The Return of the Russian Leviathan

THE STATE’S GAME RESERVE

I remember well my school-leaving ‘do’. It was in Moscow in June, in the early 1980s. My classmates and I were standing on the bank of the river, opposite where they have since built Moscow-City.[1] Back then it was a run-down industrial area, with a few small factories, warehouses and chimneys. Behind them, some distance away, you could see Stalin’s ‘wedding cakes’.[2] We were gazing on this huge, sleeping city. The early dawn had begun to creep over this vast expanse. Everything had already been said; all the promises had been made; everything had been drunk; we stood and watched in silence as the morning broke on our new life.

Suddenly one of the girls said, ‘Let’s go to Red Square!’ We looked at her in bewilderment, as if she had just appeared from another planet. In fact, she had come from another planet, because she had lived in Canada for many years, being the daughter of the Soviet Ambassador, and she had returned simply to finish her schooling. And she was the only one who had got the idea into her head at this significant moment in our lives to go to Red Square; to stand in the shadow of the towers of state, alongside Lenin’s Mausoleum and the tombs of the Bolsheviks. We stayed where we were, on the bank of the river, listening to the dawn chorus.

I really love Moscow. I love its boulevards, and the little alleys that lead off from the streets around Nikitsky Square; the sound of music coming from the open windows of the Conservatory; the old houses in the Bauman Street District, and the monasteries along the Yauza River. But I can’t bring myself to love Red Square and the Kremlin. Maybe I can enjoy the picture-postcard view you get from a distance, from the Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge; but I don’t want to go there simply to marvel at the beauty, or for a bit of peace or to feel the history.

The poet, Osip Mandelstam, wrote: ‘The earth is nowhere as round as on Red Square’.[3] The enormous size and the slope of the square make it suitable for parades and processions, for state executions and state funerals. Its proportions are right for intercontinental ballistic missiles, but not for people. It tries to be part of the city – all of these ‘stalls’ in the GUM shopping arcade with their sky-high prices, the popular ice-rinks put up by the Bosco company each winter and the concerts with military bands. But you’ll hardly find any Muscovites there, just crowds of people from out of town, policemen, foreigners and actors dressed up as Lenin and Stalin, who pose for photographs with the visitors. There is nothing in this space designed for people: no cosy park with benches; no little alleyways like in Prague Castle; no cathedrals to pop into even if you don’t have any special reason, just to light a candle and stand in front of the icon. The whole Kremlin is simply the embodiment of the state, the raison d’état. It is not a space for the individual, for the people or for a memorial: it is a space for power.

As a result, Red Square evokes the uncomfortable feeling that nothing is on a human scale. Lenin’s restless corpse lies there; the shadows of the Streltsy, executed in 1698, are still alive;[4] and the corridors of the Kremlin, so many witnesses say, are stalked by the ghosts of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. You can even smell the smoke of ‘Herzegovina Flor’, Stalin’s favourite tobacco. The Spassky (or Saviour) Gates were once open for everyone. Before the Revolution, the people would pray to the icon of the Saviour, then pass through these gates into the Kremlin; having obtained their free ticket, they could then wander freely everywhere. But under Stalin the gates became the symbol of the inaccessibility of the Kremlin. Having taken over the Kremlin in March 1918, the Bolsheviks did everything to destroy its historical memory.[5] More than half the buildings inside its walls were demolished, including the Monasteries of the Miracles and of the Ascension and the Smaller Nikolaev Palace. The Kremlin was sterilized, all signs of history or humanity were done away with; it was made suitable only for the state. That is why it is so frightening to stand there on winter nights, caught in the glare of the spotlights and the icy wind of history.

There are two types of towns or cities. There’s the market town, which grew up in the Middle Ages as a counter to royal power and where institutions were formed such as guilds, communal authorities and an independent third estate, which represented the ‘citizen’ (a word derived from ‘city’, originally meaning someone who dwelt in a town or a city). Then there’s the fortress town, which arose in the shadow of power, is controlled by, and serves, the state. Moscow grew up around a fortress constructed at the confluence of the rivers Moskva and Neglinka and was always of the second type; just a trading quarter in the shadow of the Kremlin. The whole planning of the city, its radial structure, pulls everything into the centre. The rings of Moscow, like the Garden and the Boulevard rings, were in fact walls built as a defence against the external enemy.

It is inconvenient to live next to a fortress, especially in the twenty-first century. Moscow’s radial structure suited the Tsar’s forays in the sixteenth century, but not today’s million cars; hence the city’s traffic problem. Most journeys in the city one way or another go through the centre, just as 70 per cent of all cargo in Russia goes through Moscow, because all the customs terminals are here. Sooner or later the fortress will be choked by this flow of resources. Living next to the centre of power pushes up the price of real estate and creates familiar problems, from the shutting off of main roads so that the country’s leaders can pass by, to the closure of whole areas of the city for reasons of security. For example, on behalf of the Presidential Administration, the Federal Protection Service (FSO) demanded that a whole historic part of Kitai-Gorod alongside the Kremlin between Varvarka and Ilyinka Streets be shut off, enclosed by ‘a Great Chinese Fence’, thus creating in the centre of Moscow something like Beijing’s Forbidden City.

When the powers-that-be decide to come closer to the people, it causes havoc, such as when the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, chose to step outside the walls of the Kremlin. When he visited the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow University, they cancelled all classes and banned students from the building. When he went to the reopening of the Bolshoi Theatre, the police stopped rehearsals that were taking place in theatres nearby, and even destroyed scenery in the neighbouring Maly Theatre. It seemed that he was going just a couple of hundred metres outside the Kremlin, but the living body of the city was torn apart by the intrusion of the state.

There is only one solution: the city and the state have to get a divorce. The state should no longer be the main idea and the mystical purpose of life in Moscow. The trading quarter has grown so much that the fortress has become a burden on it. In modern theories of governance, the state has lost its sacred origins, and power has become a mere function, just another production line, like the factories and the municipal economy. Manufacturing has today been moved outside the city boundaries, and the old factory workshops are going through a process of gentrification, being converted into museums, artists’ studios and university campuses. The old industrial areas are being given back to society.

In just the same way, the implementation of the functions of state power with all its costs – the emergency flashing lights on the cars, the government cortèges, the restricted areas – should be taken outside the city boundaries. The Kremlin must be given back to the people, to the nation, to society. Ten years ago, in an interview with the Vedomosti newspaper, the writer Vasily Aksyonov proposed a plan to clean up the Kremlin: ‘There’s an unhealthy aura there’, he said. ‘The President and his administration shouldn’t be in there. Instead, there should be a museum of the centuries, a museum of Russian history. The Kremlin should be a cultural and historical memorial area.’[6]

The Kremlin could be turned into a beautiful historic park, where all the gates are open twenty-four hours a day, like in the Old City in Jerusalem. People should be able to have romantic encounters there at nighttime; to touch the ancient walls and sit on the Red Steps, the parade entrance to the Kremlin Palace; to stroll with a friend on the raised bank above the Moskva River.

Where can state power be relocated? There are plenty of ideas, including the latest plan for expanding Moscow, according to which the state could have its own little city somewhere in the far reaches of the Moscow Region. The state could be configured in a Eurasian manner, setting up its new capital somewhere in the Orenburg Steppe, from where it would be easy for the government cortèges to switch on their flashing lights and call on brotherly Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. But the idea I like the best is that dreamt up by the students of the Moscow Architectural Institute, which I saw recently in a competition of student work in the Architecture Museum. It was called, ‘The Mobile Government’, and it was based on a sound Russian principle: wherever the leadership goes, life improves dramatically. The students suggested constructing a mobile model of the government, based on a special train. Travelling all over the country, the train would travel under its own cloud of abundance, and everywhere it went life would automatically improve.

And then there would be absolutely no need for it to return to Moscow.

THE ELITE AVENUE… TO DEATH

Yet another routine bloody harvest occurred on Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Prospekt: on the night of 2–3 October 2015, at the widest part of the road, where it crosses the third ring road, two accidents happened almost simultaneously. First, a BMW-X5 was flying down the middle of the road when the driver lost control, crossed the central lane and drove into a Range Rover and a Porsche Cayenne coming in the other direction. Then a four-by-four travelling at high speed rammed into the traffic jam that had formed after the first accident. As a result, two drivers died, three people were taken to hospital with serious injuries and three more suffered minor injuries. Witnesses reported that a lot of drivers got out of their cars and ran to look at the burning vehicles, thus preventing the ambulances from reaching the scene of the crash.

Two years earlier, in December 2013, the influential Deputy Prime Minister of Dagestan (a Russian region in the Caucasus), Gaji Makhachov, died at exactly the same spot on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Rushing along in the central lane in his Mercedes GL four-by-four with his wife and three children he caught the edge of a plastic block around some roadworks, spun into the oncoming traffic and hit a minibus. In that accident, three people died and six others were injured. And on the night of 8 November 2014, just half a kilometre from that spot, a BMW-M5, travelling at more than two hundred kilometres per hour, also crossed the central lane into the oncoming traffic and hit a taxi, killing the driver and his female passenger. On this occasion, five people died and a further six were injured.

One can go on forever about fatal accidents on Kutuzovsky. According to both official and unofficial statistics, it is the most accident-prone stretch of road in the capital. In 2011 alone, there were eighty-six accidents there, resulting in fourteen deaths and ninety-six injuries. Various urban legends try to explain this: from its being a geopathogenic zone, to the existence of a magnetic anomaly; all the way through to the ‘graveyard theory’, which says that when they were laying down Kutuzovsky Prospekt in the 1950s, a number of cemeteries that lay outside the city’s boundary were destroyed, and now the restless dead are taking their revenge on the living.

I grew up close to these spots, and I remember how, when my friends and I were playing in the dip that now houses the third ring road, we used to find broken slabs with indecipherable writing on them. It was only later, when I was studying old maps of Moscow, that I understood that these were tombstones from the ruined Jewish cemetery which was once situated there. But going to school in the mornings I noticed something else: how black government Chaika and Volga cars with little curtains over the rear windows would emerge from the courtyards of smart apartment blocks built in the style of Stalinist architecture. These carried the Communist Party nomenklatura who lived on Kutuzovsky and were on their way to work. In block number twenty-six on Kutuzovsky Prospekt lived two General Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev and his successor, Yury Andropov. At the time we guessed this because of the rumours that were circulating and also because of the guys in identical coats who would be stamping their feet while waiting around in the courtyards; nowadays, there are memorial plaques bearing their names.

As a result of this, I have my own theory about the deaths on Kutuzovsky: the theory of the Elite Road. This is the official name for the highways that go from the Kremlin to the West of Moscow, including Rublyov Highway, Kutuzovsky Prospekt and Novy Arbat Street. The traffic police divisions which serve there are also described thus: the Elite Division of the Elite Battalion on the Elite Highway. I don’t know whether the personnel also have special titles – ‘Elite Major’ or ‘Elite Colonel’ – but they certainly have an air about them of fulfilling a special role for the state. In reality, this is the most important road in the country, and it is there not for the convenience of the public, but so that the country’s leaders can have a safe passage from the pine trees of Barvikha (just outside Moscow and chosen by the Bolsheviks in the 1930s), to the centres of power: the White House (seat of the Russian government); Okhotny Ryad (the State Duma); Old Square (the Presidential Administration); and the Kremlin. This is why you won’t find any lorries on this road; there are no traffic lights, nor are there police ambushes with speed traps. And that’s also why there’s a central lane down the middle of the road reserved for the leaders’ cars, but no central reservation – the main reason behind the head-on collisions and deaths.

The central lane on Kutuzovsky Prospekt is one of the main symbols and institutions of Russian power in the Moscow ‘vanity fair’. This is where you measure your worth; it all depends on your elite number plate and your elite pass. Specially chosen traffic police are there not so much to keep an eye on road safety as to ensure that the hierarchy of the state can travel along their central lane. Ford Focus cars with number plates in the series eKX and xKX (the FSO and the Federal Security Service (FSB)) travel along this lane quietly and without fuss; important limousines glide past with the numbers aMP and aMM (senior policemen) and aMO (the Moscow Mayor’s Office); numbers from the ‘commercial’ series oOO and kKK zip by, carrying bankers with their guards in their Mercedes G-class four-by-fours; occasionally, a Mercedes with blacked-out windows will fly past, with the regional code 95 (for Chechnya). The inspector filters all traffic using the central lane with an eagle eye: he salutes the leadership, waves through those whose rank permits its use and stops any others daring to use the lane to check on their status and see whether they have had the audacity to break the traffic regulations.

The privileged lane illustrates the vertical of power, which has become a horizontal servility. It is the old Russian class society with its table of ranks spelled out in the letters of the elite number plates; it is Russian feudalism in all its glory.[7] It is just like in seventeenth-century Paris, when cavalcades of horsemen with torches charged around the streets accompanying noble carriages, knocking over traders’ barrows and pushing those on foot back against the walls – ‘Make way for the King!’. Since that time, France has experienced the Enlightenment, revolution, the execution of the monarch, the Napoleonic Code and five republics. The class system has been dismantled and the principle has been established of equality for all before the law; including when it comes to traffic. In Russia, however, the seventeenth century continues, as if there had never been the new times, or the right to life, property and justice; and the way in which you travel around is determined exclusively by your class standing and how close you are to the body of the sovereign.

When the leadership travels along Kutuzovsky it is not just the central lane that is closed off, but all traffic. The Prospekt freezes in a ninety-minute-long court ritual, and the cortège of dozens of cars screams past on the wrong side of the road under the silent gaze of the people sitting in the traffic jam: the patient bosses who are a rank lower; ambulances with their blue lights flashing; and the common people in their cars. Once in the summer I became fed up waiting in the left-hand lane, turned off my engine and got out of my car, stepping into the central lane. In the distance I could see a swarm of coloured flashing lights, and when the cortège drew close I fell to my knees and crossed myself with a sweeping gesture.[8] This earned me a couple of approving beeps on the horn and thumbs-up from some of my fellow sufferers. The reality is that Kutuzovsky Prospekt reveals the whole reality of the Middle Ages in which our oil monarchy lives; its hypocrisy, and its disdain for the law and for the ordinary people. Here horsepower multiplied by power and money allow any excesses; here the right of the powerful to break the law is taken to the extreme, sanctified by flashing lights and elite passes. And all of this is protected by a special police department.

But this permissiveness leaks into the lower orders of society; many of them start to travel at speeds of 100, 120, or 150 kilometres per hour, taking advantage of the width of the lanes, the perfectly smooth asphalt and the almost total absence of any speed control. And the offspring of the wealthy consider it their duty to go tearing along Kutuzovsky at night at speeds of more than 200 kilometres an hour, and bikers go at more than 250. What begins as the imposing procession along the central lane of the boss with the blue light flashing ends with nighttime races along this prestigious Prospekt and horrific traffic accidents.

At some time in the future, they will grass over the central lane along Kutuzovsky Prospekt and construct a central reservation. They will place a number of speed cameras along it, and it will be possible to travel past these shiny windows and impressive façades without fearing for one’s life. But that will happen in a different, parallel and more human Russia. Until then, the elite highway, which was built not for the people but for the powerful ones who live in their world, will continue to maim and to kill, turning power and oil into death in this ruthlessly accurate model of the Russian state.

AN ODE TO SHUVALOV’S DOGS

If Igor Ivanovich Shuvalov didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. With his name, which makes him sound like a count, and his castle in Austria; with his London apartment on Whitehall in the former home of MI6, and his ancestral estate on the site of the dacha of the chief ideologue of the Soviet regime, Mikhail Suslov; with his million-dollar Rolls-Royce and his pair of Corgis (the same breed of dog as the Queen has!), which he whisks around the world in his private jet to take part in dog shows. He is a walking cargo-cult,[9] a distillation of the post-Soviet transit.

Sometimes it seems as if the Shuvalov project is some kind of PR provocation, a bomb underneath the existing authorities, a modern Russian Marie-Antoinette with her ‘Let them eat cake’ – a catalyst for the people’s wrath. In actual fact, of course, it is not like that at all. There will be no revolution; no heads will roll off the block; and instead of the people’s wrath there are humorous posts on the Internet. All the exposure of corruption by the opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, disappears into the quicksand of Russian society, which is both cynical and apathetic, respecting strength and power over the law and morality. Memes and cartoons about Shuvalov’s dogs are posted and shared by hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook, while the rest of the country looks on with indifference, ruled by the inescapable saying among the people, ‘He does it because he can’.

As the political commentator, Vladimir Gelman, has noted, this is strikingly different from the ‘battle against privilege’ campaign in the late Soviet period. This was one of the main slogans of perestroika. Political commentators called for a return to the Leninist norm of modesty for those in the Communist Party, and the popular rumour did the rounds of the apocryphal tale of Boris Yeltsin travelling to work by trolleybus when he was First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Party. Where has all this gone? Why does society fail to react to information about corruption or about the excesses of state officials? Gelman speaks of weariness and apathy: needs must when the devil drives. ‘The unsuccessful experience of the battle against privileges of the time of perestroika and the subsequent events in which the Russian public (with rare exceptions) played the role of bystanders, convinced Russians that speaking out against the overbearing leadership was both useless and possibly dangerous.’

On the other hand, there exists a wide social contract under the title, ‘everyone steals’. Evidence of corruption and the blatant use and abuse of luxuries by the political and business elites gives people at all levels of society permission to behave in similar fashion. When they look upwards, people feel that they have the moral right to hide their income, take and give bribes and live beyond their means. The example given from on high creates an atmosphere in society that everything is permissible: if the Deputy Prime Minister’s dogs can fly around in private jets, why shouldn’t the whole leadership of the Volgograd Region fly off to Toscana to celebrate Governor Bozhenov’s birthday? If a car with a flashing light can tear along the central lane, why can’t an ordinary driver avoid traffic jams by driving on the hard-shoulder?

But besides the traditional cover-up between the various strata of society, there is a deeper reason why this ostentatious display by Shuvalov not only does not discredit, but actually legitimizes the regime. In Russia, power is based not on elections but on strength; on the affirmation of your status; on the symbolic effectiveness of the master of the discourse. Excess is essential to legitimize power: a blatant spanking of the serfs, demonstrative luxury, disdain for the law and moral norms.

In this sense, all of the examples of the demonstration of wealth – Putin’s palaces, Patriarch Kirill’s thirty-thousand-dollar Breguet watch, Shuvalov’s dogs on a business jet, lions in the private zoo of the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov – are the attributes of patriarchal power and important arguments in the hierarchy of the state; and the only people to protest about them are Facebook users and a few other active citizens. The majority of the population accept them silently as inevitable peculiarities of their socially favoured lords and masters. As a powerfully effective symbol, Corgi dogs on a private jet not only do not compromise their owner, they underline his right to power and his standing in the system.

The essence of the modern era of the evolution of society in Russia can be defined as the ruling elite irrevocably separating themselves from ‘the people’. They no longer care about creating an image of propriety; on the contrary, they have turned their privileges and personal whims into the norm. All of these lordly mega-projects – from the Winter Olympics and the World Cup to superfast trains and improvements on the streets of Moscow, all taking place at the same time as the dismantling of the social infrastructure and disdain for the needs of the common people which runs through the pronouncements of the higher leadership and deputies – all of this speaks of the final loss of social solidarity and the catastrophic stratification of Russian society as one of the main results of Putin’s counter-reforms.

Over the course of the hundred years since the Revolution of 1917, Russia has tried to create a modern society, built on the principles of solidarity, egalitarianism and the social contract (although in many ways these were merely declared aims, while in the USSR the privilege of status ruled supreme). But since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a landslide of the demodernization of power, society, the economy and the mass consciousness. As a result, Russia is rolling back from modern bureaucracy and from the oligarchic state of the times of early capitalism to feudalist, aristocratic rule, to the appearance of the class of the service nobility, as in the time of the godfather of Russian statehood, Ivan the Terrible. And Igor Shuvalov, with his carefully constructed aristocratic ways, sets a political fashion, albeit in a British way – from the royal Corgis to a house on Whitehall.

If we continue this trend down the staircase of history, we should then pass from the age of the service nobility to patrimonial nobility. It was no coincidence that in 2012 the political scientist, Yevgeny Minchenko, declared the second decade of this century as the ‘dynastic stage’ of the evolution of the system, in which the ruling elite develops the desire to create a hereditary aristocracy, so that they can transfer by inheritance property they have acquired. Only the right of patrimonial nobility could give the elite the guarantees they seek against the next redistribution of property (which will be inevitable when power changes hands again in Russia), and ensure stability and continuity in an era of wars, terrorism and sanctions.

To achieve this, new laws will be needed: hereditary titles and rights; a special judicial status for the new nobility; immunity from justice; guarantees of the inviolability of their private life and their property; classifying information about the aristocracy in registers. It seems that special status will be essential for the animals of the lords and masters, too – just like in the Middle Ages, when a peasant who raised his hand against the master’s dog was sentenced to death. And if a hundred years ago the poet Sergei Yesenin could write a touching message to the dog of Vasily Kachalov, a legendary actor of the Theatre of the Arts, then the poets of the new age could compose an ode to Igor Shuvalov’s dogs. After all, they are a symbol and a role model for modern Russia.

MISSILE MANIA

Moscow, the end of April, late in the evening. At midnight the police have shut off the Garden Ring Road: there’s a rehearsal taking place for the Victory Day Parade on 9 May. There’s electricity in the damp April air: a crowd is standing on the roadside; the police cars are stationary, blue lights flashing. From a long way off comes a deep rumbling sound. A few open military vehicles go past; and then, there IT is: the pride and joy of the Russian lands, the symbol of the might of the state and the jewel in the crown of the Strategic Rocket Forces – the twenty-five-metre long Topol-M missile. Bringing up the rear, at a respectful distance, is a column of BTR armoured personnel carriers. The ground shakes, the windows rattle, and the social networks are abuzz: everyone is excitedly snapping away, tweeting, posting and sending photos of the missile on Instagram. The only thing lacking is the battle cry, like that of the last Red Indians, as they carry this war axe.

Watching these primitive rituals in paying homage to the missile, I thought about the nature of Russian sovereignty, about the collective unconsciousness and the sanctification of strength. The missile is immanent and attached to Russia as part of the state’s armaments, built into the Russian landscape. It even led to a recent scandal with an advertising poster for Aeroflot in the Brussels metro. The poster carried an aerial shot of the Kremlin; but when you looked closely you could see that on the Kremlin Embankment there was a column of Topol missiles. Alarmed locals tried to work out the hidden message behind the poster; some even took it as a thinly disguised threat from Moscow to the European Union. What had most likely happened, however, was that the designer had been searching for a photograph of the capital at its best. This one seemed the most appropriate, and having military hardware on display was an appropriate symbol of the holiday mood, adding a certain national piquancy. The idea that just one five-hundred-kiloton warhead of this piquancy could wipe out the whole of Brussels never even occurred to the designer.

Missiles are a vital part of our mentality: ‘But we build missiles’, as Yuri Vizbor sang in a humorous song in answer to a foreigner’s criticism of the Soviet Union.[10] The missile is the carrier of the Russian myth, from the theorist of interplanetary travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, to the constructor of the first space rocket, Sergei Korolev; from the jet-propelled ‘Katyusha’ rockets of the Second World War to the submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile, Bulava. The missile is the child of the limitless Russian space, and it is also the state’s answer to the challenge of this space: a huge phallic symbol of might, in contrast to the horizontal and amorphous flat plain. The missile is the Russian dream; it compensates for the imperfections of life on earth by producing a reckless flight and the wide smile of the first cosmonaut, Yury Gagarin.

At the start of the twenty-first century, when Western countries consider parades of military hardware as an exotic anachronism, we remain one of those ambitious developing countries which still hold them. Columns of heavy technology rolling across Red Square – causing the icons to shake in St Basil’s Cathedral, the tea cups to tinkle in the shops in GUM, and the bones to quake of Stalin in the Kremlin Wall and of the holy mummy of Lenin in the Mausoleum – put us on a par with India and Pakistan, with the oil monarchies of the Arab world, and with unbending North Korea, which, full of bluff and blackmail, from time to time shows the world its Taepodong ballistic missile. All these countries are united by a patriarchal picture of the world, which is seen through the prism of fear and strength. Instead of holding parades of inventors and Nobel laureates, of GPs and school teachers (who, according to Bismarck, were the ones who won the Franco-Prussian War), we choose to roll out our huge missile as our final and main argument.

For eighteen years, from 1990 until 2008, Russia lived without demonstrations of military hardware in the capital; tanks appeared on the streets only at the time of the coup in August 1991 and the street battles in October 1993.[11] Vladimir Putin brought the ‘heavy parades’ back to Moscow alongside other traditional attributes of sovereignty just as the curtain was coming down on his second presidential term at the start of 2008. Just three months after the Victory Parade on Red Square, Russian tanks were flattening South Ossetia during the war with Georgia – the first time for many years that Russia had carried out a military operation outside its borders. Of course, these were different tanks; but such a demonstration of strength is sooner or later put into practice.

Muscovites know about the costs of these ‘heavy parades’ – and not just through gossip: roads are closed on rehearsal days and there are restrictions on aircraft flying into and out of Domodedovo Airport because the air force is preparing for the parade. There is also the dismantling of the overhead wires for the trolleybus network and other electricity cables, the reinforcement of the ceilings of some metro stations and the checking of all the subways along the route taken by the columns of military hardware. Then, of course, there is the main part of the costs: the resurfacing of the roads. When the parade was revived in 2008, the Moscow Mayor’s Office costed the repair work to the almost one million square metres it covered at over a billion roubles (twenty-five million dollars). Today, the total cost for holding the parade, including clearing the clouds from the sky, is around forty to fifty million dollars.

All this leads me to have a theory about who it is that really wants the parade. It is not the military-industrial complex, trying to gain new orders; neither is it the patriotic general public; it is not even the state, in an attempt to scare the West. It is the Moscow road-builders, who have learnt in recent years how to extract billions from the city budget, by resurfacing the same stretches of road three times in a year. It is this sector, which has been given to Vladimir Putin’s friends, the oligarchs Gennady Timchenko and the Rotenburg brothers, who are most interested in the destructive procession of military hardware over Moscow’s streets. Because, in the first instance, patriotism equals business.

TANK INVASION

The biggest hit of summer 2015 in Russia were tanks! The season opened with the parade on Victory Day, 9 May, and the unveiling of the new Russian tank, the T-14 ‘Armata’ (which, it has to be said, broke down right opposite Lenin’s Mausoleum) and the excited discussion of this event in the media and on social networks. The parade passed off; but the love for military hardware did not diminish, and on 12 June, Russia Day, patriotic mothers in Tambov formed their own parade by making up their children’s pushchairs as plywood tanks, complete with guns, and dressing their children in soldiers’ tops and military side caps. On the same day, a tank-themed Disneyland for older children was opened in Kubinka, near Moscow. The military park, called ‘Patriot’, cost twenty billion roubles (three hundred million dollars), displays the latest types of weaponry, puts on tank shows and even has a facility for those who wish to sign up for contract service in the army.[12] Twenty thousand people visit ‘Patriot’ every day.

Traditional summer festivals and public holidays are transforming themselves before our very eyes into exhibitions of military hardware. In the last couple of years, the main Russian rock festival, Nashestvie (‘Invasion’), has evolved into a military-patriotic show – the main sponsor of which is the Russian Army. It has become Woodstock in reverse: in Russian rock, the culture of protest and pacifism has been replaced by conformity, militarism and a love for weaponry – and all paid for by the state’s money. The same has happened with the Grushin bard song festival. At a meeting of the festival’s ‘military council’ it was decided that ‘alongside the festival site there should be set up an interactive historical-patriotic and technical exhibition for young people’; in other words, those same tanks are coming to this festival, too.

What next? Holding the Usadba Jazz Festival in the Arkhangelskoye estate outside Moscow to the accompaniment of artillery salvoes? Afisha Magazine’s hipster picnic supplied by field kitchens? The Tchaikovsky Music Competition with a review of military orchestras? We see tanks on our streets and in our parks; they roll across our TV screens, from ‘Tank Biathlon’ (not seen anywhere else in the world of entertainment) to documentary films; on state TV channels, films have been shown justifying the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. These films showed with pride Russian tanks on the streets of Budapest and Prague.

The degree of military-patriotic hysteria in Russia today is reminiscent of the USSR in the second half of the 1930s: a time of physical fitness parades, mock-ups of tanks and airships, shaven heads and creaking Sam Browne belts. Once again, today the country gladly lines up wearing soldiers’ shirts, has its photo taken on a tank and is preparing for war. Russia is bombarded by a continual liturgy of ‘the Great Victory’; in the arts, the most important performance of all has become the military-patriotic show; and the war in Ukraine, with its columns of military hardware marching to the border, is simply a continuation of this endless military parade that has hypnotized the nation.

The tank is one of the principal inventions of the age of steam and metal, a deadly miracle of the period of industrialization, a child of the twentieth century. It was born in the protracted battles in the trenches of the First World War, created almost simultaneously in Britain, France and Russia, and first saw fighting in September 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. Along with mustard gas, the aeroplane and the Maxim machine gun, it was yet another example of the technology of the mass society; a means of killing on an industrial scale. A little under thirty years later, armoured vehicles decided the outcome of the Second World War: two million men and six thousand tanks took part in the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943.

World War Two was both the peak and the start of the decline of the might of the main battle tank. The Soviet Union continued to maintain a massive group of tanks in the centre of Europe, with the aim of following up a tactical nuclear strike by defeating NATO forces in a tank battle in the Fulda Gap in the middle of Germany, then pressing on to reach the English Channel within three days. But military planners were already moving on from the idea of the mass tank battles of the industrial era to the post-industrial technology of the ‘third wave’, as the futurologist Alvin Toffler called it: precision ‘smart’ weapons, rapid deployment forces, space and information technology, and cyber warfare.

At the same time, in the so-called Third World, low-intensity conflicts started to break out: ethnic and religious wars, in which tanks were superseded by fighters with Kalashnikovs who would simply melt into the landscape and be lost among the local population. The USSR experienced this in Afghanistan, where tanks were useless at exercising control over mountainous terrain. And then Russia had a similar experience in Chechnya, where tanks got stuck in the streets of Grozny and were easily shot up from within buildings. Today, Russian army tanks, with their identifying marks wiped out, cannot bring victory in the Donbass, leaving us to read the reports about Russian conscript soldiers being burnt to death in their armoured vehicles, like the twenty-year-old tankman from Buryatia, Dorzhi Batomunkuev. Tanks have not won a single battle for Russia in the past thirty years, but they still remain an important symbolic resource.

In reality, the tank has become one of the symbols of the new patriotism. One of the pillars of the regime is the Uralvagonzavod Tank Factory in Nizhny Tagil in the Urals. In 2012, the head of the assembly shop, Igor Kholmanskikh, promised to bring his workers to Moscow to sort out protesting intellectuals; and soon after this he became the Presidential Representative in the Urals Federal District. This was the factory where the ill-fated Armata tank was built, the one that broke down on the 9 May parade. Indeed, Putin’s Russia has slipped back to the Battle of Prokhorovka, one of the principal engagements on the Kursk Salient in 1943, and has got stuck in the age of geopolitics, mass armies, tank battles, annexation and occupation. Putin sees himself in the role of Stalin, standing over the map of Europe at Yalta or Potsdam in 1945, waving a hand over the territory to be taken over, deciding the fate of the world. And the post-Crimea majority in Russia believe in this archaic illusion, idolizing the Topol and Iskander strategic missiles, creating the cult of the ‘little green men’ (the special forces soldiers who seized Crimea in 2014), snuggling up to the saving armour of the tanks and the BTRs. Putin has created in Russia a nation at war, which has battened down the hatches and is looking at the world through the sights of a tank.

Early on the morning of 19 August 1991, I was woken by the ground shaking. The cups in the sideboard were ringing as they knocked against each other, and the glass in the windows was vibrating. Along the Kiev Highway, not far from our dacha, a column of tanks was heading at full speed for Moscow. Every television channel was showing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; then they started to show the press conference of the Emergency Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP), which had seized power in the country. I quickly finished my breakfast and hurried into town.

Tanks were drawn up on Manezh Square, outside the Kremlin. The sun was shining, people stood around gawping, the militiamen looked bored; alongside the old building of Moscow University, the tanks did not look at all frightening. I went up to one, climbed on it and knocked on the hatch. To my surprise, it opened and, blinking against the sunlight, a puny blonde lad of about nineteen climbed out. ‘Have you got a fag?’ he asked uncertainly. I gave him a packet of cigarettes and one of the leaflets signed by the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, which called on the people to oppose the coup. Having thought about it, the tankman took the leaflet, climbed back into the tank and closed the hatch behind him.

One of those who helped with the defence of the White House, the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet (or Parliament), and who set up the headquarters of the protest, organized the radio link and prepared a possible escape route for Boris Yeltsin, was Reserve Lieutenant Sergei Shoigu. For this he received the medal, ‘Defender of a Free Russia’. How times have changed. Now Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu commissions research on how to oppose ‘colour revolutions’. In his words: ‘We do not have the right to repeat the situation of the collapse of 1991’ and ‘We must not allow the army to stand to the side, as happened in 1991.’[13] Apparently, the best guarantee against ‘the orange threat’ of revolution is to bring the tanks onto the square; in other words, create a Russian version of Tiananmen Square.

I think about how quickly time flies and the world changes. Since that moment in 1991, the USSR has collapsed, as has Yugoslavia; the USA has elected a black President; in the West they have defeated AIDS; the fourth industrial revolution is under way; Elon Musk is building electric cars and private spacecraft; Google is preparing to spread the Internet to the four corners of the world by satellite; and Russia… what of Russia? We are still sitting in the same old tank, playing at war and fighting with imaginary fascists.

Until someone knocks on the armour from the outside.

PURVEYORS OF THREATS

It was in our Basic Military Preparation classes in school that I first heard from our military teacher, a major of the reserve, the phrase, ‘the threat period’. It was at this point in our training sessions for nuclear war that we were supposed to grab our gas masks and march to the Civil Defence Headquarters.

It seems that we have reached that point now in Russia. From all sides we hear cries about threats: the Motherland is in danger! We are threatened in turn by all sorts of things: paedophiles, homosexuals, Westerners who adopt Russian children, ‘foreign agents’, ‘the fifth column’ of the Russian opposition and the US Sixth Fleet, Western ecologists and Russian separatists, the Kiev junta and the American State Department – even, in recent times, Western food products, against which Russia has introduced sanctions: beware Italian parmesan, Spanish ham, Polish apples and Norwegian salmon!

Every threat has its own lifecycle, its sell-by date. A couple of years ago none of these threats was even on the horizon. As a rule, threats appear out of nowhere (such as ‘foreign agents’ or Russian separatists). Suddenly there’s a concentrated attack in the media and the degree of public hysteria is raised. On a wave of popular anger, a draft bill is introduced into the State Duma, is instantly approved in three readings (sometimes without even the approval of the appropriate committee or a call from the government) and straightaway is signed by the President. After this, the hysteria immediately dies down and everyone quietly forgets about the threat. Who now remembers the ‘separatists’ whom we were fighting against at the end of 2013: Karelian, Siberian, on the Kurile Islands, North Caucasian, or in the enclave of Kaliningrad? Now, the separatists are held in high esteem – in Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk – but these are the ‘right’ separatists in neighbouring Ukraine. From time to time we even forget about ‘foreign agents’, as a warning closing down a few NGOs. What remains on the battlefield are sick Russian orphans, some of whom have already died because foreigners were not allowed to adopt them; discriminatory, indeed fascist, anti-gay laws; blocked websites and banished media outlets. But no one remembers this now, because Russia has new enemies: Barack Obama, the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel…

The majority of these threats, when looked at rationally, have been completely dreamt up, from the foreign child adopters to ‘the homosexual lobby’. However, it would be naive to suggest that this is simply because of the paranoia of members of the State Duma. The precise mechanism for marking out these threats, amplifying them in the media and drawing up the legal process leads one to suggest that behind this endless flow there is a unified guiding logic. Threats are sought from the outside, but they are formulated within the system. What’s more, threats are a key element of the functioning of the Russian state.

The scientific description of the role and place of threats in the state system was given by the sociologist Simon Kordonsky. For him, the very structure of the state, with its role of providing for survival, security and social stability, creates the conditions for apparent threats. Each department comes up with a particular type of threat – natural, military, social and so on – and accordingly this hierarchy of threats requires its own share of resources. The more dangerous the particular threat (be it real or imagined), the greater the flow of state resources dealt out to the various services and departments responsible for dealing with it. In such circumstances, Kordonsky writes, ‘services become ever more interested in increasing the number of the threats for which they are responsible, as well as making them appear bigger and more dangerous’.[14]

One method for gaining extra resources from the state is to invent new threats on different levels, from the state level down to the municipal level. One example of such an invention was the creation of the myth about the ‘orange threat’ after the revolution in Ukraine in 2004. This led to the formation of new organizational structures (such as the infamous Directorate E of the Interior Ministry, responsible for tackling extremism) and a variety of ‘patriotic’ youth organizations. The state set aside for certain agencies the appropriate resources to fight the ‘orange threat’, which became a particular type of corporation, interested in continuing the funding of its activity and using any means possible to reactivate the ‘orange’ myth.

In 2011 the League for a Safe Internet was launched by Konstantin Malofeyev, to combat the threat of ‘paedophiles and extremism on the Internet’. This organization was given a budget of tens of millions of dollars. It is still managing to cope with ‘its own’ threat, while trying to introduce ever more restrictive laws and receiving ever more administrative and financial resources. Sometimes, combatting a threat can bring direct commercial benefits, as happened with the Russian Sea (Russkoe morye) group of companies, belonging to the oligarch Gennady Timchenko, which benefited from the embargo on the import of Norwegian salmon. After it was announced that there would be Russian sanctions, the purchase price of salmon doubled, and Russian Sea shares rose by 34 per cent.

Exactly the same thing happened when the Russian Security Council discussed the fantasy threat that Russia might be excluded from the worldwide web (as happened to Sudan in 2007). This was a purely commercial idea, dreamt up in order to sell to the state equipment that would duplicate the infrastructure of the Internet in Russia. The threat of Russia being excluded from the worldwide web remains purely hypothetical; but real funds can be allocated to that idea – including technology costing hundreds of millions of dollars. A very peculiar ‘threat market’ is growing in modern Russia, and bets on this are constantly growing. As for the growth in the amount of resources that are redistributed, there is ‘threat inflation’, as new ones are constantly being brought into being. Threats may be genuine or just as easily imagined or carefully designed. The motivation of the players in this market may be purely for their own department, or it may be commercial (frequently these amount to the same thing), but the sale of these threats has massive internal and foreign policy consequences.

The emergence of this market has been dictated by the character of the political elite of Putin’s third term. In place of ‘Politburo 2.0’, which was made up of representatives of the power ministries (siloviki), bureaucrats and oligarchs, the leadership is now totally dominated by the siloviki. As the political commentator Konstantin Gaaze writes, all the key decisions in the past year have been taken by a closed circle of representatives of the FSB. ‘The FSB doesn’t concern itself with development, it just reacts to threats as it sees them. The government and the various departments spend years weighing up the pros and cons of any decision, but now the FSB simply “sells” a threat to the President and he immediately takes the decision reached by the Service.’ In this way, according to Gaaze, the decision was taken about protecting Russians’ personal data (according to which all personal data should be stored on Russian servers); about the embargo on foodstuffs; and also about many questions linked to Ukraine.

The threat-producing machine works on the redistribution of state resources to the advantage of the power corporations and the business structures linked to them. Here you will find means that have been earmarked for the rebuilding of Crimea and the war with Ukraine, the rearmament of the Russian Army and the modernization of the nuclear arsenal. Then there’s the expensive reinvention of the bicycle – that is, the production of Russian versions of global technology: GLONASS instead of GPS; a sovereign Internet on local servers; a national payment system, ‘Mir’, in place of Visa or MasterCard; and a national search engine, ‘Sputnik’, to take the place of Google. Fascinated by imaginary threats, the Kremlin has diverted funds from the market to the siloviki, who follow their own commercial interests exclusively through nonmarket methods. The liberals in the system have been crushed; those that are left carry out rearguard battles in the Central Bank; and market logic no longer works in post-Crimea Russia.

But this is just half the problem. The bitter irony is that the idea is tangible, and these threats, which were dreamt up and sold to the Kremlin, have become reality – only now not as the reasons for Russian policy, but as the results of this policy. The Kremlin is not reacting to threats, but creating them itself. So in the autumn of 2013, for instance, the legend was dreamt up about ‘the loss of Ukraine’ if it were to sign an Association Agreement with the EU. In many ways this Agreement was a mere formality and did not carry with it any obligations. But because of this, the Kremlin started to tie the hands of the then Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, which led to mass demonstrations on Kiev’s Maidan Square and subsequently the whole spiral of confrontation. As a result, Ukraine went ahead and signed the Agreement; and is now lost to Russia forever. Three months later, in February 2014, the annexation of Crimea was undertaken out of fear of an imaginary ‘NATO base in Sevastopol’; and what has happened as a result? Ukraine is rapidly growing closer to the North Atlantic Alliance and NATO is expanding its presence by creating permanent bases in the Baltic States, which are worried by the turn of events. In Russia they started battling with imaginary ‘separatists’ until they were foaming at the mouth, and as a result created the virus of separatism, coming to us from Crimea and Donbass.

The problem is that the siloviki, who have a complete hold on power in post-Crimea Russia, are capable of thinking and acting only in a space full of threats. All they can do is track, describe and neutralize threats. This is their particular way of dealing with the outside world, where they see only challenges, not possibilities. The siloviki need threats for bureaucratic domination; for obtaining resources and the redistribution of property. Now, though, the Chekist machinery for replicating threats has become a loose cannon and has started to destroy everything around it. It has itself become a threat to Russia’s national security. ‘The threat period’, which our military teacher frightened us with in my childhood, has finally arrived.

CHURCHILL DREAMT IT ALL UP

There’s a national sport in Russia – and it’s not fishing, or checkers or even hockey. It is exposing global conspiracies. From the false ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ about the establishment of world domination by the Jews, to the ‘Dulles Doctrine’ for the moral degradation of Soviet citizens; from the idea that the October Revolution of 1917 was funded by the German General Staff, to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 being planned by the CIA: everywhere we are looking for the false bottom in the suitcase, for secret signs or interests behind the scenes, and we always ask the question, ‘Who gains from this?’ We are perceptive and vigilant, like the patients in the asylum in Vladimir Vysotsky’s song, which said of the Bermuda Triangle: ‘Churchill dreamt all this up in 1918’.[15]

Hearing about the terrorist bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013, our homegrown conspiracy theorists immediately declared it to be a CIA set-up. Bloggers compared photos before and after the explosion and where the policemen were situated and insisted that the wounded could not have been quietly sitting in wheelchairs and that therefore they were simply actors. The television anchor Maxim Shevchenko came right out and said that the scene was part of a secret scenario arranged to cover up the USA’s failed policy in Iraq in order to justify sending American troops into the Caucasus.

Conspiracy theories have always abounded everywhere, but they became particularly popular from the time of the French Revolution, which was said to be either the work of the Masons, or the Illuminati, or the Jews. In America itself there are conspiratorial versions of the murder of President Kennedy; or those that say that the Moon landings were staged on Earth. But wherever they appear, conspiracy theories remain the product of immature or sick minds. In Russia, conspiracy has become the dominant worldview. This can probably be explained historically by the long tradition of a lack of freedom, of serfdom and by the psychology of slavery. Not being responsible for their own fate, people became used to blaming everything that happened on a higher power: the peasantry said it was ‘all due to the nobles’, and the nobles that it was ‘the will of the sovereign’.

Today – when horoscopes are published in newspapers alongside the currency exchange rates; when icons are stuck on the dashboard of every other car (and, at the same time, the driver doesn’t wear his seat belt); and when religious obscurantism dictates laws and court procedures – conspiracy theories are once again troubling Russians’ minds. But what is most frightening of all is that this is becoming state policy.

It all began in 2004, with the terrorist attack in Beslan in Ingushetia, when Chechen fighters seized a school and took the children hostage. Vladimir Putin suddenly announced that this was the machinations of the West, which was trying to snatch Russia’s ‘juicy morsels’. Then there were the protests on Kiev’s Maidan Square, and the carnival of ‘colour revolutions’, from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan to Tbilisi in Georgia. This frightened the Kremlin, which saw the spectre of a global conspiracy by the agents of democratization. Next came Tahrir Square in Cairo and the ‘Arab Spring’… Then suddenly there were the protests on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in the winter of 2011–12, and the paranoia became complete once and for all, producing a locked and hermetically sealed picture of the world. Fantastic scenarios are born in this picture, such as that the West was transferring billions of dollars to Russian NGOs in an attempt to bring about regime change in Russia. This is like Stalin’s picture of the world in 1937, when all the facts incontrovertibly pointed to each other and all together added up to a counterrevolutionary conspiracy; but not a single one of them bore any relation to reality. Nevertheless, this short circuit in the brain, this paranoia of the state, sets the political agenda and reflects the moral atmosphere of a closed and cynical society, where the individual is not free to make his own decisions: ‘the boss’ is behind everything, and everything is done simply for money.

The conspiracy theory is poor and flawed; it does not understand all the complexity, multitude and subjectivity of the contemporary world, where behind all major events there stand not secret forces but many different players, each with their own interests. And these interests are far from always being material ones; people are prepared to sacrifice their personal well-being – and even their lives – for the sake of ideas, taking part in an act of terror or going out onto the streets to protest. Nor is the conspiracy theory prepared to accept that we live in a ‘Risk Society’ (as the German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, wrote); that history is unpredictable and perverse, more likely to obey the law of incompetence and chance than an evil will. As Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, said: ‘Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.’ It seems that we find ourselves right in the middle of that cock-up now.[16]

A RACKETEER WITH ROCKETS

Reasons seem to come thick and fast these days for relations between Russia and the West to pass the point of no return. The international investigation team looking into the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014 confirmed that the aircraft was shot down by a ‘BUK’ missile, brought from Russia and fired from territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists. Immediately in the wake of this report, Western countries held Russia and its Syrian ally, Bashir Assad, responsible for the barbaric bombing of a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo; the French Foreign Ministry described it as ‘a war crime’.

It probably makes sense to point out at this juncture the West’s foresight in ensuring that the Western legal process moves slowly but reliably. And to remember the bombing in 1988 by Libyan special forces of the Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie: it took eleven years before Colonel Qaddafi gave up the suspects and fifteen years before compensation was paid to the families of those who died in this terrorist attack… But even this is not a fair comparison: the analogy with a small country such as Libya doesn’t work, and these latest revelations evoke a sense of déjà vu. Over the past three years there were many such points of no return, and on every occasion Russia and the West crossed yet another ‘red line’ and continued downwards on the slippery slope with mutual accusations and verbal exchanges, as if they were connected by an invisible chain. There will be no Nuremberg Trials, nor Hague Tribunals, nor, indeed, any other tribunal. What is much more likely is that Russia can expect trials in absentia lasting many years, and convictions, and demands for payment of multimillion-dollar compensation – all of which, of course, Russia will refuse to acknowledge. This will start a new round of sanctions, rows over the seizure of Russian assets abroad and litigation drawn out over years, if not decades. A better parallel to draw than Lockerbie is the tragedy of the Korean airliner shot down by a Soviet fighter jet over Sakhalin on 1 September 1983. To this day, there has never been a full explanation of what happened, no one has been held responsible, and you can no longer find on the map of the world the country that shot down the aircraft.

In other words, it is highly unlikely that there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia as a result of this deterioration in relations. It may even have the opposite effect: the West’s latest accusations play into the Kremlin’s long-term strategy of creating an image of Russia as an unpredictable and dangerous player, one that breaks all the global rules and therefore should be feared. Clearly, neither the shooting down of MH17 nor the bombing of civilian targets in Syria were actions planned in advance by Russia; but they come out of that high-risk environment created by Moscow in the post-Soviet space and in the Middle East, and are inevitable consequences of the hybrid war that Russia is waging around the world. Yet another act of this war was the decree signed by Vladimir Putin suspending the work of the intergovernmental agreement with the USA on the use of plutonium. Russia raises the stakes in the geopolitical game, showing everyone that it is willing to hold the West to nuclear blackmail (like the television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov – one of the Kremlin’s main propagandists – talking about reducing American cities to ‘radioactive ash’) and to dismantle all the agreements reached about nuclear weapons.

The Kremlin’s hybrid war is a policy of weakness and cunning in the information age. Having insufficient military, economic and diplomatic resources to achieve victory in Ukraine or Syria, Russia carries out precise operations so as to destabilize the situation in these two countries and provoke a confrontation with the West that it shies away from at the last moment. It conducts a powerful campaign of disinformation and propaganda with the aim of distorting the picture of what is going on and blurring the position of the West, which itself appears unclear and indecisive. The aim of hybrid warfare is the projection of unpredictability, chaos and fear; the creation of an unstable environment in which it is much easier to bluff when you hold weak cards in your hands.

In the twenty-first century, Russia’s principal export has become not oil and gas, but fear: the price of the former will fall over time; the price of the latter will rise. In the risk society that the leading contemporary philosophers and sociologists write about, from Ulrich Beck to Anthony Giddens, the winners are those who can create and capitalize on fear, turning it into a political and economic resource. In this, Russia is a leading player and provider. The manufacture of fear is part of the very essence of Russian history, both in Russia’s relations with the West and in the day-to-day relationship of the individual and the state. The system of international relations in the twenty-first century dates from 11 September 2001 (in Russia, slightly earlier – from September 1999, with the mysterious bombings of apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, in which many saw the hand of the FSB). The structure of this system fits the scenarios laid out by Thomas Hobbes, who predicted anarchy in interstate relations and a ‘war of all against all’; but not that of Immanuel Kant, who sought ‘eternal peace’ in Europe. Putin’s Russia is one of the producers and beneficiaries of this Hobbesian world, in which its main resource – fear – and its main services – security measures – are in great demand. This is the classic strategy of the racketeer, who symbolically creates a threat, and then suggests ‘protection’ at a decidedly non-symbolic price.

The key word here is ‘weakness’. Having lost the Cold War and the postwar world, and having squandered its oil profits and the remaining shreds of its reputation, Russia is incapable of constructively solving the world’s problems. Instead, it prefers to make them worse. It doesn’t welcome and settle refugees from the Third World on its own territory; instead, it sends wave after wave of them into Western Europe across its land borders with Finland and Norway, using them as an instrument of hybrid warfare in order to deepen the migration crisis in Europe and provoke anti-immigrant sentiment there. It doesn’t solve humanitarian and political problems in Syria, but meddles in an already existing conflict with selfish geopolitical aims, thus taking it to an even higher level. It doesn’t assist the objective international investigation of the shooting down of MH17, but tries to knock it off course, constantly putting forward versions that contradict each other. And Russia didn’t cooperate with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and international sporting federations in order to eliminate the epidemic of doping in modern sport, but tried to discredit and destroy WADA with information overload and attacks by hackers.

And it has to be said that for now it is all working out well for Russia. The combined efforts of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Ministry, the Russia Today (RT) television channel and the individual assault squads of ‘people’s diplomacy’ – from football fanatics in European stadiums and so-called ‘Orthodox bikers’ touring Europe to hackers and Internet trolls flooding Western networks – are ensuring that the export of fear and uncertainty is growing at maximum volume with minimum cost. The Russian threat seems to loom over the West on every corner: in the movement of Assad’s forces and the provocations of the Donetsk separatists; in any cyberattack, be it breaking into the servers of the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the USA, to attacks on Yahoo’s servers (which, the Internet company confirmed, were linked to Russian government agencies); in the unidentified submarines in the Baltic Sea; in the waves of migrants in European cities; and in the financing of Donald Trump and Marine le Pen. It no longer matters to what extent Moscow is linked to each of these episodes, or whether it was a carefully planned special operation or simply the actions of individual patriotic citizens. Russia has created a shimmering space of uncertainty in which its role is demonized and, most likely, exaggerated; but that’s exactly what Putin is trying to do.

The amount spent on the production of fear is minimal: according to the RBK news agency, Russia’s operation in Syria came in at under one billion dollars: chickenfeed by Russian standards, the cost of just a few hours of the Sochi Olympics. As President Putin said cynically about Syria: ‘We can train our army there for quite a long time without having any real effect on state finances.’[17] Add in the cost of the Russia Today information agency, the work with the various Russian diasporas in the West and with politicians like Gerhard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi, and aid to right-wing populist and separatist parties in the West, and you still get a comparatively small sum; certainly, one that cannot be compared to the ruinous investments in the infrastructure of fear during the Cold War.

On the other hand, compared to thirty years ago the West today simply does not have either the necessary organization or the will to resist. Relaxed by a long period of peace, and demoralized by the postmodern, ‘post-heroic’ era, the West is passive, disunited and too dependent on consumerism: Russia exploits this weakness. Minimal funds were dug up to deal with the archetypal Russian threat, which had been dozing in the back of the West’s consciousness since Gorbachev’s time; but this threat has raised itself once more to its full height, like an emaciated bear coming out of hibernation in the spring. It is no coincidence that whenever their team plays away, Russian football fans – in the front row of Putin’s hybrid war – take with them huge banners with a roaring bear, or that the group of hackers who broke into the WADA server call themselves Fancy Bears. On their logo they have a bear wearing the Anonymous mask. Thirty years on, the symbolic economy of the Cold War has returned to its starting position: Russians blame Obama for everything, and Americans look for the Russian threat under the bed.

However, the West is not rushing to buy life insurance or security services from the ‘Russia’ defence factory. The racketeer’s strategy works when he manages to tie the client into his ‘protection’, his defence; but the West is not exactly falling over itself to enter into talks about ‘a new security system’, and it does not see Putin as a new Stalin of the 1945-type, with whom you have to sit down around the map of the world and divide it up into spheres of influence. That is why it is more accurate to compare Russia less with a racketeer than with a small-time thug. As they say, Russia may have got up off its knees, but it is still only squatting. Since he doesn’t have real strength, the thug holds the neighbourhood in fear and manipulates the law-abiding parts of society by issuing small threats. All he has in his arsenal is a collection of petty ritual gestures (such as beating up a weakling, nicking a mobile phone, cheeking the police, flashing a knife, baring his chest), all designed to show those around him that he’s prepared to break the law and violate convention. But the thug immediately shrinks in the face of any outside force or organized opposition. For that to happen, though, such opposition must be evident, and in the current system of international relations, with Obama on the way out and the EU weakened by Brexit, that strength simply isn’t there.

What next? At first glance, it seems that the aim of this hybrid war has been achieved: the world has started to listen to Russia and started to fear it; but this is on a par with the fear that the world has for Iran or North Korea, which have been global scarecrows for decades. Russia has not so much returned to the club of the leading world powers, which it was a part of before 2014, as turned into a worldwide horror story. And in this it should be compared not with Libya or North Korea, but with the Soviet Union at the start of the 1980s. In the very same way, that country squandered the resources and the respect it had, lost all its allies and, not having the strength to solve global problems, carried out a destructive foreign policy, from the arms race to the war in Afghanistan. Pathetic in its global pretensions and its dreams of past greatness, inflated on the outside, but empty within, the Soviet Union turned into a warhead stuffed full of rubbish, a shadow of what it once was. It seemed to be eternal and unshakeable – until it collapsed overnight. ‘This was forever, until it ended’, as the sociologist Alexei Yurchak wrote in his book on the collapse of the USSR. But projects such as this always end unexpectedly, ridiculously and unstoppably.[18]

THE TORCH PROCESSION

In the build-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, the Olympic Flame continued its march around Russia’s wide expanses, accompanied by hundreds of security personnel, police, guard dogs and patriotic bikers (who nowadays carry out the role of the emperor’s mounted guard). Life along the route of the VIP cortège came to a standstill: whole towns froze; roads were closed; trains came to a halt. From being a celebration on the move, the Olympic Torch Relay became a mobile police operation. The centre of Moscow shut down for three days; in St Petersburg, thousands of soldiers cleaned Palace Square and cordoned off the city’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt.

The mind boggles at the scale of this gigantic performance. Ever since the first Torch Relay took place – the idea of Josef Goebbels before the Berlin Olympics of 1936 – this one became the longest, the biggest and the most technologically accomplished relay ever. It lasted 123 days, covered 65,000 kilometres, involved 14,000 torch bearers and used every form of transport possible: from atomic ice-breakers and spacecraft to dog-sledges and teams of reindeer. When it travelled by railway, the Flame was transported by a Russian Railways staff train, made up of eleven carriages, including two restaurant cars, and accompanied by five hundred people. The Olympic Flame went to the North Pole, into outer space and on the International Space Station (ISS). There followed a trip to the bottom of Lake Baikal; it was taken down a coalmine and to the summit of Mount Elbrus. The Olympic Torch Relay even became a religious ceremony: in the railway carriage and on the ice-breaker, the Flame travelled in a special sacred case; and when he sent the Torch on its way from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk, the Head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin (who also happens to be a patron of the Orthodox Church, and who has experience of transporting the Blessed Easter Flame from Jerusalem to Moscow), made the sign of the cross over the Flame.

Like an animal in the forest, Russia was marking out its territory. With precise points, here we had Kaliningrad (Russia’s outpost inside the European Union); Sakhalin (a message to the Japanese: don’t even think about the Kurile Islands); the North Pole (relevant for the dispute over the territorial ownership of the Lomonosov underwater ridge, where the polar explorer, Artur Chilingarov, hoisted the titanium flag of Russia in 2007). Most important of all, though, was the parade of Russian sovereignty in the North Caucasus, where the last two weeks of the Torch Relay took place before it reached its final destination in Sochi. The true meaning of the holding of the Olympics in this troubled region was that it conclusively confirmed Russian sovereignty over the North Caucasus – the final victory of the two-hundred-year Caucasian war.

And it was no coincidence that the Olympic Torch Relay took place against the background of a discussion of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation. In the State Duma a draft law was being considered that would make the propagation of separatism a criminal offence: ‘The spreading in any form of views, ideas, or calls for action that would question the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.’ It was proposed that the punishment should be severe: for the thoughtcrime against sovereignty, a twenty-year prison term was suggested – much longer than for murder! However, in Russia crimes against the state were always punished more harshly than crimes against individuals. The Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, even proposed renaming the Russian Far East ‘Our Own East’ in order to prevent it from moving even further away.

Oh, this childish belief in the power of the word – that if you forbid people from speaking about a problem, it will disappear all by itself! The taboo about having any conversations about the territorial make-up of Russia brings on a generic trauma in our political elite. There is a phantom pain after the collapse of the USSR – ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’, as Vladimir Putin called it – and a panic attack about the threat of further disintegration.

Where does this fear come from? Why has ‘sovereignty’ suddenly become such a painful place for the regime? There are two problems here, neither of which is caused by external (and, indeed, imaginary) threats to sovereignty, but by Russia’s own internal psychological hang-ups. The first is the deepening post-Soviet identity crisis of trying to understand what Russia is: a country for the Russians or a multinational empire? And where do its borders lie? In the Baltic States? In the North Caucasus? In Crimea? In Eastern Ukraine? In Northern Kazakhstan? It is not the separatists who want to dismember Russia, but the Russians themselves who cannot understand where the borders are; this is where the paranoia and hypersensitivity springs from whenever the issue is raised of sovereignty or of Russia’s borders.

The other problem is much more serious: it is a crisis of belief in Russia’s future. Here, once again, it is not a question of Russia’s territorial integrity or of imaginary threats to sovereignty, but the fact that the raw, authoritarian model is worn out and it is impossible to conduct any long-term planning in our country. Today’s Russia has been robbed of any model for the future, any long-term perspective, or any economic or social model other than the export of raw materials and the plundering of the state budget. The elite compensates for fear of the future with ever more paranoid ideas of sovereignty. Instead of coming up with genuine ideas for strengthening the state, such as a strategy of development for the depressed regions and the single-industry towns, or investment in education, healthcare and culture, in human capital and the future of the country, all they propose is rhetoric, prison terms for thoughtcrime and fantastic ideas about renaming the Far East. Once upon a time we had a country that tried to patch up holes using mere words; but this country collapsed in 1991.

This is why religious rituals of sovereignty and the Olympic Torch Relay are so important for the state, and the Olympic Games as a model for the future and the medal count as a prototype for war: it is the containment of fear, an exorcism of the eternal Russian emptiness. This is where the seriousness of the state comes from and the extreme security measures, turning what should have been a jolly carnival procession into a special operation by the security forces.

But it didn’t turn out as it should have done. The faulty torches went out (the Olympic Flame was extinguished on more than fifty occasions) and the ungrateful public laughed and whistled. It became essential to have a member of the Federal Guard Service standing by with a Zippo lighter to relight the Olympic Flame, which is exactly what happened when the rally reached Red Square, right opposite Lenin’s Mausoleum. But where can we find enough guards who, with their Zippos, can reignite the dying belief in Russia’s future?

OLYMPIC SCHIZOPHRENIA

Everyone is asking whether the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics can be compared to Berlin in 1936. I decided to ride on the wave that this historical analogy has created and look again at the legendary film, Olympia, directed by Leni Riefenstahl. I saw masses of happy faces, a parade of muscular bodies and a whole host of ingenious camera angles and original editing techniques. Up in the stands, Hitler smiled in a rather embarrassed way, Goebbels and Goering appeared at his side, and the crowd threw up their arms in the Nazi salute. The spectators got excited, jumped out of their seats, supporting equally enthusiastically their own athletes and those from other countries; they were very friendly towards the American fans in their white hats. Flags were waved bearing laurel wreaths, the Olympic Flame burned brightly in the Temple of Light designed by Albert Speer and the sky overhead was full of aeroplanes.

The sensation never left me that everything taking place had a dual meaning. In just three years, these people would begin crushing each other with tanks. In nine years, the Americans would bomb Dresden and Hiroshima. In ten years, the Nuremberg Trials would be held. We would learn about Dachau and Auschwitz; about Khatyn and Babiy Yar.[19] Can we today watch Riefenstahl and not be burdened by this knowledge? Can we take the Olympics out of their historical context? How can we watch Ludwig Stubbendorf ride to victory in the equestrian event, knowing that he will be killed on the Eastern Front in 1941; or see the record shot-put of the great Hans Welke, who was to become a policeman and be captured and executed by partisans near Khatyn in 1943? And if we cast our net wider, how can we read the works of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and the ‘court lawyer of the Third Reich’, the political theorist Carl Schmitt? How can we listen to the works of genius that are the recordings of the conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, knowing that they both served the Nazi regime, and that Karajan somehow managed to join the Nazi Party twice?

For seventy years now we have been trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, to separate politics from culture. Leni Riefenstahl was cleared by a postwar court, but still came up against a secret ban which prevented her from working in her chosen profession, and she went into photography instead. Nevertheless, at the 1948 Lausanne Film Festival, she was awarded an Olympic certificate; and in 1956 a Hollywood panel named Olympia one of the ten best films of all time. In 2001, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, presented the ninety-nine-year-old Riefenstahl with a gold medal of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Sochi 2014 is not Berlin 1936. It is not worth comparing one of the most terrifying totalitarian regimes in history with the populist authoritarianism of modern Russia. A better comparison would probably be with Mexico in 1968 and Seoul in 1988. Mexico and South Korea in those years were each ruled by one-party dictatorships, just as, incidentally, Japan was in the decades after the Second World War, if we think back to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and the Winter Olympics in Sapporo in 1972. Even a comparison with the capital of what Reagan described as ‘the Evil Empire’, Moscow 1980, is a limp one; Beijing 2008 would be closer.

Nevertheless, in the Russian discussion the Sochi Olympics inevitably brings up moral dilemmas similar to 1936: we are used to thinking on a grand scale. The question stares one in the face: should someone who is in opposition to the regime wish for a successful Games and victory for the Russian team, if each triumph raises Putin’s rating? Can you join in a celebration if it is supported by billions of stolen dollars and the destruction of a region’s ecology, and every Russian medal is simply an indulgence to redeem evil?

But if we put extreme views to one side, a normal citizen, even one who is critical of the state (and, after all, isn’t that one of the usual human criteria for normality?) cannot actually not support his country and cannot actively wish for it to fail. A significant section of the reading and thinking public has developed Olympic schizophrenia: they are torn between typical Russian Schadenfreude about the incompetence of the managers, the thieving ways of the contractors and the crisis in many sports (such as in figure skating and biathlon), and pride in our sportsmen, the volunteers and the unusually amicable policemen as well as the inspirational opening ceremony. This is not about President Putin, or the Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, or the authorities; this is about Russia as a country testing itself before the whole world over the course of two weeks.

Schizophrenia is a peculiarly Russian characteristic. Power is separated from the country by the crenelated Kremlin Wall. And for centuries the educated class was not only alien to its own people but even became used to being ashamed of Russia, while at the same time surprisingly remaining Russian patriots. As the poet Alexander Pushkin said: ‘Of course, I despise my Fatherland with my whole being; but it annoys me when a foreigner shares this sentiment with me.’[20] Shame and pride, love and hatred, give rise to the typical Russian split personality. Russian patriotism has been schizophrenic from the time of the Russian philosopher of the first half of the nineteenth century, Pyotr Chaadaev. He was the author of the critical ‘Philosophical Letters’, who dared to love Russia warts and all, and for his ideas was declared mad by the authorities.

The problem, clearly, lies in the binary nature of Russian thinking, noted by the late twentieth-century philologist and semiotician, Yury Lotman. In one of his later works, Culture and Explosion, Lotman talks about the typical black and white Russian view of the world: ‘He who is not with us is against us’; it’s us and them; Russia versus the outside world. A war rages between these two positions – for the Olympics, for social networks, history, faith, memory. In this battle, the state tries to claim all the significant national symbols: the Great Patriotic War and the Victory in 1945, spaceflights and sporting achievements. Any alternative point of view is dismissed as traitorous: either you accept these events with all the glory of the state or you are condemned as a slanderer: there can be no spots on the Sun. It is impossible to honour the Victory in the Second World War, but at the same time cast doubts on the role of Stalin; it is impossible to revel in the Olympics, yet at the same time to speak about theft, the destruction of homes, the forced resettlement of local residents and the destruction of homeless dogs in Sochi ahead of the Olympics. War is war.

Here we should remember Lotman’s warning that binary structures are doomed to lead to a catastrophic resolution of conflicts, to self-destruction and to a total explosion. We will collapse as a country if we do not put a stop to this spiral of hatred and polarization; it is a civil war in the making. We need to look for a way out in an acceptance of a multilayered reality. As Lotman wrote, European culture is resistant because it is ternary. It rests on the idea of overcoming binary structures, of allowing for a third position that accepts both of the others. It’s like in the joke about the wise rabbi, who says to the two men who are arguing: ‘You are right; and you are right, too.’ And when a third man asks, ‘How can that be, rabbi?’, he replies: ‘And you are right as well.’

The Olympics is a gigantic carnival where Russia appears in all its greatness and its provinciality, where fifty or sixty billion dollars are turned into a giant hecatomb, like the Great Pyramid of Giza, rebuilt in the spirit of the eternal Russian desire to prove something to the world. It is a combination of the work of world-class producers of mass spectacles and Asiatic Gastarbeiter who have no rights; wonderful architecture but poor finishing; selfless volunteers and indifferent bureaucrats; a mix of global ambitions and parochial bluff. In this schizophrenia, no doubt, there is also the essence of the Russian soul, which is capricious and paradoxical; just like holding the Winter Olympics in the subtropics.

THE THUGS’ GAME

They’re celebrating yet another victory in Russia. On the eve of the first match in the European Football Championship 2016, a couple of dozen Russian fans chased away a much larger group of English fans in the Old Port in Marseilles. The next day, immediately after the match, they started a pogrom in the stands where the English fans were, beating everyone they could get their hands on, including families and elderly people. The results were upsetting. At least thirty-five people were injured, and one fifty-year-old English fan was hit over the head with a crowbar and died. By way of punishment UEFA threatened the Russian team with expulsion from the tournament and fined the Russian Football Union 150,000 Euros, taking into account also the racist behaviour of the Russian fans during the match. The Russian fans were the first item in world news; but wasn’t that exactly what they wanted?

Perhaps this disgraceful episode did not deserve such attention: ‘The thugs’ game’,[21] as the movement of football thugs has become known, long ago turned into a safari park of violence and a close relative of world war; fans of all countries fight and cause trouble. This can even lead to carnage, such as the tragedy at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, when thirty-nine people died. That led to all English clubs being excluded from UEFA competitions for five years. Indeed, Marseilles remembers only too well the English fans at the World Cup in 1998, when they started a fight against Tunisian fans, which smashed up half the city. But here’s the difference: whereas in England society and politicians alike condemn such outrageous behaviour by the fans, in Russia these football hooligans are presented almost like national heroes. The correspondent of the newspaper Sovietsky Sport, Dmitry Yegorov, carried out a live transmission of the carnage on Twitter, commentating on it as if it were a football match, lauding the organization and physical fitness of the Russians. Social networks were full of praise for the Russian fans ‘slapping’ the English softies and standing up for Russia like the three hundred Spartans; one sports journalist even put out on Twitter that he was ashamed of the Russian fans who didn’t take part in the beatings.

Even more interesting was that the Russian thugs were supported by high-ranking officials, from the representative of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Vladimir Markin, to the Duma deputy and member of the Executive Committee of the Russian Football Union, Igor Lebedev. And here one has to acknowledge a very unpleasant thing: the fans in Marseilles were representing perfectly the official policy and mass consciousness of post-Crimean Russia.

They carried out the same hybrid war that is so popular in our propaganda, when well-prepared fighters trained in hand-to-hand combat are sent into Crimea or the Donbass under the guise of ‘soldiers on leave’; when violence is carried out selectively and purposefully; and when attacks take place in unexpected places. Rumours abounded on the Internet about how, on many of the video clips, these Russian fans looked so muscular, organized and sober that they could almost have been spetsnaz soldiers from military intelligence; but let’s leave that theory to conspiracy lovers. What certainly appears to be the case is that in Marseilles an organized group of fighters, the ‘Ultras’ (as the organized fans who go to fight are known), gathered from various ‘firms’ of fans and schooled in street battles, attacked the ‘casuals’ – ordinary English fans. Some of these English fans had their families with them. What’s more, they were tanked up on beer and had come there not to fight but to cheer for their team and enjoy themselves. One of the Russian fans came straight out in an interview and admitted that our fans had gone there to fight: ‘It doesn’t matter which towns our fans are from or which team they support. All that matters is that we’re from Russia and we’re going to fight the English fans. They reckon that they’re the biggest football hooligans. We’re here to show that the English fans are just girlies.’

So even if the Russian attack wasn’t a well-planned military operation, there is fertile ground for rumours to start. For Russia this was not the first ‘hybrid’ interference in social movements in Europe; others include organizing protests and spreading propaganda, influencing the media, subtly stirring up anti-immigrant sentiments, cooperating with right-wing radicals and neofascist movements and supporting odious populists and separatism in European regions. Just as when the Comintern[22] existed the USSR carried out subversive activities in the countries of the West, so Russia is getting into the cracks and splits within European society, trying to weaken the West from the inside, and explaining this as a total ‘information war’; and the nervous Europeans see these Russian fans exactly in that light.

Second, football fans really are one of the Russian state’s fighting groups. The state is irresistibly drawn to these dressed-up actors who like to put on a display of strength: Cossacks, bikers and football fans. Representatives of these tough male brotherhoods drink tea in the offices of high-ranking officials. They are held up as examples of patriotism and are given government grants for the development of civil society; and when necessary they are sent to support the ‘Russian Marches’ with the nationalists or to attack opposition rallies. In all this, the football hooligans are as far away from the traditions of football as the so-called ‘Orthodox bikers’ are from rebellion and the freedom of the ‘easy riders’; and the pot-bellied Cossacks with their stuck-on forelocks are from the honour and glory of the Russian Cossack tradition; these are all carnival fakes of the Putin era. In the conditions of total simulation of civil society in modern Russia, these protest countercultures become the representatives of pathetic officialdom, official patriotism and the fat cats who receive government grants.

Finally, the Russian fanatics (at least, those who are caught on camera) are readymade products of official propaganda, displaying on their tee-shirts and their bodies all the caricature-like kitsch of the era of the annexation of Crimea and ‘Russia rising up off its knees’: tee-shirts with ‘the little green men’ (the spetsnaz troops with no distinguishing markings on their uniforms who seized Crimea in 2014), and slogans such as ‘We don’t abandon our own’; Russian hats bearing the red star; banners with the roaring bear and Slavic warriors. And as the apotheosis of all this patriotic trash, there is a huge Russian tricolour covering half the stand bearing the words, ‘VSEM PI..DEC’ – ‘F.UCK YOU ALL’: for them, it seems, this is the national idea of this new Russia.

However, these excesses began long before Crimea: the Russian fans saved the most vile displays of great-state chauvinism and racism for their trips abroad. In the Czech Republic, Russian hockey fans unfurled banners with pictures of tanks and promises to repeat the Soviet invasion of 1968; and in the centre of Warsaw in 2012, football fans put on a procession in honour of Russia Day, almost provoking a massive fight with the Polish ‘ultras’. In the stands at football and hockey matches, Russian resentment rises up to its full height, pumped up with beer and propaganda; the Soviet empire taking its symbolic revenge: yes, we lost a great state and still haven’t learnt to play football, but we can still break chairs and ‘slap’ the Europeans around; ‘kick the hell out of the bastards’, as Vladimir Putin said one day, using the language of the fanatics. Ultimately, wasn’t it he who in one of his interviews shared the folk wisdom gleaned from his difficult childhood in the backstreets of Leningrad: ‘get the first punch in’? That’s exactly how the thugs behaved in Marseilles, and in this sense they are worthy representatives of the state: football hooliganism in hybrid Russia is a matter of vital importance for the state.

The term, ‘the thugs’ game’ exactly sums up what is going on: despite the ‘grown-up’ budgets of the clubs and the national team, despite buying world-class star players (the typical strategy of superficial modernization), Russia remains an average country in the world rankings, both in terms of its national championship and the performances of its national team. Just before the start of Euro 2016, our country was twenty-ninth in FIFA’s top fifty world teams. But our fan movement has very quickly and in a very organized way adapted the British model. The books of the English historian of football hooliganism, Dougie Brimson, achieved cult status among Russian football fans. Russia may not have become a football superpower, but it has excelled in the hybrid world of ‘the thugs’ game’, bursting onto the international stage with a deep-rooted culture of violence that is accepted by society.

But Russia is up to that same hybrid ‘thugs’ game’ in Ukraine – not carrying on an open war but delegating the task to well-prepared groups of fighters – and in Syria, interfering in an overseas war in order to demonstrate its strength, and in Europe, betting on populism, separatism and the break-up of European society. ‘The thugs’ game’ is a substitution for the honest game, for real work, for the painstaking development of institutions with simple acts of strength and demonstrations of hooliganism. Our whole society has been playing ‘the thugs’ game’ for years; the hooligans in Marseilles were simply the away team.

THE SOVEREIGN FROM THE BACK STREETS OF ST PETERSBURG

In order to understand the evolution of contemporary Russia, its politics and its society, books about Germany in the 1930s are becoming ever more useful. Even so, the collection put out by the Territoriya budushchego (Future Territory) publishing house, The State: Law and Politics, by the political theorist Carl Schmitt (who was known as ‘the Hobbes of the twentieth century’ and ‘the court lawyer of the Third Reich’) is amazingly relevant.

Schmitt’s works were written at the start of the 1930s, when the Weimar Republic was deep in a constitutional crisis and on the threshold of fascism. As a lawyer, Schmitt proposed subjugating the law to specific political tasks, opposing the abstract legality of the state governed by the rule of law, with the ‘substantial legitimacy’ that comes from having the people united. In the book’s central chapter, ‘The Guarantee of the Constitution’, Schmitt called for the replacement of the multiparty system by just such a ‘substantial order’, where the state acts with a unified will. And for this, he argued, it was essential to have a presidential dictatorship to protect the constitution.

A member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and an active supporter of the Hitler regime, Carl Schmitt died in 1985, aged ninety-six. Even after his death he remains one of the most contradictory figures in modern political theory. On the one hand, his ideas lie at the heart of the right-wing theory of National Socialism. On the other, he exerted a huge influence over all political thought in the twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas to Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek,[23] and even on the modern constitutional structure of the Federal Republic of Germany. Schmitt’s harsh criticism of the interwar liberal world order and of the idealism in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson found resonance at the start of the twenty-first century, when the wonderful liberal world that had risen out of the remains of the Berlin Wall began to fall apart.

American neo-cons and the European ‘new right’ enthusiastically quote Schmitt today; but nowhere has Schmitt’s renaissance been as turbulent and politically significant as in Putin’s Russia. Oleg Kildyushov, who has translated and researched Schmitt, calls him ‘the theoretician of the Russian 2000s’. Political scientists close to the Kremlin are particularly excited by his theory of ‘the state of emergency’. This argues that a politician becomes a sovereign only from that moment when he steps outside the law and declares a ‘state of emergency’, at the same time creating a new norm and receiving a genuine and tangible legitimacy. According to Schmitt, sovereignty means the ability to go outside the boundaries of legalism and abstract law and declare a state of emergency.

This is exactly how Putin’s Russia is behaving today, acting according to the logic of the ‘state of emergency’, tearing up the rule book and expanding the boundaries of its sovereignty. Some were frightened and others euphoric over the annexation of Crimea; but now that we can assess what happened in a sober way, it should be acknowledged that nothing significantly new took place. This was not a ‘Putin 2.0’, nor was it any sort of decisive new direction, capriciousness or madness, which Angela Merkel hinted at when she said that Putin had ‘lost touch with reality’. The President continued to act exactly in the logic of Schmitt’s sovereign, taking a political decision (the word ‘decision’ is key in Schmitt’s thinking) in violation of existing judicial norms. Furthermore, says Schmitt, the sovereign can rely on a host of ‘organic factors’: ‘the will of the people’, tradition, culture, the past, political expediency, emergency conditions – but not on the law, nor on universal human values. Just remember the unexpected ‘asymmetric answer’ by Putin to the terrorist action in Beslan in Ingushetia in 2004, when Chechen terrorists seized a school with one thousand children. In response, Putin cancelled the elections of governors all over Russia. One might well ask, what on earth did the governors have to do with this? But in the paradigm of Schmitt’s sovereign, the most important thing is the act of violating the existing judicial norms so as to declare a state of emergency.

Just about all of the authorities’ decisions over the past ten years fit into this logic, from altering the constitutional moratorium on two presidential terms right up to the ‘Bolotnaya Affair’ (the repression of people who took part in the protest meetings on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in 2012), and the prison sentence for Pussy Riot (two years in jail for singing a punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow): these were all ‘state of emergency’ actions, a violation of accepted conventions and norms for the sake of a symbolic assertion of sovereignty. For a while, this logic worked solely within the country, causing merely a few standard reprimands from the West about the authoritarian drift of the Russian state. The case with Ukraine, however, saw internal policy spill over onto the outside, shocking the world. But the Crimean gambit showed exactly the same sovereign logic of the ‘state of emergency’ by citing ‘the will of the people’, only this time it meant violating not the Russian Constitution but international law, undermining not the social consensus within the country but the international order. Looking back at Putin’s actions over the previous ten years one could see that the annexation of Crimea (or a similar piece of foreign policy adventurism) was inevitable.

At the same time, it is interesting to see how Carl Schmitt’s theory fits into typical Russian sociocultural practice. The objective logic of Schmitt’s sovereign, which causes Putin constantly to alter the game’s scenario (from where we get his trademark ‘unpredictability’) and to tear up the template in order to show his superiority over his opponents, apparently coincides with his subjective beginnings, with his ‘lads’’ (patsany) view of his status, which he brought from the backstreets of Leningrad in the 1960s, preserving the language and the romanticism of the St Petersburg criminal underworld (they would be known today as ‘city ghettos’). This concept is well understood by the vast majority of the male population of Russia, who are concerned less with what they can make of their lives and more with the ceaseless promotion of their own status. In Russia you have to be a ‘real lad’ (patsan): to know how to put down (humiliate even) your enemy; to stand on your own dignity; to show no sign of weakness; and to answer for your own words. According to this logic, it’s important to be able to break the law; indeed, it’s this arrogance and preparedness to break the law that marks out a real ‘lad’ from a ‘nerd’ (‘ordinary man’).

For Putin, who came from the sleazy world of the St Petersburg backstreets and who loves to show off that he knows the foul language of the criminal fraternity (remember his famous phrase, ‘we’ll wipe out the terrorists in the shit house’[24]) these status games are second nature. This typical Russian disdain for norms and rules so that you can assert your own status can be seen at every level of society: it might be displayed by cutting out your business partner; by overtaking a car that’s cut you up and thus punishing the other driver; or by stealing land from an annoying neighbour. In this way the logic of the backstreet bandit becomes the logic of Schmitt’s sovereign and the ‘code’ of the criminal underworld which formulates contemporary Russian politics.

PUTINISM AND QUESTIONS OF LINGUISTICS

A new enemy has appeared on the scene for the Russian authorities: the English language. A scandal erupted in the State Duma over a speech made by deputy Dmitry Gudkov in the US Senate in March 2013, which was critical of Russia. When he returned to Russia, the Duma Ethics Commission recommended that he be removed from the Duma on the grounds that his speech ‘was written and delivered in English’. Furthermore, Gudkov was charged with preparing his text in good English; in the opinion of the deputies this could be a sign of high treason.

Around the same time, the Chairman of the Cultural Commission of the Russian Federation Public Chamber, Pavel Pozhigaylo, who served in the Strategic Rocket Forces and also in the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Russian Armed Forces, gave an interview to the Voice of Russia radio station, where he said with military directness: ‘We have a small population and a serious demographic situation. So I am absolutely certain that for a period of time we shouldn’t teach foreign languages at all, so that people don’t leave the country. The Russian language is all they need. Russian literature is all they need.’[25]

In Soviet times having bad English was a good sign for people in authority. Die-hard Soviet international affairs specialists Valentin Zorin, Yevgeny Primakov and Georgy Arbatov knew the language perfectly, but in international meetings they would speak with a heavy Russian accent in which you could hear the arrogance of a superpower: if you need to know what I’m saying, you’ll get it. And if we dig down even deeper, into the Stalinist era, then, according to a number of witnesses, foreigners in Moscow in the late 1930s were afraid to be heard speaking their own language on the street because they could immediately be arrested as spies.

In the 1990s and at the start of the twenty-first century there appeared among Russian politicians and in the business community bright young people with degrees from Harvard and who spoke wonderful English. They mixed on a par with their partners in the G8 and the World Trade Organization (WTO); but they are not the ones today who set the tone in Putin’s Russia with its Chekist vigilance and its paranoid searches for ‘foreign agents’ and ‘the hand of the US State Department’. The patriotic revelations of Pozhigaylo and the Duma’s démarche about Gudkov are typical of the political discourse in modern Russia, in which anti-Western pathos, cultural isolationism and aggressive provinciality have become the norm.

Russia has fallen way behind when it comes to foreign languages and overseas contacts. According to research carried out by the organization EF, English First, on the knowledge of English in forty-four countries where English is not the official language, Russia came thirty-second, behind the other BRIC countries, China, India and Brazil. According to data from sociologists from the Public Opinion Foundation, only 17 per cent of Russians know any foreign language; and a mere 20 per cent have ever been abroad (and that includes the countries of the former Soviet Union and largely Russian-speaking resorts in Turkey and Egypt). Statistics from the Federal Migration Service show that only 15 per cent of Russians hold a foreign travel passport, and only about half of those use it regularly.

It is almost impossible to hear a foreign language in the cinema or on television: all films and foreign programmes are dubbed. The dubbing industry is flourishing. The best actors and pop stars are brought in for this, and their names appear on the billboards in larger letters than the names of the director and the cast. Films in the original language with subtitles are shown only in selected cinemas in Moscow, or at closed screenings. It is a fact that hiring and watching films with subtitles is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of studying foreign languages, as the experience of North European countries and the Netherlands shows, where virtually the whole population has a good knowledge of English, especially the younger generation.

The same language war is taking place on the streets of Russia. The law on advertising forbids the use of foreign words in advertisements without a translation unless the foreign advertising slogan is a registered trademark. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service wants to ban shops from using even the inoffensive word ‘Sale’, saying they should use the Russian words skidki (‘discounts’) or rasprodazha (‘sale’). Legal cases have already been brought in some parts of Russia against companies that have used foreign words in their advertising.

The supporters of language sovereignty often point to France as a country where cultural protectionism flourishes, where films are also dubbed (just like in Germany), and where there are quotas for the hiring of foreign films. They are even more enthusiastic in taking the USA as an example, where the population is perhaps even more ignorant than ours when it comes to travelling abroad and speaking foreign languages. But America and France can allow themselves this luxury. America is by rights the only global superpower, a major exporter of culture and the language standard bearer for the modern world. And France can do this because it is a cultural superpower, the ruler of a worldwide Francophone empire and the most popular country in the world for tourists.

Russia remains a country on the periphery of capitalism, squeezed into an inhospitable corner of Eurasia, and with a culture and a language that, throughout history, have been largely imported. There was a brief period in the twentieth century when we exported culture, when the world saw the dawning of the Russian avant-garde; and then we exported our social model and our image of modernization, educating in our universities and our academies hundreds and thousands of representatives from countries of ‘the Third World’. Today Russia has lost its empire, its territory, its reputation and its global attractiveness. It seems determined, too, to lose its population, for whom the Russian language is its native language; and even those native speakers have disastrously lost their literacy. In such conditions, to introduce linguistic isolationism just to satisfy national pride is suicidal for Russian culture. It will become simply a provincial sideshow, a subject of interest only for professional ethnographers and Slavists. The only way to preserve Russian culture is to broadcast it to the world. And for that you need English.

We shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to America; we should learn from our neighbours, such as Finland. Of course, the scale and the ambition there is not on a par with Russia’s, but the problems are similar. Like Russia, this is another country on the periphery, with a borrowed Western culture and a language that is out on a limb. The Finns acknowledged pretty quickly the lack of perspective in linguistic nationalism. Moreover, while the second language of the state is Swedish (even though no more than 5 per cent of the population speak it, it is compulsory to study it), in practice the third language is English. You hear it on the radio and on television; up to half of all university courses are taught in English (by Finnish lecturers to Finnish students); you can go up to just about anyone on the street – and this is not even counting policemen or state officials – and speak to them in English, and if they can’t answer you they will be embarrassed. What’s more, Finnish culture is in no way marginalized; on the contrary, it is becoming ever more competitive in the world. They export unique items, from design and electronics to consulting and educational services.

Of course, our political elite is hardly likely to learn any lessons from little Finland. In their dreams they put themselves on a par either with the Roman Empire or with the USA; but behind these global illusions they are sinking ever deeper into the bog of cultural and linguistic isolationism.

WAR OF THE AVATARS

Russia is a unique country, always managing to find its own particular way of doing things. While the whole world (or the Western part at least) was declaring its solidarity with the victims of the terrorist act in Paris on 13 November 2015, when in one evening hundreds of people were shot in restaurants and in the Bataclan Concert Hall, yet another massive scandal exploded on social media in Russia. Tens of thousands of Russian Facebook users coloured their avatars in the red, white and blue of the French tricolour as a sign of mourning for those who had died in the Paris attacks; and then other, patriotic, users started to reproach them for the fact that they hadn’t mourned the 200 Russians who had perished when their aircraft exploded over Sinai on 31 October 2015, two weeks earlier. A ‘holy war’ erupted, a sacred Internet-war, about the right way to mourn, about what colours you should use for your avatar and where you should lay your flowers. Thousands of friendships, subscriptions and reputations fell victim to this war. In answer to the French flag, a Russian emblem was put forward: the silhouette of an aeroplane against a background of the Russian tricolour, stylized under the pacifist sign. Tens of thousands of users adopted this as their avatar. Some tried to act as peacemakers, colouring their profile photo horizontally in the Russian colours and vertically in the French.

In the nervous reactions of the Russian domestic networks to the terrorist attacks, substituting sympathy and solidarity for internal squabbles and blame, we could see the agonies of the Russian mass consciousness. The first diagnosis was one of resentment, a sense of being deeply wounded, a readiness to mourn for any reason, to search everywhere for Russophobia and a worldwide conspiracy against Russia. Indicative in this sense was the unanimous insult felt by Russian politicians and media at the cartoons published in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo, and which in their own peculiar way they immediately linked to the Sinai terrorist act (parts of the Russian aircraft fell on the Islamic fighters and it was deemed to be a ‘continuation of the bombing’). On the day the cartoons were published, according to the magazine’s own analysis of hits on its website, there were more viewings from Russia by a long way than from any other country – 42.5 per cent, two and a half times greater than from France itself. It looks as if Charlie Hebdo is much more popular in Russia (where hardly anyone can read French) than in France. So Russian ‘worldly sensitivity’ (vsemirnaya otzyvchivost), exalted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quickly turns into international touchiness. It could be in Kiev, in Paris, or on the Internet; and a lack of attention is taken as an insult: they didn’t notice us! They didn’t appreciate us! They didn’t take account of us! This is true Lust am Leidenschaft, passion for suffering, as the Germans say who are familiar with this feeling; they lived through such a period of resentment during the Weimar Republic, which led, as we well know, to fascism. The American Slavist, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, described this characteristic of Russian culture as ‘moral masochism and the cult of suffering’; a desire to be humiliated and insulted.

The second diagnosis one could make about the discussion on avatars is that this is hypocrisy. Those who had painted their avatars in the French colours were accused of being insensitive to people suffering in the Third World. A Facebook user from Krasnoyarsk, Dan Nazarov, published a horrible photograph of a terrorist act in Kenya, where, on 2 April 2015, Islamic terrorists blew up a university building in the city of Harris and shot 147 Christian students. He posed the rhetorical questions: ‘Did you hear about this in the media? Did people lay flowers outside the Embassy? Why are we so selective in our sympathy? One group are people; who are the others?’ (This received 13,000 likes and 20,000 re-postings.) The author’s reproach is, of course, justified – only not in our country. Russia is one of those places where such indifference to suffering in the Third World has become a virtue of the state; where federal television channels scare viewers with fables about refugees flooding Europe, where the terrorist acts in Paris were accompanied by malicious commentaries in the spirit of ‘they got what they deserved, messing around with their ideas of tolerance and openness’; but we’re not going to show any compassion for the Third World.

And we have a third problem here: the deepening split in the Russian mass consciousness. For many countries, days of celebration and days of sorrow become causes for national solidarity; but for us they have exactly the opposite effect. Victory Day on 9 May and the Day of National Unity on 4 November; the terrorist actions at ‘Nord-Ost’ (when terrorists seized a theatre in Moscow in 2003) and Beslan (the seizure of a school in Ingushetia in 2004); the terrorist acts in the Charlie Hebdo editorial offices and on the streets of Paris: these all become causes for social division. In fact, Russia has witnessed these divisions for the past hundred years, since the time of the 1917 Revolution and the unfinished Civil War of 1918–21; and perhaps even from the time of Peter the Great’s reforms at the start of the eighteenth century. Our mass consciousness is deeply and painfully politicized, and precisely in the way that Carl Schmitt understood politics: as a search for enemies. If anyone is expressing sympathy with MH17, Charlie Hebdo, Paris or the West in general, our propaganda castigates it as ‘a fifth column’. The very act of laying flowers, if it hasn’t been sanctioned by the state – for example, outside the Embassy of the Netherlands – is considered suspicious and potentially an enemy action.

This is why the Russian Internet bursts into a holy war at the slightest provocation; no kind act can pass without some reproach: you grieved over the victims of the Paris attacks, but for some reason you didn’t grieve over the Russians who perished in the Sinai, which means you’re a Russophobe; you expressed sympathy for the victims of MH17, but not for the miners in the Donbass, which means you’re a traitor; you help stray dogs, but you don’t help children, which means you hate people; you plant trees, but you don’t think about people, which means you’re an eco-fascist – and so on. Our public space has become a territory of hatred and mutual accusations; our society has been atomized and struck by social anomie, deprived of any moral guidance or authority, incapable of showing solidarity or uniting in protest. Such a shattered society is very convenient for authoritarian powers, and is the ideal object for manipulation by the media and propaganda.

All this shows that this disunited social sphere can be divided into two groups: the first is convinced that the whole world is against Russia; and the second, that Russia is a part of the world. These two groups are the party of post-imperial resentment and the party of globalization. The former blames the outside world for all the country’s ills, from terrorist acts in the North Caucasus to the loss of Ukraine, from the fall in the oil price to Russia’s social problems: ‘Obama, hands off our pensions!’ as the signs read at the official celebration of the Day of National Unity. It is worth recalling what Yevgeny Fyodorov, the deputy from the ruling party ‘United Russia’, suggested: that the protests by the long-distance lorry drivers against the outrageously high road tariffs were directed by the USA to bring about the collapse of the state in Russia.

In the second group are people who consider that Russia is a part of the global community, and who react to tragedies in the world. I looked at how the avatars and cover of my Facebook profile had changed over the last few years: ‘Je suis Paris’ after the terrorist acts in Paris; a photo of Boris Nemtsov, after the murder of the opposition politician; ‘Je suis Charlie’; a black ribbon in memory of the victims of MH17; the Ukrainian flag (after the annexation of Crimea); the Boston Marathon (the terrorist act in April 2013); the crew of the submarine Kursk (on the anniversary of the tragedy in 2000); the Norwegian flag (for the terrorist act by Breivik in July 2011)… The memorial ribbon waves as a ribbon of grief, and each time my personal sorrow moves out to the wider political context; an act of sympathy becomes an act of citizenly solidarity and identity.

It is no less interesting to analyse the link between the ‘avatars of sympathy’ (with the victims of the terrorist acts in Paris, with Charlie Hebdo, with MH17) and the ‘avatars of protest’ against the ruling regime (usually a white ribbon, which has become a symbol of the opposition in Russia). Clearly, there is a strong link between those who went to the protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011–12 and on Moskvoretsky Bridge in 2015, where Boris Nemtsov was killed, and those who changed their avatars and laid flowers at the Netherlands and French Embassies after the MH17 and the Charlie Hebdo tragedies. It is basically the same 14 per cent of the population who, according to the opinion polls, do not agree with the current political regime. It is here in this opposition segment that new ways of remembrance are born: wearing the white ribbon, laying flowers on the spot where Nemtsov was shot and repainting their avatars. As opposed to the official, state forms of collective remembrance – such as the official cult of Victory Day on 9 May, or the formal celebrations like ‘Day of the City’ – this practice is deeply private; it comes from below, out of civil society.

At this point we should remember other forms of commemoration: ‘The Last Address’, in which plaques are attached to homes from which victims were taken during the Stalinist repressions; and the annual action of ‘Returning their names’, the reading aloud of the names of those who were shot, which is held at the Memorial to the Victims of Stalinist Repressions on Lubyanka Square in Moscow.[26] The state looks on these actions with suspicion; but they are the points where civil self-awareness crystallizes, where memory becomes an act of resistance to the machine of terror, be it Communist, Islamic or the terror of the police state. In Putin’s Russia, the civil memory becomes a challenge to power; and for those protesting, sympathy and grief become a common cause, res publica. Private emotion develops into social commotion, and as a result becomes political – which in no way detracts from the sincerity of the original personal concern.

Therefore, by painting our avatars in the colours of the French flag, many of us are grieving not only for the 130 people who died in Paris, but also for the 224 passengers who were killed in the sky over Sinai, and about whom, disgracefully, President Putin said nothing for two weeks; for the victims of Beslan and ‘Nord-Ost’; for Kenya and Beirut; and at the same time for us ourselves, who against our will were drawn into the Middle East conflict and the global war against terrorism. Paraphrasing John Donne: ‘Think not for whom your avatar grieves, it grieves for thee.’