Violence from powerlessness

The state, as it were, broke up into groups, where everyone has its own piece of use of violence, but no one has a monopoly on violence. People who are captured by security forces go to prison are not clear for what, but representatives of the elites go there: governors, senators, ministers. And the security forces themselves eat each other with pleasure.

Ilya Staheev

The “order of hard hand” was often the fetish of the inhabitants of our country. Perhaps precisely because there was practically no order without a hard hand. The old-free “will come to the master and judge everyone” precisely because there was an invidity in the estate: the clerk stole, drank the groom, the Barin's son poured peasants at the stable. Excessive centralization of decision -making in one hand gave rise to this management chaos. In modern language, the use of violence was not institutionalized. People did not understand when and for what they could be punished.

Alas, the modern news agenda is not much different from the seemingly distant past. People who are captured by security forces go to prison are not clear for what, but representatives of the elites go there: governors, senators, now two ministers. And the security forces themselves eat each other with pleasure. The fight of the bulldogs under the carpet has already become indecently noticeable: the carpet is getting shorter, and the bulldogs are all hungry. At the same time, the landings of the former “those in power” do not look like a fair retribution. They look like the lack of rules that regulate life even in the ruling elite.

The Nobel laureate Douglas North in the book “Violence and Social Order” is very convincing (and in other ways, representatives of institutionalism does not, they do not like paradoxes) shows that the format for the use of violence is one of the most important characteristics of any political regime. And so, says North, there are so -called open access regimes - countries in which violence is used very limited and predictably. If in an ideal model, then any citizen, falling under a particular sanction from the state, may be sure that each step of the state will be transparent (the media, public, open court, relatives know where you are specifically) and carried out according to the coordinated and understandable procedure (arrest, rights, lawyer, procedural actions according to the codes, an honest and impartial court). There are very few such countries.

There is also a group of countries with limited access regimes. There, the use of violence is limited by law and predictable for some (usually representatives of elites) and unpredictable for others. And now, among these countries, the fragile regimes of limited access can be distinguished, where a very small part of the population lives in the predictable and understandable world, and in stable - where in the same regime as the elites, a significant part of the population lives, and violence is unpredictable only for the marginal segments of the population.

This is a very important point. To understand, with a stable or fragile (ready to fall into chaos at least tomorrow), we are dealing with the regime, we must look, first of all, intelligent violence. On how they punish their own.

For a long time, Russia was in a state of stable limited access regime. If we see (God, bless the institution of law enforcement and personally Vadim Volkov) on the contingent of Russian prisoners, we will see that 60% of the sitting are unemployed, and almost 30% are people engaged in physical labor. It is significantly more often than men than women. The class instinct of Russian policeman Karl Marx and William Lloyd Warner would be prompted by mortal envy.

Niza violence comes from permissiveness, which representatives of the elites manifest in relation to each other

But criminal cases for all representatives of the elites show us that the vector of the use of violence inside the elite swayed towards the Hobbes natural state. Everyone is fighting with everyone, the power organs become, on the one hand, one of the groups of interests, and, on the other hand,, as in the good old feudal times, play the role of Landsknecht for these intra -elite showdowns. In one form or another, they try to appropriate the strength functions that did not think about it at all before (just remember these eternal calls to the State Duma and the Ministry of Culture to check everything for extremism, as well as just look at what unprecedented power resources have acquired herbivore once Roskomnadzor).

But there is another side of the coin: in the use of direct and direct violence, it is completely incomprehensible what to do with state structures that have organizations, like NODs, “Serb”, Cossacks, veterans of Donbass and so on. Niza violence comes from permissiveness, which representatives of the elites show in relation to each other: "They can - it means that we can."

We see the participation of such groups in the acceleration of Navalny rallies, we see the situation in Ingushetia, which they try to hide and shut up. And here is the latest-the situation in Yekaterinburg around the construction of the temple, where the police can not resolve the world in any way a conflict between residents who oppose the destruction of the park, and some Ural “collectivos”, consisting of athletes, Orthodox activists and other representatives of groups organized “from below” and ready to use violence.

This is the most dangerous trend. The state, as it were, broke up into groups, where everyone has its own piece of use of violence, and no one has the same monopoly on violence. This state of the state North after Hobbes calls “natural”. And what happens when people fall into their natural state, I described in my last column.

Ilya Staheev, especially for Taiga.info