Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 12 – Russia has had many kinds of people at the top of its political
pyramid, Vladimir Pastukhov says; but rarely has it had some who have risen to
the top without a revolution who are “so uncouth” as now in the case of Viktor
Zolotov, the commander of Russia’s National Guard who has challenged opposition
leader Aleksey Navalny to a duel.
“When a powerful
favorite, the first gendarme of the Empire, threatens his opponent,” the London-based
Russian historian and commentator says, “this is dangerous” because no one has
any doubts that he has “unlimited possibilities in a state where law does not
operate” (mbk.sobchakprotivvseh.ru/sences/viktor-zolotov-kak-zerkalo/).
“But when [this man] proposes to
fight his opponent in public so as to reduce him with his own hands to mush,
this is already not dangerous but rather funny and sad,” Pastukhov continues.
Everyone needs to remember that “what is permitted a military officer is not
permitted to a gendarme.” Zolotov, the historian says, is not General Rokhlin.
Because there has been much talk of
dueling in Russia lately, however, some around Zolotov apparently became
convinced that he should issue this challenge. But they didn’t think it through
and couldn’t imagine how Russians and Navalny would react to such a challenge
and such a threat – and how it would affect their views of the powers that be.
When Usmanov made his dismissive
comments about Navalny, that was one thing. “Here however is something else – a
fatal inadequacy, a lack of correspondence with the times, a falling out of the
cultural space. Zolotov’s declaration
broke through not so much a political or legal bottom as a cultural one.”
Indeed, Pastukhov continues, “it has
become an indicator of the completion of the process of the de-civilization of
Russia, and therefore it must be considered in the first instance precisely as
a cultural and not as a political or legal phenomenon.”
Zolotov, the historian says, “is
among the group of leaders who are the first to successfully complete this
process themselves, at the very least with regard to themselves. He isn’t
capable of sensing the border between wildness and culture.” His appeal to the
officer’s code of honor only highlights this fact.
“In reality,” Pastukhov continues,
Zolotov “is guided by an entirely different code, the law of the pack. His reaction is the reaction of a caveman,
direct and primitive … It is thus strange that he didn’t propose eating the
heart of his enemy at the end of the fight.”
That would have been consistent.
In Zolotov’s mental world, “physically
dealing with opponents directly is normal,” and all the work of humankind to move
beyond that over the centuries is something he is not familiar with. In his
caveman-like naivete, he is not frightening but funny” – and that carries with
it problems for him and for his fellow members of the pack.
Frightening are the people who killed
Nemtsov, Politkovskaya and Estemirova without any publicity. Frightening too
are those who torture defenseless people in jails And frightening are Zolotov’s
subordinates who “have ceased to distinguish men from women, children from
adults” and suppress everyone at protests.
Here we are speaking about something
else, Pastukhov says, “about complete cultural disorientation, about the loss of
criteria which allow people to make distinctions between between what can be
said aloud and what can be remarked about only after the microphone is turned off.”
“Zolotov,” Pastukhov argues, “is a distorted
mirror of the state of Russian culture today,” a reflection of the fact that “the
cult of the fist flourishes and that he who has the biggest fist in the land
becomes its chief shaman.”
But Zolotov’s actions do have a political
meaning: On the one hand, they are causing the Russian people to laugh at their
leaders, a development that is always corrosive of the power leaders have. And
on the other, they are making Navalny more popular, something Zolotov certainly
wouldn’t have wanted to do but now cannot fail to do anything else.
