Mafia or sect?

What will the people, finally separated from the state, choose?

The remarkable prose writer and historian Vladimir Sharov noticed about two years ago that the current period of Russian history is characterized by its withdrawal deep into, to the grassroots level; external events tend to a minimum, because they exhaust the people too much and ...

The remarkable prose writer and historian Vladimir Sharov noticed about two years ago that the current period of Russian history is characterized by its withdrawal deep into, to the grassroots level; external events tend to a minimum, because they exhaust the people too much and generally cost a lot. This trend, however, is not so much a Russian one as a global one: when contradictions accumulate in the world that previously gave rise to a world war, now they are relatively peacefully expressed in the form of a crisis. Those who fear an “orange revolution” in Russia have nothing to fear: even a completely rigged election will not force anyone to take to the streets today. The only development option that is dangerous for the authorities is the collapse of the system, devastation; it is not excluded, but it is still a long time before it. The new Russian revolution is proceeding smoothly and is expressed not in the fact that the people collapse the state, but in the fact that they leave from under it.

When several authors, including myself, started talking about this about three years ago, with the growing paralysis of the so-called vertical, with the growing decorativeness of all government events, from elections to meetings with subjects, this caused skeptical smirks. The main argument boiled down to the fact that a Russian person cannot live without a state. But the state is different for the state: it may really not do without a normal nerve center of the country, but it does not need a parasitic growth, concerned mainly with personal well-being. If the state elite does not have a unified concept of the past, a clear idea of ​​the present and a version of the future that is convincing for the majority, then there is such a state in FIG: we will build it ourselves, and we are already building it in reality, it’s just not visible yet.

Unfortunately - I say "unfortunately", since semi-underground structures usually have a harmful effect on the psyche of participants, and the legal field in Russia today has been trampled down almost to the ringing - the Internet has become the main model of civil society today, and only it can be used to roughly track the real processes walking in the country. Nowhere in the world does LiveJournal play such a role: discussions on the most important cultural, scientific and sociological issues are in full swing there today - everything that should be talked about in the press and on television is discussed and formulated there. The society organizes itself, establishes ties with compatriots, helps the elderly, collects money for medicines for the sick, develops new educational programs for children and generally lives an intensive life, not paying the slightest attention to the plans of the Kremlin propagandists and their adherents. Popular support for the regime - in percentage terms - is possible in only two cases: either the population is zombified and intimidated, and large-scale repressions are carried out in the country, or it is really put in power, and it votes without thinking at all. The first option - with this, I think, even the sworn enemies of the "bloody regime" will agree - we still do not have.

The falling away of the people from the state can be considered a fait accompli, although this process is far from over; in order to fully fall away, it is necessary to create working non-state mechanisms, and so far not everything is safe with them, since “there are few real violent ones”. You can help a few - heal and teach someone, remove a particularly inhuman boss, even create an alternative culture that does not have access to television, but is more popular than the official one. But it is impossible to solve a single problem globally - to provide all patients with guaranteed care, to help all the homeless, to give all children a decent education. It is necessary to form an alternative state - and this process promises to stretch for twenty or thirty years; it is possible that people holding key positions today will combine this official membership in state structures with informal positions in an alternative, semi-underground hierarchy, just as other underground workers, holding official positions under the Germans, secretly helped the partisans. I think there are quite a few such agents now in power; these people have taken good care of their future. I hope that the comparison will not seem blasphemous to anyone: the government today functions precisely in a mild occupation regime, which only the lazy did not write about. It is the soft occupation regimes, avoiding direct repressions, that do everything possible so that the representatives of the indigenous population do not grow up too smart (there is the Unified State Examination for this), lose their vertical mobility, and so on. (In the light of the mentioned mobility, the recent thesis of V. Tretyakov about the desirability of the estate character of Russian power is especially piquant; it is the estate that has ruined Russian society for so many years that is now recognized as a guarantee of its stability, and this is true, because there is nothing more stable than death).

On the occasion of Fazil Iskander's 80th birthday, I interviewed him and asked him what he thought about this falling away of the population from statehood. Iskander assessed this trend negatively, saying that the situation of such division leads to mutual irresponsibility. In addition, the forms of popular self-organization are unpredictable and far from always preferable. This made me think about the possible forms of this coming amateur performance. Unfortunately, humanity knows, again, basically two types of non-state popular activity: the mafia and the sect.

Both are worse.

It would seem that there is nothing wrong with leaving the yoke of such a mediocre and hopeless government. The only question is how long one can function in a partisan regime: my great Belarusian namesake has told us enough about morals in partisan detachments. There was heroism - but there was arbitrariness, and oppression, and persecution; in general, I think, today the time has come to re-read the national literatures of the late Soviet times. On the outskirts, the people and the authorities have long existed separately: Soviet dignitaries either degenerated into bais, thus integrating into feudal society, or were powerless to change this society, as, say, in almost the entire Caucasus. One of the most accurate predictions was given by Georgian literature, and above all by Nodar Dumbadze. Although Iskander himself told a lot in "Sandro" and especially in "Human Parking". In Georgia, everything was fine with self-organization - but it was there that a criminal, in fact, state within a state was built, where a bribe controlled everything. But corruption, why hide there, is one of the variants of people's statehood, an alternative to an inhuman or stupid law. The state can be opposed to the mafia - which, however, is not suitable for every country: the mafia, which is also a family, is good in the south. There, the community means a lot, and the people more or less feel themselves to be a single body. Russia is too big and cold, because of the climate and the long national depression, we too often look at each other like wolves; if southerners meet abroad, they are sincerely happy for each other, but Russians would annoy each other even on the moon. And therefore the sect becomes the most frequent form of self-organization of the Russian community.

This word has negative connotations for us, but meanwhile it would be worth giving it a neutral meaning and at least describing the fundamental features of such an association. Different researchers identify different signs of sects, but five are especially important for us: 1) A pronounced anti-state, anti-official and, in a sense, anti-social position. The work that we do, and the faith we profess, are not for everyone and will instantly depreciate, becoming universal and official. 2) The belief that the rest of the world lies in evil, and only we, the elect, will be saved. Formally, a wide campaign - and the strictest, multi-stage screening at the entrance. 3) Exalted, mutual affection and care within the sect - and equally affected hostility towards any opponent; the need for an external enemy. Numerous and effective practices of general neuroticism. 4) The sect has no ideology, since its main idea is separatism, copyright for absolute truth and related ecstatic states, which are addicted like a needle. To imitate ideology, the sect, as a rule, leans against the indisputable banality: it is necessary to help children, the elderly, the homeless; preach international friendship; in short, to fight for all that is good against all that is bad. 5) In any sect there is an “inner circle”, which can be a little more - and sometimes much more; this circle inevitably forms by itself - and it is his conflict with the others that usually breaks the sect in the end, often in two steps. First, a “renegade” appears, whom everyone poisons together, then the majority gradually joins the apostate.

The features of such a sect can be easily detected by any visitor to opposition gatherings or meetings of the Nashi movement, which is structured in full accordance with Scientology practices. They were also found in the community of MMM contributors, where Sergei Mavrodi initially possessed genuine holiness; and in most charitable foundations; and fan clubs. In all these associations, we can easily find signs of that same abstract and indisputable ideology, without which the sect is impossible: fans love sports and the honor of their native country. Mavrodi helped pensioners and taught the population about capitalism. Benefactors help the poorest and most downtrodden. One frank polemicist admitted in an online discussion that a philanthropist receives a powerful influx of endorphins from her work - and also, at the sight of someone else's grief, regulates her own "line of difficulties", realizing that her grief is not yet a problem. The most curious thing, however, is that any benefactors try to help precisely those who “do not care”, those who no one else will help. Hence the particularly dense flowering of volunteering around hospices or homeless people - with almost zero activity in those areas where working hands are no less necessary, but either there will be a problem with endorphins and a sense of one's own holiness, or not everyone will be accepted, because professional skills are needed. For a sectarian, a sense of his holiness is absolutely necessary - and in this sense, the disadvantaged provide him with a unique chance. Forgive me this cynical terminology, but a bum who received a bowl of soup or even a portion of medicine will remain a bum, and a philanthropist who gave this alms (most often public and not too burdensome) becomes a saint - first in his own, and then in other people's eyes. Bonuses, in my opinion, are incomparable.

But I'm not really talking about charity. I'm talking about two possible models of self-organization of society, of which, according to a strict account, none is acceptable. In Russia now almost everything is a sect, and it has been so for centuries, when the entire popular faith - as Alexander Etkind exhaustively spoke about in The Whip - was extra-church, extremely rich and ramified. The general split - into Old Believers and Nikonians - was supplemented by the appearance of hundreds of folk teachers of the faith, and all Russian folk religiosity rested not so much on respect for the official church, but on flocks, Khlysty and Dukhoborism. In Russia, the church regularly merges with the state and dissolves into it; the church blesses, marries, funerals, gives birth, consecrates Mercedes, admonishes bikers - but for the resolution of spiritual issues, as well as for endorphins, people go to sects.

Today's Russia faces, in fact, only one fundamental dilemma - as in the classic joke about gypsy children: will we wash these off or will we make new ones? In the first option, we will try to reorient the existing state to the needs of the population, we will try to introduce the right people into its structures, form a “modernization majority”, develop levers of pressure on officials, and so on. This would be wonderful, since the most inert church is better than the most advanced sect, and the most bureaucratic state is better than the Socialist-Revolutionary "Combat Organization" or other terrorist truth-seekers. Not a single state, not a single official church gives rise to such intolerance, such a number of truth-seekers with burning eyes and implacable hatred of dissent; that is why the attempt to build a sect on the basis of the church is doomed. “Ours” are clearly out of breath. Of course, the official is better, healthier than the underground - if only because the underground develops extremely dangerous complexes in people, forms an inflated self-esteem out of the blue. The Russian opposition madly respects itself for being the opposition, although the number of its real cases is negligible; Of course, being in the opposition tempers the soul, teaches courage and determination - but these pluses are outweighed by the minuses, namely, almost complete lack of communication skills and hostility to everything legal. It would be better to channel the energy of the masses into something open, but ... you yourself understand what are the chances of rebuilding the Russian statehood. In addition, pouring new wine into such old wineskins is almost certain to spoil the wine. In the Russian vertical - unchanged from Grozny to Stalin - a decent person in power is doomed, and it is apparently impossible to change this power structure without a radical change in the very Russian territorial structure. Sometime, when the Far East finally becomes Chinese, and Siberia gets tired of supplying raw materials to the whole country and it secedes in order to live as a free republic, it is possible that European power will turn out in European Russia, but before that, according to optimistic scenarios, two hundred years, and according to the pessimistic - a hundred. Consequently, for the next century, the lot of Russia, which has thrown off the state yoke and gone to the Net, neti and other underground forms of existence, will become the mafia (in the economy) and the sect (in the spiritual sphere). I do not scold anyone and do not call to change their minds - I am stating a fact, fulfilling the call of the same V. Tretyakov: before the system is reformed, it must be described.

And what's wrong with these structures? Every mafia ends with a transformation into a state structure, sometimes very effective, and every sect ends with a collapse, a period of long depression and the subsequent individual revival of survivors who have received a serious inoculation from any sectarianism. So for the sake of all the same endorphins, we will assume that we have the last inoculation ahead - the last two temptations of the population on the way of its inevitable transformation into society.