The proclamation of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize marks an important condemnation of the Great Russian war regime of Putin and Lukashenko. The winners are some of his opponents: the lawyer and defender of human rights in Belarus Ales Bialjatsky, the Memorial movement and the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine. Among the candidates were the most famous opponents of the Putin regime: the Ukrainian president Zelenskyj and the Russian Navalny, currently detained in a Russian penal colony. However, the election avoided major figures in the political and military conflict, including exiled or imprisoned Belarusian opponents.
The three winners are exponents of humanitarian associations, as is the only “individual” Bialiatski, a former prisoner of conscience and president of the “Vjasna” (Spring) center, founded in the late 1990s and recently dissolved by Lukashenko. A similar fate has befallen the Memorial movement in Russia, heir to anti-Soviet dissidence. And to his flank are the Ukrainian activists, in a great proclamation of opposition to the dictatorship and totalitarianism. It is a worldview that radically challenges that exaltation of “sovereign” identity that led to this year’s war, and which Russia has forcefully reasserted in recent days.
The turnaround in Russia’s war operations in Ukraine at the end of September has made the purpose of the war even more apparent since its inception. Through Ukraine, Russia intends to oppose a vision of the world that everyone now identifies with the ideology of the “Russian world”, the alternative to that of the so-called “collective West”. In President Putin’s speeches in which he announces the mobilization of the entire people and the annexation of the “liberated” republics of Donbass and the Black Sea coast, very little mention is made of territories and military strategies.
In effect, the mass of new recruits for the Moscow army must not be deployed in the other Ukrainian regions that need to be “de-Nazified”, a dimension that is really missing from the official rhetoric, after months of ranting and evocations of the Great Patriotic War.
The retired soldiers, several of whom have already been sent to the other world by the effective Ukrainian counter-offensive, and thousands of whom have surrendered and been interned due to their total ineptitude for combat, constitute a “Brancaleone” army: little threatening, of appropriation and opposition rather than assault and conquest. The fears of the international community now focus solely on the nuclear threat, which is fading as analyzes of its feasibility increase. And in the background of the political and strategic diatribes about the price of gas, the clouds of how to overcome the coming winter cold remain.
In Putin’s latest speeches, the term hegemon –“hegemonic” and “hegemony” – is repeated several times, expressions of his own thinking or that of various ideologues and promoters. Obviously, he is referring to the Western enemy who wants to “end Russia” by imposing a globalized domain deprived of identities.
“The West is willing to go over everything and everyone in order to preserve its neocolonial system, which allows it to plunder the resources of the entire world and collect a great tribute from humanity [el llamado “dan”, el impuesto de los tártaros durante el yugo medieval]the rent of hegemon“. The term is revived by other harangues in this year’s war, expressing the deepest inner resentment of the “tsar-liberator”: “everything that is unpleasant in the eyes of the hegemon who holds power is declared archaic, outdated, superfluous and harmful; and those who disagree have their legs broken at the knee”. In Putin’s mentality, the new “anti-Russian” Nobel Prize winners only confirm this “dictatorship of thought”. 2021 award to Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazette, newspaper that was closed shortly after by the court of Moscow.
There is nothing new in this accusation dictated by resentment. In it, Russia is presented as the only hope of a “fairer world order” in which the past that is intended to be erased is restored, but without providing any idea or indication about the future to be built. Everything is limited to an obsession with conspiracies, a hysterical reaction to the shadow of the strong powers that impose colonial servitude. In Putin’s entourage there is no lack of exponents of a line dedicated to projecting the image of the Russia of the future. Among them, the ex-premier Sergej Kirienko, known as the “methodologist”, seen by many as a possible replacement for the “madman from the Kremlin bunker”.
Putin explicitly refers to the ultraconservative philosopher Ivan Il’in, the most radical anticommunist expelled aboard the “philosophers’ ship” in 1922, who dreamed of the rebirth of the Russia of the tsars. But he also alludes to the “mystical cosmism” of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, theorist of human space flight in the late 19th century, as the ideal of man’s complete victory over the forces of nature. The Russian president identifies with him, in Russia’s universal war against astronomical obstacles. Rather, Kirienko and others refer to the Soviet “internal dissident” Georgij Petrovič Ščedrovitsky (alias “GPS”), a Soviet-era Moscow philosopher who, unlike the dissidents of the Samizdat, decided not to seek fame and consensus abroad. Instead, he organized a dense network of “methodological seminars” to provide the necessary tools to change the world, even under totalitarianism and repression, with a program based on the priority of methodological activism over naturalism. GPS proposed to believe in a “virtual” and alternative reality without being imprisoned by natural reality. In a certain way, it is a foretaste of the philosophy of the metaverse, which is more and more current: the true Russia, in short, is the one that does not really exist.
In the confused ideological maelstrom that inspires the defenders of the Russian war against the entire world, the very concept of “hegemony” remains one of the most random and difficult to determine in depth. There is an excellent column jellyfish, “Signal”, which explains this clearly. In the Soviet-born Putin’s consciousness, the Marxist idea of hegemony emerges clearly. And it is articulated in the relationship between the “base” and the “infrastructure”: that is, the control and ownership of material and economic goods is reflected in the secondary dimensions of culture, or “infrastructural”. It is in religion, art, and science where the “dominant mentality” imposed by the masters is reflected.
Marx’s conception was overthrown by Antonio Gramsci, who proposed to achieve the revolution through “cultural hegemony” before controlling the means of production: dictating the content of school and university educational programs, directing artistic and literary tastes and the themes that are discussed in society. Gramscism is exalted today by the omnipotence of communication tools, which determine people’s lives without the need for so much philosophy and culture, relying on the omnipotence of the new god of the Algorithm.
According to the authors of “Signal”, there is one more element to take into account, and one that plays a decisive role in Putin’s conception: they refer to the “hegemony theory” of the neo-Marxist philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein, which he called “world-system”. Drawing on his experience in post-colonial Africa, Wallerstein proposes his vision of two types of systems governing the world community as a whole: world empires based on the power of a resource-distributing center, and world-economies. In reality, it is a single entity – built by bourgeois capitalism – that increasingly replaces empires in modern times, in which the “hegemonic” role is less evident. This can be seen in England in the 19th century or the United States in the 20th century -precisely in the Anglo-Saxons, the anglosaksyso hated by Putin.
Today these roles are being redefined, and certainly not because of the fickle wars of the Russians, but because of a set of macroeconomic and geopolitical phenomena that should invite everyone to look to the future, rather than to claim the past.
In order not to be relegated to the periphery of US hegemony, Putin ends up becoming a pawn of China, a contender for hegemony. And this, in a competition in which nuclear bombs would not help anyone to prevail. The view of the world within the Kremlin walls is much less sophisticated than the analyzes of the philosophers: it aims to solve everything by force and the division between “ours” and the “traitors”, between the countries that support US sanctions and those who are willing to give in to the “good sense” of the Russians who want to preserve the “sovereignty” of all peoples. Perhaps, inclined by the recognition that the “good hegemony” resides in Moscow.
The response to any “hegemony” lies in the defense of freedom, of peoples and of individuals, as the new Nobel Prize winners attest, and as a universal exponent of the Gospel of peace like Pope Francis reminds us, who invites us to resolve the problems of the present without wars, to build the future together.
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