«Dictatorship of Law»
The perennial confusion of liberals, which has reached the stage of prostration in the past year, is due to the cognitive dissonance that arises from the constant use of the terms «law» and «court» with a growing understanding that this discourse is already empty. Even “arbitrariness” is a word from the same legal vocabulary, it explains everything at once and thus nothing at all.
By describing the situation in terms of human rights, we play along with the Kremlin, which is trying to preserve the legal scenery in the form of a parliament and a judicial systems. We cannot refuse to talk about law and court, but they must be understood differently — in the way that, without reflecting too much on this, they think in the Kremlin.
The first words of the then not yet president on this topic were heard in February 2000 in an «open letter to voters»: «dictatorship of the law.» The previously unknown formula puzzled lawyers, although it was immediately clear that this was a kind of generic, a Russified palliative to the rule of law, or the Rule of Law.
But only with time it became clear that Putin does not distinguish between law and law. The same position of flat legal normativism was followed by judges.
“Law” has become just one of the tools that has no intrinsic value, which the state is free to remake for current needs (as it did with the Constitution in 2020), and “dictatorship” over the past 23 years has clarified its meaning in that the court here is an extra link.
< p>Vladimir Putin in 2000. Photo: Sergey Velichkin/TASS
The Federal Assembly has also become redundant. The mechanisms for adopting laws and issuing judicial decisions are not transparent, and only those who sit inside understand how they work. But, being outside, we can imagine the parliament and the courts as «black boxes» to make sure that the output from them is exactly the same as the input. This is a rudiment, a peacock's tail and a luxury that the regime can afford as long as the budget allows.
Does the guarantor of the Constitution recognize this problem? He just puts a different meaning into the same words.
We often try to explain the logic of the Putin regime as just a reaction to emerging challenges — as Mikhail Zygar does, based on many interviews, in the book «All the Kremlin's Army». From this point of view, “right” really looks like a hammer that lies on a shelf and is removed from there no more often than there is a need to hammer a nail.
But all the actions of the Kremlin appear quite consistent and projective, if viewed through the prism of Censorship in the broad sense of the word,
as a struggle in the semantic space for the «magical power of nomination», as Pierre Bourdieu calls it, seeing in it «the power to create things with the help of words.»
Neither in nature, nor in history, nor in biography — is there anything that would make it necessary to give this particular person the property of «being a president.» In physical geography or, if you like, in ontology, there is also nothing that would require the recognition of Crimea as Russian (Ukrainian, Turkish, Greek, although these properties were also attributed to it). These are only words that acquire binding force only insofar as a certain number of people or, as in the case of Crimea, states agree with them.
The power to produce such «nominations», to rank, to assign titles and names, to label and price tags — this is real power. She needs violence not to increase the number of consonants, for which there are enough words, but to remove from the field and stigmatize those who disagree. And «law» and «court» are necessary to legitimize such violence in a common semantic space.
Screen country
The first strategic action of the regime, launched in the spring of 2000, was the seizure of NTV— this began the monopolization of the sphere of knowledge in the sense in which Michel Foucault equates it with power. «Knowledge» in this sense is not necessarily true, rather the opposite — most often it is a myth. Along with direct propaganda, the new NTV became a step-down transformer of meanings: the air was filled with «entertainment» so tasteless that it turned out to be unacceptable for the former viewers. Other «media» followed NTV, solving a purely commercial task of attracting a mass audience (reader). But the Kremlin was also solving another, political problem — updating the language of «knowledge» in the spirit of what immediately became a model of «soaking in the toilet.» tea.
“Analytical” talk shows have turned into stadiums, the viewer is looking forward to the already known result, and its approval is only caused by excessive aggression (the author of the theory of modern myth, Roland Barthes, describes “The World Where They Compete in Ketch” in approximately the same way).
Rally against the editorial policy of NTV. Photo: Alexander Miridonov/Kommersant
Real journalism that doesn't mount with mass entertainment can't compete for an audience with this cocktail of entertainment and propaganda. At the same time, the destruction of those sources of meanings in which the Kremlin sees a “threat of Western interference” is going on — this process did not stop for a moment, until Roskomnadzor, which gained unprecedented power in pursuit of bloggers in the form of “media and individuals acting as foreign agents”, “did not got to the mice” (if the references to obscene anecdotes, like the “sleeping beauty” just mentioned by the president, were turned by him into the political mainstream).
The next most important action, which began in 2001, was « the Yukos case”, which did not so much set itself economic goals (the seizure of property was carried out along the way), but carried a political message: the “oligarchs” were made to understand that supporting the opposition and, in general, alternative points of view would be considered crossing the red line. There was no funding in Russia, and the media and NGOs — the conductors of «Western influence» — were shown the way to the West. But in 2012, a law on “foreign agents” was adopted, and in 2015, the “law of Dima Yakovlev” was amended to include “activities of unwanted foreign or international NGOs.”
The repertoire of these performances was searched , interrogations, arrests, decisions of courts of general jurisdiction and arbitration courts (as insufficiently reliable they were deprived of their independence in February 2014), but the use of these tools does not mean that the struggle is fought in the legal space, it goes into the field of knowledge on the principle of «who is not with us, he is against us.»
Gradually, from law enforcement practice, the turn comes to the laws themselves: they lose their normative character and take on the form of orders
—as in the case of retroactive deprivation of the passive electoral right of those citizens who are marked by the authorities as «involved in the activities of extremist and terrorist organizations.» On the contrary, administrative and judicial practices are adopted and consolidated, which makes the law exist only on paper.