Putin has Moved from Targeted Repression to ‘Hybrid’ Terror, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 13 – The recent spate of random and individually unfounded charges against people like Anya Pavlikova and Vladimir Putin’s failure to pardon the victims of such judicial abuse shows that the Kremlin leader has moved from the targeted repression he used in recent years to a new and more frightening “hybrid” terror, Vladimir Pastukhov says.

            The London-based Russian historian says Putin knows all about these cases, that he could pardon those involved “but doesn’t want to” because “if you release one, you’ll have to release all the others as well. And then who will be afraid of him? And if no one in Russia fears him, then Russia won’t exist” (mbk.sobchakprotivvseh.ru/sences/pochemu-putin-ne-mozhet/).

                Not only is it the case that in Putin’s mind “Russia is fear,” Pastukhov continues. It is also the case that he “can’t allow himself to pardon” people like Pavlikova because he would then lose any control over the force machine which he has put in motion. And that means that Russia must wake up and recognize something truly disturbing.

            “This is not repression anymore: this is terror, senseless and pitiless,” the historian says. But it is as with most things Putin, a hybrid form which “the generation raised on Sharlamov’s stories and Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago do not recognize in its new post-modernist dress … and under a pseudo-liberal sauce.”

            Today in Russia, “private property while not defended is formally not prohibited. Freedom of speech continues to live in specially set aside reservations … like those for Indians in North America,” he says. And the opposition functions, albeit completely within the limits the Kremlin sets.

            “The most valuable attribute of democracy” in Russia is for the time being “the right to freely leave the country,” Pastukhov continues. But all these “’liberal excesses’” get in the way of seeing “the main thing: state terror has returned to Russia and is rapidly unwinding in its dangerous spiral.”

            With the exception of several months in 1917 and the period between the August 1991 putsch and the October turnover in 1993, he points out, “Russia as never a democratic state, and even with regard to these two periods there exist real doubts” as to whether it should have been called democratic then.

            “Dual power or even powerlessness and democracy are after all not one and the same thing. The entire rest of time, Russia was to a greater or lesser degree an aggressive authoritarian state with a repressive political regime,” one in which the powers turned to “state terror only from time to time.”

            Repression and terror are different things and this difference lies not in the number of people who suffer, Pastukhov says.  If repression has been a constant in Russian life, “eras of terror are a special case, a kind of historical exclusive,” a state in which “society cannot remain for long” because the suffering is so intense and any escape so difficult.

            The chief characteristic of terror which sets it apart from repression is “the unpredictability of the use of force.” At a time of terror, nothing guarantees anyone protection from being persecuted, and nothing prevents those who are persecuted from losing everything including their lives.

            This gives rise to a fear of “a special type, a fear that permanently and universally dominates the mind and paralyzes any will to action. Terror is an automatic system to which all are subordinate but in which no one decides anything,” Pastukhov says. Indeed, that is the chief distinction between terror and repression.

            Unlike the former, the latter is “a spontaneous process which represents by itself a social and political storm developing suddenly under favorable to itself circumstances and ending only when its energy on its own begins to dissipate.” Repression, in contrast, makes sense in that the targets are selected and the punishments chosen.

            It is thus “administered” and controlled, but “administered terror is a utopia,” the Russian historian says.

             “The USSR of the era of the Brezhnevite stagnation was a repressive state” in this sense, “despite the total harshness of the system,, but the Russia of the era of the Putinite stagnation is realizing a policy of terror, despite its superficial softness and the eclectic quality of the regime,” Pastukhov argues. 

            That has consequences, he continues. “From the Brezhnev stagnation, Gorbachev could allow himself to exit having destroying the system, but Putin, just like Stalin, is not in a position to make the choice to exit from the labyrinth of the system he has created.” The current Kremlin leader in this sense has “become its hostage, and the repressive machine proceeds on its own.”

            The individual behind such a project “still can correct the trajectory, but he already is not in a position to stop the flight,” even though it appears on the  outside that he is in control of everything. But if he intervenes against the system he has created, it will make his continued rule in the style he has chosen impossible. Consequently, he won’t.

            In short, Pastukhov says, “Putin has set up a system in which everything depends on him and Putin completely depends on the system he has created and is its slave.” The more power he gathers to himself, the more that is the case and the more problematic his future and that of the system itself become.

            While the number of issues which require his involvement grows “every day in geometric progression,” Pastukhov says, “with each day it becomes more difficult for [Putin] to intervene in the resolution of each specific one.” That leads to more issues being left without resolution and a growing instability.

            It might seem that the Kremlin leader could back off and pardon someone like Pavlikova, the Russian historian continues, but he cannot do so without undermining the system. Hence the system has turned to terror – a world that it is far easier to enter than to exit, especially when some Russians get the taste for blood.

            History suggests, Pastukhov says, that a country can exit from such a situation either via revolution or a change in rulers “in the wake of which society passes through a lengthy and feverish process of rehabilitation.”  That is the future Putin has prepared not only for himself but for Russia – and it is certain to be a most difficult one.