The Return of the Russian Leviathan

PUNITIVE HYGIENE

The battle for a healthy lifestyle has reached new heights. The Interior Ministry has introduced a draft containing corrections to the Code on Administrative Infringements of the Law, according to which, as well as testing drivers, the police will be able to test pedestrians to see if they are sober and in general carry out a medical examination on anyone they want to. (Especially if that ‘anyone’ had turned up at an opposition rally.) It seems that cleaning the social space is becoming the principal task of the authorities, and the instrument they are using is punitive hygiene.

The crusade for cleanliness began fifteen years ago after the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, when the authorities spoke about the ‘orange infection’, and the main strongman in the country became the Chief Sanitary Inspector, Gennady Onishchenko, who banned the import of Moldovan wines, then of Georgian mineral water, then of American chicken legs, depending on the demands of the day. In the course of these ten years the country did not actually get any cleaner; but hygiene and the cult of the clean body grew to become a mass political campaign with military sports camps of the pro-Kremlin youth movement, Nashi (‘Our people’); with Putin meeting patriotic young athletes; and with the President visiting the ‘Pankration’ ‘no rules’ fights, with their classic male torsos on display. Not surprisingly, the heroes of the day, looking out at us from the advertising hoardings, were the Russian fighters Nikolai Valuyev and Fyodor Yemelyanenko.

At the same time, the nationalists became interested in health and social hygiene: their main topic became eugenics and demography, and they held marches with the slogan, ‘Being Russian means being sober’. Back in 2005, Dmitry Rogozin (now a deputy prime minister) put a call in an election video for his party ‘Rodina’ (‘Motherland’) ‘to clean Moscow of rubbish’ (meaning get rid of people from the Caucasus, who are known as ‘blacks’). This has now become a reality, with raids carried out by skinheads in army boots, to clear the streets of the city of ‘scum’ (as they call Asian immigrants) and the homeless; and ‘sanitary’ raids by dog hunters to destroy stray dogs.

Finally, the Russian Orthodox Church joined in the battle for hygiene, preaching sermons about celibacy outside marriage, promoting the family and the procreation of children. In response to the Western feast of St Valentine’s Day, they brought in the Orthodox feast of Peter and Veronica, sacred patrons of the family. And advertisements assure us that the best protection against AIDS is not a condom but abstinence and marital fidelity.

In Vladimir Putin’s third term, the crusade for cleanliness was formalized in a series of laws against alcohol, tobacco, swearing, ‘homosexual propaganda’, ‘foreign agents’ and other ‘evils’. Laws were passed placing age limits on television programmes and censoring the Internet, thus beginning a battle for digital hygiene. It would be naive to suggest that this was all the work of the State Duma: in reality, all these laws helped to formulate the protective sanitary line of the Kremlin. At the same time, the state’s priorities in the area of reproductive policy were clearly spelt out. One of Putin’s first decrees on the day of his inauguration for his third term in office in May 2012 was ‘On measures for the fulfilment of the demographic policy of the Russian Federation’, in which the government was ordered to ‘raise the summary coefficient of the birth rate to 1.753 by the year 2018’. And in Putin’s instruction to the Federal Assembly in December 2012, demographic policy played a key role and it was announced that, ‘in Russia the norm should become three children in a family’.

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, described such intensive attention on the part of the government to issues of hygiene, nutrition the birth rate and sexuality as ‘biopolitics’. The state regards the population simply as a collection of bodies; it is biological capital, which it can regulate and multiply, and from which it can make a profit. Biopolitics is a higher form of sovereignty: the state appropriates the bodies of its citizens and then interferes in areas that, up until then, had been considered private matters, such as sex, choosing what to eat and drink, food, domestic life, smoking, the spoken language and social network interaction. This unceremonious interference by the state in private life, under the banner of ‘the battle for a healthy way of life’ is nothing less than repressive hygiene.

Biopolitics flourishes in totalitarian and fascist states. In the Third Reich, the idea of ‘racial hygiene’ included: sorting out the ‘genetic rubbish’, such as homosexuals, the mentally ill, the disabled and ‘lesser races’ (like the Jews, gypsies and Slavs); the fight against smoking; the cult of children and youth; and supporting the healthy Aryan family. All of this was supplemented by the simultaneous cult of the body as epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl, mass rallies and the Olympic Games. Stalin’s USSR carried out similar biopolitics: abortion and homosexuality were criminalized; having large families was made a virtue of state policy and awards were handed out for having many children; and World War Two veterans who had lost arms and legs – of which there were many – were carted off to special facilities, where they simply disappeared from view. Instead of racial hygiene and ‘the Aryan family’, there was class hygiene and ‘the Komsomol wedding’.

In today’s Russia, biopolitics is the continuation of the traditional approach to resources. The state takes and disposes of resources, labelling them ‘strategic’ (in other words, not for private use). Just as with oil and gas, the population has become a strategic resource, and the state’s biopolitics means the strategic enlargement of the population, in order to fill out Russia’s empty spaces and to increase its weight on the world stage. It is only the size of the population and not the quality of life that is the strategic argument for a resource-minded state.

Under the logic of biopolitics it is easy to understand (though in no way approve of) the ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’, which forbids US citizens from adopting Russian orphans, in practice making these children into hostages of the state. This is not just about the orphans’ right to happiness and a family, this is about the state’s right to deal with its population as it wishes. Orphans, including disabled orphans, suddenly become a strategic resource, mere biological material, which can be used as an ‘asymmetric answer’ to America. From the point of view of humanity, this law is pure cannibalism; but in terms of biopolitics it is a rational resource approach: in exactly the same way as we occasionally turn off the gas tap to Ukraine to make that country more compliant, and in the 1970s we used to turn on and off the Jewish emigration tap as a great power trade-off with America. We no longer have the Jews at our disposal; all we have left are the orphans.

Biopolitics also explains another law that has caused commotion in society: the law banning so-called ‘gay propaganda’. It’s not because of the retrograde homophobia of a large part of the Russian population; it’s because the state sees homosexuality as an infringement of its reproductive policy. Any sexual activity that does not bring about an increase in the population is considered ‘unclean’ and should be banned by law. According to this same logic, therefore, condoms are also unclean, and so conservatives are trying to restrict their sale. Should we now expect Old Testament laws forbidding masturbation?

The state’s new Orthodox hygiene policy is designed to turn the population into an obedient mass, which is loyal to the idea of the family and dutifully produces children, and which has turned its back on polygamy, contraception, homosexuality and other attractions of the devil. The most important thing here is not the quality of life; it’s the number of children you have.

The paradox and the cynicism of the situation is that modern Russian biopolitics bears no relation to biology (since it is based on wholly false assertions, such as that homosexuality is not ‘normal’), nor does it improve the health of the nation, as it is accompanied by a radical cutting back of state financing of the health system and the destruction once and for all of free Soviet healthcare. Biopolitics is above all a matter of politics and ideology, the privatization of the human resource, the disciplining of the collective body of the nation. It is the drawing up of the state’s sanitary contours, the task of which, as in times past, is to discipline and punish.

THE KING’S BODY

On 5 March 2015, the anniversary of the death of Stalin, Russia’s President disappeared. There was nothing unusual in this. Vladimir Putin had gone missing on other occasions, and the television audience were fed what they call ‘preserves’ – recordings of earlier business meetings and speeches. But on this occasion, in the particularly evil atmosphere surrounding the recent murder of Boris Nemtsov, when there was a seething mess of versions concerning who was responsible for this crime, the void in the Kremlin was especially keenly felt. The omnipresent journalists found out about Putin’s disappearance and the broadcasting of old recordings on TV and sounded the alarm.

Ten tension-filled days passed. Commentators talked of ‘Cheyne–Stokes respiration’, the pathological breathing pattern that often accompanies a stroke, which Soviet newspapers had written about shortly before Stalin died, and which has come to be a political term in Russia. By coincidence, it was at the same time of year, in March 1985, that Konstantin Chernenko died, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party, during the period of stagnation,[1] and his demise was also somewhat inopportune. After the subdued growling of the Kremlin’s ‘bulldog fight under the rug’, and after the fantastical suggestions that Putin had been taken away by aliens and the absurd rumours about helicopters over the Kremlin, a medical explanation began to emerge. There was a feeling that Putin’s absence was something pathological, as if the whole nation was writing the story of his illness: there was talk of ’flu and stroke, of back injury and pancreatic cancer; but there was even more talk of rejuvenating medicine: of plastic surgery, or scheduled Botox injections. There were even rumours about a trip to Switzerland, to Canton Ticino, where the gymnast and Duma deputy Alina Kabaeva, whom people called Putin’s common-law wife, had given birth to a son or a daughter. The life and death of Putin, his appearance, his reproductive capabilities, his facial muscles, his spine – all of this became the heart of political discussion; the sole topic of conversation.

Such close attention to the body of the sovereign is an ancient and venerable tradition, born in the late Middle Ages and at the start of the modern era. The well-known German American historian of the medieval period, Ernst Kantorowicz, devoted a book to this subject, The King’s Two Bodies. According to Kantorowicz, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian concept of the dual nature of God (Father and Son) and man (soul and body) was mixed with ancient legal tradition and produced the idea of the two bodies of the king: the physical body, which is perishable and exists in time; and the ‘political body’, which is sacred and lasts for eternity. This political body is the nation; but it is wholly linked to the physical, anatomical body of the king. The king is no longer in charge of his own body: the nation decides its fate. Kantorowicz cites as an example the English Revolution, when in January 1649 Parliament judged and executed Charles I. This was treated at the time not as a popular uprising against the monarch, but as a legal action of the political body of the king (what was known as ‘the King in Parliament’) against his physical body.

I recall how this idea amazed me when I was in Versailles – in reality, a vast theatre – where the spectacle of the king’s body in all its guises was played before the nation as represented by the court. Inside the palace the king was effectively deprived of any privacy; everything physiological was as public as it could be: in one place the king slept; in another he appeared as an ordinary man in his nightshirt; in a third he sat on the pot and washed, also in the presence of members of the court. The queen’s birthing room had places reserved for observation. There were chambers for the king’s lovers; his virility, his productivity, his male health: all was a carefully guarded ritual, a guarantee of the political health of the nation. As Michel Foucault wrote: ‘In a society such as that of the seventeenth century, the body of the king was not a mere metaphor but something political: his bodily presence was necessary for the life of the monarchy.’[2] And it is no coincidence that, just as in England, the French Revolution announced, via Robespierre’s mouth: ‘Louis must die so that the Republic may live.’ On 21 January 1793, the king was executed, as were, after him, Marie-Antoinette and her sister Elizabeth – the political body of the nation got rid of the physical body of the monarch. A similar act was carried out in Russia in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. But by an irony of fate, having got rid of the body of one sovereign, the nation immediately installed another, which to this day lies unburied in the Mausoleum.

In implementing Putin’s de-modernization programme, Russia has been knocked back into the same political theology of ‘the king’s body’. Medicine first broke into politics with the arrival of Boris Yeltsin: his great size created the effect of a bodily presence. After the decrepit old men of the Kremlin and then the lively Gorbachev, Yeltsin stumbled onto the political scene like a lumbering Siberian bear. His habits, including rumours about his drinking and his love affairs, became the stuff of legends; and his illness and the operation he underwent in his second term (when his Press Secretary, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, explained his absences by saying that the President was ‘working on documents’) became a metaphor for the weakening of the political organism.[3] This was the background to Vladimir Putin’s arrival in the Kremlin: young, sporty, with no bad habits and with the halo of a Soviet James Bond.

With Putin’s coming to power the appearance of the body of the leader who emerged from the entourage becomes a subject of carefully thought-out image-making, an object of close attention for society: ambiguous photos are published of a semi-naked man in dark glasses; there’s a blatant demonstration of his torso, a public show of machismo (with his judo, hunting, swimming and horse-riding). At the same time rumours are put out about just how masculine the sovereign is, about his divorcing his wife and his love affair with Alina Kabaeva. This doesn’t seem to fit into the background of an Orthodox renaissance and the propagation of family values, but in the logic of the sovereign, ‘what’s not allowed to an ox, is allowed to Jupiter’. Putin is able to go outside the traditional moral framework in order to demonstrate his extraordinary right to be the alpha male. (It appears likely that the supposed ‘leak’ of this description of Putin as an ‘alpha male’ by Wikileaks may have been organized by Russia in order to create just such an image of the Russian President.) The propaganda machine has created the image of a middle-aged man who says little, doesn’t drink or smoke, who uses the language of the criminal underworld and is a lover of patriotic pop music such as his favourite group, ‘Lyube’: he appeared as the dream guy for the downtrodden Russian woman, who sighed, ‘I want a man like Putin’. The President became the ideal bridegroom for Russian women (as is well known, there’s a shortage of men in Russia); he stepped into the sexual pantheon of the post-Soviet consciousness.

Putin’s body became a glamour object. He is a child of the era of exciting spy stories, the cult of the young body and plastic surgery, when the young-looking, tanned President suddenly sits himself down at a white grand piano and with feeling plays ‘What the Motherland begins with’ and ‘Blueberry Hill’, as happened at a charity concert in St Petersburg in 2010. The first decade of the century, when the country was swimming in oil riches, gave birth to a glossy presidency, based on political pretence and plastic manipulations, on high ratings and Botox. The main thing is to call a halt in time, before he starts to look like his friend Silvio Berlusconi, who, with his dyed hair and desperate attempts to look young, has already turned into a political clown. The body of the sovereign expanded to cover the whole nation. It entered every home; it stares out at us from tee-shirts and the covers of school exercise books; it led the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, to the natural conclusion that ‘Putin exists, therefore Russia exists; there is no Russia today if there is no Putin’.[4]

Then suddenly there were rumours about the President being ill or possibly even dead; in place of political theology we had political thanatology.[5] The body of the nation was shaken to the core; the political system immediately trembled. And even the return to public view of a younger-looking and wrinkle-free Putin was not taken as being back to normal for the political body: observers commented that the Tsar had been replaced, that this was not the same Putin; he smiles in a rather strange way, rather like the little girl whose mother has tied her plait too tightly. The traumatic experience of the President’s ten-day absence and the rumours about his illness presented Russia with a bald medical fact: Putin’s body had become the body of the nation; it had taken the place of politics. Instead of executive power, we now had Putin’s spine; instead of a work schedule, we had his pancreas; instead of parliamentary debates, we had an analysis of the President’s gait. And so the rumours about his illness instantaneously led to political chaos: in Russia there are no institutions apart from the body of the sovereign, and any hope of political change is inextricably linked to this body. We are all hostages to its fortune. This is exactly how it was in March 1953, when all the inhabitants of the USSR were hostages to Stalin’s body, and again in March 1985 when the whole country became a hostage to the decrepit body of Konstantin Chernenko (and before him to the terminally ill General Secretary Yury Andropov, who had been linked up to an artificial kidney apparatus) – and the country fell apart before our very eyes.

In order to break out from this model from the Middle Ages and to tear up our dependence on the body of the king, we have to do what they did in Europe in the early modern period: replace this body with institutions, to divide the person of the ruler from the function of government, so that Russia can finally become a civil nation and the President an ordinary person made of skin and bone, with illnesses and weaknesses and not a receptacle for abstract ideas and sacred thoughts. Only then will we be able to rid ourselves of the periodic necessity to listen out with holy fear for the Cheyne–Stokes respiration.

THE CONDOM AS A SIGN OF PROTEST

This object was always taboo in Russian culture. When I was a young man it cost two kopecks in the chemist’s, sold in envelopes made of rough, official paper, under the code name, ‘Product No. 2’, and made in the Bakovka Factory for Rubber Products (‘Product No. 1’, of course, was the gas mask). As teenagers, we were too embarrassed to say this word, as if it was a swear word; the sacred word ‘condom’ caused Soviet schoolchildren to catch their breath and speed up their pulse rate; occasionally, we would run to the chemist’s to look at this semi-forbidden fruit tucked away in the corner of the shop window.

We saw a similar flash of discomfort cross the President’s face during his press conference in December 2011 when he was answering a question about the ‘white ribbons’ worn by the opposition movement on their clothes. Faltering, Putin said: ‘To be honest, I think it’s rather inappropriate, but nevertheless I’ll say it: I thought it was publicity for the campaign against AIDS; I thought that they were contraceptives.’ Because of old Soviet habits he, too, couldn’t bring himself to say the taboo word ‘condom’, using instead the neutral euphemism, ‘contraceptive’.

The sanctimonious nature of Soviet culture, in which ‘there was no sex’ (in the famous words of a Soviet woman who was taking part in a tele-bridge between Leningrad and Boston in 1986), is now returning along with other types of Soviet absurdity. The Duma proposed banning advertisements for condoms outside specialized publications. In fact, even without any changes being made, condom adverts have effectively already disappeared from the media and migrated to the Internet. And considering the growth of the campaign in support of having children and promoting the family, almost to the point of introducing high duties for divorce and a suggestion to bring back the Soviet tax on singles and childless families, we cannot exclude the possibility that sooner or later condoms will go the same way as cigarettes: they’ll disappear from open sale at petrol stations and by the checkout in supermarkets and they’ll be hidden away in closed drawers at the chemist’s, where they’ll be available only with special permission. And why not then bring in an age limit for their sale, like for women below forty; or restrict the number of condoms one person can have? If in the new state–church ideology contraception is declared to be a sin, HIV to be God’s punishment and the best way to prevent pregnancy and infection to be self-restraint and marital fidelity, then condoms should be seen as a Western perversion, contradictory to the national traditions of healthy sex; a latex ‘fifth column’, threatening Russia’s demographic security.

Condoms were always considered to be foreign agents in Russia, little French things passed around the aristocracy in the gallant time of Ekaterina, in the period of Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade and Casanova, which, as everyone knows ended with the French Revolution. Two hundred years later in the Russia of the 1990s, they once again became the symbol of liberalization and moral emancipation. Western charities brought them into Russia as humanitarian aid and gave them out to all who wanted them, along with syringes; sex education programmes were introduced in schools and on television; and on Myasnitskaya Street in Moscow a specialized condom boutique opened, offering not the mass-produced condoms you would find in the supermarket, but an individual selection of items. At the same time, a lot of amusing advertisements appeared in the media (such as ‘Come properly to the end of the evening’), which didn’t just sell the product but educated people in their use and quietly got across the idea that you can talk about sex and joke about it, and that sex is fashionable, prestigious and happy.

The condom became as much a part of everyday life as the aspirin or the toothbrush. At the same time, the patriarchal, sanctimonious foundations of post-Soviet society also began to change. According to an All-Russian opinion poll carried out by the Levada Centre in 2012, only 23 per cent of Russians considered premarital sex to be immoral, compared to 29 per cent in 2007 and 42 per cent in 1992. More than half of those asked (55 per cent) considered it acceptable for someone to have more than one partner, while 77 per cent of young people approved of cohabitation, against 30 per cent of the older generation.

Russians’ sexual habits are rather relaxed. According to the annual Global Sex Survey carried out by the research department of the Durex Corporation, Russians have more sexual partners than almost any other country, losing out only to the Austrians. On average, our men will have twenty-eight partners in the course of their lives, while Austrian men will have twenty-nine. Russian women on average have seventeen partners. And 42 per cent of those questioned say that they are totally satisfied with their sex lives, which is higher than in Europe or the USA. Finally, and most importantly, thanks to widespread sexual education and modern methods of contraception, for the last twenty-five years the number of abortions carried out in Russia has been consistently falling (although we still remain the world champions): the annual rate has fallen from six million per year in the 1960s, to four million in 1990, and down to under a million in 2013.

Today’s conservative attack on sexual freedom in Russia goes against these trends. Advertisements for condoms are being banned, sex education lessons in schools are being replaced by the ‘God’s Law’ programme, and social adverts on billboards in the cities aggressively call on people to turn away from the idea of safe sex. The results of this puritanical propaganda could turn out to be completely the opposite of what is intended. They won’t be able to destroy the sexual freedom that people are now used to, but restricting the availability of condoms will lead to widespread unprotected liaisons, as a result of which the number of abortions and sexually transmitted diseases will rise; this will lead to a drop in the reproductive capability of the population, which the conservatives are so zealously fighting for. And this is to say nothing about the proposed bans on advertising and the sale of condoms, which will make people’s lives worse, restrict their choice of sexual practices and scenarios and limit people’s freedom in one of the last areas where the citizen is relatively free from the unsleeping eye of the Tsar – in bed.

It turns out that in that press conference in December 2011, Vladimir Putin was right: in an era of total biopolitical prohibitions, the condom does indeed become a symbol of the opposition and the citizen’s self-awareness. Free citizens choose safe sex; and also they decide themselves whether they have children, without any instructions from above.

THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF SODOM[6]

I’ve made an important discovery: the ‘worldwide homosexual lobby’ really does exist. And beavering away behind the scenes, it really does rule the world. One warm autumn evening I stood on the corner of Castro Street in San Francisco, right in the heart of the most famous gay quarter in America, not far from the well-known glass-walled ‘Twin Peaks’ gay bar. A mixed crowd was going past, which included the city’s most varied types – gays, transvestites, freaks, queers, old hippies, tramps – and I was surrounded by a large group of curious tourists. There was music playing, police sirens wailing, lights of clubs flashing, rainbow flags hanging from balconies; and the sensation grew that this never-ending carnival of human variety, this display of eccentricity, was the heart and soul of this place, an essential part of the identity of this great City by the Bay.

I went off to have supper in the Chinese Quarter, where the Great Eastern restaurant serves (as they assure you) the best dim-sum on the whole US West Coast, and where Barack Obama once ordered takeaway dumplings. San Francisco’s Chinatown is the most famous in America, as well as the oldest. Chinese migrants started arriving in the middle of the nineteenth century in their tens of thousands, men who came to work on construction of the Pacific and transcontinental railroads. The history of Chinatown is full of tales of xenophobia (such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), fires and ethnic crime; but today the Chinese make up 20 per cent of the population of San Francisco and are one of the more successful communities. The Chinese Quarter has become one of the symbols of the city.

Silicon Valley didn’t spring up just by chance among the rolling hills and serene gardens of Palo Alto and San Jose. At its heart lay the freedom-loving spirit of California, ‘the promised land’, which attracted the adventurers in their covered wagons. Here was to be found the entrepreneurial excitement of the frontier, which resonated to the sound of the wheels of stagecoaches and the crack of the Winchester rifle; but there was also an unimaginable mix of races and cultures: Hispanics, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, Chinese, Japanese, Russian Old Believers,[7] all seeking happiness in this golden, oil-rich and now digital El Dorado. California meant not only gold fever, but also an unprecedented freedom: the hubbub of the saloons, the can-can cabaret, the dubious entertainments in the alleyways of the port of San Francisco. In the rebellious 1960s, the hippy revolution developed in the warm Californian climate – as Scott McKenzie sang in the unofficial hymn of the counterculture of the 1960s: ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.’ It was there that the first gay revolution took place, linked with the name of Harvey Milk;[8] and there, too, in San Francisco, where the AIDS epidemic broke out in 1981.

Without all of this, Silicon Valley would never have come into being (and also, incidentally, without the huge government investments that the USA made into new technology after the shock caused by Russia’s Sputnik programme between 1957 and 1961, and without the Stanford Industrial Park). Its location is on the reckless west coast of the USA and not on the stiff and starchy east coast, even though it would appear that the country’s best intellectual resources used to be in the east, from Yale and Harvard to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This is not because hippies, Chinese and gays are especially gifted, nor that unique creative enlightenment comes thanks to the influence of LSD. The point is that in post-industrial society an atmosphere that is multinational and tolerant and allows for sexual freedom encourages the flowering of entrepreneurism, innovation and creativity. A person who is prepared to accept another with all their differences is also prepared to accept new business ideas or finance a risky start-up. And give ten thousand dollars credit for someone to construct a computer in a garage – from where the Apple empire grew.

After all, it is all about complexity management. Post-industrial societies have a high density of horizontal connections, and demonstrate a wide variety of identities, and religious, ethnic and sexual practices, each of which relies not on domination but on equality. The ability to understand and accept this complexity (also through the rituals of political correctness and tolerance, which they love to laugh at in Russia) is the key to managing and modelling complexity. In today’s world, all the major centres of creating value and meaning – New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona – are marked out by their multiculturalism (another favourite target for Russian critics of the West), broadmindedness, and acceptance of variety in ethnicity, race, religion and sexual orientation. And it is no coincidence that a number of the greatest global cities today have had an openly gay mayor: Bertrand Delanoë in Paris, Klaus Wowereit in Berlin, Ole von Beust in Hamburg, Glen Murray in Winnipeg…[9]

Moreover, the author of the fashionable concept of ‘the creative class’, Richard Florida, suggested creating a ‘Gay Index’ as a way of measuring tolerance. The level of openness to sexual minorities is an indicator of how low the barriers are for the development of human capital. According to Florida’s research, centres of the innovation economy are exceedingly popular places for the gay community to live. And the Russian political scientist, Andrei Shcherbak, carried out similar research in fifty-five countries between 1996 and 2008, in the course of which he studied the influence of tolerance on economic and technological modernization, measuring it in relation to gender equality, sexual minorities and xenophobia. In putting together his modernization index, Shcherbak took into account the role of hi-tech goods produced for export, the percentage of GDP spent on research and development, the number of academic articles on science and technology, the number of patent applications, the size of seed capital investment as a percentage of GDP and the level of foreign investment as a percentage of GDP. With all of this, his results correlated with the index of acceptance of gender equality, sexual minorities and foreigners. Statistics over an extended period of time show that it is the level of acceptance that helps society to develop, and not the other way round.

In a sense, the ‘worldwide homosexual conspiracy’ that Russian politicians love to talk about actually does exist. The point is, it’s not some sort of collusion between gay politicians in order to seize power across the globe and ravish the last bastions of morality like Russia, but the encouragement of reflexivity and greater flexibility in society in managing complexity, allowing for people to take up key posts notwithstanding their sex, race or sexual orientation. And the reaction to homosexuality as probably the strongest social irritant is the litmus test for society’s ability to accept differences.

As always, Russia is following its own difficult path (or, to be more precise, it’s going down the path which the West trod half a century ago). The growth of the homophobic mood in society and the authorities and the declaration of the country’s sexual sovereignty coincided with the time when all conversations about modernization and innovation were being wound up; all the slogans to do with this now seem to have been merely a fad of Dmitry Medvedev’s interim presidency from 2008 to 2012. At the same time, an anti-immigration mood has been growing in society, as witnessed by the pogroms against people from Central Asia that occurred in the Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo in 2013; ‘tolerance’ became virtually a swear word.

All this reflects society’s nervousness when faced with the complexity of the post-industrial world and the uncontrolled flows of people and information; there is an inability to accept this complexity and transform it into social and market technologies, or to use it to the benefit of state governance. Fear produces such chimeras as ‘a paedophile conspiracy’, ‘the gay lobby’, the ‘orphan killers’. Most probably, it would be appropriate for the guardians of the nation’s morality to forge yet another set of ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ – this time it would be ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom’.

But what we have to understand is that along with the growth in paranoia, we are losing our competitiveness. Closed systems are no longer capable of tackling complex problems. They will be affected even more strongly by global flows, but they will no longer be in a position to control them, thus condemning themselves to becoming peripheral. In our interdependent world, questions of sex, gender, race and tolerance are no longer matters of ethics or identity, but to do with the economy and the survival of the country in global competition.

Therefore, I would switch from an ideological approach to a pragmatic one. For a start, by special decree alongside the Skolkovo Innovation Centre a gay quarter could be set up, like Castro in San Francisco. Maybe something non-traditional would grow out of it – or, at least, something innovative.

TEST FOR HOMOPHOBIA

Sometimes it seems that those who were drawing up Russia’s laws in 2013, banning the promotion of homosexuality, achieved completely the opposite effect to the one they actually wanted. You hear speeches about homosexuality now on every corner, in the Duma and on television. They use the term to insult opponents and to frighten parents. An acquaintance of mine told me that she called the doctor out to examine her sick child. The doctor, a woman of about fifty years old, prescribed antipyretic suppositories, having explained that they don’t use rectal suppositories now for boys over three years. When asked why, she answered emphatically: ‘Homosexuality!’. It seems that at long last Russia has found its national idea; and this idea is homophobia.

Homophobia has become the platform on which the state’s repressive laws and the Stone Age instincts of the mob have been brought together. According to a sociological survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM), the law banning the promotion of homosexuality is supported by 88 per cent of Russians. Being openly antisemitic or racist in Russia is already considered not quite proper, at least in politics; but being a homophobe is normal, worthy and even patriotic. The bastards who beat a gay man to death in Volgograd on Victory Day, 9 May 2013, said that they did it for patriotic reasons. The official rhetoric has opened up a carnival of hatred in Russia; it’s hunting season on homosexuals. Each year there are now dozens of attacks recorded on gays, many of them ending in death, and the number of unrecorded crimes are too many to count. And even tortures carried out by the police – at least, the ones that become known, such as the rape of people who were detained, one using a champagne bottle in Kazan and another a crowbar in Sochi – follow the same homophobic logic: the state degrades people, using the kind of sexual violence that is common in the criminal world.

Politics in Russia has been brought down to the level of vulgar physiology; what the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, calls ‘the naked life’. The biological becomes political, whether we are talking about the hunt for paedophiles or the ban on foreigners adopting orphans; about the censorship of homosexuality or the concept of family policy, as put forward by Duma deputy Elena Mizulina, according to which ‘normal’ should mean a patriarchal family with four children, living together with their grandparents. The state intrudes upon the sphere of what should be intimate and private, using repressive measures to impose from above a patriarchal and authoritarian ‘norm’, which it then calls ‘a national tradition’. Aggressive homophobia rises up from the depths of the patriarchal consciousness to meet it. In this way homophobic fascism is born.

This is exactly what it is: fascism. These ‘spiritual bindings’, which President Putin loves to talk about, tie together the lictor’s bundle, the fasces, from which the word ‘fascism’ comes. Fascism always appeals to biology, to the primacy of birth, blood and soil; it is no coincidence that the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, considered homosexuality ‘the syndrome of a dying people’. Homophobia becomes the focal point for national self-awareness. It relies on masculine stereotypes, which are written about in folklore, jokes and swearing, and on rituals of initiation and stigmatization in school, the army and prison. What’s more, homophobic fascism is simple and convenient for the state, because it is not aimed at a particular group on national or race lines (at least the Caucasian people can fight back) but against a defenceless minority with no voice in society. Virtually no one will stand up for homosexuals in Russia, unlike human rights activists in the West. In Russia, sexual minorities are the ideal target for hatred, just like the Jews were in the Third Reich.

Homophobia is an anti-Western and anti-globalist idea: it seeks out internal enemies from amongst its own, be they paedophiles, gays or ‘foreign agents’. The insult ‘liberast’, a corruption of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘pederast’, shows that in Russia homosexuality is associated solely with the liberal West, which is mired in tolerance, same-sex marriages and debauchery; conservative and Orthodox activists insist in all seriousness that in the West paedophilia and incest are actively encouraged. Such hysteria demonstrates an embittered, alienated and provincial consciousness, one that is unable to adapt to the post-industrial and post-patriarchal world, in which producing children is no longer considered to be man’s principal task. It is a consciousness that finds itself lost before a multicoloured contemporaneity, just like our principal homophobe, Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov, who was shocked when the highly genial Stephen Fry dropped in on him. Homophobia is a characteristic of weak people who are uncertain of their own orientation, and who are afraid of losing what they are sure of when they first come up against reality. The weaker the country and its identity, the more fiercely homophobic it is.

This is exactly why Russia desperately needs an injection of tolerance in order to defend and publicize the rights of sexual minorities. One often hears that ‘sexual orientation is a private matter, let them carry out their sexual preferences at home, among their friends, and not bring it out in public’. But a call for ‘closet homosexuality’ is false at its very root. In the same way, you could say that Jewishness is a private matter: they should just sit at home, not go to their synagogues or wear their kippahs on the streets, because this annoys normal citizens and is opposed to Russian national traditions and foundations. After the Holocaust, Jewishness is no longer a private matter for Jews, but a subject of public policy. Analogous to this, the Russian state was the one that made sexual orientation a public matter, taking away homosexuals’ human rights, from the right to create a family to the right of self-expression, and thus the answer to this discrimination should be public and political.

As Michel Foucault taught, a person’s sexuality remains one of the last bastions of freedom and also one of the main targets for repression; and the battle takes place on the territory of the sovereignty of the individual. Russia is in desperate need of collective therapy: people coming out; gay parades; a battle for full citizens’ rights for homosexuals, from same-sex marriages to the right to adopt children. Support for sexual minorities is not easy: people may sympathize with them, but they won’t speak out openly for fear of being marked out as one of them. But it is important to understand that this is where fascism makes itself most apparent, supported by the whole weight of the legislative, law enforcement and propaganda machine. And that’s why each of us must go through a test for homophobia in our own souls: these days examining our own feelings about citizenship and humanity is as important as it once was in terms of antisemitism.

THE ‘MISS PRISON’ CONTEST

Another notable chapter has been written in the annals of Russian judicial practice. The Supreme Court of the Republic of Mordovia refused to grant Nadezhda Tolokonnikova early release from prison. Nadezhda is a member of the feminist protest rock group Pussy Riot, and was sentenced to two years’ detention for singing a punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. She was refused early release for a curious reason: the court deemed her unworthy of such clemency because she had refused to take part in the ‘Miss Charming’ beauty contest that was held in correctional colony No. 14 in Mordovia, and therefore they could not say that her behaviour in the colony had been exemplary.

Nadezhda refused to take part in the beauty contest not as a protest against the rules of the camp, but because she was taking a principled civil position. As an activist in a feminist group, she cannot by conviction take part in a sexist ritual dreamt up by a patriarchal society; it would be like asking a vegan to join in a barbeque. In her deposition to the court, Nadezhda said that her aesthetic values would not allow her to participate in such a competition. This is the very same reason given by another dissident, the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, half a century ago when he had a ‘stylistic disagreement’ with the Soviet state.[10]

Feminists the world over should applaud the Mordovian court for uncovering the truth: it actually acknowledged that women were obliged to take part in the beauty contest, and that a refusal to do so would bring disciplinary sanctions. According to this logic, the whole world is one big women’s prison colony, in the middle of which there stands a catwalk on which the entrapped women are required to show off their charms so as not to be penalized. In a patriarchal and sexist society, a woman is imprisoned in her own body from the very beginning, in a cage of social norms and male expectations. She is controlled far more than a man is by the discipline of her body, the dictates of physiology and the battle with age. Throughout her whole life, a woman has to walk a particular line; and beauty contests simply take to extremes the stereotypes of gender slavery.

Criticism of beauty contests has been growing around the world as being one of the more odious institutions of the patriarchal society, a symbol of exploitation, standardization and commodification of the female body; and it’s not just feminists or left-wingers who protest about this. Even organizers of beauty contests themselves have been trying to adapt to the new mood, doing away with the line-up in bikinis, as the Miss World competition has done. Another approach has been for the women taking part to answer questions to show how bright they are. The supposed value of these tests was shown up by the Mrs Russia competition in 2012. In conversation with a correspondent from Russian television, Inna Zhirkova, wife of the footballer Yury Zhirkov, failed to answer the simplest of questions: ‘Does the Earth go round the Sun, or the Sun go round the Earth?’; ‘Who composed the Ogiński polonaise?’; and ‘Who is Agniya Barto?’ (a well-known Russian children’s poet). She also admitted that she had never done a day’s work in her whole life. Following the public outcry following this test, Mrs Zhirkova refused to accept her crown.

Of course, most people in Russia aren’t bothered about the ethics of beauty contests. This is a country that adopts laws regulating people’s private lives and enforcing heterosexual ‘normality’. It’s a country where, for a significant part of the female population, the indicator of a successful life is a good marriage. In such a country, beauty contests are a way for a girl to climb the social ladder; they are considered the norm, and an example of how a girl should behave. A Russian girl’s dress code is clearly laid out on the catwalk: long, flowing hair, a nice dress, high heels and expensive make-up are still considered the measure of femininity; and if a man has a wife who’s a model, he’s thought to be a success.

In October 2013, Russia hosted the Miss Universe contest. This was run by Donald Trump, who is renowned for his weakness for tastelessness and kitsch, and it was held at that bastion of Russian glamour, the Crocus-City exhibition centre. The organizers and sponsors were unaware that the real Miss Russia hadn’t been able to appear in the spotlights of their competition, wearing a tight dress and with her mascara running down her cheeks. She was working as a seamstress in a prison colony in Mordovia. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova won her crown not in a prison beauty contest or on the catwalk, but in a cage in the Khamovinchesky Court,[11] where she was sentenced to two years in a labour camp; she accepted her sentence simply and with dignity. But the jury of a beauty contest wouldn’t be able to understand that.

BREAKING ‘THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS’

In the summer of 2016, Russian society experienced a totally unexpected show of collective psychotherapy; and society is still trying to come to terms with what happened. Following the English language flash mob #MeToo, there appeared in Russian social media a flash mob called #yaNyeBoyusSkazat, (‘I’m not afraid to speak out’). This became the largest ‘coming out’ in Russian history. Thousands of women shared their memories of the violence that they had suffered at the hands of men – rape, beatings, harassment, stalking and humiliation. Most of these stories were being heard for the first time, because these women were scared of sharing their experiences even with those closest to them, afraid of being judged, stigmatized or labelled as a victim; but thanks to the strength and solidarity of social media, for the first time in their lives they were able to speak about their trauma.

This prompted an explosion of comment: there was a strong and widespread reaction against this unasked for, unexpected and frightening truth. Thousands of social media users, men and women, greeted these revelations with ridicule, calling it ‘public striptease’, suspecting that it was all PR or some kind of provocation, making fun of the ‘erotic fantasies’ of these women, or hypocritically fearing for their mental health. Two visions of hell met in this flash mob: the women’s hell of pain, fear and a lack of understanding, and the hell of male chauvinism evident in these comments. But these are two sides of the same coin; two rooms in one hell; two articles of our main social agreement: on the one hand, violence as the norm in our life and the main bond of society, and, on the other, ‘the silence of the lambs’, as the unspoken recognition of the right to violence.

No, this was not a ‘war of the sexes’, nor was it a display of feminist propaganda. Society wasn’t split into men and women, nor divided between the violators and the victims. The division was between those who see violence as the normal way of sorting out relations in society, and those who oppose it and are prepared openly to speak about this. This flash mob, started by women, about women and for women, had taken the lid off the microphysics of power in Russian society: there is a source code of violence at the heart of the Russian matrix.

Violence starts in the family with a tradition blessed by the Church of the practice of corporal punishment (‘the sensible and measured use by loving parents of physical punishment in the upbringing of their child’, as the Patriarchal Commission on Matters of the Family, Motherhood and Childhood puts it). This then continues in kindergarten, school, youth camp and hospital – in other words, all the disciplining institutions of society – as one of the principal methods of socialization. The main institution for educating by violence is the army, where dedovshchina (hazing), the humiliation of junior soldiers by their elders, is a key element for teaching soldiers, even more important than military training.[12] It instils in the new conscript the sense of the hierarchy in the barrack block and of the unquestioned pecking order, and it’s no surprise that no one tries seriously to do anything to stop it. It’s worth pointing out here that men are also the objects of violence, but their stories are even more deeply buried than those of the women. It is much more difficult for the so-called stronger sex to acknowledge publicly their personal traumas and humiliations, so as not to be known as a victim.

But the most widespread evil, which seems everyday and banal, is sexual violence. The flash mob uncovered the universal and routine nature of this phenomenon. According to psychologist Ludmila Petranovskaya, in Russia ‘at least one in two women has had the experience in her life of either being raped or suffering attempted rape (it was interrupted or something stopped it), and just about all of them, with very rare exceptions, have been subjected to some kind of sexual abuse (harassment, groping or sexual threats)’. What’s more, if in public there is some semblance of normality in relations between men and women, behind closed doors at home these rules do not apply and a genuine war begins: 40 per cent of all serious crimes are carried out within the family. Between 12,000 and 14,000 women die in Russia every year as a result of domestic violence – that’s one murder every forty minutes. And those are just the official statistics: how many deaths are covered up by the police as ‘serious heart problems’? How many beatings go unrecorded or simply not mentioned to anyone?

Like dedovshchina in the army, these violent practices are neither an exception nor excessive nor ‘non-statutory relations’; they are actually part of the ‘statute’, the ruling patriarchal norm, which determines that the strongest lays down the law and sets the hierarchy of people and status. For a man it is important to be the conqueror, the subjugator, to take what is yours by force – this is how you raise your self-esteem and earn the respect of others. The ability to demonstrate your strength is part of the behaviour of ‘the normal bloke’ (muzhik): in your speech (the ability to use threats and insults); in all-male company, especially in the way you behave on the road (this is where the cult of the big car comes from, driving like a bully, and punishing anyone who upsets you); and, of course, in relations with women. In its concentrated form, the logic of force is expressed in a prison subculture, which in contemporary Russia has moved from being on the margins to being dominant. It becomes vitally important to bend the person to your will, to humiliate sexually the object of your power relations in order to establish the social order.

But that same code of the rule of the strongest, that unspoken agreement based on violence and silence, operates in politics, too. Recognizing the ‘natural’ right of man over woman, we must also recognize the right of the state over our bodies: the right of the authorities to falsify the results of elections; the right of the police to beat and torture suspects; the right of the courts to hand down unjust sentences; the right of Russia to annex Crimea from a defenceless Ukraine and without any justification to bomb Syrian towns simply to satisfy the geopolitical ambitions of our leader. It is exactly the same mechanism of power and the re-establishment of the hierarchy: when you recognize the right of a man to take a woman by force, you should also be ready to accept that the police can do with you as they wish with a champagne bottle or the shaft of a spade; this is two sides of the same biopower.

Russian power is extremely archaic and physiological: it is based not on the mechanisms of a rational system, nor even on the faceless machines of Weberian bureaucracy, but on direct physical contact, on dealing with people’s bodies by force. In order to prove the right to power in Russia, acts of excessive violence are essential, such as the demonstrative murder of farmers by the crooks who were terrorizing them in the village of Kushchevskaya in the Krasnodar Region in 2010; the torture of suspects in the Dalny police station in Kazan, which became public in 2012; the murder of the opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, in Moscow in 2015; burning down the houses of suspected terrorists in Chechnya; the demonstrative destruction of sanctioned foodstuffs… It is no coincidence that at the head of the state stands an ‘alpha male’, who has legitimized the cult of strength, starting with physiological half-naked photo sessions, right through to the use of force against opposition and against neighbouring countries; a leader whose lexicon and arguments (‘the weak get beaten’, ‘get in the first punch’) come straight out of criminal rituals of demonstrating brute force. This is why, behind the patriarchal gender models revealed so clearly by the flash mob, there is the whole archaic matrix of Russian power, carried out by ‘blokes’.

And if male violence is not a private matter, but, rather, the universal law of the state, then the protest against it is also not a private matter, but a political one. This is about the ‘de-automatization’ of violence, about acknowledging that force is not a legitimate instrument, about breaking out of the vicious circle of violence and silence. This circle can be opened up in the first place by speaking out: by publicly announcing her pain, by speaking about her trauma, a woman can find her voice and the right to her memories. And along with it, political subjectivity.

And once again we are talking here not only about women, about their pain and fear and humiliation. The problem is that we are totally unable to speak about trauma – for example, about the legacy of Stalin’s repressions. We are unable to work through traumas in our recent history – the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the painful transition of the 1990s… The hysterical reaction to the women’s flash mob can be compared to the inability in contemporary Russia to cope with the documentary stories (not to mention the Nobel Prize awarded for them) of the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. People in Russia are unable to speak in public about the problem of cancer, or AIDS, or disability; and after the passing of homophobic laws the subject of homosexuality has become an even more taboo and repressed subject. Such forbidden topics are typical of an undeveloped mass consciousness – just as the state governs us with the help of archaic rituals of physical violence, so the mass consciousness reacts as primitive magic would have done: if you don’t talk about a problem, it simply disappears and apparently resolves itself.

But nothing will change by itself. By speaking out about their trauma, women are making the first step towards overcoming the conspiracy of silence. Russia is a country trying to catch up with modernization and, as usual, it is about forty or fifty years behind the discussions of emancipation that Western society went through in the 1970s and 1980s, when they worked out the rituals of political correctness and guarantees of the defence against sexism and harassment, which we are so used to laughing at. Russia is going to have to go through the same ‘sentimental education’, shedding the myths about the submissive ‘Russian woman’ and daring ‘real bloke’, ‘the hussar’, and the practice of gender violence, which have built up over centuries. Today this may seem unimaginable; but the ice has started to crack. In the small space of social networks and the media, the first step towards freedom has been taken – not just to liberate women from fear and the dictatorship of men, but to free us all from the practice of social and state violence that has hung over Russian history like an age-old curse. We must return the right to memory and the right to speak out: two things that distinguish the free man from the slave. As so often happens, these courageous women with their personal stories have shown themselves to be in the forefront of a social movement, and it is already too late to hide or forget their uncomfortable truth.

THE POLITICS OF THE FEMALE BODY

Unexpectedly for many, political life in Russia has moved into the area of the female anatomy – not in a metaphorical sense, but in the most direct way. The liveliest discussions taking place now are not about Ukraine or Syria and not even about the next Duma elections, but about the womb and the clitoris; about female genital mutilation in the North Caucasus; about the new children’s ombudsman, who is actively fighting against abortion; about the age of consent; and about the schoolgirls who were seduced in School No. 57 in Moscow.

Everything began with a declaration by the Chairman of the Muslim Coordination Centre of the North Caucasus, Ismail Berdiev, who explained the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation in the remote villages of Dagestan as a desire to ‘calm women down’: ‘Women do not lose the ability to give birth. But there will be less debauchery.’ In the discussions that followed, Orthodox fundamentalists supported the Islamic cleric. At their head was Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who declared his sympathy for the mufti on the matter of ‘this feminist howling’.

Discussions about the details of the female anatomy became stronger with the appointment of the new children’s ombudsman Anna Kuznetsova. Journalists quickly uncovered a declaration by Kuznetsova – the wife of a priest and mother of six children – in which she supported the pseudo-science of ‘telegony’, which maintains that the cells of the womb have ‘an information-wave memory’, and when a woman has a number of partners this leads to ‘confused information’, which affects ‘the moral basis of the future child’. The ombudsman’s posts on social media show her to be a conservative Orthodox believer: she is against abortion, surrogate motherhood, vaccinations for children and even ultrasound examination, which she describes as ‘a paid-for mutation’ that will ruin the health of the patient in ten to fifteen years. ‘It’s no wonder that the Old Believers hide their children away in Siberian villages’, she writes on her page in the VKontakte social network.

As well as this, Anna Kuznetsova’s charity foundation, Pokrov (named after the Protective veil of the Virgin) speaks to women who have decided to have an abortion and tries to persuade them not to do it; in other words, the foundation tries to get doctors to go against their professional ethics, and even the law, by telling them they should come up with reasons why they should refuse the patient what she is guaranteed by state medical help, thus frightening and manipulating women. The sociologist, Ella Paneyakh, who has studied the activities of the foundation, describes its behaviour as ‘reproductive violence’.

Now we come at last to the scandal of Moscow School No. 57, where a history teacher (and, more than likely, not just he alone) over the course of many years had been sleeping with his schoolgirls. So as to avoid publicity and scandal, this fact had been covered up by the girls, their parents, the school administration and even the media, which had started to investigate on a number of occasions, but had dropped the case soon afterwards. The matter came to light only thanks to a post on Facebook from a girl who was a former pupil of the school, the journalist Ekaterina Krongauz, which led to an absolute avalanche of similar stories about this and other schools. It is worth pointing out that this wave happened against the background of another, which had already gripped Russian and Ukrainian social networks. This was the flash-mob #yaNyeBoyusSkazat, (‘I’m not afraid to speak out’; see above, ‘Breaking “The Silence of the Lambs”’), in which thousands of women for the first time in their lives spoke out about their experience of sexual violence, humiliation and harassment. The revelations by these women – from battered wives to schoolgirls who had been seduced by their teacher – was a real eye-opener for the Russian mass consciousness; not because people learnt anything new, but because the taboo on speaking out about such matters had been shattered.

The way in which public speech has drifted towards sexuality, physiology and even anatomy shows how the battle for the body in society’s perception has turned around. It is here, and not in the imaginary struggle against NATO, nor on the Russo-Ukrainian border, that we find the frontline in the battle for ‘the Russian World’; it is the line where the citizen faces up to the state. The attack unravels by the conservative, Orthodox forces, behind which stands the authoritarian figure of Putin’s spiritual adviser, Bishop Tikhon, whom some are now calling a modern-day Rasputin because of the level of his influence on the affairs of state. They say that it was he who lobbied for the appointment of Kuznetsova as the children’s ombudsman.

More importantly, though, is that it is not just a case of a few notable individuals, but rather that towards the end of Putin’s third term there was the formation of a new consensus with a particular view of the world; a new profile of power in which the pragmatic, Westernizing technocrats, such as the former Minister of Education Dmitry Livanov, were being replaced with the ‘correct’ sort of fighters on the ideological front, whose ideas are rooted in Orthodoxy. In this profile we find the new Human Rights’ Commissioner, Tatyana Moskalkova, who suggested after the action by Pussy Riot in the Cathedral that a new law be brought onto the statute book on ‘attacking morality’; and Anna Kuznetsova with her ‘telegony’; and the new Head of the Presidential Administration, Anton Vayno, with his fascinating ‘nooscope’ apparatus, for ‘studying mankind’s collective consciousness’ and ‘the registration of the unseen’.

These are all products of the past decade, fruits of the crisis in scientific knowledge and the new cultural condition of society, where on our TV screens ‘Word of the Preacher’ competes for ratings with ‘Battle of the Psychics’; where priests bless spacecraft and astrologers discuss pregnancy with gynaecologists. A post-secular world is developing in Russia with the anti-modernist agenda of a new Middle Ages. Apparently, this is what sets the ideological tone after the 2018 presidential elections, to ensure the loyalty of the elite and social stability in a time of economic crisis and the transit of power. Here we have a parallel with the collapse of various empires, be it the Roman or the Byzantine, when all sorts of sects and Gnostic teachings sprang up; or the Russian Empire on the eve of the First World War, the time of the ‘wise man’ Grigory Rasputin, the favourite of the Empress; or the Third Reich, with its occult organization, the Ahnenerbe, and its searches for Shambhala in the Antarctic. As all great empires have declined, people have sought solace in mysticism.

Coming to meet this anti-modernist wave is a growing civil wave of a totally different hue, characterized best of all by the ‘I’m not afraid to speak out’ flash mob and the revelations of the girls of School No. 57 – a spontaneous modernizing network, linked by both freedom of expression and the removal of taboos. Thanks to social networks, people are breaking the ages-old vow of silence and coming out with their personal stories, which tear away the authority of the principal patriarchal institutes: the family and the school, and the orders of closed groups (be they a clan of relatives or an elite educational institution). They are throwing down a challenge to power, which is much stronger than the state Leviathan. This is the power of tradition, written into the very grammar of the language, in the fear to violate spoken etiquette, in the judgement of the collective (‘everyone does it like this’; ‘there was no need to be provocative’; ‘don’t wash your dirty linen in public’; ‘the most important thing is to preserve the school (or the family)’). All these figures of speech preserve the patriarchal contract even more strongly than the OMON riot police and the Church – and it is against them that these first flash mobs are rebelling. Their language is that of the body: the body is speaking about its independence, its maturity, pain and fear; about the right to choose and the right to speak out.

There is a political logic in this. Where you have an authoritarian regime that has completely cleared the political field, the body becomes the frontline in the battle between the individual and the state. The body is the final frontier, which the state still cannot take over completely in the way that it can take political and civil freedoms. The anatomical protest becomes the answer to the state’s biopolitics; and in this sense the symbol, slogan and brand of this new era of political protest has become the name ‘Pussy Riot’ – literally the uprising of the female being.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that political discussions in Russia revolve around ‘female’ themes. Historically, it is the female body that has been much more repressed, marked out and objectivized than the male body, and today it is the female body (even more precisely, its reproductive organs as the receptacle for the traditional idea of the role of woman as a machine for bearing children) that has become the arena for the battle between the biopolitics of power and the biopolitical protest of the individual. It is here that the gender gesture becomes a civil and a political statement. In essence, it is a battle for sovereignty and for what we understand by this word: the sovereignty of a patriarchal state symbolized by the ritual carrying of a phallic symbol – the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile along the streets of Moscow during military parades – or the sovereignty of the individual, which is born out of Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche – the eternal female depths.

A FOUR-BY-FOUR AS A TEACHING AID

A new bizarre moral dispute is taking place in Russia: this time, everyone’s arguing over whether a driver, Vladimir Belsky, from the town of Priozersk in the Leningrad Region, was right to chase down in his four-by-four a group of boys who had fired plastic balls at his car. He knocked down one of them, ten-year-old Vanya Shchegolyov, then made him kneel while he waited for the police to arrive, before handing him over to them. Didn’t he go a little over the top in teaching the boy a lesson (it turned out that the lad had concussion from falling on the road and later lost consciousness)? Wouldn’t it have been better to punish the parents for allowing their child to play on the road? What about the school?

Everything in this story reads like some kind of grotesque fantasy; yet it is all so familiar. Children playing on the dirty spring road after school. A nasty driver in a four-wheel drive, who knocks over a child and then forces him to kneel for half an hour, crying, until the police arrive. The police, who interrogate the boy and then take him back to his parents – but don’t say a word about the fact that he’s been knocked down. But most surprising of all were all the comments on social media supporting – no, not the boy! – but the driver, for giving the lad a good lesson that you should never damage someone else’s property and that you have to answer for your actions.

Russians’ pathological fetishism for their cars is well known. People put their own personality into their vehicles, as well as their own privacy (hence the desire for darkened windows, even though the Russian climate isn’t exactly spoilt by too much sunshine). They invest them with their own rights, notably that you can’t violate my individuality. The car – especially if it’s a black four-by-four – is an extension of the Russian’s own body; it is sacred and unpredictable, and anyone encroaching on this body must be swiftly and demonstratively punished. This leads to hysterical reaction to any wear and tear or chipped paintwork, which in turn leads to aggressive behaviour while sorting out any incident on the road, and to traffic jams stretching back kilometres because two drivers have stopped in the middle of the road to argue over a tiny scratch.

Russians accept violence against their person far more readily: crushes on public transport or in queues; the inability to maintain a distance during a conversation and respect the other’s personal space; drunken brawls and beatings at the hands of the police; assault and battery in the home – all of this is the norm in a society where all social transactions are defined by brute force. But people won’t tolerate anything that harms their car or even the space around it. Recently, when I was parking on a Moscow street, I came close to the car behind me, and was subjected to an aggressive shout from the driver who was sitting in the car: ‘And how am I supposed to get out?’ This despite the fact that behind him was an empty space of nearly a metre; but he took anyone coming close to his vehicle as a threat.

What we have here is a transfer of the principle of habeas corpus from the individual to the vehicle. The car becomes the carrier of the citizen’s body not only as a marker of identity and the uncrossable line where they mustn’t be touched, but as an instrument of aggression, giving greater possibilities or else compensating for the shortcomings and complexes of its owner. When you buy these extra kilogrammes of metal and horse-power (and it’s crucial that you have a foreign four-wheel drive; it’s possible that the incident in Priozersk could have happened with a small Russian-made car, but it is far less likely), the owner receives extra rights along with the car, including the right to be aggressive. In Russian traffic there is a strict hierarchy of vehicles, based on their cost, the size of the engine, the size of the car, the colour, the number plates and, of course, the flashing light on the roof – the special blue light given to representatives of the organs of power. In such a hierarchy, a small boy who dares to raise his hand against the black four-by-four of a local businessman deserves a suitable punishment; and according to this logic, the driver is behaving correctly – going after him over the grass, knocking down the young hooligan, making him kneel and calling the police. Everything, in fact, like in a real gangster film.

The deliberate chasing after the child; the concussion; the horror and the humiliation that he experienced; being made to kneel in the slush for half an hour; the terror of being interrogated by the police – in a word, the trauma of all this, which could affect him for the rest of his life, all comes from the vicious lessons of the street, repeating the eternal models of power and violence in the Russian space. I remember when I was about nine years old, in the blissful 1970s, I was playing near our house in Moscow. I’d just made a snowman and was throwing snowballs at it. Accidentally, one of them hit a passing car. Out jumped a guy and came straight at me and hit me in the face. He broke my nose and cut my lip. Then he swore at me and drove off. Somewhere in the far-off and decaying United States he could have been given twenty years for that; but in Russia that’s called acting like a man. I put some fresh snow on my nose, stopped the bleeding, and went home blubbing. In such cases, nothing changes in Russia. The law that was recently passed in the Duma decriminalizing domestic violence in Russia, which has already been criticized by the European Union, is a tribute to the archaic patriarchal traditions of male domination and an upbringing which humiliates and destroys women, children and anyone who is weak.

But there is another side to the story in Priozersk. The children were firing plastic balls from a toy rifle, imitating the computer game ‘Grand Theft Auto’ (GTA), which is based on street battles. The problem here is that in the education of Russian children the cult of the weapon and the glorification of war have not been thought through and no one doubts the need for it. The multiplicity of toy guns and computer shooting games; children’s beds that look like tanks; morning exercises in kindergarten, where the children wear military hats and tops with pretend medals on them; and the main thing, when the toy guns are replaced by real ones, taking children through their teenage years – in school, at firing ranges, in lessons of military training and security issues; and then on to the conscription process and into the army. The necessity for the whole male population to be able to use a gun is a controversial topic that deserves wider discussion; but at least they could instil into the minds of a young man or a girl from their school lessons on military training and the initial training unit that what they have in their hands is a deadly weapon. For young children, holding a rifle in their hands means no more than holding a rattle or a magic wand, for which they have been taught no responsibility whatsoever.

Here we must question the whole system of symbolic violence, through which any person is socialized, but especially a small boy from whom society demands that he ‘becomes a man’. Shooting ranges and the biathlon have become the paramilitary fun of an era of mass armies; and paintball, an outlet for modern workers slaving away in offices. But these popular amusements actually legitimize weapons and the point of these weapons, which is to penetrate, to harm and to kill. It is no coincidence that many educational systems, such as the Waldorf System, carefully protect children from any kind of weapons, from the very concept of taking in your hands something that could – even in a pretend way – cause pain or death to any living creature. When someone plays with a rifle, they develop the idea of the rights of the strong man. And when they grow up, they can easily get behind the wheel of a black four-by-four and start to crush everything around them, from the grass to small cars.

None of this, of course, justifies the actions of the driver from Priozersk, nor does it lessen the sympathy for the child, whatever he was playing. It is simply that in this incident on the dirty Russian roadside there was a short circuit, something that brought together the circle of violence, which includes children’s games with weapons, our military-patriotic education, beatings in the family and the aggression of drivers. The subject of ‘shooting games’ like GTA has come off the computer screen onto the street. And just the same sort of scenes from another shooting-game, ‘World of Tanks’, has burst out onto the streets of towns in Ukraine, with Russian tanks in the Donbass. Because symbolic and pretend violence sooner or later turns real and deadly.

A RUSSIAN POTLATCH

In the summer of 2015, in the twenty-fifth year of Russia’s independence and the second year of the embargo on foodstuffs (a ban on bringing into the country products from countries carrying out economic sanctions against Russia), our country strengthened its sovereignty by the demonstrative destruction of sanctioned products. Thousands of tons of European cheese, fruits and meat products were cast into the fires of mobile crematoria or crushed by bulldozers. The very pinnacle of this struggle for sovereignty was the destruction by a bulldozer of the carcasses of three frozen Hungarian geese in Tatarstan. The film-clip of this immediately went viral.

This media spectacle was an instant success. No one could be indifferent to the spectacle of burning cheese and crushed fruits. It really touched a nerve; it appealed to the genetic memory of a nation that throughout history has frequently gone hungry. From a political point of view, this action achieved the maximum effect. We saw the energetic young customs officer reporting on what he was doing; we heard television commentators obediently blaming the destruction of the products on a Western virus that would be a threat to the health of the nation. Meanwhile, Russian Facebook was indignant about the amoral destruction of food and began to gather signatures for a petition to say that it should be given to needy citizens – this at the same time as these same citizens were gathering up the squashed peaches in order to turn them into home-made vodka or samogon.

In fact, this has nothing to do with food safety in Russia, nor the effectiveness of the embargo, nor EU farmers. ‘The forbidden fruit’ still found its way to the shelves, and most likely will continue to do so through a third country, taxed by an even higher corruption fee. Salmon and oysters will still appear for sale from that great seafaring power, Belarus. The European Union did not suffer either: in the year of the Russian embargo, exports of foodstuffs from the EU rose by 5 per cent, thanks to increased sales to China and the USA. The bonfires of the product inquisition will soon die away, the customs and supervisory officials will also cool off and find new ways to extract corrupt dues, and the media will obediently turn to attacking new enemies. Why was this whole circus necessary?

This is just symbolic politics, or, to put it more simply, trolling. Trolling of the West; trolling of the Russian opposition, which protested, as they knew they would; and a way of frightening retailers, who in the course of the year had already found a multitude of loopholes to get round the sanctions. The state has been carrying out widespread trolling for a number of years already: the Kremlin bots from the ‘Troll Factory’ in Olgino in St Petersburg are simply a caricature of state policy. With the absence of any political will and strategic thinking, and with a shrinking resource base, trolling represents the thoughts and the main method of state policy; the real Olgino is situated in the Kremlin and in the home of the State Duma on Okhotny Ryad. There is nothing behind this but a desire to muddle public discussion, to provoke the opponent (or the opposition) and to throw disruptive ideas into the political field.

There is a fundamental weakness at the root of the Kremlin’s trolling: because the state is unable to cope with the challenges of the outside world, or even with its own society, it puts all its efforts into propaganda and the creation of information ‘bombs’. It creates a constant flow of information in the media, trying to have a finger in every pie, just like the troll who joins an online forum in order to break up a serious discussion. Russia is unable to oppose the West in a military sense, so instead it rolls out its Topol-M intercontinental missile in parades, flies its ageing Tu-95 strategic bombers and encourages conversations about ‘radioactive ash’ – like TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, who was threatening the nuclear annihilation of the United States. Its unsubtle nuclear trolling makes it look like North Korea. It carries out similar trolling in Europe, secretly financing the most odious and marginal allies, from right-wing radicals to separatists, in an attempt to sow discord among Western societies and politics.

Not wishing to give orphans or disabled children a decent life in Russia, the state bans foreigners from adopting them, condemning many of these children to death, shocking the West and openly trolling the opposition and human rights activists. And lastly, unable to change the situation on the food market, to halt inflation and supply products to take the place of those no longer being imported, the state orders the destruction of sanctioned foodstuffs, creating the maximum media effect, which is aimed at the West, business and their own population. This changes absolutely nothing. The state looks like some kind of primitive native, performing a ritual dance wearing war paint, crying out, rolling its eyes and beating itself, under the astonished gaze of European tourists. It is no coincidence that the German magazine, Der Spiegel, placed Russia’s action of destroying food on a par with the behaviour of Somali extremists, who burnt foreign products, or the radicals of Islamic State, who destroyed American humanitarian aid parcels dropped in by parachute.

From an anthropological point of view, burning food does indeed have much in common with the traditions of primitive tribes, notably with the Potlatch of the North American Indians. This was a traditional tribal festival, in the course of which, as a demonstration of the ambitions and power of the leader, property was handed out or destroyed without any plan, which sometimes caused irreparable damage to the whole tribe. In order to demonstrate the greatness of the leader and his disdain for wealth, they gave away, threw into the sea or burnt skins, blankets, furs, boats and wigwams, kitchen implements and food reserves. For some time after the Potlatch, the tribe appeared to be on the brink of ruination, which was why such a festival was remembered for years, legends grew about it and were handed down to the children.

The Kremlin is following exactly the same logic of the Potlatch. The first sacrifice was of sick children. Next was the Russian rouble and the prospects of economic growth. Finally, sanctioned foodstuffs were cast into the sacred hecatomb. All this, apparently, has been done to demonstrate the greatness and sovereignty of Russia, its special path, fortitude and disdain for material values.

The French writer and philosopher, Georges Bataille, has called the Potlatch a political and economic expenditure, which is the opposite of the economy of consumption and accumulation. It is a particular religious action that crosses borders and prohibitions, an ecstatic spectacle of death, like the corrida. We are reminded about our own frailties and about the moment when man finally casts off his material shell. In contemporary Russia, the demonstrative destruction of food products is a move from the conspicuous consumption of the oil era to the demonstrative destruction of the post-Crimea era. Being unable to change the world, Russia is trying to frighten it: it is calling up the spirits of the past, digging out the tomahawks and painting its face with mud. It is burning cheese, crushing the carcases of geese and waving its missile at the world.

All we need to do now is wait for the anthropologists.

A REQUIEM FOR ROQUEFORT

Among the losses of recent years – the free press, fair elections, an independent court – what has hurt especially has been the disappearance of good cheese. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities’; and right now, most of all, we have a shortage of luxuries. Going into the supermarket, I plan my route so that I don’t inadvertently walk past the shelves holding Russian-made cheese, because the bright packaging with the pseudo-European names brings on mild signs of nausea: ‘Maasdamer’, ‘Gruntaler’, ‘Berglander’. And underneath this colourful packaging are concealed tasteless blocks, which are a mix of soap, plastic and the Russian national product – palm oil. If you wanted to point out one place to illustrate the fantastic failure of the policy of import substitution, then look no further than the cheese shelves.

This is reminiscent of the writer Vladimir Sorokin, a visionary genius, who foresaw it in his anti-utopian novel, Day of the Oprichnik. In a totalitarian future in Russia, all foreign supermarkets have been closed down and in their place stand Russian kiosks, in which there are just two types of each item: ‘Russia’ brand cheap papirosi cigarettes and ‘Motherland’ (Rodina) cigarettes; Rzhanaya (rye) vodka and Pshenichnaya (wheat) vodka; white bread and dark bread; apple jam and plum jam – ‘Because our God-bearing people should choose from two things, not from three or thirty-three.’ The only product of which there is but one type is cheese – Russian, and the oprichnik, the officer of the security services, struggles in vain to come to terms with the deep and meaningful thought: ‘Why is it that all the goods are in pairs, like the beasts on Noah’s Ark, but there’s only one kind of cheese, Russian?’[13]

There is a logic to the Russian state’s war on cheese, which is understandable and culturally determined. For the state, cheese is a marker of the dangerous Other, a symbol of the decaying West. It is the rot and the mould of that fluid urban class, which, having travelled around Europe, has come to think too highly of itself and demanded not only cheese but also honest elections; and these people went out onto the streets in December 2011, on Chistoprudny Boulevard and Bolotnaya Square, protesting about the falsified elections for the Duma. There is a direct route from ‘Maasdam’ cheese to ‘Maidan’, as the Ukrainian Revolution was called, and evil must be destroyed at its root – at the customs border of the Russian Federation.

If we analyse this, quality European cheese belongs in the territory of the sensible middle class, because it falls into the category of democratic, affordable refinement. Cheese is not one of those luxuries that can be shown off, like Louboutin shoes and lobsters, Breguet watches and Bugatti cars. Russian sales in this particular consumer market have not fallen off in the time of sanctions. Parking his Porsche Cayenne outside the shabby entrance to his crumbling Soviet-era block of flats and buying foie gras and XO cognac to enjoy in his tiny eight-square-metre kitchen, the Russian man can feel that he is taking part in the cargo-cult of the consumer, that he is in communion with civilization: but he has not become a part of it. But a piece of French brie, a bottle of Italian chianti and a warm baguette in a paper bag from a local bakery drew him close to Western values and were acts of social modernization.

Removing cheese from this formula broke the model of consumption, and, in exactly the same way actually, it showed that there was no demand for it in Putin’s model of the redistribution of raw materials and the whole ephemeral post-Soviet ‘middle class’. Striking against cheese was equivalent to carrying out a strike against the quasi-Western idea of normality and bourgeois values, and a return to the strict Russian archetype: for the Russian it is kolbasa, salami-type sausage, that is symbolically valuable, while cheese is simply urban capriciousness, because you don’t follow a shot of vodka with a piece of cheese. So in this sense cheese underlines the narrow dividing line between Russian tradition and our superficial Westernization.

Here we have to state the obvious, sad though it is. Despite multiple attempts to establish a culture of cheese production in Russia’s vast expanses and poor soils, from Peter the Great through to Stalin’s Head of Food Production, Anastas Mikoyan, and today’s heroic Russian dairy farmers, cheese remains a product that is alien to the Russian soul. Its lifecycle is too long for Russian history and everyday life in the country. Like wine and olive oil, cheese is the product of a stable culture. Roquefort has been made since the eleventh century; Gruyère and Cheshire cheese since the twelfth; Parmesan, Gorgonzola, Taleggio and Pecorino since the fourteenth. But it’s less a question of the length of the tradition than it is the time it takes for the cheese to mature: thirty-six months for Parmesan; five to six years for mature Gouda. For cheese to able to spend such a long time maturing, you need political and social stability, guarantees of the rights of ownership, credit and a steady demand. Cheese is an investment in a reliable future.

In Russia they made tvorog (a kind of cottage cheese), which can be made quickly and which also goes off very quickly. You put the milk out in the evening, drain it the next morning, and eat it the following evening, by which time it’s already beginning to go sour. The Russian peasant had no certainty about the future: tomorrow there could be war, a military call-up, a corvée[14] or Bolshevik demands for extra produce. The peasant didn’t manage his own life or his own property; he didn’t have time to make cheese, he just wanted to stay alive. Russian production of both material goods and foodstuffs has always been the victim of the climate and the country’s history, which dictate quick production and use; and also the victim of weak institutions under which there is no right to ownership, nor the possibility for long-term planning and storage. There is just a single Leviathan state, which can never be satisfied and which will gobble up any surplus – and cheese comes about as the result of a surplus of milk.

As a result, the question of cheese (also, incidentally, of wine) is a question of roots, about a person being tied to a place; it’s about identity, locality and regionalism. It’s about a village that has stood for the past two thousand years, where there are houses that are three hundred years old. It’s about family traditions, generations of peasants, about handwritten housekeeping books, alfalfa, which is at its best on the western side of the hill. Charles de Gaulle asked the rhetorical question: ‘How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?’[15] In fact, the General was mistaken; there are at least 400 different cheeses in France. And it is precisely that variety of tastes, regions, cultures and traditions that has made France the most popular country in the world for visitors, attracting up to a hundred million people every year. In Russia, the tradition of producing cheese arose only in the non-Russian regions on the periphery of the empire, in the Caucasus, the Baltic States and Finland; in other words, in those areas where there was no serfdom and where the sense of kinship, soil and roots was strongest. In the central spaces of the empire, where there was serfdom, cheese never caught on; it never became a tradition or a favoured taste, but remained a sort of foreign amusement, the forbidden aroma of the West, of satiety – of freedom.

The present war against cheese in Russia is following in the footsteps of this long cultural tradition, and it is no coincidence that alert citizens continue to use the ‘hot line’ to report shops where they find ‘the forbidden fruit’, and the television stations continue to show the destruction of cheese in mobile crematoria, and the health authorities continue to tell people how bad Western cheese is for the Russian stomach. Wiping out cheese is eternal Russia’s answer to the mouldy West and to curious citizens: ‘Your predecessors didn’t have a rich lifestyle, why the hell should you start now?’ And at one and the same time, these are symbolic gestures of Russia’s political independence, a step into the future, where there won’t be 246 types of cheese, as de Gaulle had to cope with, but just one, Russian, like in Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. True, it will be made of palm oil, but that’s like just about everything in our sovereign state.

THE LAND OF ABANDONED CHILDREN

Loveless, a film by Andrei Zvyagintsev about a boy who runs away from home after a row between his parents and disappears into the forest, hit the Russian screens on 1 June 2017, which happens to be the Day for the Defence of Children. Even though this was, no doubt, a complete coincidence, the timing is deeply symbolic.

Children have indeed become one of the painful subjects of our time, from the fake propaganda about the ‘crucified boy’ in Slavyansk (a well-known lie put out by Russian media supposedly to illustrate the cruelty of Ukrainians in the Donbass), to the hysteria in the Duma about the ‘groups of death’ in social media, which allegedly were trying to provoke schoolchildren into committing suicide. From ‘the children’s crusade’ of those school kids who unexpectedly took part in the protest rally in support of the opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, on 26 March 2017, to ‘the Arbat Hamlet’ – a boy who was reading Shakespeare aloud on the Arbat pedestrianized street in Moscow and was arrested for begging. With this film, Zvyagintsev hits right at the sore point where politics, propaganda and collective trauma all meet.

Just about all of Zvyagintsev’s films revolve around the subject of abandoned children. In The Return (2003), a prodigal father visits his two abandoned sons, and their lack of understanding ends in tragedy. In The Banishment (2007), the abortion of an unwanted foetus starts a chain of deaths. In Elena (2011), one of the central conflicts is between a father and his daughter (but there is also in the final scene the shot of a small baby writhing on a huge bed, as a symbol of thoughtless reproduction). In Leviathan (2014), the son of the main hero is taken off for adoption. Unborn, unwanted, abandoned children, children who are taken from their parents – this forms a key image for the director, and a symbol of the decaying cosmos and the moral catastrophe which he shows in every one of his films.

In Loveless (2017), a child is once again placed at the heart of the story; or, to be more precise, the child’s disappearance. The film has an overwhelming emptiness, a lacuna, which begins to grow like a funnel, drawing into it all the main characters, those close to them, their homes, the areas where they live, and the forest park. The aesthetics of absence, marked by traces of the boy who has disappeared – his jacket, notices about his disappearance, the cries of those searching for him in the empty forest – all heighten the suspense, turning a family drama into a psychological thriller. The tormented search for the child reminds us more than once of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Zvyagintsev always uses the same cameraman, Mikhail Krichman, whose lens gives even the simplest details a merciless sharpness and metaphysical depths; Krichman’s gripping shots and dim palette turn a Moscow suburb into the kingdom of the dead, relieved only by the fleeting beauty that is brought by the first snow, which just for a second turns the scene into a Bruegelesque winter landscape.

In line with the laws of thermodynamics, entropy grows in this space. There is no god here (although there are bearded office workers in the company of an Orthodox businessman), just as there is no state – a policeman immediately warns the parents that the police won’t go searching for the boy. Here, families are dead and the school is hopeless: the schoolteacher helplessly drags a cloth across the blackboard leaving chalk smears, while outside the window the snow gradually starts to fall. There are not even guilty people here: everyone has simply been born and lives in a loveless space, which they diligently reproduce as the only method available to them for survival and communication.

The apotheosis of this emptiness comes in an abandoned building somewhere in the forest, the boy’s last refuge. The leaking roof, the puddles on the floor, the fragments of human civilization – all this reminds us of The Zone and The Room in Stalker, which was for Tarkovsky a metaphor for the deserted soul. Even the brilliant final scene in the mortuary (which, for its intensity and lack of resolution should go into a handbook for directors) is constructed around absence. We do not see the actual fact, the events, the dead body: all we see is the reflection in faces and the reactions of the characters. But the most frightening emptiness opens up in the film’s epilogue, in the eyes of the main female character, walking on a treadmill while wearing a fashionable Bosco tracksuit with the word ‘RUSSIA’ written in English. The camera seems to fall into that totally vacant stare.

The simplest thing of all would be to see this as a caricature of Mother Russia, having lost her child and walking on the spot on a treadmill on the balcony of an elite home, while her new husband mindlessly watches news from the Donbass on the television, as presented by Russian TV’s chief propagandist Kiselyov. But Zvyagintsev doesn’t use such obvious metaphors. He does not convict, he makes a statement; he doesn’t lay blame, he presents a diagnosis. He’s made a film about a broken family and it’s come out as being about Russia, and the Donbass and Kiselyov; the final scene is not a political pamphlet, as in Leviathan, but the Zeitgeist, a frozen picture on the TV screen. Ultimately, is Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov a tragedy about a murdered boy, or is it about Russian power? It is a similar question with Loveless: it reveals a moral flaw, an abandoned boy, at the very core of our existence, but the war in the Donbass is simply one of the partial consequences of this comprehensive moral disaster.

It is crucially important that the time of the action is clearly shown in the film. It begins in December 2012, the eve of the passing of the Dima Yakovlev Law, otherwise known as ‘the scoundrels’ law’, which doomed dozens of sick Russian orphans who were waiting to be adopted by foreigners to a miserable life, worsening illness and, in some cases, death. It is exactly from this moment, when the ruling class was bound by the blood of the children, that the definitive moral decline of the state set in, accompanied as it was by the overwhelming indifference of the population. The film ends in 2015, ‘the year of normalization’, when the shock of Crimea and the shooting down of MH17 had passed, when Russia had grown used to the sanctions regime and understood that this new relationship between the state and society was serious and in for the long run. Zvyagintsev makes films about the family, but the action takes place in conditions of an unprecedented moral decline. And the basic problem here is not Putin and Kiselyov; it’s not in the Kremlin and the Donbass; and it’s not even corruption and theft: these are all merely symptoms of the disease. The director addresses the disease itself – it is society, mired in lies, cynicism and a lack of trust, having lost all hope for the future and for change; and Putin and Kiselyov simply cast this lie in the form of politics and the mass media, thus exporting it to the whole world.

It is certainly not a coincidence that in 2016 in the Russian public space the conversation turned to ethics: here we had the flash mob, ‘I’m not afraid to speak out’ (see above, ‘Breaking “The Silence of the Lambs”’), in which women spoke about the sexual harassment they have had to put with; about domestic violence and torture in Russian prisons; and about historic memory and the responsibility of Stalin’s executioners. The reflective part of society has begun to be aware of the moral dead-end in which we all find ourselves, and the conspiracy of silence that has surrounded the problems of violence, humiliation and trauma. These are exactly the questions that Zvyagintsev has been raising for many years, including the problem of not speaking out and the break in communication. In conditions where there is no state with a social policy, no church that is socially responsible or close to the people, no culture of public dialogue on questions of the family, childhood, or relations between the sexes, Zvyagintsev’s films present us with the very fundamental moral questions about which we prefer to remain silent – or leave them at the mercy of cynical populists like deputies Vitaly Milonov and Elena Mizulina, official defenders of ‘traditional values’. Andrei Zvyagintsev is now the main person in Russia raising the question of values – real values, not those dreamt up by propaganda – but the state will never acknowledge him in this role, preferring to limit the distribution of his films and defaming him in the press, as happened with his previous film, Leviathan, which they accused of being Russophobic.

One of the fleeting images in Loveless is signal tape. Right at the start of the film, the boy finds some in the forest. He ties it to a stick and throws it at a tree. The years pass, new children are born, but the tape remains there. It is as if Zvyagintsev has wrapped our society in this tape, marking the perimeter of the contours of the humanitarian catastrophe and the moral quagmire into which we have plunged. Like Pushkin’s ‘bloody boy’ in Boris Godunov, his lost child speaks about the fundamental crime lying at the base of our silent well-being, about the things we are trying unsuccessfully to forget. This is why this film is so ruthless, so discomforting – and such essential viewing.

THE AMPUTATION OF CONSCIENCE

The season of tolerance and humanity opened in Russia: as its representative at the finals of the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest in Kiev, Russia chose Yulia Samoilova, a singer in a wheelchair. Shortly before the competition, it had seemed as if Russia would boycott it, given that it was taking place in the capital of a country with which Russia is de facto at war. But suddenly, in a single magical moment, everything changed: with one generous gesture Russia was returning to the bosom of this international festival, rising above the military conflict, and announcing that it was adhering to global standards of tolerance and equal opportunities.

And everything would have been wonderful in this Hollywood-like story, demonstrating that music and the will to live can triumph over hatred and division – except that the shadow of the Kremlin propaganda machine could be seen sticking out from underneath this great humanitarian subject. The problem was that in July 2015 Yulia had performed in Crimea after it was annexed by Russia, and had travelled there without the permission of the Ukrainian authorities. Thus, Ukraine was presented with a cynical choice by Russia: either allow a singer who had broken the law in Ukraine to take part in the competition, thus violating its own principles and norms; or refuse her entry, thus opening itself up to a guaranteed artillery barrage of Russian propaganda and the judgement of the international community. The Ukrainian musician and actor, Anton Mukharsky, even proposed greeting Samoilova at the airport in Kiev accompanied by hundreds of Ukrainian Army soldiers who are now permanently disabled as a result of the battles in the Donbass.

In the end, the Ukrainian Security Service did ban Samoilova from entering Ukraine for three years, and Russia was not represented at Eurovision 2017; but, at the same time, it made Ukraine look like a miserable host that had politicized the song contest. This was a masterful propaganda stroke from Moscow’s point of view, which had been prepared to send its singer deep into the rear of the enemy as a diversionary tactic in its hybrid war against Ukraine and the West.

However, the main problem with nominating Yulia Samoilova to take part in Eurovision 2017 was that Russia did not have the moral right to send someone in a wheelchair from a country that does not provide its disabled people with equal rights for treatment, mobility or work opportunities. There are huge problems with medication for the disabled and with the provision of ramps in housing blocks. As a result, the vast majority of disabled people are confined to their apartments. It is impossible to live on the miserly disability benefits provided, or to look after a disabled child, even in the poorest Russian regions. As has always been the case, Russia has a shortage of quality protheses, wheelchairs and spare parts for them; furthermore, virtually none of these items is produced in Russia itself. Yulia, who suffers from spinal amyotrophy (an inherited disorder, exacerbated following a polio vaccination as a child), is hoping to go to Finland for an operation, and is collecting money for this via crowdfunding. As they joked bitterly on Twitter: ‘It’s only in Russia that a disabled person could go to Eurovision, but can’t go to the shop next door.’

Our Paralympic sport is also just such a Potemkin Village, if not more so: first and foremost, it is a shop window for national pride, and only after that is it a humanitarian project. When there is no infrastructure, nor any tradition of people with restricted abilities taking part in sport (it would be a great rarity in Russia for a blind runner or skier to take part in a mass marathon accompanied by a specially trained sportsman), all that exists is a state system for choosing people with disabilities to take part in top-level sports. They identify gifted people with restricted abilities – for example, former sportspeople who have been in a car accident – and suggest to them a professional career that would be the envy of any disabled Russian person: everything is paid for by the state, they travel abroad and, if they are victorious, there are generous prizes. Paralympic sportspeople are a part of the elite Russian sporting machine, and huge financial and administrative resources are thrown at their success; but it’s no coincidence (judging by the unprecedented sanctions imposed by the International Paralympic Committee) that they were drawn into the massive doping programme. And, as dependent people, they couldn’t refuse. Then, when they were caught out, the moralizing machinery of state propaganda went into overdrive, blaring out about the ‘unheard-of cynicism’ of the international sporting organizations, which had decided ‘to take revenge on Russia’ and ‘make an example of disabled sportsmen’.

Samoilova’s situation is similar to the Paralympic one in that the state draws vulnerable groups into its special propaganda operation, hiding behind their weakness like a living shield. In its clearest and most distilled way, this policy was evident in the passing of the Dima Yakovlev Law in December 2012: the state took as hostage orphaned children with disabilities, the most vulnerable group, completely lacking in rights, who were critically dependent on foreign adopters (as is well known, it is very rare for sick children to be taken into Russian families), and used them as a bargaining chip so as to ‘punish’ the West for the ‘Magnitsky List’.[16] In reality, what we are talking about here is the state’s right over the body of the individual, where even their disability is taken away from them and becomes a state resource. This is a specific type of biopolitics: the nationalization and politicization of disability, the creation of a medical exclusion space, which allows for no external criticism (‘they are insulting the weakest!’) and can be used to cover any special operations by the state, from the doping programme to the hybrid war against Ukraine and the West.

Yulia Samoilova is far from being the first contestant with particular features to take part in the Eurovision Song Contest. We had the Polish singer, Monika Kuszyńska, who is partially paralysed following a car crash; there was the blind Georgian woman, Diana Gurtskaya; a pregnant woman; the bearded Conchita Wurst; and the Russian grandmothers’ chorus: this competition long ago turned into a parade of variety and tolerance. It’s time we stopped paying attention to who is performing in front of us: a man or a woman; bearded or not; straight or gay; a cute-looking actress or a youthful old man; someone with one leg or two; standing up or sitting in a wheelchair. The only thing that matters is that he or she should perform best of all. But our lens is so configured that we pay special attention to, stigmatize and politicize these particularities, while Eurovision is a special kind of magnifying glass and a false mirror, a safari park of archaic and wounded national pride. Here the show is ruled by complicated coalitions and mutual back-scratching. Old historical scores and childish grudges are settled; national pride preens itself and defeat is taken very badly. No one could have guessed that, out of the forty-three countries, two would find themselves at war. It would have been far more honest for Russia to have boycotted the Eurovision final in Kiev from the start, bearing in mind the events in Crimea and the Donbass. But Moscow unexpectedly made the knight’s move (or, more exactly, the wheelchair move) and short-sightedly considers that it has had a propaganda victory; while in reality it is a moral defeat.

The Samoilova problem exists on two levels: the human and the political. From a human point of view, one could only wish that she had been able to take part in the competition, something she had dreamed about for years. It’s possible that the honorarium and the publicity she would have received may have helped her to pay for her operation in Finland, which would have allowed her to be able, in the future, to breathe, sing and perform normally. Perhaps her performance would have given support to all those who struggle with their traumas and their ills, so that they didn’t have to hide them, and so they could overcome their pain, isolation and anonymity. But on the political level, one is stunned by the cynicism of the producers of the show in nominating Samoilova to take part: they solve their own propaganda tasks by using the most vulnerable and dependent bodies. In reality, they have already had their consciences amputated, just as, for the rest of us, the ability to be surprised by anything has long ago atrophied.

THE FIASCO OF ‘OPERATION SOCHI’

Taking back the Olympic medals won at Sochi from Russian sportsmen and women as a result of the doping scandal, and the subsequent unprecedented ban on the national team from taking part in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February 2018, became the greatest failure of Russian foreign policy in recent years. Victory in Sochi had been one of the main international achievements, a personal triumph for Vladimir Putin, who stood, emperor-like, on the podium of the Fisht Olympic Stadium and reviewed the parade of the victors. It was a symbolic prize, which remained in place even after Russia tore up the modern world order in 2014 and turned into a revanchist state.

And now there are no medals, nor victory in the medal table, where Russia had come out on top. There is a certain logic to all of this. The medals from Sochi were the final legacy of that old, pre-Crimea, Russia, which proudly showed the world its history and the masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde in the impressive opening ceremony; which triumphed in the snowy arenas and not in the back streets of hybrid wars; and which was a part of the global world. Now everything has been put in its place: the medals have been taken away and the last link with the previous era has been severed. It turns out that the 2014 Olympic Games were just a sham, a cover for doping, a special operation by the Federal Security Service, the FSB, all part of the hybrid war with the West.

The most banal and useless answer would be to blame the West for everything – which is exactly what the state propaganda did. They produced from up their sleeves a whole set of absurd excuses about an anti-Russian conspiracy: ‘Everyone’s involved in doping, it’s just that the Russians are the only ones they catch’; ‘They’ve done this to us because of Crimea’ (or even because we were victorious in the War in 1945, as was recently put forward in the Duma); ‘Sport can’t achieve the highest results without doping’; ‘Norwegians all take asthma medicine’, and so on. They can try all they like to take comfort in myths about an anti-Russian conspiracy in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and curse the whistle-blower, Russian doping guru and defector, Grigory Rodchenkov, who revealed all the details of the doping system. But none of this changes the principal, inconvenient question: were the facts that became known from Rodchenkov’s diaries, from Richard McLaren’s report about Russian doping, from the documentary films of the German ARD television channel, and from Bryan Fogel’s film Icarus, which won the Oscar for best documentary film, all actually true? By way of an answer, there was just an eloquent silence and conciliatory statements from our normally combative official spokespersons, which de facto served as an acknowledgement of the facts as presented. What’s more, the evidence was apparently so convincing that the Kremlin preferred to accept the IOC’s comparatively soft verdict so as not to threaten the Football World Cup, which took place in Russia in 2018.

The fact is that doping in Russia is a deeply systemic phenomenon, the logical result of the resource machine in Soviet and Russian sport, where plans and norms on the number of medals are handed down from above, and medals and results are expected to be produced from below. Every trainer in each of the sports schools answers with their head and their salary for the smooth production of leading athletes; every federation in each sport answers for the preparation of Olympic champions; and the Olympic Committee is responsible for victory in the medal table. The very pinnacle of this pyramid comes when, right outside the Kremlin, Olympic champions and prize winners are handed the keys to Mercedes and Audi cars, as well as being given flats and gifts worth millions of dollars from regional governors and oligarchs. In this administrative and bureaucratic machine, honed only so as to demonstrate the superiority of Russian sport, the bodies of these athletes are turned into a mere biological resource, and doping becomes an essential method for the solution of the state’s strategic tasks. This machine has been working for decades, from children’s sport to the Olympic level, in a process of Darwinian selection culling hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t pass selection, meaning that someone who has gone through many years of ruthless training to reach the level of ‘Master of Sport’, but who didn’t then make it into the Olympic reserve, will, as a rule, be thrown by the wayside, their health ruined, and be left with a deep disgust for sport.

And this machine would have carried on working with regularly interspersed individual doping scandals. But then the Sochi Winter Olympics came along as the main image-making campaign of the decade for Vladimir Putin and became his pet project. After the poor showing of the Russian team at the previous Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, only victory on home territory would be good enough. So now the FSB became involved in the sporting-medical machine, turning the Olympics into a special operation straight out of a cheap spy novel: a doping cocktail nicknamed ‘Dyushes’[17] masked by alcohol; the collection and preservation of the urine of athletes over the course of many months; drilling a hole in the wall of the anti-doping laboratory, hidden behind a cupboard; disguising FSB operatives as plumbers; opening up and switching urine samples; and carrying out other favourite spy tricks. As became clear, everything was done in a very clumsy way – it was a typical Russian cock-up (Rodchenkov’s diaries reveal only worries and cursing over the mixed-up test-tubes and samples – you couldn’t make it up!) It appears that even the FSB hasn’t managed to avoid the overall drop in professionalism and responsibility in government service which has come about as a result of the general corruption and fall in standards in the selection process.

As a result of this poorly organized and well-publicized special operation, the scandal over Russian doping became a serious political defeat, and the negative media reporting around it was on a par with the shooting-down of MH17 (although not, of course, comparable in terms of human tragedy). And this draws the boundaries of the hybrid war and special operations which in Putin’s time have taken the place in Russia of diplomacy, sport, mass media, administrative procedures and rules. In other words, the problem is much wider than doping. It is in the whole political system, where power has been usurped by the Chekists, who have plunged the state and society into a condition of permanent threat and hybrid warfare. And this is not only internally, but in foreign affairs, too, where all the normal bureaucratic procedures have been replaced by special operations. Procedures for reaching agreement, consulting experts and taking informed decisions; all the usual mechanisms of accountability, openness and audit. The siloviki have turned all these complex processes of public policy into a bad spy movie.

In reality, everything surrounding the Sochi Olympics became a special operation, from the lobbying for Sochi during the selection process in the IOC, to the construction of the facilities, thanks to which whole territories were put under a state of emergency, limiting constitutional rights for citizens, such as the right to property and freedom of movement. Another special operation was the long-planned annexation of Crimea, with its multilayered cover-ups and lies. The war in Ukraine is a special operation, too, with the separate episode of shooting down MH17. The war in Syria has been carried out in many ways according to the laws of a special operation, with disinformation about the scale and the aims of the military presence and the covering-up of Russian casualties. A huge special operation involved Russia’s meddling in elections and internal political discussions in Western countries, through an ever-expanding system of state propaganda, fake news and trolling on social media, the culmination of which was the Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. And finally, it was the poisoning of the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK, in March 2018.

There are three problems with the special operations that have taken the place of Russia’s policies. First of all, they’re ineffective. The Sochi doping thriller not only saw Russia lose its Olympic medals and the right of the national team to compete in PyeongChang, but it also ruined the country’s position in world sport for many years ahead. The annexation of Crimea left Russia not only with a toxic asset on its hands and one for which it is paying with sanctions, but it cannot even get any use out of it: as well as the well-known problems with banks and the provision of electricity (see above, ‘A Sovereignty Full of Holes’, for the scandal about the turbines built by Siemens, which were taken to Crimea illegally, in contravention of sanctions), there is also the collapse of the tourist industry there and the criminalization of every level of authority on the peninsula. In the same way, the war in Eastern Ukraine has seen the final separation from Russia of a vital part of its former empire, exactly as the late Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted, and the irreversible drift of Ukraine into the bosom of Western institutions (precisely what the Kremlin tried to prevent). What’s more, Russia has been left with yet another toxic asset – the pirate republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, which are totally dependent on injections of Russian cash, military equipment and personnel, and on the economy of violence.

Finally, all the Russian special operations to support forces that are against the system in Western countries – from right-wing populist and proto-fascist parties, like the National Front in France and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (‘Alternative for Germany’), to the former hope of the Kremlin, the populist Donald Trump – have collapsed. The established parties proved to be more stable than the Kremlin thought, and Trump became a headache for the whole world, including Russia. So the Kremlin has ended up with a huge number of toxic assets on its hands: compromised Olympic medals; Crimea and the Donbass, not recognized by international law; Assad’s cannibalistic regime in Syria; radicals, separatists and quasi-fascists in Europe; accusations of staging a chemical weapons attack in Salisbury; and now even the unpredictable, poisonous Trump. These are all the fruits of special operations and hybrid wars in which Russia, as they say, has shot itself in the foot.

Here we have the second problem of the policy of special operations: they are highly toxic. Even in places where Russian interference went unnoticed and was merely symbolic, its policies and representatives are marked: the West is now looking for the Kremlin’s traces even in places where they may not exist. A very good example is Russia’s interference in the American elections. It appears that it was not so widespread as decisively to affect the outcome (some $50,000 was spent on creating fake accounts on Facebook, which is a mere drop in the ocean when you consider that around $2.5 billion was spent on the election campaign); but the mere fact of interference by an outside power in the holy of holies of American politics, the elections, so enraged the American establishment that a witch hunt has been opened the like of which has not been seen since the days of McCarthyism, and the heads of the Internet giants, from Google to Twitter, have been lining up to take part in hearings in Congress so as to demonstrate their loyalty and uncover the traces of Russian agents. And, to be honest, the influence of the Kremlin’s propaganda mouthpiece, the Russia Today (RT) television channel, was not so significant in America as to limit its activity there and, in so doing, place under threat of reprisals Western media in Russia. But the channel certainly deserves to be caught up in the storm that it has done so much to create. The toxicity of Russian influence is so great that the tiniest presence needs to be cleaned up. Any hint of even the most innocent contacts with Russians leads to scandal, and the ‘Russian infection’ could ultimately destroy Donald Trump, already weakened and embittered as he is.

All Russian sportsmen and women are also feeling this toxicity now, even those who were not named in the McLaren Report and who have nothing to do with the Sochi doping scam. Every Russian athlete is now, a priori, under suspicion; all Russian sportsmen and women are presumed to have taken drugs, and it is up to each one of them to prove their innocence. This is unfair and hurtful, but it’s the result of that same radioactive special operation, that Chekist polonium, which has infected everyone’s clothes. Russian holdings, capital, investments, businessmen, projects, real estate – all of these are now under suspicion, as the list of sanctions published by Washington in February 2018 illustrated. The world is now paranoid about Russian hackers, dopers, trolls or agents of influence. They are searching for Russians under the bed; and we will take with us this stigma, this radioactive background, wherever we go for many years hence, even after Putin is no longer in power.

Typically, the failure of various special operations all occurred simultaneously: in the same months in which ‘Russiagate’ broke in Washington, the Russian doping scandal happened in WADA and the IOC, as did the judgement on the shooting-down of MH17, which revealed even more evidence about Russia’s participation. It may be that Russia’s exclusion from the Winter Olympics is just the first alarm bell, and there may yet be the collapse of the whole system of Russian hybrid gains, from Crimea to Trump, from the Donbass to Assad.

And here we have the third fundamental weakness of the special operations: they are irrelevant in the modern world. Yes, it is complicated, mutually dependent and vulnerable; it is a ‘risk society’ over which it is easy to place the hybrid ‘fog of war’. But it is also a society of radical transparency, a world of networks, video recordings and anonymous activists from Wikileaks to Bellingcat, where every step is tracked, every telephone call, every bank transfer; where you can no longer hide your account offshore, or your test-tubes, or your ‘BUK’ missiles, which, it is assumed, shot down MH17; where the special services are just as vulnerable, transparent and old-fashioned as the state they serve. Our Chekists operate as in days gone by: planning, operational development, recruitment, intimidation, disinformation – but in a global society of social networks and citizen control, they can be instantly found out by traces of polonium, urine samples and IP addresses, by tracking phone calls and selfies posted by soldiers on social media. And various observers rigorously point the finger of blame at their patron: the Russian state.

In exactly the same way, because of the interference of the special services, half a century ago, at the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union lost its place in the developing information revolution. At that time, under Brezhnev, the fatal decision was taken to pass responsibility for the Soviet computing sector from the scientists to the siloviki. At that time, Soviet computer technology was at least on a par with the USA, perhaps even ahead: we had progressive programming languages such as ‘Algol’ and machines such as the BESM-1, which was a worthy competitor. But the siloviki, trying to minimize the risk to a strategic industry, turned this into a special operation, involving the theft of technology from the West, the reverse engineering of American examples (principally IBM) and their production in Soviet enterprises. But what had been done successfully with missile technology and nuclear weapons ‘borrowed’ from the West didn’t work with computers, which were significantly more complicated and needed not secret constructors’ bureaux but an open code, independent development, testing in production and on the market. The well-known sociologist and also historian of the Soviet computing sector, Manuel Castells, gives a humorous example: because the sizes of transistors and the width of the wires in the microsystems in the USA were given in Imperial measures (i.e., inches), while in the USSR they were metric, the siloviki decided to round up the American sizes to a convenient number – as a result of which the stolen chips didn’t fit the Soviet connectors! Castells acknowledges that, because of this special operation, which lasted for several decades, the Soviet computer sector was about twenty years behind the USA by the time the USSR collapsed.

Today the special operations of the hybrid war are again throwing us decades back in our relations with the outside world, just as they did at the beginning of the 1980s and at the start of the 1950s. Once again, the world is afraid of Russia and is isolating it, but we can’t capitalize on this fear and the consequences of it hurt us, like with our athletes and our sports fans. The lesson to be learnt from everything that’s happened is simple and banal: everyone should mind their own business. Athletes should be coached by trainers, and not officers of the special services; relations with neighbouring countries should be worked out by diplomats and business people and not by Russian spetsnaz soldiers with no markings on their uniforms, as happened in Crimea; Russia’s ‘soft power’ should be conveyed by artists and tourists, and not hackers, trolls and propagandists. And representatives of the special forces should carry out their own direct tasks, such as catching terrorists, and should not be substituting special operations for all the existing institutions and procedures. But in a country that chose, for the fourth time, to have as its President a Chekist, this all remains a utopian dream.