They also hated those who dared to go out to the streets not on the government assignment. They could easily be convinced that these renegades act on the orders of the State Department and the CIA. Or for reason of their mental illness. For only the lunatics and traitors can betray the solidarity of the humiliated, on which the Soviet regime was firmly holding its ground.
Putin revived this solidarity. The people who were taken to those rallies never admit to themselves that the authorities treat them like cattle. For them, those who go to rallies against Putin’s omnipotence are mortal enemies. Which does not prevent them from hating and despising Putin.
This is the result of humiliation, not perceived as humiliation: such mental condition makes a person be able only to hatred and contempt. Putin and his team knew what they were doing when they herded people to putings. They have always been and remain masters of grassroots control that is built on the appeal to the lowest impulses of the human personality and human communities. This is also applied to the business community.
The modern Russian bourgeoisie (with all the conventionality of this term at the beginning of the 21st century) is not a victim of the foray of the nomads from various government departments. The Russian bourgeoisie itself created the system. Together with their comrades from the government agencies.
And this is not the first time for them. After all, when the time came for the Russian bourgeoisie to assert itself, it failed to go ahead with its own bourgeois revolution, willingly accepting the services of autocratic power agents in resolving conflicts at their enterprises and mines. They preferred to bribe the government officials in obtaining state contracts, without really understanding why Russia needs all this European foolishness like trade unions and parliaments. Power was always more important to them than wealth.
“Big deal – a business worth a million! A man with no extraordinary brainpower, without exceptional talents, by chance becomes a trader, and then when he has grown rich he goes on trading from day to day, with no sort of system, with no aim, without having any particular greed for money. He trades mechanically, and money comes to him by itself, without his going after money. He sits all his life at his work, likes it only because he can domineer over his clerks and get the better of his customers. He’s a churchwarden because he can domineer over the choristers and keep them under his thumb; he’s the patron of a school because he likes to feel the teacher is his subordinate and enjoys lording it over him. The merchant does not love trading, he loves dominating, and your warehouse is not so much a commercial establishment as a torture chamber! And for a business like yours, you want clerks who have been deprived of individual character and personal life – and you make them such by forcing them in childhood to lick the dust for a crust of bread, and you’ve trained them from childhood to believe that you are their benefactors.”33.
In this case, any bourgeoisie that has been accepting and keeps on accepting Russian rules should be considered Russian. Foreign capital came here for cheap labor also under the protection of the autocracy. Foreign capital (again, with all the conventionality of this term) now also accepts Russian conditions. As always.
The whole trouble of the Russian bourgeoisie is that it immediately became too adult, did not go either through the religious searches of the first bourgeois revolutions, nor through the exuberance of the Great French Revolution and the subsequent national revival of Europe. It seems the Russian bourgeoisie is much less guilty of bloodshed, it did not kill the tsar, was not responsible for the red terror. But the blame for the totalitarian development of Russia is definitely on it.
And a significant part of the responsibility for the current totalitarian restoration is also on it. It was and remains too pragmatic, too committed to its own conception of bourgeoisness, which cannot be even called class-consciousness.
The Russian bourgeoisie does not correlate its own interests with any others that require solidarity protection. These people have no “Comrades in prisons, in cold dungeons”. These lyrics from the song which was sung in Soviet demonstrations referred to the victims of tsarist repression and never meant any Gulag prisoners. The bourgeoisie can haggle with the government over specifics of their business, but defending ideals, values and principles – this is what Russian bourgeoisie will always stay away from.
The world driven by purely pecuniary interest was created on the basis of the most idealistic intentions. Max Weber in his Preliminary Remarks to Protestant Ethics warned against interpreting capitalism as a solely profit-driven system.
“Such naive ideas about the essence of capitalism belong to those notions, which should be abandoned once and for all at the very start of the study of the history of culture. Uncontrolled greed in the pursuit of profit is by no means identical to capitalism and, even less so, to its ‘spirit.’ Capitalism can be identical to curbing this irrational aspiration, in any case, be instrumental to its rational regulation.”
Bad news is that “Weber capitalism” exists only in the few countries that have begun to modernize earlier and have gone through profound transformations. What was formed and being formed under the influence of their demonstration effect, as a result of involvement in global processes, is called differently – from the world periphery to the cargo-cult capitalism. You can call it capitalism according to Marx – when not historical practice, but speculative schemes play a major role in the interpretation of social relations. National bourgeoisie in such countries, together with the foreign bourgeoisie create an extremely incongruous society.
Its main contradiction is the borrowing of world economic practices and integration into world economic structures while preserving and even strengthening national identities that are formed on the basis of opposition to the world civilizational center. The degree of economic borrowing and dependence can be different, and not always it is proportional to the degree of national-political opposition. Under the Soviet regime, especially in its last decades, the economy of the USSR was very different from that of the West one and today’s Russia. But anti-Americanism and chauvinism were not as deeply rooted in society as they are now.
The Russian bourgeoisie does not have an idealistic past, and it is impossible to borrow it. As a result, the free market emerges as its ugly parody and the very principle of human relations under so-called capitalism is deformed.
I do not like Vasily Rozanov, but, perhaps, you can not do without a long quote from the “Apocalypse of Our Time” (I wonder who came up with an almost identical name of an American film – there were always a lot of Russians in Hollywood):
“MOSCOW DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TEARS”
– and makes a stupid mistake. That’s why she is poor. It is necessary to believe, and not in tears, but – in general, always, until deception. Phoenicians in ancient time, at the beginning of history, learned to believe and made up a simple piece of paper, a special written sign they used for this purpose. It was conditional: and who produced it got the “trust”, and it was called credit. Those who had it, were the “trustworthy” people and definitely trusting, not by talk or “friendly conversation”, but in a way of business relations and for making life easier. Thus, they became the first wealthiest people in the world. No match to Russians. Who manage even at such later time still growing poor, still deceiving and keep on ruining their lives.
***
The beauty of a debt is its payment – and the Russians follow that and can not fail to do so, paying [the bill] established by the Phoenicians… But resolutely everywhere they can, they try to live at the expense of each other, cheating and pimping. And thinking of happiness fall into a greater and greater