No one knows what awaits us yet with that crazed demon wielding all the power of Russia.
History advances but not vertically, wrote Leo Trotzki – as brilliant as it is intellectual, as disastrous as it is political. This progress follows, according to Trotzki, an “unequal and combined” development. That means: historical formations that we believed to be surpassed, not only can return but are also contained or embedded, sometimes surreptitiously, in the most current or modern ones (feudal agrarian structures in Soviet socialism, Trotzki was an example). . The thesis has proven to be correct and is valid for geology, universal history and even for individual histories.
From the people-mass to the people-citizens
In every civilized being nests the humanoid that precedes it and domesticating it is usually a difficult task for each one. Some do not achieve it, when they come to cosmeticize the Paleolithic being within them. That’s what I was thinking when listening to Vladimir Putin’s long speech in front of his interviewer (rather, his American propagandist) Tucker Carlson, in which the cruel dictator tried to justify the mass murders he commits in the neighboring country, Ukraine, by appealing to a concept of a nation that has long been surpassed in historical and social studies. I am referring to the concept of ethnic-cultural nation to which in democratic countries only fascist or fascistoid groups resort, as opposed to the concept of legal-political nation , which today prevails in international relations.
Putin repeated in front of Tucker the same arguments that appear in his text On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians . He spoke as if reciting a lesson, without raising or lowering his tone. He is undoubtedly accustomed to speaking in circles where his followers listen to him raptly, as if each of his words were a revelation or a prophecy. Something similar happened with Hitler when, among his people, he unleashed long discussions about his theory of races, comparing human beings with animals, to end up concluding that the Aryans are a superior race (in the film Der Untergang , Bruno Ganz imitated him perfectly). Only dictators can allow such aberrations. In any democratic country, Hitler’s rants, including Putin’s, would have provoked laughter or derision. The shameful thing is that Tucker Carlson listened to him with affected devotion, thus losing the opportunity to interrupt him with some observation and make him look ridiculous on camera. That’s what any honest and professional journalist would have done. But Tucker is just professional.
What became very clear in the first part of Putin’s monologue is that the tyrant, in trying to demonstrate that Ukraine and Russia form a historical unity, was referring, among several, to linguistic, religious, and cultural aspects, leaving aside all the events that have led to turning the people of Ukraine into the citizens of a modern nation.
For Putin, the people are simply a population united by ties of blood and a common language within the same habitat . On this point, Putin agrees letter by letter with Stalin’s definition of a nation. The nation – wrote Stalin – is «a stable human community, historically formed and emerged on the basis of the community of language, territory, economic life and psychology manifested in the community of culture» (Stalin, Marxism and the national question ). Following Putin himself, East Germany could never have been a nation, since it belonged to the same ethnic-cultural context as West Germany. And yet, the United Nations, taking into account its legal and political credentials, recognized as a nation. Putin also
Putin was living in East Germany when the crowds of that country burst into the streets chanting the slogan: “We are the people” while tearing down the ideological walls along their marches before the cement ones were torn down. That “We are” evidently did not refer to the ethnic people but to the sovereign people, understood as the original repository of power. Of a power that, for the vast majority of East Germans, had been usurped by a dominant political class ( nomenklatura ) at the service of the USSR. For this reason, Putin never managed to understand the historical meaning of the national and popular revolutions that, putting an end to communism, freed their nations from Russian-Soviet imperialism .
By ignoring the East German people as a political unit, Putin, like Stalin yesterday, ignored the concept of citizenship and thus did not recognize the political makeup of the nation where he was living, which by demanding unity with the West did not It denied the German historical-cultural foundation, but it did demand the radical democratization of the country under a rule of law expressed in a Constitution and its institutions.
According to his imperialist vision, Putin saw in the democratic actors of the countries subject to the USSR, disintegrating elements of “the historical unity” (to which Ukraine belonged) created at gunpoint by the USSR. For that same reason, I would never be able to understand later why Ukraine, by distancing itself from Russia as East Germany had done, would constitute, after the declaration of independence in 1991, a nation based on political and not ethno-cultural pillars. Much less would I be able to understand the meaning and character of Ukrainian national movements such as “the orange revolution” of 2004 or the Maidan revolution of 2013, which proclaimed the right to form a European and democratic, non-Russian and non-authoritarian Ukraine.
It would perhaps go without saying that the arguments that Putin uses today to affirm that Ukraine belongs to Russia can be extended by him, and without any problem, to the Baltic countries, Finland and even Poland. In fact, his booklet on the historical unity between Ukrainians and Russians is the ideological foundation of a declaration of war on today’s Europe, based on the principle of the sovereignty of legally and politically constituted nations and, above all, recognized as such. at the United Nations. This is the case of Ukraine.
Putin as the anti-Lenin
In such a way that Putin’s madness (it has no other name) lies in his project to return to pre-modern Europe, to the one where the Russia of the tsars shone for its size and military power. This project implies, of course, returning – just as Stalin attempted – to archaic, pre-revolutionary, pre-communist, pre-Leninist Russia.
The animosity that Putin displays against Lenin lies in the fact that the Russian revolutionary saw in the October Revolution Russia’s entry into a supposedly pre-revolutionary modern Europe (it is the central thesis of his book The State and the Revolution ). in contrast to Stalin who rehabilitated Russian (ur) nationalism in the name of communism. That is why Gorbachev was inspired by Lenin, just as Putin would be inspired by Stalin . Or even simpler: Putin represents, both in his country and in his extranational projects, the historical return to barbarism , using, for the sake of that objective, the development of science and postmodern technology, including the nuclear threat.
Historical development is uneven and combined, let us repeat again with Trotzki. The thesis applies perfectly to the history of Russia.
For a non-democratic and anti-political person like Tucker Carlson, given the mass consumption he was able to observe in Moscow supermarkets, Russia is today a very modern nation and, in no way, barbaric. For someone more enlightened, the concept of barbarism has nothing to do with the number of supermarkets but with the absence of democracy.
Towards a postmodern barbarism
The term barbarism has, as is known, a Greek origin. Barbarians were not non-Greeks, as is often said, but all peoples who do not live in polis, that is, all those who are not governed politically. Therefore, the Greek areas or islands governed by agrarian canons and not by those of the polis were inhabited by “barbarian Greeks.” Politics, according to the Greeks, was a condition of citizenship but also of civility (not to be confused with civilization).
It seems that the Greeks were right. It is no coincidence that authoritarian rulers, think of Russia, Hungary, Turkey and in Latin America in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez, have obtained their largest amounts of votes in agrarian areas, which the further away they are from the cities, the more authoritarian they are. With some reason, Karl Marx spoke to us about the “idiotism of peasant life.”
Marx spoke of agrarian idiotism in the Greek sense and not in the psychological one. Idiots, for the Greeks, were all the people who did not have access to political life, even living in the polis. Now, returning to the present, we could affirm that, from the moment of its declaration of independence from the USSR, the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian people decided to constitute a political nation and not just an ethnic or cultural one, that is, a radically opposed nation. to the barbaric idea of a nation that Putin proposes to us as an alternative to the modern political nation.
At this point it will be necessary to reaffirm: the concept of political nation does not negate the concept of cultural nation . Furthermore, the formation of cultural nations can be considered the basis that allows the emergence of a political nation. Let’s take an example: Iran.
Iran is a religious and cultural nation, even more so: it is religious-cultural and for this reason it is governed by a theocratic dictatorship just as it has been for thousands of years. Dissident groups, constantly increasing, do not deny the religious-cultural character of the nation, but rather its archaic theocratic governance, demanding sexual and gender rights, greater citizen participation, more political freedoms, in short: democratic reforms.
In Iran, as in Russia, there is a fierce struggle between the historical past and an eventual democratic future . That is the reason why the Russian dictatorship, reactionary and “pastist”, finds a notable affinity with that of Iran, as well as with other Islamic dictatorships. In the Greek sense we are witnessing a rebellion of barbarism against democracy characterized by the existence of a citizenship and the formation of a civility. In the process, Putin’s Russia has not only gone back, as Putin himself boasts, to the tsarist era, but even further back.
After all, even the tsars had councils of ministers whom they consulted periodically. Putin, on the other hand, using the most sophisticated technologies, has returned to that primary era of humanity in which power was not exercised by the most intelligent, or the wisest, or the cleverest, but by the most brutal. Yesterday, a democratically elected president, today he appears to be the most violent dictator in the world. Yesterday, Angela Merkel’s favorite partner, today Kim Jong-un’s favorite partner. For today’s Putin, there is no such fine distinction that Hannah Arendt made between violence and power. For Putin, power is violence and violence is power.
Navalny is just one, perhaps the best known, of a very long line of people whom Putin has ordered to be assassinated. That means, without more or less, that we are not only facing a regime that commits, like all dictatorships, murders. Putin’s criminality is structural, and that means systemic . Once that point is reached, there is no turning back. Nobody knows what awaits us yet with that crazed demon wielding all the power of Russia, a country where the faint hints of citizenship and civility that appeared during Gorbachev and Jelzin no longer exist.
Citizenship and Civility
Citizenship and civility often appear as synonyms, but they are not. Citizenship refers to a relationship of rights and duties between the members of a people and the national state. Indeed, we are citizens electing our representatives in the state, but also paying our taxes to the state. Civility, on the other hand, is something more complex: it refers to systems of relationships not only vertical with the state but also horizontal and transversal within what Hegel calls civil society.
Civil society is not everything that is not a state, but a complex set of social relations . Or put in these words: there is no society without associations . These associations include not only politics – in fact, due to their relationship with the state, they are more of a citizen – but also all types of non-criminal relationships, formed in accordance with the laws granted by public law. Lech Walesa, in his revolutionary times, said it in his simple language, and very clearly: “We fight for a new order that allows, for example, canary breeders, to organize among themselves, and establish links with other organizations. dedicated to other things.” In more sophisticated language, Habermas spoke to us about the communicative interaction from which social discourses are generated that can only be born in democracy but that at the same time are forgers of democracy. That’s called civility. That civility that had begun to appear during Gorbachev would later be devastated by Putin’s dictatorship.
Well, by opposing the West, the antidemocratic triad of our time, that of Russia, China and Iran, is in fact opposing prevailing notions of citizenship and civility. Both have been denied within their own countries. The hatred of the West that they profess and propagate is nothing more than the terror of the democratic possibility in their nations. Only in this way can we explain their attacks on external democracies. Therefore, the so-called new world order that they postulate, joining them, in a shameful way, democratically elected governments like that of Lula in Brazil, has no other objective than to subordinate the world’s democracies to the dictates of autocracies. Or to put it more imaginatively: it is about destroying the mirrors in which the democrats of their countries look at themselves.
That, precisely that, is what is at stake in the war on Ukraine. Whoever doesn’t understand it that way is because they definitely don’t want to understand it that way.
*Article originally published on the blog Polis: Politics and Culture.