Russia’s war in Ukraine is an example of anti-politics, of pure negativity, based on a feeling of personal loss; compensation both for the elite’s inferiority complex in relation to the West, and the people’s loss concerning the conditions of their own life. The state can’t change Russia’s role on the international stage with the help of ‘soft power’ or quality economic growth, and it cannot achieve respect or recognition from its partners. The vast majority of the population, trapped within the framework of the class system that Putin has restored, is also unable to break out from the bounds of state paternalism (in reality, class slavery) and social parasitism, a syndrome of trained helplessness. The symbolic compensation was the creation of a dreamt-up enemy in the image of Ukraine and dreamt-up victories: the annexation of Crimea and the creation of the pirate republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. But from the broader point of view, the popular slogan ‘Crimea is ours!’ and the actual seizure of southeast Ukraine became ‘the march of the losers’. This is the final parade of the forces that have suffered an historical defeat in the battle with globalization. They have lost in the clash with the open society and with the mobilization of citizens, with the Internet and with the European Union, with modern art and the financial markets, with ‘soft power’ and with complex structures. Crimean resentment is a contract of the state with a critical mass of people who are unable to adapt; it is an apology for weakness, the defensive reaction of a fading nature, an historical dead-end.
The irony of the situation is that these dreamt-up resentful offences become real. Russia called up the ghosts of confrontation so zealously that, as a result, it was put under sanctions, which are having a negative effect on the economy and the standard of living. Russia’s geopolitical specialists scared us so wonderfully with fairytales about NATO expanding into Ukraine that, as a result of their paranoid politics, they turned Ukraine into a hostile country and obtained a decision by NATO to widen its military presence and set up permanent bases in the Baltic States. And Putin took offence against the West over such a long period and so demonstratively that the West eventually answered him in kind, turning Russia into a pariah state. Resentment is a vicious circle, which gives rise to hostility all around: as the saying goes, ‘one who takes offence hurts only himself’.
The only prospect is of Russia’s inevitable collision with reality, healing itself of its empty ambitions, imagined offence and its inferiority complex, and coming to terms with its status as a mediocre country of average income. Lord Skidelsky described these perspectives in an article, explaining the idea that there will be no world war with the West for resources, and that the West’s only wish is to see a stable and non-aggressive Russia, even if it has an authoritarian government. All that remains is to hope that Russia’s recovery from its post-Soviet resentment does not prove to be as tortuous and bloody as was Germany’s healing process to recover from its Weimar ressentiment.
THE FLOWER REVOLUTION
A strong wind is blowing across the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge and a snowstorm is swirling all around. Spring is a month late coming to Moscow, as if agreeing with the authorities’ decision to switch Russia to ‘permanent Winter time’: in October 2014, President Putin ended the practice of the country changing over to summer time. In March, the frosts set in, it snowed again, and this April night it’s as cold as winter. Heavy snowflakes are swirling around in the spotlights above the walls of the Kremlin, over the Spassky Tower – which is covered in scaffolding as it is being restored, and looks like a grim gigantic ziggurat – and over Red Square, beyond which, like a phantom, the shining lights of the GUM shopping arcade are visible. At one o’clock at night the bridge is empty, there are neither cars nor people, and only around the improvised memorial at the spot where Boris Nemtsov was murdered is there a group of volunteers, protecting the memorial from hooligans and vandals. This people’s memorial made out of fresh flowers has already been destroyed a few times by unidentified workers wearing plain clothes, from the city’s street-cleaning department, and by hooligan pro-government activists – but every time that has happened the memorial has sprung up again and people have continued to bring flowers, posters, portraits of Nemtsov and Russian flags, which have once again become the symbol of the opposition movement, just as it was when the USSR was collapsing in 1991.
The opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, was shot on the bridge by Chechen killers on the night of 27 February 2015; the motive for the assassination, according to the ruling of the court, was because he had insulted Islam. But most people in Russia are in no doubt that this was not a religious but a political murder, linked to Nemtsov’s opposition activity and his harsh criticism of Putin. Today the memorial to Nemtsov is a genuine Via Dolorosa, a road of grief, covered in a carpet of carnations, which runs along the last route walked by the politician, from the start of the bridge to the spot where he was murdered; here a pyramid of flowers stands. Day and night people bring bouquets, some even order large baskets to be delivered by the florists: the bridge is covered in baskets with hundreds of roses. On these cold spring days, the flowers on the bridge have become a citizens’ protest, and it’s no joke that they have frightened the authorities, who don’t know what to do with this spontaneous memorial. Right in the centre of Moscow, underneath the walls of the Kremlin, a symbolic war with flowers is taking place: a war between winter and spring; between fear and hope; between the state, ashamedly hiding away behind the backs of the street-cleaners, and the buoyant urban class.
Why is the state so afraid of these flowers? There’s a number of reasons. The first and most obvious one is that they are a ghost of the ‘colour revolutions’, which started in the ‘Carnation Revolution’ in Portugal in April 1974. According to the legend, it began when one woman from Lisbon placed a carnation in the barrel of the rifle of a soldier standing in front of her. It was the season for carnations, and people started handing out flowers to the soldiers. An almost bloodless military coup successfully took place on 25 April 1974, which put an end to one of the last dictatorships in Europe. After that, within a year, the Franco regime in Spain had ended, as had the Colonels’ Junta in Greece. Thirty years later, flowers returned to politics: in the wake of the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia (2003) came the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine (2004) and the ‘Tulip Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan (2005). Recent years have witnessed attempts at ‘colour revolutions’ in Belarus, Uzbekistan and Armenia. It’s more than likely that these have been exaggerated by journalists, but fear opens eyes wide, and ‘flower paranoia’ has firmly settled into the souls of post-Soviet autocrats.
Second, the history of spontaneous memorials is a battle for the city’s space: who does it belong to, the state or the citizens? The whole of late-Soviet and post-Soviet history can be presented as a process whereby civil protest has taken over areas in Moscow, from the demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands on Manezh Square and at the Luzhniki Stadium in 1990–1, and from the protests and scuffles around the White House (at the time the home of the Russian Parliament) in 1991 and 1993, to the years-long battle with the ‘Strategy-31’ opposition movement behind the Mayakovsky statue on Triumphal Square on Tverskaya Street. The ‘Strategy’ movement was rallying for the right to demonstrate seven times a year, on the thirty-first day of each month of that length, thus carrying out the freedom of assembly guaranteed by Article 31 of the Russian Constitution. Demonstrations in 2011–13 widened the geography of the battle: now it included Chistoprudny Boulevard, Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospekt, as well as the Garden Ring Road, which, in February 2012, protestors turned into ‘the White Ring’, creating along it a living chain made from white ribbons, the symbol of the opposition. In moving around the city, these protests have been creeping ever closer to the Kremlin, and the murder of Nemtsov on 27 February 2015 unexpectedly and visibly placed a bloody spot and created a place of memory right alongside the walls of the Kremlin. The fifty thousand people who went in procession to the place three days later in the March of Remembrance didn’t just pay their final respects to the murdered politician; they also threw down a challenge to the people behind these walls, whom they considered to be either directly or indirectly linked to the killing.