If the leaders of the state can not stop doubting whether they are great or mediocre

If the leaders of the state cannot stop doubting whether they are great or mediocre, how can they achieve the clarity they seek? The classics of Russian literature gives the answer - you have to kill someone. You can kill a defector intelligence officer, or the author of anti-corruption investigations, but all this is small, not of a state scale. Especially when the hegemon is an eyesore, regularly showing that the rules for him, unlike others, are not written. No, here you can’t manage with people and weaning of territories, it is necessary to kill the whole state system. Designate a victim, and kill. Show everyone that you have the right.

The leadership of the Russian Federation, ripening for business, spent days thinking about other people's greatness and doubts about their own insignificance. It was the twenties of the twenty-first century, and in my mind everything was promises to Gorbachev, Belgrade, Iraq. “They don't play by the rules, but we have to. But someday we will finally rise from our knees, cast aside humiliation and be able to. The victim was suitable: a louse, a fictitious state, a bloodsucker, the Nazi regime, charging exorbitant prices for gas transit. Useless to anyone, on the contrary, harmful to everyone, the Poles will still join the division into parts, but we are not against it.

When the war against Ukraine began, the rationalizations of the leadership of the Russian Federation still included stories about security guarantees, about threats, ordinary themes of state thinking, in its own way inhuman, but pragmatic. Someone hoped to discern the preservation of healthy pragmatism in the Russian Federation, in defiance of the moralizing of the West, to assess what is happening in terms of trade routes, resources and transit infrastructure. Exactly as Raskolnikov did in the course of the story, all these topics that bring pragmatic calculation into action were discarded as nonsense. For many months, the Russian Federation has been fighting Ukraine not for something specific, but with Ukraine as an evil, crazy Nazi drug addict, clown and servant of the imperialist masters. At stake in the war is the very ability to designate someone as evil and destroy, first of all defending in your own mind the terrible thesis that the masters of life create morality for themselves at will.

The current crime is much worse than imagined by Dostoevsky. If the old woman had been hacked to death not in the apartment, but on Senate Square, if she had refused to die, and Raskolnikov kept hacking and hacking her with a blunt and rusty ax slipping out of her hands - that would be a comparison. “Once we started, we need to finish it. If we stop, if we don’t kill, then they won’t take us seriously, and if we cut down, they will start to respect and deal with, they will accept us as people, in the first class. ”

The result of following such dreams is only self-destruction, this is an understandable moment of the crime. But what about punishment? By the will of the leadership of the Russian Federation, the crime is committed not only by them, but by the country as a whole. The leadership and the country are different entities, but this argument is much weaker than many would like. The country is drawn into a crime both legally and spiritually - and the issue of rehabilitation for Russia will be no less than it was for Raskolnikov. Rehabilitation in the literal sense, not in the eyes of others, but the restoration of oneself as a subject, the return of the health and integrity of one's soul.

We just have to figure it out. One moment comes to mind, important for everyone who cares about Russia, Russian culture and destiny. Rehabilitation rests on the idea that the killer never ceases to be human. Even in a fallen state, he retains his human dignity and its external expression in rights, which serve as the very possibility of redemption and restoration. Accepting responsibility does not mean giving up rights. On the contrary, it is the criminals who need lawyers, the protection of the rights of the criminal is not only not something shameful, but forms an integral part of justice. Russia needs lawyers, and there is no one to play this role except ourselves.

Being a lawyer does not mean covering up a crime. On the contrary, the lawyer can and should recommend confession and repentance to the ward, where the facts leave no doubt. But a lawyer must fight even more against the arbitrariness of those who claim to act as agents of just retribution. In the hands of people who are capable and ready to play this dual role, the fate of Russia is in many respects.

Artyom Seversky 2022-11-05