Two anniversaries

socio-political process over the next 10-15 years

10 years ago, two unrelated events happened on Russian territory.

One thing happened thanks to America and, like any globalization, it was a HORIZONTAL phenomenon. Live Journal appeared in Russia.

The second one grew on our soil, or rather, it was stuck into it. This is Putin's vertical. The coincidence in time is accidental.

But the historical inevitability of a collision between the global HORIZONTAL, which has already appeared on our land, and our leaven, or rather oil, VERTICAL, is natural and inevitable. The outcome of this collision is also inevitable.

It is this battle that will form the essence of the Russian socio-political process for the next 10-15 years.

Putin’s vertical, although it was stuck in from above, actually grows from the depths of Russian history with all its traumas and family curses: the adoption of Orthodoxy, the 200-year yoke, the oprichnina, Peter’s knee-jerk breaking and, the crown of all this, STALINISM. That is why Putinism was accepted so easily by Russian society as if it were native. Putinism is like Stalinism-lite. An ideal option for the majority of the population. Stalin today is apparently the main hero of the majority. If the TV bosses had not cheated, Joseph Vissarionovich would have become the name of Russia. Putinism is accepted by the majority also because Stalin is needed by each of the majority “for everyone else.” According to the correct observation of Dmitry Oreshkin, “everyone wants Stalin for others, no one wants Stalin for themselves.” Putinism became such Stalinism “for others.” For oligarchs, journalists, human rights activists, the West.

That is why the majority of the Russian population (citizens in this population are a minority) not only did not resist, but also accepted with relief everything that Putinism brought: the resurrection of the Big Father, the abolition of elections, the elimination of freedom of speech, parliament as a place for discussion, the separate existence of business and authorities, etc.

LiveJournal is a phenomenon, like all globalization, perpendicular to Putin’s VERTICAL (and not only Putin’s, any other). Because it's HORIZONTAL.

Flat world. A world where everyone is equal. People, countries, nations. A world in which everyone depends on each other. In which taxes and salaries for American employees are calculated in a small Indian town, and a famous banker-politician enters into a discussion with an unemployed man. And if a banker-politician is an asshole, then no security will help him.

It is this global HORIZONTAL of modernity that comes into irreconcilable contradiction with our sovereign historically conditioned native VERTICAL.

The place of the coming battle is the heads of an ever-increasing part of the Russian population. The result is the transformation of some of them into citizens. How will this magic happen?

Today the battle between HORIZONTAL LJ and Putin's mighty VERTICAL looks funny. Funnier than the fight between David and Goliath. As funny as the battle between Gutenberg's invention and the monopoly of the omnipotent church on truth. But VERTICAL always felt its impending death in HORIZONTAL. It is no coincidence that the spread of Johann Frilevich’s brainchild was slowed down for some time and limited to the church VERTICAL.

And today, in the same China, the local Confucian-communist VERTICAL has been fenced off from LiveJournal by the Great Wall of China for 10 years now.

Our guardians of the VERTICAL are also constantly trying to shorten the still tiny, still short HORIZONTAL. And not only in the form of LiveJournal, but also in the form of Skype and any other opportunities for people to communicate normally, that is, HORIZONTALLY.

The vertical Koshchei sense their death!

This death is brought by SOCIAL NETWORKS, which are the main result of the HORIZONTAL, FLAT WORLD.

Just before our eyes, these social networks broke the backbone of the communist VERTICAL in the poorest and most undeveloped country in Europe, in backward Moldova.

The strategy and technology of this invisible battle between our historical VERTICAL and the HORIZONTAL of our time looks like this.

VERTICAL rests on the lack of trust and solidarity between people. With zero or very little social capital in society. It is no coincidence that the creator of the most powerful VERTICAL in the history of Russia, Stalin, was so careful not only to prevent any horizontal contacts in his environment (people were afraid to visit each other), but also in the population entrusted to him, vigilance excluded any hint of creation HORIZONTAL.

The triumphant march of Putinism across Russia became possible because by the end of the 90s the total amount of social capital in Russia had fallen below a critical level. The level of solidarity in society was almost zero. At the same time, in the Czech Republic and Russia, the authorities raised their paw on TV. Tiny Prague brought 200 thousand to the streets. And the power crawled away. In huge, sleepily yawning Moscow, only 30 thousand came out to defend their TV. The authorities brushed them aside like a fly, along with freedom of the media, and crawled further, to business, which stood applauding its killer, to elections, to the regions...

How that social capital was wasted, that level of trust and solidarity in society, which at the end of the 80s was an order of magnitude higher than 10 years later, is a topic for a separate discussion. Today, despite the apocalyptic sentiments among the liberal intelligentsia, time is giving Russia another chance. The previous increase in solidarity and trust in society occurred in the late 80s, when the creation of two parallel countries on the territory of the USSR was completed: under the crust of Soviet power, people lived their own lives, with virtually no overlap with the authorities.

Putin’s VERTICAL has separated itself from the population by canceling elections, creating a border between itself and the rest of the country, which is guarded by tens of thousands of fighters, and guarded much better than the state border of the Russian Federation. And the population, finding itself fenced off from the authorities, begins to live its own life, build its own communications, independent of the authorities, and again grow its HORIZONTAL.

The modern “extension” of HORIZONTAL in Russia is inevitable and LJ is only one of the mechanisms of this process. And such an extension of the HORIZONTAL inevitably leads to the accumulation of TRUST in society, to an increase in SOLIDARITY, that is, to what makes the VERTICAL shrink, shorten, and shrink like a shadow on a summer afternoon.

Shadow, know your place!

This inevitable outcome of the battle between the sovereign VERTICAL and the global HORIZONTAL can be postponed, but cannot be changed.

The global crisis, the essence of which is the aggravated contradiction between the locality of politics and the globality of the economy, is reducing the maneuver of sovereign VERTICALS.

All of the above does not mean at all that the battle between OUR (I mean the readers of "The Hedgehog") HORIZONTAL and their VERTICAL will take place without our participation and we can all sit in the auditorium, watching its progress. Like all patterns in society, this one requires effort, the creation of infrastructure, and its own heroes.

There is a separate problem of converting social capital, trust and solidarity into action, into the energy of change.

This battle between HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL and the inevitable victory of the former is, of course, only an opportunity, a chance, a tendency.

But this is a trend that can overturn the very artistically drawn pictures of a dried up and finished Russia, which is doomed to croak with varying degrees of melodiousness in an oil swamp until the end of time.