29 August 2024
by Leonid Nikitinsky
Source: Novaya gazeta
The shortcomings of experts and the rise in acts of aggression are the ‘twin evils’ responsible for what happened in a penal colony near the southern Russian city of Volgograd – and what could happen elsewhere tomorrow.
The taking of hostages in the Volgograd penal colony is just the latest of a string of failures. We start off being able to see clearly, but we cannot guess what form the next ‘black swan’ event may take. It is like a drone strike, everyone knows it will come, but no one knows from where. After all, there is no pilot.
It is worth noting that the white swan is an important symbol in prison inmate culture – there is a terrible prison for lifers in the town of Solikamsk, named ‘White Swan Penal Colony.’ And this Volgograd prison, a medium-size institution, announced itself as a ‘Green Swan” and raised the flag of ISIS (acting independently of the prison authorities). From the point of view of management theory, there is no difference: the next swan might be of any colour.
The key word here is not ‘situation,’ as the President has recently begun to call any national emergency which arises, but ‘excess.’ An excess is a symptom of a situation, with its cause usually being something that a real expert could predict. Except that those in charge of making decisions have stopped listening to experts. Those who understand these issues have been crowded out by the yes men – men who may also have some level of understanding, but will not act on it by saying anything for fear of ending their careers.
It is better just to take advantage of the ‘situation’ at hand today and fill one’s pockets, as no one can tell what will happen tomorrow. The former governor of Prison Colony No. 19 was convicted of bribery, and there is no certainty that the new one will be any different.
Loyalty and corruption, which translates as ‘decay,’ are just two sides of the same coin. The systemic personnel crisis is chiefly because of the sheer fall in quality and the incurable decay of human capital.
The government is now run by people who seem to have just been transferred from undercover police work. In prison slang, the head of everything is referred to as ‘kum.’ And where has he been? Did no one notice the Ukrainian army’s preparation for its offensive into the Kursk region? How could we overlook the preparation of the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall, known even to foreign intelligence agencies? This is the context in which the repeated seizure of hostages in the penitentiary system seems of little importance. The protesters were all killed, and the details of the event, how it all happened, will only be known to the Federal Prison Service. At the end of the day, this is what prisons are like, there are always ‘excesses’ happening there.
But parallel to this degeneration at all levels of government, pressure is building up inside the kettle of civil society which has been intentionally deprived by the state of all those institutions which enable state and society in one way or other to interact, or at least to understand what is buried, and where, in this jelly-like, social mass, electrically charged with lightning like a storm cloud. The state has no means of dealing with these situations except violence. But this method does not allow you to predict future events.
The only thing clearly visible is the increased level of aggression. What once took the form of antisemitism in daily life, now takes the form of the pogroms we saw at Makhachkala airport.
Prisoners used to slit their own wrists in protest at humiliating treatment. Now they respond by killing anyone they can reach.
The penal colonies run ‘re-education programmes’: prisoners watch television, listen to Bastrykin calling for revenge against ‘migrant invaders,’ and watch the bare-knuckle fights put on by Vladimir Soloviev and Co. stirring up existential hatred of the ‘enemy’ every evening. Calling themselves supporters of ISIS, the drug dealers from the mountains (whom we cannot be certain were convicted lawfully) spoke of only one thing: they had heard the calls to war. Only for them it is not the same war and the enemy is different: not the mysterious ‘Ukrainian Nazis,’ but the prison guards who have for so long been dealing with them with batons. They will start with them, but just where they will stop, God alone knows.
Once the fires of war have been lit, they smoulder everywhere: As Thomas Hobbes put it, ‘the war of all against all.’ The calls for men to be mobilised may indeed have resulted in a so-called rallying around the flag: first a rallying around the flag hoisted by the Kremlin; and now the green flag of ISIS. The next flag raised, almost certainly, will be red. But it will never be raised where the people who started all of this are expecting.
You did not need to be an expert to predict that the Special Military Operation in Ukraine would lead society into a new and more dangerous condition. You do need to be an expert to know what to do next. You won’t find the experts we need alongside those who are making the decisions.
Translated by Oscar Seecharan
