Highbrow lackeys

The institutionalized liberal opposition is the apologist of the Putin regime. This opinion, expressed at the Khodorkovsky readings, has somewhat shocked political figures and intellectuals who were among the audience. The person who voiced this opinion was Yury Afanasiev, historian, founder of the Russian State University for the Humanities, a well-known activist of the 1990s democratic movement. As he is a known representative of the li­beral milieu, we asked Mr. Afanasiev to comment on this statement.

Can your statement be considered as an accusation leveled against the liberal public?

“No, it is not an accusation. I do not want to judge, let alone accuse, anybody. I have neither the right nor the desire to do so. Rather, my words are a sad statement of the actual political position of a certain part of the liberal public —unfortunately, the larger part of it has adapted to the current sociopolitical system, regards itself belonging to and embedded in it, and publicly defends the necessity of cooperating with the Putin regime.

“Let us be fair: in the course of the Khodorkovsky readings, the participants naturally refrain from direct or any other apologetics of the Putin regime. On the contrary, speeches are quite critical and, as a rule, provide a tho­rough analysis of the current economic and political situation and social relations. For this reason, when speaking of apologetics with respect to these readings, one ought to make some reservations.

“But, in essence, one must look differently at and take a deeper view of apologetics here. It would be a good idea to look at the Khodorkosky readings as a certain intellectual, political and moral institution, and at the participants in the ensuing sequence of events and phenomena: the current condition and place of Russia as a society and a type of culture against the general backdrop of civilization — the ability of its ruling class to adequately perceive and assess this situation, and the approach to the question of what kind of Russia has a future and whether one must work for deliverance from the Putin regime or think of the necessity of paradigm change. From this perspective, the political and moral attitudes of the readings’ participants emerge as very gloomy and, at first glance, totally inadmissible, but, at the same time, if you personify them, they will look quite natural, totally explainable in human terms, and in principle subject to no condemnation on the part of a righteous umpire.

“I must say I am very much aware of the inadmissibility of moralizing. I have said this more than once. At the previous readings I reminded the participants about collaborating. This also grates the ears, and some regard this, quite justifiably, as an injustice and an accusation. Usually, when one speaks about collaborating, he or she means collaborating with an enemy occupational regime that has conquered a country by force and subdued its society.

“I nevertheless also admit of a different de­finition.

“In reality, with all necessary reservations and explanations, the Putin regime can quite be classified as occupational because the authorities are treating the populace as a conquered and enslaved entity.

“But here is a glaring paradox of our existence: none of those who wish to collaborate with this kind of regime should be condemned personally. People have to live. They have fami-lies, children. They need to do something to earn a living. And, wherever you work — in industry, business, or academia — you always have to enter into a relationship with this regime.

“But the ideological attitude of the people who have deliberately opted for politics is quite a different thing. Can or should we take a critical view of this attitude and call a spade a spade?”

The whole population of Russia is in this situation—in relationship with the regime…

“This is the point. The problem is, of course, broader: it is about a society already deprived of inner energy, a de-cultured and in fact lifeless society, about the ever-increasing entropy in it.

“I will put it in clear-cut terms: the vast majority of the population sincerely supports this government or at least do not think of offering it any organized resistance or expressing their protests in a visible and active political form. What happened in Pikalev, Irkutsk, and Mezhdurechensk, and other places of this kind are one-off, isolated and spontaneous outbursts of protest, except perhaps for Dissenters’ Marches and Action 31. I do not think there are any grounds to generalize these events and claim that the entire populace is protesting or that the people’s feelings have become stronger.

“In my view, there are two, mutually exclusive, at first glance, factors that cause sociopolitical passivity of the populace. The overwhelming majority of Russians have been on the verge of survival for the past two millennia. Many dozens and hundreds of local worlds have ceased to exist before the very eyes of those who survived in the same conditions. Endless collective disappearances due to famine, epidemics, plunder and enslavement have left an imprint on social memory and have been handed down from generation to generation as historically transmitted phenomena of culture. The whole social mentality is based on this kind of phenomena.

“Existence on the verge of survival does not make people very tolerant or even capable of to-lerating. On the contrary, this turns them into weak-willed creatures that are resigned to their fate and ready to die standing, without resisting, like trees in a forest. They are also a fertile ground for spontaneous explosions.

“The other factor is petrodollars that have showered on the Putin regime in the past few years, which makes it possible not only to maintain minimum levels of life, but also improve in small doses the material condition of, first of all, public-sector employees. Russian workers are significantly composed of public servants, the military, law-enforcement officers, employees at all kinds of supervisory bodies and security facilities. So it is clear what kind of basic social policies are being pursued towards these categories of the population. Besides, one should not forget that corruption is the lot of these same categories. Business people have their own reasons to keep silent and toe the line. This results in double, if not triple, morbid passivity — a passivity leading to death.”

But are there any grounds for protest at all?

“In the past twenty years, Russia has seen the final formation of a regime of reigning bureaucracy in the shape of an indivisible government-cum-ownership conglomerate. This is the aggregate result of all Russian history, from approximately the 15th century to the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Earlier, i.e., before the 15th century, there was no Russia as such: there were just a few dozen scattered, isolated, local — mostly rural — worlds. They were far flung across the huge Eurasian expanses of our primordial homeland, representing different ethnicities, languages, and cultures, such as Finno-Ugric, Eastern Slavonic, Turkic, and Mongolian. They had different names. There were some cities among them: Great Novgorod, Pskov, Kiev, and principalities: of Tver, Riazan, etc. Some lands, cities and principalities were at various times part of Muscovy and the Bulgar khanates, others were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Besides, most of these disparate states were not independent for almost three —13th through 15th — centuries. They were conquered, enslaved and made part of the Mongolian Empire of Genghis Khan’s descendants. They paid tribute and were vassals to it. And the entire population considered themselves lackeys of the conquerors. The whole population, including boyars, princes and the like, were in servile, slavish dependence on the Mongolian Khan. It is in these conditions of slavish servility and centuries of kowtowing and treachery that Russia was forming as a country and a state. This process continued in the following centuries.

“Owing to the irregular nature of its deve­lopment, this big society suffered a birth trauma, and it is unable to get rid of this pathology to this day.

“As a result, we now have something truly outlandish: coexistence and mutual resistance of two cultures in one society. These two cultures, of the government and of the people, have never been closely tied to one another. They have never really understood each other and even spoke in different languages for two (18th and 19th) centuries. In the same context, Rus-sian society, seen as a relationship between the government and the populace, i.e., in its subject-object relations, is and has always been before totally dominated by the government. This absolutely suppresses the individual and excludes any creativity.

“The governments — tsarist, Soviet, and especially those of Yeltsin and Putin — skillfully returned to what is known as mono-subjective approach and, finally, sterilized Russian society, made it incapable of self-organization, reflection, and self-development.

“Finally, it should be said that Russia was being formed as a big society, a united country and state, not by overcoming the pre-cultural, pre-modern if you like, condition of the minor states but, to the contrary, by turning their pre-etatist culture into a general norm.

“The Russian government has never even tried to rationally identify itself. What always stood in the way were either the problems of legitimization or failure to understand that Russia became Russia not only with the participation of and owing to the Tatar Horde but also on the basis of the Horde’s culture of institutionalized power and domination. Hence all kinds of myths, created by 18th-century quasi-statist intellectuals, about the ‘Tatar Mongol yoke’ and that Russia ‘sacrificed itself,’ lagged behind in its historical development but thus allegedly saved Europe from a ‘Tatar invasion.’

“Whenever I speak of support for the Putin regime, I mean the need to reconsider in the fullest possible manner Russia as a type of culture, its prospects or, on the contrary, its being doomed in this sense.

“The Khodorkovsky readings prefer not to reach to such depths.”

But, maybe, there is no need in such ruminating? We have to live and act in the 21st century.

“This is necessary if there is an intention to do something real.

“Russia as a type of culture is historically unique, not just specific. It was often stuck in a contradiction between traditionalism and mo-dernization. These barriers are so strong that there has never been and is so far unlikely to be any modernization here in spite of all the latest Kremlin harangues.

“This should be understood. You cannot bypass this contradiction and drag yourself out of the mire unless you think it over.

“But here is a paradox in perceiving our national history. Even if we assume that our past someday rids itself of all its mythological outgrowths, it will still be extremely difficult for a deformed Russian mind to digest the rationally-presented reality that will emerge after this catharsis.

“Alas, this reality will turn out to be far less pleasant and digestible for the Russian mind than a deep-rooted myth. Besides, this reality, as the truth itself, will be far more matter-of-factly and far harsher.

“Yes, Russia became, not without foreign interference, a united state and, at the same time, a split and self-disparaging society. But the roots of our social disorderliness, the split of our spirit, and inescapability of our troubles are not the fault of the Mongols, Kha-zars, or even Germans. It is due to our inner roots. They are in a non-organic formation of Russian society and in our minds shaped and mutilated.

“Now I will name some of the most important, in my view, components of a real transition from a large number of archaic and isolated communities to one big society and a united state. I mean the authorities that personified and embodied a large society and the isolated local states that represented the bulk of the populace. I mean a transition to their coexistence and confrontation within the framework of a large society and a single country.

“As this large society became a united entity, it was at first called Muscovy, the Muscovite Tsardom, then it expanded to Russia, and, finally, spread out and grew to become the Rus-sian Empire, occupying the entire central part of the boundless Eurasian space. The same entity later assumed the shape of the Soviet Union and, finally, has collapsed and reemerged as Russia. The most important realities, which made part of that transition from a multitude of disconnections into a united being in the 13th-15th centuries, have a direct bearing, no matter how strange this may seem, on the content and essence of a latter-day transition from the USSR to Russia in 1991.

“It took the previous transition 300 years, when all those disparate communities and local states were united, above all, by the fact that they became an enslaved, dependent and tri-bute-paying territory, a colony, an inner component of first the Great Mongolian Empire and then its heir, the Golden Horde. And the Mongolian Khan became the one and absolute ruler, administrator and owner of the entire population of those communities, including their tribal, princely, and purple-wearing upper crust.

“This governance and, particularly, its nature, the manner of interacting with the conquered human communities, is a unique phenomenon in world history.

“It is unique in that:

- Mongolian conquests were never accompanied with the settlement of the conquerors on the occupied territory and their dissolution in the conquered population;

- in the course of almost two and a half centuries they impacted the conquered indirectly: they exercised their violent rule and tribute-exacting exploitation of the populace from a distance — from Karakorum and then from Sarai;

- for this reason, the power of a Mongolian Khan over the object of his rule always remained an external factor, it was always outside the object;

- the Khan’s government and the inherent mass of violence helped form a stable community of princes and boyars loyal to the Horde: the khan’s alter ego Regis, i.e., sort of a second self of the Mongolian Khan;

- by the logic, meaning and course of the period in question, this kind of the Mongolian khan’s alter ego resulted in autocratic power.

“Now about logic. In the West, a large society was structured and the government in it was based on the interrelationship of many already existing social subjects, such as feudal lords, cities, church, and social estates. The entire population of the emerging societies was represented by this kind of social subjects. The go-vernment was originally formed as a multi-subject substance and was in itself a certain complete result, the result of an agreement. This logic is typical of both monarchic and republican power.

“In the classical Orient, the government of a large society is a fundamentally non-individualistic and non-subjective category. It is itself a system and has a systemic origin. Even when this government is subject to one emperor or one shah, they are never per se, they always remain part of a system. With respect to other governmental entities and to the entire population, even the most omnipotent sovereign is not a subject: he is the Son of Heaven in a complex system of Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, traditions, and the cult of the elders.

“A totally different logic of the formation of a large society, as well as the logic of taking and retaining supreme power in society, was being established in the proto-Russian space under the auspices of the Mongolian Khan. By force of circumstances, the source of power was taken outside this space from the very outset of the formation of a large society. The grand prince would receive from the Mongolian Khan a yarlyk (permit of ruling), as well as the right to collect tribute from the Khan’s, not his, subjects on the territory under his jurisdiction. In addition to the yarlyk, to be the grand prince and to collect tribute, he would also receive his share of domination and violence over the Khan’s subjects, but, at the same time, he would become doomed to servility before the Khan, an absolute and slavish dependence on him. Owing to its duality and symbiosis with the Mongolian power, the future Russian, and so far Muscovy and Horde, government found itself totally independent of the formation of society and received a greatly increased power for exercising violence over the latter. This kind of government did not need to build a relationship with other subjects and seek legitimacy to remain in place and further expand. It acquired a superhuman, almost unearthly, dimension for a long time.

“This quite a deep immersion into the genesis of a large society and a united state is needed to amply confirm the vitality and eventual strengthening of the Russian system, the notion by which Andrei Fursov and Yury Pivovarov identified the nature of governance and the relationship between the government and the po­pulation in Russia.”

How would you assess the whole period of Soviet power?

“Everybody thinks: we built things, therefore we developed. What is usually meant by ‘built things’ is buildings, various structures, and factories. In a word, “he [Stalin – Ed.] came with a wooden plow and left with the atomic bomb.’ Sometimes they mean socialism — many associate it subconsciously with a positive sign. All this has had an imprint on mass consciousness. But mass consciousness still holds a vacant space for understanding that it was in reality a tragic period, when dozens of millions of people were physically eliminated as Russian society was being ‘deculturized.’

“The Russian mind remains very far from understanding the obvious: the veneer of culture, which had been accumulating for centuries like humus on the soil, was ripped off in the Soviet years, and this was the main content and the consolidated result of all the Soviet years. There was no construction or creation in terms of personality development and improvement. There was growth, increases, and expansion at the expense of the destruction of humanness in a human. The sprouting social differentiation was suppressed in the course of the so-called collectivization, industrialization, and a cultural re-volution, and everybody was made to serve the state for starvation wages under the same pay rate all over the Soviet Union. The country became an artificially created sociality.”

This raises a natural question: did Russia ever develop?

“This is the question of questions. One must understand the nature, i.e., the content, of Russia’s economic and sociocultural dynamics, and only then will it be clear how and, what is more, why the country used to change, expand, grow and strengthen, and then it abruptly collapsed three times — in the 17th century, in 1917, and in 1991. But it has never developed after the 15th century, i.e. after it appeared on the world’s map as a large society and a united country.

“I’ve tried to say this before, but I perhaps can’t do it very concisely and very clearly. So let me say it again.

“There was no modernization under Peter I, Alexander II, and Stalin, to which our current leaders and their hirelings like to refer so much. To be more exact, there were three very large anti-modernizations. But, nevertheless, some people are still in rapture over this, and today Medvedev wants to repeat something of the kind in Skolkovo. In other words, it is about ‘mo-dernization, imperial style,’ when we once borrowed from the West the best technologies —mostly in the military sphere, as well as some institutions, management techniques, and me­thods of industrial organization. We borrowed them to deal a painful blow to the same West and, which is equally important, to keep the existing regime intact.

“And each time we achieved the set goal at the expense of Russia’s development.

“It is said sometimes about the 1991 events and the collapse of the USSR that society tumbled down somewhere very far and deep, into the Middle Ages and feudalism. I have long been trying to say that there was no tumbling-down. And there was no flight into the abyss. And we never had any middle ages or feudalism to which one could fly.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union laid bare the matrix-type foundation of Russia, the ori-ginal hard rock of the 15th century. What had been gathered in those times was exposed in 1991. No matter how sad it is to say so, this exposed savagery: a large society and a country forcibly put together on the basis of local states and their traditional, pre-cultural, level.

“When Russia was being formed as a country, no transition to modernity had yet occurred anywhere. But in the West, the only place where, strictly speaking, this transition took place, there were different grounds for such a transition, a different sociocultural content, and this transition occurred in the course of events that could not have taken place in Russia. This transition and the formation of the personality and a civil society in the West were based on Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the transition itself took place in three stages: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. We had neither law nor morality as foundations on which the very beginnings of the Modern Epoch were formed. The first law faculty appeared in Russia as late as in the 19th century. In a Modern society, morality was formed in everyday life and in church on the basis of religion. The connection between Rus-sian Orthodoxy and the fact that Russia did not develop as a sociocultural entity is a separate topic which should not be discussed in passing.

“When the West was moving towards the Modern Epoch in the course of the aforesaid events, Russia saw the formation of a large society, which resulted not in a Western-type society based on the creative personality and mass-scale innovations but in a mono- or self-subjective anti-modernist Russian autocracy.

“Saying that 1991 laid bare the matrix-type foundation of the 15th-century Russian society, I refer to specific issues. These are relationships between individuals and between the go-vernment and the populace on the basis of a pre-feudal administrative rent: the relations were not contractual, as in the West, but based on agreement. Now it is called a ‘deal.’ I think one should begin talking about reforms, as the Khodorkovsky readings, with admitting the existence of this matrix-type foundation.”

A sacramental question: what is to be done?

“It is also a major issue. Do we need to save this kind of Russia, where the government is despotic, where the personality and the vast majority of the populace are the objects of suppression?

“My answer is no.

“If this kind of Russia is to be further reproduced by the efforts of the ruling elite, will it have anything that deserves to be saved?

“This will aggravate sufferings. Now it is destruction, physical and moral, of the tens of millions of people. The number of the humiliated and destroyed is going to grow.

“What we need to save is not this Russia and this regime.

“As I see it, the question is about the necessity to re-lay the very foundations of our lives. One should change the paradigm of Russia.

“What should be changed is not just the regime, not just the established sociopolitical system, but, in a sense, the type of thinking, the world view, the traditions and habits of people.

“Is this possible? No question has yet been raised in this way in world practice with respect to a certain country. It is only Germany and Japan that may be said to have changed in modern times the paradigm of their previous setup and development. But this resulted from their defeat in World War II as well as owing to the efforts, financial and economic aid, and direct administrative intervention of the occupational forces into their life set.

“Russia emerged victorious in the same war, and its regime, similar to the Nazi one, was enormously strengthened as a result of the victory. Before answering the question ‘What is to be done?,’ one must first get a true picture of Russia in which we seem to be living, degrading and dying. Otherwise, no chance.

“The Khodorkovsky readings and the people who attend them, and analyze what is going on, mean, pursue and speak openly about quite a definite political goal: cooperation with this Putin regime, with this government. Moreover, they are setting a goal to enter this very government.

“They entertain an illusion that, by accommodating this government, one can do something good and that Russia can be saved even by this go­vernment.

“This political attitude is in fact in support of the regime.”

But, maybe, you are mistaken in your assessments and your diagnosis is wrong?

“Any judgment, any analysis and conclusions, including mine, naturally, are subjective.

“I build my conclusions on logic and facts, I try to substantiate them with due account of and on the basis of the available approaches and interpretations in the present-day social knowledge. My research specialty — the history of historical science — obliges me to know and take into account not only the most important interpretations of the USSR history but also the instances of mass-scale, practically total, misunderstanding of what occurred or is occurring in this country.

“It seems to me that, as far as inadequate perception of events is concerned, we seem to be now somewhere in the late 1930s. At the time, immediately after the extermination of millions in the course of ‘socialist construction,’ in the conditions of widespread impoverishment, and in the course of the mass-scale destruction of those who were busy destroying others only yesterday, everybody suddenly cried out: ‘It is now greater fun to live.’ But they were almost totally wrong about the history of the formation of the Soviet Union and about what it really was. And it is not only we, aborigines, who were mistaken. We were visited by many prominent people from various countries, not at all fools but such illustrious personalities as, for example, Lion Feuchtwanger, who also thought and wrote highly of us. They also believed we were conquering the sky, whereas in reality we dug a pit.

“Now, in terms of inhumanness and anti-humanness of what is going on, our society is perhaps in a worse situation than it was then, in the 1930s.

“Naturally, the forms of existence may be changing in the course of time, sometimes almost beyond recognition. But it is still important to be able to see through senses even behind such radical transformations.

“Today we do not have mass repressions, extrajudicial executions, or the Gulag itself. The country’s top leaders have repeatedly and publicly condemned all the disgraceful practices of the past and have repudiated all kinds of ‘Stalinist crimes.’ But is this a guarantee against inhumanity?

“Is it necessary in our time to resort once again to massive extrajudicial killings or, maybe, the same effect of intimidation can be achieved by way of high-profile, pinpoint, and never-to-be-solved political murders of universally-known people? Is a bulky Gulag really needed if the electronic media have shown us the blood-curdling details of the death of Sergei Magnitsky and Vera Trifonova in a pretrial cell?

“To further prove the inhumanity of current policies, one should say a word about demography: the number of Russians falls by almost a million a year. The number of the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts, tuberculosis patients, the HIV-infected, and those suffering from AIDS is always on the rise and has already exceeded a total of ten million. In the same line of inhumane indications is a terrible, as nowhere else in the world, polarization of society, the parasitism of ‘elites,’ the ‘brain drain,’ demagogy, and an unheard-of undisguised enrichment of the ruling top.

“But what is by far the most glaring sign of this regime’s inhumanity is the fact that, as a result of the government’s purposeful actions in the past twenty years, the population of Russia, as an intelligent human community, as a collective social actor, has been totally withdrawn from conscientious and practical participation in the country’s economic and political life. Having liquidated, in a quasi-legal way, elections, referendums, the independent media, and justice, the Putin go-vernment has placed a human community into a ghetto of sorts. The law on the expansion of security service functions is just one of the facts that confirm this. From the angle of subject-object relations, this country’s population is now in a reservation: the government will now take care of, feed, and protect it as a zoological treasure. The country is studded with the dummies and simulacra of state institutions, the bodies and organizations of administration, representation and self-expression.

“This inhumanity is quite comparable with that of Stalin and the Nazis.”

And what event in the history of Russia can you assess positively?

“Perhaps a period, not an event: the late 1980s and the early 1990s. I take a generally positive attitude to the mass-scale outburst of protests against what was before and as the beginning of changes for the better.

“As time went by, I still developed a sensation that it was not a mass awakening but, rather, an excitement. It is the perception of and a reaction to events at the level of emotions, a sensual perception. After all, no positive and rational projects were drawn up at the time, and what Gaidar and Chubais did was the result of a formalistic and superficial idea of the possibility of radical transformations on the road to democracy, an open society, and a market economy. You can, of course, appoint new owners, dish out the national wealth, pass a well-balanced budget, and carry out tax reform by means of technocratic methods in the field of finances and macroeconomics. But you cannot thus achieve a different sociocultural quality of society. Such things cannot be done without legal and moral principles. So our ‘reforms’ resulted in a still greater degradation — both moral and legal.”

You said that Russian society is dying. Which ones are developing in this case? The impression is that entropy is on the rise throughout the world.

“I will not take the liberty to dissect the world of today and single out the dying and the developing societies. It is enough for me to try to ponder the situation in Russia. I would not like to speak about any other examples. One can only speak in no uncertain terms about the civilizations that used to but no longer exist, for example the Scythian or Mongolian nomadic civilizations. One can speak about Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, for they no longer exist either. As for our society, all we can do is plumb the depth of the ailment which the civilization, or culture, is suffering from on the basis of demographic data, epidemiological diseases, and moral indicators which I have already discussed with reference to Russia.”

Do you think the government is deliberately striving for domination?

“I think so. The history of our country shows that when people are allowed into economic and political life and given the freedom of action, they begin to live a normal life, work, invent something, and make complaints about the authorities. This happened, for example, during the NEP: people, who were given an opportunity to do something on their own in the economic field, became very active in setting up businesses, cooperatives, firms, publishing houses, newspapers, and all kinds of civic associations. There were oceans of artistic leagues that comprised thousands of artists, writers, and poets. This aroused a true life, an activity.

“Lenin was aware of having to reckon with this kind of people’s self-sufficiency. He said that ‘NEP is in earnest and for a long time.’ He also thought that one must make deals with peasants. Stalin saw the same in the country’s life but acted in a diametrically opposed manner. He decided that people who display independence and make complaints are to be eliminated.

“Stalin made a decision: if people act independently and are hard to please, they should be replaced. And he achieved this. He canceled the NEP. He destroyed peasants, workers, and intellectuals as social communities. He leveled off all social differences, forced everybody to earn fixed wages, and made everybody a dependent state servant. He turned people into a community that lives by instincts, he “deculturized’ Russia, as I said above.

“The 1990s, a time of spontaneous outbursts, demonstrations and true elections, saw the formation of parties and establishment of all kinds of publications. Now Putin has issued a series of laws that turn people into mere executors. He has established, after all, a political and economic system in which people should be outside politics and outside the economy, expanded the rights of the Federal Security Ser-vice, and just abolished all elections. The government is aware that, God forbid, they may have to answer for everything one day. So they are mapping out quite a well-considered strategy of self-salvation.

“This strategy holds no place for Russia’s prospects.”