Yes, neither the Supreme Soviet of the USSR nor the State Duma are equivalent to the parliaments of the West. The CPSU is not an analogue of their political parties. “United Russia” is more like not the British Conservative Party, the German CDU, but, we admit, the same CPSU. It’s not the worst thing, and our people, objectively speaking, don’t value freedom of political choice as much as the West. But in their opinion it is: not to belong to the free world.
In the 19th century, mocking our “raznochintsy” dupes (in the very term, both rank and farce), tricking them into throwing bombs at governors, tsars, the Poles coined the slogan “For our and yours freedom!” A completely utilitarian application: losing (after 1612) in battles, taking revenge in demagoguery and terror.
How about thinking more? We also value freedom, but in addition to “freedom of choice”, ours also includes… “freedom of choice”. I am not inventing paradoxes: Russian freedom includes the freedom to choose oneself or sometimes to entrust one’s freedom of choice to others (tsars, rulers).
Western political freedom requires constant efforts to ensure it, to maintain its mechanism: the political machine requires constant attention, work, lubrication. Society’s self-withdrawal from current politics is fraught with this. And the constant political work in the name of freedom feels to us like a difficult and unpleasant duty.
Here, different sides are saying completely different things about a fact. Study the results of checks and verifications by those who checked them, delve into the protocols of the sometimes annual debates, check the certificates… Before reaching the middle of the list of necessary troubles, the Russian will start yawning, absent- look attentively around.
I remember at school that they memorized to read aloud and with an expression: “Johann Wolfgang Goethe! Only he is worthy of life and freedom who will fight for them every day!
There was even such a list of “recommended phrases for composition epigraphs” (lest any clever guy avoid Schopenhauer, or even Nietzsche). On the list: verified Russian classics, Marx-Engels…and those Goethe verses stood like a proud rock. And we took the sonorous “Only he is worthy” as an epigraph to an essay like “How I spent the summer”.
Now, after so many years, Secretaries General, Presidents later, I see our profound attitude towards Goethe’s dilemma. Well, okay, “to fight”, but “every day”! .. And painfully rolling his eyes: “What, every day?”
In the framework of the “struggle for freedom”, Russia is not something to reproach, it is a sin even to compare with anyone. Certainly, if the battle is real, not a non-contact NATO bombing of Serbia, but let’s say: Napoleon or Hitler is on the threshold. But every day?
Richard Pipes, Reagan’s adviser on the USSR, Russia, conscientiously selecting the most accurate in-depth assessments of Russian historians, chose this one, Vasily Klyuchevsky: “The Great Russian is sure of one thing: one must cherish the summer working day. It makes him hurry, work hard, and then sit idle all autumn and winter … Not a single people in Europe is capable of such short-term work stress that a Great Russian can stand develop; but nowhere in Europe do we find people so unaccustomed to equal, measured and constant work.
Yes, in the provinces north of Ryazan, the agricultural season lasts four months. Such a simple clue to an unusual aversion to uniform political life/work. Just as rarely mentioned is another honest confession. Montesquieu (the father of liberalism, the author of the “separation of powers…”) illustrates the dependence of history on geography with a Russian example: “Today only despotic violence unites all these vast spaces”. And the dilemma is simple: if you want to be like the Europeans, crush yourself to their size…
Scout Somerset Maugham in 1917 carried out the most difficult mission in Russia – he met Kerensky, Savinkov … The writer Maugham simultaneously looked at the Russian people, the elite, leaving surprisingly accurate remarks: “The advantage of Russians is that they are much less slaves to convention than Europeans. It wouldn’t occur to a Russian to do anything he doesn’t want, just because it’s supposed to be. The Russian has much more personal freedom than the Englishman.”
Do not consider this essay as a “madman’s game”: to quote Montesquieu – Pipes, Maugham – “Bito!” But the degree of polemic around “freedoms”, the number of victims of the same Arab spring (the most recent powerful “freedom campaign”) and, above all, the Russian discourse deserve attention.
Half a century before the expression “existential liberty” took root, Maugham, by separating “personal liberty” from politics, anticipated modern philosophy, Sartre, who formulated: “Liberty is what we do with what they do to us”.
Without abolishing political freedoms, one can even introduce an equation. Denoting freedoms: L, components: ex (existential) and pol (political)… We obtain Lex + Lpol = const. Those. their sum is approximately constant. For the growth of one, we pay with the decline of the other.
A true connoisseur of souls, Dostoyevsky saw: “It’s terrible how free-spirited a Russian man is! Can you imagine? The man who heard his own death sentence, who was waiting for the order “please! was afraid of something else. A real conversation about freedoms will remind Dostoyevsky’s passionate admirer, Friedrich Nietzsche: “Don’t say what you are free from! Tell me why you’re free!”
An important, albeit fleeting, explanation struck me as one of Aquinas’s prayers (“his works are the basis for building the Western political machine”). The father of Western political philosophy added to his prayer list “Thanks to the Holy Spirit for deliverance from the need to have a political opinion”.
Let’s think about it. Not from political opinions (Foma is not an anarchist!) – get rid of their necessity. Another word is important in Aquinas’s “formula”: opinion. Appreciate the nuance. After all, having an opinion, you can act or not. Slap a million people for his triumph or push him in… Thomas, understanding the primacy of opinion, does not speak of action, but of the very root: opinion in general. As if to answer those who tugged at him by the sleeve (some in the parliamentary gallery, others at a protest meeting): “I have no opinion on this point at all.” Action: shrug your shoulders. Thomas gives thanks for the freedom to entrust his choice to God (or to his anointed), while maintaining this freedom – relief valve, insurance against the absolutism of the political machine.
It turns out that absolute monarchs are easily overthrown, but the absolutism of the political machine is something else: you can’t even see those sitting behind its tinted windows! To think about it, the monarch only needed the obedience of the people, and the political machine also needed stupidity: and now the mass stretches, like a tube, to vote for those who are displayed on the TV screen for over an hour. “On the contrary” on this subject – Oscar Wilde unveiled one of his paradoxes: “Modern democracy has only one dangerous enemy – a good monarch”. But these truths do not lose their meaning when the sign is changed. Sartre’s famous “I am my own freedom” was inadvertently modified by one of my risque business friends (in the dashing 90s): “Whoever puts me in prison, I am my own prison! »
My discourse is therefore not against freedom, but against the naive absolutization of its interpretations (dictated by those who themselves treat freedom in a very utilitarian way). I remember the proud admonition of 1990s Democratic journalism: “Remember, freedom is there or it is not!”
Even the confident banality is not terrible, the main thing is: here freedom was confused with a Schengen visa. Here is the “Schengen”, really, or it is – or it is not! But with such a philosophical baggage to climb towards real freedoms?
