A year without war: how Russia survived 2021
We summarize every new year of God. The ritual is similar to Olivier, and the composition is the same – an unappetizing mixture of dissimilar ingredients. While there was politics, newspapers published two-column tables: who won in the year? who lost? There are no more tables as there is no game. This makes it difficult for the columnist and narrows the topic circle.
There is no politics – but what is there? Digitalization construction sites, trapping terrorists in hundreds. Departments compete, complementing digital reality with colorful pictures.
The authorities have found in digital nirvana an opportunity to do without boring communication with the population. The economy is recovering well from the epidemic crisis, however, cabbage is expensive. There is no room for revolutions here, but there will always be a place for collapse in our lands. War is not necessary for this, although it is called for.
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The main mistake of the year is the thought that there will always be time to make a choice. Let it be small, but there is time. However, the place for choice is the political scene, with its intrigues, with its crises and compromises. Politics, even the mediatory one that existed, added time to choose. Now he is gone.
Self-accelerating events
Where did we end up after changing politics to something else? In strategy lands, not necessarily military.
Strategies are always used “yesterday”, when it’s too late to choose. They are like corridors aimed at victory or disaster. The speed of the movement is picking up despite the peace negotiations. You cannot reach an agreement with the enemy without whipping each other with a power whip. During US-Vietnamese talks more died about the world than in the years of war that preceded them.
But the main property of the strategy is self-acceleration. Politics can fall into suspended animation, enter a dangerous area, rest in stagnation; strategy – no. The inability to accelerate here is a bug, a puncture, a defeat. The next attack is fiercer than the previous one, fire in the direction of the main blow more ruthless than the past. Russia in the strip of strategies is a country testing itself for strength.
More recently, about stability turning into stagnation. About the tacitly loyal “deep people”. We did not notice that here, too, we are talking about a strategy – a strategy to contain the population. Society became depoliticized, dispersed among the population, losing its political impulse.
But the strategy, having won, is exhausted – it has nothing to do with the victory. And now the singer of the deep people Vladislav Surkov bitterly notices that the population lives in parallel with life. The defeated turn into invisible people, not resisting anything, they sabotage everything.
Doctor’s power
The COVID-19 epidemic has changed the landscape. As in the film by Lars von Trier “Melancholy”, a threatening body hung over the people, not related to our business, but settling in them. Hybrid with the ordinary, the planet Melancholy sometimes threatens to crush, then just hangs over everyone. An emergency that does not interfere too much with the lives of the majority. People who are sick disappear, as in the world of “The Master and Margarita”. Deaths have become commonplace, as at the front. In two years, the extraordinary has passed into everyday life, convenient in the administrative game of the authorities with the person. The world of indiscriminate testing with hacky analyzes hastily.
The doctor became Moidodyr, who pursues with instructions that you are not allowed to do anything else. He broadcasts as an instructor of the city committee, and as that, he has the right to fire or deprive something.
The pandemic has become a global horror consensus that it is useless to object to. All this machinery is thoroughly layered with business, but not yours and closed to you. Silent sabotage by anti-Axis has gained limitless prospects.
Unfortunately, the strategy of depoliticizing the population has been crowned with complete success just when a mobilized mass is needed for universal vaccination. The tools of mobilization are worn out – there is no spontaneous loyalty, there is no energetic commitment, and there are no adherents themselves. There is no democratic press, always ready to lend a shoulder to the authorities in difficult times. There is no eccentric Duma with its inter-party coalitions, and there is no one to mold leaders from. Going to the Deep People for this is useless and almost certainly destructive. Strategies are like arrows, and ours are all pushing outward. The transit was postponed for 6 pm after the war.
Old people
This year, like foliage in the fall of leaves, an important facade of power crumbled. “United Russia”, which was called the “party of power”, won the elections, but somehow strange. Those describing its success list the techniques for creating an international message, and it really is. But this is not enough to believe in the reality of the party in power. And is she still a party? Disappeared exclusivity, except for numbers and places in the Duma, it is known how it was obtained.
This structure is convenient for the technical mobilization of voters. It cannot be called insignificant, its apparatus is debugged. It can still be (briefly) reprogrammed for different types of political identity, and the members of the United Russia Party will not go crazy with this. The imposed identity was reduced to a set of interchangeable accessories.
The United Russia device has been polished to a shine. We dreamed of such a convenient political butt in the hand of a sovereign 20 years ago – and now there is a tool, but there is no one to control. The system’s hinge – the Kremlin’s artificial intelligence – has gone somewhere.
The control system has simplified itself by shooting off its party level. The vacuum expands, turning into a hole. The image of power no longer coincides with the vague image of its party. But there is no need to scoff at the fate of a relic that has outlived its day. The trouble is that it is of little use for solving transit problems – even the task of delaying it. The party will not be able to ensure a thorough stagnation either. Party members represent power that they do not have.
The ruling party became an implant in the system of power, having dropped out of it itself: the operational exclave of power, the “Old People” leisure club.
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Tank communications
“System RF” have always been considered more successful on the world fields than on the domestic one. The global reasons for this success were not assessed: the effect of a peaceful pause or respite, which is not uncommon in international relations. In its first twenty years, Russia could have disbanded the army – there was no one in the world to attack it. The country lived in a peaceful bubble, straining forces in the war with tiny Ichkeria. The globalization of Russia has become a derivative of a short-lived unipolar moment.
But Pax Americana expired with the Bush Jr. presidency, and difficulties began. Moscow answered the difficulty military military, the war with Georgia and Ukrainian history. Russian publicists love to point out the crossroads where “they should have done wrong”, do not discuss the reality of actual decisions. There is no point in the curses of 2014 – decisions have long ceased to be one-sidedly Russian. The Western sanctions machine has been launched.
The insane spiral of sanctions-anti-sanctions, Zelensky’s neurotic Ukraine, weak Europe, the decline of American leadership in the world are the dead knot of the world order where we live. There is no non-military way out of it. The consensus was the mutual refusal to talk. European pacifism, this rabid printer of anti-Russian sanctions, does not know how to launch de-escalation. Sanctions, even “hellish” ones, are easier to expand than to discuss mutual claims. The tools of diplomacy are forgotten, in their place is the rose of strategies. Such a political achievement as the Minsk Agreements has been turned into a strategic trap – for Kiev, then for Russia. Having stopped the small war of 2014-2015, they are preparing a big war in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, Alexander Lukashenko has joined the host of warmongers.
In a stalemate, NATO and the EU are useless – these powerful military ensembles are incapable of urgent solutions. The living face of the West turned out to be one old man Joe Biden, the Russian method of strategic dialogue. drop strategyinvented by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the USA in the 1950s. This time, Moscow turned it against the collective West. Dropping sounds rude, but how to break through a European answering machine?
At the height of the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, a famous politician told me how in his office, under a dusty cover, something began to screech loudly and buzz: a fax from the Washington-Moscow hotline started working. From there, papers began to climb – and the crisis began to be resolved. In 2021, the hotline was launched, maneuvers are needed at the Ukrainian border. The analog bulk of the tanks powered the digital hotline. Only the threat of a major war arouses interest in dialogue. Troops on the Russian-Ukrainian border are included in the diplomatic training of the Russian-American summits. For 2021, this is not a bad result: a year without war.
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The opinion of the author may not coincide with the point of view of the editorial board