The crusade for cleanliness began fifteen years ago after the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, when the authorities spoke about the ‘orange infection’, and the main strongman in the country became the Chief Sanitary Inspector, Gennady Onishchenko, who banned the import of Moldovan wines, then of Georgian mineral water, then of American chicken legs, depending on the demands of the day. In the course of these ten years the country did not actually get any cleaner; but hygiene and the cult of the clean body grew to become a mass political campaign with military sports camps of the pro-Kremlin youth movement, Nashi (‘Our people’); with Putin meeting patriotic young athletes; and with the President visiting the ‘Pankration’ ‘no rules’ fights, with their classic male torsos on display. Not surprisingly, the heroes of the day, looking out at us from the advertising hoardings, were the Russian fighters Nikolai Valuyev and Fyodor Yemelyanenko.
At the same time, the nationalists became interested in health and social hygiene: their main topic became eugenics and demography, and they held marches with the slogan, ‘Being Russian means being sober’. Back in 2005, Dmitry Rogozin (now a deputy prime minister) put a call in an election video for his party ‘Rodina’ (‘Motherland’) ‘to clean Moscow of rubbish’ (meaning get rid of people from the Caucasus, who are known as ‘blacks’). This has now become a reality, with raids carried out by skinheads in army boots, to clear the streets of the city of ‘scum’ (as they call Asian immigrants) and the homeless; and ‘sanitary’ raids by dog hunters to destroy stray dogs.
Finally, the Russian Orthodox Church joined in the battle for hygiene, preaching sermons about celibacy outside marriage, promoting the family and the procreation of children. In response to the Western feast of St Valentine’s Day, they brought in the Orthodox feast of Peter and Veronica, sacred patrons of the family. And advertisements assure us that the best protection against AIDS is not a condom but abstinence and marital fidelity.
In Vladimir Putin’s third term, the crusade for cleanliness was formalized in a series of laws against alcohol, tobacco, swearing, ‘homosexual propaganda’, ‘foreign agents’ and other ‘evils’. Laws were passed placing age limits on television programmes and censoring the Internet, thus beginning a battle for digital hygiene. It would be naive to suggest that this was all the work of the State Duma: in reality, all these laws helped to formulate the protective sanitary line of the Kremlin. At the same time, the state’s priorities in the area of reproductive policy were clearly spelt out. One of Putin’s first decrees on the day of his inauguration for his third term in office in May 2012 was ‘On measures for the fulfilment of the demographic policy of the Russian Federation’, in which the government was ordered to ‘raise the summary coefficient of the birth rate to 1.753 by the year 2018’. And in Putin’s instruction to the Federal Assembly in December 2012, demographic policy played a key role and it was announced that, ‘in Russia the norm should become three children in a family’.
The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, described such intensive attention on the part of the government to issues of hygiene, nutrition the birth rate and sexuality as ‘biopolitics’. The state regards the population simply as a collection of bodies; it is biological capital, which it can regulate and multiply, and from which it can make a profit. Biopolitics is a higher form of sovereignty: the state appropriates the bodies of its citizens and then interferes in areas that, up until then, had been considered private matters, such as sex, choosing what to eat and drink, food, domestic life, smoking, the spoken language and social network interaction. This unceremonious interference by the state in private life, under the banner of ‘the battle for a healthy way of life’ is nothing less than repressive hygiene.
Biopolitics flourishes in totalitarian and fascist states. In the Third Reich, the idea of ‘racial hygiene’ included: sorting out the ‘genetic rubbish’, such as homosexuals, the mentally ill, the disabled and ‘lesser races’ (like the Jews, gypsies and Slavs); the fight against smoking; the cult of children and youth; and supporting the healthy Aryan family. All of this was supplemented by the simultaneous cult of the body as epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl, mass rallies and the Olympic Games. Stalin’s USSR carried out similar biopolitics: abortion and homosexuality were criminalized; having large families was made a virtue of state policy and awards were handed out for having many children; and World War Two veterans who had lost arms and legs – of which there were many – were carted off to special facilities, where they simply disappeared from view. Instead of racial hygiene and ‘the Aryan family’, there was class hygiene and ‘the Komsomol wedding’.
In today’s Russia, biopolitics is the continuation of the traditional approach to resources. The state takes and disposes of resources, labelling them ‘strategic’ (in other words, not for private use). Just as with oil and gas, the population has become a strategic resource, and the state’s biopolitics means the strategic enlargement of the population, in order to fill out Russia’s empty spaces and to increase its weight on the world stage. It is only the size of the population and not the quality of life that is the strategic argument for a resource-minded state.
Under the logic of biopolitics it is easy to understand (though in no way approve of) the ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’, which forbids US citizens from adopting Russian orphans, in practice making these children into hostages of the state. This is not just about the orphans’ right to happiness and a family, this is about the state’s right to deal with its population as it wishes. Orphans, including disabled orphans, suddenly become a strategic resource, mere biological material, which can be used as an ‘asymmetric answer’ to America. From the point of view of humanity, this law is pure cannibalism; but in terms of biopolitics it is a rational resource approach: in exactly the same way as we occasionally turn off the gas tap to Ukraine to make that country more compliant, and in the 1970s we used to turn on and off the Jewish emigration tap as a great power trade-off with America. We no longer have the Jews at our disposal; all we have left are the orphans.
Biopolitics also explains another law that has caused commotion in society: the law banning so-called ‘gay propaganda’. It’s not because of the retrograde homophobia of a large part of the Russian population; it’s because the state sees homosexuality as an infringement of its reproductive policy. Any sexual activity that does not bring about an increase in the population is considered ‘unclean’ and should be banned by law. According to this same logic, therefore, condoms are also unclean, and so conservatives are trying to restrict their sale. Should we now expect Old Testament laws forbidding masturbation?
The state’s new Orthodox hygiene policy is designed to turn the population into an obedient mass, which is loyal to the idea of the family and dutifully produces children, and which has turned its back on polygamy, contraception, homosexuality and other attractions of the devil. The most important thing here is not the quality of life; it’s the number of children you have.
The paradox and the cynicism of the situation is that modern Russian biopolitics bears no relation to biology (since it is based on wholly false assertions, such as that homosexuality is not ‘normal’), nor does it improve the health of the nation, as it is accompanied by a radical cutting back of state financing of the health system and the destruction once and for all of free Soviet healthcare. Biopolitics is above all a matter of politics and ideology, the privatization of the human resource, the disciplining of the collective body of the nation. It is the drawing up of the state’s sanitary contours, the task of which, as in times past, is to discipline and punish.