Social Atomization or Social Molecularization?

Which one prevails in Russia today?

Roman Kunitsyn

B.Y. Kagarlitsky has published another interesting article, called “Society Behind Fences,” in the online magazine “Rabkor.” In it, he writes about the attitude of a significant part of Russian society towards the Special Military Operation. And this attitude, paradoxically, is...almost nonexistent. In other words, the “pro-government majority,” which vocally supports the actions of the political leadership, does not in fact have its own consistent, thoughtful opinion on the Operation. They simply repeat what the TV propagandists say, but it practically does not touch their minds or their hearts, and they have very little personally involved in it. Perhaps some of them genuinely believe in their own militant rhetoric, but not so much that they were ready to sacrifice anything for the sake of these slogans. “Therefore, attempts to convince, find counterarguments or report facts that counter these beliefs are useless,” writes Kagarlitsky.

Sociologist Grigory Yudin spoke about this recently. He noted with bitter irony that the Russian dead-enders are not militaristic monsters at all, as they seem to be to the people of the West. Europeans see crowds of Russians on TV waving posters in support of Putin and his Operation and are horrified, and quite pointlessly so. Imagine, Yudin suggests, that President Putin on February 24th had said, in his address to the nation, the opposite of what he in fact did say. For example, imagine that he proposed, in pursuance of the Minsk agreements, to transfer the territories of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic to the jurisdiction of Ukraine, with guarantees that the rights of Russian citizens living there would be respected. Amazed Western viewers would still see the same crowds waving United Russia flags, and in the crowds the same “joyful” faces and would hear the same words of support.

Of course, there would be opponents of this - those “cheers-patriots” who today, choking with delight, comment on every advance of the Russian army in eastern Ukraine. Perhaps they would go to unauthorized protest rallies and their police would detain and fine them - as they detain and fine pacifist liberals today. And there would be 10-20 percent of them who have political convictions, who would be ready to express them, and even suffer for them. But the vast majority, alas, do not have them (and they should not be strictly judged for this, because this is not their fault!).

But the well-known sociologist exaggerates a little. Again, remember that these citizens have voted for Putin over and over again, and they generally like aggressive nationalist rhetoric. However, you cannot call them true believers. In their heads are a mixture of hundreds of different and contradictory theses. Whatever decision the authorities make, they, not at all feeling like hypocrites, infer the necessary thesis from this mixture and thus rationalize their support. Their main and only fundamentally unshakable belief is “the authorities know better.” Now they are shouting “we will destroy all the Bandera!”; if the president would decide otherwise, they would chant: “We are brother peoples and we have no cause for conflict!” Perhaps they would chant the second slogan less confidently than the first, but they would definitely not object to the authorities because of this.

At the same time, while waving the requisite, employer-issued flag at the support rally, they are in fact thinking about something completely different, about what they really care about, and what is most important. This depends on the people themselves, and not on the boss, who will not reckon with anyone anyway. They think about their career, about wages, about rising prices, about harvesting in the country, about their children entering a university, about their health, etc. This is what they are deeply emotionally involved in. As for what happens thousands of kilometers away, where shells are exploding and houses are burning, they do not care.

Strictly speaking, they are not particularly concerned about what is happening in their own backyard or in the neighboring apartment. Newspapers report many cases of lonely pensioners dying in their apartments, their corpses languishing there for months or years. It never occurs to the neighbors to ask “how is Uncle Misha or Aunt Galya” and why they have not been seen for a long time. By the way, it is quite different in the “soulless West.” Tenements in Europe and the US are run by elected councils, there is a culture of “small talk” in the elevator or in the stairwell, courtesy visits to the neighbor. Everyone knows each other and, of course, they will raise the alarm if John has not left the apartment for several days.

Kagarlitsky called the situation in Russia “life behind a high fence,” and so it is. But it would be interesting to talk about the reasons for this phenomenon.

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Sometimes this is associated with the notorious atomization of society, but, in my opinion, this is not true. Atomization just leads to civil self-organization, as the example of the modern West has shown. With the development of capitalism, the destruction of various kinds of communities began there, dissolving the world of the rural peasant and urban artisan alike - often purposefully (remember the expulsion of peasants from their lands or the oppression of the rights of guild artisans). This was beneficial for the emerging capitalism - a person who can count on help from the community members or simply on the help of a traditional, large, multi-generational family will not become a proletarian. Only those who have nowhere to turn for help will go to the labor market in order to sell the only thing they have left - labor power.

But it is precisely because people have been turned into social atoms, that they cannot count on help either from their relatives, or from the community, or, finally, from the state - reduced to a “night watchman” - that disunited people are forced to unite. Only this is a different association, not similar to the communal one, which takes place according to a completely different principle. In a community of neighbors, or a professional organization, or a family, a person does not feel like an individual, but part of the whole. Oneness with others is a fact of his life from which he simply proceeds. The new unity born of atomization is instead rational, built on calculation and awareness of common interests. The proletarian, in order to survive and achieve a decent standard of living, unites with other proletarians (and in the same way the bourgeois, in order to achieve their class interests, unite in formal and informal organizations and seek to influence the state). This is how civil society is born. So, the emergence of civil society is the result of the destruction of local communities, social atomization, proletarianization, and pauperization.

Where organic communities remain, even in a residual, half-decomposed form, there can be no civil society. Moreover, the community is the basis of a despotic state. Friedrich Engels showed this in his work “On Socialism in Russia,” where the creator of historical materialism argued with the populist Peter Tkachev. Engels wrote: “... the complete isolation of individual communities from each other, creating throughout the country, it is true, the same, but in no way common interests, constitutes the natural basis for Eastern despotism; from India to Russia, wherever this social form prevailed, it always gave birth to it, always found its complement in it. Not only the Russian state in general, but even its specific form, tsarist despotism, does not hang in the air at all, but is a necessary and logical product of Russian social conditions.”

This idea of Marx’s friend is simple: the Russian peasant communities, which included one or more villages, were self-enclosed, the peasants were not particularly interested in what was happening outside their “world,” so they did not want, and could not, unite with other communities to speak as a single force. This is the difference between a society consisting of communities and a civil society permeated with horizontal self-organization. To regulate relations between them, a state is needed - and not a democratic one, standing on the basis of horizontal relations within civil society, but a comprehensive, all-powerful, despotic one. By the way, Engels was right, and this was confirmed by the experience of Russian revolutions - neither in 1905 nor in 1917 could the Russian peasantry act as a single force, both times the urban proletariat and radical parties played the role of the bettering ram.

Actually, we see something similar now. The high fences that Kagarlitsky writes about are the closed worlds of Russian households, the multitude of which the regime of “siloviki-oligarchs” is based on, as though they were pillars. Awareness of this is hampered by the thesis that since the transition to capitalism, social atomization has taken place in Russia. However, this is not quite true. Rather, there has been, if you like, social molecularization.

The Russian post-Soviet people (mainly, of course, those in the provinces) broke up into molecules - households, which can be considered the last historical form of existence of the Russian community. They are not directly related to the pre-revolutionary community that was destroyed by the Soviet government and even to the original Soviet communities, i.e. labor collectives. Paradoxically, the current communities were created already in the post-Soviet era, by the Yeltsin regime, which was afraid of a popular uprising or communist revenge. Yeltsin’s “privatization” of state housing and summer cottages and personal plots became their economic support. This was not any privatization, that is, the sale of state property to private individuals, it was a free transfer of their apartments and summer cottages to families in exchange for loyalty to the new regime. Thus, conditions were created for a “distributed economy” or those same “new communities.”

They were described by the sociologist Yuri Plyusnin in his book The Social Structure of Provincial Society. Such households include several families, usually relatives, but sometimes friends (colleagues, classmates, neighbors, countrymen). Plyusnin calls he type of management characteristic of these households “distributed.” It has one or more city apartments, a country house with a garden plot (cottage) and cars with a garage, which is also used as a platform for various kinds of side jobs (the “garage economy”). Such is life. Between an apartment and a dacha lives the majority of provincial state employees - doctors, teachers, employees of state enterprises, petty employees, clerks, entrepreneurs, and finally, the formal unemployed and pensioners. The source of income for them is a pension, salary, profit from small business, but in addition - the production of agricultural products in their own garden, the sale of surpluses, profit from private transport, crafts (car repair, tutoring, private medical practice, etc.). In principle, the 1990s showed that they can survive even without state payments, but still state payments are an important part of living at a “decent level.” It is very important for such a household to have “its own official”, “its own policeman”, etc.

These are, indeed, closed worlds, they do not need to unite with anyone, as long as there is even a little support from the state. Their members really care little about what is happening "behind the fence." That is why, by the way, the ideology of Russia’s isolation from the rest of the world is so important to these households - they transfer the experience of their economic life to foreign policy. It is not surprising that they constitute Putin’s “nuclear” electorate (and partly the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which is increasingly moving to the position of "Putin's party”). No wonder they are so apolitical. It is common for Putin’s electorate to believe that their obligation to the state is to go to the polling station to vote for the “leader of the nation,” and let the leader do what he believes is best - after all, he is a genius of all times and peoples. And they have their worries up to the throat in the garden.

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The tsarist regime made a huge mistake by declaring war on the peasant communities, which before the Stolypin reform were the backbone of the monarchy, contrary to the beliefs of the Narodniks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. S.G. Kara-Murza once said that the true father of the Russian revolution was Stolypin - and so it was. The Putin regime is making the same mistake now. The pension reform, the self-employed law, compulsory vaccination, the Operation that has led to the most severe sanctions - all these are blows to the “distributed households” that were its mainstay. In fact, they are doomed to disappear in the near future. Soviet apartments, “privatized” in the 90s, are deteriorating, the same applies to “dachas”, the car market is shrinking due to sanctions.

Representatives of the older generation will still somehow live, as they always have, plying between a city apartment and a vegetable garden, supplementing their pensions and payments with subsistence farming products. For young people and even middle-aged people, the prospect is sad. There is no money for a mortgage and it is not expected. Jobs will soon be cut. Prices are rising. It is not without reason that among them there are much fewer supporters of the Opration and in general the policy of the president than among pensioners ...

The social molecularization is going to be replaced by the more notorious process – now the real one! - atomization. And along with it, the inevitable civil self-organization.

Translated by Dan Erdman