#9 | June 5 - 18, 1997  

by Mark Ames

Why aren't there any political assassinations in Russia today? On paper, it makes no sense. The nation has gone from a great empire to a kind of banana republic sucking loans out of organizations that were originally set up to assist the Third World, while millions of workers go unpaid for months because the structures (government/banking) that are supposed to pay them are busy siphoning their wages off to Cyprus... You couldn't ask for more perfect conditions for political instability. So why isn't anyone getting killed over it? (Indeed, the only assassinations are ones that involve mafia-style hits over valuable assets-the haves getting capped by the have-mores.) Why isn't there a Zapatista-style guerrilla movement? A single political assassination?

The argument that Russians are passive and enjoy "feeling the sting of the knout," as the last Empress put it a few years before being bayoneted, shot, rifle-butted and necro-sodomized by not-so-passive Russians, is not only racist but also false. For several decades leading up to the 1917 revolution, Russia was plagued by political terrorism. Even during Soviet times people rose against their oppressors. The Kengir uprising against Stalin's GULAGs ended with some 600 deaths, and over 1,000 Russians were gunned down in the suppression of a worker's uprising in Novocherkassk in 1964. Today, we can only count one uprising as such-the 1993 revolt, which led to somewhere between 150 and 500 deaths. It was actually the perfect uprising, from the point of view of the power structures (and comically moronic on the opposition's part). It concentrated the entire opposition movement inside of one building in the center of the capital, instead of dispersing throughout the nation. Thus it was easy not only to crush the opposition, but also to marginalize them, and therefore-and this is the key-completely discredit armed opposition as an option.

That the Russians are reacting passively-or rather, not reacting at all-to the present national calamity is obvious; what isn't obvious is why. The reason, I believe, is that Russians are oppressed by a kind of State Nihilism so comprehensive and effective that people have lost not only their will to fight, but even the ability to conceive that active opposition is an option. It is a nihilism that is imposed from above, a nihilism that grew organically around the activities of those in power, until it became a symbiotic force intertwined with the power structures. State Nihilism has proven to be a far more potent tool to control the populace than State Terror, which has failed as a power-strategy in late-20th century politics. State terror calls too much attention to itself and to the structures behind it-terror focuses people's attention on who they should oppose, and what they would gain by overthrowing them. But what if the populace could be inversely-terrorized? What would they be fighting for if they were convinced that nothing could be changed?

In order to rally even a vanguard to action, there has to be a kind of binding ideology. When the People's Will activists tossed bombs at Alexander II's passing carriage, they weren't killing a man and the innocents surrounding him-they were advancing the cause of Righteousness. The same with the Israeli settler who sprays kneeling worshippers with bullets, or the Palestinian who walks into a yellow schoolbus with a bomb attached to his chest. Who in today's Russia has that kind of fervent belief in something?

Almost no one. Marxism-Leninism is dead; Orthodox religion is mostly a fashion trend/ cigarette importer; Western liberalism turned out to be a cruel hoax, although some grotesque form reigns today if only by default. The one movement which could have rallied a powerful opposition-nationalism-has been effectively declawed and debased, particularly by the disastrous war in Chechnya, but also by the clowns who coapted nationalism, such as Zhirinovsky (who was probably created by the KGB precisely to cheapen and control nationalism) and Yeltsin. Chechnya in many ways posed the greatest threat to those in power, not because of the danger of the dissolution of the Russian Federation, but because it could have whipped up real nationalist sentiment among the Russian masses. Nationalism would have given people purpose, and national purpose is the enemy of those who are today ruling. Losing a drawn-out war against a tiny guerrilla movement turned out to be the perfect strategy-even if it wasn't planned that way-to discredit the possibility of Russian national glory and further the sense of hopelessness. Paradoxically, the loss in Chechnya actually strengthened the regime.

Every action that reinforces the national despair and nihilism also reinforces the position of those in power. Each obvious case of corruption and cronyism only reminds the public of how helpless they are, and how little they can do. The more blatant the theft, the more demoralized the public; the more demoralized the public, the more powerful the rulers; and the more powerful the rulers, the more assets they can steal. It's an amazing circular equation of State Nihilism that would cause a revolution in almost any other country where ideology, religion or nationalism still existed. In a way, the Russians are innovators in this. But Russians have been innovators in the realm of ideas for quite a while-indeed, the word "nihilism" was first coined by Turgenev in Father's and Sons to describe his character Bazarov, although that was used in an entirely different, more "positive" sense. There's no reason why State-imposed "negative" Nihilism won't become an alternative power-strategy to liberalism in the 21st Century, just as communism opposed liberalism. If anyone denies that Russia is gripped by a state-controlled, all-encompassing nihilism, then just look to that most telling symptom of all: earlier this year, Russians were asked (via government organs), What does Russianness even mean? The answer is irrelevant; the answer lies in the need to ask the question. The question caused a stir, then frustration, then passive despair. And, not surprisingly, an answer never arrived. We barely hear it asked today. The answer was nihil.