman tries to sell you apples. You try them and say, No, I won’t buy them; they’re a bit sour. The market woman says something like the following to you. It is my apples that are sour? You are sour yourself, and you have a sour mug. And who the hell are you to give my apples a bum rap? I remember your parents: they were layabouts! So she begins to generalize: you were only talking about the taste of the apples, but in response she—

Attacks you personally?

Leontiev: The personal attack is only a detail. But here everything is brought into play, the broadest contexts. Hegel calls this generalization “abstract thinking.” According to him, it is the market woman, rather than the philosopher or scientist, who thinks the most abstractly, because she cannot focus on anything specific and generalizes everything. From my point of view, this is what is happening in our society. The great philosopher Merab Mamardashvili, who for me is quite comparable with Hegel, said, “The devil plays with us when we do not think precisely.”

And the devil is playing with us now: we have stopped thinking precisely. Say, neither the Ukrainians themselves nor we understand clearly what is really happening in Ukraine. But the huge number of people who never for a moment doubt they know exactly not only what is happening now but also what will happen next horrifies me. The number of clairvoyants and seers has gone off the scales. And the farther they are from the scene of events, the more accurately they know everything.

What is the cause of this epidemic?

Leontiev: It is a symptom of cognitive breakdown. Criticalness—the ability to filter incoming information, separate fact from fiction, and soberly assess the limits of one’s own knowledge—is considered one of the main mechanisms of the mature mind. Now it would appear that all the natural filters have come undone. The mind ceases to function: it just swallows readymade packaged texts and spits them back out. As soon as you try in a debate to clarify or specify something, your opponent, like Hegel’s market woman, responds by expanding the topic of the conversation to infinity, entwining anything whatsoever into it. This is the most important method of the usually unconscious manipulation now being used: lumping everything together. The topic of the conversation becomes fuzzy, and a lot of details irrelevant to it are entwined in the conversation.

The meaning of the word “opinion” has been devalued in our country. Any nonsense that occurs to someone is labeled an opinion. This assumption that all opinions are equal is a product of so-called postmodernism. Earlier, when experts were asked for their opinions, it was assumed they were the products of intellectual work in the fields in which the experts were professionally employed. It is then that real discussion can unfold, and we can find someone who can be trusted.”

Nowadays, on the contrary, there is often no trace of analytical and intellectual work in what are commonly referred to as opinions. A person gets some “kind of, like” bit of information from somewhere in left field. These “opinions” are not rooted: they can easily switch to their direct opposites. So I am very skeptical about the figure of eighty-five percent of the population who, according to pollsters, now support everything the Russian president does in Ukraine. This is largely a weather phenomenon. The wind has inflated this degree of support, but when it blows in the other direction, it will fall below zero.

You mean the majority of Russians have a heightened psychological “meteodependency” on the political climate? On the stance of the authorities?

Leontiev: What is the “Russian mentality”? Everything said about the peculiarities of the Russian psychology wholly conforms to the psychology of a normal child. This includes a rich mental and emotional life, but a spontaneous one. Hence the inability to control oneself, to keep promises. Small children can be quite cruel: they do not know what pain is, and do not value life. Our country has had a prolonged childhood; we have not succeeded in growing up. Life, both one’s own and that of others, has a low value.

Many things are caused by the inability to link cause and effect. There is no sense of time, of the dynamics of change: Russia is worried about territories, about not giving an inch. We have virtually no social institutions. The State Duma is like a kindergarten during naptime, when the minder has left the room. Everyone is bawling about his or her own thing.

Maybe it is time to replace the concept of “state of mind” with the concept of an “instinctual state”?”

Leontiev: I would rather speak about a state of mind in windy weather. Thinking is energy consuming, and people who have failed to grow up find it easier to throw words around. The fundamentals of humanity’s survival are simple and sound. They unite rather than divide people, despite all their differences. For example, it is good when people live, and bad when they die and kill, even under the most plausible pretexts. But we have a divided society, and in this situation it is important not to contribute to the polarization. It is a virus that has infected the country

Olga Makhovskaya (fellow at the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ph.D. in psychology, and writer): I would say that what is happening today is a reflection of the country’s biggest fault: we have frittered away our values. When they answer any question—whether to fight or not fight with Ukraine or the whole world, whether they are for or against Putin—people are guided by their fears rather than values. And I can say that there, at Maidan, even before the war the protest was not as encapsulated as it is in our country. Encapsulation is when everything happens in cliques: I go to a protest rally with my friends, but as for everyone else, I do not really know or understand how they live. When there is no overall consolidation, you are among a circle of friends but in a society of strangers. It is extremely difficult to get past the bouncers at the door. In Ukraine, there is definitely not this stark opposition between the intelligentsia and people of the land, for example. There, the latter are in fact the most respected, because the land will always feed you, whatever the regime. And these are grounds for personal dignity. They have greater reserves of values there than we do. There is a Russian proverb that says money cannot buy you love. But there is no comprehension that money cannot buy you anything valuable at all—neither freedom, life, talent nor friendship. It is these things that have failed in Russia today.

I think it is not just a matter of events in Ukraine. This segment of people who think alike, a whopping eighty-five percent, is also encapsulated. A person who is willing to kill someone else and himself in the process is not trying to clarify your stances on these issues. He is just ready to kill.

Makhovskaya: From my point of view, the figure of eighty-five percent is rather an indicator of society’s extreme lack of self-confidence than of public opinion. When a survey on happiness, for example, is conducted, and the vast majority says it is insanely happy, politicians see this as a lovely figure. But any psychologist will tell you that such uniformity indicates a state of helplessness. This is a society of old people and little children—of old people, who suffer from diminished intellect and have no future, and of children, who because of their age cannot be independent.

What is happening in our country today—the intolerance and hatred—is directly linked to the state of being in an axiological and normative vacuum. The social psychologist Durkheim called this condition “anomie.” It happens when old institutions, functions, and norms have been destroyed, and new ones have not yet formed. The main conditions for the emergence of a new set of values are the consolidation of society and an optimistic view of the future. But in Russia, values are promoted that divide people and narrow their horizons: money, power, and pleasure. Transient values camouflage the lack of eternal values—“Thou shalt not kill,” for example—of the old conservative attitudes to work, education, patience, love, and mercy.

Perhaps the Soviet legacy could also be making itself felt in this case. At school, we were made to memorize Nekrasov’s lines “The heart grown weary of hating / Will never learn to love.” But no one told us about the saying of Confucius: “If you hate, it means you have been defeated.”

Makhovskaya: What we remember in childhood is quite important, because we pass it on to our own children as a cultural code. If you cannot love because you cannot hate, it means you must hate: it is a terrible thing, of course, to send this message to schoolchildren. But nowadays there are no less alarming signals, first and foremost, the loss of sensitivity among most citizens. Social sensitivity is a sympathetic attitude to the problems of groups of people to which the individual himself or herself does not belong. Television has “scorched” its viewers by constantly raising the sensitivity threshold.

Why does everyone call each other fascists nowadays? What is the cause of this?

Makhovskaya: It is similar to the children’s game of good guys and fascists [i.e., something like the Anglophone games cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers]. Psychologists believe that the unbearable fear of death is overcome in such children’s games. Given the depth of the trauma caused by World War Two, a trauma passed from generation to generation in Russia, the power of post-traumatic stress syndrome and the relief a small victorious war gives to “inflamed” consciousness are understandable. Despite the fact we won World War Two, psychologically we have been left unappeased, inconsolable, and uncertain that it will never happen again. On the contrary, we have always been reminded that the enemy never slumbers, that we have to be prepared. We live with the convulsive readiness to attack or flee. Sooner or later, individuals cannot contain themselves and enter into conflict; an insignificant occasion can serve as the trigger. The abusive fascist phraseology comes from this same source.

There is another factor that affects how events are perceived—group favoritism. Members of one’s own group are perceived as better, more educated, smarter, prettier, and broader-shouldered.

I will illustrate what you are talking about with a quotation from writer Zakhar Prilepin: “[U]krainian POWs and Russian POWs differ even physiognomically. The Russians are whiter; their eyes are more bewildered and kinder. [The Ukrainians] are darker. They do not look you in the eye; there is something hunted and angry about them at the same time. Almost all of them are shorter than me.”

Makhovskaya: It is a classic example. When we at the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences studied how Soviet viewers perceived Americans during the first spacebridges with the US, we discovered that a couple weeks after the programs people could not recall either the faces of the “enemies” or what they had said. But as they tried to recall what they had seen, they confidently insisted the Americans were “reptiles.” They recalled the “good guys” in detail, with a tendency to add height, texture, and beauty: the people who had gone out to do battle with the ugly dwarfs from the US were simply cartoonish epic heroes.

Sadly, the level of our psychological culture is such that we do not cope with these cognitive distortions. Even more frightening is that this is the level of the politicians and their servants who induce hatred and broadcast negative stereotypes to the whole country.

__________

Editor’s Note. I usually do not have much truck with psychologistic explanations of political and social phenomenon, especially when it comes to Russia, where even before the onset of Putinism 3.0, the popular, public and academic discourses, both liberal and nationalist, were lousy with all-encompassing exegeses of Russian society’s ills (or virtues) based on a supposedly unique, perennial or horribly mutated (as a result of Stalinism, serfdom or perestroika—take your pick) mindset or mentality shared by most Russians or certain classes in Russia. The article translated above certainly possesses many of this approach’s defects, but in its own clumsy way it gives some insights into the zeitgeist in the country right now, details usually ignored or dismissed by, say, local leftist commentators, eager to inscribe everything going on into a more palatable, boilerplate “anti-capitalist” narrative. Whether we like it or not, the sheer hysteria of recent months and its effects on people’s sense of their possibilities, responsibilities, and limitations becomes a factor in political and public life every bit as material and potent as the Putin oligarchy’s need to bolster its financial fortunes or generate new venues for state-sponsored highway robbery.

Photo courtesy of The Daily Mail

Oleg Aronson: Time of the Strikebreakers

Time of the Strikebreakers
Oleg Aronson
Index on Censorship (Russian Edition) 26 (2007)

It is difficult to write about Putin’s Russia, something one does reluctantly. One hesitates to use the word Putin because by this act alone you intrude into the political arena, where your least utterance cannot remain mere hot air but can also turn on you and make you regret what you have said. Such regret does not arise because you were wrong or unfair or because you were misinterpreted, but because your words are always addressed not to those who listen, but rather to those who eavesdrop. Some might be inclined to detect paranoia in this last phrase, to interpret it in the light of conspiracy theory, the “rise of the secret services” or something of the sort. I have in mind something else, however: the specific shift in Russian political sensibility that has taken place before our eyes. An oversupply of mutually repetitive utterances has now been stockpiled, and their lack of content underwrites their existence in the mediaverse. It is simply impossible to listen to them any longer, just as listening itself has become a chore.

It is not so much the political situation (in which power, capital, and the mass media are concentrated in one and the same hands) that I would like to discuss, as it is the “nonpolitical” situation. When we examine the zone of the nonpolitical, the lifeworld of the ordinary man, however, politics is, all the same, one of the conditions that shape it. Politics has long since ceased being something in which people take part; instead, it has become something that shapes people. It has ceased being a clash of parties, social groups, views, and convictions; it has ceased being a concern only of the state and its institutions. Politics courses through our bodies—bodies that vote, work, watch TV, sit in cafés, smoke cigarettes, sleep, die, etc. Politics has long ago become biopolitics. This is not news. It is always the time you live in that is the news.

It is this that makes us speak out today: this strange time that we did not anticipate and in which we find ourselves now. One struggles to find a precise description of this time or even an imprecise description, one that would nevertheless capture the current conjuncture. In our case, defining even a few of the situation’s peculiarities means giving a chance to the absolutely mute, feeble forces of the nonpolitical. It means revealing the possibility of another politics—not a politics devised by political scientists and political operatives, but one that grows out of the life of society itself. In our time, it is extremely hard to imagine such a thing. For a start, however, it would be good to describe this strange time in some way. When does it begin? In what sense is it strange?

We would be mistaken in thinking the time of this new political sensibility begins with the rise to power of the new politicians. Their rise is a symptom, rather. Many still remember (although the mass media have done everything they can to make us forget) Gorbachev’s perestroika and the first years of the Yeltsin administration. It was a romantic period when the experience of democracy became part of our lives. And it was because this experience was new that the very idea of democracy itself was perceived romantically. Ours was an anarchic democracy, one without the institutions on which democracy depends. In this sense, it was a popular democracy, independently of the fact that a significant part of the population might not have supported it. In turn, the spontaneity and popular character of democracy in the late eighties and early nineties might not have manifested themselves had revolt not become a vital necessity in Soviet times, especially during the Brezhnev years.

I consciously use the word revolt here, rather than “resistance” or “social change,” because the latter was the bailiwick only of society’s politically active members. Revolt, on the contrary, is always nonpolitical in nature: it springs from life itself, not from its political realities. Revolt is born of hunger and fear, of humiliation and injustice that exceed the individual and thus become social phenomena. Revolt is a resistance of bodies that marks the limits of biopolitics.

At the end of the Soviet era, the word democracy was the symbol of this revolt. We began building democracy then, and its shortcomings, aporias, and weak points were revealed. This is all more or less obvious to critics of the western model of democracy. Institutionalized democracy, of course, is a rather refined control mechanism premised on the clear equation of the ordinary man with the socially active individual. Your identity as an individual has everything to do with your having a “point of view,” the “right to vote,” the “franchise.” The main thing, though, is that you are endowed with power albeit paltry and imaginary power. This reduction of politics to the individual is the constant in democracy’s rhetoric and its ruse. Even our current political elite has not rejected this rhetoric, although the word democracy has ubiquitously become a term of abuse, and invectives against the western social order, commonplace. Here, of course, we discover a certain resemblance between our time and the Soviet period, when there was also a constitution, a system of elections, courts and lawyers, and the notorious of “grassroots criticism.” Then as well, however, there was a general albeit unspoken understanding that this entire system was fictitious and deceitful, and this was a source of the perestroika era’s consensus on revolt.

The situation today is different. First, it is “democracy” and “democrats” that have been officially blamed for all the woes of the Yeltsin years. Second and more important, this puppet democracy has acquired a service class that far outnumbers the standing political bureaucracy. This is mainly a new generation of people, most often young people, who do not remember even the early post-perestroika years, much less Soviet times.

It would be unfair, however, to limit this segment of society only to “new” people, most of whom are successful or hope to be successful. As opposed to many members of the older generation whose service to the current political authorities is wholly cynical and who have happily forgotten what they said a decade ago and what they believed in (perhaps sincerely) two decades ago, the “new” people have already been formed as political bodies per se. If we can understand what makes them tick we will go some way towards shedding light on the situation.

Television regularly treats us to political talk show hosts (Vladimir Solovyov and Maxim Shevchenko, for example) who have at the ready an amazingly cynical set phrase when anyone mentions the absence of free speech in Russia and the state’s control of the mass media: “You are saying this on national television.” We are constantly confronted by the fact that critical views on the current state of affairs are voiced by figures (Novodvorskaya, Zhirinovsky, Borovoi, Nemtsov, et al.) who have long ago become TV clowns. If new faces turn up by accident among this pack, then the hosts, feigning surprise that our democracy gives even such “nutcases” the chance to speak out, will find the right (prescripted) words to demonstrate to the home audience just how marginal their stance is.

Russia’s imitation “democracy” is in no way a social system with all its attendant shortcomings. It has long since been turned into a reliable instrument of the political hacks. It would not be worth mentioning it at all if not for the fact that our “democracy” incarnates the ambivalence that characterizes the current situation in general. Just like Health Minister Mikhail Zurabov, democracy is to blame for everything but it cannot be sent packing. It is “effective” after its own fashion, that is. It has to go on living because it is guilty and thus will continue indefinitely to swell the ranks of its detractors, the ranks of the current order’s zealous defenders.

Thus, a certain young writer, Anastasia Chekhovskaya, gives a rapturous account in Izvestia of her meeting with Putin. She relates how glad she is that the state has commissioned her to educate the populace, to teach them “good feelings.” Then, without batting an eye, she calls these same people lumpen who have been mutated by mass culture and almost openly declares that it is “young people” like her who are the new elite.

Or take our contemporary artists. Their state commissions have not come through yet, but they are already looking for the right people to serve.

And then there are other “young people,” the members of the Nashi (Ours) movement. Dressed in identical team jackets (it is clear who footed that bill), they are bused in an organized fashion to pro-Putin rallies.

Here they are on Pushkin Square, guarded by the police. They are singing songs and yelling patriotic slogans right at the moment when, on the other side of Tverskaya, the OMON is beating the March of the Dissenters with billy clubs.

Here are some other “young people.” They attend the Marches of the Dissenters not because they are dissenters but because they are provocateurs.

Finally, there are the Live Journal users. They are not members of any party, and they do not go to demonstrations. They are, however, incredibly active when it comes to voicing their support for practically any government campaign. They curse Georgians and Estonians and pensioners who refuse to sell off their garden plots in the countryside outside of Moscow.

These are not simply examples of “grassroots political activism.” There is nowhere from which such activism could emerge: the time is not disposed towards it. This is a new social space that has taken shape precisely in the last several years: we might describe it as an open call for a place in the sun. Only there is no search committee and no list of qualifications for the jobseekers. It is probably not even a job competition but a show in which only the most cynical end up in power or on the tube. All the other applicants master the art of “natural cynicism” (the ability not to see pain, humiliation or the trampling of liberty), expecting a summons to serve in the most miserable “bureaucratic” (in the broadest sense of the word) postings, where these mid-level satraps will employ their skills with the right amount of zeal.

A graduate of the school of political perceptivity, the new-model individual has been hatched in record time. This is the type of people Gleb Pavlovsky has dubbed “the victors.” They are instantly recognizable: they are the ones who talk about the “horrors of Yeltsin-era democracy,” who criticize the Dissenters for their lack of a “positive” program, who rejoice over the country’s growing budget and the size of the Stabilization Fund, who condemn businessmen who cheat on their taxes, who calculate how much doctors, teachers, and pensioners do not get as a result (while of course forgetting that tax revenues go to the state, which despite its enormous budget does not pay the needy anything). We could go on. While it would be wrong to say that all these folks are well off, they are already “others.” Even if their grip on power and money is still slight, power and money figure virtually in their way of thinking, in their sensibility. The state needs such people. They are the new (dependent) “power” elite. A semi-powerful elite whose power extends to the moment when they are reminded who made them what they are and how. Semi-victors.

But what is to be done with the losers? What is to be done with those whom we still call ordinary people? With people who keep their counsel and watch TV? (Whether they condemn or support Putin while doing so is unimportant.) With those who, with the best will in the world and even in their wildest fantasies, are unable to appreciate the Stabilization Fund’s significance? With those who protest when driven to their wit’s end, only to be told that they do not have permits to demonstrate and that the principles of democracy dictate that they should pursue their rights only through the courts?

The watershed that has happened today cannot be reduced to a divide between rich and poor. The media find it convenient to represent the state of affairs in this way, thus directing the energy of protest against the oligarchs. In today’s Russia, the demarcation line runs between “victors” and “losers.” It is not a line, even, but an abyss. Leaping from one camp to another is no simple matter. Strange as it may seem, it is much easier to become a “victor” (a lot is done to smooth the road to victory). It is much harder to side with the “losers,” to share with the injured their experience of humiliation.

No one needs the losers. They are not simply forgotten: systematically, for years on end, they have been the victims of real genocide. Everything points to the fact that it is not only the Anastasia Chekhovskayas of the world but also the central authorities themselves who are waiting for entire segments of the population to become extinct naturally. The lumpen will be the first to go. Then the pensioners. Then the people who for some odd reason continue to give them medical treatment. Then the people who continue to work in small towns and villages for a pauper’s wage. (In this sense, apparently, they expose their “passive” natures.) Then the people who remember something. Those who do not want to join the jubilant ranks of the victors will be the last to go.

Politics in Putin’s Russia is almost wholly constructed around the principle of exclusion. If you are not loyal to state power, then sooner or later you will end up a loser. Ordinary work that is even minimally connected to politics has taken on a completely different character. Whereas it was once possible to speak of “convictions” or “temporary alliances,” nowadays the line between cooperation and strikebreaking has become precariously thin and is disappearing by the day.

During Soviet times, people joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) because it was a condition for enrolling in university. They joined the Communist Party only because it was, once again, concomitant with professional advancement. Everyone understood the ambiguity of the situation: during the Brezhnev years, the number of sincere communists could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Moreover, although there were frightfully few dissidents and human rights activists in those days, an enormous number of people (the majority, perhaps) were, if not exactly nonconformist, then “in disagreement” with the regime. Perestroika showed that such “dissenters” were numerous even within the country’s communist leadership.

Nowadays, there is no obligation to join the party, but one has to be a “consenter”: to be statist in one’s thinking; or, to be more precise, to have a body malleable to the state’s line. Otherwise, you are excluded, even if you are just a human being, not a dissident. Exclusion has become the principle of state policy. This exclusion is both economic and political. One has to be in the business of servicing the authorities or the natural resources extraction industries; if you are not, you will be forgotten. When the excluded are remembered, it is via the latest talk show (most often, during an election campaign), which usually leads to nothing. One has to go to the polls and vote for one of the party lists, any of which has long consisted of nothing but “victors” who are barely distinguishable from one another. If you are apolitical or a “protester,” then nowadays you do not exist: the minimal turnout threshold has been abolished, and so has the “against all” option on the ballot. Thus, the legal space for protest has been disappearing. So when you head to the polls to engage in the most democratic of democratic acts, you unwillingly become obedient to the general line and even a bit of a strikebreaker.

Isn’t this word too harsh? I don’t think so. You might ask: Where is the “strike,” the protest, the political movement (finally) that this great mass of people is, suddenly, breaking? Do you really think it is only the comments of television talking heads and the provocateurs planted in the crowd of protestors that lead me to such conclusions? After all, the former will foam at the mouth as they prove to you that they really are voicing their own beliefs, while the latter will claim they are merely engaged in run-of-the-mill “effective” politics. It is true: there is something awkward about the word, but in its harshness, it is quite accurate. There really is, as it were, nothing much to break (all protest actions are local and turn out few protestors), while the self-image of these people is just the opposite—that of positive builders. If we ask what it is they are building, however, then it will be clear what it is they are breaking.

Each and every one of them is building a “strong state.” They are volunteers. In the best (and extremely rare) case, they are sincere enthusiasts, but in principle, they are calculating pragmatists. The rationale of the strong state requires a triumph of victors over the vanquished on both the foreign and the domestic fronts. While it is easy to find foreign enemies (and even easier to find weak foreign enemies), on the home front the hunt for “enemies of the people” (aka enemies of the state) has already begun. And it is the people who protest—pensioners, the impoverished intelligentsia, part of the student body—who turn out be the enemies. It is of little importance who is “left-wing” and who is “right-wing” because their protest is not mere protest. It is a revolt, albeit for the time being a rather mild revolt. Although it is nonpolitical in character, it is occasioned by the political situation.

Revolt is a lawless thing. So-called democratic rights—the right to vote, the right of assembly and peaceful protest, the right to strike, the right to have one’s grievances redressed in the courts—are intended to limit the possibilities of revolt. They are mechanisms for regulating social discontent. That is why it is so hard to reject “democracy.” At the end of the day, it is an advantageous form of governance for states, especially those inextricably bound up with big capital. Tyrannies have the habit of crushing revolts, while democracies create mechanisms for controlling them. Any revolt can instantly be interpreted in political terms and used by politicians of all stripes for their own purposes.

The Kasyanovs and Khakamadas will always try and set up their soapboxes in the midst of a politically formless protest. Nor it is an accident that members of the absolutely servile Public Chamber appear amongst the outraged residents of the Moscow suburb of Butovo, rather than somewhere in the sticks, where the violence directed against its citizens by the state is no milder.

Aside from protest, however, revolt has another aspect: the stoppage of work. Not just any specific kind of work, but the work of the state itself. Hence, those who relate negatively to all forms of revolt are either bureaucrats or strikebreakers. The former are fond of repeating ad infinitum that protestors should use only legal means to exercise their rights. They are hostage to the notion that democracy is a form of the state. In practice, this transforms democracy into a means of manipulation. The latter group (and nowadays the numbers of such people are growing) consists of bodies. They are bodies that have become elements in the state machine (a “powerful” and “successful” machine), whose smooth functioning requires the elimination of all obstacles. The main obstacle is the class of unwanted, superfluous people. It is telling that the bodies servicing the state system constantly regale us with the rhetoric of “positiveness” and “hard effort.” While we are working, they are protesting. We draft new legislation, but all they do is hold demos. We are building the state up, but they are trying to tear it down.

In fact, revolts have become an important factor in our attempt to make sense of the present situation. From a political point of view, they do not exist. There are only random excesses committed by marginalized groups, and these excesses are described in a purely negative key. There is, however, a principally positive element in revolts that is not visible to political analysts. This positive element has to do with the fact that any revolt falsifies politics. To put it another way, life itself uses revolt to falsify politics, to point out the falsity of its claims.

It is no longer different species of politics at odds in this case, but different ethics. The first ethic is the corporate ethic, which has lately become ubiquitous—the ethic of doing what needs to be done, of usefulness and reliability. The second ethic is the ethic of community. It means standing with those people whose tastes, views, and ideals you cannot share, with people who are sometimes completely different from you. But you stand with them only because you are willing to join them in a community based on the experience of injustice, which everyone knows to one degree or another. Not recorded on any scrolls, the community ethic is the continually repressed source that nourishes the idea of democracy. It cannot be eliminated completely, although politics has developed a multitude of instruments for making us forget it. Once you do forget, however, you shall forever be deaf to the violence that is perpetrated right outside your door—sometimes by your own hand.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Updated on August 30, 2019. Images courtesy of Jane the Virgin and Ororo