The Return of the Russian Leviathan

SOVEREIGN TERRITORY… WITH NO ROADS

There’s only one thing more dreadful than Russian roads: Russian roadworks. Recently I had the misfortune to witness one of these local catastrophes, when I was driving from Moscow to Tartu, in Estonia, along the M9 ‘Baltiya’ federal highway. It has to be said that this road, which passes through the Tver and Pskov Oblasts, was never renowned for its smooth carriageway, which was why those in the know would travel to the Baltic region via the Minsk highway. But on this occasion, I came across something extraordinary even by the standards of Russian roads: 250 kilometres from the capital, the asphalt ran out. We’re not talking about somewhere east of Lake Baikal, or somewhere in the distant reaches of Siberia; right in the heart of European Russia, a federal highway had become a dirt-track, with holes of epic proportions, covered with a metre-thick layer of slushy muck. Trucks were trying to crawl through it, making drunken patterns. Some bashed into each other, others disappeared into ditches. Coming in the other direction were mud-spattered cars with Moscow number plates; I exchanged ironic smiles with their drivers. Occasionally I came across a few cars with foreign number plates. I saw one Toyota carrying a group of Portuguese, who were enthusiastically taking photos out of every window; this would be something to tell the grandchildren.

It took me four hours to cover 100 kilometres of this asphalt-free highway, during which time I didn’t see a single roadworker; not one police car; no equipment for repairing the road; no signs saying how long the roadworks would last or indicating any diversion. There was just the long-extinct road-bed. At the petrol station they told me that the roadworkers had dug up the surface at the beginning of autumn and then disappeared without saying when they’d be back. For the fourth month in a row, the road looks as it did after the aerial bombardment at the end of 1941, when battles were raging with the Germans around Rzhev and Velikiye Luki. At the same petrol station, they told me about the French long-distance lorry driver who came and pleaded with them: ‘I got lost on these roads; how do I find the main road again?’ This, they told him, is it. This is the main road from Europe to Moscow.

It was on this road that I came to understand two important things. First, we have entered a new stage: one of absolute impunity. Even five years ago it would have been difficult to imagine something like this in Russia. Yes, people stole from the state, but there was nonetheless the obligation at least to give the impression of doing something. Now, anything goes, and no one is held accountable. Hot on the heels of what was simply theft has come total indifference. What the practice of the past few years has shown is that in Russia now no one ever answers for anything – not for stolen billions, not for satellites which crash, not for the unleashing of wars.

But that’s only half the trouble. What’s even more frightening is something else: we’re losing the country. I’ve been driving along this road to Estonia for almost ten years; exactly the same period of time that, the propagandists tell us, Russia has been steadily ‘picking itself up off its knees’. And what I see with every passing year is that just 100 kilometres from Moscow this landscape is falling apart before my eyes. The M9 highway is constantly being repaired, but it simply gets worse and worse. All around there are ever more dead villages; at night you can travel for dozens of kilometres and you don’t see a single light on anywhere. The people you come across are increasingly wretched. They wander aimlessly along the roadside with their sledges, or they try with a look of hopelessness on their face to wave down a car. (Incidentally, I didn’t see any local buses, either.) With the exception of a few petrol stations, services along the road are miserable. There are a few dodgy-looking cafés – even the thought of stopping at them is scary – and there’s the odd stall with spare parts for lorries. Just as in the sixteenth century, locals flog by the roadside whatever they’ve gathered in the forest: dried mushrooms, frozen berries, coarse fur clothing. And the forests themselves are gradually claiming back the space that civilization has left behind: the abandoned fields and villages are overgrown with shrubs and bushes, and the trees are creeping ever closer to the road. And if in the past you could be ambushed along the road by the traffic police with their speed radars, this time I didn’t see a single one. The authorities, infrastructure, people – everything is dissolving into oblivion…

But the problem is much wider than just this road. What we’re talking about here is the very structure of the Russian state: how it relates to the area it governs and the territorial sovereignty of Russia. And even as the Ministry of Justice and the State Duma do battle with ‘foreign agents’ and revolutions in neighbouring countries, and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tells us that Russia is defending its sovereignty in the battle for Syria – all this time we’ve already lost our sovereignty on the M9 highway. There are two sides to sovereignty: formal power and control. You can still see some symbols of power along that road. For example, in the town of Zubtsov, right next to the Boverli Hill Hotel, you can see the building of the local administration, flying the Russian flag. And on the road into the town of Nelidovo there’s a concrete booth adorned with the slogan ‘Forward, Russia!’ But effective control over this area has already been lost. Here, there is no state, no infrastructure, no institutions; in short, no life.

Another decade of such decay and no one will be travelling along this road to go to Pushkin Hills; or Karevo, birthplace of the composer Modest Mussorgsky; or to Ostrov, with its unique skiing tracks; or to ancient Izborsk; or to the white stone walls of the Pskov Kremlin. And after another ten years, all that will be left of Russia will be twenty large cities; showpiece infrastructure projects like Olympic Sochi; a ring road around Moscow; and stadiums built for the 2018 football World Cup. In between them will be just emptiness, with sparse forests and neglected roads. Russia is turning into a moth-eaten blanket – one with ever more holes and ever less fabric. We defended our sovereignty in the bloody battles around Rzhev and Vyazma in the winter of 1941; but we’ve lost it on the roads going through those same places.

THE SMOKE OF THE FATHERLAND

Dulcis fumus patriae, as the ancient Romans used to say: ‘The smoke of the Fatherland smells sweet’. In Russia we breathe in this smoke each springtime: the country is enveloped in fire. As soon as the snow melts and last year’s grass dries out, people go out into the countryside and set fire to their rubbish, the grass, stubble, reeds and cane. According to Greenpeace, every year hundreds of thousands of acres of fields and forests are burnt. Some five or six thousand homes burn down; old country estate houses and nature reserves are destroyed; people are killed; cattle are burnt alive. Irreparable damage is done to nature, the soil, vegetation and the creatures that live in the grass and the forests. As the spring creeps up from the south to the north of Russia, for a month or more the whole country plunges into a mad frenzy of self-destruction, until the rains come and the first greenery appears.

The most dangerous time of the year is when the spring holidays occur. Last year, tragedy struck at Easter when on just one day, 12 April, Khakassia burst into flames all at once in a number of different places. And just around the corner lay an even greater ecological disaster: the May holidays, from 1 May until Victory Day on the 9th.[2] This is when millions of Russians answer the call of the wild, and go to meet it with their barbecues and buckets full of meat to skewer; with music and various forms of transport. Off-road vehicles and quad-bikes go charging all over the soft earth, churning up the fresh grass shoots; cars are lined up all along the banks of the rivers and the waterways; songs blare out; you can’t get away from pop music; tree branches begin to crack; the air is heavy with smoke from the meat; and the May twilight is lit up by the first piles of rubbish. A substantial proportion of the Russian population long ago established that they’re firmly at odds with their surroundings, thus reducing it to a state of chaos. The burning grasses are just one part of a huge problem, which is summed up by the fundamental anti-ecological nature of our existence.

Why do people in Russia burn grass? Anthropologists talk about the genes that have been handed down from the slash-and-burn agriculture practised by our ancestors in the forests of Eastern Europe, chopping down and burning the forest so as to fertilize with ash the poor clay soil. Cultural historians describe the archaic rituals of spring and the belief in the cleansing power of fire. And representatives of the Emergency Situations Ministry just call it blatant hooliganism. In fact, the idea that burning the grass warms up the soil and enriches it with ash, which helps new grass to grow, has long since been irrevocably exposed as a myth. Soil doesn’t warm up significantly from a fast-moving grass fire; but what does happen is that buds and grass seeds on the surface perish, as do useful micro-organisms and tiny creatures. Birds’ nests and eggs are destroyed; newly born hares die, as do hedgehogs and their babies, frogs, insects, larvae, cocoons and worms. Weeds such as burdock and cow-parsnip, which are more resistant to fire, grow up in place of different grasses; and after cane has been burnt down, more cane grows to take its place.

There is one other popular explanation: the great desire to burn off the grass before your neighbours burn it from the other side; you want to be the first to do it. The idea that you don’t actually have to burn off the grass, it seems, doesn’t occur to the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages. This sort of ‘war of all against all’ is typical of societies that are totally fragmented and socially dysfunctional.

The philosopher Maxim Goryunov sees in the fires the metaphysics of the Russian world: ‘The Russians, like their Finno-Ugric predecessors, who burnt the primeval forests in order to plant turnips and swedes, burn the cultural and political landscape around themselves for the sake of their gas pipelines and their multi-storey prefabricated towns.’[3] Likewise, the ‘Russian Spring’, as they have called the separatist movement of Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine, has turned out to be a Russian conflagration and a Russian pogrom, as experienced first hand by the inhabitants of the Donbass, which has become an area of total social catastrophe.

But the main way to explain the grass fires is the irrational Russian phrase, ‘Let it all burn with a blue flame!’. In other words, ‘To hell with it all!’. The Russians are inexplicably drawn to demonstrative and exuberant self-destruction. ‘It burns beautifully!’, they think, as they set fire to the outskirts of the village, which leads to the torching of the field, the forest, the village and ultimately of themselves. In the fires on the steppe we see Pushkin’s idea of the Russian bunt or riot, which he described in The Captain’s Daughter, as well as shades of the ‘worldwide conflagration drenched in blood’, about which the poet Alexander Blok wrote in his poem ‘The Twelve’, for which he was attacked. Fellow poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, recalled how, in the first days of the Revolution, he was walking past the thin, bent figure of Blok warming himself by a fire in front of the Winter Palace in Petrograd. ‘Do you like it?’ asked Mayakovsky. ‘It’s good’, replied Blok; but then added, ‘They burnt down the library in my village.’[4]

The metaphysics of the Russian conflagration can be found in the secret dreams of the ‘underground man’ in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, in the desire to destroy harmony in the world and live according to your own ‘stupid will’. The cultural theorist Mikhail Epstein locates the underpinnings of post-2014 Russian politics specifically in the wounded pride of the ‘underground man’. Today, Russia is voluntarily torching all that was created over a quarter of a century of reform and change – bourgeois comfort and a fragile post-Soviet sense of well-being; openness to the outside world and a system of relations with the West – all for the sake of crazy geopolitical gestures done for effect. Russia is pouring oil on the fires of civil wars in Ukraine and Syria, and threatening the West with a nuclear holocaust. But at the root of this suicidal policy is the very same irrational passion for self-destruction and for wiping out their own habitat which drives the anonymous fire-raisers. And just as the television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov in a live broadcast was threatening the USA with ‘radioactive ash’ from a Russian nuclear strike, so the whole of southern Siberia was being covered in genuine ash from fires that had been started by ordinary Russian citizens. As the writer Viktor Pelevin said: ‘There is undoubtedly an anti-Russian plot; the only problem is that the whole adult population of Russia is complicit in it.’[5]

SACRED ICE

On 16 September 2013, Russia brilliantly carried out a small victorious war.[6] In the Kara Sea the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) forcibly seized the Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise. Greenpeace activists had been trying to carry out a peaceful protest on the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform in the Pechora Sea. People armed with automatic weapons landed by helicopter. In the course of the operation warning shots were fired from an AK-74 Kalashnikov rifle and from the gun of a coastal patrol vessel. Then the eco-warriors’ icebreaker was towed into Murmansk, where thirty activists were sentenced by the court to two months’ imprisonment and the Prosecutor’s Office opened a case under article 227 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, ‘For Piracy’, which carries a prison sentence of up to fifteen years.

No one was bothered by the disproportionate nature of the proposed sentence for the crime. If a year earlier three girls from Pussy Riot could each receive two years in prison for singing a punk-prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, then in this case the ecologists had encroached on something far more sacred than a church: a gas platform belonging to Gazprom! This was a clear case of blasphemy! Never mind that the Prirazlomnaya platform was a decommissioned Norwegian platform, had faulty equipment, and was infected with radionuclides; or that they hadn’t been able to use it for two years because of safety violations or its general unprofitability: none of that mattered at all. In the eyes of the siloviki[7] and patriots, the oil platform was a national treasure, a symbol of energy security, of the sovereignty of the state and a forward post in the battle for the resources of the Arctic. This is what explains the cruel actions of the siloviki, the patriotic hysteria whipped up in the press and the typically Russian conspiracy theories which claimed that Greenpeace was acting in the interests of Russia’s Western competitors for the Arctic’s oil.

A resources war has been under way in the Arctic for decades: over the oil and gas deposits on the Shelf, over fishing grounds and over commercial shipping routes. As global warming increases and the Arctic ice continues to melt, the appetites of both states and corporations are being sharpened. The pinnacle for territorial claims so far has been the triumphal planting of a titanium flag of the Russian Federation on the bottom of the Northern Ice Ocean, on the Lomonosov Ridge, to lay claim to Russia’s part of the continental shelf.

The problem is that the biggest loser in this war is Russia itself, irrespective of the volume of Arctic waters it manages to appropriate. The threat to Russia’s future comes not in the territorial claims of competitors, but in the ecological disaster happening right now in the Arctic. If mass industrial mining of hydrocarbons begins there, along with busy commercial shipping, this disaster will quickly turn into a total catastrophe, which will affect Russia most of all because of its extensive Arctic coastline and its reliance on the Arctic ‘air-conditioning’. Oil exploration is the dirtiest sector in Russia (principally because of gas-flaring), and were there to be an accident the tragedy would be many times greater than the explosion that took place on the oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010: in the Arctic waters, it would be possible to collect no more than 10 per cent of the oil which would be spilt.

What’s more, the proven reserves of ‘black gold’ on the Arctic Shelf will last for no more than three to five years. In the Barents Sea, for example, proven reserves are five times less than Russian companies currently produce annually. The oil on the Shelf is ‘heavy’, of inferior quality, and its production cost is significantly higher than oil produced on land. If the global oil price falls lower than one hundred dollars a barrel, then drilling for oil in the Arctic becomes unprofitable.

The real reason for the pursuit of oil in the Arctic, and the way in which this is defended by helicopters and coastal protection vessels, has nothing to do with sovereignty or Russia’s national interests; instead, it is all about the mercenary aims of the oil corporations. The entire Arctic infrastructure, including ice-breakers, exploratory drilling and auxiliary vessels, is paid for out of the state budget. In the same way, tax relief is given for the mining and export of natural resources. Russian people never see any of the oil, since it goes straight from the well-head for export; nor do they see any benefits from the tax deductions from the almost zero profitability of the product.

When questions of the Arctic and the incident with Greenpeace are raised, there’s often talk about sovereignty, about the sacred borders of Russia, about the generations of Polar explorers, about victories and sacrifices. The point is that you can’t put sovereignty into your pocket. Russia can seize huge Arctic territories, but expanding economic activity there simply for the good of a few individual corporations could prove exceedingly costly to the country. Sovereignty means not simply having judicial control over a territory, but having the ability to use it in a rational manner, nurture it and pass it on to future generations. In this understanding of the term, Russia has already lost sovereignty over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of territory, which is saturated with oil, or polluted by radiation or the results of all manner of economic or military activity. Furthermore, as is well known, the fragile nature in the Arctic takes centuries, not years, to recover. Take Novaya Zemlya, with its high background radiation levels; or Wrangel Island, where lie hundreds of thousands of empty fuel barrels that have been spilt over the years. These are shown on the map as Russian territory; but in reality, for the foreseeable future, they have been lost not just to Russia but to all mankind. These sovereign territories have suffered an ecological catastrophe on a global scale.

Beyond the territorial waters of a few individual states, the Arctic is the property of all mankind. A global movement has already existed for several years calling for the Arctic to be regarded as international territory with special conservation status, with economic and military activity prohibited and only science or tourism allowed. Greenpeace’s ‘Save the Arctic’ petition has been signed by more than eight million people. There is already a precedent for this in international law: the 1959 Antarctic Agreement, and the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), from 1982. For the preservation of Planet Earth and of the future of Russia, it would be worth extending such a regime to the Arctic.

We’re not talking here about states giving up their sovereignty within the confines of existing borders or territorial waters. And we’re not talking only about Russia, but about all the countries bordering the Arctic. We do mean the possibility of giving up exclusive economic zones and, in general, military activity; about stopping mining for natural resources; about industrial fishing and the transit of commercial shipping. It’s one thing to consider using the Northern Sea Route at present rates and for present tasks, such as supplying Arctic ports or supporting scientific activity. But it would be a completely different matter if, even as the ice continues to melt, a commercial route were to be established through the Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, providing a waterway for container ships and supertankers, thus turning the Northern Ice Ocean into a busy transport highway with all the high risks this brings for shipping. This must not happen. Like the Antarctic, the Arctic must be turned into an international nature reserve.

Right now, this call sounds like a kind of utopia, especially considering the tangle of historical, economic and geopolitical problems connected with the Arctic: modern civilization developed in the Northern Hemisphere, and the Arctic has been an arena for a centuries-long confrontation. It is highly unlikely that states – especially Russia as it ‘gets up off its knees’ (according to the propaganda slogan) – will be prepared to give up their appetites for sovereignty or their economic ambitions. But when the global campaign to save the Antarctic began, that too seemed no less utopian. Now it’s the turn of the Arctic.

Ultimately, Russia’s national interests consist not in sticking titanium flags on the bottom of the sea, nor in illusions of territorial acquisitions; not in new military bases, nor in ‘energy security’ (which, in fact, simply defends the interests of the oil corporations); but in the ecological security of the country and its sustainable development. For Russia, the Arctic represents an ecologically vulnerable zone, and in such a situation our interests are defended not by Gazprom and Rosneft, not by Arctic troops, nor by coastal patrol vessels, but by a bunch of gutsy Greenpeace activists. But it’s difficult for the country to understand this when it’s been blinded by the mirage of sovereignty and myths about inexhaustible resources.

CRIMEA AS A TERRITORY OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

How funny it all was at the start: we had the ‘Cat Stomping Law’ (the nickname given to the Law on Silence that forbids loud noises during the night and was adopted in St Petersburg)[8] and the return of school uniform – State Duma deputies Vitaly Milonov and Elena Mizulina comically battling away for morality; and the creation of the Theology Department of the National Research Nuclear University (MEPhI – Moscow Engineering Physics Institute), the country’s leading university in the sphere of the natural sciences. At first this all seemed absurd, grotesque, like trolling: Cossack patrols, the blessing of space rockets, the banning of exhibitions and shows by demand of the Orthodox community. In 2012, things began to look rather more serious, when the court case against Pussy Riot began; and the ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’ was passed, forbidding foreigners from adopting Russian orphans. And then came the law banning gay propaganda. There was still the hope that this resistance to change was just the result of political games; that it was propaganda for internal consumption, just an attempt to scare people after the protests that took place in Moscow in the winter of 2011–12.

Observed from outside, Russia was just another authoritarian state which habitually put pressure on the media and on dissenters but played according to global rules – carrying out IPOs; attracting investment; preparing for the Winter Olympics in Sochi and for the chairmanship of the G8; speaking at the Council of Europe and in the UN Security Council. There was some criticism of Moscow on human rights issues, but it was still possible to reach agreement with the Kremlin when it came to international affairs, Syria being a case in point. Pragmatism was the watchword in politics, and Putin gave the impression that he was a man ‘who’d backed the right horse’. Domestic policy and foreign policy were separate. At home, there were ‘spiritual bonds’ – the name that Vladimir Putin gave to traditional values – while abroad, there were credit ratings, the NordStream gas pipeline and his good friends Gerhard and Silvio.[9]

And suddenly the dam burst, and the murky waters of Russian internal policy gushed abroad, dragging Russia into the Crimean gamble, taking it beyond the boundaries of international law and starting a new Cold War with the West. The ‘spiritual bonds’ of the internal Russian product became the basis for foreign policy. The Eurasian fantasies of the philosopher Alexander Dugin, the patriotic kitsch coming from the pen of Alexander Prokhanov, the primitive geopolitics coming out of the military academies, led by retired generals: this intellectual rubbish suddenly became mainstream, resulting in an actual war, intervention in Ukraine and nuclear threats made to the West by the Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, and the television presenter, Dmitry Kiselyov. The sound of the anecdotal stomping of cats became the clank of caterpillar tracks. In the three weeks separating the Winter Olympics in Sochi from the referendum on the status of Crimea on 16 March 2014, Russia went from being the victorious and hospitable host of the Olympic Games to an aggressor state, putting on the line its own reputation and international stability for the sake of a rocky peninsula in the Black Sea. On 16 March, Russia changed the situation at a single stroke, at the same time ending the twenty-five-year project of normalization and adaptation to the global world that had been going on since 1989, the year when Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall fell. Russia found itself in this new world with an annexed territory – but with no rules, guarantees or norms of international law. The unexpectedness, sheer scale and possible consequences of this stunning transformation all put it on a par with the collapse of the USSR.

There’s no point in looking for any rational basis, or for any systemic boundaries in this revolution; the wheels have come off and it’s not clear what else it will destroy. To try to understand this you don’t need the geopolitical specialists Kissinger or Brzezinski; you need the Russian philosophers and writers, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Danilevsky. Russian policy has been grabbed now not by the Gazprom manager with the villa in Antibes (who’s flying off on his private jet to save his shares), but by an Orthodox Chekist[10] with a slim volume by Ivan Ilyin, an émigré philosopher and monarchist. For too long, we ignored the revanchist rhetoric of ‘the Russian world’; and now that world has come to us in armoured personnel carriers.

Russian politics has passed through a Jungian revolution in which the collective unconscious, the archetype and the myth have triumphed once and for all. Having begun as trolling and political technology, the irrational has gradually burrowed its way to the very core of politics and has itself become the policy, the lens through which the Kremlin sees the world. This discourse has taken hold of the subject and brought to life a new ideological and messianic form of politics. As the political scientist Alexander Morozov writes, ‘the ideas of profit, trade, exchange, cooperation, institutional and traditional “politics of interests” – indeed, the whole discourse of Realpolitik, has given way to risk, heroism, heroic suicide and “fate”. No sacrifice, nor even the final catastrophe, will convince the initiators of such a policy of how absurd it is.’[11]

Crimea became that very ‘fate’: the moment of truth; the focal point for all the grudges of recent years; the post-imperial resentment and the wounded pride, like in Alexei Balabanov’s film Brother 2 (‘You bastards still have to answer to me for Sevastopol!’, screams the hero at a group of Ukrainians); the thirst for revenge and the search for ‘fascists’ in the neighbouring countries; the inferiority complex (‘America can, so why can’t we?’); and the global ambitions. Crimea was where the mix of complexes and fears was satiated and proved to be the crystallization of the new Russian regime. And at one and the same time, the territorialization of the collective subconscious, which found a launchpad for itself, deep in the heroic myth of Sevastopol.

Today in the hero-city[12] there’s a carnival: the main figures of this new Russian discourse strut their stuff, such as Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov, and the leader of the patriotic bikers, Alexander ‘the Surgeon’ Zaldostanov, along with Cossacks and war veterans. Alexander Prokhanov praises the Russian President to the skies as ‘Putin Taurida’,[13] and ecstatic commentators talk about ‘the beginning of new Russian conquests’. Inspired by the success of the Sochi Olympics and charged with a messianic role, Russia decided to rewrite the global rules of the game and reconsider the whole global architecture built after 1991 – and even what came out of Yalta in 1945. Sensing the West’s impotency and disunity, the crisis of leadership in America and the weakness of the European Union, Moscow decided to stake everything and throw down the gauntlet to the modern world order. At first, Russia simply criticized the West for its moral degradation, and built up its own protective barrier against homosexuals and liberals. Now, Russia has decided to spread the borders of the empire, doing so, what’s more, on the same conservative and moralistic foundations it has used to create order at home.

Will this new Russian crusade be successful? In the final analysis, it is based on a romantic myth, not on sober calculations. At its root is an irrational impulse, just like the German Blut und Boden, ‘blood and soil’, which today has brought millions of Russians out in solidarity with Crimea, but which has very few resources or institutional foundations. In contrast to Stalin’s USSR, today’s Russia does not have the army, nor the technology, nor – and this is crucial – an attractive ideology to present to the outside world, which was the case with socialism. Analogies with Iran in 1979 don’t hold water, either. Putin is not Khomeini, Patriarch Kirill is not Khamenei, and Moscow’s Orthodoxy does not have the mobilizing potential of Shiite Islam. It’s just as impossible to create Holy Rus’ in secularized, urban Russia as it is to create ‘the Russian world’ on bayonets, or to unite Orthodox civilization according to Samuel Huntington’s principle[14] – if, of course, you don’t count as such the gathering of the ‘age-old Russian lands’ of Crimea, Trans-Dniester, Abkhazia and Ossetia.

History repeats itself twice. What is happening today in Crimea is the final act of Russia’s imperial drama, which in a tragi-comic way is eliminating its Soviet legacy. It is somewhat frightening to observe this exorcism, when the Kremlin has breathed the cold of the grave and the spirit of the past has arisen. But this is just a wild and unrealistic chimera, shadows, a superficial simulacrum, be it of rusty Cossacks or Orthodox bikers. Right now in Russia it is nighttime; we simply have to wait for the cock to crow for the third time.

DRUM SOLO

In my Moscow childhood long ago, there was a map of the world hanging in the kitchen of our flat. It hung there partly to educate me, but partly to cover up the paint that was peeling off the walls. In the upper right-hand corner, the most beautiful country in the world stood out in red. As I ate my porridge and listened to the children’s radio programme, Pioneer Dawn,[15] I thought how unspeakably lucky I was to have been born in the happiest and biggest country in the world; what’s more, in its capital city! And I dreamt about the future, when we would grow even bigger and stronger, and we’d probably incorporate Mongolia, Bulgaria, perhaps Romania and Hungary as well (after all, they were brotherly countries); then we could take in Afghanistan, and Alaska… Outside the window dawn had not yet broken, and huge snowflakes were falling, the kind you get only in childhood; clear children’s voices were delivering a Pioneer song on the radio, and the future looked wonderful.

Forty years have passed since then. The country creaked when it made a final imperial charge to the south,[16] began to crack up on the Berlin Wall and finally crumbled in a cloud of dust. We Soviet citizens became used to living with new borders; we built our own states and began to visit each other. We learnt the new global rules of the game, engaged in talks about disarmament, set up new rules and institutions for ourselves, gained access to new countries and joined new markets, and opened up for ourselves a world that was much more complicated, colourful and interdependent. It seemed that we had begun to appreciate that great powers are determined not by their size, not by having hundreds of warheads and millions of square kilometres of territory, but by their GDP per capita, the openness of their society and the attractiveness of the country. It seemed as if we had cast aside our childish geopolitical romanticism and messianic dreams and were becoming a grown-up country.

But today, looking at the masses rejoicing over the annexation of Crimea, seeing the flags on the balconies and the celebratory fireworks over Moscow (as if this were May 1944, as if Sevastopol had been liberated from actual – rather than imaginary – fascists); and watching how the Politika talk show on Channel One finishes with a collective rendition of the Russian national anthem, I once again hear the theme tune to Pioneer Dawn. And when I read the note which the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia,[17] Vladimir Zhirinovsky, sent to the Polish foreign ministry suggesting that Russia and Poland should divide Ukraine between them, and I see the plan he drew up for the suggested occupation of Ukraine, showing Russia extending across the whole of the Black Sea coast from Adzharia in the east to Bessarabia in the west (and the jester, as everyone knows, comes out with things that the king would never dare say out loud), I once again see the red map of my childhood on the wall and remember the joke about the Soviet schoolchild who went into a shop and asked for a globe of the Soviet Union.

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

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

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

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

Until the parents come back.

JIHAD IN DONETSK

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

However, the joy of receiving this award was somewhat overshadowed by the fact that the Russian President shared it with some rather dubious characters: the pro-Eurasian philosopher, Alexander Dugin (‘for expounding the ideology of Russia’s expansion’); the political strategist and former prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR),[20] Alexander Borodai; the leader of ISIS, Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi; the leader of the Boko Haram sect, Abubakar Shekau; the British Islamist known by the nickname of ‘Jihadi John’, who was ‘famous’ for a video put out by ISIS in which he is seen beheading an American journalist; and two Kuwaiti citizens who organized the funding of ISIS and units of Al-Qaeda. So here we have an alternative G8: three Russians and five Islamists, who in the previous year had sent out a challenge to the existing world order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What unites all these phenomena is that in Nigeria, Syria and Iraq, as well as in Donetsk and Lugansk, similar zones have emerged where there is uncontrolled violence. They are examples of what the British sociologist, Mary Kaldor, has called ‘new wars’. These are new types of organized violence, in which the boundaries are wiped away between the traditional type of war, in which states and armies take part, and organized crime, terrorism and the systematic violation of human rights. ‘New wars’ are like whirlpools that suck in people, territory and resources. Their existence is fuelled both by external military and humanitarian aid, as well as by their own ‘economy of violence’, based on robbery and murder as well as trade in arms, humanitarian aid and people. For the local ‘entrepreneurs of violence’ (field commanders and political leaders), violence is a profitable business that demands constant new investment. Many economists who examine modern wars see them not as ‘ethnic conflicts’, ‘struggles for national liberation’ or ‘decolonization’, but simply as a type of organized crime.

The ‘hybrid war’ in Eastern Ukraine, of which Russian military theoreticians are so proud, has become another of the ‘new wars’ as defined by Kaldor. Donetsk and Lugansk today remind one of Chechnya between 1996 and 1999: a bandit state, a ‘black hole’ of violence, contraband and terrorism, which almost pulled in the whole of the North Caucasus. It is no coincidence that among the ranks of the militia bands in the Donbass there are Chechen battalions. These are not simply warriors sent by the Chechen President, Ramzan Kadyrov; they are also fighters for the purity of the faith against the hated West. The paradox of this situation is that Vladimir Putin, who came to power and gained popularity at the peak of the struggle against terrorism, blood and money that fuelled the hotbed of terrorism in Chechnya, has now created with his own hands a second Chechnya even closer to the centre of Russia, right on the border with the Rostov Oblast. All sorts of mercenaries are undergoing a military baptism, and the mad ‘re-enactors’ of historic battles are living out their bloody fantasies. Here we have yet another similarity with ISIS, which attracts fanatics and scumbags from all over the world. Some 15,000 foreigners are fighting in their ranks, including up to 2,000 citizens from Western Europe, such as ‘Jihadi John’, who beheaded journalists and became one of the ‘heroes’ on Foreign Policy’s list.

A social and humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in the Donbass, and violence is becoming a way of life. This violence cannot be contained within the region’s borders. More and more frequently, it is bursting out into the outside world, as happened with the destruction of flight MH17. The global community has already shown that Russia was responsible, having provided the separatist fighters with modern weaponry. This violence is already being felt in Russia itself, as shown by an incident that happened on 3 November 2014, when four drunken militia fighters from the DPR who were taking a break in the Moscow region and celebrating election day in Donetsk, shot up a traffic police patrol in the Solnechnogorsky District. Three of them got away. Apparently, they were all from the ‘Ghost’ (Prizrak) brigade led by the Lugansk commander, Alexei Mozgovoi. Mozgovoi himself is given huge support in Russia, where he holds meetings with leaders of the parliamentary parties – the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and A Just Russia – and travels around Moscow in a four-by-four with number plates decorated with the Novorossiya symbol. As he himself acknowledges, if traffic police inspectors stop him and recognize him, they wave him on his way, wishing him well.

According to rumours, the brains behind these pirate republics meet not in the frozen wastes of Donetsk or Lugansk, but in Moscow, in a separate room in the ‘Kofemaniya’ café on Bolshoi Cherkassky Lane,[26] exactly halfway between the FSB building on Lubyanka Square and the Presidential Administration headquarters on Staraya Square. Alexander Borodai, ministers from the DPR and senior representatives of the Presidential Administration have been spotted there. It seems that these ‘global thinkers’ of the twenty-first century, the postmodernists, can slip away from their cosy Moscow offices to bless the jihad with military Orthodoxy and modern weaponry. They have not yet managed to build their ‘Russian world’; but they have succeeded in tearing Russia away from developments going on around the world, just as their like-minded thinkers who cannot cope with globalization have done in Nigeria, Colombia, Iraq and elsewhere.

GLOBAL BIRYULYOVO

The Russian media came up with another reason to laugh at Europe. In October 2013 in Paris there were mass demonstrations and strikes at the lycées in protest at the extradition from France of two migrant schoolchildren, a fifteen-year-old gypsy girl from Kosovo and a nineteen-year-old Armenian lad. The students demanded the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls. Once again, Russian propaganda talked about ‘the extremes of tolerance’ and ‘the dominance of migrants’. It would simply be impossible to imagine such a scenario in Russia.

Two vital factors are missing from any Russian discussion about migrants. The first is the human dimension (hardly surprising in a country where social Darwinism has triumphed). The migrant problem is examined from a variety of viewpoints: economics, corruption, the labour market, national security, street crime, society’s adaptability, Russia’s cultural immunity. It is looked at using biological terms such as ‘fresh blood’ and mechanical terms such as the ‘assimilative machine’, as the conservative economist and politician Maxim Sokolov describes it. But hardly anyone talks about the most basic fact: this is first and foremost about people who have lived side by side with us for years, decades even; people with their own joys, heartaches and rights. And not just the legal rights of entry, residence and work, but the standard human rights to life; freedom from slavery, hunger and oppression; the right to shelter and to justice.

This is very difficult to explain to Russians, who have become so hardened and neglected over the past twenty-five years that they are constantly creating their own outcasts: the elderly, the homeless, drug addicts, AIDS sufferers. You could even add to that list stray dogs, which in Russia are looked on as biological rubbish, not as living creatures with their own inalienable rights. Migrants (or ‘animals’ to use the slang of Russian neofascists) are effectively on a par with those stray dogs. Society can regulate their usefulness and their population at its own discretion. Some can be trapped and sterilized; others can be poisoned; a third group can be sent to shelters. Gastarbeiter (guest workers) are looked upon merely as biomass. All that needs to be agreed is how many there are, the correct way in which they can be used, and the regulation of their social and cultural hygiene.

Not surprisingly, over the last few years Russian society has adopted the most primitive form of racism. One can recall the pathetic posters of the nationalist ‘Russian March’ (which now takes place in the depressed Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo), with their slogan, ‘For the sake of the white children’s future’; against a background of a field of wheat there’s a dyed blonde woman holding a fair-haired child. Or the ultraliberal journalist Yulia Latynina, who writes in the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta about the ‘slave subculture’, with its ‘traditional culture of despotism, oppression and Islam’. There’s even the respected opposition figure, Vladimir Ashurkov, a graduate of the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, who presented the classic civilizing argument in the business newspaper, Vedomosti:

Progressive thinkers in the late nineteenth century could argue this way, as when Kipling wrote about ‘the white man’s burden’ and the Count de Gobineau spoke of racial superiority; when non-Europeans were touted around the world in cages and put on display in circuses; and when the English advertisement for Pears soap suggested that it could wash clean black skin. It is impossible to imagine such ideas being put forward now in Western newspapers or at Wharton; but in Russia in the second decade of the twenty-first century it is still considered a normal level of discussion.

The key misconception of Russian advocates of racial purity is the idea that there is a certain understanding of what is ‘our’ identity; ‘our’ city, in which ‘we’ are the ‘landlords’ and ‘they’ are simply ‘tenants’. This is an ideological statement, but does not represent social reality. Russia – and Moscow, what’s more – is a veritable cauldron of life, in which the process of ethnic integration has been operating for longer and more successfully than in the most tolerant of European countries; we simply stubbornly refuse to acknowledge this fact. As a Eurasian civilization, Russia stands at the junction of various cultures. Aliens who were conquerors (Tatars) or the conquered (from the Caucasus) were easily assimilated. Russia has never been a ‘pure’ nation, but an eternal colonial frontier, with its Slav-Ugric genes, its soul from the steppes, and its elite, made up of descendants of Tatar mirzas (royal princes), Baltic barons and Caucasian princes. And the main melting pot of this potpourri was Moscow, which for more than six hundred years has been mixing together these human tides, races and religions.

Even the names of streets in Moscow speak of this multicultural heritage: Ordynka was the road to the Golden Horde; on the Arbat stood the Tatars with their carts called arbas; then there are also Great Tatar Street and Little Tatar Street, with its mosque, within walking distance of the Kremlin; there’s Armenian (Armyansky) Lane near Lubyanka Square; Georgian (Gruzinsky) Streets, both Large and Small, just off Tverskaya; Maroseyka Street, a short form of Malorossiki, or ‘Little Russians’, where the ‘Little Russians’ – as the Ukrainians were known – settled.

It is true, though, that Russia was never a haven of tolerance. In our ethnopolitical history there are plenty of classic examples of colonialism, barbarism and violent russification: the Pale of Settlement and the Black Hundreds; pogroms and uprooting of whole peoples. But this was, after all, an empire. The empire could accommodate different peoples and they could serve the empire. And Moscow, unlike St Petersburg, was always a giant marketplace, a massive transit hub; and in the age of globalization the capital’s role as a giant valve for the transfer of resources – be they raw materials, finance or people – has only grown.

And here we have the second blunder of modern Russian nationalism: in their search for ‘blood and soil’, the nationalists are turning away from Russia’s massive imperial heritage, from the breadth of a great power and its ability to live with Others. It is surprising that the nationalists cannot see this as they march under their black and yellow banners of the Russian Empire in the ‘Russian March’ in Biryulyovo. They are unaware that Russia has an imperial, not a Russian, ethnos; that it was the empire which gave Russia its great history, but at the same time replaced the Russian nation. By demanding that the city should be cleansed of migrants, that the Caucasus should be cut off from Russia or that visa regimes should be established for the Central Asian states, the nationalists want to turn the Russian Federation once and for all from the successor state of the empire into just another provincial country.

This is the main difference between Russia and other former empires, such as France, Britain or the Netherlands. In the postcolonial era, they have managed to transform their experience of empire into a sense of responsibility for the peoples whom they oppressed for centuries, into a proactive policy of immigration, assimilation and tolerance. In recognition of their moral responsibility for colonialism, the great nations have demonstrated generosity, having no fear for their gene pool and cultural immunity. If Russia wants to be a global player, if it wants to influence events in Syria and in the Balkans, to hold talks on a par with the USA and China, it must accept its responsibility for the centuries of colonialism, for ‘its’ Tajiks and Dagestanis, for their markets and their ethnic quarters, for the builders and cleaners from these regions, for the mosques and the doner-kebab kiosks. This is normal; this is the legacy of empire. And today, holding ‘great nation’ status includes being welcoming.

Unfortunately, the word ‘welcoming’ does not come into the Russian political lexicon. With its discordant ‘Russian March’, with its pretend Cossacks, its Nazis, its heathens and its football fanatics, Russia is turning away from an empire and becoming a mere province; as is evident in the distant Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo.

SEDUCED BY GEOPOLITICS

Political scientists have always had a hard time in Russia. It’s a country where there have never been free universities; where independent political thought has led to prison sentences; and where critical thinking has remained the stuff of dreams. This is a country where political science has been simply a timid servant, at the beck and call of those in power, and where you could count genuine political scientists on the fingers of one hand.

There is, however, one sphere of knowledge in which political thought in the Fatherland has been allowed to develop fully: the secretive and mystical discipline known as ‘geopolitics’. One hundred years ago, at the time of the fathers of geopolitics, Rudolf Kjellén and Friedrich Ratzel, the concept was infused with a particular intellectual freshness; but in the past fifty years it has grown considerably stale, and in Western political science it has been kicked into a far-off corner of a cupboard as one of the guises of the theory of political realism. It has become the destiny of veterans of the Cold War, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or John Mearsheimer, whose article in Foreign Affairs in July 2014, talking about how the West had ‘missed its chance’ with Russia, was greeted with delight by Russian experts.

On the contrary, in post-Soviet Russia, with its virginal political thought, geopolitics became the queen of the sciences. Provincial teachers of Marxism, military philosophers in military uniform and mere charlatans flocked to it, covering up their lack of knowledge of the humanities with this deceptively thin theory, which, to the kind Russian heart, looked like a conspiracy containing pretty words such as ‘Eurasia’, ‘heartland’ and ‘Atlantic civilization’. In Russia, for the ruling class geopolitics removed the need for a critical outlook on the wider world, suggesting instead messianic myths and simulacra such as ‘national interests’ and ‘the struggle for resources’.

In the Russian understanding of geopolitics, the world consists of unitary states, all of which have their own ‘interests’ and political will and which exist in a Darwinian battle for resources. Vladimir Nabokov beautifully described this view of the world in his novel The Gift, using as an example a Russian émigré, Colonel Shchyogolev, who analyses the world from his couch:

In reality, of course, everything is much more complicated than this. There is no unified ‘West’, or ‘Russia’ or ‘America’; nor are there any abstract ‘national interests’. There are the interests of Vladimir Putin and Igor Sechin (the President of the oil company, Rosneft); the interests of Putin’s friends, the Kovalchuk brothers and the Rotenberg brothers; the corporate interests of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the External Intelligence Service (SVR). There are the interests of the White House and the Pentagon; the interests of NATO, and of the [then] President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko. Then there are the interests of corporations such as Siemens and Shell. In other words, there is a complicated multilayered configuration of strategies, institutions, bureaucracies, selfish intentions and fatal errors, all pulling in different directions. And there is no single point where these interests coincide, however much the lovers of these narrow theories might wish for it to be so. ‘Geopolitics’ in today’s Russia is simply an ideology that justifies imperial ambitions and the state’s priority over the individual in the allegedly eternal confrontation between Russia and the West in the battle for resources.

In actual fact, there is no competition for ‘Russian resources’; Russia is merely flattering itself thinking that there is. There is simply a normal concern that our country, like the Saudis, regularly produces oil, buys its iPhones and its cars from the West, and doesn’t interfere in the internal affairs of the West. Back home, as far as the West cares, Russians can carry out exorcisms or light the bonfires of the Inquisition. In the West, they gave up caring long ago about the state of democracy or human rights in Russia. And when a single ‘petrol pump which pretends to be a country’ (in the very apt words of Senator John McCain) suddenly starts to kick up a fuss by saying it has been insulted, and takes out its offence on those around it, the West simply sees it as a fire or health hazard and puts it into quarantine.

The fiasco in Ukraine is a good example of how Russia, acting upon its geopolitical fears and myths (a fear of strategic encirclement, Ukraine joining NATO or the European Union), rather than on a rational assessment of the risks and advantages, has forced itself into a trap. Moscow turned its fears into self-fulfilling prophecies: by annexing Crimea and starting a war with Ukraine it simply pushed Ukraine into the embrace of the EU and NATO, wrenching away from itself and embittering a formerly fraternal people. Russia has shot itself in the foot, leaving the West simply to look on in amazement at what Russia is doing, and then gave itself a headache about what to do with this Ukraine that has suddenly fallen into its hands. All this is the result of an erroneous assessment of Russia’s ‘national interests’ and the false conclusion that they lie in a battle with the West for Ukraine in the geopolitical space of Eurasia.

If we look at this closely, we see that Russia is not facing any sort of ‘challenge from the West’. There is the challenge of globalization and of the post-industrial society, and the West and Russia must both face up to that. After 1991 Russia was offered the chance to play by the general rules of the game, perhaps not as a world leader but certainly as a regional player. Over the course of twenty or so years, a unique architecture for mutually advantageous cooperation was constructed, in which Russian resources were exchanged for Western investment, technology and institutions. A Westernized consumer society was created in Russia which, in the words of the American political scientist Daniel Treisman, turned Russia into a ‘normal country’. By the start of the twenty-first century, the West had given up on the idea of a democratic transition in Russia and gave Putin licence to maintain internal stability. At the same time, no one promised Russia a role in resolving global issues simply because of its past merits and victories. Today such a role is guaranteed only by deep structural changes and the construction of a competitive economy and responsible foreign policy, as in China.

A decade and a half ago, in the year 2000 (which now seems so far away that it is hard to imagine that it ever existed), on the eve of his first election, the young and progressive Tsar Vladimir, answering the question of his confidants as to what was meant by the national idea in Russia, answered briefly: ‘being competitive’. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then – and now much blood, too – but if we take that as the definition of national interests, then everything in Russia has been turned on its head. It seemed that at last national interests would include investment and technology, the strengthening of human capital, available education and healthcare, working institutions, freedom of speech and association and free and fair elections. These were the slogans with which the liberal opposition took to the streets; and it is they who today still represent the genuine – and not the false – national interests of Russia.

On the other side are those who are committing acts of aggression against a neighbouring state; who have unleashed a dirty war right under their very noses; who send Russian soldiers to be slaughtered and try to cover up this crime; who have torn up the whole system of links with the West, from arms control to investment and financial instruments; who have turned Russia into an international outcast; who are destroying the very capability for economic growth and modernisation. These are the people who are destroying Russia’s national interests.

Today Russia does not need geopolitical myths that lead us to war and mobilization, but a programme of national demobilization and a lowering of the temperature of hatred and confrontation with the West. The Cold War is over; it’s time to build our house and bring up our children, not send them to the slaughterhouse. We are faced by a multitude of small wars – with the Islamic State, with drugs, poverty, cancer, the Ebola virus – and in these wars the West is our ally. We need to take back the concept of ‘national ideas’ from paranoid people and charlatans, and forbid them by law from using the term ‘geopolitics’ as a false science, on a par with conspiracy and astrology.

PROFESSION: INVADER

In Russia, they love jokes about invading other countries. After Prague in 1968, there was a joke doing the rounds about who uses which mode of transport: the Frenchman said that he goes to work on a moped, on holiday in a Renault, and abroad by aeroplane. The German goes to work on a bicycle, on holiday in a Mercedes, and abroad by ship. The Soviet citizen answered that he goes to work on the tram, on holiday by train, and abroad in a tank.

In the well-fed, post-Soviet era, there’s a popular joke about the Russian tourist who is being questioned at the border on arrival in a Western country:

‘Nationality?’

‘Russian.’

‘Occupation?’

‘No, just visiting.’

Now the jokes have been turned around. On the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, a video, called ‘I Am a Russian Invader’, went viral across the Russian Internet. Created in the infamous studio, My Duck’s Vision, the film is an apologia for Russian colonialism and gives a list of the blessings that the ‘invader by birthright’ has brought to the occupied territory. Yury Degtyarev, the studio’s general director, who is known for his links to the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (‘Our people’), acknowledged that the video was ordered by people close to the state. The film has been translated into ten languages, including Polish and Chinese. It should be noted that, curiously, the link to it was placed on the Facebook page of the Russian Embassy in Finland, which caused quite a stir in the Finnish press.

The video itself is not worthy of attention. My Duck’s Vision has already produced a string of trashy film clips, from the ‘scandalous truth’ about McDonald’s and Apple to one where the hero grabs the breasts of thousands of girls and then, with the same paw, shakes hands with Putin at a youth gathering at Lake Seliger in the Tver Oblast. The point is the avalanche of popularity achieved by ‘Invader’. In the first week it was watched on YouTube nearly five million times and received six times more ‘likes’ than ‘dislikes’. When such a viral video explodes on the Internet, it causes an even deeper virus within the Russian subconscious: it helps create a false impression of superiority, confidence in our infallibility and a painful nostalgia for the empire.

The droning voice of the presenter stresses the advantages of civilization that Russia has brought to its conquered lands, creating an almost Kipling-like impression of the ‘Russian man’s burden’. Look, in Siberia, where previously ‘they sold women for a bundle of sable pelts’, we have begun to extract oil, gas and aluminium, and we have built cities with nurseries and hospitals. Farmsteads in the Baltic States have been turned into electricity stations and factories producing radio technology and cars. And, guess what, in the steppes of Central Asia, we constructed cosmodromes and stadiums, and we grew wheat and cotton.

The voice forgets to say that the advantages of the modern era, which were imposed upon the native peoples of the North, destroyed their traditional way of life, took away the feeding grounds for their reindeer and soaked these grounds with oil, tore children away from their nomadic families and stuck them in boarding schools, killed off shamans and healers, destroyed the knowledge of pre-European civilizations and brought with them the main exterminator of the aboriginal peoples: vodka. The voice forgets to say that cotton became the curse of Central Asia, drying up the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers for the sake of irrigation, turning the Aral Sea into a desert, and every year forcing the men, women and children of Uzbekistan to take part in the compulsory harvesting of this ‘white gold’. And in any case, Uzbek cotton cannot compete on global markets: it is much poorer in quality than Egyptian cotton. Equally uncompetitive were the RAF minibuses and Rigonda radiograms made in Latvia. These clumsy creations of the Soviet automobile and radio industries were in demand only in the semi-closed socialist camp; they had no chance on the world market against ‘Toyota’ or ‘Sony’. And the Baltic peoples could remember much more besides: their occupation by the Red Army and the deportation of tens of thousands of people to Siberia, the destruction of farmsteads and their enforced replacement with collective farms, and the ecological disasters they suffered. The apocalyptic scenery of the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker was shot at a disused electricity station near Tallinn.

The Russian Empire and then later the USSR behaved towards their outlying districts in the classic manner of an agent of modernization, smashing the traditional way of life with the iron fist of industrialization, creating modern infrastructure but, at the same time, destroying the natural environment and reshaping the map of the nations. Over the course of hundreds of years, Russia expropriated neighbouring territories, reaching out in what the historian Paul Kennedy called ‘imperial overstretch’. But by the end of the twentieth century this gigantic territorial project had run its course and collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions and responsibilities. It is enough today to compare the standard of living on the Karelian Isthmus in the Leningrad Oblast, which was occupied by the USSR during the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939–40, with the standard of living in neighbouring Finland. Travelling by train or car from Helsinki to Vyborg is an existential act. It seems that when you cross the Russo-Finnish border the very quality of the space around you changes. The houses are dilapidated; the roads get worse and worse; there are neglected forests and abandoned fields, in which lies a huge amount of scrap metal: rusting rails, old car bodies, severed cables – the remains of a great dream of modernization, long-forgotten. The ‘Russian invader’ may have been able to conquer territory (‘at what price?’ is a separate question), but he was not very capable of making it fit for habitation.

From an historical perspective, the Russian colonization of Eurasia was simply a part of the Age of Exploration of the early capitalist and imperialist time. Russia was caught up in the Age of Modernity; like England, France and Holland, Russia widened the borders of the known world. They conquered foreigners using cold steel, gunpowder and the cross, incorporating new lands and creating one of the largest empires ever known. But here the similarities end. After the fall of the French and British Empires and the turbulent social changes of the 1960s, the discourse of postcolonialism was established in the West. This was linked to Edward Said’s 1979 book Orientalism, in which he describes how the West dreamt up the East as an object of study, to be disciplined and colonized; and with the works of Gayatri Spivak, which in the 1980s posed the radical question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’

The postcolonial theory has never gained popularity in the academic community in Russia, and is regarded with the same disdain as the Western ideas of tolerance and political correctness. Intellectually, Russia is half a century, if not a century, behind, back in the times of Kipling, with its ignorant sense of pure racism and colonialism and its naive certainty of the superiority of the white man. In reality, Russia always lags behind by about fifty to a hundred years. This was the case with the gunpowder revolution, with socialism, with liberalism… and it is only now that we are reaching the most painful phase of coming to terms with the collapse of our colonialism (Putin described the collapse of the USSR as, ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’), which the West went through half a century ago.

The popularity of a video about the Russian invader is based on the same dense arrogance – on the myths of the advantages of Soviet civilization and of the superiority of the fictional ‘Russian world’. The annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbass demonstrate the same ‘invader’s syndrome’. From the Belovezha Accords in 1991,[29] which signalled the end of the USSR, Russia had a contemptuous attitude to Ukrainian independence. The very word ‘nezalezhnost’ (Ukrainian for ‘independence’) is spoken by Russians with irony. Russia does not consider Ukraine as a state but as an ethnography, merely a Cossack in his baggy trousers, standing in the doorway of one of the chain of ‘Taras Bulba’ Ukrainian restaurants; for them, Ukraine is simply a sort of lesser Russia. Just as two hundred years ago, at the time of the Monroe Doctrine, the Latin American countries were looked on by the USA as ‘banana republics’, so Ukraine is now regarded by the Russian chauvinist in the same way: it is the ‘pork fat republic’, named after a typical Ukrainian product (and Belarus is the ‘potato republic’), and it does not have the right to political sovereignty.

This is why the first Ukrainian revolution of 2004, and particularly the second of 2013–14, were such a blow to Russian pride. The declaration about their own values and priorities was a clear demonstration that Ukrainians did not want to be simply ‘the little brother’. And Crimea and the Donbass were the ‘Russian world’s’ answer to the Maidan, as the Ukrainian revolution has been called.[30] This was not simply a geopolitical takeover, but a demonstration of the superiority of one civilization over another; the idea that, under Russia, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine will have a happier and richer life.

What happened as a result, though, is well known. Crimea is effectively living in a state of emergency. Water supplies are insufficient, and electricity is constantly being turned off. It is struggling as a holiday resort: in 2013 there were six and a half million tourists; this fell to three and a half million in 2014. Prices have risen by 50 per cent, and there has been a mass seizure of private businesses under the guise of ‘nationalization’. The peninsula has been turned into a huge military base, with the abuse of the rights of civil activists and repression of Crimean Tatars. Dozens of people have been tortured or simply disappeared without trace, and thousands of refugees have fled to mainland Ukraine. The road and rail blockade of Crimea has caused increased chaos on the ferry from the Russian mainland to Kerch, only slightly lessened by the construction of a bridge. Even with this bridge, Crimea is less of a peninsula; rather, it is a besieged island.

And if the ‘little green men’ who invaded Crimea were nicknamed ‘the polite people’ (as the propaganda called the Russian special forces in their unmarked uniforms), the Russian volunteers and full-time soldiers who entered the Donbass in their hastily renumbered military vehicles with the markings scratched out were anything but polite. The result is that up to ten thousand people have been killed and a million refugees have fled. The Donbass has been destroyed and turned into a humanitarian Chernobyl,[31] an open wound of the kind that did not exist even after the collapse of the USSR. One year after the event, the results of the ‘Russian invader’s’ actions in Ukraine have been catastrophic; but this fact does not worry those who created the viral video. The video has had an excellent effect on the internal audience, sowing chauvinism and hatred. By calling itself an ‘invader by birthright’, Russia is most of all occupying itself.

NOUGHTS AND CROSSES

The patriot’s dream has come true: Russian SU-34s are proudly flying over far-off colonial lands and dropping smart bombs on nasty men with beards – just as American F-16s did in the skies over Kosovo and Iraq. In briefings to the General Staff, dashing officers show videos from the optics of the missiles’ homing devices: the ground gets closer and closer in the crosshairs of the sight; you can see buildings, cars and people; then you see the silent cloud of the explosion and all these items have been turned to naught – just like the Americans did in Iraq! Russia is once again in the premier league of geopolitics and it can bomb whomsoever and wheresoever it likes! The country looks on, bewitched by this hi-tech show, which is so strikingly different from the blood, dirt, crying children and incinerated tank crews in the Donbass; even the colours are fashionably calming: the cloudless blue sky and the sandy-coloured desert. A collective anaesthetic is applied to the consciousness of the masses, which has been exhausted by the news from Ukraine.

I remember how it was sixteen years ago, when an ageing NATO, seeking enemies and a purpose in the wake of the Cold War, unleashed the full strength of its air forces against Serbia. The seventy-nine-day air war in Kosovo became one of the more shameful pages in the history of the North Atlantic Alliance: cities, passenger trains and buses, which in just the same way came within the crosshairs of the missile’s sight, all destroyed, leaving more than five hundred civilians dead. And I remember how old Europe forgot about the values of humanity and went completely mad in a militaristic rage: in Britain, the Sky News television channel jealously counted the number of sorties flown by the Royal Air Force; in Germany the Bild newspaper wrote up the bombings as if it were talking about Michael Schumacher’s races: ‘The German Tornados are taking-off in pole-position!’ Now Russia, offended by its apparent geopolitical losses, has decided to get its own back on the West by means of a virtual, telegenic and, it seems, safe postmodern war, answering the principal question of Russian life in the twenty-first century: if the Americans can do it, why can’t we?

The first virtual war was described by the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, in his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. For him, Operation Desert Storm in January and February 1991 was not a war but a media spectacle of the aerial destruction of the Iraqi Army. Desert Storm was the first war in history formatted by the media. For example, at the request of CNN, some of the bombing missions were carried out at night – even though this increased the risk of collateral damage and even friendly fire incidents; but CNN wanted this because it produced even more spectacular television pictures. Eight years later, in Kosovo, the technology for showing war reached a new level. The homing devices in the warheads of the bombs and missiles had become television cameras. In a world where the mass media rules, the aim of the war becomes not winning but showing; not capturing territory but capturing the audience. It is likely that the day is not far off when miniature cameras in bullets will show in slow motion how they approach a person (let us say, a terrorist) and enter his body – the ratings will be sky high. And from here it is just a short step to the idea of a demonstration war, even one for fun, like the one described by the Russian fiction writer Viktor Pelevin in his anti-utopian novel, S.N.U.F.F. He wrote about drones equipped with both television cameras and machine guns, flown by a long-distance operator, which at one and the same time shoot the enemy’s soldiers and film it for the television evening news.

The postmodern war is like a computer game. Together with the virtualization and dehumanization of the enemy, it becomes as safe as an electronic game, the aim being to have no losses for the technologically superior civilization. The death of Western military personnel becomes both an image problem and a legal problem, which they try to minimize. Already today, widows of British Army officers are filing multimillion-pound claims against the Ministry of Defence, demanding extra compensation for the death of their husbands in Iraq, as if death was not one of the professional risks an officer takes in a war zone. A hedonistic society is no longer prepared to come to terms with the death of its soldiers.

And now, inspired by the bloodless successes of ‘the little green men’ in Crimea, and wishing to demonstrate the technical modernization of the armed forces over the past few years, Russia has decided to stage its own exhibition war in Syria: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we present “Patriot” on tour.’ The newest name for an arm of service – the Air-Space Troops – suggests a futuristic mode: now we are going to be shown Star Wars, the battles of the future! This is exactly how the Russian media paints the operation in Syria: as an easy war, a bloodless game of noughts and crosses; a bit of fun in which these heroes with their high technology, these terminators in their hermetically sealed helmets, destroy an abstract, dehumanized, evil enemy. The reports issued by the General Staff amaze us with their attention to detail: workshops making suicide vests, warehouses with spare parts, garages housing pick-ups and armoured vehicles, headquarters and training camps – all are destroyed. All one can do is marvel at the professionalism of the Russian intelligence services, who know the enemy’s territory right down to the last bush. It is as if we are being given the chance to take part in an online shooting game: from underneath the wing of the jet fighter, take aim at the houses, the sheds and the hangars from which these funny little men are running. Television reports either that these fighters are running away, shaving off their beards and putting on niqabs, or turning up by sea in Odessa in their thousands, before going on to the Donbass to fight against the pro-Russian separatists.

The decidedly game-like, cartoon nature of this information is matched by the sheer impossibility of believing it. They bombed a workshop or an empty shed, and five hundred, or maybe just fifty, people gave themselves up? Or did they just pop off to a wedding in a neighbouring village? These reports contain no pain; no blood; no information about the dozens of casualties suffered by the peaceful population – the sorts of things reported by the international media and human rights organizations every day. All we hear about is the hi-tech operation, in which a couple of dozen Russian aeroplanes jokingly sorted out the enemy who could not be defeated by an international coalition headed by the USA using hundreds of aircraft and flying some seven thousand bombing sorties over the course of a year.

The apotheosis of this show came when Russia launched twenty-six cruise missiles from ships of the Caspian Sea flotilla as a celebratory salute in honour of Vladimir Putin’s birthday on 7 October 2015. They flew 1,500 kilometres over Iran and Iraq at a height of just fifty metres (and it was shown that four of them fell on Iranian territory), struck unidentified targets and made an indelible impression on the outside world, principally because their launch was totally pointless. Given that the so-called ‘Islamic State’ has no serious air-defence weapons, Russia could have hit the same targets using air-dropped bombs, which are infinitely cheaper than missiles, which cost one million dollars each; but, as they say, putting on a good show is priceless.

In the same celebratory tone, like in the Stalinist propaganda film Cossacks of the Kuban, television describes the daily life of Russian soldiers in Syria: they show ruddy-faced cooks serving up borshch and pancakes (everything made from Russian products, even the fruit juice, the correspondent stresses); prefabricated dormitories with air-conditioning; a bath-house with eucalyptus branches provided.[32] The Zvezda television channel of the Ministry of Defence enthusiastically describes daily life at the Russian air force base in Latakia as ‘destroying Islamic State in comfort’. Once again, this reminded me of an incident during the war in Kosovo, when an American pilot of a B2 stealth bomber, which had flown from its base in Missouri to bomb Yugoslavia, said: ‘The great thing about this plane is that you take off from base, carry out your mission, and return to wife, and children, and a cold beer.’

The question about the effectiveness of the military operation becomes lost behind the aesthetics of war porn and the simulacra of the virtual war. The fact was that three months of Russian bombardment did not bring about any change to the situation on the ground: but the opposition counterattacking on all fronts plainly did not tie in with the reports from the General Staff about the destruction of workshops and the Jihadists fleeing to Odessa. However, who needs military effectiveness when you have media effectiveness, and when Russia has got the whole world talking about its aircraft and cruise missiles?

Reality unexpectedly exploded upon this virtual story on 31 October 2015, with the crash of a Russian Airbus over Sinai and the death of 224 people – just as it came back to haunt America in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Jean Baudrillard wrote about all this in 2002 in his essay The Violence of the Global. In his opinion, the answer to the technological and information domination of the new world order is apocalyptic terrorism, as a return to physical reality. In its pursuit of illusory geopolitical bonuses and cheap media effects, Russia voluntarily stepped into a war with widespread international terrorism. Suddenly we became hostages in a game of noughts and crosses, which had seemed so far away and harmless when it was on our television screens and in the General Staff’s briefings. Now it has come into our homes; and it is no longer clear who or where will be wiped out.

THE WAR WITH POKÉMON

In July 2016, on Ilyinka Square in Moscow, by the Kitai-Gorod metro station and just a stone’s throw from the holiest of holies of Russian power – the complex of buildings that make up the Presidential Administration on Staraya Square – a spontaneous, unsanctioned rally occurred. Every day, especially as dusk fell, hundreds of people began to gather in the square. Sitting on the benches and on the grass, they became engrossed in their smartphones. They introduced themselves to each other, quietly chatted, and went off for a drink and a bite to eat, before once again taking up their positions. In the darkness among the trees and bushes, hundreds of screens glowed.

No, this was not an opposition rally called ‘Occupy Kitai-Gorod’; it was the hunt for Pokémon. On Ilyinka Square there were four PokeStops[33] with constantly activated ‘lures’ (bait to catch Pokémon). The creatures were appearing roughly every couple of minutes, including rare examples, such as Vaporeon, who caused a well-publicized crush in New York’s Central Park. He was chased by dozens of people, all trying to catch him on their smartphones. All night in the square a life understood only by the initiated went on; a few vehicles rushed past on Ilyinka Lane; while in the windows of the buildings of the Presidential Administration lights burned behind the white blinds, which, it seems, had remained there from the time when the buildings housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Divided by a fence under the watchful eye of the Federal Protection Service, two civilizations met, two concepts of space: the world of the state and the world of Pokémon. And the question arose as to whether these two worlds could live peacefully side by side in the consciousness of the citizens and on the streets of the city. The second Pokémon invasion of Russia began in the summer of 2016 when the new Pokémon Go game, with its added realistic features, was released. (The first invasion was way back in 1996, when Pokémon for Game Boy, the first version, appeared on the scene. It was accompanied by a franchise with cards and souvenirs, and mainly captured fans of computer games and the younger members of the population.) In the new version, characters are linked to Google Maps and actual places on the planet, and players move out of the virtual space into real places: on the streets of cities, in woods and parks.

This time, as opposed to the politically innocuous year of 1996, when the very idea of bringing in legal restraints on a computer game would have seemed funny, the Russian authorities saw in Pokémon a threat to national security. Denis Voronenkov, a Duma deputy from the Communist Party,[34] asked the FSB and the Communications Ministry to ban the game in Russia; he believed that it had been developed by the US special services in order to carry out reconnaissance and gain access to places otherwise difficult to reach. The deputy was convinced that ‘the USA is trying through this video game to formulate the image of the next war, which will exactly suit the aims and the interests of Washington’. Senator Franz Klintsevich agreed with the Communist deputy, suggesting that playing the game should be banned in churches, prisons, hospitals and in cemeteries and at memorials. Predictably, the Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky, waded in, declaring that ‘culture and Pokémon have nothing in common’. He compared the game with the Langoliers – creatures from the novels of Stephen King, which destroy reality. ‘There was a time when I played. I played at the start of the 1990s when “Tetris” appeared, and I immediately understood that this is evil. These are creatures that devour everything, like in Stephen King’s books; they devour space and time’, said Medinsky.[35]

Here, one could simply once again laugh at these Russian obscurantists, who throttle everything that is alive and progressive; or talk about this particular period of heightened paranoia in the history of Russia, when the siloviki have seized power and see conspiracies and threats everywhere. This would certainly be partially true; but the real piquancy of this situation is that deep down they really do feel a threat to their very existence: these amusing cartoon Pokémon characters announce the arrival of a new reality, one in which today’s Russian authorities – or, indeed, any others – simply have no place.

What we are talking about here is a new cartography, which is writing new laws of sovereignty and citizenship. Historically, the modern state was defined by geographical maps. This was how it happened: it was not the state that drew the maps, but the modern epoch, with its geographical, geometrical and cartographic imagination, which gave birth to the state. The state is a geometrical entity; it arises out of Cartesian rationalism, Hobbesian empiricism and the lineal geometry of Euclid and Newton. In his fundamental book The Power of Maps from 1992, the American culturologist and geographer, Dennis Wood, demonstrated how, at the start of the modern age, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, people began, with the help of maps, to imagine and then construct the wider world and political order. The cartographical images of the world led to the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries; and following on from that, colonialism and the ideas of state sovereignty and the nation-state. Lineal cartography gives us borders, regularity, planned and organized life, a controlled population living within the boundaries of defined territories: all the elements that make up the modern state. In fact, it is from maps that the idea arises of sovereignty as a territorial dimension of power, and the idea of citizenship as belonging to a particular territory.

At the end of the twentieth century, with the appearance of computer networks, the idea of territorial sovereignty received its first serious blow: networks became widely pervasive and transborder; a transaction could take place remotely from the server; space lost its connection with a particular place; the so-called ‘space of flows’ appeared (such as the Internet, the global financial market and satellite television). But the desktop computer was still joined to a cable, a provider and an IP address, which meant it could still be controlled and registered. With the appearance of the mobile Internet, all these restrictions were removed. The individual is set free from cables, providers, coverage areas and national operators: with his smartphone and tablet, he is instantly connected to millions of other users within a global information sphere. A new cartography is born before our very eyes, one without borders, states and the usual institutions: this is Google Maps, working in real time, in which a person with his gadget (and soon this will be one and the same thing as we turn into one biotechnical item – an android), linked to an anonymous GPS satellite, becomes an anonymous point of coordinates on the global map.

And suddenly Pokémon appears like agents of this new space, and with them a new cartography of reality, which is not even tied to street names. In the Pokémon Go interface there are no street names, only nameless areas and crossroads with special places marked out by the programme. It reminds one of navigating by orientation points, as was done before maps existed: ‘Go as far as the big rock; turn left and keep going until sunset.’ The game does away with the rules of linear cartography of the age of reason, with its hierarchies, borders, institutions of power, territorial rules and administrative regimes. Millions of people wander around the streets as if these streets don’t exist; they are moving according to an alternative map, paying no attention to cars, trees, fences or law-enforcement officers. And herein lies the actual threat to the authorities. Pokémon Go is a global ‘occupy’ movement, a rethinking of the principles of urbanization, borders and the boundaries of the city; a radical rewriting of the social space; a desacralization of the concept of ‘space’(the Holocaust Museum in Washington has forbidden the capture of Pokémon on its territory). It is a round-the-clock flash mob with no clear political goals.

Yet it is just a single step away from politics. The whole concept of the city and the city state – the cradle of politics and the object of the social contract, and the reformatting of the new cartography – is an act of politicization. Pokémon Go is a challenge to territorial splits and divisions; on the West Bank of the River Jordan, Palestinians put Pokémon on the other side of the border wall or in Israeli settlements and, in attempting to catch them, a warning appears: ‘the mistake of apartheid’. I won’t be at all surprised if rare Pokémon turn up in Kim Jong-un’s secret bunker or in Islamic State camps. This organization may be officially banned in Russia, but not on Google Maps.

Yes, Pokémon may be just a game, a mere fad of the summer of 2016, which quietly died away with the coming of the severe winter in the Northern hemisphere. But they are, nevertheless, emissaries from the future, forerunners of an augmented reality, which, with each passing day, will take a stronger grip on our imagination, our communications, our cities and our streets in a way that has proved impossible for, say, NATO or Islamic State. What’s more, no state can possibly build any barriers to defend itself against this reality. An ever-increasing number of users will make their way onto this map, outside the control of the laws of sovereignty or citizenship, and they will spend ever-increasing amounts of time in this fluid and flexible space, earning and spending money, falling in and out of love and living by their own rules. Enhanced reality will take the place ever more strongly of what is ‘real’ (but is it actually ‘real’?). Just look already at how fans of Game of Thrones, disappointed by both candidates in the 2016 US presidential election, created their own political party. Soon the state itself will have to go into its own augmented reality, creating there its own virtual objects.

As a result of this, the Moscow city government is planning on creating a Russian answer to Pokémon, an app for iPhone and Android called ‘Know your Moscow’, where instead of cartoon characters you will be able to catch the doubles of the poet Alexander Pushkin, the first cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, or the rock star Viktor Tsoi, and take a selfie with them. And International Memorial, the historical-educational and human rights organization, has since 2013 supported a site called ‘The Topography of Terror’ (the idea and the name have been borrowed from the museum of the same name in Berlin). On an interactive map of Moscow, sites are superimposed where the Soviet Terror was carried out: apartments of those who were repressed, prisons, torture chambers, sites of execution and burial. It is possible that this project could be expanded into enhanced reality in such a way that, as you walk the streets of the city, everyone would be able to see the hidden archaeology of repression, meet the ghosts and hear the voices of the victims of the Terror… A variety of frequently contradictory realities will cross over each other in the city, users of the app will be able to migrate between them or live in a number of them all at once; and with time the state will become simply one layer of this hybrid world – what’s more, far from the most interesting one.

KREMLIN FIREWALL

News from the world of Russian hi-tech sounds ever more like information reports from a battlefield. Natalya Kaspersky, the President of the InfoWatch group of companies and a co-founder of ‘Kaspersky Lab’, has introduced a system to record telephone conversations in the office. The police are going to use the GLONASS satellite tracking system (the Russian equivalent of GPS) to remotely turn off the engines of offenders’ cars: since 2017 all cars produced on the territory of the Customs Union of Post-Soviet Countries[36] have been fitted with special modules that allow them to be tracked and controlled with the help of GLONASS. Furthermore, Russian commercial centres have welcomed the new Russian Federation law on protecting personal data, which means that they have to keep the personal information of Russians living in the country: many Western firms were forced to install special equipment in Russia in advance. Russian hi-tech is preparing for the construction of the century: the creation of a digital iron curtain, an analogue of the ‘great Chinese firewall’.

Back in the far-off days of 1990s techno-optimism, we believed that the computer (in partnership with the video recorder) would bring us freedom. Russians, being masters of the grey import, flooded the country with IBM computers with AT and XT processors. The first programs were written by long-haired guys with holes in their sweaters, physics students from Phystech, the elite technical college, who had just opened their first cooperative businesses. They were the heralds of the open information society, the pioneers of the digital frontier. We greeted the successes of our native IT entrepreneurs – Ilya Segalovich, Arkady Volozh, Anatoly Karachinsky and Eugene Kaspersky – as a counterweight to raw state capitalism. The Yandex and ABBYY brands seemed to be the Russian bridges into the world of globalization; and the Facebook symbol invariably appeared on the banners of the demonstrators at the protests on Bolotnaya Square in the winter of 2011–12.[37]

Now everything has changed. The lesson has been well learned by the domestic IT industry of Pavel Durov, the creator of the social network vKontakte (‘In Touch’, considered the ‘Russian Facebook’). This libertarian clashed with the FSB, had his business taken from him and ended up being chased out of the country as a digital dissident. Now those programmers – still wearing the same sweaters with holes in them – write the code for ‘SORM’: Operational Search Systems, a complex of measures giving the special services control over telephones, mobile and wireless networks; and they are building the new Russian panopticon, a digital prison with a system for total monitoring of the population.

The optimism of the 1990s about the liberating actions of the Internet rested on the illusions that the new technologies, which are at one and the same time personalized yet provide a network, would produce a new type of social relationship: non-hierarchical, egalitarian, participatory; and that they would create a new type of politics, which would shake up the old hierarchy of parties, elites and states, which the industrial age left us as its legacy. And indeed, in the past twenty years completely different forms of politics have appeared, based on the new technologies, from the networked campaigning of Barack Obama in 2008 and the success of the Pirate Party in Iceland, to the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ in the Arab world. But Obama left office, Facebook helped bring to power the populist and chauvinist Donald Trump, and Twitter in the Arab states was taken over by the Islamists. At the same time, authoritarian regimes learnt how to live with the net; not just live with it, but use it to their own advantage: personalization and customization can be turned into personal control over citizens by means of their gadgets and their social network accounts. And social media activity, it turns out, can easily be transformed into noise on the net, when different forms of civil activity on the Internet can become lightning rods, a valve for letting off steam – a substitute for political protest. And at the same time, hi-tech companies can be changed from being agents for change into agents of the state, as happened, for example, with Kaspersky Lab in Russia.

Here we see a fundamental rule of ‘network neutrality’: technology is neutral, not only in relation to its content and application formats, as the very term implies, but in relation to political regimes, too. The network can be used both to liberate people and also to spy on them; both to consolidate a protest and to disperse it. Technology itself is neither good nor bad, in the same way that an axe is neither good nor bad: it is simply an instrument in a person’s hands. The same axe can be used to chop the wood to make a cottage or to kill someone. The network does not exist separately from society, the elite, or the state. It transmits the vast majority of social relationships, but it does not define them. For example, the Islamic State has shown itself to be very advanced technologically, combining the social and religious practices of the Middle Ages with skilled management of the media and social networks.

In Russia the interrelationship of technology and the governing regime has its own peculiarities. First, it is a question of resources. In terms of the distribution model of the economy and the skilfully manipulated paranoia about ‘national information security’, the IT sector becomes a vital feeder of the budget alongside other strategic sectors: atomic energy, the air and space sector and the military-industrial complex. The IT sector gives rise to a large number of go-betweens who peddle ‘threats’ (people such as Duma deputy Irina Yarovaya; the creator of the League for a Safe Internet, Konstantin Malofeev; or the Communications Minister, Nikolai Nikiforov, who suggested that .doc files and the Times New Roman font could undermine the Russian Federation’s information sovereignty). These people dream up threats to information security to obtain resources from the budget. Storing Russians’ personal data; archiving for three years the contents of telephone and Internet communications (‘the Yarovaya Law’); relocating credit card transaction transfers to Russian servers; the creation of a national search engine and operation system; the transfer of state structures onto a national software system; and the possibility of creating the infrastructure for a sovereign Internet along the Chinese model: all of this gobbles up a huge slice of the budget pie, which no hi-tech company would turn away from.

Second, this is a question of the innovation culture. An engineer in Russia is a state worker. In Russian history, technology and modernization (particularly in the military-industrial context) were always first and foremost strategic priorities for the state, and only in a distant second place matters for private capital. For centuries, it was with this in mind that the state trained its engineers. As the Russian investigative journalist, Andrei Soldatov, has said:

Soldatov makes the comparison with Napoleon, who closed down the schools of philosophy and opened engineering schools, because he didn’t need revolutionaries; and with Stalin, who created a huge number of polytechnical colleges in order to teach people technical skills but without a university education. So the problem is far from being a specifically Russian one; but it was particularly in the USSR, where technical modernization became a question of national security, that the state almost completely took responsibility for the engineering culture. This went from Stalin’s sharashki (special camps for scientists who were carrying out strategic research), to Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s scientific-research institutes, to the ‘closed towns’ under the control of the military-industrial complex,[39] to the ‘post boxes’ – secret institutes and factories that were known only by their postcode.

From the end of the 1980s a new culture of innovation began to grow in Russia. This was based, on the one hand, on the mighty Soviet engineering potential and strong school of physics and mathematics, and, on the other, on private initiative and networks. This produced a string of unique computer programs and home-grown IT leaders with global ambitions, such as the afore-mentioned Eugene Kaspersky. But it failed to create a sphere of technological, intellectual or civil autonomy, or an innovative environment like Silicon Valley in California. All attempts to create such an environment, such as Skolkovo, were closely tied to their state patrons; and in the current conditions of the financial crisis and economic sanctions they are stagnating.[40] And in Putin’s third term, when the authorities set out to clean up and nationalize the information and hi-tech sphere, they simply went back to the bosom of the authoritarian state.

It has become common to describe Putin’s regime in ‘hybrid’ terms, and here we have yet another ‘hybrid’: hi-tech authoritarianism, embedded in the structures of the information society. This phenomenon was described in the anti-utopian works of Vladimir Sorokin (Day of the Oprichnik; The Sugary Kremlin; Telluria),[41] where a future Russia, having shut itself off from the West by a wall, and having restored the monarchy and the customs of the Middle Ages, uses artificial intelligence devices, mobile video telephones and the advances of bionics and genetics. In this way, Russian traditionalism works hand in hand with the iPhone in exactly the same way as Islamic State: the patriarchal consciousness and archaic social and political institutions blend perfectly with postmodern technologies that have been bought or stolen in the West or developed under the control of the authoritarian state.

We can see, therefore, how in the modern world authoritarianism has adapted to the demands of the information society and uses its infrastructure for its own survival. In their book, How Modern Dictators Survive: Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda and Repression, economists Sergei Guriyev and Daniel Treisman write about how in the past few decades a new type of authoritarianism has arisen, better adapted to coping with a world of open borders, global media and the knowledge economy. Illiberal regimes, from the Peru of Alberto Fujimori to the Hungary of Victor Orbán have learnt how to concentrate power in their hands while avoiding isolating their countries and engaging in mass killings, and, at the same time, working cleverly with information. Although they may resort to violence from time to time, they hold on to power less through terror then by manipulating society’s consciousness.

The same thing is happening in Russia. On the one hand, the regime controls the flow of information in the traditional media and on the Internet; on the other, it tries to monopolize the hi-tech sector, bringing it under its own interests and preparing structures to possibly shut off the country’s access to information. This is the looking-glass of authoritarianism: namely, those areas where new networks and civil autonomy could be born – this digital frontier which could become the space for freedom – is being used in Russia to create archaic means of authority. Once again in Russian history, technology is working not to free society but to strengthen the state; the axe is once again becoming not the carpenter’s instrument but a weapon of repression. And if Russia in the future shuts itself off from the world with a ‘Kremlin firewall’ created by state-of-the-art technology, then by its very nature this wall will still be that of the Middle Ages.

A SOVEREIGNTY FULL OF HOLES

On 28 July 2017, Russia suffered a diplomatic embarrassment. The Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin – who has been put under sanctions by both the USA and the EU – flew to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, and planned to go on from there to the region of Transnistria, which no country has recognized as a separate state. But the Romanian authorities would not allow him to fly over their territory; and the aeroplane with the Deputy Prime Minster on board returned to Minsk.

Of itself, this incident is not worthy of attention. Dmitry Rogozin is a comical figure, one moment suggesting building military bases on the Moon, the next, underwater cities in the Arctic; but this latest incident is an example of the wider problem facing modern Russia – it is rapidly losing its sovereignty in foreign policy. How can you describe it otherwise, when the government’s Deputy Prime Minister cannot fulfil his mission in a country in the near abroad because the route goes either through Romania (which is taking part in the sanctions against Russia) or through Ukraine (with whom Russia is at war)?

Now to a far more serious problem: the scandal involving turbines made by Siemens, which were illegally sent to Crimea in contravention of European sanctions. The export to the peninsula of technology and equipment had been banned more than a year earlier, after the EU condemned the occupation of Crimea. What was more, Vladimir Putin had given the company’s senior management his assurances that their goods would not be used in Crimea. Siemens filed a lawsuit with a demand to seize the four turbines, which were supposed to provide all the electricity to the peninsula. As a result, because of the European sanctions and Russia’s clumsy attempt to circumvent them, Russia was unable to provide electricity to a part of its strategic territory; in other words, Russia’s energy sovereignty was undermined.

Finally, the packet of American sanctions signed by Donald Trump on 2 August 2017. The full scale and effect of these sanctions has yet to be seen (including losing one third of exports of Russian gas to Europe); but what can be said is that they have significantly restricted Russia’s foreign policy and foreign trade capabilities. If we assess the overall situation over the past three years, Russia’s room for manoeuvre has been severely restricted and it has suffered political and reputational damage. It is impossible not to see that our country is steadily losing its sovereignty.

One of the recognized theoreticians on sovereignty in political science is the American, Stephen Krasner. In his textbook work from 1999, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (which is a clear reference to Max Weber’s definition of the state as ‘organized violence’), he writes that the word ‘sovereignty’ has four meanings: international legal sovereignty (the judicial recognition of a state within its own borders); Westphalian sovereignty (the exclusion of foreign interference on the authorities of a state); domestic sovereignty (the ability of the authorities to exercise control within their own borders); and interdependent sovereignty (the ability to conduct policy regarding transborder flows of information, people, ideas, goods and threats).[42] One glance at the policy of Putin’s Russia makes it clear that, for its sins, it can partially meet only these first two demands of sovereignty: the country is recognized by the United Nations (although without Crimea); and ‘foreign agents’ have been driven out of internal policy. At the same time, the ability of the authorities to exercise control over processes taking place within the country and, what’s more, to play a role in globalization have dramatically weakened.

The problem for the Russian political class is that it lives exclusively in the past. It sees international policy wistfully within the framework of some sort of ‘Yalta Agreement’, or even ‘the Congress of Vienna’; and internal policy in an even more ancient way – within the framework of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War, and for the first time recognized the state as sovereign within its own borders. The Russian elite does not want to acknowledge that ‘Westphalia’ ended long ago. States no longer control global flows; they share their authority with transnational organizations. It is no wonder that Krasner calls absolute sovereignty ‘hypocrisy’ and compares it to a Swiss cheese: full of holes.

If we take even the most basic meaning of the word ‘sovereignty’ from any political dictionary, it means the independence of the state in domestic and foreign policy. But what sort of independence can we talk about when Russia is dependent on Siemens to provide electricity to Crimea; on Romania for the Deputy Prime Minister to fly over Moldova; on America for all of its foreign policy; and on Ukraine for its domestic agenda? In actual fact, Russia’s foreign policy is nothing more than an agonizing and deep dialogue (with overtones of Freud or Dostoevsky) with America about spheres of influence, great power status and ambitions. And it is a dialogue that turns into a monologue about wounded pride. The obsession of the Russian authorities with the US elections; the childishly naive battles with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; the vaudeville romance with Donald Trump; the attempts to interfere like an awkward bear in the American elections: these are all signs of the hopeless, pathological and psychological dependence of Moscow on Washington.

In the same way, Russia is dependent on a fragment of its empire, which has broken away: Ukraine. Russia has built its whole external and internal agenda on the demonizing of the Ukrainian Maidan, filling the air time on television and radio with endless talk shows about Ukraine, turning the Ukrainian agenda into an internal Russian one in such a way that, if Ukraine suddenly disappeared, Russia would be left hanging in the air and would crash to the ground. All this indicates that Russia simply does not have its own agenda or its own policy. These are just sporadic reactions to external irritating factors, an inability and a lack of desire to accept the world as it is and acknowledge its own dependence on this fact.

To understand its situation better, the Kremlin should look at those who have gone even further down the road of ‘sovereignty’: Iran, for example, or, even better, North Korea. Boasting about its absolute independence, North Korea finds itself in a state of total vulnerability. It lives under sanctions and under the permanent threat of a nuclear strike. The only way it can survive is by raising the stakes in a deadly game of poker; its sovereignty hangs by the narrow thread of nuclear bluff and mutual threats.

The irony of the situation is that at the root of Russia’s problems today lies this very striving for sovereignty that became the basis for Putin’s conservative about-turn. First, there was the YUKOS affair in 2003: the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the state’s capture of the largest oil company. Then there was the Beslan tragedy in 2004, when Chechen fighters seized a school and, thanks to the incompetence of the operation to free the hostages, more than three hundred children died. Putin suddenly blamed this terrorist act on the West, accusing them of trying to destroy Russia. Next there was Putin’s famous speech in Munich in 2007, in which he effectively declared a new cold war; then the war with Georgia in 2008; and after that came Crimea, the Donbass, the battle with separatism and ‘foreign agents’ in Russia, the destruction of Western sanctioned goods and the construction of a sovereign Internet. But the deeper Russia dug itself into the mud of an imagined Westphalian sovereignty, the more it lost its actual sovereignty, the independence of its foreign policy, control over its economy and society and the ability to adapt to globalization.

The key mistake in all of this was the annexation of Crimea (just like the saying: ‘This is worse than a crime; it’s a mistake’). It seemed as if Russia was strengthening its territorial sovereignty, beginning to gather in its lands; but by this action it radically blew up the nation’s independence. Four years on it is clear that Russia has lost its technological sovereignty (ask the oil men who cannot drill on the sovereign Arctic Shelf without Western technology); its sovereignty in foreign policy (by going over to a regime of confrontation with the West, every subsequent step taken by Russia narrowed down its room for manoeuvre until it hit the wall of sanctions); and even its internal sovereignty. As Krasner writes, rulers often confuse authority with control; and in Russia, while there has been a formal strengthening of the vertical of power, actual control over the economic and social situation grows weaker by the day. On closer inspection, one of the main achievements of Putin’s rule, which the propaganda constantly trumpets – the strengthening of sovereignty – is a myth.

The result of all this is the usual Russian story: however much you battle for sovereignty, you simply strengthen the authorities. Perhaps all the Kremlin was after was the strengthening of the authorities, and this striving for sovereignty was a mere ideological smokescreen to give the appearance of legitimacy? But this has the reverse effect: the more power the Kremlin holds, the less sovereignty Russia has. In the end we could have the situation where power lies just in the Kremlin, the Forbidden City, the emperor’s palace – and the country will be left to the dictates of fate. Such a situation has already occurred in Russian history. In December 1565, Ivan the Terrible left with his court, treasury, icons and tsarist regalia for the village of Kolomenskoye, and from there for the settlement of Alexandrovsk, about one hundred kilometres from Moscow. Here he founded the Oprichnina, a state within a state. In reality, the Tsar took with him his authority, leaving Russia at the mercy of the Tatars and then his own oprichniki. And when he died, the Polish-Lithuanian forces took over, as a result of which the country’s sovereignty was lost for many years, right up to the Zemsky Sobor of 1613, when the House of Romanov came to the throne.[43]

Sovereignty is not the tsar’s wagon train laden with icons or the president’s cortège; it is not Russian special forces, spetsnaz, in Crimea, nor military bases in the Arctic, nor a parade of Topol-M ballistic missiles on Red Square, nor a defile of ships on Navy Day in St Petersburg. It is the constant work of the authorities to improve the country, to integrate it into the wider world and have the rest of the world acknowledge this. And in this sense, the Siemens case is a warning sign for Russia: you can take over territory, clear it of undesirables, stuff it with weaponry and hold a military parade; but without turbines and international recognition, sovereignty doesn’t work. At the end of the day, Crimea ends up as that hole in the cheese which Stephen Krasner wrote about in his book.