HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

Why have I spent so much time on this apparently abstract and deeply philosophical question? Because it’s fundamental. There are certain things that you don’t need to prove to anyone. Among those who are opposed to the regime there is agreement that the current law enforcement and judicial system are anti-constitutional and in need of deep revolutionary change. There have been many suggestions as to how this could be done, and most of them aren’t meaningless and are very useful.

Multi-page, detailed reports and brilliant short essays have been written that are full of specific suggestions and complete reform projects. The general outlines are clear. The competence of jury trials should be expanded; the independence of the courts strengthened; the FSB should be transformed from a “second government” into a body focused on combating terrorism and espionage; in general the special services should be disaggregated and diversified; there should be a radical change in the role of the prosecutor’s office; and much more besides. But all of these suggestions will be useless unless the main revolution takes place: inside people’s heads. Nothing will change if people don’t understand the essence of what the concept of just laws really is.

Any structure can be shortened, any mechanism can be perverted, any guarantee can be circumvented if there’s no agreement on the main principle: the criterion by which the success or failure of reforms is judged. And here there is just one criterion: freedom. It is the priority of freedom that overturns the unjust law and accepts the just law; and overturns the dictatorship of the law, that’s dangerous for society (and acts merely as a fig leaf for a new autocracy), and makes the state governed by the rule of law.

Chapter 21. The Moral Choice:

Justice or Mercy?

Max Weber once noted that if you scratch the most rational theory you’ll find that it’s based on some totally irrational idea that we accept on faith. This idea brings together everything that we regard as completely rational and logical.

It’s also the case that at the root of any political programme lies some kind of moral imperative that we vote for not with our minds but with our hearts. This voting with the heart is more important than voting using your intellect. In most cases, logical mistakes can be corrected; but moral errors are usually fatal.

It’s generally accepted that the fundamental moral imperative in politics is justice. Society reacts angrily to any violation of the balance of justice, and if the pendulum swings too far then the balance may be restored by means of a revolution. Yet if you ask the average person what’s the essence of justice, very few can give you an answer. However, ask someone whether they think that Russia is today run “fairly”, then the vast majority – including many supporters of the regime – will answer with a categorical “no”.

In a nutshell, this is the regime’s main problem. On the moral level, it’s rejected by the majority of those who usually ignore politics. The restoration of justice can be delayed, but it can’t be avoided. Sooner or later, this secret political lever will start to operate and turn the next page of history.

You’d think that there would be nothing simpler then bringing morality back into politics: all you have to do is restore justice. But when you look closely at justice, nothing is as simple as it might have seemed.

First of all, each person has their own idea of what justice means, and it’s very difficult to find a definition of what everyone would consider as “justice”. Secondly, and more importantly, the price of restoring the balance of justice frequently seems exorbitant. We must never forget that the Bolshevik Revolution took place on the crest of a wave of a search by the Russian people for justice, and its sworn aim was specifically the creation of the most just society in the world. But what it ended up as was in an even more unjust society, that lasted for decades.

So the search for justice must itself be done in a balanced way. We have to find a balance for the balance, so as not to turn history into an hour glass, using a revolution to turn it over from time to time. Every time that we have the intention to “destroy the world to its foundations by violence, then build our new world”, we are simply – like in the joke quoted above – “making our own Kalashnikov rifle”, that we use over and over again to destroy both Russian civil society and the green shoots of a state governed by the rule of law.

So that we don’t repeat this, we must put spontaneous searches for justice inside a framework. I think that this framework can be constructed in only one way: by combining it with a moral principle that’s even deeper and more universal than justice.

For me, this principle is mercy.