Russian friend comment on Cracks in Kremlin

Reaction to article http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-06-14-pomerantsev-en.html


  The main premise is correct: genuine, unapproved political activity doesn't reach any significant scale; what reaches TV and major news outlets is manufactured and curated by FSB and the Presidential Administration (the head of that apparat plays the role comparable with the US Chief of Staff for a president). As soon as a grassroots initiative gets noticed, it and any of its sponsors are visited by tax authorities, public health authorities, fire inspectors, and/or "hate speech" investigators, completely depriving the core actors of resources, support, free time, and, not infrequently, also freedom. Courts happily rubberstamp "hate speech" ("extremizm") convictions for bloggers, offices are raided, computers seized, and so on. Since politics requires money and other resources, and since every business understands that its very existence is predicated on keeping the govt happy, genuine political participation simply doesn't happen beyond LiveJournal and a few other sites.

  The manufactured politics was indeed the hallmark of Surkov's time as the "Chief of Staff". He created an elaborate spectacle of "independent" internet media, propaganda organizations (essentially, PR agencies for the govt, who recruited popular bloggers and fed them propaganda lines to disseminate), picked and promoted TV personalities, bused high school students to Moscow for huge pro-govt demonstrations, paid "modern artists" to stage costumed "protests" at foreign embassies, and so on. A _lot_ of money was disbursed high and low for these activities; considerable amounts were also stolen. Leaked e-mails shows the routes of distribution, and also that some young and popular bloggers didn't get paid as well as they hoped :)

  In the end, this got old, and Surkov was replaced by Volodin, who favors a more direct and violent approach to dealing with the opposition. A bunch of "creatives", previously cushily employed found themselves fired and rejoining the "office plankton" whom they so readily ridiculed for "not knowing the taste of fois gras", etc. Some of them gave interesting interviews about the workings of that machine and the associated fashionable milieu.

  Incidentally, this is the part that the author doesn't understand. Conformism, soviet or otherwise, has very little to do with this crowd. The "creatives" who made their careers in this system are bona fide Western "Bohemians" and "postmodernists" -- some even are recognized as "modern artists". They are as fashion-driven as any "postmodernist" hopefuls, and the fashion is controlled by money; by disbursing the oil money, it was easy to control the fashion. Many of them are educated in the West -- e.g., Leontiev went to school in NYC. They are just as shallow as US fashionable journalists -- e.g., Masha Gessen wrote an abominable book about Perelman, full of ignorant BS and fashionable nonsense; when given control of Radio Liberty in Moscow, she promptly fired anyone who was any good, etc. (Now her role seems to be to demand placing propaganda posters "to fight homophobia in the populace" throughout Moscow's parks, while the other wing of that carnival demands isolating children from "propaganda of non-traditional forms of sex". The show goes on, essentially destroying any kind of grassroots political cooperation over
manufactured divisions).

   All of this makes it hard even for the educated people to concentrate on things that actually matter: rule of law, independent courts, freedom of the press, curbing of ubiquitous corruption. In that, Surkov's policies have succeeded: noise, outright garbage, pseudo-thought, and continual "punking" and "trolling" became a norm of public discourse such as it is. It's impossible to speak seriously about anything of value; the fact that young people don't seem to adhere to any coherent ideology is primarily due to this. Govt money pays for young "historians" at the actual Moscow U. who glorify Stalin's accomplishments in their dissertations; the examples of successful careers draws people who are drawn to this kind of thing.

  All in all, this has some direct parallels with recent US politics -- but just imagine the personality cultists and the youth agitators rapidly promoted to federal positions of power and given considerable funds, while everyone else is deprived of their resources and silenced. Or imagine MSNBC and NYT never called out on their "fake but accurate" stories, creative editing of what people actually said, and encouraged to conduct trials-by-media. Very soon the people on top will get to resemble the Russian pro-govt "creatives" rather quickly.