Vladislav Inozemtsev: Russians have been playing with thimbles for decades
Everyone discussed the fateful law on military registration at the beginning of this week, and I will not repeat it. Can it be considered the beginning of the totalitarian era? Perhaps I will not be so categorical – if only because totalitarian societies assume a much smaller scale of mess and corruption than the Russian one, and I will only repeat that it is a continuation of the terror against their own society, which I long ago called the content of the Kremlin’s policy for the entire 2020s (since “Snob” preferred to destroy that publication, I can only offer a link to a re-post).
However, I would like to draw attention not to the definitions, but to the way in which power introduces a new “serfdom,” showing itself to be an undoubtedly talented social innovator.
In communist dictatorships, the basis of totalitarianism was the direct power of the state over the individual through its direct control of him. Property as such did not exist-people were at best the owners of their meager possessions. It was believed that property was the main enemy of totalitarianism. Some especially clever people like A.Chubais even justified privatization by saying that it was a “vaccine against communism”. However, it turned out that the opposite is true; it is only in the West that property is synonymous with freedom, but not in Russia.
In Russia, for three decades the government had been trying to force people to live by rules which they themselves had no intention of respecting. It was not easy to make people believe that it was safe to declare income, buy real estate, and invest money in business. But when the population rebuilt itself, it found itself dependent on its rulers in a way that it probably did not even in the days of socialism. When you have a wallet full of money and socially rented housing, it is easier to go to a rally than when you can lose a mass of things that you have accumulated over decades and in which your whole life is embodied.
The state has tied citizens to the control of their real estate, cars, accounts, and incomes. The only way to get out of this “paradise” now is to say goodbye to all familiar life. I have said several times that Russian emigrants will no longer meet with abandoned assets in the country, but now the Kremlin has made it very clear: the rights of ownership of any property in Russia belong only to those who recognize the state’s ownership of their lives, and in no other way. This has already been explained to the oligarchs, almost all of whom have returned to the country; it has been explained to the foreign suckers, most of whom hurriedly left, forgetting about the “invested” funds – and now this lesson has been taught to everyone else.
Russians have been playing with thimbles for decades: but if the old Soviet authorities occasionally zeroed out cash savings, and for everyone, the new Russian ones decided to zero out all property – if only those who were dissatisfied with them. I have no doubt that the new method is more effective than the old one – the moths are trapped, from which many of them will no longer fly away, even if there are loopholes in the borders…
Specially for the “Kremlin bezBashennik” telegram channel
Vladislav Inozemtsev
