Russian Officials and Citizens Exchanging Ever Sharper Words, Undermining Existing System

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 13 – Ever more Russian officials are permitting themselves to express extremely critical words about the Russian population, a clear indication that they are not officials or feudal nobles but rather inadequate people who can’t behave in ways that are expected and necessary for people in their positions, Sergey Shelin says.

            Such statements raise questions about the adequacy of those in such offices, the Rosbalt commentator says, because normal officials invariably portray themselves in public as servants of the people and because feudals as many Russians assume their rulers to be act in correspondence with a code of nobility (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2018/11/13/1746100.html).

But clearly, Shelin continues, Russian officials today are neither one or the other, an indication of the growing decay of the powers that be. The outrageousness of the statements of some junior officials in fact has become so great that the upper reaches of the political pyramid are distancing themselves from the lower levels.

            However, doing that carries with it the risk that the upper reaches will not be in a position to have the mechanisms in place to enforce the decisions from above; and so the laughter and scorn the statements have generated in the population suggest that the regime will have to take action soon against those who violate the norms.

            After all, the Rosbalt commentator suggests, an authoritarian regime can survive almost anything except open derision by the population because such laughter and contempt make it increasingly difficult for the regime to function and even to  remain united in the face of that derision.

            The absurd remarks of junior and midgrade officials like the suggestion of one that any Russian can live on 3500 rubles (50 US dollars) a month because macaroni is cheap or that the state doesn’t owe Russians anything because the state didn’t ask them to be born have attracted widespread attention.

            But what has attracted less attention, precisely because it is still so amorphous, is the increasingly critical stance of the population to the authors of such remarks and the growing suspicion among Russians that such words reflect the attitudes not just of those who mouth them but of the regime itself.

            In Novaya gazeta, journalist Elizaveta Kirpanova says that the responses of the population to these comments by officials says a lot about the nature of the Russian political system today and she interviews social psychologist Olga Gulyevich of the Higher School of Economics on that point (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/11/12/78557-podumali-i-lyapnuli).

                Among other things, Gulevich says that people typically treat the comments of others as reflecting more than an individual point of view, thus increasingly blaming the ruling stratum as a whole for the comments of a few, and respond in much the same way, reflecting views of groups with which they identify rather than offering their own opinion.

            Consequently, the increasingly sharp attacks by Russian citizens on the outrageous comments of a few officials suggests that deference to the ruling stratum is declining and, what may be even more important, that Russian citizens are thinking of themselves not as individuals who will likely remain silent but as members of groups who can and should speak out.

            To the extent that analysis is correct, it suggests that far more attention should be paid to how Russians are reacting to the outrageous remarks of officials than to the remarks themselves, exactly the reverse of what has been true not only in Russia itself but also in international media discussion of these cases.