Paul Goble
Staunton, August 4 – Russia is fast
becoming “a land of fences” in which “the unpredictability of the authorities,
the stratification of society, and the absence of any defense of private
property is making people ever more cautious and closed off from one another,”
according to five Russian observers with whom the Rosbalt news agency spoke.
This walling off, the agency’s
Tatyana Khruleva says, is both “physical and mental.” As soon as an individual
has sufficient money, he will “begin to erect ‘walls’ … between himself and
those who stand lower on the social latter. And some of them even break away
from the entire country by choosing to emigrate” (rosbalt.ru/russia/2017/08/03/1635879.html).
Philosopher Maksim Goryunov argues
that people shut themselves off from others because they “do not trust the space
in which [they] are situated. If I feel that it is aggressive and dangerous … I
will seize a tiny bit of land and establish there my own zone of security and
comfort.”
In one sense, he continues, “these
Russian fences are like the Dutch dams.” The Dutch seized land from the sea; and
Russians are seizing territory “meter by meter from the surrounding environment
which toward them is extremely aggressive,” not only environmentally but
socially and politically.
Because the common space is so “uncomfortable,”
Goryunov says, “Russians as quickly as possible seek to return to their yard
where everything is rational and in order.” It is of course possible that the
surrounding space will become more orderly and then people won’t need such
fences, but “certainly this will not be in our time.”
Petr Bychkov, a political
psychologist at St. Petersburg State University, points out that wealthy people
in all countries try to separate themselves from others “but all the same not
to the degree they are doing so in present-day Russia.” The country’s “difficult
history” has made progress in this regard much slower.
In Russia, he says, “the process of
enrichment as a rule takes place very rapidly: if yesterday an individual was
nothing, then today he may be in a position to avoid a 1.5 million US dollar
house with an enormous fence.” And he may want to have that fence because he is
aware that he could lose everything overnight.
This also explains why Russians are
so reluctant to invest in their own country, Bychkov says. But he adds that “the
Asiatic mentality” of Russians is also at work. As Nicholas Berdyaev noted,
Russians combine in themselves “an insane submissiveness and faith in God with
an unrestrained propensity to revolt and atheism.”
On the one hand, he continues, “we
speak about the need to strive to democracy so that every voice will be heard.”
But on the other, “the Asiatic mentality dictates that power must be
untouchable.” This unstable combination leads to the desire to “close oneself
off” from everyone else in at least a small space.
And there is an additional factor at
work: “Even if an individual earned his wealth absolutely honestly, if he is
surrounded by poverty and devastation, he of course will close himself off” for
self-protection. Thus, the cause for
fences and walls is “not in people as such bt in the conditions in which they
are forced to live.”
Political scientist Grigory Golosov
says that Russia is in this regard in fact quite typical of other countries
with poor but rapidly developing economies.
Until the level of interpersonal trust rises as it has in Western
countries, people who gain any additional wealth feel threatened by those around
them.
For things to change, he argues,
Russia must reduce social and economic inequality and come up with reliable
measures for the protection of private property, something the country as of
yet lacks.
Aleksandr Konfisakhor, a political
psychologist, says that it is universally true that wealthy people seek to
separate themselves off from others, although they usually do it by the
selection of the places they go rather than by erecting walls. In Russia, however, they prefer walls and
fences because “no one feels himself secure” physically or economically.
“Unfortunately,” he adds, “I do not think
that in the foreseeable future there will be any significant changes for the
better. Russians have a completely different psychological type: we never seek
to bring others up to our level. On the contrary, it is the norm to show that
you are rich and successful” compared to these others.
And Sergey Shelin, Rosbalt’s
observer, says that “the striving to separate oneself from everything around is
completely natural in our unnatural circumstances.” Fences and walls provide a certain sense of protection
from a broader world in which there is no such sense available.
He suggests that the reason for this
does not lie in the authoritarian system alone. “An authoritarian order is all
the same order. It forces all including bureaucrats and policemen to live
within certain frameworks. But we do not have such frameworks,” and instead, we
build fences and walls.
“One sociologist quite usefully
called our regime ‘a state of the bosses,’” one in which the bosses do what
they want” within the limits of their particular possibilities. That worked when resources were large but as
resources are becoming ever more restricted, each of them feels himself to be a
potential target from whom everything could be taken.
And Shelin concludes: “Many of those
who know partially or completely are leaving Russia are hardly critics of the
political regime, they aren’t poor, and they aren’t people who have suffered a
career collapse. They simply find things here ever less comfortable and more
horrific.”
“Such a system is our know-how,” the
observer says. “That is how we distinguish ourselves from a large part of the
world, and it is a system where changes for the better simply aren’t
anticipated.”
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