Caste

How a neo-feudal society is being formed in Russia, which can only survive on the principles of modern serfdom

From the editor:

We invite everyone to the conversation. With this text by Elena Panfilova, we begin a conversation about Russian neo-feudalism and neo-serfdom, which, if you look from above, comprise all, even the most idiotic innovations and laws at first glance. The author dwelled on what they are trying to do with education. Ahead is a story about the economic forms of modern serfdom, the policy of stupidity of the nation, the reorganization of the social sphere, the struggle for “slaves” between “governors-general”, the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in this, the artificial creation of social inequality between different categories of the population and even different regions. About how a system is being created from which it will be impossible to get out of the allotted place for generations, and those who succeed as the first student will owe everything to the new aristocracy.

Sometimes individual strange initiatives of the authorities look exactly like this: isolated and unexpected, jumping out as if from a snuffbox of general oddities, not causing any reaction other than a shrug of the shoulders. But sometimes they, these separate and strange ones, suddenly pour out on the head of society in such a crowd that the thought involuntarily arises that all this is not without reason, that these are not isolated ideas of power, but something that makes up some kind of systemic action, which has, albeit hidden for the time being, but target.

Let's look directly at the chronology of appearance during literally the last time:

• “The fact that we have 11 years [in school] is an unaffordable luxury. This is us living in the 19th century. It must be compressed so that later it can enter the field of vocational training earlier...” - Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky on the need to shorten the duration of school education.

• “Remove English from the list of subjects for admission to universities in the areas of “economics” and “management” as an entrance test” - a draft list of entrance tests (IT) for admission to universities from the Ministry of Education and Science and the fact of the gradual removal of English from school curricula.

• “Today the most important task in the education system is the development of educational work. We need to raise children who love their Motherland and are ready to work for its good. We adopted a law on the mandatory display of the Russian flag not only in schools, but also in all educational organizations, discipline rules in classrooms became mandatory,” - Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Education Olga Kazakova on what is most important now in school

• “This year we are launching a large-scale program to reorganize our secondary technical education. We will increase admission to budget places by half so that all Muscovites who finish 9th grade can get free places in our colleges and, accordingly, receive working specialties,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin on the priorities of Moscow education

• “This [Darwin’s theory] is not true, it contradicts religious education, all religions have recognized this. Who else should admit this in order to remove it from textbooks and not put it into the consciousness of our children?” - Assistant to the Prime Minister, ex-mayor of Grozny and ex-Prime Minister of Chechnya Muslim Khuchiev on the exclusion of Darwin’s theory from the school curriculum

• “I believe that social studies in its current form is useless. The way it is now, it won’t be useful in life,” Vladimir Medinsky again about the exclusion of social studies from the school curriculum for grades 6–9.

• “It’s a completely vicious practice that has developed in society: the belief that a woman should get an education, then make a career, then secure a financial base for herself and only after that... worry about childbearing... The situation must be reconsidered. The message should be different. The sooner she gives birth, the better for her health,” - Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko about giving birth immediately after school.

• “The federal project “Professionality” <development of the system of secondary specialized vocational education> is planned to be expanded by 2026 to 1.5 thousand participating colleges in all regions of Russia,” Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Tatyana Golikova on the expansion of the special education system.

• “We need to give birth, give birth and give birth again. You can give birth at eighteen or nineteen... Grandparents should help, and this is mandatory. We need to form families in institutions - these are the best families, student ones, who then go through life together,” State Duma deputy Zhanna Ryabtseva on stimulating early births.

• “By 2027, the number of teachers and masters in the segment of secondary vocational education will increase by 7% compared to the current year and will amount to 173,600 teachers,” - National report on the implementation of state policy in the field of education to the Federal Assembly on the development of secondary specialized education.

• “The goal of the course is to introduce young people to the traditional system of family values ​​for our Fatherland and the formation of pro-family value and semantic attitudes: marriage, large families, chastity,” is the work program of the “Family Studies” course, introduced in a number of schools in the country since September 2024.

• “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, your instruction to train 1 million qualified specialists for key sectors of the economy by 2028 will be exceeded. We already see that we will prepare 1 million 350 thousand, and by 2030 - about two million. And we set our goal to bring the employment rate of graduates to 85%,” - Russian Minister of Education Sergei Kravtsov during the opening by President Putin of the first practical training site for Moscow colleges, created on the territory of the Rudnevo industrial park on October 2, 2024.

...We should apologize for such an abundance of quotes and messages that more than succinctly show how power suddenly powerfully and en masse rushed at the younger generation in an attempt to reformat what should have been instilled in this generation since childhood. We should, but we won’t, since we have also excluded from mention the updated standards for teaching literature, where such humanistic authors as Vladimir Korolenko and Narine Abgaryan were removed from the program, new program requirements for social studies lessons, where children will be told about such new Russian “heroes” like Donbass “volunteers” Vladimir Zhoga (his father Artem Zhoga in December 2023 asked Vladimir Putin to run for a new presidential term and was recently appointed presidential envoy to the Ural Federal District) and Arsen Pavlov (Motorola) ), as well as Daria Dugina and patriotic conductor Vladimir Gergiev. We did not include here a detailed description of innovations in school labor lessons (the programs have been significantly expanded and refined in terms of mastering direct skills and abilities) and the subject, which until recently was called “Fundamentals of Life Safety,” but will now become “Fundamentals of Life Safety and Defense of the Motherland” (it included the module “Military training. Fundamentals of military knowledge”). And so it’s clear where everything is heading.

If you rise above this whole host of initiatives, you can clearly see the picture of the authorities’ expectations of what a young Russian should enter from school into adulthood:

less humanitarian-scientific-foreign, more military, professional-labor, patriotic and strongly patriarchal, and also be ready to get married and give birth immediately upon receiving a certificate of secondary education.

Why does the government need this? What kind of society does it want to build with this approach? The answer seems to lie on the surface, but let’s try to understand it more specifically.

New serfdom

Many analysts and experts, having read this series of messages about the shrinking of programs, content and accessibility of general secondary education, about a clear and active collapse towards building a system that looks like “boys go to vocational schools and machines, and from there to the army, girls to maternity hospital,” the first thing they suggested was that the main reasons for this powerful social shift lie in two problematic areas of Russian politics: recruiting the ranks of the armed forces and solving demographic problems.

It seems, indeed, that it is expected to make a sharp shift in the education system, when the bulk of schoolchildren throughout the country will receive only a basic general education.

In which there will be less thought-provoking, and more doctrines and linearity, leaving no room for fantasy and unnecessary thoughts about what is happening around, and then go to fill jobs in an industrial militarized economy, which requires more and more millers, lathes, foundries to produce like rockets, shells and drones, as well as basic domestically produced consumer goods, which should replace everything that has left the market as a result of sanctions.

At the same time, it seems, the task is being set that these seventeen-eighteen-year-old turners and mechanics, without interrupting their studies and production, will create young families with peers, give birth to first-born children and go to the army. The state will shower them with money in the form of various benefits, payments and preferential mortgages - plus, as said, it will attract grandparents to help, and this will create an ideal cycle of plugging human holes in production, the army and demography.

One might assume that these are just coincidences and speculation. But, firstly, there are never so many coincidences, and, secondly, in the case of our state, the most amazing speculations, as a rule, turn out to be a reality over time. Today we see a picture that leaves no doubt that they have taken the matter seriously. Here are the problems that arose already this year throughout the country with the admission of schoolchildren to the tenth grade, because suddenly additional tests arose, and those who did not pass them were kindly but persistently offered to go to college, and more and more persistent conversations and proposals for the introduction of compulsory distribution and detention two to three years for university and college graduates who studied on a budget. Adjacent to this is the only remaining mortgage of any kind - for young families in the regions, where those same industries are located.

Everything is woven together into a clear plan, according to which young people will be pushed regulatory, administratively and financially to join the number of residents of the industrial province working in industrial production and producing something iron and children. And these children (according to the way the new education system is being built) will only have the opportunity to repeat their path: technical college - machine tool - army - machine tool, and so the state will not only and not so much solve immediate problems in production, at the front and in demography,

but will carry out a large-scale social reorganization, effectively enslaving the lower productive class.

And yes, all this will have an unconditional class principle, since the road to complete secondary education, to the higher education that follows from it, as well as to the opportunity to read not only what remains in the nibbled literature and social studies program and to study not only the native, great and mighty, will only be received by those who are currently fortunately born in big cities in families that can do a little more than everyone else.

Higher education, if the created system takes root, will become a thing received not for talents and merits, but depending on whether the opportunities and position of the family in society can provide it to the child. That is, exclusively a caste and class opportunity . What is extremely important and curious: these highest classes with great opportunities passed through caste formation and a kind of enslavement a little earlier than society as a whole.

Long reconstruction

If you look carefully at the last twenty years of Russia’s life, you can clearly see how slowly, gradually the structure of the domestic elites transformed, just like Surkov with his “long state”, slowly, so that the result of certain actions and decisions seems to be you can’t see in the moment, a class society was taking shape on principles that seemed to be terribly far from the 21st century.

These principles are more reminiscent of pre-Petrine and Peter the Great times, when the elites were given a lot, but no less was asked of them. By the way, in that same Surkov article of 2019, which described what only the Russian state can be, based on what it called the “deep people,” one can also see prototypes of what is happening in relation to society and the education system and determining the trajectory of development of the destinies of young people right now. But they started with the elites themselves, and Surkov described the process of nationalization and enslavement of the Russian elites this way: “With its gigantic supermass, the deep people create an irresistible force of cultural gravity that connects the nation and attracts (presses) the elite, from time to time, to the ground (to their native land) trying to soar cosmopolitanly."

But here, as is always the case with him, he is disingenuous and casts a shadow over the fence. No people attracted and crushed domestic elites to the territory of Russia; this was done firmly, decisively and without sentimentality by the state and the top leadership of the country. With an unwavering hand, the Russian authorities outlined the contours of what the ruling and ruling class should look like in the country.

From the remnants of the oligarchs who took the government's brunt and the higher bureaucracy adjacent to them, intertwined with them, a new aristocracy was fashioned with all the class benefits and privileges that accompanied its position.

This aristocracy lives in a world of its own law, its own financial system, its own way of life, which in no way intersect with what is written in the rules, regulations and laws for ordinary people, for the rest of the country.

The selection for this “high society” was careful and strict: those who did not meet the criteria, which are determined by the triangle “unconditional loyalty – wealth – readiness to serve”, flew quickly and in one direction - some to jail, and some abroad. Over the course of a couple of decades, the class practically took shape and took shape; in fact, the turn of February 2022 mothballed it, testing that same crystalline, unshakable loyalty, and willingness to follow the craziest orders, and no less willingness to share money in order to confirm, demonstrate involvement and service .

But no aristocracy would have survived and endured the test of the events of the last two and a half years, if not for the parallel, but slightly lower class of service nobility, partly security, partly economic. On his two legs, where one is responsible for order, and the second for ensuring that the country has what to eat, stands the entire stability of today's Russia. Everything is simpler here, no triangles, just one simple line “loyalty-serve”. And the wealth is collected by the servants themselves, depending on who gets it: someone produces, divides it up, and what remains is taken for themselves, and someone forces others to share, implementing the principle of forceful quitrent.

The class-power machine works without failures, since everything unnecessary has been cleaned out of it over the last decade, and it takes care of itself. Businessmen, judges, officials, bankers, investigators, deputies and mediocre security officers formed a social cushion that in a normal society could be called the upper middle class, but in spirit and essence they are categorically not that, namely that of the serving nobility, allowed to perform functions, where it is ordered and where it is given, and surrounded by an invisible but reinforced concrete fence of rules and expectations.

And they are all certainly the same serfs - like the aristocracy and nobility of the pre-Catherine era. None of their positions protects them from anything and absolutely does not guarantee them anything.

Moreover, after February 22, a new tribe of now truly servicemen rushed into their cozy little world, who before our eyes are beginning to squeeze positions, estates and candle factories left and right. But their system quickly integrates them into restrictions and requirements, where the main requirement is loyal service.

Exactly as for the nobility before Peter III and Catherine. After all, only by Peter the Great’s Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility of 1762 and the subsequent “Charter of the Nobility” issued by Catherine II in 1785, the then Russian aristocracy and nobility were exempted from compulsory civil and military service, could resign at will and freely travel abroad. . True, during the war the government had the right to require nobles to return to serve in the armed forces. If at the same time the nobleman was abroad, he was obliged to return to Russia under pain of confiscation of land holdings.

Isn’t it very reminiscent of a picture from a meeting of the Security Council on February 21, 2022, and a ban on traveling abroad for security forces and officials, and endless friendly votes in the Duma “For” the most crazy initiatives, and cheap dressing in khaki, and trips to The front zone is not empty -handed. It turns out that what is customary to call the domestic elite was rebuilt into a system that is perfect for the interests of the highest power and reconstructed in a rich, powerful, but serf estate earlier than the authorities have reached the people itself.

Instrumentalization of neo -feudalism

The fact that according to the theory of cyclicity of history, principles, rules, foundations and Code of the past, can return in a new form in the last century, Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in his work “New Middle Ages”, Vladimir Shlyapentokh in the book “Modern Russia as Feudal Society” and many others. So, Berdyaev claimed that “we live in an era when a free return to the hierarchical principles is inevitable everywhere. Only hierarchical principles indicate the cosmic ladage of the universe ”that a new aristocracy will be in the society of the new Middle Ages, and“ the city should approach the village ... ”. Hlyapentoch, describing modern Russia, noted: “In the Middle Ages, only kinship made it possible to occupy key positions in society. When it comes to the selection of personnel, in modern Russia everything is solved by "communications". Of great importance is the separation by clans, “commands” and “clicks”. Members of one clan are devoted and trust each other ... The transfer of power is carried out not on the basis of a democratic procedure, but in accordance with the monarchical principles, which suggested that the current leader could choose the heir. ”

If you carefully look at how modern domestic society is arranged, and to which the last power initiatives move it, it is impossible not to note such obvious neo -feudal elements as:

• personalization of power, clearly moving towards absolutism;

• the instructive of personal and family ties, with the design of the appropriate ideology and the legal system;

• the formation of an hereditary elite, aristocracy and service nobility in the person of officials, security forces and national entrepreneurship, with the consolidation of the feudal culture of their interaction, where the struggle of groups and clans replaces political and economic competition;

• The consolidation and imposition of archaization and paternationalization of the social, cultural and educational spheres

• And, finally, the social and economic enslavement of citizens through economic and regulatory stimulation of binding to a certain lifestyle and activities.

The fact that all this time seemed only a kind of background for the fact that the authorities of the authorities are attracting the greatest attention: military operations in Ukraine, threats to the collective West, amazing a nuclear baton, the penetration of the state into an increasingly spectrum of society, the crowding out of normal economic competition, ideological somersaults With the sliding into the scraping and bastard, it was very likely - and remains not at all a background, but the very essence of a long and sometimes not so noticeable activity of the authorities. Such activities where the main goal is the construction and effective operation of society with a neo -feudal way of which discusses the interests of both the absolute monarchy that crowning it (and it seems to us, as it sometimes seems to be not far from it), and the elite classes that ensure the stability of such a system.

Citizens with such a device really cease to be citizens (taxes will be held automatically, the elections have turned into a vote, free public participation is not encouraged, or even punished, there are no signs of citizenship), and the state of the population that has given the functions specified in the power that has been given to him slides.

The current attempts to manipulate education serve this and primarily this. If you re -read all of them, holding a more than similar plan to the truth by a new old enslavement and turning of people into a silent production, military and giving birth to mass, they cease to seem to be what you can get rid of: well, just the next fool of the authorities.

Not a fool, but a system. Thoughtful and calculated, clearly built, like a boales ready to swallow the future of generations of Russians. And this system has very high chances of really becoming such a boa constrictor, to become a reality. In his way, however, there are several barriers.

• Firstly, feudalism, even if it is neo is very, very expensive and not very effective. Not only that all this aristocracy and service nobility must be kept in a state of satiety, so that they do not enjoy all their strongly reflected by power capabilities where it is not necessary, so the people, so that he works, fought, gave birth and do not squeak, must be poured with a fair amount funds. And they were not that there was an excess in the current economic situation.

• Secondly, such a public device has a habit of eating itself from the inside with the very principles of its basic corruption, blat, self-ownness and inter-plane stresses. Being dependent on the only source of legal will, the only arbitrator that the myriads of counteracting interests in the space of eight time zones simply cannot physically cover, the system will inevitably begin to break through the holes of conflicts and the emergence of new young and those who want more feudal lords, sooner or later begin to lose stability.

Well, thirdly, at least from the point of view of the cyclicity of history, at least if you believe in its linearity, no one has yet tried to manage such a public structure, when on the right is an almost uncontrolled, free flow of information and social networks, on the left-it is gaining artificial intelligence and the inhabited cosmos, behind - millions of citizens, albeit so far soaked now, but recently tasted various freedoms, ahead - all the same good curiosity of the young generation, which, no matter how you put in the vast bed of educational programs and decrees Dolores Ambridge, but it is still anyway Read the forbidden - and will do it differently.