The problem is that the siloviki, who have a complete hold on power in post-Crimea Russia, are capable of thinking and acting only in a space full of threats. All they can do is track, describe and neutralize threats. This is their particular way of dealing with the outside world, where they see only challenges, not possibilities. The siloviki need threats for bureaucratic domination; for obtaining resources and the redistribution of property. Now, though, the Chekist machinery for replicating threats has become a loose cannon and has started to destroy everything around it. It has itself become a threat to Russia’s national security. ‘The threat period’, which our military teacher frightened us with in my childhood, has finally arrived.
CHURCHILL DREAMT IT ALL UP
There’s a national sport in Russia – and it’s not fishing, or checkers or even hockey. It is exposing global conspiracies. From the false ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ about the establishment of world domination by the Jews, to the ‘Dulles Doctrine’ for the moral degradation of Soviet citizens; from the idea that the October Revolution of 1917 was funded by the German General Staff, to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 being planned by the CIA: everywhere we are looking for the false bottom in the suitcase, for secret signs or interests behind the scenes, and we always ask the question, ‘Who gains from this?’ We are perceptive and vigilant, like the patients in the asylum in Vladimir Vysotsky’s song, which said of the Bermuda Triangle: ‘Churchill dreamt all this up in 1918’.[15]
Hearing about the terrorist bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013, our homegrown conspiracy theorists immediately declared it to be a CIA set-up. Bloggers compared photos before and after the explosion and where the policemen were situated and insisted that the wounded could not have been quietly sitting in wheelchairs and that therefore they were simply actors. The television anchor Maxim Shevchenko came right out and said that the scene was part of a secret scenario arranged to cover up the USA’s failed policy in Iraq in order to justify sending American troops into the Caucasus.
Conspiracy theories have always abounded everywhere, but they became particularly popular from the time of the French Revolution, which was said to be either the work of the Masons, or the Illuminati, or the Jews. In America itself there are conspiratorial versions of the murder of President Kennedy; or those that say that the Moon landings were staged on Earth. But wherever they appear, conspiracy theories remain the product of immature or sick minds. In Russia, conspiracy has become the dominant worldview. This can probably be explained historically by the long tradition of a lack of freedom, of serfdom and by the psychology of slavery. Not being responsible for their own fate, people became used to blaming everything that happened on a higher power: the peasantry said it was ‘all due to the nobles’, and the nobles that it was ‘the will of the sovereign’.
Today – when horoscopes are published in newspapers alongside the currency exchange rates; when icons are stuck on the dashboard of every other car (and, at the same time, the driver doesn’t wear his seat belt); and when religious obscurantism dictates laws and court procedures – conspiracy theories are once again troubling Russians’ minds. But what is most frightening of all is that this is becoming state policy.
It all began in 2004, with the terrorist attack in Beslan in Ingushetia, when Chechen fighters seized a school and took the children hostage. Vladimir Putin suddenly announced that this was the machinations of the West, which was trying to snatch Russia’s ‘juicy morsels’. Then there were the protests on Kiev’s Maidan Square, and the carnival of ‘colour revolutions’, from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan to Tbilisi in Georgia. This frightened the Kremlin, which saw the spectre of a global conspiracy by the agents of democratization. Next came Tahrir Square in Cairo and the ‘Arab Spring’… Then suddenly there were the protests on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in the winter of 2011–12, and the paranoia became complete once and for all, producing a locked and hermetically sealed picture of the world. Fantastic scenarios are born in this picture, such as that the West was transferring billions of dollars to Russian NGOs in an attempt to bring about regime change in Russia. This is like Stalin’s picture of the world in 1937, when all the facts incontrovertibly pointed to each other and all together added up to a counterrevolutionary conspiracy; but not a single one of them bore any relation to reality. Nevertheless, this short circuit in the brain, this paranoia of the state, sets the political agenda and reflects the moral atmosphere of a closed and cynical society, where the individual is not free to make his own decisions: ‘the boss’ is behind everything, and everything is done simply for money.
The conspiracy theory is poor and flawed; it does not understand all the complexity, multitude and subjectivity of the contemporary world, where behind all major events there stand not secret forces but many different players, each with their own interests. And these interests are far from always being material ones; people are prepared to sacrifice their personal well-being – and even their lives – for the sake of ideas, taking part in an act of terror or going out onto the streets to protest. Nor is the conspiracy theory prepared to accept that we live in a ‘Risk Society’ (as the German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, wrote); that history is unpredictable and perverse, more likely to obey the law of incompetence and chance than an evil will. As Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, said: ‘Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.’ It seems that we find ourselves right in the middle of that cock-up now.[16]
A RACKETEER WITH ROCKETS
Reasons seem to come thick and fast these days for relations between Russia and the West to pass the point of no return. The international investigation team looking into the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014 confirmed that the aircraft was shot down by a ‘BUK’ missile, brought from Russia and fired from territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists. Immediately in the wake of this report, Western countries held Russia and its Syrian ally, Bashir Assad, responsible for the barbaric bombing of a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo; the French Foreign Ministry described it as ‘a war crime’.
It probably makes sense to point out at this juncture the West’s foresight in ensuring that the Western legal process moves slowly but reliably. And to remember the bombing in 1988 by Libyan special forces of the Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie: it took eleven years before Colonel Qaddafi gave up the suspects and fifteen years before compensation was paid to the families of those who died in this terrorist attack… But even this is not a fair comparison: the analogy with a small country such as Libya doesn’t work, and these latest revelations evoke a sense of déjà vu. Over the past three years there were many such points of no return, and on every occasion Russia and the West crossed yet another ‘red line’ and continued downwards on the slippery slope with mutual accusations and verbal exchanges, as if they were connected by an invisible chain. There will be no Nuremberg Trials, nor Hague Tribunals, nor, indeed, any other tribunal. What is much more likely is that Russia can expect trials in absentia lasting many years, and convictions, and demands for payment of multimillion-dollar compensation – all of which, of course, Russia will refuse to acknowledge. This will start a new round of sanctions, rows over the seizure of Russian assets abroad and litigation drawn out over years, if not decades. A better parallel to draw than Lockerbie is the tragedy of the Korean airliner shot down by a Soviet fighter jet over Sakhalin on 1 September 1983. To this day, there has never been a full explanation of what happened, no one has been held responsible, and you can no longer find on the map of the world the country that shot down the aircraft.
15
Vladimir Vysotsky was a popular singer of ballads in the 1960s and 1970s whose often humorous songs were regarded as being on the edge of what was acceptable to the Communist leadership. http://vysotskiy-lit.ru/vysotskiy/stihi-varianty/317.htm. Letter to the Editor (in Russian).