Body as a given

From the editor. According to recent reports in some media, it is planned to transform the current regional-municipal structure into 20 large agglomerations. What are the advantages of the new administrative-territorial structure, and what are the disadvantages? told Russian Journal about these conversations and what such agglomerations could become Russian political scientist Svyatoslav Kaspe .

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The most interesting thing (and perhaps the only truly important thing) in the latest rumors about the reorganization of the Russian territorial organization is not the essence and details of the (allegedly) proposed project, but the fact that these rumors, firstly, appear, -secondly, they are seriously discussed by the political press and the expert community. This is unthinkable in any state with an established composition of the “political body” and its real constitution that has become the subject of consensus. What is important, neither in a federal state (just try, for the sake of experience, to imagine the plot of the “enlargement of regions” initiated by Washington in the information space of the United States!), nor in a state that is not federal at all.

Not only in Great Britain, the idea of, for example, the political and administrative division of Scotland into Highlands and Lowlands or, say, the absorption of Wales by England would cause immediate hospitalization of its author in a specialized clinic with walls upholstered in soft matter ; in France, the idea of ​​the need for ease of management to radically reduce the number of departments, pulling them towards “large urban agglomerations”, would lead to exactly the same result. For the reason that a real constitution - of course, if it exists at all - is not, unlike a formal one, a subject of rational engineering. Mandelstam’s question “I have been given a body - what should I do with it” implies that the body is given as a given (hence the continuation of the quote - “So one and so mine?”) and excludes attempts to acquire some other body or shuffle the existing organs in some some other order, even if it seems more reasonable.

We are quite capable of not only developing such projects, but also, what is most frightening, implementing them - after all, there is no doubt that if there is sufficiently demonstrated political will, the Russian territorial organization can be redrawn in the (allegedly) intended way, and in almost any other way . The reason is not only that most of the territorial divisions of Russia do not have any pronounced subjectivity - in the manner of Texas or Oregon, Welsh or Vendee, Tuscan or Castilian. The fundamental reason is that the Russian state per se still remains - as can be seen from the example under consideration, for its own intellectual and political elite, but, apparently, for the general population of citizens - something between a tabula rasa and a fata Morgana .

Nothing is better suited to constant re-construction than phantoms and mirages; and each new attempt to decisively remake political reality, as well as the willingness to seriously discuss the most vague hints of such prospects, once again problematizes this reality itself. In fact, it calls into question its status as reality. Moreover, if these attempts are still not weakening, then it turns out that all the efforts made to reify Russian political reality in the 2000s, to consolidate the state and to transform it from a “declaration of intentions” into a fact, have gone in vain. Thus, both these attempts and their adherents and apologists are retroactively discredited.

Then you can move in two ways. You can remake and re-spell the golem again and again in the hope that one day the spell will work, that the Russian political body will gain a soul and the ability to autonomously exist (however, an analogy with Dr. Frankenstein’s product is probably more appropriate here). Or you can try to scratch your itch for rational engineering and give your body a chance. Simply give the currently established Russian territorial organization - which, by the way, has developed not just anyhow, but still historically, even if we are talking about very recent history - sufficient time for its transformation from an occasional constellation into a national tradition. All traditions arise this way, and not all of them are perfect from a rational point of view - their strength does not lie in reason. If we want to have traditions, they must be nurtured; and do not touch what has just begun to take root .

Several years ago I heard a high-ranking political manager say: “Stop cockroaching the country!” It seems to me that these words could become a good expression of the national idea. In any case, they could not be more applicable to the plot under discussion.