After Buchi, or the Society of Silent “For”

When a nation becomes deaf and dumb, Mariupol and Bucha become possible, NT columnist and Carnegie Foundation expert Andrei Kolesnikov is sure Photo: Mariupal: 90% of buildings in the city are destroyed

"Let others scream in despair,

From resentment, from pain, from hunger!

We know that silence is more profitable,

Because silence is golden!”

Alexander Galich, Prospector's Waltz, 1963

Theodor Adorno's phrase about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz

but it always seemed strange to me: just poetry is one of the few means of expressing feelings that are unthinkable in their intensity. In any case, a thick volume of poems about Babi Yar became possible. And these are, as a rule, very good poems - in Russian and Ukrainian. And what is now possible after Mariupol? And after Buchi?

After the Basque Guernica, destroyed by the bombing of the Condor legion, Picasso's Guernica became possible. Like today's shameless propagandists, in 1937 the Francoists accused the Republicans of setting the city on fire - they bombed themselves and set themselves on fire. In the same way, Soviet officialdom successfully concealed the truth about Katyn for decades.

Bucha and Mariupol will now be talked about - and this is for centuries - as about Auschwitz, Srebrenica and other examples of unmotivated cruelty. The Putin regime has now put itself on a par with some Pol Pot.

Heroization of violence

Knowledge of Auschwitz sobered the post-war German society, which did not want to hear anything about it while the war was going on. After February 24, Russian society also refused to know anything, shutting itself off from the world with the letter Z, as they fence themselves off from evil spirits with a cross. And there is no certainty that knowledge of Mariupol will sober him up and force him to think about the world in terms of repentance. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, poetry became possible; after Mariupol, talk shows of hatred for the whole world on federal Russian TV channels are still possible.

The tragedy of the nation, justified in advance by the ideology of Putinism: there will be no one here to repent for Mariupol. Historicism of Putinism, its ideology, turned to the past and whitens the darkest pages, knows only heroes, but does not know victims. As a result, the cult of Victory turns not into a lesson in avoiding war, but into a cult of war as such. The lesson of history has been altered, turned inside out, vulgarized and turned into agitation.

Putin's ideology has no positive content, it has no positive goal, no image of the desired future. The whole identity of the Putinists is based on something negative, and therefore militarism turns out to be an important component of it. The hero of such an ideology is by no means Gagarin, but a bandit without a name, but with some nickname - for example, "Motorola". A man who does not pave the way to a humanistic future, but drives us into the archaic past with its trench heroism - sweat, blood, lice and murders.

Murder and violence are glorified. The main credible institutions are the institutions of violence, the army and the FSB. Moreover, all this is sanctified by the official Russian Orthodox Church: if earlier the sanction for destruction for the sake of higher goals was given by the propaganda department of the Central Committee, now it is the Russian Orthodox Church.

The ideology, one of the components of which is the idea of ​​a single Russian nation, which includes Ukrainians, as a result, killed this idea, creating a strong negative identity of Ukrainians. After Bucha and Mariupol, there will never be a single nation. And on the Russians / Russians there will remain the stigma of the people who allowed and supported Putinism.

Silence as complicity

And here the question of guilt and responsibility arises. Including collective guilt and responsibility for what happened to Ukraine and Russia. For the fact that Russia is now thrown back in its moral state into the most deaf and paranoid years of Stalinism, where denunciation was considered valor and duty, and black was called white. For the fact that Russia is experiencing an anthropological catastrophe.

The normal feeling of a normal citizen of the Russian Federation, and not a subject of Putin, is terrible horror and shame burning from the inside. Shame - for what Putin has done and for the stupid bitterness with which many of our compatriots support him, profaning the very concept of patriotism. The majority, led by the women's death battalion led by Skabeeva. Simonyan, Zakharova and company, not ashamed, but joyfully. The minority is ashamed both for themselves and for them.

The same feelings were experienced by people who retained the ability to think, doubt, compassion, in 1968 after the invasion of Soviet tanks in Prague. Then, too, they were taken away and tried for the mere deployment of posters. But Putin's time outdid Brezhnev's in terms of the number of victims and detentions.

Then, in October 1968, in her last speech at the trial, Larisa Bogoraz uttered the main words that remained relevant for many years after they were uttered, and turned out to be important again today: “It was not enough for me to know that my votes “for”, - it was important for me that there would be no my vote “against” ... If I had not done this (I went to the square on August 25, 1968. - A.K.), I would consider myself responsible for these actions government, just as all adult citizens of our country are responsible for all the actions of our government ... "

Schoolchildren in a free and democratic Russia should have learned these words by heart, and August 25 should have been celebrated as a holiday for the awakening of the national conscience. But they live in another Russia - where the truth is called fakes, and they themselves are taught to inform on "national traitors".

And then Bogoraz, boorishly interrupted by the judge, said: “I had one more consideration against going to the demonstration ... This consideration is about the practical uselessness of the demonstration, that it will not change the course of events. But I decided in the end that for me this is not a matter of benefit, but a matter of my personal responsibility.

“How many times we were silent in different ways, but not “against”, of course, but “for,” Alexander Galich sang.

He sang that silence - as in the interpretation of Bogoraz - is complicity in the actions of the regime.

Brueghel's blind men

So, in the logic of Larisa Bogoraz, there is at least a collective responsibility of those who approved and remained silent for what is happening with their native country and what the state is doing. Perhaps there is a difference between collective guilt and collective responsibility. Hannah Arendt, a philosopher who has dealt with the topic of German responsibility in post-war Germany, has written extensively about this. In the article “Collective responsibility”, she draws a line between political (collective) responsibility and moral and/or legal guilt. In "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" she spoke about the fallacy of the principle of collective guilt in relation to the German people and even "the whole of German history from Luther to Hitler." “In practice,” Arendt wrote, “this turned out to be a universal means of whitewashing those who were really involved in something, because where everyone is to blame, no one is to blame.” That did not relieve the German people of responsibility for what happened to them and to other peoples.

All this has yet to be experienced by the Russian people, who already in the eyes of public opinion in a significant part of the world (not only in the West) are equated with the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s. This is how, striving for "denazification", you can gain the glory of "Nazifiers".

In extreme situations, such as the story of Putin's "special operation", anyone who is silent is not "against", but "for". And this is a case of collective responsibility. That is why the majority, the so-called public opinion, does not want to believe "fakes" (that is, the truth), justifies Putin's actions and even sometimes tears his shirt in a quasi-patriotic impulse.

Passive conformism is no less terrible than active and aggressive. Collective irresponsibility ("my hut is on the edge") gives rise to collective responsibility. It's blurry, which is good. This is collective voluntary blindness. The nation follows Putin like Brueghel's blind men. When a nation becomes deaf-blind-mute, Mariupol and Bucha become possible.

General Gleichschaltung

This is the very Gleichschhaltung, the cowardly adaptation of the common man to the political regime within which he exists. According to Jurgen Habermas - "voluntary connection to the dominant ideology." The concept is German because it has characterized the mass consciousness of the nation since 1933. The same kind of phenomenon was observed during the years of Stalinism and in the late USSR. (In an interview, Arendt recalled how her fellow German intellectuals quickly became involved in Gleichschaltung, among them it became a rule: "... a vacuum formed around me.")

The Gleichschaltung phenomenon explains the 80% support for the "military special operation". Yes, not all respondents who answered “I support” really support the fighting, destruction and killings. But having said so, they joined the silent “yes”. Therefore, this figure must be taken seriously.

And Larisa Bogoraz also spoke about this in her last word: “The prosecutor ended his speech with the assumption that the sentence he proposed would be approved by public opinion ... I have no doubt that public opinion will approve this verdict, as it approved of similar sentences before, as it would approve any verdict... Public opinion will approve a guilty verdict, firstly, because we will be presented to it as parasites, renegades and conductors of a hostile ideology. And secondly, if there are people whose opinion differs from the “public” one and who find the courage to express it, they will soon be here (points to the dock).

If ever a nation thinks about what happened to it, and what was done with its consent, it will find a thousand excuses for itself. Arendtov's "man of the crowd" will proceed from the following assumption: "When his profession makes him kill people, he does not consider himself a murderer, because he did it not out of predisposition, but the strength of the profession. He won’t hurt a fly just like that” (from the article “Organized Guilt”).

This explains both the rallies in Luzhniki, and Bucha, and 80 percent of those who support and are silent. We have nothing to do with it. That's how the circumstances came about. We were told that the Nazis were there. We were following orders. We were afraid of losing our jobs. We had a mortgage.

And in fact, they couldn't. Because they voluntarily abandoned such an instrument of maintaining the conscience of the nation and the effectiveness of the administration as elections and democracy. Because they stopped thinking and made endless compromises. And the compromises ended in the catastrophe of the universal Gleichschaltung.

In the photo : Mariupol, 90% of the buildings in the city were destroyed