The breaking point, it seems, was in autumn 2004: first there was the terrorist action in Beslan, where Chechen fighters seized a school, taking around a thousand children hostage, for which President Putin unexpectedly blamed certain forces behind the terrorists who wanted to snatch Russia’s ‘juicy morsels’, clearly meaning the West. Then there was the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in the winter of 2004, when the Kremlin directly blamed the USA for apparently aiming to weaken Russia by tearing away from it its key partner. Putin’s stubborn reluctance to see the real forces and processes that had led to Beslan and to the Maidan (the collapse of the neopatrimonial regimes in the Caucasus and in Kiev, which Moscow supported), and his desire to blame everything on the intrigues of the USA, is typical resentment: an attempt to transfer his own misfortune onto the figure of an external enemy.
On the other level, there is enormous resentment on the part of wide sections of the population who have been unable to adapt to the new reality of the market economy, or to the global flows of finance, information, images, migrants or technology, and who take out their anger on the Russian liberals and reformers. Many political parties expressed the views of these layers of society, from the Communists to ‘A Just Russia’ (a political party), but most of all over the past twenty-five years they have been represented by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, which captured this Russian resentment precisely, with its slogan, ‘For the Russians, for the Poor!’[31] In this catchy slogan, postulated as an axiom, no one stops to explain why the Russians are poor and how they are poorer than, say, the Tajiks, the Moldovans and all the other fellow partners in the post-Soviet transit. Before our very eyes the discourse of offence becomes the dominant one in the social sphere and it becomes a particular genre of Russian politics.
In Brezhnev’s times, a joke did the rounds about Soviet man’s sixth sense: ‘the sense of deep satisfaction’, a cliché used in the propaganda, which he was supposed to experience when he became familiar with the details of a regular congress of the Communist Party. Now it seems that the basic instinct of post-Soviet man is a sense of the opposite kind: deep offence at the outside world.
In the public discourse, there are special groups in whose name offence is created, such as, for example, veterans. It appears that veterans (and not only war veterans, of whom there are very few left, but veterans of labour, the Communist Party or the KGB) form a group with particular reactions, in whose name it is convenient to label and to judge everything. Another offended group is the ‘Orthodox community’, which sees its role as calling out blasphemy in shows, be it Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in Konstantin Bogomolov’s production in the Moscow Arts Theatre, or Jesus Christ Superstar in Rostov. This choir of victims was recently joined by representatives of the siloviki: the security guards at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour experienced ‘moral suffering’ when they witnessed Pussy Riot’s performance.
Soviet speech practices have returned with a vengeance. The authorities have recreated the Soviet practice of orchestrating outraged public opinion: ‘Inhabitants of Tolyatti Against a Memorial to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’; ‘Veterans of Novgorod Offended by the Programmes of the Dozhd[32] television channel.’ This is typical collectivization of speech, the creation of a collective body with its sacramental phrase, ‘I haven’t read Pasternak, but I’m outraged!’, which comes from the times when meetings were held attended by thousands of Soviet citizens to judge the author of Doctor Zhivago, even though they hadn’t actually read the book. This is the body of society that speaks through the mouths of veterans, guards, loyal representatives of the arts and trained journalists at President Putin’s press conferences. A whole class of professional offended people has emerged, which under the impression of ‘speaking for the people’, transmits the will of the ‘owners of the discourse’ and, in doing so, becomes an effective instrument of repression, the pervasive censor of the collective unconscious.
Spreading the discourse of offence, in practice the state cleans the public arena; like a virus, resentment is self-perpetuating in society and produces new prohibitions, taboo subjects and groups of offended citizens. Officially, the regime is not involved; it simply formulates ‘the will of the people’, expressed in various ways through hysteria, denunciations and collective letters – but in reality it moulds this will then goes on to manipulate it.
The myth about Ukrainian fascism grew out of the state’s teenage complexes, the elite’s childish disappointment with the West and the social infantilism of the population. The resentment demanded an object for symbolic revenge: after twenty years of having a go at Gaidar and Chubais, people had already tired of that; the opposition protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011–12 had already been broken up; America was a long way off; and then suddenly there was the Ukrainian Maidan, the mass protests on the Maidan (Independence Square in Kiev; ‘Maidan’ means ‘square’ in Ukrainian) in the winter of 2013–14. For the second time in ten years, Ukraine was daring to ignore its big brother and was trying to tear itself away from the paternalistic paradigm on the way to a bourgeois-democratic revolution and European development. The answer was consolidated Russian resentment, in which the frustrated ambitions of the Kremlin merged with the jealousy of the Russians. Ukraine was declared a traitor, and its treachery was even more offensive because the Ukrainians were supposed to be the Russians’ blood brothers, the closest of all in the Slav family. In accusing Ukraine of treachery, there were clear echoes of the ressentiment of the Weimar Republic and the Dolchstoss im Rücken (‘stab in the back’ theory),[33] which was popular in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; this time it was a European ‘stab in the back’.
The invention of ‘Ukrainian fascism’ was a diabolical triumph for the political technologists, who managed to create the myth about the ‘Banderovites’ and the ‘punishers’ (a reference to the German squads that carried out reprisals following Ukrainian partisan activity during the Second World War) and suggest it to the government and the vast majority of the population through television. For some years now, the whole of Russia, including President Putin, has tended to live as if in an endless TV serial, a parallel reality, where fascists march around Kiev, where Ukrainians, not Donbass rebels, shoot down MH17, and where the West sponsors the ‘Maidan’ revolution, planning to bring Ukraine into NATO and to position the US Sixth Fleet in the Black Sea.
Typically, the use by Russian propaganda of the image of fascism as a synonym for absolute and final evil is the ultimate dehumanization of the enemy. In the Russian discourse, fascism represents the universal value of ‘the Other’; a whole new Russian identity is built on the ideology of the victory over Nazism. An ontologization of the conflict with Ukraine is taking place, making it the struggle of absolute good against absolute evil. And according to Nietzsche, here is where ressentiment creates its own system of values, ‘the moral of the slaves’, which says ‘no’ to everything external and foreign. Mikhail Iampolski remembers the French political philosopher, Étienne Balibar, who described ressentiment as ‘anti-politics’: ‘Anti-politics is not just the result of the crisis of statehood, it is also the product of Nietzschean ressentiment, which has its roots in the inability to act positively. As Nietzsche believed, everywhere we have only pure negativity, a reaction to the resistance of the outside world.’[34]
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