Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Moshkin and Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] In Russia, criminal punishment has been introduced for those who knew about an upcoming sabotage, but did not report it to law enforcement. Now such secrecy will result in up to a year of imprisonment - the corresponding decree was signed by Vladimir Putin on April 21.
For anyone familiar with the history of Russian classics, this document evokes an association with an episode from the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The same package of laws that the president approved includes tougher penalties for discrediting the Russian army (up to 7 years behind bars if the lie was spread for self-interest or for hire).
A fine of up to half a million rubles is now imposed for calls to introduce new sanctions against Russia or extend old ones - that is, for what the so-called “non-systemic opposition” (now, as a rule, recognized as foreign agents and/or extremists) has repeatedly distinguished itself with.
Finally, the legislation on foreign agents has become stricter, including those who assist foreign NGOs.
All these measures have something in common.
All of them are aimed at protecting society from those for whom, almost a century and a half ago, Fyodor Mikhailovich came up with a politically incorrect but capacious definition: demons.
Those whom the classic himself, alas, feared.
CONVERSATION AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF A TERRORIST ATTACK
"Imagine you or I standing outside Daziaro's shop and hearing a nihilist telling another that in ten minutes the Winter Palace would be blown up. Would we go and warn them? Hardly. I doubt it. And as for seizing these nihilists or pointing them out to the police, that would never even cross our minds," is how journalist and book publisher Alexei Suvorin conveyed Dostoevsky's words, spoken 145 years ago in the writer's apartment.
Suvorin admitted to himself: he wouldn’t have reported it either.
But the participants in that conversation were not young people who had not yet grown up to a reputation and a name in society. One was a pillar of the publishing business, the other a living classic. By that time, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot had already been written, and the final volume of The Brothers Karamazov was being published.
From the pen of Dostoevsky came the main Russian anti-nihilistic novel, "Demons", back in the early 1870s. A former radical Petrashevsky, Dostoevsky wrote this book using the experience of the second generation of revolutionaries, the Nechayevites.
And the topic of conversation between the writer and the publisher was by no means abstract.
On that very day, February 20 (March 3, new style) 1880, a lone terrorist, Ippolit Mlodetsky, attempted to assassinate Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, one of the authors of the liberal reforms of Alexander II. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by Narodnaya Volya. The organization did not hesitate to ascribe to itself the "achievements" of others in order to raise its own weight in the eyes of the public - Salman Raduyev would do the same at the end of the 20th century, and the leaders of Al-Qaeda* and ISIS* in the 21st century.
An explosion in the Winter Palace was also not a theoretical possibility.
Shortly before the conversation between Suvorin and Dostoevsky, in February 1880, the Narodnaya Volya militant Stepan Khalturin, having got a job as a carpenter in the imperial residence, planted dynamite in one of the rooms. It was according to this scheme that in 1999 the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk occurred. None of the "crowned satraps" were hurt. But the Narodnaya Volya member's victims were representatives of the people - the explosion tore ten ordinary soldiers of the Finnish Guard Regiment to pieces. Another 80 were seriously injured.
From the point of view of liberals and progressives, both the convinced conservative Suvorin and Dostoevsky, who was close to the royal family, were unconditional “pillars of the regime.” And yet, “it would never have occurred to them.”
No one was going to lose the bulk of readers. After all, if you were published in the wrong place or praised by the wrong person, the "progressive public" would have organized an obstruction, as happened with Nikolai Leskov. Suvorin knew for sure the power of public convictions and did not want to be known as a "scoundrel" (and as a result go broke).
Dostoevsky could see for himself what the power of liberal public opinion was in 1878. Then the populist terrorist Vera Zasulich, who shot at the St. Petersburg mayor Fyodor Trepov, received an acquittal instead of the 15-20 years of imprisonment that she was supposed to receive. That was the decision of the jury. The outstanding Russian lawyer Anatoly Koni, who presided over the trial, was "rooting" for Zasulich. The prosecutor Vladimir Zhukovsky refused to support the state prosecution and resigned.
The opinion of "society" was expressed by the moderately liberal journalist Grigory Gradovsky (incidentally, the son-in-law of the famous nationalist Vasily Shulgin ): "Zasulich's story touched all hearts. It is hard, like torture, shameful from the knowledge that such barbarities can be committed."
The “barbarity”, that is, justice in relation to the terrorist, was not carried out to the great satisfaction of the liberal public.
As memoirists testify, “ Dostoevsky witnessed the delight with which the acquittal was greeted by the public in the courtroom and the thousand-strong crowd awaiting the end of the trial outside the courthouse.”
KILLERS BEHIND THE WALL
Shooting, explosions of “infernal machines” and other manifestations of revolutionary terror became the backdrop that the repentant radical Dostoevsky felt like no one else.
An astonishing fact is known: literally across the wall from the writer’s last place of residence in Kuznechny Lane, in the adjacent front door, there was a safe house of the Narodnaya Volya members – the cell of Alexander Barannikov (party pseudonym “Porfiry”), who was responsible for the murder of the chief of the gendarmes Nikolai Mezentsov and several attempts on the life of Alexander II.
In January 1881, when Dostoevsky was dying, Barannikov was arrested. And on the day of the writer's death, February 9, 1881, another terrorist was detained through the wall, having run into a police ambush.
A little over a month after Dostoevsky’s death, in March 1881, “by order of the ‘People’s Will’, Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator, was killed.
Publisher Alexei Suvorin will live another thirty years. He will have time to witness a new version of terror – the Socialist Revolutionary and anarchist – and to experience the first Russian revolution and its suppression. And until the end, Suvorin was haunted by the conversation with Dostoevsky. In 1903, during the time of Yevno Azef and the “Combat Organization”, the publisher again recalled the writer’s long-standing confession:
"I went through all the reasons that would make me do it (report a possible explosion to the police - editor's note). Reasons that are solid, solid, and then I thought about the reasons that would not allow me to do it. These reasons are simply insignificant. Just the fear of being known as an informer."
THE MOST "LIBERAL" COUNTRY
This state of affairs persisted for decades. The Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov, himself a model victim of the then cancel culture, wrote in 1907:
"Russia is the most "liberal" country, where, to put it in vulgar language, any sixth-grade schoolboy can "outdo" Voltaire, Rousseau, Buchner, Renan and generally all Western "free thinkers", no matter how many of them there were and where they were. Of course, he can "outdo" them not with his intelligence and talent. No! He can neither write nor speak. That is not the point. But "God", "government", "laws", "sovereign", "Gospel", "Bible" - all this is criticized by him in such a way that no Renan could have dreamed of it."
Rozanov was not exaggerating when he wrote that since the 1830s, the ideology of the educated class was formed by oppositionists – liberals and radicals, while patriotically thinking writers and publicists were “canceled”:
“There was persecution; there was harassment; there was a 70-year-long slap and spitting… It is worth comparing the dull, cornered life of Strakhov, who sometimes did not have a pinch of tea to brew for a visiting friend, with the noisy, broad, powerful life of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, who almost “did not deign to talk” to Turgenev himself; it is worth comparing the wretched life of Dostoevsky in the shameful Kuznechny Lane, where only cabbies’ yards stand and prostitutes live in their rooms, with the life of Stasyulevich, in his own stone house on Galernaya Street, where the “opposition editorial office” of the “Bulletin of Europe” was located.
It is not surprising that decades of such brainwashing did not go to waste. So much so that even the priest of the Shlisselburg Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Ioann Florinsky, spoke of the terrorist Ivan Kalyaev (the murderer of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich ) as follows: "I have never seen a man going to his death with such calm and humility of a true Christian."
Educated society enthusiastically welcomed the 1905 revolution (at the height of the Russo-Japanese War), and then, at the decisive moment of the First World War, the February Revolution. “They are shooting from the windows on Nevsky… But there is no need to judge anyone. It is not a time for judgment – it is terrible. And whatever happens next – it is joyful,” Zinaida Gippius wrote in euphoria.
But the joy did not last long. Instead of the victorious march of democracy under the rule of former lawyer Alexander Kerensky (who made his name defending various "expropriators" in court), a completely expected series of catastrophes occurred.
Unlike the "tsarist regime", the Soviet government (even though it canonized Khalturin and Sofya Perovskaya, and Kalyaev and Yegor Sozonov, not to mention the Bolshevik expropriators) did not stand on ceremony with the old regime radicals and liberals. The Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists were sent to prison and "disposed of". Their fate was shared by progressive lawyers who defended the bombers - for example, Mikhail Mandelstam, a lawyer at Kalyaev's trial - and journalists who admired the fighters for the people's happiness.
"RESTORATION OF POLAND ALONG THE DNIEPER"
In the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, this liberal (or, as they used to say, democratic) public opinion reproduced itself. According to the same patterns and under the same slogans, like the Socialist Revolutionary "In the struggle you will find your right" or the slogan known since the Polish uprisings "For our freedom and yours."
The people's tribunes and publicists of perestroika sympathized with the desire of the Baltics, Transcaucasia and Central Asia for independence (and did not notice the genocide of Russians that began on the outskirts of the disintegrating empire).
Then the heroes of the progressive public were the Ichkerian "freedom fighters" who organized the terrorist attacks in Budyonnovsk and Beslan. New heroes came to replace them: the leaders of the color revolutions in the post-Soviet space, and in Russia itself - the "innocent victims" oligarchs.
Finally, in February 2014, the opposition-liberal public made a choice in favor of post-Maidan Ukraine - "anti-Russia". And this choice turned out to be fatal for it after February 2022. Politicians, writers, bloggers, pop artists, stand-up comedians and other "rulers of thought" left "abroad" en masse. Modern Westerners found themselves in the position of a collective "Herzen in London", and it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to influence minds in Russia.
The current “foreign agent” wave of emigration is considered to be almost unique in the degree of hatred towards the abandoned homeland.
There is nothing new in Russophobia and the desire to “root for others” in the radical environment. More precisely, at first glance, there is nothing new.
DEMONS 2.0
Indeed, back in 1834, the “first dissident” Vladimir Pecherin, having emigrated to Berlin, wrote “in a fit of Byronism”:
How sweet it is to hate your homeland
And eagerly await its destruction,
And to see in the destruction of the fatherland
The universal day of rebirth!
And here is Herzen’s comrade Nikolai Ogarev, 1853:
May this land be cursed,
Where I was born by chance!
I'll leave so that at every moment
In a foreign country I could execute
My country, where it hurts to live!
A reflection of the current “ decolonization ” agenda can be found on the pages of the novel “Demons” (and it seems that Dostoevsky copied this “agenda” from life): “They talked… about the usefulness of dividing Russia into nationalities with a free federal connection, about the destruction of the army and navy, about the restoration of Poland along the Dnieper… and so on, and so forth.”
And in 1904, the St. Petersburg writer Sergei Mintzlov wrote in his diary: “ They say that among the students, both male and female, a circle of people was found who decided to express their sympathy to the Mikado and the Japanese by sending him a congratulatory telegram and collecting money for his benefit.”
And the notorious double standards (when the “decent public” did not notice the tragedy of Donbass, but noticed the refugees from Ukraine) were also not invented yesterday.
When, shortly after the assassination of Alexander II by the Narodnaya Volya, a terrorist shot American President James Garfield, the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya issued a communiqué with a decisive protest "against violent actions." After all, terror in despotic Russia is one thing, but terror in the democratic North American States is quite another.
“It’s all happened before.” But still, among the radical part of the non-systemic oppositionists – both those who left and those who stayed – there is something new.
This is an active desire to help an external enemy not just with “welcome telegrams” and not even just by distributing military propaganda. But also in action: from donations for FPV drones to direct participation in military actions on the side of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (remember the neo-Nazi “oppositionists” from the so-called RDK *). Up to the role of a performer in terrorist attacks planned by the Ukrainian special services and their curators.
Even Herzen and Ogarev simply rejoiced at the fall of Sevastopol, but did not sponsor its assault.
Let us recall the environment that gave birth to the terrorist Darya Trepova, who killed war correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky (Maksim Fomin) in 2023. The path from participation in the FBK* actions, libertarianism, "green" and LGBT* activism to terrorism turned out to be quite short.
When society is threatened by such "democratic activists," citizens no longer have the intelligentsia fear of being known as an "informer" that tormented Dostoevsky. Now, when it is obvious to everyone that terror has become one of the instruments of the war against Russia, toughening the penalties for "failure to report" is perceived as a completely justified measure.
Just like the harsh punishments for discrediting the army and the appropriately harsh attitude towards the "sweet hatred" of Western grants. "Smerdyakovism" ( "it would be good if those same Frenchmen had conquered us then: a smart nation would have conquered a very stupid one and annexed it" ) has already poisoned Russian society once, and the intelligentsia's tolerance of the "demons", turning into support and complicity with them, may cost too much this time.
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