However, it works as a rating of national apathy. It is a
direct result of a civil war that the Russian government has been waging on its
own people. The non-indifferent 10.1 percent commemorate the victims of that war every
Oct. 30 by reading an endless list of names in front of the
grim political police building on Lubyanka Square, and take part in the Last
Address project, putting memorial plaques on houses from which those victims
were taken. The rest are numbed to their government’s activities, good or bad.
The civil war has been waged in Russia for nearly a century.
Generations change and so do its targets and methods, but the war itself endures.
As poet and balladeer Bulat Okudzhava put it in a very popular song written in
the 1960s: “I’ll also perish in that one and only civil war, and the commissars
in their dust-covered hats will bend silently over me.”
When World War I broke out in 1914 and socialists in the
warring countries were all swept up in the patriotic fever, Lenin called on his
Bolsheviks to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. He had his wish
granted only three years later – with a vengeance. Officially, the Russian
Civil War ended in 1922 with the defeat of the White forces in Siberia and the
end of resistance in Central Asia. However, the real civil war only intensified
with the cessation of armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. They continued to
wage war and did so much more successfully, considering that they were now fighting
a civilian population.
What Leon Trotsky meant when he called for a permanent
revolution was probably a permanent civil war against everyone who didn’t fit a
fairly vague Bolshevik vision of the bright communist future. Joseph Stalin, who first
sent Trotsky in exile and then got him killed, maligning him all the while,
nevertheless adopted many of the man’s radical ideas.
The early victims of the civil war were the nobility, the clergy
and religious leaders, business leaders, land owners and small proprietors of
any kind, the officer class and various other social groups in their entirety.
The huge Russian peasantry, the seemingly bottomless reservoir of manpower for
the Czars’ wars and white elephant construction projects, had its most
productive members exterminated and the rest put on the road to destruction by
slow rot. The military elites and the engineering cadres of the Russian Empire
were replaced, with the old guard being sent to the GULAG. The precious Silver
Age in the arts and literature was ruthlessly destroyed, too, and many of its
most brilliant lights executed, killed in labor camps, starved to death, driven
to suicide or forced to emigrate.
Ethnic minorities suffered terribly as well. Acts of war
against them ranged from genocide – as in the case of the man-made famine in
Ukraine – to deportations of ethnic groups in their entirety or in part and to the
elimination of national cultural elites.
By the time Adolf Hitler invaded Russia, the domestic civil war
had come a full circle and was being waged on Vladimir Lenin’s closest associates and
other party faithful, along with military commanders who had come to prominence
fighting the Whites. The civil war machine even managed to turn on itself,
purging layer after layer of security service officers.
Even the struggle against the Nazis was used by the Soviet
government to fight against its own people. Soviet losses – which most
historians agree were upward of 20 million, more than all the other combatants
taken together – reflected the fact that the Soviets were being exterminated
with murderous gusto by the combined efforts of both Hitler and Stalin.
Stalin’s death and the end of his terror marked a change in
the methods of waging the civil war, not the underlying fact. The Soviet people
were by then prisoners of war – no longer killed but held in one vast prisoner-of-war
camp. They were not allowed to leave and were fed the poor diet devised for
them by the government; they owned no property and got only the information that
the government wanted them to have. No wonder real prison inmates called the
outside world “the Big Zone”, to differentiate it from the small zones, or their
labor camps.
That is not to say that active hostilities completely
ceased. Various dissidents and malcontents were still hunted down and isolated
in jails and mental hospitals.
Another feature of the post-Stalin civil war was that the
hunted had now joined forces with the hunters. An extraordinary feature of the
Soviet demographic crisis which began in the 1970s was the fact that it was
largely self-imposed. At the time, the Soviet health care system was still
functioning relatively well, but the Soviet people began willfully to engage in
a self-destructive behavior, which eventually, coupled with a broader crisis in
the 1990s, led to a catastrophic decline in physical well-being and life
expectancy, most dramatically among males.
Another feature of the late-Soviet way of fighting its own
people – which in part explains that 89.9% approval rating for Putin – is that
the people no longer knew any better. When Soviet Jews began to leave for
Israel, many of their countrymen saw their departure as punishment. The Soviet
government even revoked the Soviet citizenship of those traitors as though it
was punishing them, and not doing them a huge favor.
The civil war continues today, assuming yet another form. At
its early stages, the war was justified by its ideological purpose – the
creation of a just society and the happiness of future generations. Government
officials put in charge of waging that war saw themselves as soldiers, forming
part of a rigid hierarchy and being subjected to its harsh discipline. However,
the war itself had no purpose and was highly destructive for the country.
Today’s war is completely different. It has no ideological underpinnings,
but it has a point, which is personal enrichment of those who wage the war. Unlike
Stalin’s warriors, Putin’s openly and blatantly act on their own behalf or as members
of a criminal gang. They are no longer soldiers but, rather, gangsters or even
marauders, stripping everything that’s valuable from the dying body of their
country.
Unlike Soviet government officials, who were locked in the
same “zone” as their countrymen, the current lot, from the highest federal
official down to the lowest local bureaucrat– don’t see any future in Russia for
themselves and their kids. They see it as a ravaged battlefield, a place where
the browbeaten population is too apathetic to defend their own freedoms,
economic prosperity and even lives – or those of their children. Putin’s
warriors despoiling their own people have long sent their money and progeny
abroad and have invested in real estate in London and Miami. This is why their current
confrontation with the West looks like clowning, a freak show for the benefit
of the local populace.
It is unfortunate that Ukraine has to foot the bill for this
bit of buffoonery.
