As for anger, this is linked to the underdevelopment of the social fabric of the country; it is linked to infantilism. This is a powder keg. We have no intellective tradition that would afford us an awareness of our own states of being, that would enable us to ponder lucidly: What are my feelings? Why do I hate? Why do I suffer? And failing to understand this, we create imaginary enemies. In a word, this anger arises in large measure from infantilism.[18]
For a quarter of a century we have attempted to integrate ourselves into an adult world, where there are limits on the individual’s desires; a world where we must learn to overcome childish traumas and fears, reworking them into politics, philosophy, culture and art. This is what Germans have done for half a century, sitting at their school desks and agonizingly working their way through their neuroses. (The Tin Drum itself reopened many unhealed wounds. Günter Grass was hounded, accused of being unpatriotic and of indulging in pornography.) Now all our efforts have gone down the drain. The teenage complexes of the ‘Russian boys’, as Dostoevsky called them, have slipped out from behind their desks and are raising hell. The adults have gone out, so the boys can smoke, swear, scoff unlimited amounts of ice-cream, and steal the long-coveted bicycle from the boy next door. The Russian spirit is taking a holiday, and, having pulled up our pants, we’re ready to chase after the Komsomol,[19] wave our flags, and march in step.
Until the parents come back.
JIHAD IN DONETSK
At the end of 2014, Russia could be congratulated on a foreign policy victory: in the wake of Forbes magazine naming Vladimir Putin ‘the most influential man in the world’, the Foreign Policy journal included him in its list of ‘The One Hundred Global Thinkers’, under the category ‘Agitators’. In a footnote to the list of nominees, the journal explained that, for Putin, ‘Russia’ is defined not by its present-day borders, but by the common culture, language and history of the Russian people. And that the manifest destiny of the state is to unite all these people, even if that means spitting on the territorial sovereignty of other countries.
However, the joy of receiving this award was somewhat overshadowed by the fact that the Russian President shared it with some rather dubious characters: the pro-Eurasian philosopher, Alexander Dugin (‘for expounding the ideology of Russia’s expansion’); the political strategist and former prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR),[20] Alexander Borodai; the leader of ISIS, Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi; the leader of the Boko Haram sect, Abubakar Shekau; the British Islamist known by the nickname of ‘Jihadi John’, who was ‘famous’ for a video put out by ISIS in which he is seen beheading an American journalist; and two Kuwaiti citizens who organized the funding of ISIS and units of Al-Qaeda. So here we have an alternative G8: three Russians and five Islamists, who in the previous year had sent out a challenge to the existing world order.
Did Vladimir Putin dream about achieving such status on 11 September 2001, when he telephoned George Bush to offer him his support in the battle against the world’s evil? Now the American President [at the time of writing, Barack Obama] officially names Russia on the list of the three greatest threats to the security of the USA, along with ISIS and the Ebola virus. Separatists in Eastern Ukraine who are supported by Russia are put on a par with Islamic terrorists. And the President of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaitė, has publicly labelled Russia ‘a terrorist state’.
One could, of course, simply say that such comparisons are tendentious and provocative; just another part of the West’s information war against Russia. But the real problem is that the ‘hybrid war’ which has been unleashed in Eastern Ukraine with Russia’s active participation has demonstrated just the sort of social chaos, uncontrolled violence and archaic practices that are in many ways similar to the actions of Islamic fundamentalists in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and other countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Maybe in Donetsk there haven’t yet been manifest executions such as the theatrical punishments carried out by ISIS, where, in the middle of the desert, hostages with orange hoods over their heads have had their throats cut. But ‘people’s’ courts and military field courts are already held in the Donbass, in which, with no due judicial process, death sentences are handed down to alleged rapists and looters. Lynch mobbings happen, such as the one against Irina Dovgan, a resident of the Donetsk Oblast who was accused of having links with the Ukrainian Army. She was tied up for hours in the centre of Donetsk and subjected to beatings and insults from passers-by. Then there’s the infamous Donetsk ‘Pit’ (in the military prison of the former Ukrainian Security Service), where mass torture and rape are carried out. Maybe the Donetsk militias haven’t forbidden children to go to school, or kidnapped more than two hundred schoolgirls, as militants from Boko Haram did in Chibok, Nigeria, in April 2014; but in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), by order of the field commander Alexei Mozgovoi, women are forbidden from going to clubs, cafés and restaurants, because they should ‘sit at home and sew cross-stitch’. Mozgovoi declared: ‘She should sit at home, cook pies and celebrate 8 March.[21] It’s time that she remembered that she’s Russian! It’s time that she remembered her spirituality!’ At the same time, there’s a video on the Internet showing a Cossack beating a girl who has apparently broken this ban.
On the territories controlled by the separatists, total de-modernization has taken place. Archaic tribal practices rule; the strong hold all the rights; there’s the law of the Kalashnikov – indeed, all the characteristics that we have come to associate with conflict zones in Africa. It’s not surprising that the Lugansk and Donetsk Peoples’ Republics have together earned the nickname on the Internet of ‘Luganda’. Vladimir Maksakov, a journalist for the website Colta, who spent twenty-two days in the Donetsk People’s Republic as a volunteer, and was then locked up in ‘the Pit’, witnessed the primitive behaviour in Donetsk in 2014:
Sunday was one of the main holidays in Donetsk, ‘Miners’ Day’. That evening we saw two men by the lift. One of them had been brutally beaten, the other was lying on a stretcher and had been shot in the legs. I took them for Ukrainian prisoners of war. But no: they were miners who had carried on celebrating after the curfew came into effect.
One of the militia came in. He had a broken nose and a battered and bruised face. He told us what had happened. He was seeing a girl home when he saw some guys on the staircase doing something with the switchboard. He took them for fighters and opened fire on them. It turned out that they were from the Internet provider; but he understood that too late.[22]
The militarized regimes in Donetsk and Lugansk try to hide behind a fig leaf of legitimacy and democracy by holding elections and referenda. In reality, these pirate republics have far less in common with modern states than with the free lands of the Cossacks, to which runaway peasants and convicts fled from all over Russia, because ‘the Don doesn’t give up escapees’. They are like the bands of robber Cossacks who gathered around Stepan Razin in the seventeenth century, and Yemelyan Pugachev in the eighteenth;[23] like the insurrections of Nestor Makhno and Alexander Antonov during the Civil War of 1919–21.[24] The separatism which Russia encouraged in the depressed region of the Donbass brought to the fore the archaic strata of the Russian psyche, which, it seemed, had already been destroyed by Soviet modernization. Few even guessed that it existed, apart from the ingenious screenwriters of the 1990s, Pyotr Lutsik and Alexei Samoyardov in their films, Children of Iron Gods and The Outskirts, who touched on these chthonic depths, as well as the blood and soil of the ‘Wild East’. The prophet of Putin’s Russia, the film director Alexei Balabanov, also worked with these archaic strata, predicting the annexation of Crimea, war with the West and Russian fascism.
19
‘Pulling up their pants and chasing the Komsomol’ is a line from the Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, as he tried to reconcile himself with the new Soviet life in the early 1920s. The Komsomol – the Young Communist League – was the next stage after the Pioneers. It encouraged social activism and further indoctrinated Soviet youth.
20
Sometimes known as the DNR, from the Russian original,
21
8 March was always marked in the USSR as International Women’s Day. It is now celebrated more widely around the world. It was one of the dates of the ‘Red Calendar’, introduced by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution as a replacement for the church calendar, with its feast days and saints’ days. The Red Calendar devoted specific days to workers in different areas of society, such as ‘Miners’ Day’, referred to a little later.
22
https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/5329-22-dnya-v-dnr. ‘22 Days in the DNR’ (in Russian), 11 November 2014.
23
Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev led peasant revolts. In Soviet times these were idealized into early examples of uprisings of the common people.
24
Nestor Makhno was commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, which fought for an independent Ukraine during the Civil War. Alexander Antonov led an insurrection in the Tambov Province in Russia against the Bolsheviks.