Raid

Arranging a hunt for Russian citizens, the state tramples on human dignity, equating people to animals, says NT columnist Andrey Kolesnikov

"There is a hunt for wolves,

The hunt is on

On gray predators

Mothers and puppies!

The beaters scream, and the dogs bark until they vomit,

Blood on the snow - and spots of red flags.

Vladimir Vysotsky, 1968

According to dictionaries, a raid is when they drive the beast. Dictionary Dahl: "Exhibition of the beast from the forest, from the reeds to the shooters or in the net by a large number of hunters." The regime has brought almost the entire male population of Russia to the state and status of animals, including even those who, according to the old concepts, would have been classified as pensioners. The raids in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the hunt for living people who do not want to become fertilizer, cannon fodder, do not want to be killed and kill, but want little - just to live - this is a humiliation of human dignity.

In these acts of the Putin state, there is contempt for the law (because a raid is an illegal method even within the framework of the institutions that an authoritarian state has at its disposal); an attack on a person's freedom; violation of justice; humiliation.

THE AUTHORITY TELLS YOU THAT YOU ARE NOBODY, YOU ARE JUST A SOLDIER WHO HAS TO SACRIFICE YOUR BODY, YOUR ALL LIFE, WHICH DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING FOR THE STATE, FOR THE SAKE OF FANABERIAS, IN ESSENCE, ONE PERSON

Professor of the European University in St. Petersburg Oleg Kharkhordin, who has studied the problem of dignity, writes: “... the dignity of a person is humiliated when a person begins to be treated as animals, machines, objects, or as, to some extent, a subhuman. You humiliate another when you treat him like cattle, just a tool for the realization of your goals, or like an unintelligent child who is not capable of independent action. The country, he concludes, cannot "get up from its knees" if a significant part of the population is on its knees, humiliated.

The situation of the "special operation" intensified this feeling of humiliation and lack of rights hundreds of times. That is why people are running - literally running away from Putin and his guardsmen. They run abroad, run away from the round-up, in order to preserve the human in themselves, to preserve freedom and dignity. And freedom and dignity are interdependent categories. The third element of this construction is fairness. To drive a person like a wolf is unfair. And all these categories exist in the shell of laws, only legal laws, not anti-legal, authoritarian ones. Authoritarian laws contradict the essence and spirit of law, which, according to the Roman maxim, is the art of goodness and justice.

The man had a personal history. He has childhood memories. The books he read, the films he watched. Mom and dad, grandma and grandpa. Funny and sad episodes of life. The memory of smells, flashes of light. Feelings of overwhelming happiness and unquenchable grief. He had and has a biography, studies, work, love. And all this is washed away, destroyed by one movement of power, which tells you that you are nobody, you are just a soldier who must sacrifice his body, his whole life, which means nothing to the state, for the sake of the fanabers, in fact, one person. You are the body with which this one person, as he himself admitted at a recent press conference in Astana, wants to close the “line of contact”. And it's all. This is your only and last destination. You and your life have been nullified. Forget your memory, love, grief, education, skills, profession, family, parents, children.

You are a beast to be caught and used. Perhaps once. Because, as the same leader who needs you as a body said, “there is a primary preparation from five to ten days. Then, depending on the military specialty, they enter combat units, and there training takes from five to 15 days. Then the next stage is already directly in the troops taking part in the hostilities. And there is additional coordinating.” Is everything so smooth? But even if it goes so smoothly, it is somehow hasty for those who never held a weapon in their hands or did it 20, 30 or even 40 years ago.

In terms of the degree of break with reality, this recalled the words of Putin's predecessor as president. In January 1996, when Raduev's gang attacked Kizlyar, Boris Yeltsin comforted the public with talk about "38 snipers" who would save everyone. But that's okay. It is difficult to imagine Yeltsin in the same way as Putin, referring to his own fellow citizens.

Injustice is also inequality. Raids are organized on those who are less protected, for example, in some hostels. Although the round-ups are of a carpet nature, and in this sense they equalize everyone. Everyone who came to hand in a country where people are now afraid to go out of the house. Or discover your presence in your own apartment.

MOBILIZATION IS ITSELF, EVEN IF THE FORMS AND METHODS BY WHICH IT IS CARRIED OUT ARE HUMAN

In the public space, they discuss not that mobilization in modern society is an unthinkable and archaic phenomenon, and not that raids are illegal and unfair, but those who hide from them. In some media, these people are referred to as "evaders" and "conscripts". And they are not conscripts, and dodgers. They are citizens of the Russian Federation with a set of human and civil rights enshrined in the trampled chapter of the second Constitution of the Russian Federation.

At one time, both the pension reform and even pandemic restrictions were perceived by a significant part of the population as a humiliation. Mobilization in itself, even if we put aside the forms and methods by which it is carried out, is the humiliation of a person. But the political regime gives it an areola of heroism, public service and sacred duty. Due to the fact that mobilization pulls a person out of his habitual living environment and turns him into a part of a single and indivisible whole, it has a kind of educational effect: due to the military brotherhood, hundreds of thousands of people turn into an obedient and sometimes proud of their obedience biomass. This is exactly what Putin needs now.

How will those who can return from the "lines of contact" return? Huge masses of people who saw a senseless death and found as enemies not those who sent them to kill, but those whom they killed. Humiliated, with trampled dignity - will they, when they return, humiliate and trample on the dignity of those who did not go through hell?

Russia is going through a demographic (flight of some and mobilization of others) and anthropological catastrophe. Pre-established obedience, fears, neuroses, humiliation and the desire to humiliate. How will this society survive (there is nothing to say about the state), overcome the inhuman in man? In the meantime, those who are still at large and not in the army are buying books about everyday life in Germany in the 1930s, with horror and unmistakably recognizing themselves.