The problem, clearly, lies in the binary nature of Russian thinking, noted by the late twentieth-century philologist and semiotician, Yury Lotman. In one of his later works, Culture and Explosion, Lotman talks about the typical black and white Russian view of the world: ‘He who is not with us is against us’; it’s us and them; Russia versus the outside world. A war rages between these two positions – for the Olympics, for social networks, history, faith, memory. In this battle, the state tries to claim all the significant national symbols: the Great Patriotic War and the Victory in 1945, spaceflights and sporting achievements. Any alternative point of view is dismissed as traitorous: either you accept these events with all the glory of the state or you are condemned as a slanderer: there can be no spots on the Sun. It is impossible to honour the Victory in the Second World War, but at the same time cast doubts on the role of Stalin; it is impossible to revel in the Olympics, yet at the same time to speak about theft, the destruction of homes, the forced resettlement of local residents and the destruction of homeless dogs in Sochi ahead of the Olympics. War is war.
Here we should remember Lotman’s warning that binary structures are doomed to lead to a catastrophic resolution of conflicts, to self-destruction and to a total explosion. We will collapse as a country if we do not put a stop to this spiral of hatred and polarization; it is a civil war in the making. We need to look for a way out in an acceptance of a multilayered reality. As Lotman wrote, European culture is resistant because it is ternary. It rests on the idea of overcoming binary structures, of allowing for a third position that accepts both of the others. It’s like in the joke about the wise rabbi, who says to the two men who are arguing: ‘You are right; and you are right, too.’ And when a third man asks, ‘How can that be, rabbi?’, he replies: ‘And you are right as well.’
The Olympics is a gigantic carnival where Russia appears in all its greatness and its provinciality, where fifty or sixty billion dollars are turned into a giant hecatomb, like the Great Pyramid of Giza, rebuilt in the spirit of the eternal Russian desire to prove something to the world. It is a combination of the work of world-class producers of mass spectacles and Asiatic Gastarbeiter who have no rights; wonderful architecture but poor finishing; selfless volunteers and indifferent bureaucrats; a mix of global ambitions and parochial bluff. In this schizophrenia, no doubt, there is also the essence of the Russian soul, which is capricious and paradoxical; just like holding the Winter Olympics in the subtropics.
THE THUGS’ GAME
They’re celebrating yet another victory in Russia. On the eve of the first match in the European Football Championship 2016, a couple of dozen Russian fans chased away a much larger group of English fans in the Old Port in Marseilles. The next day, immediately after the match, they started a pogrom in the stands where the English fans were, beating everyone they could get their hands on, including families and elderly people. The results were upsetting. At least thirty-five people were injured, and one fifty-year-old English fan was hit over the head with a crowbar and died. By way of punishment UEFA threatened the Russian team with expulsion from the tournament and fined the Russian Football Union 150,000 Euros, taking into account also the racist behaviour of the Russian fans during the match. The Russian fans were the first item in world news; but wasn’t that exactly what they wanted?
Perhaps this disgraceful episode did not deserve such attention: ‘The thugs’ game’,[21] as the movement of football thugs has become known, long ago turned into a safari park of violence and a close relative of world war; fans of all countries fight and cause trouble. This can even lead to carnage, such as the tragedy at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, when thirty-nine people died. That led to all English clubs being excluded from UEFA competitions for five years. Indeed, Marseilles remembers only too well the English fans at the World Cup in 1998, when they started a fight against Tunisian fans, which smashed up half the city. But here’s the difference: whereas in England society and politicians alike condemn such outrageous behaviour by the fans, in Russia these football hooligans are presented almost like national heroes. The correspondent of the newspaper Sovietsky Sport, Dmitry Yegorov, carried out a live transmission of the carnage on Twitter, commentating on it as if it were a football match, lauding the organization and physical fitness of the Russians. Social networks were full of praise for the Russian fans ‘slapping’ the English softies and standing up for Russia like the three hundred Spartans; one sports journalist even put out on Twitter that he was ashamed of the Russian fans who didn’t take part in the beatings.
Even more interesting was that the Russian thugs were supported by high-ranking officials, from the representative of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Vladimir Markin, to the Duma deputy and member of the Executive Committee of the Russian Football Union, Igor Lebedev. And here one has to acknowledge a very unpleasant thing: the fans in Marseilles were representing perfectly the official policy and mass consciousness of post-Crimean Russia.
They carried out the same hybrid war that is so popular in our propaganda, when well-prepared fighters trained in hand-to-hand combat are sent into Crimea or the Donbass under the guise of ‘soldiers on leave’; when violence is carried out selectively and purposefully; and when attacks take place in unexpected places. Rumours abounded on the Internet about how, on many of the video clips, these Russian fans looked so muscular, organized and sober that they could almost have been spetsnaz soldiers from military intelligence; but let’s leave that theory to conspiracy lovers. What certainly appears to be the case is that in Marseilles an organized group of fighters, the ‘Ultras’ (as the organized fans who go to fight are known), gathered from various ‘firms’ of fans and schooled in street battles, attacked the ‘casuals’ – ordinary English fans. Some of these English fans had their families with them. What’s more, they were tanked up on beer and had come there not to fight but to cheer for their team and enjoy themselves. One of the Russian fans came straight out in an interview and admitted that our fans had gone there to fight: ‘It doesn’t matter which towns our fans are from or which team they support. All that matters is that we’re from Russia and we’re going to fight the English fans. They reckon that they’re the biggest football hooligans. We’re here to show that the English fans are just girlies.’
So even if the Russian attack wasn’t a well-planned military operation, there is fertile ground for rumours to start. For Russia this was not the first ‘hybrid’ interference in social movements in Europe; others include organizing protests and spreading propaganda, influencing the media, subtly stirring up anti-immigrant sentiments, cooperating with right-wing radicals and neofascist movements and supporting odious populists and separatism in European regions. Just as when the Comintern[22] existed the USSR carried out subversive activities in the countries of the West, so Russia is getting into the cracks and splits within European society, trying to weaken the West from the inside, and explaining this as a total ‘information war’; and the nervous Europeans see these Russian fans exactly in that light.
Second, football fans really are one of the Russian state’s fighting groups. The state is irresistibly drawn to these dressed-up actors who like to put on a display of strength: Cossacks, bikers and football fans. Representatives of these tough male brotherhoods drink tea in the offices of high-ranking officials. They are held up as examples of patriotism and are given government grants for the development of civil society; and when necessary they are sent to support the ‘Russian Marches’ with the nationalists or to attack opposition rallies. In all this, the football hooligans are as far away from the traditions of football as the so-called ‘Orthodox bikers’ are from rebellion and the freedom of the ‘easy riders’; and the pot-bellied Cossacks with their stuck-on forelocks are from the honour and glory of the Russian Cossack tradition; these are all carnival fakes of the Putin era. In the conditions of total simulation of civil society in modern Russia, these protest countercultures become the representatives of pathetic officialdom, official patriotism and the fat cats who receive government grants.
21
The Russian term is ‘
22
The Communist International (Comintern), known also as the Third International (1919–43), was an international organization led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that advocated world communism and carried out subversive acts to try to bring this about.