March 12, 2022
The solution that virtually all Western politicians now are committed to is to impose sanctions so unbearable for every Russian stratum that it will eventually either make Putin withdraw forces from Ukraine or lead to a popular revolution. But the assumption that this strategy will work is ab initio wrong, although the modern political culture of the West makes this fact very difficult to comprehend.
The key for understanding it is domestic violence.
One of the main topics of Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (the name of our project refers to it) is the opposition of the polis and the household as the main concepts of the life of a city-state in classical Greece. Only a head of a household could be a citizen of the polis and, hence, be a subject of the political realm where he was expected to participate in political life. The population of a household consisted of younger relatives, women, children and slaves whose mere existence was purposed only to supply the life of a home. The natural community of the household was derived from necessity whereas the community of the polis constituted the sphere where men can enjoy various activities associated with freedom should it be arts, philosophy or political life.
According to Arendt, ancien regime absolutist monarchies essentially were huge households, and the national states of the 19th century were too, with freedom related to merely social, not truly political sphere. But the Western democracies of the 21st century, despite their complex social structures, are much more political than other historical societies.
Today’s Russia is a paragon of Arendt’s household. No expression reflects it better than “People is the new petroleum” — a phrase that Sergey Ivanov, a deputy prime minister of Russia then, said in 2009.1 In the case of totally fraudulent elections and the dictator’s self-isolation in his small private echo chamber there are no working institutions to make Putin accountable to the public. Western sanctions would be appropriate for a polis, but not for a household ruled by a violent tyrant. It is the crucial difference which even Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, failed to perceive.
Let us proceed with an example.
A local brawler constantly beats his wife and children and it’s no secret for the neighborhood. The wife, poorly dressed and often tear-streaked and even bruised, actually owns the house, although she has no access to property entitlement documents which her husband took by force. And then the debaucher went completely rogue, starting to beat his neighbors and threating to burn down the whole neighborhood — and yes, he actually has a shed full of fuel canisters. Your goal is to get rid of her husband. What options do you have to do? Maybe to refuse serving the beaten wife at a local grocery store? Forbid her to use money or ban her from admission to neighbor families? Refuse to provide her any help? Make her starve and by that encourage her to oust her out-of-hand husband? Or even spit on her heels? Well, her husband’s behavior is essentially her fault after all, isn’t it? Or did we in the West learn to handle these situations in a slightly different manner?
The traits of long-term abuse victimhood are clearly seen in the present-day Russian society: learned helplessness, shame, guilt and anxiety mixed with various immature coping responses such as extreme moral relativity. The society knows that every promise can be broken (see the recent amendments to the constitution and “resetting” the counter of Putin’s terms), that every agreement can be altered and that he will never let you go safely. There is a widespread observation that the government policy for enrooting the so-called “traditional values” of the patriarchal family along with the decriminalization of domestic violence goes in line with the whole abusive character of Putin’s rule. Comparing Putin to a violent husband already became a mainstream in social media, especially among female audience. “I feel raped” — it even became a platitude among women, both regarding the invasion and in the broader context of Putin’s despotism.
After the rape comes shame. That shame that every victim knows. That it’s your fault for being a victim, that you could have avoid the disgrace. That you could put more efforts in resistance. These feelings are very common among the certain part of the Russian society now.
And then we have encountered the good old dehumanization of a victim, being performed by the West like in the heyday of a Lars von Trier movie. The incomparable pinnacle of it, of course, is a leakage about Meta hate speech policy changes which created a wonderful gift for Putin’s anti-West propaganda — that Meta allows to urge for killing Russians.
The policy adopted by Visa and MasterCard is one of the most painful stabs so far. Although the cards still work within the country, now it is virtually impossible for Russian citizens to make any payment in the Western part of the Internet while some Western services are crucial for the Russian general public now. You can’t pay for a VPN or a web hosting. Or, say, if you are a doctor, you can’t renew your subscription for a professional medical database to heal people efficiently.
After the credit card cancellation, the Russian government almost immediately imposed ban on purchasing foreign currencies in cash.2 Neither you can withdraw dollars or euro in ATM machines. And if you flee the country, you won’t be able use ATM abroad as your cards won’t work. Thus, even if you have significant savings, you would have no means for living if you manage to emigrate. Bravo, Visa. Nicely done, MasterCard.
Olga Chyzh, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, made a good case on Twitter for why protests in Russia are unlikely to bring about the regime change.3 A large protest by itself does not topple a regime, it’s a leader’s response that does. To make the change happen by his response, peaceful or violent, a leader should have an option to flee or retire and simultaneously he shouldn’t be sure that he has armed forces at his full command.
Putin has no option to flee. And he obviously has the military at his full command, to the extent that they executed the order to ground up Kharkiv, a city mostly populated by Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians.
And there is an example of enormously large scale protests in Belarus, with an unprecedented share of the population participating in them — and with no outcome at all. This can be explained by an opinion that Gene Sharp’s works on the alleged effectiveness of non-violent protest created a tremendous delusion both for the Western elites and for the oppressed nations. And this delusion led to the blaming of the victim that we witness now.
The Western world in the recent decades made a significant progress in treating the problem of domestic violence and household abuse. The practices of women’s shelters can be applied to the realm of international affairs, and politicians can learn from social workers how to act both effectively and humanely.