The Light that Failed by Ivan Krastev

Author:Ivan Krastev
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241345719
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Not the Slavophile classics in the Kremlin library, but Russia’s unique combination of African mortality rates and European birth rates is what best explains the conservative turn in Kremlin political rhetoric.77

Conservative rhetoric was also needed to give some ideological shape to Putin’s majority and to help the Kremlin draw a line between patriotic Russians and liberal traitors who, in their picture of the world, are controlled by foreign embassies. But it is useful sloganeering not moral conviction, and its grip on behaviour is negligible and evanescent. Paranoia about foreign plots, by contrast, has far-reaching effects.

In the Kremlin’s fevered political imagination, demographic decline is not only Russia’s unwelcome fate. It is also a malign Western conspiracy. In 1994, at the Wright Laboratory in Ohio (predecessor to today’s US Air Force Research Laboratory), an over-imaginative employee came up with the idea of developing a ‘gay bomb’.78 The concept behind this hypothetical psycho-chemical device was that spraying female sex pheromones over enemy forces would make combatants feel sexually attracted to one other, leading moonstruck enemy fighters to make love not war.

Needless to say, the ridiculous proposal of a gay bomb never got beyond the ‘bright idea’ stage. But Russian leaders nevertheless behave as if a gay bomb had been tossed at them in 1991. ‘My relations to gay parades and sexual minorities in general is simple,’ Putin explained, concluding ‘it is connected with my official duties and the fact that one of the country’s main problems is demographic.’79 In Putin’s mental world, Russia’s demographic crisis reflects a global moral crisis. Following the West today means ‘to recognize everyone’s right to … freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil’.80

It is impossible to understand the series of repressive laws being adopted in Russia recently, including legislation against ‘gay propaganda’,81 if we do not realize that what is at stake is the dramatic impact that the Westernization of Russian society had on the fraught relations between generations, particularly within the Russian elite. One of the principal forces that corroded the legitimacy of communism was the limited extent to which Soviet elites could transmit their privileges to their own children. To be sure, nomenklatura children were zolotaya molodyozh (gilded youth), and everyone knew just how privileged they were. But they could not legally inherit their parents’ status. This residual infringement on a hard-wired proclivity of human nature to favour biological offspring was a fundamental weakness of a regime founded on the egalitarian idea that opportunities in life should never be distributed according to the social status of one’s birth family.

Having finally escaped these constraints in 1991, Russia’s post-communist elites threw themselves enthusiastically into giving their own children a leg-up in the social competition for power, wealth and prestige. They often did so by sending them to study abroad. The problem was, many of these lucky kids decided never to return. And those who did came back with very different, non-Russian habits and beliefs.

Understanding the psychology

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