Suicide of Integration, or Russian Ideology as Antisystem

Against the backdrop of all the "historic" resolutions being passed by the Ukrainian Parliament, concerning Ukraine's accession to the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly and the growing political hubbub about the need to restore that "brotherly union of Slavic peoples" the very object of accession looks a bit strange. Now it declares an internal war and then does not want to ratify the treaty recognizing the existing "brotherly people."

People, even those not really in the mood for integration, are aware of this strangeness and react appropriately. In the course of a poll carried out by the Socio Market Service in November 1998 involving 400 residents of Dnipropetrovsk (not the most nationalistic region of Ukraine) 45% of the respondents stated that they would say a resolute yes even now to the question of referendum confirming the Act of National Independence.

Let us take a closer look at Russia and understand what this intuitively perceived strangeness is all about. It seems somehow strange to even address Lev Gumiliov for arguments against the revival of this union, because he considered such "reunification" correct with the Russians allowing the Ukrainians (naturally those who forfeited their mother tongue, culture, and national identity) to serve as sergeants in the Russian army. However, in my opinion, one of Gumiliov's concepts can well serve today as an illustration of why Ukraine has nowhere to get integrated.

According to Gumiliov, antisystem primarily means an ideology based on the principle of negation of life and apology of death. As a "classical" version of antisystem Gumiliov offers Manichaeism, which held the world was created by the Satan and so every adherent must die, taking with him as many fellow countrymen as he can (especially totally unsuspecting ones, meaning that they are servants of the Satan). In his opinion, the appearance of an antisystem means the beginning of the senility of the ethnos, its transition to the phase of fracture. Paraphrasing Goya, it is a "downfall of passionateness in the course of intersuperethnic contacts, begetting monsters."

Even a most superficial analysis allows one to discern strong anti-Semitic roots in practically every ideological trend of current Russia. Some of these ideologies are actually antisystems being more dangerous many times over that Manichaeism (the Manichaeans, for objective reasons, had no access to nuclear weapons). Compared to Ukraine, where only one full-fledged antisystem was born, the White Brotherhood, Russia looks like a real evil empire. Let us now make a small digression into the basic ideological trends of today's Russia.

Different variations of the national patriotic ideology: The groundwork of these ideologies is originally composed of the principle outwardly hostile interference - "Judeo-Masonic capital" and "Zionist-US imperialism" aiming to uproot all people on earth, especially the Russians. And only "Russian knights" can stand in their way, chopping off the "Hydra's venom-spitting heads" and "crushing all those disgusting rats." True, although no one has put it in so many words, such "knights" have only one actual prospect: a hero's death. Ghosts cannot be defeated because:

(1) They can never be defeated in principle. They have been in existence since the origin of humanity, and they have always gotten the better of all the other peoples. The theme of the fall of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Roman civilizations as a result of such Judeo-Masonic plots has not only mere historical relevance. There are versions that Hitler was created by those Freemasons, and that US NSC Memorandum #20/1 is still effective, meaning, in all probability, that the latter document's planned nuclear war has already taken place and the Russians have just failed to notice.

(2) Russians are stupid. Such statements by Russian "patriots" are anything but rare. Krasnodar Governor Kondratenko reduces all his Federation Council appearances to this. Russia's soils are not fertile because the Russians are fools, hence no contacts with the West should be allowed to be expanded, because Russia will never win the competition. A statement clear enough, even if not expressed in so many words.

(3) The Russians have never been at the helm of their country. Russia has always been headed by either Jews and Freemasons systematically destroying the Russian people or by the khokhly (a less than fond label for Ukrainians) who have always suppressed and robbed the Russians in every possible way (this theory seems especially popular these days). In this context Boris Yeltsin is presented as a case study in such Judeo-Masonic leadership.

Against this backdrop all those necrophiliac gestures by all those "patriots" do not look surprising - e.g., Volodymyr Zhirinovsky constantly cursing that "anti-people regime," blaming it for a genocide now going full speed ahead in Russia - he believes that the populace is getting one million smaller each year; at the same time he counts how many millions of Russian lads he will place in the way of Pakistani and US tanks in the course of the "final southern thrust" and how many would have to die storming Vilnius. This "anti-people regime" is so very bad apparently because it can destroy only a million people a year for no apparent cause, whereas Mr. Zhirinovsky promises to destroy about ten million for a "good cause."

Or take moderate patriotism. It presents no better picture. Consider, for example, Russian scholar A. Panarin's The Revenge of History: Russian Strategic Initiative in the Twenty-First Century. The whole thing is based on debating Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. Pretending to be scholarly (which it is not), this work offers quite a number of extremely interesting ideas and assumptions. However some are elucidated in a manner worth dwelling upon: Russia is portrayed as today's only surviving Orthodox kingdom; it is alone in this world; the democrats are assumed to have doomed it to worldwide solitude (??); the Russians' major ethical asset is their compassionate (read: in principle inactive) love; the fiasco of all reforms in Russia means the defeat of Western ideology (!?); Russia's return to Europe is possible only in the form of confrontation with the rest of the world (Panarin is against this: such confrontation should aimed only at the West, while every effort should be made to befriend China and the Islamic world); Russia has never been an empire, because residents of Eurasia mastered a system of coexistence based on superethnic and interconfessional universalities; Russia has outgrown such an archaic form of state formation as empire with its forcible methods of administration (??). Continuing the list of such inanities makes no sense. The general idea is clear: Russia is good and everybody else is very bad. And if all those other bad guys refuse to cooperate to get any better, the only logical outcome is a total war, but only against "foreign countries in the immediate area." All the rest, in Mr. Panarin's opinion, should be made friends. One thing is not clear: why have enemies if you have such powerful friends?

Leftist ideology in Russia is an extremely complex phenomenon. A certain leftist stratum is partially opposed to the existing regime (e.g., Gennady Ziuganov), another one has conveniently integrated into the National Patriotic ranks (e.g., Albert Makashov), and the third has worked out its own anti-Semitic antisystem ideology, mostly composed of the rising generation tending toward the Komsomol newspaper Bumbarash-2017. The key idea of the Russian New Left can be summed up as "Kill the bourgeois and die!" (the latter part of this motto seems to be implemented by some of the Left pretty effectively, using drugs). Thanatotic attitudes among young Russians are acquiring a threatening scope. Antisystem underground rock has long been effectively competing against all the other pop trends. Below are a couple of lines from today's Russian superstar A. Nepomniashchy:

"Set ablaze that kiosk selling US shit! Throw bricks at the windows of that hard-currency grocery store! Put a hand grenade under their cute Chevrolet! Draw a hammer and sickle on their posters! Kill all who love the Yankees!"

And this is what another well-known Russian political hooligan, A. Tsvetkov, thinks: "All that scum who chose their short-lived political course are not worth being allowed to live. Communism is inevitable. But you are not likely to survive under Communism. A world of people wearing masks is beautiful. No one can guarantee that no one else will bash in his head with a crowbar, yet no one can be forbidden to use that crowbar." It is not surprising that the young people taking part in the 1994 and 1995 Moscow student riots demanded not work and study, but an opportunity to "overthrow the anti-people regime."

Even the liberal democratic concepts in Russia's mass conscience gradually acquire antisystem features. The Leftist Italian journalist Della Ciesa, author of a rather naive book called Good-bye Russia! provides an interesting dialogue with Russian liberal intellectuals. To his story about the horrible life of the Russian homeless they reply indignantly that all who cannot get adjusted to the existing regime (which they believe liberal) should be allowed to die out like the dinosaurs. The reader is left with the impression that Russian reforms were futile not because they were poorly designed, but because those working them out lacked something in moral terms. It is hard to build a solid structure when the project efficiency criteria is that of exactly how many workers got killed building it.

In the above context the Russian Duma's stubborn resistance to nuclear disarmament looks not so much like political irresponsibility as inner conviction. Indeed, destroying "evil" (USA, Israel, and the West in general) by expending the "hero's" life (Russia and the rest of the world) is supposed to be the ultimate triumph worth every sacrifice. This scenario does not read too convincingly today, but it is an open secret that all such "sacrificing patriots" will win the next elections in Russia. If and when they do, all such "marginal" concepts will stand a fair chance of being accepted officially.

Next to Russia, being on the critical list economically and politically, Ukraine looks almost as fit as a fiddle. Anyway, its most powerful antisystem is that demanding immediate reunification with Russia, being well aware that Russia would never forgive the Ukrainians (even those in the Crimea) for what they did on December 1, 1991. Even if mass revenge is not taken for some reasons, should we sell out our youth in return for some mythical well-being and the actual senility of the geriatric empire still holding on?