Autocracy? Kinda, but not really. Dictatorship? Not so much. Absolute power? Be serious.
The Complexity of Political Power Structures.
Photo by Nikita Karimov on Unsplash
by framersqool
Foreword: disclaimers, terminology and premises
The title above is meant to introduce an informal treatise on the topic of the modern Russian state.
(And, the question of whether there even is any such thing.)
Is it modern, is it even really entirely Russian, and is it actually a state at all?
Bear with me: everything you think you know, depending on the sources and depth of your perceived knowledge about today's wartime Russia and its methods of rule, is probably wrong, or only partially but deceptively accurate. The extent to which it is not, together with how deceptive thoroughly factual knowledge about Russia can be, is how I mean to address this topic here.
Wish me luck. I am not the first western spectator of Russia to try. (Results are mixed...)
To begin with, I am no scholar, at least not in any formal sense.
I work from a permanent disadvantage, as an autodidact of Russian history over four decades' time, of not ever having had any dissertations reviewed by any academic panel, nor any papers or articles on my research published in scholarly journals, of not being any member of a think-tank, nor credentialed in any other manner as an expert. I do not speak, read or write in Russian, but given a freeze-frame capability, I can more or less work out a name or place name written in Russian, and even with some effort sound out whole phrases, and not really know what the words mean.
Along with a truckload of salt, you may also take into consideration that my education in things Russian has been largely an extemporaneous, undisciplined and even chaotic improvisation, all this time.
Most of the books I have read were found in thrift stores, more or less evenly divided among those written by English-speaking western authors and those written in other languages, including Russian, and then translated by others into English.
All of the actual Russian media I have viewed, whether film, television or written, has been from the limited and probably less than fully representative samplings of what has been translated or subtitled into English.
All my sources, plus some degree of personal encounters with living Russians, being a substantial and tantalizing set of drops, the study of Russia from my western amateur's armchair has proven to be a damn big ocean.
So be it.
My primary credential is having been a witness, albeit from some distance I'm told is called American Exceptionalism, an idea that we need nor worry overmuch about history because we don't have to live it, these past sixty-two years of the history of my own lifetime. Events in the larger world have certainly affected me, but no less so than the traditional oblivion to them and misreadings of them which stand as essential components of the American Way.
This, along with my favorite composer being Stravinsky, is what I have to work with, plus what I am able to add each day as I pursue the early-retirement project of trying to understand this war the best I can, with a refurbished laptop, a consumer-grade search engine, and a revulsion for and abstinence from social media.
And my books. I do have a fair number of books.
It would also be dishonest of me not to add that, like apparently most of the rest of the non-Ukrainian world, my grasp of things Ukrainian is far, far behind what I have managed to learn as a self-appointed student of Russia.
But all that said, it's hard to imagine I could do any worse than how this war has been covered in the media west of the Atlantic, which is why I am doing this at all. (And I enjoy it.)
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I was recently asked, in good faith by a fellow American who knew I would try to answer well, why indeed one might bother to concern oneself at all with this current war in Ukraine.
My answer amounted to.... I can't answer that question.
But how, in a way I can, depending on how much time one has (!), and how many historical blanks I'd need to fill in for anyone, before even beginning to try.
Of course I can try, but only in the sense of providing potential sources for one to seek answers for themselves, offering my own findings and commentaries and analyses, and summarizing those of others.
It is in the very nature of my own definitions of intellectual and moral liberty that it is none of my business to tell others what they should do or not do, think or not think, believe or not believe.
'Support', sadly enough, is a word I rarely use any more, its having lost all meaning from over-use.
I can, as here, offer my own views, and you can make of them what you will.
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Now then....
I like to work in threes, in this effort and in many other aspects of trying to organize my thinking, identify my queries, and come to workable conclusions.
Subject, audience, purpose; facts, analysis, conclusions; distance, rate, time; before, during, after... et cetera.
Romanov, Bolshevik, Federation.
For this undertaking, I have chosen three different angles to start out from, and seek to explore the basic concept of unilateral rulership of a nation: autocracy, dictatorship, and absolute power.
And argue that, in my own view, these are not actually equivalent, interchangeable or even particularly synonymous concepts. And to what extent none of them is very helpful nomenclature, to describe the Russian state today.
These are cliches, memes, easy narratives, and my own view also holds that this war has seen more than its share of such shortcuts, in those attempts at explaining it to which I have been privy.
In the informal and essentially anecdotal style I've chosen for this particular essay, I'll just work with my own understandings of each of these terms, and of how I read their common usages.
So sue me, for using the old politician's or cult-master's or propagandist's trick, of defining my own lexicon and then arguing from it.
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Autocracy, at least for the purposes of Russian history, is mostly a tradition, or even a national mythology.Traditions not being altogether uninstructive of factual history, and myths not always being purely fictional, we might agree that the mythology of the Russian autocracy and the tradition of its sitting at the head of the machinery of state is a reliable constant in the study of that history.
Taken as both, one might also examine, thirdly as promised, the value of the idea of autocracy, as an icon.
My argument: autocracy in this Russian context DOES NOT mean, indeed has never meant, that one man rules all things Russian.
It means that it is commonly accepted as right and good and normal, that one man should.
God bless the Tsar, the Tsar will protect us, if the Tsar only knew.....
(Keep that last point in mind, it means more in all things Russian than you might realize.)
There is an outfit in Ukraine called Lviv Media, which has undertaken a wartime task of interviewing Russian prisoners of war. Using my Pythagoreanist formula, one might describe these as interrogation, humiliation, or indoctrination. They appear to be meant as all three, in that well-rehearsed sequence.
Some POWs fall for the 'journalist's' (for the viewer) predictable methods, hook, line and sinker, and these are not a pretty spectacle to witness. Each party seems to suffer his own moral crisis within it.
Some uphold their dignity and composure and never allow themselves to be drawn in by him.
Others, now and then, argue back, reciting the standard Kremlin litany of Special Military Operation apologetics, as if they were their own views.
The interviewer asks them each, in Russian which he speaks as fluently as many Ukrainians, what they think of this war, of their president, and of Ukraine now that they have invaded it.
Most will say that it is indeed obviously a war (though the term itself is effectively banned in Russia for the time being), that it was their president's decision to start it and he must have his reasons because he is after all The President, and that they have no real grievance against Ukraine per se, and had entered the war because they were already serving Russian soldiers, or they were drafted, or because the army (or Wagner Group) pays better than the factory or mill or mine or odd-jobbing back home and so they enlisted.
Almost all of them maintain that these are political matters, and that they are not interested in politics.
Just one illustration of how autocracy functions in Russia as a comforting myth, a defensible tradition, and most importantly a self-exonerating icon.
The reason so few POWs ever become troubled by the notion that to obey the Tsar might in itself have been an immoral act, is that the idea had never occurred to them. When confronted with it, it is heard as a distant noise.
But if you still believe that the terms of their service are rooted in the personal will of an autocrat, I'd suggest you spend a few hundred hours studying up on the forms, functions and effectiveness of those terms, in practice. Mobilization, mandatory service, contract service, PMC (mercenary) service, all these exist each as a world of law and procedure and management unto themselves. As for the actual conditions in which any of these serve, the will of an autocrat seems the very least of the factors determining what they have to fight with, and live with, as they serve. Bear that in mind for later on.
Dictatorship is most certainly one of the most loaded, and therefore most ambiguous, terms in the English language. It is most often used as an epithet conflated, and I will argue mistakenly, with both autocracy andabsolute power. It is, for the purposes of upholding western 'democratic values', self-explanatory, indisputable, and altogether a moral indictment.
But what does it mean, as a job description?
To examine this question more deeply, let's agree for this exercise that Adolf Hitler's twelve years of rule have since become the most commonly-accepted archetype of a dictatorship.
Let's revisit, as an exercise, the events of June 6, 1944, and explore the question of why German Panzerformations, based quite near the beaches of Normandy where the full-scale invasion known as Operation Overlord was underway, never showed up to augment the stationary defenses the Allies were undertaking to breach in force, until it was too late.
To repel an invasion the entire German (western front) war machine had been anticipating, debating, and seeking to prepare for, over several years' time.
As a dictator, who had (as many wartime dictators are prone to do) assumed personal command of certain elements of the German war effort in the apparent belief that he alone knew best, only the Fuhrer held the command authority to deploy those Panzers.
And the Fuhrer, also the very archetype of a hypochondriac, had taken a strong sedative the night before and was still fast asleep when reports of the invasion began to arrive in his Berlin headquarters from the Oberkommando Wehrmacht (OKW, the German army's high command.)
And none dared wake the Fuhrer.
When in his own good time he did awaken, and the news was cautiously and timidly presented to him, he flew into a rage, and began to hold forth on the matters of who was to blame, whose heads would roll, how the German people did not deserve or appreciate all he had tried to do for them, etc, etc...
Of course everyone in his palace court had heard all this before, knew its predictable elements and life span all too well, spent their days mostly seeking to do their jobs while not having these episodes come to be directed at them, and waited it out.
Hours later.... Herr Fuhrer, about those Panzers....
Those hours, and many more such episodes exactly like them, cost Germany the war.
So exactly how much power did this dictator manage to exercise in this situation?
Certainly not absolute power, and I'll be getting to that.
But he had dictated a war, dozens of wars actually, into existence, along with his dictatorial colleague Comrade Stalin whom he came in due course to betray as Germany's primary strategic ally; he had dictated that the USSR would be invaded, against the terms of an agreement his own foreign minister had signed at his command; and he had dictated that he alone must command in the war(s) as each in turn developed into an untenable bloody rout.
Dictate all you like, said History, and see how it all comes out.
He had been unable to dictate the outcomes of the Battle of Britain, of Stalingrad, or the effectiveness of the Atlantic Wall, or even to the fullest extent his own monstrous intentions behind The Final Solution.
In the instance of the Normandy invasion, his dictates had been limited to defining what his subordinates could NOT do, (wake him up with bad news, for one) and in this case deploy the Panzers to the beaches and save the day.
He had not even, himself, dictated into existence the longstanding German military traditions of chains of command and absolute obedience, which in themselves had caused his field commanders to wait for those orders, instead of issuing the orders themselves.
My argument, as all such shameless breaches of Godwin's Law are prone to do, has probably overextended itself here already. But Vladimir Putin is no Hitler, not even close on a number of levels.
The purpose of the above lengthy digression from Russian history, is to illustrate from the history of the Third Reich both the capabilities and limitations of dictatorship itself.
The locals here in the High Plains of Oklahoma like to say, 'you can wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.'
Dictatorship is definitely a thing, and both Hitler and Putin certainly have regarded themselves as both in possession of and capable of wielding dictatorial powers. And in each instance, these powers have been met largely with attempted and even enthusiastic obedience by their respective subordinate peoples.
In this sense the western liberal-democrat mindset might do well to ask itself, whether dictatorship is not indeed the ultimate expression of.....
the consent of the governed.
Even if we accept for the moment that the President of the Russian Federation regards himself as a dictator, that his people do, more or less, (see also above: autocracy), and even as this moralistic epithet of no particularly instructive value comes from the westward as some kind of general consensus,
SO WHAT?
The more searching, relevant and applicable query needs to become:
...is he any good at it?
The man certainly has his share, to keep the above folksy wisdom going here, of shit in one hand, in the form of a catastrophically failed war plan, an increasingly disillusioned citizenry, and a puzzle in international relations of staggering proportions, for him now to confront as it drags on.
The question facing the entire world now is, to what extent will his other hand become filled with manifestations of his own wishful thinking?
And of course, to what extent will anyone outside Russia help him along, in remaining a dictator?
As for his role as the current Russian autocrat, 'the Russian people' by most indications have no problem at all with Putin's war. Its structural failures and calamitous outcomes and incalculable costs, in lives and hardware and public treasure, are not being blamed on him as being the cause of them.
Which is where the iconic nature of the autocracy, and the permanent genuflection toward its majestic mystique of, 'if the Tsar only knew....', (or, someone else can always be blamed) come into play, as the only rationale the autocrat requires, in order to continue playing, also, the role of a dictator. With the consent of the governed.
In other words, the position of both Russia's presidency and its current President, as representative of a traditional, mythological, iconic autocracy, had never been at risk at the hands of the Russian people to begin with. The probable means of Vladimir Putin's self-destruction, as an autocrat, will be a result of his seeking further to rule as a dictator.
The former is one thing, the latter quite another: the two are not mutually inclusive.
Autocracy's demands are met by his simply sitting on the throne, and keeping up the appearances of its power. Autocracy only requires the consent of the faithful.
Dictatorship requires the consent of the governed, and Putin may well be in the act of squandering them both.
There is little doubt that Russia's next head of state will, in turn, personify the longstanding and traditional role of its autocrat. The question is whether that individual will then be foolish enough to try and rule as a dictator.
As for absolute power, as we like to say in the 21C, what does that even mean?
Its definition in the meme-o-sphere is no definition at all, just another cliche.
I can already hear it echoing in the reader's head: absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Before considering the matter settled by means of just another simplistic and meaningless cliche, let's examine this logic (?) in reverse, by starting with the question of absolute corruption, shall we?
It is probably the most agreed-upon view of Russia and Russian life, that both have long since been cursed by and mired in and effectively ruled by ways and means which are accurately described as absolutely corrupt.
Did the current office-holder in the Kremlin cause this? Or, conversely, did his assuming what powers he has as its head of state cause him to become absolutely corrupted by Russia's existing ways?
One may as well ask why the chicken crossed the road, and answer, because the egg came first.
In other words,
My Argument is that this entire formulation is utter nonsense.
No such thing as absolute power exists, nor ever has (see also above: autocracy, dictatorship), and even if we can be satisfied with such a dumbed-down notion as absolute corruption, was it ever absolute power which had caused this? Or is the reverse somewhat closer to an intellectually honest summary of either power or corruption? Does not indeed the presence of absolute corruption lend itself best to the attempts at exercising absolute power?
One might make a case that absolute corruption enables a more absolute approach to power, but the other way around?
I don't buy it.
Plug in the formula of the consent of the governed being required to fuel and feed and facilitate a dictatorship, and the superstitious allegiance (irrespective of any individual's cult of personality) to the ideaof autocracy, as opposed to subservience to the autocrat himself, and the calculus thus demands we accept that:
absolute power is even more of a myth than autocracy is.
Yes, absolute corruption rules in Russia, but what creates it, upholds it, expects it?
(the ongoing consent of the corrupted, mayhap?)
to be continued
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.