Alex Gibney’s documentary Citizen K presents the story of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s rise to prominence and his eventual fall from grace. Yet, there is something amiss in this narrative of the rise and fall of the oligarch – namely, the concept of oligarch and oligarchy itself.

The Soviet-era Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili famously said that ‘the devil plays with us when we think imprecisely’. There can hardly be a better proof of that than the uncritical adoption of the terms ‘oligarch’ and ‘oligarchy’ in the analysis of post-Soviet Russian politics.

Since the late 1990s it has become customary to refer to the newly emerging business elite, be it bankers, oil company CEOs or media tycoons as ‘oligarchs’ and to view their influence on politics as a sign of the degeneration of the Russian political system into an oligarchy.

It was in the name of the struggle against the oligarchs that in early 2000, in its very first months, the Putin presidency launched an assault on Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media Most corporation, thus taking the first step in the imposition of state control over mass media.

The need to rein in the oligarchs was also the justification for the arrest and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003 and the eventual takeover of his company Yukos by the state-owned Rosneft.

The connection of political parties, civil society organizations and media outlets to these and other ‘oligarchs’ became a stigma permitting their purge from the political system and, in the best case, their retreat into exile abroad.

From Oligarch to Citizen?

Alex Gibney’s documentary Citizen K presents the story of Khodorkovsky’s rise to prominence as banker and oil tycoon in the 1990s and his eventual fall from grace in the Putin era, culminating in his ten-year-long prison term in 2003–2013.

Featuring an extensive interview with Khodorkovsky himself, residing in London since his release from prison, the film ventures to trace the transformation of Khodorkovsky from a notorious oligarch, gaining his wealth in the dubious loans-for-shares scheme of 1995, into a leading oppositional figure and pro-democracy activist.

From a more general perspective, it also traces the transformation of the chaotic yet dynamic Russia of the 1990s, in which the meteoric rise of the likes of Khodorkovsky was possible, into a stagnating authoritarian regime that has assumed increasing control over the economy.

The overall message of the film seems to offer a morality tale: having ignored and even undermined democratic politics by cultivating shadowy insider deals with the government in the 1990s, oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky were among the first to suffer from its absence as soon as the strengthened state sought to revise the rules of the game to its advantage.

Yet, there is something amiss in this narrative of the rise and fall of the oligarch – namely, the concept of oligarch and oligarchy itself.

Oligarchy against ‘Oligarchs’

The benefits of the use of the term ‘oligarchy’ to designate one’s political opponents are evident: after all, from Plato onwards, the term was devoid of any positive connotations and served as the negative obverse of ‘aristocracy’, the rule of the excellent. It is therefore no wonder that the term became a favored denigrating epithet in Russian political discourse, especially as the government sought to reestablish control over the economy and rein in the entrepreneurial class that emerged in the 1990s.

Yet, scholars of politics need to do better than imitate governmental rhetoric, especially as this rhetoric turns increasingly aggressive and obscene. While Gusinsky or Khodorkovsky could be accused of many things, neither their wealth nor their political activity suffices to define them as ‘oligarchs’.

Even in the 1990s, when this term could be better applied to the bureaucratic inner circle in Boris Yeltsin’s administration rather than the bankers and tycoons that benefited from its policies, the same inner circle that brought forth the candidacy of Putin as Yeltsin’s successor.

Moreover, Khodorkovsky’s political engagement after 2000 ventured to oppose precisely the tendency of the Putin administration to consolidate both political power and ownership of the key sectors of the economy in the small group of loyalists, including both government officials and representatives of the private sector.

In this regime both state-owned and nominally private companies close to the government were granted privileges and preferential treatment, while those distanced from the regime were subjected to harassment and persecution by the security apparatus of the state. As a result, public office and private property have become increasingly indistinguishable, as public officials amassed extraordinary wealth and ostensibly private persons wielded enormous power.

Ironically, in 2003 it was the proverbial ‘oligarch’ Khodorkovsky that most vocally opposed the emergence of this system.

Those who rule are rich as long as they rule. It is this form of government that was termed ‘oligarchy’ in Plato’s Republic and distinguished from aristocracy and timocracy, which are also characterized by the rule of the few, but are grounded respectively in wisdom and honour rather than mere pursuit of wealth.

Ironically, in 2003 it was the proverbial ‘oligarch’ Khodorkovsky that most vocally opposed the emergence of this system, whose subsequent development leaves precious little doubt about its oligarchic nature, even as some of its representatives vainly present themselves as the new aristocracy.

The functionaries of this system have little to do with the flamboyance and vigour of Khodorkovsky, but accord uncannily with Plato’s famous depiction of the oligarchic personality as ‘a shabby fellow, who saves something out of everything and makes a purse for himself; the sort of man whom the vulgar applaud.’

The Man with a Past

The film features numerous examples of such applause, but none of it to Khodorkovsky. While Khodorkovsky gained the support of the liberal intelligentsia during his imprisonment and continues to be influential in the liberal opposition movement, he has what one of the interviewees in the film euphemistically called ‘a past’.

The ordinary people interviewed in the streets reproduce, without exception, the governmental narrative of Khodorkovsky as a ‘thief’ and endorse, without evidence, the governmental accusation of Khodorkovsky as organizing the contract killing of the mayor of Nefteyugansk in 1998. While Khodorkovsky remains optimistic about democracy in Russia in the long term, it is clear that in the short term his project has been a failure.

There are many reasons for this defeat, but one of them was the conceptual inversion undertaken by the regime’s ideologists that passed, with little critical reflection, into scholarly analyses and media representations of contemporary Russia.

Rather than view the show trial of Khodorkovsky and the governmental takeover of Yukos as a step in the constitution of an oligarchic form of government, it was misinterpreted as part of the regime’s alleged struggle against the ‘oligarchs’, of which Khodorkovsky was merely the wealthiest and the most influential one.

The unpalatable excesses of the period of ‘primitive accumulation’ during the 1990s gave the entrepreneurs of the time such a bad name that any bad name whatsoever became applicable to them, including that of the oligarch.

This in turn made the Putin regime’s carefully constructed self-image as a state engaged in the struggle against oligarchs appealing to the audience that, being a priori hostile to oligarchs of all kinds, made little attempt to investigate what kind of state was engaged in this struggle and whether it merited the name of the state at all.

As Mamardashvili had warned, imprecise use of concepts enabled an oligarchic regime to legitimize itself by claiming to go after the oligarchs and delegitimize all opposition to it by linking it to the imprisoned and exiled ‘oligarchs’ that could only wear this label as a dubious consolation prize.

While the devil has definitely won this round, the film concludes with Khodorkovsky saying, with an optimism that seems to mask a quiet desperation, that he still dreams of returning to Russia and ‘changing something’, as if changing anything whatsoever at this point would be a tremendous feat.

Sergei Prozorov is Professor of Political Science at the University of Jyväskylä. His research interests include political philosophy, theories of democracy and totalitarianism, biopolitics and governance.

Documentary film festival DocPoint will be held in Helsinki from January 27th to February 2nd.

Julkaisu DocPoint: Citizen Oligarch ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

There is an old Soviet-era joke about a painting called ‘Lenin in Paris’ which depicts Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya in bed with another man. To the surprised questions from the audience ‘where is Lenin?’, the museum guide somberly responds ‘Lenin is in Paris.’

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s award-winning film Leviathan is bound to raise similar questions, since it is named after something that is most certainly missing from it. While some reviews of the film invoked Hobbes’s Leviathan to suggest that Zvyagintsev’s work criticizes the all-powerful authoritarian state, the reality depicted in the film has precious little to do with Hobbes’s ‘common power to keep them all in awe’.

Where is Leviathan? In fact, the biblical sea monster whose name Hobbes used for his figure of the sovereign, only appears in the film as dead, in the form of the skeleton of the whale. The state, for which the image of Leviathan was a metaphor, is in equally poor health: the law is reduced to meaningless phonemes mumbled by local judges and the posh Moscow lawyer, the police exercise arbitrary violence for their own gain or in the service of powerful crooks, who in turn appropriate the institutions of government to pursue personal enrichment and vanity.

Leviathan the mortal god is dead. So is the immortal one, for that matter. Perhaps the most despicable, almost Satanic character in the film that boasts quite a plethora of villains is the local bishop who endorses and sustains the rule of the corrupt small town mayor as ‘God’s work’ and incites his recourse to violence with the claim that all power derives ‘from God’.

The decision to demolish the main protagonist Nikolai’s house that starts his series of trials is not due to the mayor’s desire to build himself a new palace, as the viewers are led to believe for most of the film, but to the bishop’s whim to build a new church on the same spot. Given that the construction of this church comes at the cost of every possible injustice done to Nikolai and his family, this nice and sturdy building is less appropriate for the worship of God than for hiding from his wrath, if he ever showed up.

The State of Nature

What remains after the death of God and the death of the state? Evidently it is the state of nature, which is represented at the beginning and the end of the film by austere Arctic landscapes utterly indifferent to the mishaps and the very existence of the characters.

The social contract that formerly gave rise to Leviathan is void and the society is in a state of the predisposition towards war of all against all, in which apparent rulers are no less afraid or likely to fall than the ruled – witness the mayor’s paranoia about the revelation of his past crimes or his beating up of the Moscow lawyer despite the latter’s proximity to the feared head of the Federal Investigative Committee.

This is the world where history has ended and merged with nature in a state of advanced decomposition. Along with the skeleton of the sea monster and rotting sunken boats we observe the general corruption of the society, whereby even the best of characters are marred by lies, promiscuity, envy, greed or cowardice. In place of the proverbial vertical of power we end up with a horizontal, where everyone is equal to everyone else because none of them is worth much.

The main theme of the film is therefore the failure of every claim for or quest for transcendence, be it the transcendence of God (who truly abandoned this land), the sovereign (reduced to a thug-turn-mayor who in a drunken fit of sincerity tells Nikolai that he never had any rights around here and never will), the sea monster (who is only momentarily glimpsed alive by Nikolai’s wife Lilya before her apparent suicide). There is nothing but this world in all its despicable immanence.

Instead of the image of the innocent society kept in awe by a monstrous power we observe the plenitude of petty monsters doing their dirty little deeds amidst the carcasses of the gods. Indeed, the deeds in question are so dirty and the characters so unappealing that throughout the film one secretly wishes for some sort of Leviathan to appear and put things right or at least put this town out of its misery.

Yet, the true lesson of Zvyagintsev’s film is that it is never going to take place, that there is no place whence the new Leviathan can appear. The world is all here: God is dead, Lenin is in Paris and the Biblical ‘creature without fear’ is a harmless skeleton.

The Trials

Having started a feud with the mayor to save his house from demolition, Nikolai suffers ordeals that go from bad to worse. Betrayed by Lilya and all his friends, he ends up convicted for the murder of his wife, sentenced to fifteen years in prison. What began as a vain attempt to challenge the local authorities ends up a catastrophic defeat, all the more horrifying because there is no monster, warm or cold, that is to blame for it.

This is where the film radically departs from two of the sources of inspirations for its script, Von Kleist’s 1808 novella Michael Kohlhaas, whose protagonist famously goes on a violent quest for justice after failing to be compensated for the mistreatment of his horses, and the story of Marvin John Heemeyer, whose 2004 feud with the officials in Granby, Colorado over a zoning dispute ended in his rampage in an armoured bulldozer to demolish the town hall and other public buildings.

In contrast, the best Nikolai can do in his struggle against the local authorities is invite his army friend, now a Moscow lawyer with apparent connections in the security service, to dig up the dirt on the town mayor and threaten him with exposure. This decision misfires in many ways, the lawyer starting a fateful affair with Nikolai’s wife, while being far less of a danger for the mayor than he boasted to be. The subsequent turn of events finally crushes Nikolai into utter passivity, as he confesses to understand nothing of what goes on around him.

What he does not understand is that there is nothing to be understood. Similarly to many other characters in the film, Nikolai appears oblivious to the death of Leviathan. Like Kafka’s man from the country that spends his entire lifetime at the door of the law waiting to be let in, Nikolai waits for something to happen, at least show and explain itself if not redeem those suffering from injustice.

Yet, the reason why there is no redemption is precisely because there is nothing to be redeemed from: there is no Leviathan to blame for any of this but only the complicity of everyone in living as if it was there. With the death of mortal and immortal gods all that remains is dwelling in the space of history-become-nature along with other natural beings whose claims to higher power have no ground whatsoever. There are only small-time crooks and their pharisaic priests all the way up.

Lilya comes to understand this, having first sought protection and security with the lawyer, and cannot live with this. Neither can Nikolai, utterly broken after being convicted for his wife’s murder. The ones who can go on comfortably living are the mayor and the bishop, confidently inaugurating the new church in the final scene, content in their certitude that there is no God to ever punish them. Those who plunder in the name of Leviathan end up further empowered by its death, which their victims do their best not to notice or pretend to disbelieve.

Reclaiming the Ruins

Many have interpreted the film in religious terms as demonstrating a life abandoned by God that can only be mended by the return to the true Christianity, rather than the uncanny cult that passes for state religion in today’s Russia. While such readings are of course possible, the film itself hardly provides any basis for such an interpretation, ending, as it began, in a bleak depiction of nature devoid of all transcendence.

The religious interpretation of Nikolai’s ordeal, offered in the film by a local priest in terms of the Book of Job, clearly falls flat, only provoking Nikolai’s resentment. Since the skeleton of Leviathan is there on the shore for all to see, what exactly is the point of asking whether Nikolai can ‘pull in Leviathan with a fishhook’ (Job 41: 1)? Of course, he can. This ‘creature without fear’, of whom ‘nothing on earth is equal’ (Job 41: 33), is now equal to everyone and everything on earth, abandoned along with them under the empty sky.

Yet, how is deliverance even conceivable in this space of abandoned immanence? Evidently, it can only come from the realizationthat if power is no longer concentrated in one monstrous transcendent figure, but is wholly disseminated into the social realm, this also means that there is nothing to prevent one from the reappropriation of one’s natural right that one previously surrendered to Leviathan.

There is no sense whatsoever in continuing to dwell in the ruinous realm, whose self-appointed rulers are hardly the best guarantors of security. It is only the failure to come to terms with the death of Leviathan that resigns everyone to a life that is truly ‘nasty, brutish and short’. If the closure of all transcendence can bring any consolation, it is that all the resources for reclaiming one’s life are already there in this dreary world, which is the only possible site of salvation.

In the tradition of rabbinic Judaism, at the messianic banquet on the last day the righteous will feast on the meat of Leviathan. The gigantic monster that used to instill fear in all will thus be desacralized and returned to free and common use, for the nourishment for all that remain.

In Zvyagintsev’s world, things are admittedly less promising. The meat has rotten and come off Leviathan’s bones and all that remains is the bare skeleton. How can these bones be brought to free use to reclaim one’s natural right in the world without mortal and immortal gods?

In a scene close to the end of the film we observe Nikolai’s son Roma silently contemplate the whale skeleton on the seashore. Like some of the film’s characters and some of its reviewers, he might be longing for the new Leviathan. Or he might be thinking of all the useful things that can be made of its bones.

Julkaisu What is to be done with Leviathan’s bones? ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

First, the escalation of the Crimean crisis has all but obscured the events in the Ukraine during November 2013 to February 2014 that led to it and which alone make it intelligible. What took place during this period was a revolution in the full sense of the word, i.e. without the qualifying adjectives such as ‘velvet’, ‘colour’, etc., that we have become accustomed to. What aligns this revolution with the classical revolutions of modernity was the radical affirmation of popular sovereignty or constituent power as the foundation of any constituted structure of authority.

While the ‘colour revolutions’ in the post-Soviet states during 2003–2005 are best understood as inter-elite conflicts with an element of popular participation, the Euromaidan movement is clearly irreducible to the support for any established political force or orientation. The much-discussed tensions between the movement and the parliamentary opposition parties throughout the standoff with the Yanukovich regime testify to the autonomous operation of constituent power, which as of now has not yet exhausted itself in any new regime.

While this makes the Ukrainian revolution quite a bit messier than the largely peaceful transitions of power in 1989–91 or 2003–2005, it is important to recognize that this very messiness, including the much lamented use of violence, expresses what contemporary Europe may have largely forgotten but which remains at the foundation of its democratic principles: the locus of sovereignty is not the state let alone the current holders of state power but the people, that constitutes itself and exists as a political subject, rather than as a statistical population, only to the extent that it is capable of asserting this sovereignty directly and immediately.

Second, it is this revolutionary expression of popular sovereignty that has been perceived in Russia as both an affront and a threat, leading to the deterioration of Russian-Ukrainian relations to the lowest level in post-Soviet history. From its very beginning, the Putin regime has been extremely wary of and hostile to revolutions. Indeed, the consolidation of authoritarianism since the second term of the Putin presidency has been interpreted as the reaction to the Orange Revolution of 2004 that sought to make the regime revolution-proof, crushing any ‘extra-systemic’ challenge at its root.

The fear-mongering against the ‘orange opposition’ that in 2005 gave the world the dubious pleasure of the Nashi movement is presently taken to an even more hysterical level in the anti-Ukrainian propaganda, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the very fascism it claims to find on the streets of Kiev. The extreme aversion to revolution also explains Putin’s somewhat paradoxical attitude to the deposed Yanukovich, who is vehemently affirmed as ‘legitimate president’ while being treated with barely disguised contempt.

We may also recall that during the period of colour revolutions Russia persistently supported the discredited regimes whose ‘pro-Russian’ commitments were at best dubious. This support was less a matter of tactical or strategic interests than of acting on a fundamental, if somewhat paradoxical, principle that any authority, once established, is sacrosanct, while revolution is always illegitimate. Since the Ukrainian revolution marks the most definitive and decisive abrogation of this principle in post-Soviet history, the Russian response is similarly unprecedented in its scope and intensity.

Third, the irony of the moment is that Russia does not oppose what it perceives as revolutionary chaos and turmoil in Ukraine with any stabilizing measures, but with a radical ‘revolutionization’ of the post-Soviet territorial order, whose basic principle was the inviolability of the administrative borders of the former Soviet republics. While before December 1991 there were numerous debates on and scenarios of border revisions in case of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, after the Belovezha Treaties the principle of the territorial integrity of the post-Soviet states was virtually uncontested, simultaneously delegitimizing any border revisionism along the lines of the Yugoslav scenario and making possible separatist conflicts in Chechnya, Transdniestria, Abkhazia, etc.

Until 2008 Russia upheld this principle, being both staunch in its own campaigns against separatism and lukewarm in its support for pro-Russian separatist movements in other post-Soviet states. The 2008 war in Georgia that resulted in Russia’s recognition of the independence of the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia marked the first stage of the breakdown of the post-Soviet territorial order. The ongoing annexation of Crimea arguably marks its complete annulment. It is hardly surprising that no post-Soviet state has so far supported Russia’s actions in Crimea, which seem to respond to the ‘revolutionary chaos’ in Kiev with fostering counter-revolutionary chaos in the entire region.

While few were happy with the previous order, which, after all, had no other foundation than the internal administrative structure of the Soviet Union, this order nonetheless proved effective during the two decades of its existence, making the post-Soviet space a far less conflictual space than many had feared in 1991. Its dissolution transforms the region into a zone of anomie, in which every square inch of territory is in principle contestable. A Greater Russia has become possible, as has, of course, a lesser Russia, and the same applies to all post-Soviet states.

Fourth, if Russia’s actions are grasped as a counter-revolutionary insurgency that responds to the domestic revolution in the Ukraine by the revolutionization of the post-Soviet order, we ought not to be surprised to see it resort to exactly the same methods that were used to prevent the ‘orange revolution’ in Russia. The occupation of Crimea by unknown soldiers without insignia is not that different from the takeover of corporations by front companies such as Baikal Finance Group or the takeover of oppositional parties by friendly ‘political technologists’.

The reliance on ‘unidentified’ people and forces for the more shadowy and dubious operations is merely one of the many strategies of scheming and plotting that were developed in contemporary Russia as the substitute for political practice. What is taking place today is merely the belated adaptation of foreign policy to the modus operandi long at work in the domestic politics, whose proverbial stabilization under Putin merely stabilized, without transforming, the ruinous scene of post-Soviet anomie, corruption and violence. This anomie is presently spilling over beyond Russia’s borders as a weapon against the revolutionary anomie allegedly arising from Kiev.

Fifth, the annexation of Crimea is merely the first step in the attempt to crush the revolution, the step that is logistically the simplest, militarily the least risky and the most likely to enjoy public support in Russia, at least in the short run. Since by itself it does nothing to undermine the revolutionary Ukraine and might even consolidate its unity, it is likely to be followed by other attempts by ‘unidentified’ forces to destabilize the situation. It is certainly ironic that it is precisely the counter-revolutionary ‘force for order’ that for a decade has enjoyed frightening itself with stories of revolutionary chaos that has single-handedly destroyed the post-Soviet territorial order, creating the worst crisis in Europe in over twenty years.

Yet, it is hardly surprising, since the valorization of constituted authority as such, the defense of any order once it is established is a supremely nihilistic gesture that affirms nothing but the power of those who have power. Such power can sustain itself almost indefinitely through intrigue, corruption and violence, yet it is incapable of creating anything new and for this reason lives only in the sense of delaying its death.

Article image: jorono / Pixabay

Julkaisu Five theses on the aftermath of the Ukrainian revolution ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

On August 17, 2012 three members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’, entitled ‘Mother of God, Drive Putin Away’, performed on February 21 at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, was deemed to be a blasphemy of religious rituals, offending the beliefs of Orthodox Christians. Pussy Riot’s performance was compared by its detractors to the anti-religious campaigns of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s-1930s, the most infamous of which was the destruction of churches, including the original Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, blown up in 1931.

In his speech act at the trial Prosecutor Alexei Nikiforov explicitly referred to the band’s action in terms of ‘abuse of God’ (bogohulstvo): “Any temple carries holiness, a solemn atmosphere that those present in it must maintain. The bacchanalia of this sort throws a challenge to this. This testifies to the moral decline in the society. The keykeeper of the Cathedral has remarked on the similarity of the women’s action to the Union of the Godless in the 1920s, parodying processions and collective prayers that subsequently almost led to the destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church.” (Cited in Elena Kostychenko ‘Sedmoi Den’ Slushaniy po Delu Pussy Riot‘, Novaya Gazeta, August 7, 2012.)

However understandable it might be as a rhetorical strategy, the analogy between Pussy Riot’s punk prayer and the anti-religious campaigns of early Bolshevism or Stalinism is entirely misleading. Contrary to the iconoclastic pathos of Soviet art and politics of the 1920s, which sought to weaken the political and social influence of the Church through public education and propaganda, the performance of Pussy Riot does nothing to undermine religion as such, or Orthodox Christianity in particular, but rather criticizes its implication in the decidedly worldly politics of the Putin regime. There is certainly a difference between an anti-Putin prayer to Virgin Mary that calls on her to become a feminist and a poster of Virgin Mary receiving an abortion or other infamous means of anti-religious propaganda in the early-Soviet period: the exhumation of entombed saints, the exposure as fraudulent of ‘weeping icons’ and other miracles, the burning of the effigies of God and liturgies set to pornographic lyrics.

The difference between the two approaches may be elaborated by considering the notion of parody used in the speech of the prosecutor. The conventional understanding of parody approaches it as a strategy that seeks to suspend or deactivate the force of a practice by transferring it to a new domain, usually a less solemn or serious one. Yet, in its more originary sense, developed in the sphere of musical technique, the concept referred to the loss of correspondence between musical melody and the rhythm of speech, whereby speech takes place in the space beside (para) the song. It is this originary sense of parody as the rupture of the natural bond between melos and logos that conditions the possibility of parody in the more familiar and limited sense as the free movement of speech between different contexts (Agamben 2007).

The performance of Pussy Riot is certainly parodic in this wider and more originary sense: as a prayer set to punk rock music, their song offers a perfect paradigm of the dissolution of anything like a ‘natural bond’ between melos and logos, whereby the words of the prayer may be relocated to the domain of punk rock or, conversely, loud and abrasive music may become the setting for a prayer. Yet, this general sense of parody is a feature of language as such and not a purposeful strategy of the speaker. The fact that a logos may be relocated to a melos that is incongruous with it, and the other way round, only testifies to the non-existence of any natural bond between them.

Yet, if we consider the Pussy Riot prayer in terms of the more familiar sense of parody, things become more complicated. It is far from certain that in this case we may speak of a transfer of discursive content of prayer to a comical context. While the parodies of the Soviet Union of the Godless that set vulgar lyrics to liturgical music sought, successfully or otherwise, to make us laugh at what formerly filled us with awe, the prayer to Virgin Mary to drive Putin away clearly serves a rather different function that, moreover, would be seriously jeopardized by the ridicule of the addressee of the petition. Similarly, the lyrics describing the repressive and corrupt character of the Russian state and the complicity of the Church in this repression and corruption may hardly be termed comical or humorous, even in the more acerbic or satirical sense.

The Church’s praise of rotten dictators,
The cross-bearer procession of black limousines,
A teacher-preacher will meet you at school,
Go to class – bring him money!

Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin.
Bitch, better believe in God instead.
The belt of the Virgin can’t replace mass meetings.
Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest!

(Pussy Riot: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away)

The same applies to the statements of the members of Pussy Riot during the trial, which are completely devoid of ridicule or spite but rather repeatedly refer to anger and pain that motivated their performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

We are distressed that the great and luminous Christian philosophy is being used so shabbily. We are very angry that something beautiful is being spoiled. It still makes us angry and we find it very painful to watch. (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s Closing Statement)

Our motivation is more eloquently expressed in the words of the Gospel “For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” I, and all of us, sincerely believe that it will be opened for us. But, alas, so far the bars are closed on us. (Maria Alyokhina’s Closing Statement)

Both the song and the statements are characterized by a decidedly non-ironic ferocity that contrasts quite sharply with the prevailing attitude to politics among Russian artists, intellectuals and the civil society more generally. This attitude, which in the late-Soviet period received the name ‘styob’ (literally, ‘jibe’), consists in the ironic distancing from all structures of authority and the subjection of the official discourse to a desublimating parody that deprives it of both sense and force and in this manner carries a certain liberating effect despite leaving the parodied phenomenon strictly intact. By making the maxims of the Soviet ideology meaningless, the practitioners of styob also sought to make them powerless with regard to their hold on one’s existence. Rather than confront the system frontally and inviting a repressive response, the practitioners of the ethos that I have previously termed ‘para-Soviet’ sought to twist loose from the hold of the increasingly sterile ideological maxims and cultivate alternative forms of life at the minimal distance from the official discourse. (Prozorov 2009, Ch 3)

While it certainly contributed to the degradation of the Soviet order by desublimating its ideological maxims, the emancipatory effects of styob should not be overestimated. Indeed, the very appeal of thepara-Soviet ethos is conditioned by the impossibility or extreme danger of assuming an explicitlyanti-Soviet position. It was only because the Soviet system was here to stay that it made sense to cultivate livable spaces in its interstices, furnishing them through alternative cultural practices that deactivated the official discourse through ironic parody of its maxims. The eventual success of this deactivation obscured the fact that it was made possible by the prior occupation of the position of extreme disempowerment, lacking any means to confront power directly and reject its ideology explicitly. Conversely, the relative decline of styob under late Gorbachev and Yeltsin testified to the weakening of state power and the newly gained possibility to challenge the state frontally on the terrain of ideology and not beside it in the practice of parodic displacement.

The consolidation of the Putin regime from 2004 onwards witnessed a return of the parodic ethos, yet the character of this regime led to an important transformation in its logic. While the Soviet system was characterized by a rigid and monolithic ideological edifice, which underwent almost no transformation since the death of Stalin, the Putin period has been marked by the abandonment of any ideological identification in favour of a thinly disguised nihilism, which has no qualms about borrowing elements from the most disparate ideological orientations, combining them in a logically inconsistent manner and discarding them after use without any regret. While the Soviet regime in its last decades could be accused of no longer believing in its own maxims and concealing this disbelief under the veneer of ideological rigidity, the Putin regime has arguably dispensed with ideology even as a matter of appearance and hence does not even pretend to believe in itself. To laugh at this system is always already to laugh with it.

The spread of irony, sarcasm and travesty during the Putin period is thus different from the Soviet era in that it carries little or no emancipatory potential. Instead, it serves to soften the impact of authoritarian rule by suggesting that it is all somehow not serious, an ironic citation from the ‘black books’ of the 20th century with an obligatory wink at the end. At least until the post-election protests of 2011-2012, the societal response to the regime tended to take the same parodic form, ranging from the refined ironies of the regime’s apologists to the shrill and abrasive laughter of such protest-art groups as Voina (War), of which Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is a former member. Thus, styob has arguably become the true dominant ideology of contemporary Russia, whose function is to make laughable everything, including the ruling regime but also every instance of protest or dissent, which find each other acceptable only insofar as neither of them is ultimately ‘for real’. The ideological catchphrase of the Putin era might well be borrowed from Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Dark Knight: ‘Why so serious?’

In this culture of universal parody, the performance of Pussy Riot is exceptional precisely in not being blasphemous. Indeed, the accusation of blasphemy, of using the name of God ‘in vain’, is incorrect both formally and substantively. In the formal sense, in the syntagm ‘Mother of God, drive Putin away!’ the divine name is not extracted and isolated from semantic content, but, on the contrary, is linked with the object of the petition. In the substantial sense, the entire purpose of the performance is to stop the name of the Mother of God being uttered in vain in canonical prayers and to reclaim it in the struggle against the allegedly corrupt state and church. Rather than being an instance of a blasphemous parody, the punk prayer in question is a perfectly serious speech act that ventures to wrest the force of prayer from its confinement within the canonical ritual and to reclaim it for free use in political practice.

[In] our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to combine the visual images of Orthodox culture and protest culture, suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it might also take the side of civic rebellion and protest in Russia. (Ekaterina Samutsevich’s Closing Statement)

It is this overcoming of separations and the return of things to free common use that constitutes the original meaning of ‘profanation’ and distinguishes it from parody. Whereas parody seeks to deactivate the force of a practice by relocating it into an inappropriate context, profanation seeks to reclaim and amplify this force by dismantling the very distinction between the appropriate and the inappropriate, so that there is no longer a privileged or sacred place, alongside which parody could be practiced. While parody makes it possible to dwell beside the dominant order, while submitting its ideology to blasphemous ridicule, profanation seeks to intervene into and overcome this very dominance. (Agamben 2009)

In his statement on the Pussy Riot case made on March 24, Patriarch Kirill lamented that ‘the Devil had had a good laugh over us, having brought us so many sorrows in the days when we should be distancing ourselves from worldly worries, when we should be deep in prayer, observing Lent, confessing our own sins’. Yet, insofar as Pussy Riot’s prayer was a serious speech act, what or who the devil was laughing at is anyone’s guess.

Sources:

Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, New York: Zone Books, 2007.
Sergei Prozorov, The Ethics of Postcommunism, New York: Palgrave, 2009.

Julkaisu The Prayer of Pussy Riot: From Parody to Profanation ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.