As the political commentator, Vladimir Gelman, has noted, this is strikingly different from the ‘battle against privilege’ campaign in the late Soviet period. This was one of the main slogans of perestroika. Political commentators called for a return to the Leninist norm of modesty for those in the Communist Party, and the popular rumour did the rounds of the apocryphal tale of Boris Yeltsin travelling to work by trolleybus when he was First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Party. Where has all this gone? Why does society fail to react to information about corruption or about the excesses of state officials? Gelman speaks of weariness and apathy: needs must when the devil drives. ‘The unsuccessful experience of the battle against privileges of the time of perestroika and the subsequent events in which the Russian public (with rare exceptions) played the role of bystanders, convinced Russians that speaking out against the overbearing leadership was both useless and possibly dangerous.’
On the other hand, there exists a wide social contract under the title, ‘everyone steals’. Evidence of corruption and the blatant use and abuse of luxuries by the political and business elites gives people at all levels of society permission to behave in similar fashion. When they look upwards, people feel that they have the moral right to hide their income, take and give bribes and live beyond their means. The example given from on high creates an atmosphere in society that everything is permissible: if the Deputy Prime Minister’s dogs can fly around in private jets, why shouldn’t the whole leadership of the Volgograd Region fly off to Toscana to celebrate Governor Bozhenov’s birthday? If a car with a flashing light can tear along the central lane, why can’t an ordinary driver avoid traffic jams by driving on the hard-shoulder?
But besides the traditional cover-up between the various strata of society, there is a deeper reason why this ostentatious display by Shuvalov not only does not discredit, but actually legitimizes the regime. In Russia, power is based not on elections but on strength; on the affirmation of your status; on the symbolic effectiveness of the master of the discourse. Excess is essential to legitimize power: a blatant spanking of the serfs, demonstrative luxury, disdain for the law and moral norms.
In this sense, all of the examples of the demonstration of wealth – Putin’s palaces, Patriarch Kirill’s thirty-thousand-dollar Breguet watch, Shuvalov’s dogs on a business jet, lions in the private zoo of the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov – are the attributes of patriarchal power and important arguments in the hierarchy of the state; and the only people to protest about them are Facebook users and a few other active citizens. The majority of the population accept them silently as inevitable peculiarities of their socially favoured lords and masters. As a powerfully effective symbol, Corgi dogs on a private jet not only do not compromise their owner, they underline his right to power and his standing in the system.
The essence of the modern era of the evolution of society in Russia can be defined as the ruling elite irrevocably separating themselves from ‘the people’. They no longer care about creating an image of propriety; on the contrary, they have turned their privileges and personal whims into the norm. All of these lordly mega-projects – from the Winter Olympics and the World Cup to superfast trains and improvements on the streets of Moscow, all taking place at the same time as the dismantling of the social infrastructure and disdain for the needs of the common people which runs through the pronouncements of the higher leadership and deputies – all of this speaks of the final loss of social solidarity and the catastrophic stratification of Russian society as one of the main results of Putin’s counter-reforms.
Over the course of the hundred years since the Revolution of 1917, Russia has tried to create a modern society, built on the principles of solidarity, egalitarianism and the social contract (although in many ways these were merely declared aims, while in the USSR the privilege of status ruled supreme). But since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a landslide of the demodernization of power, society, the economy and the mass consciousness. As a result, Russia is rolling back from modern bureaucracy and from the oligarchic state of the times of early capitalism to feudalist, aristocratic rule, to the appearance of the class of the service nobility, as in the time of the godfather of Russian statehood, Ivan the Terrible. And Igor Shuvalov, with his carefully constructed aristocratic ways, sets a political fashion, albeit in a British way – from the royal Corgis to a house on Whitehall.
If we continue this trend down the staircase of history, we should then pass from the age of the service nobility to patrimonial nobility. It was no coincidence that in 2012 the political scientist, Yevgeny Minchenko, declared the second decade of this century as the ‘dynastic stage’ of the evolution of the system, in which the ruling elite develops the desire to create a hereditary aristocracy, so that they can transfer by inheritance property they have acquired. Only the right of patrimonial nobility could give the elite the guarantees they seek against the next redistribution of property (which will be inevitable when power changes hands again in Russia), and ensure stability and continuity in an era of wars, terrorism and sanctions.
To achieve this, new laws will be needed: hereditary titles and rights; a special judicial status for the new nobility; immunity from justice; guarantees of the inviolability of their private life and their property; classifying information about the aristocracy in registers. It seems that special status will be essential for the animals of the lords and masters, too – just like in the Middle Ages, when a peasant who raised his hand against the master’s dog was sentenced to death. And if a hundred years ago the poet Sergei Yesenin could write a touching message to the dog of Vasily Kachalov, a legendary actor of the Theatre of the Arts, then the poets of the new age could compose an ode to Igor Shuvalov’s dogs. After all, they are a symbol and a role model for modern Russia.
MISSILE MANIA
Moscow, the end of April, late in the evening. At midnight the police have shut off the Garden Ring Road: there’s a rehearsal taking place for the Victory Day Parade on 9 May. There’s electricity in the damp April air: a crowd is standing on the roadside; the police cars are stationary, blue lights flashing. From a long way off comes a deep rumbling sound. A few open military vehicles go past; and then, there IT is: the pride and joy of the Russian lands, the symbol of the might of the state and the jewel in the crown of the Strategic Rocket Forces – the twenty-five-metre long Topol-M missile. Bringing up the rear, at a respectful distance, is a column of BTR armoured personnel carriers. The ground shakes, the windows rattle, and the social networks are abuzz: everyone is excitedly snapping away, tweeting, posting and sending photos of the missile on Instagram. The only thing lacking is the battle cry, like that of the last Red Indians, as they carry this war axe.
Watching these primitive rituals in paying homage to the missile, I thought about the nature of Russian sovereignty, about the collective unconsciousness and the sanctification of strength. The missile is immanent and attached to Russia as part of the state’s armaments, built into the Russian landscape. It even led to a recent scandal with an advertising poster for Aeroflot in the Brussels metro. The poster carried an aerial shot of the Kremlin; but when you looked closely you could see that on the Kremlin Embankment there was a column of Topol missiles. Alarmed locals tried to work out the hidden message behind the poster; some even took it as a thinly disguised threat from Moscow to the European Union. What had most likely happened, however, was that the designer had been searching for a photograph of the capital at its best. This one seemed the most appropriate, and having military hardware on display was an appropriate symbol of the holiday mood, adding a certain national piquancy. The idea that just one five-hundred-kiloton warhead of this piquancy could wipe out the whole of Brussels never even occurred to the designer.