explainers

Staving off apocalypse, Putin-style Meduza’s Ideas editor reflects on why the Russian authorities peddle the notion that the future is evil

Source: Meduza

In the early Putin years, the authorities still put out slogans that promised a better future, like “Doubling the GDP” or the maximally abstract but nice-sounding “Modernization of Russia.” But since the early 2010s, official rhetoric has switched its focus to the struggle against external threats and preventing the political apocalypse the Kremlin associates with the “color revolutions.” The tasks the Kremlin has now set for itself and Russian society are not future developmental milestones but, instead, the vague goals of the “special military operation” in Ukraine and indicators for the country’s so-called elections. If we try to look at what’s currently happening in Russia with a fresh set of eyes, we might find it strange that Putin is even still in power. Meduza’s Ideas editor Maxim Trudolubov explains what’s going on.

An invisible struggle is going on within Russian society. It’s more significant than highly visible struggles like, for example, the rift between people who fled Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and those who stayed. The invisible divide separates people who have a stake in Russia’s current present state from those who hope for, count on, even gamble on the country’s future.

Every society has similar kinds of divisions. They manifest as political struggles between conservatives, on one side, and the liberals and left wing who stand for change, on the other. Those who are invested in the present and those who strive for the future can intersect — even people with wealth, business interests, and social capital, who are winning in the here and now, can fight for change.

But today’s Russia presents one of those difficult circumstances in which the chasm between the two parts of society is widening. It doesn’t help that those who are most fortunate in the present are very often the beneficiaries of war.

The ‘freedom’ of despotism and corruption

Before the war, Putin-era elites had a rosy vision of the future: life on the state’s dole, somewhere where their children had prospects, their property was protected, and the weather was better than in Russia. Western sanctions restricted the possibilities for realizing those dreams, but didn’t fully destroy them. A number of the high-ranking businessmen and bureaucrats who bear direct responsibility for Russia’s aggression are still enjoying that lifestyle. (Just one example: Boris Obonosov runs the Tactical Missiles Corporation, which manufactures weapons that Russia uses to kill Ukrainians and destroy their homes. Obonosov’s daughter and her husband own valuable real estate in Czechia, in the E.U., and go there regularly.)

Clearly, though, the future holds fewer opportunities for Russia’s most privileged to live that way. The Kremlin knows that and tries to stem discontent about it through a combination of threats and present-day incentives. The mysterious deaths of Russian business leaders serve as the background against which Russia’s leaders offers new “freedoms” to those who cater to the highest authorities. For elites within Russia’s security apparatus, this means the freedom to search out new “enemies,” persecute dissenters, and generally employ any kind of extrajudicial violence.

For civilian elites, who are accustomed to high incomes and gradual integration into Western societies and structures, Putin has begun offering more freedom to get rich at home in Russia. He has consistently made old corrupt practices increasingly acceptable. Russia withdrew from the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption, which was ratified in 2006 — an earlier era. Officials and members of regional parliaments are no longer required to publicly disclose their incomes. Significant parts of the registers and databases concerning public employees are fully or partially closed to the public. This is the freedom of corruption.

It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around how ordinary Russians, who are increasingly deprived of real freedoms, can bear the expanding “freedoms” of people cozy with the authorities to rob and use violence against them.

The pragmatic answer to that puzzle starts with understanding that ever fewer Russians have alternatives to working either directly for the state or for large corporations with ties to the state. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, small businesses’ total economic share had fallen to 11.5 percent, the lowest percentage since record-keeping began in 2008.

According to 2021 data, 39 percent of Russia’s 75 million-strong workforce was employed in the public sector or in state-owned corporations, whereas 49 percent were in the private sector. However, as researcher Pavel Luzin has pointed out, a number of enterprises that formally belong to the private or mixed sectors operate under de facto state control. Major employers like oil company Rosneft and Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, are examples. This means that public employees should be counted as closer to 50 percent of the workforce.

Russia’s economy is stagnating. All of the government’s efforts are aimed not at growth, but at staving off crisis. At the same time, Russia’s unemployment levels have traditionally been low, which means that public sector workers can count on some measure of stability, albeit with a low salary. Alongside Western sanctions, the large number of poorly but reliably paid workers creates another “safety valve” for the Kremlin. The growing technological backwardness of Russia’s remaining workforce means that Russian workers will become ever less globally competitive and won’t rush either to leave the country or to protest the status quo — that is, the war.

The state also uses a system of grants to incline the population toward direct or indirect support for the war. Many Russian NGOs that previously worked on politically neutral causes like supporting people with disabilities, providing medical care, or raising funds for medication have reoriented toward providing aid to residents of the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and supporting military hospitals. For such work, they receive much more money from the state than NGOs could have counted on previously.

The state strives generally to make ideas like civil society and charity describe only phenomena connected to support for the war, rather than with human dignity or social development.

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Time as a threat

The deeper reason that state power in Russia is so stable has to do with the fact that the Kremlin has managed to give citizens the impression that the passage of time itself brings with it ever newer threats. Putin’s real supporters don’t back him so much as they cling to the present moment, with its diminishing possibilities. Perhaps without realizing it, they favor slow degradation because they fear a quick demise. Consciously or not, they reproduce the prison logic described by, among others, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: You can die today, I’ll go tomorrow.

Political managers get society to approve of the current leader, even when quality of life, by all objective measures, has been deteriorating for over a decade. People imagine Putin as their defense against even more difficult declines, cataclysms, and invasions by enemy forces. This vision of the world has a long history, and one which is both much older than and opposed to the idea of history that has prevailed in the West for 200 years.

The idea of progress — that life will be better in the future thanks to the transfer of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next — arose as part of the European Enlightenment. The second half of the 18th century saw the introduction of the concept of linear, as opposed to cyclical, time (a French statesman named Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was the first person to fully articulate the “Idea of Progress”).

In many cultures, the traditional conception of time and progress was cyclical — better times came around, but were always eventually followed by degradation and decay. This worldview tended to see the past as bright and the future as bleak. The overarching narrative held that God created a perfect and final version of the world, which, with time, could only get worse. From epoch to epoch, man lost his innocence and his connection to the divine. The Bible illustrates this conception of time with the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Greek mythology understood history through the five Ages of Man: gold, silver, bronze, heroic, iron. Except for the Heroic Age, which improved upon the Bronze Age, each age, like its corresponding metal, is less precious and harder than the last.

Perhaps this is the sense in which Putin’s quasi-ideology represents a return to “traditional values.”

The Russian katechon

There’s another ancient source for the notion that the world is in decline — the katechon, or restrainer. Katechon is an Ancient Greek word meaning “that which withholds,” and it appears in the Bible in a somewhat enigmatic verse that reads, “And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who restrains it is removed” (2 Thessalonians 2:6–7). There is debate about the meaning of this verse, but many interpretations view it as describing the special role of a political power — such as the Roman Empire — in preventing the end of the world for as long as necessary. The ruler, from this perspective, bears the responsibility for establishing order in the face of impending chaos. Using force, he facilitates the most important thing — the spread of Christian doctrine in the territories he rules, thanks to which more people will have the chance of salvation when the apocalypse does come. The ruler thus cannot, and should not, prevent the end of the world. But he can buy time for his subjects.

This conception of the katechon is popular in far-right circles, following the German political theorist and prominent Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt, who incorporated it into his philosophy. Schmitt believed that the “withholder” had to prevent the “political apocalypse” that threatened the state from below. In his view, the proliferation of opposing political parties (and the communists most of all) signaled danger, and he espoused a secular version of the katechon as a figure who would make human activity possible against the chaos of contemporary political life.

Whether or not Russia’s current rulers share this gloomy, mystical view of political reality is immaterial — their actions put it into practice. The “bright past” is either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, depending on the audience. And the “dim future” is the threat of crisis, the collapse of the country, or its capture by enemies. Declarations about development, economic growth, and positive guidelines were abandoned in the aughts. Their echoes still sounded in the first half of the 1990s, but even then the rhetoric of threat and the need to stave off “political crisis” prevailed.

But staving off is not the same thing as prevention. Assuming that the leader’s role is only to buy time before the end of the world — in this case, a “color revolution,” as anti-regime mass protest in post-Soviet countries is known — suggests that such an event is, in any case, inevitable. The staunchest loyalists and the most uncompromising opposition agree on one thing: the future might be delayed, for better or worse, for a very long time, but it’s coming, and it won’t include either Putin or the power structures he’s created. The difference is that the loyalists are against that future and the opposition is for it.

The only way to release some of the pressure associated with that Putin-free future is to abandon the mental trap that views political change as apocalyptic, in either a negative (“the end of the world”) or a positive (“the new kingdom”) sense.