The Voice Over

The events of the last two years, which still seem unbelievable, comic, macabre, illustrate this point. It seems that there is no law too absurd to pass—and our bewilderment and public outrage merely spur on our lawmakers. There is also no situation you could consider unthinkable. The war with Ukraine, Khodorkovsky’s release,³ banning Parmesan⁴—none of this seems surprising anymore: in the dark, all swans are black. The borders of what is possible have stretched to the horizon, logical arguments do not work, everyday pragmatism does not save us: it’s like falling into a zone of turbulence that shifts all proportions, moves all the accents—and removes the very possibility of a corridor, a clear perspective, a view of the future. Which might be the hidden meaning of what is happening, its actual purpose.

In a recent interview, Boris Groys talks about the fear of the future as one of the hallmarks of the present, and of the idea of saving oneself from the future as an urgent problem. “There is the sense that the future, whatever shape it takes, will bring about some kind of unpleasantness and a worsening of what is. There is a tendency to hold one’s ground and preserve what is. In other words, what’s current today is how to save oneself from the future and maintain the status quo.”

Nowhere is this fear stronger than in Russia. We habitually express horror at the fact that (according to sociologists) 84 or 86 percent of the population supports Putin. But, in reality, the consolidation is almost 100 percent, and it all boils down to the fear of tomorrow, which brings us all together: Putin, cabbies in Moscow, teachers in the provinces, social media users, and those active in the protest movement. The mere thought of the fact that the unsightly and uncomfortable today is not the final point, that tomorrow will be worse, is the source of a heavy, secret, communal anxiety. Tomorrow promises myriad unknown dangers—war, crisis, revolution, mass repression—and our neurotic logic fails to accept that those things are not likely to happen all at once.

Putin’s rule over the last years (with his conservation projects à la “linger a while—thou art so fair!”) was the first symptom of this turn in our worldview. The commonplace thing to say about Putin is that his main political goal is to preserve this very same status quo, to strengthen his position at the gambling table. This is, broadly speaking, what the conflict between Putin and the protesters on Bolotnaya⁵ was about: he reminded us of the social contract of the aughts (offering the private joys of travels, consumption, and the unsubtle ploy of oil bonuses in exchange for our non-participation in political life), the opposition demanded a future, a return to the historical process, a life that was dynamic instead of static. But when things were set into motion, the ensuing dynamic turned out to be worse than any stasis—and as early as the winter of 2013 we were talking and thinking about how nice it would be to go back at least a couple of steps. Back to the previous summer, to the protest spring of 2012, to the peaceful autumn of 2011—before the Bolotnaya Square case,⁶ before the cannibalistic laws were passed, before people were banned from their jobs, etc. Back to the warm stasis when life was, it turns out, much more bearable.

On the other hand, there are people who seem to derive pleasure from the way our wheels have spun out of control, from the sense of finding oneself in the midst of history. Interviews with warlords of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” bubble with the excitement of people who have finally found themselves in the right place, feeling useful and important, taking their position, attacking, rising up off their knees—in a new kind of sense, for which a mere year ago they would have had to reach back to the ’20s, to Babel’s Red Cavalry with its splendid murderers. This sense of history as laughing gas, a wild carousel of possibilities, where any volunteer will receive an automatic weapon and a live target as part of the bargain, was until recently untranslatable to the language of the present.