Last week the Russian mafia state was constrained to set free investigative reporter Ivan Golunov. This time, the outrage over blatantly false drug dealing charges against Golunov was not limited to his colleagues in the media and the liberal intelligentsia, but spread much wider than usual. Many previously apolitical and even loyal Russians clearly felt that they had had enough.
Golunov’s case was not outstanding. Charges against him were trumped up – but so had been dozens of previous cases in which activists, journalists, entrepreneurs and other innocent people had been clapped in jail. Nor were fabrications any more or less sloppily concocted than before. The cops who have been appointed as scapegoats for the Golunov fiasco are understandably dumbfounded. They did everything by the book – or rather, by the unwritten set of instructions issued by the mafia state.
The fact that the Golunov case became the stark for the outrage was more or less random. But it had been building for some time. Since Putin’s “victory” in the 2012 “election” the mafia state has been systematically devouring its own soldiers. If before being a loyal part of Putin’s vertical of kleptocracy, enriching yourself and shipping your ill-gotten assets and family members abroad meant that you would be left alone, now no one is guaranteed against an arbitrary arrest. Various groupings within the mafia are on a war footing, and nobody is safe.
In this respect at least it is a throwback to Joseph Stalin’s years, when blind loyalty and obedience to a set of rules didn’t always shield you from being arrested and shot, your wife from being gang-raped and send to the camps and your kids dispersed into orphanage. Moreover, repressions didn’t moderate as time went by but in some cases got more severe.
Vladimir Putin’s mafia state isn’t as pathologically bloodthirsty as Stalin’s USSR – at least not yet. But the two are similar in that they both go after their own. And, just as after Stalin’s death the Soviet bureaucracy wanted a reprieve from the sword of Damocles that the security apparatus held over each and every head, so Putin’s kleptocrats want the freedom to enjoy their accumulated spoils in peace, without the threat of criminal prosecution.
And yet the system is organically unable to avoid devouring itself.
Russia’s problem is that it is a Viking state – a political entity originally set up by invaders ruling over an indigenous population. While other states were established throughout history – some also by the Vikings – Russia never developed into a cohesive national state. The rulers there have always been foreigners. Even though the original Vikings assimilated, becoming Russian czars and nobility, the indigenous population never fully understood them and deeply resented their rule.
Poet Alexander Pushkin, who had perhaps the deepest understanding of his country, wrote an extraordinary poem on this subject, The Bronze Horseman. He also famously observed that in Russia the government is the only European.
This may be the secret of Russia’s traditional devotion to territorial expansion. It has been an alternative to improving one’s own territory and improving the lot of the people – something that occupying powers typically don’t do. Russia has always tried to achieve security not by strengthening its own borders but by pushing them outward. It makes sense if you don’t trust the people with whom you live behind those borders.
Actual foreigners – Catherine II and Stalin – were the most admired rulers in Russian history, perhaps because they fit the role of foreign rulers so naturally. Another czar who was bestowed the moniker Great was Peter I. He abandoned Moscow for a Scandinavian city that he had founded on the Baltic – as though drawn to Scandinavia, the ancestral lands of Russian princes.
The tables were turned on the rulers by the Bolshevik Revolution. Notably, even as it started to bash “foreign” rulers, one of the early acts of Lenin’s government was to move the capital back to Moscow.
The irony of the Bolshevik revolution was that it was led by Russians returning from years of living abroad. The old ruling classes were systematically eradicated but the model endured. Rather quickly, the new rulers turned into foreigners and began systematically putting down the indigenous population. Stalin, when he assumed power, ensconced himself in the Kremlin like a foreign despot. And he started by breaking the backbone of the Russian nation, the peasantry.
The revolution upset the stability of oppression that had endured for so many centuries. The Soviet classless society meant that the ruling class became fairly fluid – but each new incarnation still behaved like occupiers, not a legitimate government.
The post-Stalinist ruling class seemed to be almost indigenous – until it was overturned in 1991. The new rebellion was led by a leader from deep inside the country, the Urals, but the new ruling elite – built, notably, by a coterie from Peter the Great’s city led by a man who had lived in Dresden, Germany, for a long spell – became the most blatant occupation regime to date. They are shamelessly stripping Russia’s assets, sending them to the West and relocating there their families.
In the 18th century, under Peter the Great’s successors, there came an influx of Europeans – mostly German and French. Soviet history used to claim that they were despoiling Russia and exploiting the Russian people. Of course the real foreigners were nowhere as rapacious as Russia’s current rulers, the Russians assuming the role of a foreign ruling class and outdoing in robbing Russia any potential occupying power.
The Bolshevik Revolution introduced massive confusion within this specific Russian dichotomy between the ruling class and the populace. It destroyed the old ruling class and churned Russian society. The old ruling class was stable. It had a set of understandable, predictable rules. Its members were loyal to the class and to each other. The new class, being fluid, lacks definition.
The revolution unleashed a civil war between classes which ended in the defeat and physical destruction of the old ruling class but also in the emergence of a new ruling class which installed itself in place of the old and took a terrible revenge on the indigenous people.
This Stalin’s murderous rampage was the continuation of the civil war by other means. Or rather, a refighting of it. Soviet poet Bulat Okudzhava wrote a popular song with lines that went: “I’ll end up dying in that same never-ending civil war.”
The civil war in Russia has raged intermittently for over 100 years. This is why Putin’s elites could not stop themselves from devouring themselves. And this is why it will now lash out against society that dared to defy it on the Golunov case. This is also why the current elites’ impersonation of a foreign ruling class is not going to be the last instance when post-revolutionary Russia undergoes a radical reshuffle at the top.
However, until the Viking state model is shattered and replaced by some form of a national state – or maybe several national states in place of one – Russia’s next batches of rulers will keep turning into occupiers, the chasm between them and their people will endure, the civil war will go on and Russia will remain an expansionist and disruptive force on the world stage.
