The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now. Dmitrii Shusharin

for various reasons – is growing. Everyone can be entered into an absolutely illegal list of so-called watchdog control and deprived of the possibility of free movement.62

      All those who, following Medvedev’s article, began to discuss ways of modernizing Russia, ignored one very sharp contradiction. What kind of modernization can we talk about, if our country’s foreign policy is conceptually and in practice at the level of the one before last and last centuries? It’s still the same Realpolitik that led the world to the First World War. And how the Russian citizen, the subject of modernization can be described? A paranoid looking for spies under his bed, a man who recognizes only one way of communication – to “mop up”? Do you see him as a familiar character? I do. It’s Danila Bagrov, the one from Rusha (the movie “Brother”). The hero of the nineties, an exemplary model citizen of Putin’s Russia. All his modernization is to rub out a Ukrainian in the outhouse, settling accounts with him for Sevastopol, and let the Frenchman, who does not know the Russian language, know that America will soon be dead in the water. That, however, does not prevent him from flying to doomed America in a worn sweater, and returning from there in a fancy beige coat, having fun bullying passengers in the first class.

      In the tandemocratic period of Russian history, the hundred flowers did not bloom; the blooming was assigned to those who could be called Kremlin’s hungweipings. It was a time of extraordinary activity of the pro-government youth movements, although doomed because they had never been Putin’s own. The youngsters observed the cult of Uncle Slava Surkov, a minion rather than a tsar. Therefore, they gradually came to naught. And they did not sling muck at the ruling elite (later this job was assigned to progressive public and intelligentsia headed by Alexei Navalny), but at quite harmless human rights activists.

      The human rights agenda is an invention of Soviet dissidents perfectly aware that any talk about changing the political regime will lead to immediate repression, but the demands to observe country’s own Constitution and the Helsinki Final Act will allow at least some time to manifest public activity. In a non-political country human rights activities became political. And most importantly, it was the protection of non-political human rights. Soviet individuals were not politically neutral because of the absence of appropriate political institutions, but also being such by nature of their internal organization and personal properties.

      The protection of human rights is a process that cannot have a final result, because there are no ideal societies. Human rights champions can have tangible achievements, but in general, the very existence of a human rights movement that exerts constant pressure on the authorities, but does not refuse to cooperate with them, has an impact on the social situation. The authorities can hate human rights activists, and the latter are not obliged to love the former, but it doesn’t make them an opposition force, in the sense that it exists in a political society.

      Attitudes toward human rights defenders, consciously formed by agitprop and Kremlin youth, revealed the nature of Russian society and the state much clearer than all presidential addresses, articles and other signals.