Translated material
There is a folk war
Andrei Arkhangelsky and Andrey Kolesnikov: how the "special operation" turned into a "folk war"
Sergey Medvedev: I want to congratulate us all: “Special Military Operation” is completed and, according to Sergei Kiriyenko, the “People’s War” began in Russia. It is interesting whether he will be held accountable for fakes about the Armed Forces of Russia, since the word "war" is officially prohibited. What does the "folk war" mean? How ready are the Russians to die on her fronts? Has the war become a new national idea of Russia?
Video version of the program
With us, a culturologist A NDRA Arkhangelsk and political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov . A folk war is, among other things, a readiness for death. Now there are more and more evidence in social networks about those monstrous losses that are no longer professional military, but mobilized, like Primorsky, 155th Marine Corps, which became the Guards, Voronezh brigade, from which, according to various information, died from 300 to 500 people. How are deaths in Russia perceived?
The folk war is, among other things, and readiness for death
Andrei Arkhangelsky: Putin's regime built his strategy with the help of concepts of 70 years ago: all this so-called “denazification”, “Nazis” and “fascists”, who are supposedly in Ukraine. Everyone is used to this rhetoric. Despite the fact that this is absolute madness and crazy projection, nevertheless, it worked to some extent because it spoke in mental memory.
After February 24, these words continued to work for one simple reason: the mass consumer of this shit (sorry for the expression) has no responsibility. That's when Putin declared mobilization, then this war became an objective reality in sensations and not only. Everything that was before can be called a postmodern game, although it is difficult to imagine that people who have started this madness have an idea of postmodern. But at the time of the declaration of mobilization , when hundreds of thousands of people were involved right in this, the postmodern game ended, terrifying reality has come, and it will continue to objectify. No matter how much the TV sought to hide military defeats and losses, it is still impossible to avoid this information in the transparent world.
Sergey Medvedev: Yes, the TV “came” from a remote picture to the life of people in the form of a funeral, missing husbands, sons, brothers who do not send information from Ukraine for weeks and may already be considered missing. The question is - what are the consequences?
Andrei Arkhangelsky: A folk war suggests that you are ready to die. But still, the majority of consumers of this television department did not suggest that they would have to give their lives. In fact, this war is only for Ukraine, because people have no question there, for which to die, everything is clear there. But in the case of the Russians, the answer to the question "What are you dying for?" Hanging in the air. And in this sense, the whole concept of folk war is showered with every day, and the further, the more.
Sergey Medvedev: Andrei, we have repeatedly discussed that the main achievement of Putin's propaganda is the creation of a huge conformal majority. What will happen to this conformity, with the demobilization of people, readily accept everything that the state feeds when the real opportunity to die invades this?
At the time of mobilization announcement, the postmodern game ended, and there was a terrifying reality
Andrey Kolesnikov: Here you need to separate active and passive support. Now active support, according to the Levada Center , has decreased to 44%, even Putin’s supporters would like peaceful negotiations, because there is some fatigue from what is happening. This desire to unite on a negative platform, of course, exists precisely in the genre of humility, but mostly not active. Of course, there are very active people who support all this, for them the war becomes a national idea, meaning and content of life, which, however, leads to death. And there is even a willingness to share this discourse with the heroization of violence, sacrificial death, which is taught by one of the propagandists in the person of Patriarch Kirill.
But in modern society, this design begins to scatter gradually. Putin involved the population into this war, asking people to share responsibility with him. He needs the bodies of these people to plug the holes on the contact line. This was said by President of the Russian Federation Putin in Astana: "I need your blood, your bodies. I do not have enough of you." People in an essential part took it badly and left, disappeared, but a more significant part began to act in the genre of predefined humility. But! People are ready to do this exclusively for money, and where the money is not paid, mobilized riots arise. This is a new phenomenon that is somewhat eroded by the right -conservative romantic concept of folk war. Accordingly, it turns out not very folk.
Andrey Kolesnikov
What is happening, of course, very strongly shares the nation. Even if about 20% against the war and Putin, which is about the same, then these are tens of millions of people. And Putin himself, in my opinion, being in Vladivostok, admitted that along with consolidation there is polarization of society, a split and even radicalization. But, he said then, "we will get rid of these people, this is the burden." This part of the nation carries the label of "foreign agents", "national traitors", "fifth column."
Sergey Medvedev: So far, in October, people just went to the military registration and enlistment office, to these buses and trains, we saw that very humility. But will it end when funerals will come back instead of these people?
What is happening greatly shares the nation: even if about 20% against the war and Putin, then these are tens of millions of people
Andrei Kolesnikov: There is a historical imperial experience of our previous state - this is an Afghan war, when funerals and zinc coffins that came to the USSR from Afghanistan became a slow -off bomb. There were many less victims, and the dynamics was not so fantastically destructive, but this undermined the moral basis of the Soviet Union, like a drop in oil prices, and the militarization of the economy, and double thinking. The Afghan war was one of the factors for undermining the unity of that same Soviet people in a new historical community.
I think the same thing is happening now, but for some reason much more slowly. Obviously, this internal social resistance, the adaptability of people to what was happening turned out to be simply colossal. Support indicators decreased slightly, but if you draw a long curve, then it is on a fairly high plateau compared to what was back in January of this year and in December of the past. This is still holding.
Sergey Medvedev: Andrey, can we expect a protest increase?
Andrei Arkhangelsky: There is no political habit of protest. There is no transition from internal moral indignation, which we can suggest from some part of the population to a political act. The moment on which the current Ukrainian nation took place was a moment when moral indignation turned into a political act (Maidan and everything that followed him). In Russia there is no habit of a political act. It’s not without reason the Kremlin for 20 years not only pursued political activists, but repelled the habit of a political act and generally to a person’s feeling in a political field, thereby destroying ethics. Therefore, I believe that protests are impossible.
There is no habit of political act in Russia
Sergey Medvedev: I am impressive how the administrative apparatus was obediently built into this war, how people stop any performances of their employees, any use of the word “war”, how they hang these Z. Is it possible to say that Putin really rebuilt the absolutely silk obedient state ready to work in the conditions of the war?
Andrey Kolesnikov: To a certain extent - yes. We see how it is ineffective in a mobilization situation, but this is a technical part. And the state apparatus has developed, it works. He is extremely loyal. He makes incredible nonsense, from the point of view of common sense, nevertheless, acts as the apparatus of a repressive authoritarian state, absolutely corresponding to the task, should act. They are precisely the part of this single "we", which claims to be the name of the "people" and the conduct of the "people's war". In principle, they succeed.
Double consciousness is probably present. I think that in the upper part of the apparatus there are many in horror from what is happening there. Yes, there are, of course, incidents, when people leave (mainly quietly) from state corporations, ministries, from the apparatus, but there are few of them. Everyone else prefer to be inside this team and share with great leadership responsibility for what is happening in the hope that it will be forever. Yes, Putin built such a scheme in which it seems that this state and he himself will really never disappear, and they continue to serve him, not seeing for themselves to get out of this system. Families, salaries, mortgages, for some-team spirit-all this holds in this very service, forcing to make completely crazy decisions.
Sergey Medvedev: The Rednidt's banality of Evil. If, before the school principal, this was participation in the falsifications of elections, the stuffing of the ballots, the sealing of negligent students, about something disrespectful about something, now the same directors are handing over students and their parents to the police, they make visual agitation with the heroes of Donbass in schools. This inclined evil leads to Auschwitz.
Andrey Arkhangelsk
Andrei Arkhangelsky: Putin's layman behaves about the same as the layman behaved in Nazi Germany. Firstly, he realized himself not part of evil, but only part of the apparatus. Secondly, as it happens in such cases in authoritarian regimes, they usually, getting on the bench of the defendants, are justified: "I only followed orders." As Hannah Arendt wrote, you cannot blame the person that he acts within the state and serves the state, no matter how criminal this state may be. In order to realize the crime of the state’s action, you need to be a full -fledged personality, an internal dialogue with your own conscience is necessary. This is the destiny of the minority.
Sergey Medvedev: But there is a completely special category of people who also serve the state, but not passively executing, but actively forming the agenda of this war and calling for violence. These are propagandists.
Putin's inhabitant behaves about the same as the layman behaved in Nazi Germany
Andrei Arkhangelsky: As the practice of two ships on the propagandists shows (the trial of the propagandists of the Third Reich Streicher and Frice and the trial of the “thousands of hills” in Rwanda), they have nothing to do with the words of hatred, being employees of the state media, or did it in their own blog. In this case, each individual person is responsible for his words. Oddly enough, the freedom of speech on their side is here, because you are to some extent free in choosing words. This is terrible from a moral point of view, but from the point of view of jurisprudence, this is unlucky.
The trial of the propagandists of the Third Reich made a certain discovery: he separated the words of hatred from the words calling for violence. Words directly calling for violence that led to victims among the civilians, after February 24, there were much more, and in this sense there is something to present to the propagandists. But it is precisely the words that, if the court proves this, led to terrible consequences.
All this became possible because before Putin destroyed the freedom of speech. Now the world, seeing what consequences terrifying words lead to, should conclude that freedom of speech is not just a good wish, but almost the only guarantee from this madness. As the same process showed over the propagandists of the Third Reich, all this worked in a system where there were no alternative points of view. It is the lack of alternative points of view that would be available to the Russian viewer that is a key problem of this general division.
Sergey Medvedev: The politician Dmitry Gudkov argues.
Dmitry Gudkov
Dmitry Gudkov: The desperate attempts of Kiriyenko and other politicians to launch a new narrative say only that everything is going on completely out of plan. Everything is collapsing with them, they have failure for failure, defeat after defeat-this must be somehow explained. I do not see any attempt to find a national idea here. Most likely, this is an attempt to save yourself in this system: you must say what Putin will like. Kiriyenko is not so stupid person as not to understand that such a narrative simply does not work in these conditions. But you need to survive in this system, since Prigogine will come to you tomorrow, so you should always demonstrate the loyalty and support of the leader: this is a megagaranth of political survival in this system.
Sergey Medvedev: Maybe the war is the same national idea that Russia has been looking for 30 years?
The same people who defend the war and Putin at the same time complain that, here, I wanted to update BMV for myself-it did not work out because of the war
Andrei Kolesnikov: Putin really found this gold mine, hitting several places with a shovel in several places, and it flowed to the gold of support, the gold of Great Power, which previously flowed somewhere inside in an unauthorized form. To wake these rather low and archaic feelings in people, special efforts were needed, more than one year. Yes, historically, this pseudo -people's spirit rose during periods of wars, confrontations and conflicts. Yes, indeed, Russia has always been in a certain defensive position in relation to the West, and rejected everything western. Nevertheless, in recent decades, Russia still has passed some stages of modernization, and our country knows the periods of liberalization, falling asleep these great-power complexes.
If there were not some personified historical circumstances, we could develop quite normally. When there are circumstances indicating that we are moving back to the archaic, to the usual state of the predefined humility of the authoritarian state, in these circumstances, a person begins to adapt and behave like a person of that time. This is what the sociologist Lev Gudkov calls "refundable totalitarianism." As soon as those circumstances that are historically present in our politics are formed, a person begins to behave in accordance with them, becomes submissive, resentified, evil, anti -Western, although he uses the fruits of this West in excellently. The same people who are now defending the war and Putin with foam at the mouth, at the same time complain that, here, I wanted to update BMV-it did not work out because of the war, go in Italian costumes. All this fits in one head, because they became consumers of the Western type, and did not become citizens of the universalist universal type.
Sergey Medvedev: Can a defeat in the war transcode Russia?
Andrei Arkhangelsky: I believe that there is nothing eternal in this sense. I see the only cure for this by political activity. I think that after the regime either collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, as has already happened, or will be frustrated by defeat in the war, there will be a return of political practices. But there should still be some feelings. A person must love capitalism, and politics, and his participation, even if hatred for someone. A person should feel a passion for this occupation with politics.
And, of course, all this is possible only in a free or relatively free society, and not in the current Putin, where all the nuts are twisted. Only the return of real political elective activities can change this allegedly unchanged code of violence, which is asleep in a Russian person. As soon as the possibilities for political action are opened as soon as it takes place in a legal field, in a transparent society, this code will change very quickly. About the same thing happened from the mid-80s until the end of the 90s. The mistake of the Yeltsin regime is that it was necessary to rely not on the intelligentsia, but on wider folk layers.
Only the return of political elective activities can change the allegedly invariable code of violence in a Russian person
Andrei Kolesnikov: Yes, historically defeats in the wars - Crimean, Japanese - led to very serious public changes. Now it seems to me that this will not happen. This mode can find words in order to present any defeat as a victory. Even the withdrawal from Kherson overturned only the hawks, the rest of the mass was fully resigned to the fact that it was a tactical move, saving manpower, and this is very humane. People liked it, because they just want it to end - defeat, victory ... Not necessarily people capable of reflection will be found in such quantities that the nation rethinks themselves and the state rewind itself. Although the departure of the authoritarian regime, as a rule, ends with another period of modernization and liberalization.