Modest Kolerov: Bureaucracy and Terror: The Executioner for the Liberal Suicide

The countries described by Marxists as belonging to the ‘second and third echelon’ of capitalist development, among which Russia and other ‘catching up’ nations in Asia and Latin America belong, have been described by researchers for a long time as having a unique social role assigned both to bureaucracy and to its national intelligentsia. The ‘powerproperty’ phenomenon is especially characteristic of the bureaucracies of Oriental societies. However, bureaucracy as a social group, growing vertically from poor, low-ranking officials to aristocratic and unattainable ranks, can by no means be compared to the ‘middle class.’

Society and power in the situation of calm

Indeed, if one does not delve into the really important terminology, bureaucracy and the intelligentsia can be schematically represented as vertical sections opposing the horizontal sections of the ‘layer-cake’ that represents traditional social groups. Moreover, the most interesting trait of the social well-being of bureaucracy is that its ‘bottom’ serves to objectively fulfil its ‘power-property’ function and to subjectively stand in opposition to the ‘top’ of the structure, which, roughly speaking, provides the ‘bottom’ bureaucrats with their sustenance.

As was the case in Russia between 1917-1918, a selfishly irritated bottom bureaucracy is fertile ground for ambitiously minded authorities, irrespective of their revolutionary slogans. It is this cynical ‘irritation’ that brings bureaucracy psychologically closer to the ‘middle class,’ while the existential pathos of the latter requires only stable progress and holds no loyalty during times of crisis.

In contrast to bureaucracy, mediacracy has never been united in the political sense. This is true even under the Communists, who used it as one of the tools of ideocracy. Nowadays, its diversity has become a tool for political struggle, whose objective is to gain influence in both the political and non-political realm, as well as on all levels of bureaucracy from the highest down to its grass roots.

Conversely, the political and bureaucratic class simply does not exist outside of media-communications. This is because it provides even armchair technocrats with a chance at a purely technocratic existence, due solely to the fact that their ‘clients’ cover and ‘pay for’ the authorities’ public and political expenditures; these are the individuals creating the very power that otherwise could not exist without media communications.

It is senseless to show models that emulate the bureaucracy. Its role model is the notional Sidor, who served as a police officer until 1917 and attended the meetings of the Union of the Russian People, eventually becoming a Bolshevik and joining the Cheka (the All-Russian Special Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation, and Sabotage). Anyone who sets aims higher for bureaucracy automatically ceases to be viewed as one of its role models.

Society and the authorities in an emergency situation

Terrorist attacks carried out in the Moscow metro on the morning of March 29 had the potential to cause an explosion in Russia’s political agenda, in the same way that the 9/11 attacks affected American politics, had it not been that these political changes were already becoming a fact of Russian political and public thought. The ostentatious bomb explosions at Park Kultury station, a major transport hub, and at Lubyanka station, the symbolic centre of state security, overwhelmed the superfluous cup of temptations that was already overflowing prior to the attacks.

Spoonfed by one of the irresponsible clans in power, the late Soviet liberals have recently suggested dismembering the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and castrating the Federal Security Service (FSB). Today, after the terrorist attacks that directly challenge the degree of paralysis within the MVD, these individuals are calling for the further breakdown of the MVD into 10 ministries and 4000 municipalities and want to oust the FSB to Antarctica along the way.

Terrorist attacks in areas symbolic to the state and statehood are a defiant slap in the face of Russian authorities and the whole of Russia. By dealing out such slaps, the enemy does not want to fray the hairs on the head of interdepartmental contradictions and interparty buck passing. The executioner strikes at full swing and does not thank the liberal demagogues who are playing right into his hands.

Liberal demagogues are sinking the state ship in order to sink their political opponents together with it, yet the terrorist executioner kills indiscriminately, including the demagogue’s children. The majority of Russian liberals are the flesh incarnate of domestic bureaucracy. They speak about the kinship of the bureaucratic and intelligentsia consciousness, while their critics from the generation of Pobedonostsev and Tikhomirov all the way down to the ‘Vekhi,’ whittled away their conservative teeth over one hundred years ago. In attacking the ‘bureaucratic consciousness,’ they do not set any political tasks to bureaucracy, because they primarily count on its implicit aforementioned ‘Sidor syndrome.’ The last terrorist bomb suffered by the Moscow metro was in 2004, close to the Rizhskaya station. However, the most terrifying attack in Moscow was the explosion in the high-rise apartment building on Guryanova Street in 1999. All of these attacks happened either in the context of, or in direct relation to, the war in the Northern

Caucasus. The plague of underground terrorist resistance has continued to infected the nation as an organism since then, and today, it has finally come to a cerebral haemorrhage. The drastic difference between the current situation and the situation in 1999 is that today there is no need for a military and political background for such ostentatious terrorist attacks. There is no longer a need for a special reason for such attacks to be perpetrated. The terrorist threat has stopped being a random event and has become commonplace. The voluntary weakness of society and of the state makes terrorism its indispensable counterpart. Moreover, the main problem now does not lie only within the Caucasus, but lies in the fact that there are no more Caucasian borders. There are no Caucasus in London or in Madrid, in New York or Washington, yet there is still terrorism.

Destroy the militia because it is bad. Leave the N o r t h e r n C a u c a s u s because it is dangerous. Pay the ransom to the terrorists for ‘your’ hostage because the shell cannot fall on the same place twice and ‘my’ people will not be taken hostage again. Such is the logic of the tired, childish, bourgeois, and dependent individuals, who were provided with their well-being during the economic growth, and who regained their sense of poverty during the current crisis. They are the most desired targets for the terrorists. Terrorism has truly spread everywhere and exists without borders.

Ten years ago, one intelligent moscow mother and wife was trying to persuade me, without joking, that in order to separate ourselves from the threat of terrorism, we need to leave the Caucasus, to abandon the southern and the eastern territories, and that we should actually confine ourselves behind the Moscow highway belt. Additionally, if this highway proved to be an unsafe border we could go to New York. The air was still vibrating with these assurances right up to the events of 9/11.

Today, bourgeois rubber geography is no more. The terrorist war, devoid of any borders, is waged together with the war of society against law enforcement agencies. The war of society against bad law enforcers is actually both legal and justified, but we wish that the authorities could protect us from liberal ideas, from nervous emergencies, from MVD officials appointed by the party, and from bureaucratic leapfrogging. These issues have already engendered the following: the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant; pandemonium with tariffs on housing maintenance and utilities in half of Russia’s regions; burning through billions of the federal budget to support failed state corporations; costly games involving an ‘integration_monopoly’ with cynical USSR neighbours; and they are bound to engender the vivisection of Russian medical care and education in the future. So, why exactly, during the fight against ‘home_delivered’ terrorism, did society find a target, who, albeit inefficiently, is still fighting terror? For some reason, we do not see the liberal sobs about the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant failure as a legitimate result of their energy reforms, about the housing maintenance and utilities, or about the state of education and medical care as a logical result of their ‘sterilisation of the M2 unit.’ The ‘bad’ law enforcers, dispatched for service from all over Russia, keep killing one terrorist after another in the Caucasus, and aim with the best of their ability to crush those who finance, arm, and guide suicide bombers to places like Lubyanka and Park Kulturi. Nevertheless, the ‘good’ liberal society, with its aged USSR leaders and young powerful followers, are preparing for the political death of these individuals, as well as the social vivisection of their families.

Russian Journal