Boris Nadezhdin and learned helplessness

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In gratitude for your support, we previously periodically wrote letters to you, talking about how things are going and sharing our thoughts. This year we decided to make this newsletter regular. Once a month we send you a letter from one of the three founders of The Bell - Elizabeth Ossetian, Irina Malkova or Peter Mironenko. This newsletter is personal - in it we share what we are thinking about and what we are experiencing. We will be glad if you answer us. The usual world has long collapsed, and communication, support and dialogue have acquired even greater value.

Like other business journalists, I never loved to write about politics (in a wide, but literally, the struggle of professional power politicians). Not because this is a “dirty business” - the business is often no better. And because in political journalism it is especially difficult to distinguish the retelling of rumors and provocative lies from the truth. In the work of a business journalist, of course, this is also full. But, firstly, there are more reliable points of support-statistics, reporting, objective data on the situation in the markets. And secondly, people in business are responsible for their words with money-and this still reduces the level of information noise.

When a dispute begins in the editorial office, write or not write about a particular political topic, I act as a skeptic. But by the 20th of January, when the lines for the signature for Boris Nadezhdin became a meme, and even the associates of Alexei Navalny spoke to his support, even I had no doubt that this topic should become the main one in our evening and then weekly mailing. Although in the case of Nadezhdin, the skepticism had a double coefficient - after all, this topic began not just as political, but as political technological. There is no doubt that under this Nadezhdin permission to collect signatures (that is, to conduct a legal anti-war campaign) lay some kind of idea of the Kremlin.

What kind of idea it was, you can guess endlessly. The easiest option is that the Kremlin sets a deliberately losing anti -war candidate so that he gains conditional 0.5%, showing the marginality of this agenda. So, probably, in the past elections with Ksenia Sobchak (1.68% of the vote). We can assume a strategy and more complicated - for example, political scientist Grigory Golosov came up with this: Nadezhdin becomes a prominent opposition politician, with the help of soft repression he is squeezed abroad, and there he becomes a treatable figure useful for the Kremlin in the forefront of the opposition.

But guessing about the secret plans of the Kremlin in this case (like almost any other) is useless. Whatever the idea there, she obviously began to live her own life, as is the case with political technological constructions. In addition, none of those who stood in lines were seriously and counted that the Kremlin would give a chance in the election to an anti -war candidate - Nadezhdin became just a gathering point, around which people have united in whom the state took the opportunity to participate in political life and express their political position, without risking being repressed.

The anti-war and anti-Putin part of Russian society is clearly necessary for some person around whom one could unite. Who would have thought that the functionary of the ATP that had seen the species could be, but Nadezhdin, in which no one really believed and therefore was not afraid, became a rather compromise figure so that the leaders of the FBK and Maxim Katz supporting each other supported him. Given the clear request, such persons will appear further - and, most likely, they will not be politicians (Boris Akunin reasonablyspoke about this in a recent interview with Ossetian).

And here it seems to me important one thing. One of the main factors that allowed Vladimir Putin to build a dictatorship in Russia and start a terrible war is our Russian post -Soviet cynicism, including the assumption that people and organizations always have secret selfish motivation, and actions are performed either for money, or on assignment, or “for PR”. A critical attitude to public people is, of course, good. But its logical continuation often becomes the position of learned helplessness: if so, then you don’t need to do anything, what is the point of helping the Kremlin Murzilka. The story with Nadezhdin shows that there is a meaning - two years after the outbreak of war, people opposing it saw that they were and there are many of them. And this is already important.