A set of prejudices

The Russian ruling elite does not have a coherent concept of national policy, but there is a certain set of prejudices inherited since the Soviet era, and prejudices that make the state approach to the national sphere very contradictory. I will name only two main contradictions of the Soviet and Russian national policy.

The first contradiction is between the idea of ​​a single political nation and the principle of the multinational state.

Representatives of some ethnic minorities live in all states, but this does not in any way make the states themselves "multinational." The multinational state is not a fact, but a principle. The principle of politicization of ethnicity, reaching its logical limit in the ethno-territorial division, that is, the endowment of ethnic minorities with national-state status. According to the population, Russia is just very homogeneous-both quantitatively, in the sense of the predominant share of the Russian population, and qualitatively, in the sense of the degree of cultural-linguistic unification.

In other words, we are “multinational” not because we have ethnic minorities, but because we built them to the rank of nations and gave them state status . This logic of ethnic ethnicity is in clear contradiction with the logic of the civil nation, which involves precisely that the ethnicity of minorities remains their private affair.

The second contradiction is a contradiction between the state status of national minorities and the lack of similar status in the national majority. Neither the Russian Federation as a whole, nor any individual parts of it are a form of national self-determination of Russians as a people at least to the same extent, in which the form of self-determination of Chechens is Chechnya, Tatars-Tatarstan, Yakutov-Yakutia, and so on.

These two contradictions created a specific pain, the severity of the national question in the Soviet Union and in Russia. Moreover, the situation of Russia in this regard is more complicated, because the Soviet Union as a state had a certain supranational source of legitimacy. It was an ideocracy. In fact, the bearer of sovereignty was a party performing on behalf of a global ideology. In the same way, in pre -revolutionary times, the bearer of sovereignty was not a people, but a dynasty.

When the authorities have a transcendental source of legitimacy, it can afford to play multinational, its support point in general is outside the nation . The problem of the Russian authorities is that it has lost this highest point of support, and the multinationalism as a principle has retained. And it is this principle that blocks the democratic evolution of the Russian government.

One of the provisions of the French Declaration of Human Rights and a Citizen of 1789 said: only a nation is a source of sovereign power. This principle marked the entrance simultaneously in the era of democracy and in the era of nationalism. The national and democratic principle of substantiation of power is in modern times hand in hand. The idea of ​​the nation in this context is expressed by the fact that power cannot come from the people if this people do not have a commonality of self -awareness and cultural homogeneity, necessary, at least, for mutual understanding and mutual trust of people and, as a maximum, for the emergence of the effect of “common fate” and “common will”.

That is, of course, at the level of local communities, local self -government, democracy may well do without a nation. But at the level of a large society - no.

Therefore, the principle of multinationality, inherited by us from the USSR, is a barrier to democratization. This is the main reason that we endlessly reproduce the traditional design of the “supreme power” ascended over society, but without any traditional or ideocratic supports and grounds for this design.

The Russian ruling class today is a nomenclature without communism and feudal to know without the idea of ​​divine law. This is a very ambiguous position.

It seems to me that the painful attitude of the authorities towards the national issue is associated precisely with this groundlessness of its own position in the national coordinate system.

I still do not see signs of gaining national soil under my feet. But there are signs of some productive fright - awareness of the precariousness of the structure that has developed. It seems to me that the authorities felt - I mean, first of all, the president - the danger of Soviet inertia in the national question, which has already led to the dismantling of the USSR.

It is good, by the way, that the idea of ​​reconstruction of the Ministry of Nationalities was rejected. Because today, any departmental, bureaucratic solution to the national question without its political rethinking will further drive us to a dead end of Soviet national policy and deepen the contradictions that I spoke about.

If we do not leave this Soviet inertia, then we have every chance of becoming an failed state. It is noteworthy that even before the events on Manezhnaya, in the summer of last year, when Medvedev communicated with members of the Human Rights Council, he said that if we do not form Russian national identity, then "the fate of our country is very sad."

What does it mean? This means that, firstly, the president captures the lack of a full-fledged national basis among today's state, with all the ensuing consequences for the fate of this state. And that, secondly, he, apparently, relies on a more consistent conduct of the principle of a single civilian nation.

In principle, this bet can be productive. But some reservations are important here.

The idea of ​​a civilian nation is perceived by us mythologically. As a certain guarantee of universal harmony in contrast to the dangerous, conflict idea of ​​an ethnic nation. In particular, it is perceived as a formula for the painless integration of the Caucasus. Those. Integration, which occurs, as it were, automatically due to the fact that we refuse the “Russian” nation in favor of the common to all “Russian”. This is a very naive performance.

The fact is that the civil nation requires no less intense community and even homogeneity than ethnic. This is the homogeneity of political culture and civil consciousness.

Is there this homogeneity between us and the Caucasus? Unfortunately no. Because it is from the Caucasian leaders that we hear that the laws of Sharia are above the laws of Russia. According to the behavior of Caucasian youth, we see that the laws of adat are also higher than the laws of Russia. It is in the Caucasian republics that the authorities promise in the elections the level of support of 110%, and the Russian appointment, a large official sent from the center, simply, like a doll, is taken out of the office - he did not go through an ethnic quota. These are all illustrations of a huge difference in civil, legal and political culture between central Russia and the Caucasus.

The formation of a civilian nation means the elimination of this difference. Is it possible? Probably yes. But this is assimilation. Only not ethnographic, but actually national. Assimilation in a single civilian culture. And if it is provided, then the ethnographic features of the Caucasus, including the notorious Lezginka, will not worry anyone. They will lose political significance.

In this regard, the main request of Manezhnaya Square may well be considered a request to a civilian nation, for civil dignity.

By the way, even a certain brutality of protest fits into this logic. What is the meaning of a citizen’s figure in the era of bourgeois revolutions? She denies - including by force - a claim to the dominance on which social relations of the feudal era were based. It overtakes the strategies of intimidation, which reduced the majority to the position of lower -grade people.

So, today the nerve of protest is that Russian youth rejects this neo -feudal claim to dominance, which, unlike persons with a less aggravated sense of civil dignity, captures from the Caucasus. She sees not only the rituals of dominance stitched in the behavioral code. She sees the technologies of ethnic dominance based on an effective combination of informal self -organization (clan structures) with formal institutions (the authorities of the national republics, their plenipases in the regions).

The meaning of the formation of the civil nation is in the breakdown of these dominance technologies, uncompromising dismantling of clan structures .

The civilian nation is therefore called civilian, which consists of citizens, and not of clans, feudal families and privileged classes. Actually, this is exactly the condition that the Russian majority strives for. This is the “Russian request” today. And it is impossible to achieve a “civil state” without a support on it.

The article is a full version of the text "Set of prejudices", published in the last Newsletter "Russian Journal - Theme of the Week".