The deliberate chasing after the child; the concussion; the horror and the humiliation that he experienced; being made to kneel in the slush for half an hour; the terror of being interrogated by the police – in a word, the trauma of all this, which could affect him for the rest of his life, all comes from the vicious lessons of the street, repeating the eternal models of power and violence in the Russian space. I remember when I was about nine years old, in the blissful 1970s, I was playing near our house in Moscow. I’d just made a snowman and was throwing snowballs at it. Accidentally, one of them hit a passing car. Out jumped a guy and came straight at me and hit me in the face. He broke my nose and cut my lip. Then he swore at me and drove off. Somewhere in the far-off and decaying United States he could have been given twenty years for that; but in Russia that’s called acting like a man. I put some fresh snow on my nose, stopped the bleeding, and went home blubbing. In such cases, nothing changes in Russia. The law that was recently passed in the Duma decriminalizing domestic violence in Russia, which has already been criticized by the European Union, is a tribute to the archaic patriarchal traditions of male domination and an upbringing which humiliates and destroys women, children and anyone who is weak.
But there is another side to the story in Priozersk. The children were firing plastic balls from a toy rifle, imitating the computer game ‘Grand Theft Auto’ (GTA), which is based on street battles. The problem here is that in the education of Russian children the cult of the weapon and the glorification of war have not been thought through and no one doubts the need for it. The multiplicity of toy guns and computer shooting games; children’s beds that look like tanks; morning exercises in kindergarten, where the children wear military hats and tops with pretend medals on them; and the main thing, when the toy guns are replaced by real ones, taking children through their teenage years – in school, at firing ranges, in lessons of military training and security issues; and then on to the conscription process and into the army. The necessity for the whole male population to be able to use a gun is a controversial topic that deserves wider discussion; but at least they could instil into the minds of a young man or a girl from their school lessons on military training and the initial training unit that what they have in their hands is a deadly weapon. For young children, holding a rifle in their hands means no more than holding a rattle or a magic wand, for which they have been taught no responsibility whatsoever.
Here we must question the whole system of symbolic violence, through which any person is socialized, but especially a small boy from whom society demands that he ‘becomes a man’. Shooting ranges and the biathlon have become the paramilitary fun of an era of mass armies; and paintball, an outlet for modern workers slaving away in offices. But these popular amusements actually legitimize weapons and the point of these weapons, which is to penetrate, to harm and to kill. It is no coincidence that many educational systems, such as the Waldorf System, carefully protect children from any kind of weapons, from the very concept of taking in your hands something that could – even in a pretend way – cause pain or death to any living creature. When someone plays with a rifle, they develop the idea of the rights of the strong man. And when they grow up, they can easily get behind the wheel of a black four-by-four and start to crush everything around them, from the grass to small cars.
None of this, of course, justifies the actions of the driver from Priozersk, nor does it lessen the sympathy for the child, whatever he was playing. It is simply that in this incident on the dirty Russian roadside there was a short circuit, something that brought together the circle of violence, which includes children’s games with weapons, our military-patriotic education, beatings in the family and the aggression of drivers. The subject of ‘shooting games’ like GTA has come off the computer screen onto the street. And just the same sort of scenes from another shooting-game, ‘World of Tanks’, has burst out onto the streets of towns in Ukraine, with Russian tanks in the Donbass. Because symbolic and pretend violence sooner or later turns real and deadly.
A RUSSIAN POTLATCH
In the summer of 2015, in the twenty-fifth year of Russia’s independence and the second year of the embargo on foodstuffs (a ban on bringing into the country products from countries carrying out economic sanctions against Russia), our country strengthened its sovereignty by the demonstrative destruction of sanctioned products. Thousands of tons of European cheese, fruits and meat products were cast into the fires of mobile crematoria or crushed by bulldozers. The very pinnacle of this struggle for sovereignty was the destruction by a bulldozer of the carcasses of three frozen Hungarian geese in Tatarstan. The film-clip of this immediately went viral.
This media spectacle was an instant success. No one could be indifferent to the spectacle of burning cheese and crushed fruits. It really touched a nerve; it appealed to the genetic memory of a nation that throughout history has frequently gone hungry. From a political point of view, this action achieved the maximum effect. We saw the energetic young customs officer reporting on what he was doing; we heard television commentators obediently blaming the destruction of the products on a Western virus that would be a threat to the health of the nation. Meanwhile, Russian Facebook was indignant about the amoral destruction of food and began to gather signatures for a petition to say that it should be given to needy citizens – this at the same time as these same citizens were gathering up the squashed peaches in order to turn them into home-made vodka or samogon.
In fact, this has nothing to do with food safety in Russia, nor the effectiveness of the embargo, nor EU farmers. ‘The forbidden fruit’ still found its way to the shelves, and most likely will continue to do so through a third country, taxed by an even higher corruption fee. Salmon and oysters will still appear for sale from that great seafaring power, Belarus. The European Union did not suffer either: in the year of the Russian embargo, exports of foodstuffs from the EU rose by 5 per cent, thanks to increased sales to China and the USA. The bonfires of the product inquisition will soon die away, the customs and supervisory officials will also cool off and find new ways to extract corrupt dues, and the media will obediently turn to attacking new enemies. Why was this whole circus necessary?
This is just symbolic politics, or, to put it more simply, trolling. Trolling of the West; trolling of the Russian opposition, which protested, as they knew they would; and a way of frightening retailers, who in the course of the year had already found a multitude of loopholes to get round the sanctions. The state has been carrying out widespread trolling for a number of years already: the Kremlin bots from the ‘Troll Factory’ in Olgino in St Petersburg are simply a caricature of state policy. With the absence of any political will and strategic thinking, and with a shrinking resource base, trolling represents the thoughts and the main method of state policy; the real Olgino is situated in the Kremlin and in the home of the State Duma on Okhotny Ryad. There is nothing behind this but a desire to muddle public discussion, to provoke the opponent (or the opposition) and to throw disruptive ideas into the political field.
There is a fundamental weakness at the root of the Kremlin’s trolling: because the state is unable to cope with the challenges of the outside world, or even with its own society, it puts all its efforts into propaganda and the creation of information ‘bombs’. It creates a constant flow of information in the media, trying to have a finger in every pie, just like the troll who joins an online forum in order to break up a serious discussion. Russia is unable to oppose the West in a military sense, so instead it rolls out its Topol-M intercontinental missile in parades, flies its ageing Tu-95 strategic bombers and encourages conversations about ‘radioactive ash’ – like TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, who was threatening the nuclear annihilation of the United States. Its unsubtle nuclear trolling makes it look like North Korea. It carries out similar trolling in Europe, secretly financing the most odious and marginal allies, from right-wing radicals to separatists, in an attempt to sow discord among Western societies and politics.