The Historical Reasons Russians Are Devoid of Critical Thinking
Putin's popularity depends on his people being predictably indifferent to his crimes
We talk about what the effects of the Ukrainian War on the Russian psyche will be. Some naively suggest that once Putin is ousted, the ensuing thaw in the totalitarian repression will permit Russians to flourish and grow like the famous perennial flowers in Russia called Snowdrops which push through the snow and ice.
Others imagine that it will be a long-awaited moment of reckoning. Putin and his small army of sycophantic criminals and murderers will finally be judged by Russian society. There is only one problem, though, and it is a rather obvious one: There is no such thing as a “Russian society” outside of the one that Putin has created.
History has been Putin’s ally
The process began under Stalin with the onset of the socialist revolution. Everything in society had to be devoted to the re-education of the masses. Personal aspirations were regarded as a virus left over from czarist times that needed to be eradicated. Poets who dared write about love and the romantic ruminations that so torture the souls of intellectuals found themselves in prison camps and worse. Every aspect of society became an extension of the Party.
The chess club, the skiing club, the drawing club, and the book club all had to subordinate their interests to the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and then Stalin. The first generation to come of age during these times found them heady, and inclusive and made everyone feel as if there was a place for them in the construction of a new society that would lead humankind eventually to its most fulfilled state of being. A similar revolution was underway in Germany and to a lesser extent in Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
The same demons that would prove so dangerous to the development of the Russian people of the future have been unleashed today. To justify the excesses of the early Soviet period, Stalin’s Party needed to hack away the natural and centuries-long accepted traditions of law and order and replace them with a new understanding of law and order.
In the pre-Soviet period, the notion of entering into a person’s home, a home they purchased, and kicking them out onto the street because it was determined that they “had too much” would have landed such extremists in jail. In the Soviet Union, however, such acts were considered just, and those committing them heroic. The same held true for murder and other violent acts against citizens deemed to have too many possessions. There was even a period in the early Soviet Union when the Party unofficially promoted violence against people wearing glasses because they were considered to be intellectuals and everyone knows what intellectuals are good for — “nothing.”
For Aristotle, although the concept of “political man” was a function primarily of his nature, specifically in his unique linguistic capabilities, which enables him to seek, discern and articulate truth and virtue, its ultimate expression was something entirely differentiated from mere biology, his flesh and bones, and material makeup. From his very name to the will of his mind and the consequent actions that carry him through life, Aristotle’s idea of man as a political, social being was bound up with the understanding that this, too, guarded against the worst ills of his nature. “For as man is the best of the animals when perfected,” he wrote in Politics, “so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice .”
To reduce humans to apolitical animals, to alienate them from one another, to number them, to tag them, and to dehumanize them. This is what Stalin meant when he said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths a statistic (Hannah Arendt’s Warning).”
This “sundering” of Russians from law and justice has been Putin’s special, little project since the day he became Russia’s unexpected president. All the while speaking the language the liberal democracies wanted to hear, behind the scenes Putin was tediously tilling the soil, planting the seeds, endlessly watering the fertile ground. With each uptick in the price of a barrel of oil, the minerals in Putin’s soil became richer and more potent. Whether or not he consciously knew what he was doing, the outcome was a near-perfect one.
By letting Russians acquire material wealth via a flourishing economy populated with privately-held companies and eventually cheap, consumer credit, the politicization of the masses that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse began to fade. People lost interest in fighting for intangible political rights because the time had arrived that if you wanted something, then work for it; if you wanted to travel, work for it. If you wanted to become a sommelier, a professional diver, a mountain climber, or a world-class chef, then work for it.
Just don’t go out and protest against the government because that will land you in trouble. Putin masterfully pointed out that life was as good as you could make it and if you were too ungrateful or lazy to improve your life, then don’t blame him. He was just doing his best to make Russia as great as possible.
It was Putin, as he told the people, who was protecting Russia from a resentful and envious West. The world wanted what Russia had and to get it, the world would sooner or later again try to destroy Russia. Everyone needed to be strong and united — and distracted.
Balotnoye protests were the turning point
As harsh as it sounds, it’s not a criticism of the Russian people. It’s just a case of “it is what it is.” The average Russian, through little fault of their own, is incapable of making critical assessments when there is a chance that the object requiring consideration could lead them into questioning political truths and realities.
There has never in Russian history been a moment when any form of democracy flourished. Civil society did not exist in the pre-modern era when Russia was part of Kievan Rus and it did not exist at any time during the Romanov dynasty, the Soviet period, or Russia’s post-Soviet period.
By 2012, Russia had arguably reached its post-Soviet peak. Integrated into the world economy, a member of the G-8, it also gained WTO membership in that year. Despite the corruption of Putin’s re-election to the presidency, the world was for the most part happy partnering with Russia. The future seemed bright not just for Russia but also for the world economy.
In the winter of 2012, however, hundreds of thousands in Moscow came out to protest the allegedly corrupt elections. They demanded that Putin not be permitted to ascend to the presidency and wanted a new vote. They believed that Aleksey Navalny, the protest leader, had won the election. The government permitted the protests to go on and then symbolically on the day that Putin was being inaugurated, March 6th, surrounded by his army of thieving sycophants, the police crushed the protests and the “March of Millions.”
With the crushing of the demonstrations, a bullet was fired into the back of the head of Russia’s post-Soviet experiment not with democracy but rather with being a productive (relatively speaking) member of the world community. From 2012 on, as Putin systematically moved the country down the road to totalitarianism, the world grew more and more concerned. The warnings about the withering of Russia and its return to its worst impulses from the Soviet era were many but few were listening.
Russia’s opposition was blown apart with arrests, murders, and exiles. Many of the leaders vanished to other countries. Some were poisoned or just shot in broad daylight directly in front of the Kremlin (Boris Nemtsov). In the image below, you can see the Kremlin in the background.
Working tirelessly, Putin’s security forces, and his newly-created Praetorian Guard, “Rosgvardiya,” made any form of protest a crime. It videotaped protestors and raided their homes. Laws were passed that stated that any protest of two or more people would be broken up. Amazingly, Russians began to protest singly. I once saw a protest on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt that began with a young woman down by the Moscow Train Station standing with an anti-Putin sign. The next person stood three meters (9 feet away) holding a similar sign. Every three meters, there would be another protestor. There were hundreds of them. Many were arrested anyway even though they weren’t standing together.
Eventually, Russians grew tired and many just gave up. It became both costly, too dangerous, and even too futile to fight back.
By way of analogy, we might consider how an abusive spouse employs intimidation and panoptical invigilation to monitor and then suppress his victim’s contact with the outside world, gradually cutting them off from their critical support network of family, friends, and colleagues.
Once his victim is isolated, the predator can begin the far more intricate undertaking of incessant psychological attack, distorting his victim’s perception of reality, gaslighting them into accepting, even appreciating, their “new normal,” a condition sometimes referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. Having dashed the outside supply lines and emptied his victim of all self-confidence, the abuser is now in a position of absolute power, able to dictate terms and translate reality, to fill his prey with whatever narrative, whatever ideology, best serves his own interests. To dominate them, in other words, totally (Hannah Arendt’s Warning)”.
This is the frame of mind of the average Russian today, ”dominated, in other words, totally.” They are not willing anymore to risk fighting back because as we have seen since the beginning of the war, the punishments and the efforts at establishing the complete external and internal dissociation of Russian citizens are so relentless and even so violent that sometimes it’s easy to say: “Can you blame them?”
As much as I want to, and often do, I also don’t know what I would do if I were still living there today. I am pretty sure, and for the sake of my family, I would have remained quiet. My act of protest, and support for my family, was first not to go back after we left and now it is to write relentlessly about what is going on — and to try to find a way that we can reach these Russians unwilling, or unable to fight back.
Too many of them, however, seem just a little too blissfully ignorant if not even happy about what is going on.
Once man was rent from his community, “a clod washed away by the sea,” to marshal Donne’s famous words, he was left prone, exposed to still a more profound, insidious disjunction; the estrangement even from “the self” as an independent agent of reason.
For Arendt, it was this interior citadel of the mind that represented the individual’s last stand against totalitarian ideological infiltration; the ability to hold an inner dialogue with one’s own conscience, to weigh countervailing impulses, to observe the same position from different angles, to entertain discordant ideas without necessarily subscribing to one or either of them. In short, to think for oneself.
Socrates referred to his daimon or daimonion — literally “divine something” — as a kind of inner conscience with which he consulted, and which kept him from erring, from the commission of evil and susceptibility to it. We might think of this as the proverbial “voice in our heads” urging us to return the wallet we found in the back of the taxicab (Hannah Arendt’s Warning)”.
I am sure that many Russians today are hearing that little voice in their heads. They understand that what their country is doing is wrong, criminal even.
And yet, I am more than positive also, that many, way too many, are not just ignoring that voice but don’t even hear it. They have accepted the new order because it makes life in the country that is their homeland, their Motherland, more comfortable. It’s always easier to agree than to not agree.
It is always easier to know that you are keeping the abuser happy even if it requires you to abuse and hurt others. This is where contemporary Russia is today. I know many of these people who are in full acceptance of what is happening and they see almost nothing wrong with any of it because they look at it as a case of if not them, then me.
As I have said many times, this war just doesn’t end for Russia and all goes back to normal. Russia does not come back from this war for generations, if ever, not because we can’t forgive but because Russia keeps forgetting its own violent, bloody, flawed, and questionably moral past.