CHAINS IN PARADISE

This entry ought not to be seen as its author’s endorsement of a particular social system, although I’ve long made it transparent that I believe that socialism is the most natural system for Russia, organically ingrained in the Russian national soul. Instead, it should be treated as a continuation of a very complicated and badly neglected intellectual argument, currently suppressed by the demands of political correctness, on one side, and rather disingenuous circumspection, on the other.

Seemingly dated, but in fact time-transcending, this entry discusses one of the biggest mistakes of the Soviet political establishment, in unnecessarily denying essential political freedoms to those people who ought to have been persuaded that the Soviet way of life was superior to the Western way of life, and thus making the Soviet way of life appear inferior. I may refer to a similar logic of Giovanni Gentile, who honestly believed that Fascist totalitarianism in Italy did not require any political repression, because it was capable to prove its own superiority by the sheer force of the example. (Again, this is not about social comparisons, but only about the elementary logic of such practice!)

The big question here is, of course, whether political repression is so essential to the principle of totalitarian state that no logic to the contrary can convince the state to abandon its own foundation. Political repression has various forms and in more nuanced ways it is necessarily present even in the freest democratic societies, but it is much more prominent and unmistakable in totalitarian societies, where political hypocrisy does not rise to the higher levels of refinement, as it does in free societies. As a result, every citizen of the totalitarian state is perfectly aware of the fact of such repression (take it or leave it), whereas in free societies there is an abject lack of such awareness and the actual level of effectiveness of public indoctrination and brainwashing is paradoxically incomparably higher than in totalitarian societies.

The question however remains whether it is possible to reduce the level of political oppression in controlled societies, introducing a De Gaulle-style dirigisme into both the socio-political and the economic life of such societies, and in this respect certain trends toward dirigisme in Russia, as encouraged by Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev have a potential to go far in liberating an essentially totalitarian society from its structural reliance on what I am calling “chains in paradise.”