Hybrid totalitarianism

Elements of totalitarian practices have appeared in Russian authoritarianism, suggesting even more conformism, aggressiveness and hatred, says NT columnist Andrey Kolesnikov

A significant part of the Russians - from among those who support the "operation" and Putin - have turned into haters who do not listen to arguments that destroy their deaf-blind vision of the world. This is a sign not of an authoritarian, but of a totalitarian society, which accepts the state position as its own.

Russia, in principle, fell out of a number of explainable and classified authoritarian regimes. It was once talked about in terms of hybrid authoritarianism, although there was nothing hybrid in Putin's Rossiya corporation for a long time - it turned out to be a completely mature authoritarian regime. But now, after the defeat of civil society and the civic sphere in general, which includes independent media, after an unprecedented “special operation” in terms of negative consequences, it’s time to talk about the elements of totalitarianism in Putin’s authoritarian system.

Lev Gudkov described the system that was taking shape even before the "special operation" as "return totalitarianism", which means the regeneration of temporarily dormant totalitarian elements after a historically short pause in the form of the Yeltsin model. You could call what happened to Russia as a result of Putin's 22-year rule "neo-totalitarianism." However, due to the preservation of a number of basic elements of authoritarianism, I propose to call this regime "hybrid totalitarianism."

Silence is not enough

The concept of "information dictatorships" by Daniel Treisman and Sergey Guriev is well known. Modern dictators, researchers argued in a number of works, govern, rather, by manipulating information, and not by methods of repression, especially mass ones. To a certain extent, this also applied to Putin, but back in 2020, after his “zeroing” and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, it became clear that the “information dictatorship” was degenerating into something more uncompromising, reckless and repressive. "Bunkerized" Putin became more and more bitter and cruel. His system was becoming the same, based on the complete subordination of the establishment and the tacit consent of the masses.

The tacit consent of the majority, according to Ralf Dahrendorf, is one of the key signs of authoritarianism. “Those who do not obey,” wrote the classic of political science in his book “The Temptations of Unfreedom,” “are persecuted, they are gagged, they are imprisoned, sometimes they are expelled from the country, but the state, as a rule, no longer kills them.”

The silent ones act together within the framework of a kind of social contact: you, the authorities, provide us with minimal welfare / stability, we, ordinary people, do not meddle in your affairs and are not at all interested in them. Since 2014, prosperity has been replaced by the greatness of Russia, but ordinary people were still required to do only one thing - to stand aside from the affairs and deeds of the "elite". Ordinary Russians remained consumers of market goods, but not citizens in the proper sense of the word, who are characterized by responsible behavior, including in elections. Initially, in the Putin system, this was a model, in terms of Treisman-Guriev, demobilization, not mobilization (“Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century”). She was closer to Salazar than, for example, to Stalin. But where the central thesis about the greatness of the state appears, there is also mobilization - for the support of power and the flag, and, as it has now become clear, for military "exploits".

This is already a mobilization model, which Dahrendorf called totalitarian: we are talking about regimes that use "the total mobilization of everyone and everyone in the name of some ideology and in the interests of a leader or a small ruling clique." War, the thinker noted, is “deliberately built into” this type of regime “as the inevitable culmination of its development.” And of course, artificially provoked crises are needed for mobilization - thanks to this, power is consolidated.

In the 1950s, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in collaboration with Karl Friedrich, developed the theory of totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy. According to his understanding, under authoritarianism, the main thing is prohibitions, an understanding of what people should not do. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, combines prohibitions and imperatives, prescriptions: that is, subjects are obliged to know not only what they should not do, but also what they must according to the direct instructions of the state. Not only repression and control are important, but also the mobilization of the masses within the framework of predetermined obedience.

Elements of such relations between the state and society manifested themselves at full design capacity just after the start of the "special operation". It is no longer enough to be demobilized to keep quiet - you need to loudly express your support for the regime. Line up children in kindergartens with the letter Z, conduct lessons on methods of combating fakes in schools, encourage pupils and students to report on teachers and teachers, and vice versa, put on white bandages.

The call of the first person in the state to “self-cleanse” is not an authoritarian, but a totalitarian practice. The division of citizens into the right "patriots" and the wrong "national traitors", the "fifth column" is also a totalitarian practice. In other cases, it is not enough just to be silent "for" - you need to cast a vote. You have to show loyalty. This is the mark of a good citizen. More precisely, not a citizen, but a subject.

(Anti)culture of hate

And yet - you need to hate the enemy. Motiveless and thoughtless. The enemy is not only external, but also internal. As the writer Leonid Sobolev noted in 1946 during a discussion of the second series of the film "Ivan the Terrible" by Sergei Eisenstein, "one must fall in love with the oprichnina." The totalitarian system seeks love for violence against enemies, and seeks justification in historical examples. This is partly why, in the modern Russian public consciousness, Stalin has turned into a positive character in recent years.

The (anti) culture of hatred for everything that is declared alien justifies the total purge of civil society, the public sphere in general: hence the complete blocking of the independent media field, the destruction of high-quality educational organizations (pressure on Shaninka and her professors is just one example), a ban on work any scientific foreign structures. Finally, all authoritarian legislation rests on this culture of hatred and intolerance, including the more frequently used tool of the law on foreign agents.

One of the means of expressing the culture of hate is hate speech. The problem is also that in a society engulfed by aggressive submissiveness, the boundaries of discourse are also expanding. You can call your compatriot, a citizen like you, but holding a different opinion, a "traitor" and consider him a person of the lowest grade. One can freely and calmly, as the highest officials of the state do, talk about a nuclear war, which was completely unacceptable in Soviet times, during the Pax atomica period, when the warring parties understood the unacceptability of damage. Now this understanding - and this is another sign of an anthropological catastrophe - is fading away. Fortunately, we avoided the atomic crisis during the period when Russian troops were at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. People who manage to dig trenches in the radioactive zone are learning the non-existent lessons of non-existent history from Putin, but they do not know the real lessons of history, even the Chernobyl case.

Totalitarian practices are Samoyedic. They reduce the quality of human capital because the best are persecuted and the worst are encouraged - negative selection occurs. They contribute to the degradation of the economy. But political imaginary expediency is placed above socio-economic rationality.

There are many states everywhere, not only in the economy. But the economic (financial, budgetary) dependence of millions of people on the state as an employer and an "ATM" is an additional factor in keeping workers in obedience. Economic dependence breeds political dependence.

The state, in turn, forced to maintain high budget revenues in order to buy the political loyalty of the majority, depends on oil. Oil and gas have made an invaluable contribution to the evolution of the political and ideological system of Putin's Russia. The Dutch disease was also a political disease. Once, in the 1970s, the former Minister of the Oil Industry of Venezuela and one of the founders of OPEC, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, remarked: “In ten or twenty years, but it will definitely happen: oil will destroy us” (he was quoted in his memoirs the legendary head of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan). And it really happened! Moreover, the economic collapse is accompanied by political degradation.

Finally, a sign of totalitarianism is self-isolation and false ideas about the ability to survive in the modern world at the expense of everything one's own, without everything foreign. This country took place in the days of Stalinism - ideologists insisted on the primacy of the USSR / Russia in everything from the invention of radio to cultural achievements. As Comrade Zhdanov said, our literature "has the right to teach others a new universal morality." (Moreover, he spoke at that moment about Soviet censored literature.)

Russia plunged into some sort of haze, a dystopia. This is indeed “return totalitarianism”, but it has some features and properties that are rather difficult to explain after the country has nevertheless received some concepts of political democracy, civil culture and a market economy, freedoms and rights. A serious question is the duration of aggressive-conformist sentiments and the stability of the hybrid regime itself, sitting on bayonets, police batons and orders from Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Justice. From the inside of today's situation, everything seems not only hopeless, but also irrevocable. However, it is known from history that totalitarian regimes are ineffective, and the rulers are able to consistently cut all the branches on which they themselves sit. This does not make it any easier for the inhabitants of Russia, but this is the case when, unfortunately, we justified the most banal and vulgar truth of politics - every nation deserves the government that it has.

The people of Russia deserve better than this recurring effect of the totalitarian rut? This is what we will have to prove in the coming years.