Dormitory position

Maxim Trudolyubov reflects on two Russian readings of the word “citizen,” neither of which implies a direct, constitutional interpretation

For every Russian debate about citizenship and politics, the subtext is verses from “The Poet and the Citizen” by Nekrasov: “There are good hearts to which the homeland is holy. God help them!.. and the rest? Their goal is shallow, their life is empty. Some are money-grubbers and thieves, others are sweet singers, and still others... still others are wise men: their purpose is conversation.” The wise men, according to Nekrasov’s Citizen, do not want to interfere and say: “ Our tribe is incorrigible, We don’t want to die for nothing, We are waiting: maybe time will help, And we are proud that we are not doing harm!” The poet says that he almost fell asleep listening to all this, and calls on his interlocutor to come down from heaven to earth (note, this is the Poet speaking to the Citizen, and not vice versa). But the Citizen, in response, goes one step further and comes to the slogan: “You must be a citizen.”

It would be good to understand what a citizen is here. The answer, if you follow Citizen Nekrasov, is this. A citizen who is a poet must “boldly smash vices.” And if a person is not a poet, but simply a public figure, then he must have a “mighty ideal.” At the same time, “a heavy lot fell on him.” This man bears on his body “all the ulcers of his homeland” and in the end goes into the fire “for the honor of his fatherland, for his convictions, for love.” And this man dies, but he dies not in vain, because “a thing is strong when blood flows underneath it.”

Primordial Citizen

Can the described figure even be called a citizen? The crossed here prophet, preacher, liberator, revolutionary and saint, perhaps a holy fool, create in their sum a theatrical, exaggerated image. This, of course, is not a city dweller, not a tradesman, not a burgher, in other words, not a class unit. This is not quite a French citoyen, although it is citoyen that is closest to Russian, given the influence of the French Enlightenment and French political history on the Russian poetic and journalistic language. This is not a citizen in the constitutional sense of the word, that is, not a person who has rights and obligations by virtue of belonging to some political unit. Before us is a citizen born before the advent of legislatively enshrined rights of citizenship, a pre-eternal, pre-constitutional citizen.

And it was not Nekrasov who invented the Russian citizen. In the ode “The Duties of the Community” by Vasily Petrov, translated from French almost a hundred years before “The Poet and the Citizen,” a citizen is a “position,” that is, in the modern Russian meaning the same duty (cf.: Samuel Pufendorf’s book “On the Duties of Man and citizen” in the Russian translation of the 18th century - “On the position of man and citizen according to natural law”): “The position of a citizen is kindly forgotten among people today!” In Petrov’s ode one can discern the beginnings of a conservative understanding of citizenship (more on that later). In Kondraty Ryleev’s poem “Citizen”, 1824) this is the rank: “Will I, at a fatal time, disgrace the rank of citizen.” Here we can see the beginnings of a poetic and journalistic understanding of citizenship. How such different and unique understandings of citizenship were formed in Russian culture is a separate interesting story. What is important for us now is that both of them are indeed extremely significant in Russian culture.

That understanding, which can be called conservative, did not receive a good name in Russia, because such was the fate of conservative journalism and the ideas it supported. One of the well-known defenders of this trend was the publisher of the magazine “Citizen”, an opponent of the reforms of Alexander II, Prince Vladimir Meshchersky. Prince Meshchersky called for taking an example not from France, but from Prussia, where “being a citizen does not mean shouting about freedom, but means freely participating in the correct movement of your people forward.” According to Meshchersky, the term “citizen” had to be understood “not in the French vulgarized and weakened “citoyen”, but in the English and German Burger” (see Meshchersky’s article “ Forward or Backward ,” written in 1872). The editor of The Citizen for a short time in the 1870s was Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In the pre-constitutional understanding - both in the conservative and in the poetic - there is a deep internal contradiction. By passing laws and enforcing them, one can oblige a person to pay taxes and comply with certain community rules. You can legislate to give a person the right to hold public office, vote and express his opinion about the actions of the government. But is it possible to state in law the obligation to fight dark forces?

Citizen under duress

Today's Russians, and in general everyone who grew up reading Russian literature, either openly or covertly carry within themselves a poetic and journalistic understanding of citizenship rather than a conservative and official one. The “burgher” understanding of citizenship, rejected by the liberal and revolutionary tradition, was not accepted in pre-revolutionary Russia, and in the Soviet Union it had no chance at all: Soviet official education - by the sheer abundance of civic poetry in the school curriculum - supported a poetic, pre-constitutional understanding of the word “citizen”.

Meanwhile, in real Soviet life, the word “citizen” functioned as an address. Beginning in the 1920s and 30s, it developed into an alternative means of identifying official relations to “comrade.” The address “citizen” was supposed to show the detachment, the pure legality of the relations (“citizen boss”, “citizen, your turn”) that reigned in law enforcement agencies, courts and other places of forced meeting between man and state, such as passport offices and Soviet government bodies. The citizen in these situations was a petitioner, a violator, a person under investigation, a prisoner: the government stood above him, and he, the “citizen defendant,” was under it. This transformation - from the sublime to the understated - closed the semantic circle: pre-revolutionary publicists and poets tried to encourage a person to be a citizen, but the Soviet system simply forced it. “You must be a citizen” has become literal. Only this was a truncated citizen. The appeal recorded the real situation in which Soviet people lived - the owner of a large number of responsibilities and a small number of rights.

On what can citizenship rights be based at all? The basis of the rights of a citizen, including a citizen-burgher, in the culture of the West was property and a free (in the sense of not a slave) state. The minority in the ancient Greek city-states were neither slaves nor strangers: these were the real citizens. Property was also firmly linked to citizenship. Property was not only “immovable,” but even identical with the family, which occupied a certain place in space. “Therefore, even in the Middle Ages, expulsion could entail destruction, and not just confiscation of property. Not to have any property meant not to have a family place in the world that would be called one’s own, that is, to be someone who is not provided for by the world and the political body organized in it” (Hannah Arendt. “Vita Activa, or On the Active Life ").

Such pragmatic foundations of a civic position are not very clear to Russian culture. In Russian culture, there is an unwritten hierarchy of activities, built on the relationship to power. Activities, including creative ones, can be protective; there is always a demand for them: such activities are understandable and excusable, but they are not highly valued and are subject to oblivion by descendants. The activity can be pure, divorced from the topic of the day, dedicated to theoretical science or high art: such activity is a level higher, society proudly preserves the memory of it, and the state willingly appropriates it. But real high activity must , or, in Nekrasov’s way, must be civil. Everything else - even art - is a departure from it, a guilty avoidance of the main thing.

Inactive citizen

The foundations of Russian citizenship are also determined by relations with and to power—its acceptance or rejection. A citizen of the Russian Tsar and the Russian conservative publicist is a subject who realizes the natural duty of man to honor God and authority, not to offend his neighbor, and to give alms. The citizen of the Russian poet and liberal publicist is an independent person striving for a high, albeit unattainable, ideal of a just society.

But how can a person be obliged not to offend his neighbor and to honor authority? This is on the one hand. On the other hand, how can a person be obliged to bear the “ulcers of his homeland,” “go into the fire,” or at least “smash his vices”? The heightened uncertainty of the role of our pre-constitutional citizen, on the one hand, and the obligation to be one, on the other, create a conflict. For some reason, the authorities themselves must want to fill citizenship with content. What will make her? For some reason, a person must be so selfless as to go into the fire. What will make him? The Russian person latently feels the obligation to be what most people cannot be - a hero. A truly functioning Russian citizen is somewhere between a forced Soviet citizen and an “active citizen” invented by PR people. This cannot but give rise to a feeling of powerlessness in front of social reality, and for many, a feeling of indifference, Lermontov-like coldness, see public opinion polls, which can be briefly described as follows: “And some kind of secret cold reigns in the soul, when fire boils in the blood.” .

Both “eternal” understandings of citizenship are equally legitimate in our culture. In certain eras, one becomes more legitimate than the other, but both are “airy” and do not have a clear institutional support. The simple way would be for Russian political society to stop oscillating between the two directions described and focus on the boring, constitutional one. But who in Russia is looking for such paths?