6 December 2024
by Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: Radio Svoboda
Cowardice is killing Russia. People’s fear of losing their immediate well-being is leaving our country without a future. This is well understood by the authoritarian regime, which stays afloat by no means due to its authority, and not even due to its power, but due to the fear that it has been implanting in society. This is the motivation behind the political repressions and draconian innovations in legislation, especially criminal legislation: to frighten society so badly that people can think about nothing but saving their own freedom and life rather than about changing the political atmosphere in Russia. Dictatorship’s weapon is fear.
Simultaneously, the regime is feeding society arguments for reconciling with this state of affairs in the country. There is “Politics is a dirty business,” and “It’s not all so straightforward,” and “They’re all fine,” and “It’s good where we aren’t,” and “A plague on both your houses,” and “If not us, then NATO,” and for the most simplistic, “It has nothing to do with me.” All these are arguments of different sorts, calculated for varying tastes and consumers with varying intellectual abilities. The expiration date on most of these arguments expired back in the late Soviet era, but for lack of others the regime has lifted what it finds most appropriate from the putrid socialist past and added a touch of official orthodoxy, statism, nationality, and imperial motifs to taste. The Kremlin uses this concoction to ply that segment of the people who seek, in Pasternak’s expression, “labor and law and order, hand in hand and as one.” However, one should not exaggerate the significance of this hastily cobbled together ideology. It is secondary. In first place, as always, is the tyranny and violence that engender appalling fear.
But what about the elites, the opposition, the liberally inclined Russian intelligentsia, the advanced middle class, the university professors and students? Naturally, the Kremlin’s ideological hodgepodge is not for them, the level is wrong. They’re recommended to read the Criminal Code. And they do. And draw their own conclusions. Understandably, no one wants to go to prison. Understandably, everyone wants to live in comfort and safety. The only question is, at what price? What can be sacrificed for the sake of an honest name, an easy conscience, and shaky hopes for a change in the country’s political climate?
To this question there are two very different answers.
Some choose the path of resistance, the path of fearlessness and risk. For many of them, this road takes them past the barbed wire. This path is a response to the authoritarian regime’s main argument, a response to the terror against civil society. “We will stand up to tyranny, and our only weapon will be our determination not to surrender, not to give in to fear and to believe in victory,” these people say. This is a difficult but worthy path. Hundreds of new political prisoners and thousands of those who have still been lucky enough to avoid the terror of the law enforcement organs have taken or are now taking it.
Others prefer to respond to the regime’s ideological constructs in such a way that tyranny does not touch them personally. There is nothing bad in trying to avoid danger. Who is going to argue with that? The question remains, though: at what price?
Some pay with internal emigration and reject public activity, they write “for the desk,” are cautious on social networks, and pour out their soul at the kitchen table. Others choose actual emigration, where, seemingly, there is nothing more to fear. But even here the fear sowed in Russia manifests itself in the most incredible way. Journalists numbered by Moscow among “foreign agents” meekly post the Roskomnadzor label, although all they are risking is the as yet hypothetical possibility of losing the real estate they left behind in Russia and the quite real possibility of losing their fees for their work. Just that! A very “high” price, of course, especially compared with the price political prisoners in Russia today are paying.
Naturally, one can say that this label is nonsense, a trifle, an insignificant concession redeemed by the high professional mastery shown in ideological battles with the Kremlin. But for a journalist, conceding to censorship is not a trifle. For politicians, emigration is a marker of their political insolvency; for journalists, consent to censorship is a marker of their professional failure. They are voluntarily branding themselves with seemingly “compelled” loyalty. What are all the correct words and intelligent arguments worth of Latynina, Osetinskaya, Gordeeva, Shenderovich, Shulman, Eidelman, and the many other “foreign agents” who lay down under Roskomnadzor and continue to pretend that they are free people and independent journalists? They’re worth nothing! Fear devalues their words. Their words turn into blather.
What’s even worse, the journalists, writers, and cultural figures who have given in to Roskomnadzor are facilitating the triumph of the Kremlin narrative, which says that fear is standard for public life. That this is how it should be. That it cannot be otherwise and everyone agrees with that. That there is no other way to deal with this nation. And reading or listening to these luminaries of liberalism, our wise nation easily internalizes the idea that even for the sake of life’s trifling comfort it is all right to get on your knees and yield to lawlessness. If the leaders of public opinion allow this for themselves, then what can be asked of us mere mortals?
Writers’ and journalists’ concession to censorship—this is the Kremlin’s real victory over free speech. Thank god, the victory is not yet all-encompassing, but a kneeling revolt is straight out of the little that today can still gladden the authoritarian regime and inspire it to new repressions.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
