Re: Russia: Life After Trust: Once you lose faith in one institution, you start to lose faith in them all. Lessons from Putin’s Moscow.

[David Morris]

And what about someone who dared step over the line? Even if you set aside
the conspicuously unsolved assassinations of reporter Anna Politkovskaya
and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, it was clear which way the system
leaned. I didn’t have to go far for examples. Oleg Kashin, a leading
journalist who contributed to the political blog I established at GQ, was
beaten within an inch of his life in 2010; the detectives on the case began
by asking his friends, “Well, did he use his head when writing [about
politics]?” (Even a public promise of manual control by Dmitry Medvedev,
the president at the time, didn’t help convict the ultimate culprits,
believed to be working for Andrei Turchak, a regional governor whom Kashin
had offended in a blog post). My friend Andrew Ryvkin, who wrote for the
same blog, was also attacked — in broad daylight, by two well-known
pro-Kremlin writers, for a Twitter slight; his attempt to report the case
ended when the detective told him, “Come on. They’re famous guys. You must
understand.” That last sentence was telling. There is a Russian word,
ponyatiya, which literally means “things that are understood” — i.e.,
unwritten rules. Like many phenomena of modern Russian life, it comes from
prison culture. And to live by the ponyatiya means not only to stay within
the lines but also not to acknowledge the lines’ existence out loud: a
version of the wrestling world’s kayfabe. And, just like with wrestling,
this pretense takes as much effort, if not more, as the real thing.

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 2:40 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Russia: Life After Trust
> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/lessons-
> from-putins-russia-for-living-in-trumps-america.html
> Once you lose faith in one institution, you start to lose faith in them
> all. Lessons from Putin’s Moscow.
> By Michael Idov
> One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and
> oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans,
> and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has
> been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting
> about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But
> residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one
> that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is
> needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by
> fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be
> trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in
> charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about
> everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you
> expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the
> higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it. Now that
> Russia has begun to export this Weltanschauung around the world, in the
> form of nationalist populism embodied here by Donald Trump, I am
> increasingly tempted to look at my years there for pointers on what to
> expect in America.
>
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