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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In this timely and incisive book, Sergei Medvedev argues that Russia's war in Ukraine was not merely a whim of Putin's obsession: rather, it was the result of two decades of authoritarian degradation and post-imperial ressentiment, a culmination of Putin's regime and of Russia's entire imperial history. Building on his prize-winning book The Return of the Russian Leviathan, Medvedev argues that it was not only Putin that started this war, but Russia itself, which, by and large, has imagined and embraced it with enthusiasm, seeking to relive its own military glory and colonial past.
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Seitenzahl: 281
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: Method in this Madness
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Notes
Part I The Anatomy of Violence
The State Came after the Body
People in Cages
In Bed with the State
Notes
Back to 1937
Punishment of the Innocent
Anonymous Violence
The Semiotics of Terror
Note
The Final Diagnosis
Covid Authoritarianism
Masks Off
Bare Life
Note
People as ‘The New Oil’
500 Million Serfs
Living to Pension Age
Dead Souls
Superfluous People
Note
The Zoos of Terror
Note
The Generator of Entropy
The Crisis of Russian Soft Power
The Export of Fear
Agents of Chaos
Notes
Part II The Memory Crusade
Kolyma by the Kremlin
An Identity Crisis
A Colonial Landscape
Nostalgia for the Empire
Notes
Memorial to Russian Resentment
Notes
Thus Spake Zhirinovsky
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Beware the Postmodern!
A New Frankenstein
Notes
The Offering Made to the Ninth of May
The Fear of Holidays
The Cult of the Dead
Celebrating War
Notes
A Long Farewell to Empire
The Half-Life of the USSR
A State without a Nation
A Wounded Tyrannosaurus
Notes
Part III The War Nation
The Zombie Apocalypse
Note
Revenge of the Underground Man
Notes
The Z Virus
Notes
Russia Inside Out
An Anthropological Catastrophe
From Grozny to Mariupol
The Russian Overcoat
Notes
Mobilization as Russian Fate
History Re-visited
Mining for People
Resigned to Fate
The Russian Culture of Death
Notes
The Age of the Sledgehammer
Notes
War as a National Idea
Guns on the Wall
War as Identity
War as an End in Itself
Notes
The Unfinished Work of 1945
The World in Search of a Bunker
The Weaponry of the Weak
Repeating 1945
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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A War Made in Russia
SERGEI MEDVEDEV
Translated by Stephen Dalziel
polity
Copyright © Sergei Medvedev, 2023
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5841-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950231
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Introduction:Method in this Madness
1
My favourite subject in school was history. We were taught by Galina Rudolfovna. She was very strict, had a veritable beehive hairdo, wore glasses as thick as the bottom of a bottle and spoke in a dogmatic manner. She also happened to be the leader of the school’s Communist Party cell. Marxist ideology was the white charger on which she rode, and in triumphant tones she expounded to us the indestructible logic of Marx’s version of history. She explained its base and its superstructure; who the productive forces were, and their relationship to the means of production; and the changes in social and economic formations. I liked the harmony of this structure and the power with which it provided answers to every question. But the school course did not stop there. Galina Rudolfovna went further, telling us about the roots of Marxism and about classical German philosophy. She introduced us to Friedrich Schelling and Georg Hegel and explained the logic of his view of history. My teenage imagination was seized by the ‘vicious mole of nature’ metaphor drawn from Hamlet by Hegel: he wrote that the world spirit imperceptibly digs in the thickness of history and comes to the surface in the form of an ideal state. For the philosopher, this meant the modern Prussian kingdom, which continued the splendour of Frederick the Great. Hegel explored this further in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, maintaining that when the mole goes on digging, we have to listen to it.
Sitting in the classroom, brightly lit by fluorescent lights, I would gaze out of the window at the late autumn dawn that was hazily breaking over Moscow. Grey buildings and bare trees stared back at me. I remember those last years of the Soviet Union as a dull, cold time. There were queues in the shops; patriotic songs playing on the radio; people spoke in half-whispers – the grown-ups talked about nuclear weapons, Academician Andrei Sakharov, the war in Afghanistan. Cemeteries in Moscow were filling up with rows of fresh graves of lads in paratrooper berets only a little older than I was – and my classmates and I understood that it was essential that we moved on to higher education so that we could defer military service. In November that year, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died, and he was followed by a procession of different general secretaries. The Soviet Union entered a shadow world. The country died after a few more years, suddenly expiring, as often seems to happen to the state in Russia; it went out with a whimper, not a bang. But those school lessons on Hegel’s philosophy stayed with me, as did the Shakespearean image of ‘the mole of nature’ and the desire to listen to its relentless digging and to search for the logic in historical events.
Forty years later, Russia is again waging a colonial war on the territory of a neighbour, Ukraine. Once again, patriotic songs are being heard, the rows of graves are lengthening, the fear of a nuclear strike has returned and people are talking in kitchens in half-whispers. People were expecting this war. British and American intelligence warned it was going to happen. Yet, even so, hardly anyone believed that in the twenty-first century a major state, a member of the UN Security Council, would up and invade a neighbouring country with large army units comprising some quarter of a million people, to try to seize its territory and depose the lawful government. It was as if we were still in the depths of the twentieth century; or, perhaps more accurately, the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. Europe had seen nothing like this since 1945. If we look a little wider, we can remember only Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. The war that Russia started in Ukraine in 2022 is a massive geopolitical rift and has signalled the collapse of the whole international security system. It is a tragedy for Ukraine, but also a disaster for Russia, which has been torn away from the global community, and now the country is in free fall.
No one can yet predict the scale of this collapse. We are tumbling downwards along with the avalanche, desperately trying to stay on top of it so that we do not get buried alive. There is a great temptation to put this down to the madness of one man, who stamped on the edge of a dangerous cliff and set off this avalanche; or to blame the Russian elite, who are mired in a swamp of resentment and an inferiority complex. We could just call it all ‘Putin’s war’, or ‘the post-empire syndrome’, but that would be retreating from my objectivist view of history. To use another phrase from Shakespeare, this book is an attempt to find some ‘method in this madness’: to find some sort of legitimacy in this disaster; to fit it into the logic of Russian history, into the phases of the life and death of the Russian Empire, into the structures of Russian politics, society and the mass consciousness. In other words, it is an attempt to discover the objective nature of this war. This has been long prepared for, breaking through, rather like the mole, in the fullness of time, and bursting out as Putin’s state unleashing the largest and bloodiest slaughter seen in Europe since the Second World War.
2
War has always been a way of life for the Russian state, its very raison d’être. The state arose at the dawn of the modern era on the eastern edge of Europe, ‘squeezed between Lithuania and the Tatars’, as aptly put by Marx. It had constant battles with the expanding empires of the West on one side, and with the horsemen of the Eurasian steppe on the other. Looking westwards, the state’s principal task was predominantly one of defence: for centuries it had to beat back attacks by European armies. In the seventeenth century, there were the Poles and the Lithuanians; it was the Swedes in the eighteenth; Napoleon came in the nineteenth, followed by more French invaders and the British in Crimea; at the start of the twentieth century, Germany and Austria attacked, and then Hitler invaded in the middle of the century. All of this helped to form what the nineteenth-century Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky described as the ‘combative order of the state’ (boyevoi stroi gosudarstva), a state always geared for war. As far back as the eighteenth century, Russia was forced to create a defensive line that stretched for over 2,000 kilometres from the Black Sea to the Baltic. This was made up of a double line of forts, placed a day’s march from each other; but this still failed to prevent further invasions. As a result of these wars, Russia was the only one of the early empires of the modern era that survived a clash with the West, while all of the others – the Mesoamerican empires of the Aztecs and the Incas, those of the Safavid Dynasty in Persia and the Great Moguls in India, the Qin Dynasty in China and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan – succumbed to the pressure of a superior civilization, and became colonies or protectorates of Western countries. The Harvard historian Marshall Poe has called this ‘the Russian moment’ in world history, and he puts it down specifically to the way the Russian state and society were organized along military lines.1 At the same time, Russia managed to extend its influence westwards, encompassing Poland, Finland and Bessarabia.
In the south and the east as well, Russia had to defend itself ceaselessly in the early centuries of its existence. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols seized the lands of Rus’ and turned them into part of the western province of the Empire of the Descendants of Genghis Khan, the Ulus of Jochi. Even after the collapse of the Golden Horde two centuries later, Muscovy continued to fight against its remnants for a long time. Crimean–Nogai slave raids on Rus’ continued until the end of the eighteenth century. From earliest times, a defensive rampart was created and strengthened on the southern and eastern borders to guard against slave raids from the steppe. This was similar to the Great Wall of China but located on the other side of the Great Steppe and made of wood, which was the basic building material used by the forest-dwelling Russian people. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan, capital of the Khanate of that name, which was one of the main legacies of the Golden Horde and a rival to Moscow. Ivan’s crossing of the River Volga in Kazan began the ceaseless expansion of Russia to the east and the south that continued for the next 400 years. During this unprecedented expansion (Richard Pipes calculated that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alone, Russian territory grew by 35,000 square kilometres each year, an area which is comparable to the size of the modern-day Netherlands), Russia seized the whole of Northern Eurasia and became the largest continental empire in history.2
Such an expansion of territory demanded that the state be structured in a particular way, as did the endless wars and expeditions, influencing its relationship with the population and how it was administered territorially. Alexander Etkind has described this phenomenon as ‘internal colonization’, under which the state colonized its own people within its own borders, simultaneously moving these borders as it carried out external colonization.3 Relations between the state and the population in Russia were never based on civil or republican models, but on colonial and exploitative ones. People were regarded as natural resources for achieving the state’s strategic goals. In many ways, the colonization of Siberia and the Far East was brought about by military and policing tools, indeed by penal methods, rather like the colonization of Australia by the British Empire. The state built fortresses and prisons in the conquered lands, populating these huge frozen territories with soldiers, exiles and convicts. As a result, the territory of Russia came to be regarded in many ways as the embodiment of repression and penitentiaries. For centuries, Siberia has been not just a frontier, but a metaphor for fear of the state, a place of exile. Complete generations of enemies of the state vanished in the frozen wastes of Siberia, as did whole peoples. The area became a place of exclusion, punishment and oblivion.
External wars and internal colonization determined a special role for violence in the relationship between the authorities and society, and between the state and the individual. The whole territory of Russia became one of surveillance and police control, with virtually no place for civil organization or local autonomy. The military–feudal structure that developed in Russia meant that the basic function of the landed gentry was a military one: the nobleman received land from the state in order to breed recruits for the army and to report for duty with weaponry, horses and all the accompanying baggage when the sovereign called. A militarized elite developed in the country. From birth, a nobleman was assigned to a particular regiment; it is only from the second half of the eighteenth century that the nobility had the opportunity to perform regular civil service. For a large part of the population war became a routine, everyday activity, and the risk of being killed helped to form the well-known Russian sense of fatalism, the habit of gambling with fate. Yury Lotman, who has researched Russian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has written about this, citing it as evidence of the Russian’s passion for card games and duels, so richly depicted in classical Russian literature.4
This ‘combative order of the state’ described by Klyuchevsky led to the particular role of the special services and the secret police as the custodians of state violence. With few institutional checks and balances placed upon them, they were granted unhindered access to the supreme power and gained a disproportionate influence over state policy. In Stalin’s USSR, this led to mass terror wielded by the state security services. In effect, the Soviet Union became a terrorist state institutionalizing the state’s war against its own population, and the Empire’s against the outside world. From a mere instrument of the state, violence turned into its prime function.
Mikhail Gorbachev tried to break this mould, by lessening the world’s fear of Russia, allowing for the break-up of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe and the growth of national self-awareness in the republics of the USSR itself, and carrying out an unprecedented reduction in both Soviet nuclear and conventional strength. But his attempts were half-hearted, as were the subsequent reforms carried out by Boris Yeltsin. In dismantling the structures of imperial domination, they failed to touch the apparatus of internal violence, notably the KGB – or, as it has re-named itself in modern times, the FSB.5 It has maintained its previous functions, its leverage and its way of thinking, and it has wormed its way organically into the new market structure of post-Soviet Russia as one of the main entrepreneurs of violence. What’s more, the Chekists (as they like to call themselves, after the first Soviet secret police force, the Cheka) have retained the myth from Soviet times that they form a ‘secret order’, a hidden power that is ready to spring to the assistance of the state should there be a collapse of power.
… The year 1999 crept on. Russia had experienced a stormy decade of post-Communist transformation that had been labelled ‘the wild nineties’. In 1998, the country had suffered a profound economic crisis. On 17 August, the government announced that it was defaulting on its short-term debt. By the end of the year, the rouble had tumbled to a third of its previous value, people’s standard of living had fallen dramatically and the banking system was paralysed. Boris Yeltsin, who had survived a quintuple heart by-pass operation, effectively vanished from the scene and was spending long periods away from the Kremlin; his press secretary constantly used the euphemism that he was ‘working with documents’. Having been scared by the default, Yeltsin’s ‘family’ (that is, his daughter, his future son-in-law and his close circle of officials and oligarchs) were concerned about the transition of power and the guarantee of their own security, and were feverishly seeking his successor. Public opinion polls showed that the people were demanding stability, a strong state and a tough leader: a healthy, teetotal, middle-aged male – perhaps a general with combat experience or a representative of the special services, an intelligence officer. The figure who embodied that ‘strongman’ image demanded by the people and Yeltsin’s entourage was the barely noticed executive director of the FSB, a colonel: one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. In August 1999, Yeltsin appointed him as acting head of the government of Russia and named him as his successor. The night of New Year’s Eve 1999, as the millennium crept closer, Yeltsin announced his resignation, and Putin became acting president. In March 2000, he was elected president. A new century had begun in Russia – along with a new political era.
3
One of the key questions that this book is trying to answer is: is the war in Ukraine Putin’s personal war, or is it all of Russia’s war? Or, more broadly, is the present regime a random occurrence, created by one man, or the natural consequence of Russia’s long-term evolution? In their 2019 book, Putin vs. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia, the political scientists Sam Greene and Graeme Robertson go for the second option: ‘We need to think not of Putin’s Russia, but of Russia’s Putin. We need to understand that Putin is not above the country; he is of the country, of its politics, its society, and its history.’6 Incidentally, almost twenty years ago, in 2005, the writer Viktor Pelevin, who is known for his aphorisms on contemporary Russian life, said that Russia had found its national idea: ‘that’s what Putin is’.7
The question about Putin is, first and foremost, a question about identity. In a time of multiple ruptures – the collapse of the Soviet Empire and of the socialist economy, the crisis of ‘traditional values’ and the onslaught of the global world – Russia was facing a deep identity crisis. The values of the Communist system had rotted and sunk into the past, and the global market had not proved to be a worthwhile replacement – and the ‘Russian idea’ was simply the pipe dream of some bearded freaks. Instead, Putin started to push the idea of nostalgia for Russia’s great past and for the vanished lustre of the Empire.
Putin was not alone in this appeal to a former greatness; he even anticipated events in other parts of the planet. Trump came along with his message to ‘Make America Great Again’; in Britain, Brexit reflected a nostalgia for the country being outside Europe; East European nationalists such as Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński appeared, in Hungary and Poland respectively; and there was the rise of the ultra-right in Western Europe. Putin’s turn towards conservative nationalism in many ways anticipated the rise of the authoritarianism of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; Narendra Modi in India; and Xi Jinping in China – and therefore we should not ignore the global appeal of Putinism. Nevertheless, his main message was for domestic consumption: rather like the hero of the cult films Brat [Brother] (1997) and Brat-2 (2000), Danila Bagrov (the Russian equivalent of Rambo, who cured the USA of its ‘Vietnam syndrome’), Putin promised to take revenge for the imagined ‘insults done to Russia’, and ‘to raise Russia up off its knees’. The spin doctors who moulded Putin’s image in 1999–2000 exactly caught the type that was needed: a strongman, terse and uncompromising, talking tough on terrorism without playing the liberal. Against the background of insipid politicians of the ‘post-heroic era’, Putin was shown to the world as the archetypal military chief: appearing now before the public in the cockpit of a jet fighter; next on the deck of a naval launch; then out horse-riding, baring his torso, thus creating one of the most memorable images of the past decades and throwing us back to an age of masculinity, patriarchy and naked power.
Putin has given back to Russia one of its main archetypes: war. He came to power as ‘the war president’ and has not left the subject alone even for a single year of his rule. His sudden appointment to the post of prime minister on 9 August 1999 coincided with the surprise attack on Dagestan by Chechen fighters two days earlier. Then there was a series of mysterious explosions in blocks of flats in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buynaksk in the south of Russia in September 1999, which killed over 300 people and wounded a further 1,700. Another explosion was prevented in a block of flats in Ryazan, but this was then described as ‘just an FSB exercise’. Chechen terrorists were blamed for the attacks, but there are theories that suggest that the FSB and Putin personally were behind the attacks, and that Putin wanted to raise his ratings as a protector of the nation ahead of the presidential election in 2000, as well as strengthening the role of the FSB and justifying a new war in Chechnya. One of those who strongly suggested that Putin played a role in this was the former FSB lieutenant-colonel, Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium by Russian agents in London in November 2006, according to an investigation by the British Special Branch.
Whoever was behind these explosions, the Second Chechen War sharply increased Putin’s popularity, and his phrase ‘We’ll wipe out the terrorists in the shithouse’ became a meme and the slogan of his first presidential term. This term was built on the global war against terror and coincided with the terrorist acts on 11 September 2001 in the USA and America’s subsequent war in Iraq – which, at the time, Russia supported. However, this cooperation with the USA ended in September 2004, when Chechen terrorists seized a school in Beslan in North Ossetia. More than 300 children perished in the botched operation to free the hostages, but Putin unexpectedly blamed the attack not on Islamic extremists but on Western countries, who allegedly were standing behind the terrorists. From that point on, the focus of Putin’s permanent war switched to the West. He blamed the West for the collapse of the USSR, which he described as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’, and for subsequent attempts to weaken and dismember Russia.
By 2007, this ideology had been formulated into a particular sort of ‘Putin doctrine’, which he presented at the Munich Security Conference. He shocked his audience by launching into invective against the USA, the enlargement of NATO and the ‘unipolar world’, as well as by his announcement of Russia’s sphere of interest, and effectively his declaration of a new cold war. Just one year later, in August 2008, Russia attacked Georgia, seizing a part of its territory, South Ossetia, and recognizing the independence of this quasi-state. According to the accounts of insiders, around this time the minds of the occupants of the Kremlin were gripped by a book by the Russian businessman and politician Mikhail Yuriev, called The Third Empire: Russia As It Should Be. It was a political fantasy, written as an alternative future history. As a result of global wars, by the middle of the twenty-first century an authoritarian Russia, led by Emperor Vladimir II, defeats the USA, and seizes the whole of Europe, Turkey and the Middle East. The leadership may not have seen this book as a call to arms, but it was taken as the prophecy of an inevitable war with the West in the 2020s. The occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, followed by the annexation of Crimea and a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine, merely convinced the Kremlin of the prophetic nature of the book.
To prepare for this future war, a massive rearmament programme was launched in Russia from 2011 to 2020, at a cost of 700 billion dollars. Alongside this, a plan for military reform was devised under the guidance of the civilian minister of defence, Anatoly Serdyukov, which was intended to enable the transition to a mobile, contract army. In 2013, the so-called ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ was published, named after the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, General Valery Gerasimov. This put forward the concept of ‘hybrid warfare’, which emphasized, together with military operations, non-military actions such as (among other things) political and diplomatic pressure, information wars, subversion and the removal of the leadership of an enemy country.
But the main change that has happened in Russia over the past fifteen years is that war has become the language of everyday life, just as militaristic rituals have become a part of state propaganda and daily routine. On one hand, the cult of the Second World War and the religion of ‘the Victory’ have been endlessly implanted into people’s consciousness, and they have become the unofficial state ideology. On the other hand, militarism has crept into every aspect of life, in public celebrations and rock festivals, in schools and cinemas. Everywhere there have been exhibitions of military technology and small arms, children have been dressed up in army uniforms and have been taught how to assemble and strip down automatic rifles; even babies have been put in strollers that have been done up to look like tanks. In 2008, military parades began again in Russia, which had not happened since Soviet times, and each year since then ever heavier military vehicles have appeared on city streets, tearing up the asphalt and the city’s infrastructure; even the ballistic nuclear missile, Topol-M, has been rolled out. Television presenters have positively drooled while talking about nuclear strikes on London and Washington, threatening to turn them into ‘radioactive dust’, and in his annual addresses to parliament Putin has shown animated films about Russian hypersonic nuclear missiles that can fly right around the globe. As far as the propaganda of war is concerned, Russia has turned into a North Korea of sorts.
War has captured the population’s imagination; it has become attractive, even sexy. For two generations of Soviet people after the Second World War, the mantra was ‘May there never be a war.’ The Soviet state, led by people who had lived through that war, proclaimed the struggle for peace – in words, at least. But all this has changed in the twenty-first century, as people have been seduced by slogans of revenge, and Putin’s promise ‘to raise Russia up off its knees’. A frivolous sticker has appeared in the rear windows of millions of cars all over Russia. It shows the Soviet crest, the hammer and sickle, raping the fascist swastika. Under the picture is written the slogan: ‘1941–1945. We Can Repeat It’.
4
War was the main theme of my previous book published by Polity Press, The Return of the Russian Leviathan.8 To be more precise, it told of four internal ‘wars’ that an increasingly authoritarian regime was waging during Putin’s third presidential term, from 2012 to 2018, when he had returned to power following the brief, cowardly and, actually, fictional ‘thaw’ under Dmitry Medvedev (2008–12). That period ended with Russia’s unsuccessful ‘revolution of dignity’ in the winter of 2011–12, marked by street protests by the urban populations of Moscow and other large cities. The authorities’ response to this was to switch on the machinery of repression and political terror – and it has been operating ever since.
The first of the four wars I described in the book was ‘The War for Space’. Like a classic state of centuries past, Russia had become obsessed by the idea of seizing territory, from the grandiose claims on the Arctic (that 1.2 million square kilometres of the waters of the Arctic Ocean, including the shelf that goes up to Canada, belong to Russia) to the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of regions of Eastern Ukraine in 2014; from the colonial war in Syria to the taking over of squares and boulevards in Moscow by police squads in order to clear out protesters.
The second was ‘The War for Symbols’: the signs of authority, of power and of the sacralized ‘sovereignty’ that became a fetish under Putin’s rule. Strategic missiles became a particularly important symbol, featuring on T-shirts and advertising hoardings; television showed the bizarre Russian sport of the ‘Tank Biathlon’; and right in the centre of Moscow a monument was erected to the creator of the Kalashnikov rifle, as if this were Russia’s greatest contribution to world civilization.
The third war was ‘The War for the Body’, about the government’s interference in the private lives of citizens, in their physicality, their sexuality and their eating habits; in the life of the family and reproductive policy: all covered by Michel Foucault’s term ‘biopolitics’.9 The authorities introduced laws against LGBT people that are fascist in nature (something that unites all authoritarian regimes is a hatred of homosexuality); they forbade foreigners from adopting Russian orphans (the so-called ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’, which the people nicknamed ‘the cannibals’ law’); they introduced sanctions on the importing of Western foodstuffs and destroyed banned products, crushing them with bulldozers and burning them in mobile crematoria.
Finally, the fourth war was ‘The War for Memory’. The state began actively to push a memorial policy, publishing new history textbooks that created a single myth about Russia’s greatness; imprisoning those who preserved the memory of Stalin’s terror (such as the historian Yury Dmitriev, from Karelia); implanting a state religion of the Victory in the Second World War, with its own cathedrals, pilgrimages and the cult of the dead. A militarized society was created in Russia, one that dreamt about the myths of the Second World War and was ready for confrontation with the outside world. But a genuine hot war still seemed far off and unthinkable.
Three years ago, when The Return of the Russian Leviathan
