Just about all of the authorities’ decisions over the past ten years fit into this logic, from altering the constitutional moratorium on two presidential terms right up to the ‘Bolotnaya Affair’ (the repression of people who took part in the protest meetings on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in 2012), and the prison sentence for Pussy Riot (two years in jail for singing a punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow): these were all ‘state of emergency’ actions, a violation of accepted conventions and norms for the sake of a symbolic assertion of sovereignty. For a while, this logic worked solely within the country, causing merely a few standard reprimands from the West about the authoritarian drift of the Russian state. The case with Ukraine, however, saw internal policy spill over onto the outside, shocking the world. But the Crimean gambit showed exactly the same sovereign logic of the ‘state of emergency’ by citing ‘the will of the people’, only this time it meant violating not the Russian Constitution but international law, undermining not the social consensus within the country but the international order. Looking back at Putin’s actions over the previous ten years one could see that the annexation of Crimea (or a similar piece of foreign policy adventurism) was inevitable.
At the same time, it is interesting to see how Carl Schmitt’s theory fits into typical Russian sociocultural practice. The objective logic of Schmitt’s sovereign, which causes Putin constantly to alter the game’s scenario (from where we get his trademark ‘unpredictability’) and to tear up the template in order to show his superiority over his opponents, apparently coincides with his subjective beginnings, with his ‘lads’’ (patsany) view of his status, which he brought from the backstreets of Leningrad in the 1960s, preserving the language and the romanticism of the St Petersburg criminal underworld (they would be known today as ‘city ghettos’). This concept is well understood by the vast majority of the male population of Russia, who are concerned less with what they can make of their lives and more with the ceaseless promotion of their own status. In Russia you have to be a ‘real lad’ (patsan): to know how to put down (humiliate even) your enemy; to stand on your own dignity; to show no sign of weakness; and to answer for your own words. According to this logic, it’s important to be able to break the law; indeed, it’s this arrogance and preparedness to break the law that marks out a real ‘lad’ from a ‘nerd’ (‘ordinary man’).
For Putin, who came from the sleazy world of the St Petersburg backstreets and who loves to show off that he knows the foul language of the criminal fraternity (remember his famous phrase, ‘we’ll wipe out the terrorists in the shit house’[24]) these status games are second nature. This typical Russian disdain for norms and rules so that you can assert your own status can be seen at every level of society: it might be displayed by cutting out your business partner; by overtaking a car that’s cut you up and thus punishing the other driver; or by stealing land from an annoying neighbour. In this way the logic of the backstreet bandit becomes the logic of Schmitt’s sovereign and the ‘code’ of the criminal underworld which formulates contemporary Russian politics.
PUTINISM AND QUESTIONS OF LINGUISTICS
A new enemy has appeared on the scene for the Russian authorities: the English language. A scandal erupted in the State Duma over a speech made by deputy Dmitry Gudkov in the US Senate in March 2013, which was critical of Russia. When he returned to Russia, the Duma Ethics Commission recommended that he be removed from the Duma on the grounds that his speech ‘was written and delivered in English’. Furthermore, Gudkov was charged with preparing his text in good English; in the opinion of the deputies this could be a sign of high treason.
Around the same time, the Chairman of the Cultural Commission of the Russian Federation Public Chamber, Pavel Pozhigaylo, who served in the Strategic Rocket Forces and also in the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Russian Armed Forces, gave an interview to the Voice of Russia radio station, where he said with military directness: ‘We have a small population and a serious demographic situation. So I am absolutely certain that for a period of time we shouldn’t teach foreign languages at all, so that people don’t leave the country. The Russian language is all they need. Russian literature is all they need.’[25]
In Soviet times having bad English was a good sign for people in authority. Die-hard Soviet international affairs specialists Valentin Zorin, Yevgeny Primakov and Georgy Arbatov knew the language perfectly, but in international meetings they would speak with a heavy Russian accent in which you could hear the arrogance of a superpower: if you need to know what I’m saying, you’ll get it. And if we dig down even deeper, into the Stalinist era, then, according to a number of witnesses, foreigners in Moscow in the late 1930s were afraid to be heard speaking their own language on the street because they could immediately be arrested as spies.
In the 1990s and at the start of the twenty-first century there appeared among Russian politicians and in the business community bright young people with degrees from Harvard and who spoke wonderful English. They mixed on a par with their partners in the G8 and the World Trade Organization (WTO); but they are not the ones today who set the tone in Putin’s Russia with its Chekist vigilance and its paranoid searches for ‘foreign agents’ and ‘the hand of the US State Department’. The patriotic revelations of Pozhigaylo and the Duma’s démarche about Gudkov are typical of the political discourse in modern Russia, in which anti-Western pathos, cultural isolationism and aggressive provinciality have become the norm.
Russia has fallen way behind when it comes to foreign languages and overseas contacts. According to research carried out by the organization EF, English First, on the knowledge of English in forty-four countries where English is not the official language, Russia came thirty-second, behind the other BRIC countries, China, India and Brazil. According to data from sociologists from the Public Opinion Foundation, only 17 per cent of Russians know any foreign language; and a mere 20 per cent have ever been abroad (and that includes the countries of the former Soviet Union and largely Russian-speaking resorts in Turkey and Egypt). Statistics from the Federal Migration Service show that only 15 per cent of Russians hold a foreign travel passport, and only about half of those use it regularly.
It is almost impossible to hear a foreign language in the cinema or on television: all films and foreign programmes are dubbed. The dubbing industry is flourishing. The best actors and pop stars are brought in for this, and their names appear on the billboards in larger letters than the names of the director and the cast. Films in the original language with subtitles are shown only in selected cinemas in Moscow, or at closed screenings. It is a fact that hiring and watching films with subtitles is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of studying foreign languages, as the experience of North European countries and the Netherlands shows, where virtually the whole population has a good knowledge of English, especially the younger generation.
24
A phrase uttered by Putin during a press conference in September 1999, commenting on the Russian air force bombing of the Chechen capital Grozny.
25
https://pora-valit.livejournal.com/1258484.html. ‘Time to call a halt? Everything you need to know about emigration’ (in Russian), Voice of Russia radio station, 21 March 2013.