HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

If a democratic coalition with a left-wing agenda is unable to come together, then the chances that there’ll be a peaceful transition of power by democratic means aren’t great. The regime will continue to hang by a thread until that thread is cut by a revolution from below, and on the wave of that revolution new Bolsheviks will come to power. If this is the case, there’s a real risk that Russian history will slide into yet another downward spiral, and as a result Russia will disappear from current world history.

Chapter 18. The Intellectual Choice:

Freedom of Speech or Openness that’s Shackled?

Whenever the conversation in Russia turns to discussing the political regime, those who try somehow to classify it inevitably end up with cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the regime appears undoubtedly authoritarian, repressive and even totalitarian. Those in power are irremovable; the opposition has no chance whatsoever of winning through elections that are merely a formality; any citizen can fall foul of police thuggery at any moment, even if they’re not involved in politics in any way; but if they are involved in politics then they’ve even more chance of being beaten.

It used to be possible to write about all this relatively directly and openly online, and even in certain mass media that was reasonably easy to access. The authorities could be criticised, you could carry out independent investigations, dig the dirt on senior government dignitaries and so on. And basically, they got away with it, although there were individual cases where certain outstanding journalists lost their lives. But such things happen in other countries, too; in recent years, for example, this has occurred in Slovakia, Bulgaria and Malta.

It should be noted that until recently, you could express your opinion in Putin’s Russia more easily than you could in the USSR, even in the most liberal times. Ekho Moskvy Radio, Novaya Gazeta newspaper, the “Rain” [ Dozhd’ ] television channel, a comparatively open Internet and much, much more would have been simply unimaginable in the Soviet Union. You could have been locked up for a long time even for dreaming about such a thing. This is why many people spoke and wrote about Russia as if it were a reasonably free country; at least as a country where there was freedom of speech. Was that justified?

The problem is that freedom of speech in the literal meaning of the words is the highest legal and constitutional principle that the government must adhere to. This freedom is guaranteed by the full force of civil society, and is built into the policy of the state. But there is no such freedom in modern Russia. In its place there is a space, the borders of which are strictly defined by the state, with whose permission, and under whose watchful gaze a native called “Glasnost” is permitted to exist. This old museum piece lives on a reservation allotted to it on the edge of a police state. It’s there to amuse gawkers from the capital or visiting tourists.

Life in the reservation depends entirely on the will of the state: it could shut it off entirely at any moment, but for some unknown reason of its own it hasn’t done this. Apparently, the danger of closing the reservation (with the fuss that this would cause, the need to distract the gawkers with something else, etcetera) for now is considered more dangerous than the threat this openness might bring to the regime. The situation didn’t just happen in an instant but built up historically under the influence of a multitude of factors that were varied and at times contradictory. In order to understand how to get out of this situation and, more importantly, where it might lead, it’s essential to give a brief description of how it evolved.

In the Soviet Union, society was just about as closed as it could be in real life. This closed nature of society gave unique possibilities for state propaganda, which helped the regime to control people’s consciousness, and thus the behaviour of the majority. Herein lies one of the main differences between a totalitarian regime and an authoritarian one. The former relies not only on police repression, but also on the active programming of people’s consciousness and their behaviour with the help of an all-powerful propaganda machine. The present regime doesn’t have anything like this, and I don’t think it will ever succeed in creating it.