4. The War for Memory: this includes the active historic and memorial policy of the state, from the publication of a single history textbook for schools, to the cult of Victory Day on 9 May; from the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin to the battle against the ‘falsifiers of history’. Having become desperate to build the future, the state now lives on dreams about an heroic past, creating the myth about Russian history being an unbroken line of victories, while being terrified to acknowledge failures and mistakes and repressing traumatic memories.
The common denominator of these four wars is the battle for ‘sovereignty’, under which the Kremlin understands maintaining unlimited state power and defending its independence against any outside influence. The authorities wish to control the geographical and symbolic territory of Russia; the collective body and the collective memory of the nation. Over all these battles hangs the figure of the sovereign: President Putin. And it is no coincidence that throughout this book the name of the main theorist of sovereignty in the twentieth century, the German jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, keeps cropping up. ‘The Crown Jurist of the Third Reich’ is very popular among pro-Kremlin political scientists.
But it would not be entirely accurate to link the return of the state with Putin alone; rather, he himself became an iconic figure, who embodied and designated a great historical cycle: the eternal return of the Russian Leviathan. It is not Putin who has resurrected the traditional model of Russian history, it is that Russian history itself in the twenty-first century has become embodied in the figure of Putin, who has become the ‘national idea of Russia’ (to use the highly accurate words of the Russian fiction writer, Victor Pelevin).
Should we be afraid of Putin’s post-Crimea Russia? Hegel wrote that history repeats itself twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce. Despite all the tragic individual crimes of this regime, like unleashing the war in Ukraine, or the shooting down of MH17, the Russian Empire has entered a final, tired, imitative period of its history. Many of the passages in this book talk about fakes, about simulacra, about historical reconstruction. The new Russian approach to sovereignty may at times be deadly, but on the whole these are now phantom pains, the wars of an outdated Empire that is already past its sell-by date, that has exhausted its resources and that is now fighting a rearguard action on an inexorably declining territory. At times, it is terrifying to witness these battles; at times it is edifying. But more often than not it is simply funny. This book is written at the point where historical intuition meets comical intonation, and tragedy meets farce.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
A number of concepts referred to in the text may be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader. These are explained in both endnotes and a glossary provided by the translator. The endnotes also include references to a number of original sources. The reader should be aware that many of these sources are in Russian only.
PART I: THE WAR FOR SPACE[1]
SOVEREIGN TERRITORY… WITH NO ROADS
There’s only one thing more dreadful than Russian roads: Russian roadworks. Recently I had the misfortune to witness one of these local catastrophes, when I was driving from Moscow to Tartu, in Estonia, along the M9 ‘Baltiya’ federal highway. It has to be said that this road, which passes through the Tver and Pskov Oblasts, was never renowned for its smooth carriageway, which was why those in the know would travel to the Baltic region via the Minsk highway. But on this occasion, I came across something extraordinary even by the standards of Russian roads: 250 kilometres from the capital, the asphalt ran out. We’re not talking about somewhere east of Lake Baikal, or somewhere in the distant reaches of Siberia; right in the heart of European Russia, a federal highway had become a dirt-track, with holes of epic proportions, covered with a metre-thick layer of slushy muck. Trucks were trying to crawl through it, making drunken patterns. Some bashed into each other, others disappeared into ditches. Coming in the other direction were mud-spattered cars with Moscow number plates; I exchanged ironic smiles with their drivers. Occasionally I came across a few cars with foreign number plates. I saw one Toyota carrying a group of Portuguese, who were enthusiastically taking photos out of every window; this would be something to tell the grandchildren.
It took me four hours to cover 100 kilometres of this asphalt-free highway, during which time I didn’t see a single roadworker; not one police car; no equipment for repairing the road; no signs saying how long the roadworks would last or indicating any diversion. There was just the long-extinct road-bed. At the petrol station they told me that the roadworkers had dug up the surface at the beginning of autumn and then disappeared without saying when they’d be back. For the fourth month in a row, the road looks as it did after the aerial bombardment at the end of 1941, when battles were raging with the Germans around Rzhev and Velikiye Luki. At the same petrol station, they told me about the French long-distance lorry driver who came and pleaded with them: ‘I got lost on these roads; how do I find the main road again?’ This, they told him, is it. This is the main road from Europe to Moscow.
It was on this road that I came to understand two important things. First, we have entered a new stage: one of absolute impunity. Even five years ago it would have been difficult to imagine something like this in Russia. Yes, people stole from the state, but there was nonetheless the obligation at least to give the impression of doing something. Now, anything goes, and no one is held accountable. Hot on the heels of what was simply theft has come total indifference. What the practice of the past few years has shown is that in Russia now no one ever answers for anything – not for stolen billions, not for satellites which crash, not for the unleashing of wars.
But that’s only half the trouble. What’s even more frightening is something else: we’re losing the country. I’ve been driving along this road to Estonia for almost ten years; exactly the same period of time that, the propagandists tell us, Russia has been steadily ‘picking itself up off its knees’. And what I see with every passing year is that just 100 kilometres from Moscow this landscape is falling apart before my eyes. The M9 highway is constantly being repaired, but it simply gets worse and worse. All around there are ever more dead villages; at night you can travel for dozens of kilometres and you don’t see a single light on anywhere. The people you come across are increasingly wretched. They wander aimlessly along the roadside with their sledges, or they try with a look of hopelessness on their face to wave down a car. (Incidentally, I didn’t see any local buses, either.) With the exception of a few petrol stations, services along the road are miserable. There are a few dodgy-looking cafés – even the thought of stopping at them is scary – and there’s the odd stall with spare parts for lorries. Just as in the sixteenth century, locals flog by the roadside whatever they’ve gathered in the forest: dried mushrooms, frozen berries, coarse fur clothing. And the forests themselves are gradually claiming back the space that civilization has left behind: the abandoned fields and villages are overgrown with shrubs and bushes, and the trees are creeping ever closer to the road. And if in the past you could be ambushed along the road by the traffic police with their speed radars, this time I didn’t see a single one. The authorities, infrastructure, people – everything is dissolving into oblivion…
1
‘Space’ here should be understood in the sense of everything around us, not what is beyond the planet.