Oleg Orlov, a member of the Board of the International Historical Educational Charitable and Human Rights Society 'Memorial' (International Memorial), centre, looks on as his lawyer Yekaterina Tertukhina, right, holds a document after a court session in Moscow, on Oct. 11. The court ordered Orlov, co-chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, to pay a fine of nearly $1,500 on the charges of "discrediting" the Russian military in his criticism of Russia's campaign in Ukraine.Alexander Zemlianichenko/The Associated Press
Nina L. Khrushcheva is a professor of international affairs at the New School and the co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones.
The Kremlin rarely surprises me. When I read George Orwell’s 1984 in the 1970s, at age 10, I immediately recognized our Soviet life. By then, everyone was used to the state insisting that everything was becoming “better and more joyous,” as Stalin had claimed in 1935 when people were dying of hunger and being imprisoned for fictitious crimes.
Later in the 1970s, when Leonid Brezhnev was touting the Soviet model of “developed socialism,” some 300,000 Soviet citizens were defecting to the West. Yet as large as that number seemed at the time, it pales in comparison to today’s figures. The mass exodus following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, is more reminiscent of the one triggered by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Between 1917 and 1922, up to three million aristocrats, landowners, doctors, engineers, priests, and other professionals fled the new dictatorship of the proletariat.
Today, even modest estimates suggest that around 800,000 people – IT specialists, journalists, writers, scientists, actors, directors, intellectuals – left Russia in 2022 alone. As in the past, these professionals could see the writing on the wall. They left to escape Vladimir Putin’s increasingly repressive security apparatus. The state in Russia has always tended toward absolutism, and its coercive and penal arms have rarely wielded as much power as they do now.
Of course, Mr. Putin owes his authoritarian mandate to Russians themselves. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians – reeling from rapid, profound economic changes and the new culture of consumerist individualism – grew nostalgic for the “strong” state. Their superpower status, historic breakthroughs in space, and grand victories on the battlefield were all long gone. Trading their new freedoms for the promise of renewed imperial glory seemed like a good deal.
They were duped. Those living in Russia today wake up every morning to a new chapter of 1984. “This must be a nightmare,” they tell themselves; yet it is all too real.
Consider the recent charges brought against Oleg Orlov, the co-chair of the Nobel Prize-winning human-rights organization Memorial, for “discrediting the Russian armed forces.” During a courtroom hearing on Oct. 11, prosecutors, appalled at Mr. Orlov’s willingness to stand up for his convictions, accused the defendant of having “a heightened sense of justice and a complete lack of self-preservation instinct.” The prosecutors have also resorted to “punitive psychiatry,” by calling for Mr. Orlov to undergo the kind of evaluations carried out in the 1970s. They contend that his long career of advocacy (including protesting the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979) must have left him mentally “inadequate.”
This bizarre episode was a moment of truth for me. To witness such a brazen inversion of good and evil turned my despair into something closer to horror. Reason, logic, and humanity have been systematically sucked out of Russian life, dragging us back to the era of Stalin and his gulag. After Stalin, the only time the state engaged so openly in such violent repression was under Yuri Andropov, who headed the KGB in the 1970s before becoming general secretary of the Communist Party in 1982.
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As the Nobel Prizing-winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich recently pointed out to me, the war, the Orlov trial, and other such episodes confirm that words matter in just the way that Orwell suggested. For years, Mr. Putin has railed against Western values and European “civilization,” emphasizing “self-sufficiency and the uniqueness” of Russia as “not just a country, but a distinct civilization thanks to its rich traditions … numerous cultures and faiths.” Now, that civilization has gone beyond rhetoric to reject all cultural norms of civilized behaviour. Mr. Putin wins the “first prize in absurdity,” Ms. Alexievich notes. He “wants to be the worst barbarian on the European continent.”
If there is a close contemporary analogy to this project, it is that of the Taliban, which also rejects modernity in favour of divinity. The Kremlin today even promotes absolute religiosity. Mr. Putin’s desire to please the church suggests that he fancies himself an incarnation of the Russian national spirit.
“These are the dark forces,” Mr. Orlov warns. We are dealing with people who want “full revenge for the fall of the Soviet empire.” The empire they want to build will include Andropov-style control over every aspect of Russian life, as well as a grander claim of being anointed by God. Like the Orwellian equation “2 + 2 = 5” it is a story that you would have to be insane – or brutally compelled – to believe.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023.