On the particularities of a hybrid war

It is sometimes enough to switch on a TV set and tune it in to a genuine Russian channel.

Here’s the first switching. Oh no, I won’t sigh and moan – it’s just a country of absurdity. Sometimes even accidental details make you feel that you don’t belong there.

My parents starved in their green years, my father had a dystrophy in wartime. I lived in the times of shortages and lines. And now I switch on television and hear a long and passionate rant about valiant Russian customs officers who are heroically thwarting the attempts of Belarus to carry to Russia the European foodstuffs that are subject to countersanctions. It is so important for the country and the people to keep stores free of surplus food!

Of course, many cannot remember starvation, shortages, and breadlines. But it is common knowledge that countersanctions will mark up prices. And it is only one of the consequences.

But people will swallow the bait. The populace agrees with the authorities that food should be worse and more expensive. This is, let me say it again, the Russian people’s historical choice.

I switch on TV for a second time. An on-the-spot report from the Kremlin’s St. George Hall, where, as is known, the names of St. George Order holders are written in gold on the white marble walls. They show the names of recent recipients. OK.

The next sequence shows a few empty boards, and we hear a cry of joy: they are intended for the names of the new recipients who are sure to come up in Russia.

And everybody smiles – there will be heroes, but nobody is saying why they will emerge.

I am waiting for a no less joyful reportage on enthusiastic work at some factories that turn out wooden and zinc coffins.

It has finally happened. War has entered the media and mass culture as a routine thing, like the weather, owing to the joint efforts of newsmen and soap opera guys. In other words, this is a usual and permanent condition for Russia’s residents. Equally routine and permanent are the two-minute hatred spots that rally the warring people together. This is the difference between totalitarian and democratic states.

Russia needs, now and always, a simple and clear explanation of what is going on rather than the dull rigmaroles of the many successors to Pomerants and Gefter: the ignorant scribblers Maksim Kantor and Dmitry Bykov, the professional liars Pavlovsky and Gelman, the mumbling Zinaida Mirkina, and Khodorkovsky who is working off his release from prison, to say nothing about “straw men,” such as Slava Rabinovich, Yasha Mirkin, Sasha Sotnik, and very comical Piontkovsky.

They don’t seem to be Putinoids, chauvinists, or Crimea-crazy jingoists. But… They are not calling clearly and openly for an immediate and unconditional return of Crimea to Ukraine; they are at best mumbling something about a referendum or, like Khodorkovsky, advise not to touch upon this point at all and get ready for the next State Duma elections, which was mindless during the last election campaign and is totally absurd now.

Also active are the two persons who have made a contribution to the systemic destruction of Ukrainian statehood in the past ten years. Gleb Pavlovsky brings forth a fountain of empty words that boil down to the necessity for the president to revamp his inner circle. He considers the poll results about support for Putin’s current policy as rubbish, for he believes in the power of spin doctoring – it is supposedly easy and simple to turn the populace around. But the point is that, no matter how hard it was turned around, it came to the present, most suitable for itself, condition.

Marat Gelman works at a distance – he pretends to be a political emigre. He expresses a position that is very suitable for the Kremlin: against the current course but also against sanctions, for they are aimed (he says it with anguish and sobs) “against my country.” Note: against the country, not against the regime.

It is against sanctions that the agitprop has set two bellicose financiers – Slava Rabinovich and Yakov Mirkin. Rabinovich is reviling Putin but, like Khodorkovsky, opposes sanctions. But, for the Ukrainians, he is a burnt-out case: he suggested federalization and was hurt very much by the reaction to this.

Mirkin is “for internal consumption”: he speaks and writes at length and boringly about how to adjust to sanctions and how small- and medium-scale business will save Russia, while this very business is being stifled. But it is Putin who is setting examples here. The oil price slump is being made up for with the increased gasoline excise duty and new tax exemptions for oil exporters. It is common knowledge. But the “dear tsar” cares about his subjects and, speaking in front of TV cameras, demands that gasoline prices be slashed. The show is in full swing.

Economists rarely speak now. No matter who argues about the Russian economy, what their position, rank, or clout is, they are neither professional nor worthy of trust if they do not consider system-forming factors in their oral and written texts. And these factors are as follows: personal interests of Putin and his clan, annexation of Crimea, war in the Donbas, seizure of some parts of Georgia and Moldova, a confrontation with the outside world that has reached the level of nuclear blackmail, and the laws of the past 15 years, aimed at establishing a totalitarian regime.

Without taking this into account, any arguments of economists is just a case of casting pearls before swine. This is not about economists alone – nobody dared to comment on the decision to issue a loan for building a bridge over the Strait of Kerch patterned after the Stalinist industrialization loans. All the best is making a comeback, including the “voluntary-coercive” nature of public extortions.

Another manifestation of intellectual dishonesty is a mantra about an early and inevitable fall of the regime. It is clear that people do not want to admit that they have lost – so they are dreaming of an oil price slump and a nationwide uprising in Russia.

But the result will be the same, no matter whether the regime strengthens or falls. These are different kinds of disasters, but in any case authority, anarchy, or new authority is a disaster. A mindless and pitiless Russian rebellion… This was said about the war between two imposters – Pugachev and Catherine II. And if the former had come to power, nothing would have changed in Russia’s annexationist policy.

But even if a “healthy climate” and democratic prosperity sets in, today’s dreamers will find no place in a new world. Nor will they find a place in a totalitarian Russia or in a Russian rebellion which is even more totalitarian than the authorities.

Why then all these torments? The losers are also human. Why then pipe-dream and moan? Just live on.

But – let us complicate the wording – only people who are far from an atheistic life philosophy can argue like this. This is inaccessible to those who lack inner, organic, personalism, for whom a human is an aggregate of social links and cultural meanings.

What the Russians have no problems with is spiritual ties. The history of the Russian Christian personalism, which also comprises the Russian spiritual and intellectual heritage abroad, i.e. the real Russian world which is part of the world culture and civilization, is enormous.

But the impression is that this has never existed for anybody. There is a different thing.

Mass culture, which places commercialism above ideology, was a response to totalitarianism, but it turned out to be a weapon for those who decided to revive the latter.

Yes, it is banal. But it is also concrete and real. It is now and here.

Studying the realty is the most difficult thing. As Varlam Shalamov said, “the writer should be a foreigner in the world he is writing about.” The world “writer” can be replaced with anything else, and “writing” with “studying.” All the more so that literature has made a no lesser, if not   a greater, contribution to studying    totalitarianism than science has, owing to the particularities of the object under study.

To become a foreigner in the current situation, one must withdraw from the space of mass culture without losing the comprehension of it. In my view, this distancing begins with the awareness of the fact that mass culture is incompatible with tragedy, tragic consciousness, and tragic perception of the world. The paradox is that a tragic attitude rules out suicidality, and only a tragic consciousness gives an impetus to action. This is what Shakespeare’s Hamlet is about.

However, the masters of discourse    – the intellectual and media elite, not the authorities – will not allow a sad simplicity which makes a tragedy a tragedy. Everything drowns in pharisaism again and pushes the Russians farther from what could lay the groundwork for an updated Russian nation. The opposition imitators are thus taking part in what Soviet schoolbooks called “transformation of the country into a single military camp.”

The Kremlin is making an all-out effort to wage a war against Ukraine and destroy it with all the available means. Yes, it is a hybrid and, what is more, a total war.

And what is the effort of Ukraine? And of the entire world which seems to be unaware of Russia already waging a hybrid and all-out war against it?