"Let others scream in despair,
From resentment, from pain, from hunger!
Because we know silence is more profitable,
Because silence is gold after all!"
Aleksandar Galič, "Waltz of the Gold Digger", 1963.
Learning about what happened at Auschwitz was a wake-up call for the post-war German public, who did not want to hear anything about it while the war was going on. Since February 24, the Russian public also refuses to know anything, barricaded itself from the world behind the letter Z - which has become a symbol of war in Russia - like a crucifix that could ward off evil.
It is not certain that the awareness of what is happening in the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Bucha will be a wake-up call for Russians that will make them think about peace in terms of remorse. Despite the claim Theodor Adorno that after Auschwitz it became impossible to write poetry, after Auschwitz and the massacre committed by the Nazis against the Jews in Babin Yar in Ukraine, a lot of good poetry was written. After the "Condor" legion of Nazi Germany bombed Guernica in 1937, pikaso painted the cult work of the same name. After Mariupol, shows on Russian state TV channels continue to spew hatred towards the rest of the world.
The tragedy of the nation that a priori justified the ideology of Putinism is that there will be no one in Russia to repent for Mariupol. The historicism of Putinism, its ideological focus on the past and covering up the darkest pages of the country's history, knows only heroes, not victims. As a result, the cult of Russia's victory in World War II turned not into a lesson about avoiding war, but into a cult of war itself. The lessons of history have been twisted, turned upside down, devalued and turned into agitprop.
Heroization of violence
Putinist ideology is completely devoid of any positive content. She doesn't have any positive goals or a picture of her desired future. The whole identity of Putinists is based on something negative, so militarism is an important part of it. Under this ideology, the hero is not Jurij Gagarin, the first man in space, already a nameless bandit who has some nickname, like Motorola, a Russian fighter from Donbass. Someone who, instead of paving the way to a humanistic future, returned us to the archaic past, full of trenches, blood, lice and murder.
Putinism knows only heroes, not victims, so the lessons of Russian history are distorted
Murder and violence are heroized. The main institutions of trust become institutions of violence: the army and the FSB secret police. And all this is blessed by the official Russian Orthodox Church. If in Soviet times destruction for the sake of high goals was approved by the propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, now it is done by the church.
The ideology that embraces the idea of a united Russian nation that includes Ukrainians has killed that idea, creating a negative identity for Ukrainians. After Buca and Mariupolje, there can never be a single nation. And the Russians will bear the mark of people who allowed Putinism to happen and who supported it.
Silence as complicity
And there is the question of guilt and responsibility, including collective guilt and responsibility for what happened between Ukraine and Russia. Due to the fact that Russia has been returned to the same moral state as during the most repressive and paranoid years of Stalinist terror, when telling the other person was considered a virtue and a duty, when black was white. Because Russia is going through an anthropological disaster.
Normal feelings for a normal citizen of the Russian Federation - who is not a subject Vladimir Putin - are a terrible inner hell of horror and shame. Shame on what Putin has done, and on the stupid stubbornness with which many of our compatriots support him, desecrating the very concept of patriotism. The majority, led by a female death squad led by state media journalists Olga Skabeeva i Margarita Simonjan and spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova and others, he does not feel ashamed. On the contrary, they rejoice. The minority is ashamed, both for themselves and on behalf of these cheerleaders of death.
Those same emotions were felt by people who retained the ability to think, to doubt, and to empathize in 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague during the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And then, as now, people were arrested and convicted just for putting up posters. Putin's Russia, however, far surpassed that Brezhnev era by the number of victims and arrests.
Back in 1968, a dissident Larisa Bogoraz she participated in demonstrations against the invasion on Red Square in Moscow. In her closing statement at the trial in October of that year, she said something very important that has remained relevant for many years, and today it has gained importance again.
"It was not enough for me to know that they did not have my vote 'for'. For me, it was important that they would not hear my voice against it ... If I had not done that (protesting on August 25, 1968), I would have held myself responsible for those actions of the government, just as all adult citizens of our country bear responsibility for all actions of our government".
In a free and democratic Russia, schoolchildren were to learn these words by heart, and August 25 was to be celebrated as the anniversary of the awakening of national consciousness. But instead, the pupils live in a different Russia: one where truth is mocked as false and where these children are taught to condemn "national traitors".
After the judge rudely interrupted her, Bogorazova continued: "I was against going to the demonstration for another reason... It was the practical futility of the demonstration, that it would not change the course of events. But in the end I decided that for me it was not a question of what kind is the benefit of it, but my personal responsibility".
Similarly, a dissident Soviet songwriter Aleksandar Galic sang "How many times we have been silent in various ways - and not 'against', of course, but 'for'." For him, silence, just like in Bogorazova's interpretation, is complicity with the actions of the regime.
The blind leading the blind
So, according to the logic of Larisa Bogoraz, those who approve or remain silent bear, at the very least, a collective responsibility for what is happening in their country and for what the state is doing. And that, most likely, is the difference between collective guilt and collective responsibility: something that the philosopher is about Hannah Arendt wrote a lot in her work about the responsibility of the Germans after the Second World War.
"In post-war Germany ... the cry 'We are all to blame' which at first hearing sounded so noble and alluring, in fact only largely exonerated those who were actually guilty. Where all are guilty, no one is." wrote Arendt in the article "Collective Responsibility", drawing a line between political (collective) responsibility and moral and/or legal guilt. Which does not mean absolving the German people of responsibility for what happened.
All this is yet to come for the Russian people, who in the eyes of public opinion in most of the world (not only in the West) are already on par with the Germans of the 1930s and 40s. In order to "denazify", they disgraced themselves as "Nazifiers".
In extreme situations, such as Putin's "special military operation", any silence is for, not against. This is the case with collective responsibility. This is why the majority - the so-called public opinion - does not want to believe in "lies" (ie the truth) and justifies Putin's actions.
Passive conformity is no less terrible than active and aggressive conformity. A collective lack of responsibility ("it has nothing to do with me") leads to collective responsibility. It is collective voluntary blindness. The nation follows Putin like the blind leading the blind. When a nation becomes blind, deaf and dumb, Mariupol and Buča become possible.
General Gleichschaltung
This is what in the Nazi era was called gleichschaltung (gleichschaltung): the cowardly adaptation of the common man to the political regime in which he exists. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas he described it as a "voluntary conversion to the prevailing ideology". That concept has characterized the mass consciousness of the nation since 1933, when Hitler became chancellor. A similar phenomenon was seen during Stalin and in the late years of the Soviet Union.
The Gleichschaltung explains the latest polls showing that 80 percent of Russians support their country's "special military operation." It is not the case that all those who have declared like that really support the conflict, destruction and killing. But by saying they support, they joined the silent "yes", so we have to take these numbers seriously.
When a nation becomes blind, deaf and dumb, Mariupol and Buča become possible
Larisa Bogoraz also spoke about this in her closing speech in court. "The prosecutor concluded his speech by suggesting that the sentence he is seeking will meet with the approval of public opinion ... I have no doubt that public opinion will approve this sentence, just as it has approved similar sentences in the past, as it would approve any sentence ... Public opinion will approve a conviction, firstly because we will be presented to him as parasites, as heretics and carriers of the enemy's ideology. And secondly, if anyone has an opinion that differs from the "public" one and finds the courage to express it, he will soon find himself in my place." .
If a nation ever stops to think about what has happened to it and what has been done with its consent, it will find a thousand ways to justify it. Of what she called the "man of the crowd," Arendt wrote, "when his occupation compels him to kill people, he does not consider himself a murderer because he has done so not out of inclination, but in his professional capacity. Out of pure passion, he never would trample on an ant", she wrote in the article "Organized guilt and universal responsibility".
This explains the rally at Moscow's Luzhniki stadium in support of the war, and the scene in Buca, as well as 80 percent of people who support the war or remain silent. "We have nothing to do with it". "Such is the set of circumstances". "We were told there were Nazis there". "We were just following orders." "We were afraid of losing our jobs". "We had to pay the mortgage".
And indeed, they could do nothing. Because they voluntarily renounced free elections and democracy: an instrument for preserving the conscience of the nation and ensuring the efficiency of administration. Because they stopped thinking, and made endless compromises. And those compromises ended in the disaster of general Gleichshaltung.
The author is a senior fellow and chair of the program on Russian domestic politics and political institutions at the Moscow Carnegie Center
Translated and edited by: Angelina Šofranac
Bonus video:
