On the limits of the permissible

Hope is the Kremlin’s main weapon in the fight for the minds and souls of the civilized world. It is obvious, and the fighters themselves, including the principal one, Putin, are quite frank about it. He is continually sending the world his messages (using his own officialese). No worries, everything will be okay. It is a turn, not an overturn. Well, a zigzag, so to speak.

Indeed, international observers and experts on Russia live in the hope that the world has remained the same, and everything that is going on now is nothing more than a little trouble in the old scope, in the previous paradigm. For if they admit the opposite, their own status will be threatened. They all belong to the world that is becoming history. These sentiments are consciously supported by the Kremlin and are cherished to all sorts of people, not experts alone.

And of course, cowardice is present in all of this, it is indispensable. Yet the main thing is hope, just like it was in the late 1930s. Yet no matter how hard you might condemn Daladier and Chamberlain, they hoped to avoid war. And they were the mouthpiece of relevant public sentiments. However, even after the joint German-Soviet assault on Poland the British government might keep on hoping. Molotov had all grounds to stigmatize Anglo-French imperialism as an aggressor and instigator of war, after London and Paris took the side of Warsaw.

Now the world is suspended in an intermediate state, which is most convenient to the Kremlin. Let hopes live. They prevent people from seeing the obvious: international law is dead. Just as are (maybe, even more importantly) the former customs and traditions, which used to regulate relations between states.

Such a mindset is consciously promoted in Russia. Not without the assistance of government, but first and foremost, by the minds self, the most progressive and honest. People working in still relatively free media are absolutely not embarrassed by the fact that they have turned into obituary writers. For all these publications about yet another NGO becoming a “foreign agent,” about bans on rallies, demonstrations, theater productions, films, about arrests and searches are nothing but a chronicle of a death foretold, a farewell to the old epoch.

How long can it last? Anyway, everything is already clear, and nothing can be changed. This is the people’s will, their historical choice. What are they indignant about? Elements? Necrophilism, necromancy, spiritism… Everything is over, but the new life is not yet interpreted. But it is life. The life after the death of what was before. This is the future, while all that was called freedom and democracy is the past. It is dead and is now history.

In the late 1980s, veteran apparatchiks asked: so we have lived our lives in vain? No one had the guts to honestly say “yes” to them. Now it is the turn of perestroika veterans, human rights advocates, champions of democracy and other paltry minorities to ask this question. Even without waiting for it, I answer: yes, in vain, all for nothing. In Russia any life dedicated to serving the public is lived in vain and all for nothing, for it is serving the void. In that country there has never been, and will never be, any society and any nation. And the service to the country, state, empire is also to no avail. They do not exist as such, they are always someone’s private property. And so it has always been: the results of the previous delusions are here for everyone to see.

Given all that, intellectual life in Russia is hyperactive and exceeds the boundaries of its wonderful fatherland. In this case I consider it useful to list less famous names than those of TV stars. Sometimes they are individuals with a liberal flair. On the international arena Nikolay Zlobin, Aleksandr Baunov, and Sergey Stankevich are particularly conspicuous. The new art opposition is forged by Marat Gelman in Montenegro. He is excessively praised by another figure charged with work among the diaspora: Aleksandr Morozov, who rushes between Bochum, Prague, and Moscow. He is the major appraiser, guru, and classifier of intellectual life in Russia and Russian communities abroad. It is therefore important to follow what he writes and says: he is an indicator of the mainstream, which is now identical with the presidential administration’s general line (there are also the lines of intelligence service and military, but they are less evident).

Let us take Morozov’s list of high-society events which are to represent intellectual and political activity, only for one day. It includes only spiritual seances under the monitoring of the president’s staff. A bit of this and that, neither fish nor fowl. There is probably one exception: a seminar on alternative cultural policy. If it simply boils down to “away with Medinsky,” and the program is proposed to the incumbent regime, it will be yet another seance. If it is presented as the activities of a shadow cabinet, formed by the opposition (which actually should do this), it will be a horse of another color. Then the moderator of the seminar should be referred to as the shadow minister of culture. But in Russia the phrase “shadow government” means something absolutely different. And the development of any alternative programs may become part of the charge in the trial case of plotting to seize power.

All in all, the list is quite symbolic: nowhere in Moscow is the progressive community discussing the main topics: foreign policy and war against Ukraine. This list allows us to assess today’s limits of the permissible. Seeing this blissful paradise, one cannot but conclude that Russia has never known a more harmonious social order than now. Everyone is busy, each one with his own.

Again I quote Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s Book Two on the atmosphere in the literary activist circles in the year before the great terror:

“In general, the harshness of judgment was denounced in this country in all circles without exception. The revolutionary extremisms of the 1920s was replaced with ‘exquisite’ manners, halftones, and cooing. Marshak found the most lucid tone, who passionately spoke of the love of arts and of sublime Poetry. Everyone fell for the bait. Calling a spade a spade was considered indecent, harsh logic was taken as excessive crudity.”

A mirror image of what is going on in Russia’s socio-political life now. Everything that you hear is intellectual cooing, and an alternative to it is not intellectual honesty, but the hysteria of street and net protest, permeated with political provocations.

And the equilibrium is as unstable as in the time described by Mandelshtam. Russia is the scene of a true pogrom of theater, which reminds more and more the campaigns of the past, especially fighting cosmopolitism. And those who signed letters of support of the Kremlin’s Crimean banditry are now protesting against the banditry in theater, clinging to words and formulations, making slips of the tongue and mumbling incoherently.

Back then, everything was decided in a matter of days. And now it is “signed” or “not signed,” “said” or “not said.” No, the undersigned and supporters will not suffer any consequences, it is rather the other way round. But the niche is occupied, and a mark is made in that personal dossier which is kept someplace other than the HR department.

Theater will not remain the only victim. The general line in repressions is obvious as well. It would be silly to accuse Absurdistan of absurdity. Criminal cases against physicists, bloggers, or rank-and-file citizens who suddenly found themselves involved in politics are based on the same principle: the more absurd, the better. Their goal is to inspire the idea in the masses that people go to jail not for a crime, but because someone wants them behind bars. And no one will waste time and effort inventing the reasons. They will be given a short shrift, that’s all. This is not absurdity, but a method of governance. As Anna Akhmatova said in the years of Yezhov’s terror, it’s high time to realize that people are put in jail for nothing.

The same is true for any bans: we will do as we please. And they will. And no one will be able to change anything. They will just keep hoping.

Meanwhile, Ukraine and Ukrainians will be increasingly more and more hated by the progressive community, no illusions about that. We should not judge the sentiments of mainstream intelligentsia by singular statements of some worthy people. The estrangement will grow: a voluntary slave’s envy of free men (and those breaking free) will take its toll.

Dmitry Shusharin is a Moscow-based historian and political journalist