The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Sergei Medvedev

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509536061
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: European Politics

Winner of the 2020 Pushkin House Book Prize

Russia's relationship with its neighbours and with the West has worsened dramatically in recent years. Under Vladimir Putin's leadership, the country has annexed Crimea, begun a war in Eastern Ukraine, used chemical weapons on the streets of the UK and created an army of Internet trolls to meddle in the US presidential elections. How should we understand this apparent relapse into aggressive imperialism and militarism?

In this book, Sergei Medvedev argues that this new wave of Russian nationalism is the result of mentalities that have long been embedded within the Russian psyche. Whereas in the West, the turbulent social changes of the 1960s and a rising awareness of the legacy of colonialism have modernized attitudes, Russia has been stymied by an enduring sense of superiority over its neighbours alongside a painful nostalgia for empire. It is this infantilized and irrational worldview that Putin and others have exploited, as seen most clearly in Russia's recent foreign policy decisions, including the annexation of Crimea.

This sharp and insightful book, full of irony and humour, shows how the archaic forces of imperial revanchism have been brought back to life, shaking Russian society and threatening the outside world. It will be of great interest to anyone trying to understand the forces shaping Russian politics and society today.

PART I: THE WAR FOR SPACE¹

SOVEREIGN TERRITORY … WITH NO ROADS

There’s only one thing more dreadful than Russian roads: Russian roadworks. Recently I had the misfortune to witness one of these local catastrophes, when I was driving from Moscow to Tartu, in Estonia, along the M9 ‘Baltiya’ federal highway. It has to be said that this road, which passes through the Tver and Pskov Oblasts, was never renowned for its smooth carriageway, which was why those in the know would travel to the Baltic region via the Minsk highway. But on this occasion, I came across something extraordinary even by the standards of Russian roads: 250 kilometres from the capital, the asphalt ran out. We’re not talking about somewhere east of Lake Baikal, or somewhere in the distant reaches of Siberia; right in the heart of European Russia, a federal highway had become a dirt-track, with holes of epic proportions, covered with a metre-thick layer of slushy muck. Trucks were trying to crawl through it, making drunken patterns. Some bashed into each other, others disappeared into ditches. Coming in the other direction were mud-spattered cars with Moscow number plates; I exchanged ironic smiles with their drivers. Occasionally I came across a few cars with foreign number plates. I saw one Toyota carrying a group of Portuguese, who were enthusiastically taking photos out of every window; this would be something to tell the grandchildren.

It took me four hours to cover 100 kilometres of this asphalt-free highway, during which time I didn’t see a single roadworker; not one police car; no equipment for repairing the road; no signs saying how long the roadworks would last or indicating any diversion. There was just the long-extinct road-bed. At the petrol station they told me that the roadworkers had dug up the surface at the beginning of autumn and then disappeared without saying when they’d be back. For the fourth month in a row, the road looks as it did after the aerial bombardment at the end of 1941, when battles were raging with the Germans around Rzhev and Velikiye Luki. At the same petrol station, they told me about the French long-distance lorry driver who came and pleaded with them: ‘I got lost on these roads; how do I find the main road again?’ This, they told him, is it. This is the main road from Europe to Moscow.

It was on this road that I came to understand two important things. First, we have entered a new stage: one of absolute impunity. Even five years ago it would have been difficult to imagine something like this in Russia. Yes, people stole from the state, but there was nonetheless the obligation at least to give the impression of doing something. Now, anything goes, and no one is held accountable. Hot on the heels of what was simply theft has come total indifference. What the practice of the past few years has shown is that in Russia now no one ever answers for anything – not for stolen billions, not for satellites which crash, not for the unleashing of wars.

But that’s only half the trouble. What’s even more frightening is something else: we’re losing the country. I’ve been driving along this road to Estonia for almost ten years; exactly the same period of time that, the propagandists tell us, Russia has been steadily ‘picking itself up off its knees’. And what I see with every passing year is that just 100 kilometres from Moscow this landscape is falling apart before my eyes. The M9 highway is constantly being repaired, but it simply gets worse and worse. All around there are ever more dead villages; at night you can travel for dozens of kilometres and you don’t see a single light on anywhere. The people you come across are increasingly wretched. They wander aimlessly along the roadside with their sledges, or they try with a look of hopelessness on their face to wave down a car. (Incidentally, I didn’t see any local buses, either.) With the exception of a few petrol stations, services along the road are miserable. There are a few dodgy-looking cafés – even the thought of stopping at them is scary – and there’s the odd stall with spare parts for lorries. Just as in the sixteenth century, locals flog by the roadside whatever they’ve gathered in the forest: dried mushrooms, frozen berries, coarse fur clothing. And the forests themselves are gradually claiming back the space that civilization has left behind: the abandoned fields and villages are overgrown with shrubs and bushes, and the trees are creeping ever closer to the road. And if in the past you could be ambushed along the road by the traffic police with their speed radars, this time I didn’t see a single one. The authorities, infrastructure, people – everything is dissolving into oblivion …

But the problem is much wider than just this road. What we’re talking about here is the very structure of the Russian state: how it relates to the area it governs and the territorial sovereignty of Russia. And even as the Ministry of Justice and the State Duma do battle with ‘foreign agents’ and revolutions in neighbouring countries, and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tells us that Russia is defending its sovereignty in the battle for Syria – all this time we’ve already lost our sovereignty on the M9 highway. There are two sides to sovereignty: formal power and control. You can still see some symbols of power along that road. For example, in the town of Zubtsov, right next to the Boverli Hill Hotel, you can see the building of the local administration, flying the Russian flag. And on the road into the town of Nelidovo there’s a concrete booth adorned with the slogan ‘Forward, Russia!’ But effective control over this area has already been lost. Here, there is no state, no infrastructure, no institutions; in short, no life.

Another decade of such decay and no one will be travelling along this road to go to Pushkin Hills; or Karevo, birthplace of the composer Modest Mussorgsky; or to Ostrov, with its unique skiing tracks; or to ancient Izborsk; or to the white stone walls of the Pskov Kremlin. And after another ten years, all that will be left of Russia will be twenty large cities; showpiece infrastructure projects like Olympic Sochi; a ring road around Moscow; and stadiums built for the 2018 football World Cup. In between them will be just emptiness, with sparse forests and neglected roads. Russia is turning into a moth-eaten blanket – one with ever more holes and ever less fabric. We defended our sovereignty in the bloody battles around Rzhev and Vyazma in the winter of 1941; but we’ve lost it on the roads going through those same places.

THE SMOKE OF THE FATHERLAND

Dulcis fumus patriae, as the ancient Romans used to say: ‘The smoke of the Fatherland smells sweet’. In Russia we breathe in this smoke each springtime: the country is enveloped in fire. As soon as the snow melts and last year’s grass dries out, people go out into the countryside and set fire to their rubbish, the grass, stubble, reeds and cane. According to Greenpeace, every year hundreds of thousands of acres of fields and forests are burnt. Some five or six thousand homes burn down; old country estate houses and nature reserves are destroyed; people are killed; cattle are burnt alive. Irreparable damage is done to nature, the soil, vegetation and the creatures that live in the grass and the forests. As the spring creeps up from the south to the north of Russia, for a month or more the whole country plunges into a mad frenzy of self-destruction, until the rains come and the first greenery appears.

The most dangerous time of the year is when the spring holidays occur. Last year, tragedy struck at Easter when on just one day, 12 April, Khakassia burst into flames all at once in a number of different places. And just around the corner lay an even greater ecological disaster: the May holidays, from 1 May until Victory Day on the 9th.² This is when millions of Russians answer the call of the wild, and go to meet it with their barbecues and buckets full of meat to skewer; with music and various forms of transport. Off-road vehicles and quad-bikes go charging all over the soft earth, churning up the fresh grass shoots; cars are lined up all along the banks of the rivers and the waterways; songs blare out; you can’t get away from pop music; tree branches begin to crack; the air is heavy with smoke from the meat; and the May twilight is lit up by the first piles of rubbish. A substantial proportion of the Russian population long ago established that they’re firmly at odds with their surroundings, thus reducing it to a state of chaos. The burning grasses are just one part of a huge problem, which is summed up by the fundamental anti-ecological nature of our existence.

Why do people in Russia burn grass? Anthropologists talk about the genes that have been handed down from the slash-and-burn agriculture practised by our ancestors in the forests of Eastern Europe, chopping down and burning the forest so as to fertilize with ash the poor clay soil. Cultural historians describe the archaic rituals of spring and the belief in the cleansing power of fire. And representatives of the Emergency Situations Ministry just call it blatant hooliganism. In fact, the idea that burning the grass warms up the soil and enriches it with ash, which helps new grass to grow, has long since been irrevocably exposed as a myth. Soil doesn’t warm up significantly from a fast-moving grass fire; but what does happen is that buds and grass seeds on the surface perish, as do useful micro-organisms and tiny creatures. Birds’ nests and eggs are destroyed; newly born hares die, as do hedgehogs and their babies, frogs, insects, larvae, cocoons and worms. Weeds such as burdock and cow-parsnip, which are more resistant to fire, grow up in place of different grasses; and after cane has been burnt down, more cane grows to take its place.

There is one other popular explanation: the great desire to burn off the grass before your neighbours burn it from the other side; you want to be the first to do it. The idea that you don’t actually have to burn off the grass, it seems, doesn’t occur to the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages. This sort of ‘war of all against all’ is typical of societies that are totally fragmented and socially dysfunctional.

The philosopher Maxim Goryunov sees in the fires the metaphysics of the Russian world: ‘The Russians, like their Finno-Ugric predecessors, who burnt the primeval forests in order to plant turnips and swedes, burn the cultural and political landscape around themselves for the sake of their gas pipelines and their multi-storey prefabricated towns.’³ Likewise, the ‘Russian Spring’, as they have called the separatist movement of Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine, has turned out to be a Russian conflagration and a Russian pogrom, as experienced first hand by the inhabitants of the Donbass, which has become an area of total social catastrophe.

But the main way to explain the grass fires is the irrational Russian phrase, ‘Let it all burn with a blue flame!’. In other words, ‘To hell with it all!’. The Russians are inexplicably drawn to demonstrative and exuberant self-destruction. ‘It burns beautifully!’, they think, as they set fire to the outskirts of the village, which leads to the torching of the field, the forest, the village and ultimately of themselves. In the fires on the steppe we see Pushkin’s idea of the Russian bunt or riot, which he described in The Captain’s Daughter, as well as shades of the ‘worldwide conflagration drenched in blood’, about which the poet Alexander Blok wrote in his poem ‘The Twelve’, for which he was attacked. Fellow poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, recalled how, in the first days of the Revolution, he was walking past the thin, bent figure of Blok warming himself by a fire in front of the Winter Palace in Petrograd. ‘Do you like it?’ asked Mayakovsky. ‘It’s good’, replied Blok; but then added, ‘They burnt down the library in my village.’⁴

The metaphysics of the Russian conflagration can be found in the secret dreams of the ‘underground man’ in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, in the desire to destroy harmony in the world and live according to your own ‘stupid will’. The cultural theorist Mikhail Epstein locates the underpinnings of post-2014 Russian politics specifically in the wounded pride of the ‘underground man’. Today, Russia is voluntarily torching all that was created over a quarter of a century of reform and change – bourgeois comfort and a fragile post-Soviet sense of well-being; openness to the outside world and a system of relations with the West – all for the sake of crazy geopolitical gestures done for effect. Russia is pouring oil on the fires of civil wars in Ukraine and Syria, and threatening the West with a nuclear holocaust. But at the root of this suicidal policy is the very same irrational passion for self-destruction and for wiping out their own habitat which drives the anonymous fire-raisers. And just as the television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov in a live broadcast was threatening the USA with ‘radioactive ash’ from a Russian nuclear strike, so the whole of southern Siberia was being covered in genuine ash from fires that had been started by ordinary Russian citizens. As the writer Viktor Pelevin said: ‘There is undoubtedly an anti-Russian plot; the only problem is that the whole adult population of Russia is complicit in it.’⁵

SACRED ICE

On 16 September 2013, Russia brilliantly carried out a small victorious war.⁶ In the Kara Sea the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) forcibly seized the Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise. Greenpeace activists had been trying to carry out a peaceful protest on the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform in the Pechora Sea. People armed with automatic weapons landed by helicopter. In the course of the operation warn...