The New Yorker's Terrifying Look into Putin's "Ruscism" (My word for it)
I knew there was something abyssal going on in Russia when I first started encountering Vladimir Putin's troll army propaganda-bombing the comments sections of every major (and some minor) Western information and entertainment websites with a vast web of unhinged Orwellian lies. If it had just been limited to the laughable canned slogans written in broken English, which were also ubiquitous, then the campaign would have been easy to dismiss as the pathetic and tone-deaf sausage of a solipsistic dictatorship swimming outside its own small and heavily polluted intellectual pond.
But it went beyond that - it was no mere depraved advertising campaign waged by amoral ciphers drawing a Kremlin paycheck. There was deeper structure to the madness that hinted at sincere psychotic beliefs and cultivated social delusions. Even while saying things that on their face amounted to "2 + 2 = 5" you could sense that some of these people were not just cavalierly flinging around nonsense as a job - they were in fact engaging in the kind of psychological self-torture that genuine ideologues engage in to force their minds to believe things that the universe continually tells them are not true. However vast the legions of pay-per-keystroke troll whores were, there were among them a number of people engaging in a kind of Information Jihad they clearly believed in.
If it had just been the former, I could have dismissed the phenomenon entirely and laughed it off, but sensing the latter made the propaganda campaign so much more menacing in a country with a dead superpower's nuclear weapons arsenal. These bizarre points of inky darkness in the idea space were not cynical bureaucrats hollowly lip-synching to a memo, but zealous advocates for a vision completely and deliberately divorced from both reality and accountability. These few seemed to be people driven by a bottomless hatred so complete that even the lack of rational motivation for it merely gave it fuel, as if the "Western conspiracies" they railed inchoately against were all the more monstrous for arrogantly daring not to exist despite Glorious Leader Putin's demands that they do.
What their attitude represented was so abhorrent that I've mostly avoided thinking about it, but then I read a piece in the New Yorker detailing the strange trajectory of post-Soviet Russia from chaotic experimentation with democracy to being devoured body and soul by Vladimir Putin's increasingly dark and apocalyptic vision. And suddenly the whiff of Death and shadow of circling vultures that always seem to hover subconsciously whenever arguing with the Russian troll network started to make sense in concrete terms. In the (very long) article, we see the descent of Russia through anecdotal experiences of former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, led in dread-inducing steps down the path of Putin's devolution from amorally pragmatic strongman to increasingly ideology-driven dictator.
Ultimately, we are shown the face of the ideology that now drives his regime and continues to spiral out of control: Radical, apocalyptic religious fanatics on the far-right fringe of the Russian Orthodox Church who articulate Putin in terms of divine prophecy and destiny; totalitarian theorists who sincerely propose that Russia and Putin (they regard the two as mystically identical) have made traditional conceptions of morality obsolete, and that service to them is now the definition of righteousness and justice; Neo-Nazi intellectuals who propose that elimination of all within or without who challenge (let alone dare to disprove) the aforementioned ideology must be pursued for the Motherland to survive and have dignity. These madmen's clinically insane beliefs are now more or less the state doctrines of the Russian Federation, fully supported by government funding and media exposure, and are being carefully woven into the fabric of the Russian people's collective identity.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. Aside from de-emphasizing (but still clearly encouraging) racism, this emerging Russian totalitarian ideology basically is, at its roots, fascism: The attempt of a nakedly self-interested elite headed by an all-powerful dictator to overthrow rationalism in the minds and destroy compassion in the hearts of his subject population, replacing them with nonsensical Newspeak definitions that amount to Belief is Truth and Obedience is Justification. And unlike the Soviet Union's demonization of the West, which was always couched in rationalistic (though often far from actually rational) terms that tended to restrain more bellicose voices among them, the new "Ruscism" makes it a point of pride to be unencumbered by concern for consequences - to make the act of willful infliction a moral justification unto itself.
Now tell me, who does this sound like? What totalitarian ideology of the past arose from roots of nationalism and desire for redemption of humiliations suffered at the hands of democracies? What political mass-psychosis preached the replacement of rationalism and morality with absolute belief in the state and its Glorious Leader? What was that ideology called, that articulated Total War as a fundamental state of being and the highest aspirational expression of humankind? That treated the country as a mystical and eternal object whose actions were right and just by definition, and all who were harmed by them as wrong by definition? We've seen this movie before. Only those guys didn't have thousands of nuclear ICBMs.
What we appear to be witnessing is a dictator who is gradually crawling up his own ass into murderous psychosis and dragging a nuclear-armed, two-continent-spanning former superpower with him. There is still evidence of pragmatic thinking on his part - i.e., he has not attempted to expand the scope of his territorial seizures in Ukraine beyond Crimea - but as he walls off Russia into a bubble of propaganda of his own making; as he empowers men who are natively far madder than himself; as he becomes more isolated both by his own choice and by the consequences of his actions via Western sanctions; will he even notice when he himself falls off the cliff of his own making and becomes the character portrayed in his arrogant propaganda fiction?
As the article notes, there is ample reason to believe he has always partly bought into it - believed in grandiose conspiracy theories attributing Russia's troubles to Western malevolence. So how far down that rabbit hole will this tyrant fall, and how far down will Russia as a whole be dragged? Make no mistake, that hole is now huge, and they are standing on the edge of it staring down into its depths. There is no mistaking the vehemence with which a painfully large number of Russians now buy into these notions. I find myself wondering whether someone who sees the "glory of Mother Russia" as some mystical eternal force that transcends time, space, and human morality would see anything wrong with cementing it by being the nation that tries (perhaps succeeds) to end the world? Murder-suicide occurs on the part of individuals, so make no mistake, it becomes a possibility on the part of entire nations when individuals hold absolute power.
No one on Earth today holds more absolute absolute power than Vladimir Putin. You can say that the state of North Korea is more total in its control of its subjects' lives, but the fact is that Putin holds the power to end the world. His power is not leavened by vast self-interested bureaucracies as in the Soviet Union, where anyone could be toppled if a sufficient alliance of interests turned against them, or by self-interested oligarchs and thugs as under Yeltsin: He has crushed them all, and now there is only him. He is the state, and to the extent his propaganda is resonating with the Russian people (it clearly is), he is increasingly also the nation. So who tells him No when he decides to do something truly insane? What happens if, say, he gets some bad medical news and is told that he only has a short while to live...would someone like that rather go out with a bang than a whimper?
Someone like that, who already held paranoid notions about Western hostility before he started making them into self-fulfilling prophecies, is probably worried about plots against his person. So perhaps he wants to guarantee that if anything happens to him, even a heart attack (since surely that's one of the possible ways they might get to him) absolute and total vengeance would automatically be unleashed. It sounds like a comic book villain, but this is a real man in control of thousands of real hydrogen bombs that would fly on real rockets and incinerate real billions, and this man's state is promoting what is essentially Nazi ideology on the nature of morality, the state, and leadership.
So, thank you New Yorker, for making me shit myself. If you've got some time and a change of underwear ready, here's that article:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse
= new reply since forum marked as read
By 2003 "liberal" Russians--those that liked democracy, freedom of expression, the kinds of issues that most DUers would think were at least heading in the right direction--had a profound disgust for Putin. That was a mere 4 years after his election, and years before the NYer perceives his "evolution."
By this time he'd already started peeling off bits of other countries and supporting them for Russia's ends. While he was playing the West, he was decimating Groznyi for separatism, for "deviant thinking." Reporters were already running into problems. One way an oligarch could piss off Putin was by having a media source disagree with him.
By this time he'd punished a lot of oligarchs to bring them to heel, mostly because he was firmly convinced that power over the economy should be managed by having power over the businessmen that own the companies. If you can control key sectors, you control everything.
What comes to mind isn't just Stalin. What comes to mind is Lenin. Lenin barged in with massive nationalization programs that just couldn't work. It would be like massive nationalization programs now if the new "owners" and managers were proles. Without the buy-in of the experts that run companies, that have experience with such things, you'd have somebody with a high school degree flipping burgers at McDonald's suddenly being told he was in charge of flight logistics for a major airline. What could possibly go wrong? Hence the NEP, to get things running and keep them running while changes were made behind the scenes, while new cohorts (kadry) were trained to take over. The managers and owners trained their replacements while the executioners loitered and kept their axes sharp and polished. Stalin was a matter of time; the NEP was profoundly at odds with rhetoric and the "revolutionaries" on the ground knew it. And were slowly moving into positions of authority as they were trained and became expert enough to keep things from crashing. For all his high-sounding words and celebrated closing of places like the Kolyma camps, Lenin turned right around and opened them when he needed the gold and gems.
The first lesson is to appear fairly harmless until you're not. During this time there were attempted revolutions in several European countries. All failed. But in the end, conditions were ripe and already moving towards Stalin's stark shift. It seems like an abrupt change because of the size of the shift, but the shift was already underway before Lenin's death towards more centralized planning, more strict control over the economy--and then the culture--and more prison camps.
The second lesson is to make the economy work. If you get control over that, at some point you can exert more control over society. If people are happy, oddly enough, and fed pablum, they stay happy. The malcontents that want "alternative" lifestyles, that want "avant-garde" literature, that want to "break the mould" are fairly few in number.
As of 2012 and 2013 Putin was still saying that the Customs Union was economic. "Of course" the regional language would be Russian, but each nation was free to have its own culture, etc. Just meet the necessary economic conditions and regulations and all's well.
The third lesson is then to set a vision that can serve as the unifying theme of a society. The NYer says that the staffers dissed standard Communist ideology, as well they should. But it misses the point that Communist ideology wasn't a stand alone item. Stalin had managed to wed it with religion in the interests of getting all Russians to support the Communists against the Germans. He was uncomfortable with it, but the Patriarch was in his pocket and repressions against the churches stopped. After WWII, the CPSU was all about hagiography. Stalin and the Red Army. Then just the glories of the USSR and the Red Army. This faltered only for about 6 or 7 years: from the collapse of the USSR until Putin.
With Putin came distress over the dissing of the USSR's great achievements. "Repression" literature was on the outs. In 2000 or so the archives closed. The history textbooks over a decade went from saying horrible things about Stalin, even the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty, GULags, etc., to relative silence, then continued their conservative march to trumpeting the glories of the USSR in the '20s and '30s ("no depression, just growth!"
and '40s (we single-handedly defeated fascism! we rule!" and '50s and '60s ("We stopped western imperialism!" .
By Putin's second year the trends that started to "take back" the past were officially sanctioned and encouraged. By Putin. But these were low-level trends that nobody wanted to see.
And the glories of the USSR and the Red Army were because they were specifically *Russian* in culture and, underlyingly, *Orthodox* in faith. Inseparable from Russian. By the end of 2013 the "Russian world" idea was coming to the fore and cultural suppression--not just suppression of facts and news, but culture--was well in hand. Armenia wasn't just going to be part of the Custom's Union, but of the "Russian world." Orthodoxy, ethnicity and autocracy, the three pillars of the Russian empire. Syria is an important country, Putin announced, because it was an outpost and defender of the Russian world--by supporting the required use of Russian and study of Russian culture.
I rather appreciate an op-ed article published a few days ago on the Mariupol city news site about the ideological underpinnings of the "Novorossiya" crowd. He points out that a country has two things: an economic base and some sort of organizing principle, however weak. Have no clue who the writer is, he just says that he has some random thoughts that he's organized and put on paper. Not complete. The site is run by I know not whom, but is generally anti-rebel and was during the DPR occupation of Mariupol (which used to be the city of Zhdanov in the USSR).
http://www.0629.com.ua/news/589388
The key points are fairly simple
1. The USSR fought fascism, a crime against humanity, and that was one of its prime glories and showed its moral excellence.
His response is that people fought not for the USSR per se, but for their families, for their homes and for their towns first and foremost. Moreover, that what Stalin and the "USSR" did was also considered by pretty much the entire world to be a crime against humanity, one usually believed to be as large as Hitler's, if not larger.
Moreover, while "our grandfathers fought against fascism!" is a rallying cry, the #2 "country" sending troops against the Fuehrer was Ukraine. To which Putin replied that the Ukrainian's contribution was meaningless; without them, the Russians would have won. This moves the glory from the USSR specifically to Russia.
What's important isn't just a fact, but actively suppressing other facts. (I'd add that Putin and those with him engaged in precisely this. As the Novorossiya/Eurasianists do.)
2. The inability to accept that any other country has the right to self-determination or independence. The NYer puts this as "phantom limb syndrome", the loss of empire that "historical justice" demands be returned to the Russians. I've seen this argued here by neo-imperialists who vote left of center. Then again, the biggest supporters of the rebels in E. Ukraine are Russian nationalists, Orthodox fanatics, and, well, the Communist Party.
This is Putin. In 1999 he couldn't accept self-determination for Chechens. The breakup of the Soviet empire was a major geopolitical catastrophe.
3. Schizophrenia. On the one hand, Ukrainians and Russians are one people, they're Slavs. On the other hand, the New Russian folk insist on calling them "ukry" ("Ukrs" , gay-lovers, fascists, junta. All sorts of things to say that they're not Slavs; they're actually occupiers.
4. More schizophrenia. Ukraine was always a "brother nation." Kicked around a bit, always to be subservient. But then when it comes time for Russia to show its brotherliness, Ukraine is just lectured and abused. Ukr must repay every cent. "Non-brother" nations like Korea, Latin American countries, they get aide. They get debt written off. Ukraine has always been expected to repay every cent. Russia resents that it's not part the empire. It expects unconditioned loyalty and obedience, while Russia has to make nice to others.
5. Economics. The Donbas is ageing. While it provides a lot of the income to Kiev's coffers--which the DPR and LPR folk love to quote--it draws heavily for social services because of ageing infrastructure, high unemployment, mine and industrial subsidies (which the EU, btw, probably won't allow), and pensions. An oft-cited number says that for every hrivnya sent to Kiev the Donbas gets 5 in return. At least the Novorossiya people say they'll get natural gas for cheap. But Ukraine's "outrageous price" is less than Russians in Russia pay.
Just pitch in religion. The big news in Luhans'k today, according to the LPR, was the arrival in Luhans'k of the Port Arthur icon; it was intended as a sign and guaranteed of Russian victory over the Japanese but, sadly, arrived to late to save the day. Pussy Riot dared to insult a church by performing in it and dissing Putin. Putin regularly appears with Patriarch Kirill. And there's the "Russian Orthodox Army" in the Donbas.
And ethnicity. So the Donbas folk insist that the people in the Donbas are true Slavs. The Ukrainians are fake Slavs, inferior. Hey, "skull shape" proves it. Putin doesn't even go that far in his racism. But Putin does count a lot of neo-Nazi groups and skinhead racists as his friends and allies, so perhaps that'll come along eventually as Putin "evolves."
