Finally, the Russian fanatics (at least, those who are caught on camera) are readymade products of official propaganda, displaying on their tee-shirts and their bodies all the caricature-like kitsch of the era of the annexation of Crimea and ‘Russia rising up off its knees’: tee-shirts with ‘the little green men’ (the spetsnaz troops with no distinguishing markings on their uniforms who seized Crimea in 2014), and slogans such as ‘We don’t abandon our own’; Russian hats bearing the red star; banners with the roaring bear and Slavic warriors. And as the apotheosis of all this patriotic trash, there is a huge Russian tricolour covering half the stand bearing the words, ‘VSEM PI..DEC’ – ‘F.UCK YOU ALL’: for them, it seems, this is the national idea of this new Russia.
However, these excesses began long before Crimea: the Russian fans saved the most vile displays of great-state chauvinism and racism for their trips abroad. In the Czech Republic, Russian hockey fans unfurled banners with pictures of tanks and promises to repeat the Soviet invasion of 1968; and in the centre of Warsaw in 2012, football fans put on a procession in honour of Russia Day, almost provoking a massive fight with the Polish ‘ultras’. In the stands at football and hockey matches, Russian resentment rises up to its full height, pumped up with beer and propaganda; the Soviet empire taking its symbolic revenge: yes, we lost a great state and still haven’t learnt to play football, but we can still break chairs and ‘slap’ the Europeans around; ‘kick the hell out of the bastards’, as Vladimir Putin said one day, using the language of the fanatics. Ultimately, wasn’t it he who in one of his interviews shared the folk wisdom gleaned from his difficult childhood in the backstreets of Leningrad: ‘get the first punch in’? That’s exactly how the thugs behaved in Marseilles, and in this sense they are worthy representatives of the state: football hooliganism in hybrid Russia is a matter of vital importance for the state.
The term, ‘the thugs’ game’ exactly sums up what is going on: despite the ‘grown-up’ budgets of the clubs and the national team, despite buying world-class star players (the typical strategy of superficial modernization), Russia remains an average country in the world rankings, both in terms of its national championship and the performances of its national team. Just before the start of Euro 2016, our country was twenty-ninth in FIFA’s top fifty world teams. But our fan movement has very quickly and in a very organized way adapted the British model. The books of the English historian of football hooliganism, Dougie Brimson, achieved cult status among Russian football fans. Russia may not have become a football superpower, but it has excelled in the hybrid world of ‘the thugs’ game’, bursting onto the international stage with a deep-rooted culture of violence that is accepted by society.
But Russia is up to that same hybrid ‘thugs’ game’ in Ukraine – not carrying on an open war but delegating the task to well-prepared groups of fighters – and in Syria, interfering in an overseas war in order to demonstrate its strength, and in Europe, betting on populism, separatism and the break-up of European society. ‘The thugs’ game’ is a substitution for the honest game, for real work, for the painstaking development of institutions with simple acts of strength and demonstrations of hooliganism. Our whole society has been playing ‘the thugs’ game’ for years; the hooligans in Marseilles were simply the away team.
THE SOVEREIGN FROM THE BACK STREETS OF ST PETERSBURG
In order to understand the evolution of contemporary Russia, its politics and its society, books about Germany in the 1930s are becoming ever more useful. Even so, the collection put out by the Territoriya budushchego (Future Territory) publishing house, The State: Law and Politics, by the political theorist Carl Schmitt (who was known as ‘the Hobbes of the twentieth century’ and ‘the court lawyer of the Third Reich’) is amazingly relevant.
Schmitt’s works were written at the start of the 1930s, when the Weimar Republic was deep in a constitutional crisis and on the threshold of fascism. As a lawyer, Schmitt proposed subjugating the law to specific political tasks, opposing the abstract legality of the state governed by the rule of law, with the ‘substantial legitimacy’ that comes from having the people united. In the book’s central chapter, ‘The Guarantee of the Constitution’, Schmitt called for the replacement of the multiparty system by just such a ‘substantial order’, where the state acts with a unified will. And for this, he argued, it was essential to have a presidential dictatorship to protect the constitution.
A member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and an active supporter of the Hitler regime, Carl Schmitt died in 1985, aged ninety-six. Even after his death he remains one of the most contradictory figures in modern political theory. On the one hand, his ideas lie at the heart of the right-wing theory of National Socialism. On the other, he exerted a huge influence over all political thought in the twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas to Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek,[23] and even on the modern constitutional structure of the Federal Republic of Germany. Schmitt’s harsh criticism of the interwar liberal world order and of the idealism in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson found resonance at the start of the twenty-first century, when the wonderful liberal world that had risen out of the remains of the Berlin Wall began to fall apart.
American neo-cons and the European ‘new right’ enthusiastically quote Schmitt today; but nowhere has Schmitt’s renaissance been as turbulent and politically significant as in Putin’s Russia. Oleg Kildyushov, who has translated and researched Schmitt, calls him ‘the theoretician of the Russian 2000s’. Political scientists close to the Kremlin are particularly excited by his theory of ‘the state of emergency’. This argues that a politician becomes a sovereign only from that moment when he steps outside the law and declares a ‘state of emergency’, at the same time creating a new norm and receiving a genuine and tangible legitimacy. According to Schmitt, sovereignty means the ability to go outside the boundaries of legalism and abstract law and declare a state of emergency.
This is exactly how Putin’s Russia is behaving today, acting according to the logic of the ‘state of emergency’, tearing up the rule book and expanding the boundaries of its sovereignty. Some were frightened and others euphoric over the annexation of Crimea; but now that we can assess what happened in a sober way, it should be acknowledged that nothing significantly new took place. This was not a ‘Putin 2.0’, nor was it any sort of decisive new direction, capriciousness or madness, which Angela Merkel hinted at when she said that Putin had ‘lost touch with reality’. The President continued to act exactly in the logic of Schmitt’s sovereign, taking a political decision (the word ‘decision’ is key in Schmitt’s thinking) in violation of existing judicial norms. Furthermore, says Schmitt, the sovereign can rely on a host of ‘organic factors’: ‘the will of the people’, tradition, culture, the past, political expediency, emergency conditions – but not on the law, nor on universal human values. Just remember the unexpected ‘asymmetric answer’ by Putin to the terrorist action in Beslan in Ingushetia in 2004, when Chechen terrorists seized a school with one thousand children. In response, Putin cancelled the elections of governors all over Russia. One might well ask, what on earth did the governors have to do with this? But in the paradigm of Schmitt’s sovereign, the most important thing is the act of violating the existing judicial norms so as to declare a state of emergency.
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Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist; Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism; Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, ‘bare life’ and