Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 16 – “The rise of authoritarianism in Russia always
involves the coming together of two streams, one from above and one from below,”
Sergey Mitrofanov says; “and all those who try to change something [in such a
country] must understand that” rather than placing the blame on one side or the
other.
In “Yezhednevny zhurnal” today, the
Russian commentator begins by noting that when Russians marked the Day of
National Unity earlier this month, they made no reference to the downing of the
jetliner over the Sinai, even though that tragedy had taken place only four
days earlier and might have been expected to be on their minds (ej.ru/?a=note&id=28935).
The “simplest explanation” for this,
he suggests, is that no one told them to do so given that the Kremlin was still
“feverishly calculating the consequences” of linking or not linking that event
to Syria, a process that is still very much going on. Without direction of this
kind, most Russians simply would not have responded in public.
Another explanation, Mitrofanov
says, is “the steady lowering of the value of human life in the Russian
Federation.” In August 1991, the death of three was “a symbol of victory and
freedom.” In 2000, the death of 118 became “a symbol of the indifference of the
authorities” to soldiers. Now, 224 deaths provoke only discussions about not
being able to travel to Egypt.
And this absence of public
expression of grief contrasts with the hysteria over the caricatures in “Charlie
Hebdo,” even though it is certain that few Russians had ever seen that journal.
What they had seen and heard was official permission and even encouragement to
be angry.
The shooting down of the airplane
over Sinai, however, is instructive in another way: Tour firms quickly
calculated how much they would lose as a result, but no one asked why there were
such losses or who could cover them.
Instead, it was somehow assumed that the regime would take care of
everything.
“This is a strange kind of
capitalism when a private sector and its clients demonstrate their complete
vassal-like dependence on the authorities,” Mitrokhin says. And still no one
asks “why Russia is again encircled by enemies, for ISIS is only a small
detachment of Evil. The main enemy is” instead an incomprehensible and
universal EVIL.”
At the same time, the Russian people
continue to show their “growing love for the president” in ways that far exceed
what the Kremlin could have planned, be it a crowd that comes together in the
shape of his face or a special portrait of Putin so that “even the blind can be
aware of his visage.”
It is in such things, the absence of
horror after the shooting down of the plane over the Sinai and public displays
of such things that “we approach the main secret of Russian existence,” the penchant
of Russians to ignore what should not be ignored and to celebrate
unquestionably that which should be questioned.
At the end of Soviet times, “one
good philosopher, Aleksandr Akhiezer, who did not live to the complete and
final triumph of his philosophical conception of social inversion wrote that
the same thing was true in 1937 when the nation actively destroyed itself
although it could have resisted.”
Unfortunately, then and now, no one
in authority gave them direction, and so they did not and do not ask questions
or resist, Mitrofanov says. And as a
result, their own authoritarian predispositions come together with the
authoritarian pretensions of their rulers to build an authoritarian regime it
will be very hard to root out.
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