Perverted Logic of Totalitarianism Returning to Putin’s Russia, Skobov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 22 – The perverted logic of totalitarianism is returning to Russia now that the powers that be are launching criminal cases against those who insist that others are being persecuted on the basis of the Soviet insistence that no one is persecuted for their ideas but only face legal sanction if they take action, Aleksandr Skobov says.

            But the trap is that from the perspective of the Soviet government and of the Putin regime, statements about the system the Kremlin doesn’t like are actions as are statements in defense of those who make these statements and suffer persecution as a result, the Moscow commentator says (graniru.org/opinion/skobov/m.283559.html).

            In the perverted upside-down logic of totalitarianism then and now, criticism of the regime was and is “considered ‘defamatory’ not because it was or is ‘slanderous.’ Rather, it was and is considered ‘slanderous’ because it ‘defames,’” a syllogism that totalitarians can apply against anyone who says anything they don’t like.

            Such pseudo-logic lies behind the accusations of officials that Memorial and OVD-Info justify terrorism and extremism. In fact, Skobov says, both these groups and many others besides are being punished because from a totalitarian perspective, “disagreement with the actions of the authorities as such” cannot be tolerated.

            “How far this mechanism will be applied depends exclusively on the views of those in power,” he continues. “Some hope that it will act in this way only in cases of particular concern to the regime and allow in the rest quite broad freedom to criticize. But the repressive machine is always inclined to expand and to spread the spheres of its actions more broadly.”

            Until recently, the Moscow commentator says, many felt that “a special characteristic of the new, post-industrial and post-modern authoritarian was that it was not afraid of information openness.” That view was fed by the fact that “autocracies today somehow do away without direct censorship or ideological prohibitions.”

            “The mechanisms of control over the political sphere worked differently,” it was assumed. “But in recent years, something has serious changed regarding the attitude of authoritarian regimes to freedom of expression.” And in Russia as in other authoritarian regimes, the powers have developed new ways of imposing censorship.

            These “new dictatorships are returning to the same ‘juridical logic’ of classical totalitarianism of the 20^th century,” he says. They are doing so “armed with technical methods of control over society which the totalitarianism of the 20^th century knew nothing about.” the hopes of some that the Internet will make that impossible are clearly misplaced.

            Skobov concludes: the relative tolerance of the new dictatorships is passing. The relative freedom of the past represented only the time it took those regimes to gather their forces in other to be in a position to impose an even harsher totalitarianism than the ones Russia and some other countries escaped a generation ago.