Coming to meet this anti-modernist wave is a growing civil wave of a totally different hue, characterized best of all by the ‘I’m not afraid to speak out’ flash mob and the revelations of the girls of School No. 57 – a spontaneous modernizing network, linked by both freedom of expression and the removal of taboos. Thanks to social networks, people are breaking the ages-old vow of silence and coming out with their personal stories, which tear away the authority of the principal patriarchal institutes: the family and the school, and the orders of closed groups (be they a clan of relatives or an elite educational institution). They are throwing down a challenge to power, which is much stronger than the state Leviathan. This is the power of tradition, written into the very grammar of the language, in the fear to violate spoken etiquette, in the judgement of the collective (‘everyone does it like this’; ‘there was no need to be provocative’; ‘don’t wash your dirty linen in public’; ‘the most important thing is to preserve the school (or the family)’). All these figures of speech preserve the patriarchal contract even more strongly than the OMON riot police and the Church – and it is against them that these first flash mobs are rebelling. Their language is that of the body: the body is speaking about its independence, its maturity, pain and fear; about the right to choose and the right to speak out.
There is a political logic in this. Where you have an authoritarian regime that has completely cleared the political field, the body becomes the frontline in the battle between the individual and the state. The body is the final frontier, which the state still cannot take over completely in the way that it can take political and civil freedoms. The anatomical protest becomes the answer to the state’s biopolitics; and in this sense the symbol, slogan and brand of this new era of political protest has become the name ‘Pussy Riot’ – literally the uprising of the female being.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that political discussions in Russia revolve around ‘female’ themes. Historically, it is the female body that has been much more repressed, marked out and objectivized than the male body, and today it is the female body (even more precisely, its reproductive organs as the receptacle for the traditional idea of the role of woman as a machine for bearing children) that has become the arena for the battle between the biopolitics of power and the biopolitical protest of the individual. It is here that the gender gesture becomes a civil and a political statement. In essence, it is a battle for sovereignty and for what we understand by this word: the sovereignty of a patriarchal state symbolized by the ritual carrying of a phallic symbol – the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile along the streets of Moscow during military parades – or the sovereignty of the individual, which is born out of Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche – the eternal female depths.
A FOUR-BY-FOUR AS A TEACHING AID
A new bizarre moral dispute is taking place in Russia: this time, everyone’s arguing over whether a driver, Vladimir Belsky, from the town of Priozersk in the Leningrad Region, was right to chase down in his four-by-four a group of boys who had fired plastic balls at his car. He knocked down one of them, ten-year-old Vanya Shchegolyov, then made him kneel while he waited for the police to arrive, before handing him over to them. Didn’t he go a little over the top in teaching the boy a lesson (it turned out that the lad had concussion from falling on the road and later lost consciousness)? Wouldn’t it have been better to punish the parents for allowing their child to play on the road? What about the school?
Everything in this story reads like some kind of grotesque fantasy; yet it is all so familiar. Children playing on the dirty spring road after school. A nasty driver in a four-wheel drive, who knocks over a child and then forces him to kneel for half an hour, crying, until the police arrive. The police, who interrogate the boy and then take him back to his parents – but don’t say a word about the fact that he’s been knocked down. But most surprising of all were all the comments on social media supporting – no, not the boy! – but the driver, for giving the lad a good lesson that you should never damage someone else’s property and that you have to answer for your actions.
Russians’ pathological fetishism for their cars is well known. People put their own personality into their vehicles, as well as their own privacy (hence the desire for darkened windows, even though the Russian climate isn’t exactly spoilt by too much sunshine). They invest them with their own rights, notably that you can’t violate my individuality. The car – especially if it’s a black four-by-four – is an extension of the Russian’s own body; it is sacred and unpredictable, and anyone encroaching on this body must be swiftly and demonstratively punished. This leads to hysterical reaction to any wear and tear or chipped paintwork, which in turn leads to aggressive behaviour while sorting out any incident on the road, and to traffic jams stretching back kilometres because two drivers have stopped in the middle of the road to argue over a tiny scratch.
Russians accept violence against their person far more readily: crushes on public transport or in queues; the inability to maintain a distance during a conversation and respect the other’s personal space; drunken brawls and beatings at the hands of the police; assault and battery in the home – all of this is the norm in a society where all social transactions are defined by brute force. But people won’t tolerate anything that harms their car or even the space around it. Recently, when I was parking on a Moscow street, I came close to the car behind me, and was subjected to an aggressive shout from the driver who was sitting in the car: ‘And how am I supposed to get out?’ This despite the fact that behind him was an empty space of nearly a metre; but he took anyone coming close to his vehicle as a threat.
What we have here is a transfer of the principle of habeas corpus from the individual to the vehicle. The car becomes the carrier of the citizen’s body not only as a marker of identity and the uncrossable line where they mustn’t be touched, but as an instrument of aggression, giving greater possibilities or else compensating for the shortcomings and complexes of its owner. When you buy these extra kilogrammes of metal and horse-power (and it’s crucial that you have a foreign four-wheel drive; it’s possible that the incident in Priozersk could have happened with a small Russian-made car, but it is far less likely), the owner receives extra rights along with the car, including the right to be aggressive. In Russian traffic there is a strict hierarchy of vehicles, based on their cost, the size of the engine, the size of the car, the colour, the number plates and, of course, the flashing light on the roof – the special blue light given to representatives of the organs of power. In such a hierarchy, a small boy who dares to raise his hand against the black four-by-four of a local businessman deserves a suitable punishment; and according to this logic, the driver is behaving correctly – going after him over the grass, knocking down the young hooligan, making him kneel and calling the police. Everything, in fact, like in a real gangster film.