RUSSIAN WORLD Russians, victims of themselves

A series of video documentaries released by Masha Pevchikh, one of Navalny’s best-known collaborators, places all the blame and responsibility for what is happening today on the criminals and corrupt people who prevented the development of a free and democratic society in the 90’s. Both Putin’s propagandists and opposition publicists, old and young, speak of those years shrouded in feelings of guilt and resentment.

In this delicate phase of the world war – from Ukraine to Palestine, passing through the scenarios related to the upcoming elections in Europe, in England, in the United States, in Georgia and in the entire world – the Russians feel more and more victims and “losers”, and a word that used to define the condition of the Russian population in the ’90s resonates more and more in public debates, on social networks and in semi-clandestine interviews from abroad: the poterpevshie, “those who have lost.” At that time he was referring to the frustration of those who had been defeated in the Cold War that led to the fall of the USSR and the deep economic crisis of the Gorbachev years. As the professor and columnist of Radio Svoboda Sergei Medvedev, “I heard this word for the first time in the delicatessen, when a pensioner complained about the reduced ration of salami he had been given and the employee told him with resignation: ‘stop complaining like a poterpevšij‘, benevolently granting him one more slice, when salami was scarce even in Moscow and in the provinces it had already become a myth.

Russians feel defeated not by the harshness of Putin’s regime and political repression, nor by the stalemate of the war in Ukraine and the sacrifice of young people on the front, nor even by the tax reform that will absorb tons of money to maintain the war industry. The lament continues to be for that humiliation of more than thirty years ago, for the suffering “of the nineties”, the original sin that does not leave consciences in peace despite all the subsequent world convulsions. All the blame goes back to that unfortunate historical period, and the trigger for the new wave of victimhood was a series of video documentaries broadcast since mid-April by Masha Pevchikh, one of the best-known collaborators of the martyr Alexei Navalny, titled Predateli, “Traitors.” Filmed in the typical sensationalist style of the Navalnista “Fund to Fight Corruption” movement, the stories attribute all the blame and responsibility for what is happening today to the criminals and corrupt people who have prevented the development of a free and democratic democracy. progressive and ended up handing Russia over to the tsar of the oligarchs, the mafia godfather Vladimir Putin.

In recent days the debate has started again in a sensational way with an interview conducted by one of the most followed bloggers, Jurij Dud, with one of the great protagonists of the Yeltsin period, the oilman Mijail Khodorkovsky, who later became Putin’s opponent and ended up imprisoned in a concentration camp for a decade, only to be amnestied at the end of 2013 and exiled abroad, where today he is one of the most followed voices of the liberal opposition. He also echoed Pevchikh’s accusatory tone, especially against the politicians who organized the transition from Yeltsin to Putin, such as Anatoly Chubais, the “great puppeteer” who left Russia when the invasion of Ukraine began and now lives in Israel, after miraculously escape the classic poisoning at the hands of the secret services. The saying has spread that the Russians “do not suffer for Kharkiv, but for Chubais”, in a month of terrible bombings in Ukraine on Chernigov, Odessa and Kharkiv, with deaths and exterminations, while in Russia the decisions of the oligarchs of thirty years ago.

In Kharkiv, forensic doctors take DNA samples from children to try to identify the bodies of their parents torn apart by Russian bombs, while Russians verbally fight to decide the truth about the financial auctions of 1994, the privatization of Svyazinvest in 1997 which initiated the collapse of the financial pyramids and the role of the “Yeltsin family”, which at the end of the century had fun in the palace on Osenny Bulvar in Moscow and then left power in the hands of Putin in exchange for total immunity, which their daughters and heirs still enjoy in the golden exile of London. Pevchikh’s series is actually the embodiment of Navalny’s “political will” that he expressed in the text released from the concentration camp, “My fear and my hatred”, in August 2023, when he was the first to attack the politicians of the post-Soviet decade. Beyond the successes and errors, it is surprising the enormous interest with which all Russians, awakening from the state of total ataraxia and indifference regarding internal and external events, began to “dissect” those distant years.

The nineties are talked about by both Putin’s propagandists and opposition publicists, boomers and zoomers, old and young, all wrapped in guilt and resentment that make them feel victims of all the evils of times past. and recent, from East and West, from the Cold War and before, from the Napoleonic invasion to the medieval Tatar yoke. Medvedev calls this attitude “slave morality”, the vengeful hatred of the “humiliated and offended” person – borrowing Dostoevsky’s expression – who feels helpless in the face of the ruin of his personal and communal destiny, and tries to blame any blame on the evil that comes from everywhere. He is Dostoevsky’s “underground” man, who lives in a basement in Saint Petersburg after a series of humiliations inflicted on him by the authorities and local society, and dreams of destroying the Crystal Palace in distant London, the headquarters of the Evil One. against whom he unleashes his desires for revenge.

It is the cursed question asked by the father of the 19th century Russian revolutionaries, Aleksandr Herzen: kto vinovat?“Whose fault is it?”, addressed successively to the Tatars, to the landowning boyars, to the nemtsy (Germans or foreigners in general), to Jews, to anglosaksy, to the tsars or the Soviets, and now to the oligarchs of the “wild nineties”. The protagonists of that era are long dead, like Yeltsin and Gaydar, or scattered in exile, like Khodorkovsky and Chubais, but the anger against them not only does not subside, but grows more and more, because they evidently cannot unleash it against the caste that is now in power to avoid unpleasant consequences. It is a kind of “therapeutic hatred”, which no longer has meaning or consequences, but allows one to channel frustration and reconcile with an otherwise unbearable present, attributing an identity to those who feel excluded from world reality.

“Retropolitics”, on the other hand, is a traditional Russian trait, which idealizes the brief periods of openness by discussing them in the infinite times of “stagnation”, as occurred in the Brezhnev era, after the few years of the “Khrushchevian thaw” in the basements where the dissidents of the samizdat, or the circles of exiled intellectuals who argued constantly or locked themselves in the hermitage of their disdainful solitude, like Solzhenitsyn in the cold of Vermont. It is a cycle that has been repeated for centuries: before the Bolshevik revolution it was the “Silver Age”, an explosion of creativity between 1905 and 1917, after the victory over Napoleon it was the “Magnificent Decade” between the 1930s and 1940s. of the 19th century, with the great debate between Slavophiles and Occidentalists, and thus we can go back to the schism of the 17th century between the reformers and the “old believers”, or to the dispute between the pauperist monks and the “statists” of the late 19th century. 15th century, confirming a correspondence of the Russian soul with the weather, which means short springs and endless winters.

In these fleeting openings and windows to the outside world, Russia manages to phagocytize the cultures, religions, scientific discoveries and social transformations of the peoples of Europe, Asia and other continents and then suddenly vomit them out, to retain only its own deformed and hysterical version. As can be clearly seen with the “religious renaissance”, the rediscovery of the faith that animated people in the nineties in a sincere search for spirituality and meaning, to later sink into the patriotic and militant Orthodoxy that blesses the war and massacres with a criminal arrogance that makes even the preaching of the medieval Crusades pale. This drift also applies to politics and economics, morality and culture, school and all institutions of today’s Russian society. In recent days a new brochure entitled Politrukthe “political leader” (Politicheskij Rukovoditel) from Soviet memory, a military instruction manual that establishes that alongside each officer and each soldier there must be an instructor and “political advisor” who “with his inspired word and his example of unreserved dedication to the service of the Fatherland is capable of cement the spirit of the military collectives,” as the introduction by Deputy Minister of Defense, General Viktor Goremykin, says.

On the other hand, the Politruk had already been reintroduced in February by Putin himself in all state organizations with a “confidential” decree, according to which each position must have a “deputy director for political and social functions”, as was precisely the case. in Stalin’s time. The goal is always to “strengthen patriotism and ensure an adequate and deep understanding of state policy”, extinguishing any desire to rediscover themselves, to rediscover the Russia lost in the nineties and in the fog of past histories.

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