Ksenia Krimer/The Society of Violence
The Society of Violence
by Ksenia Krimer [1]
Rough Russia: Whether in popular songs, prisons, orphanages, clinics, private households or in the army - violent relationships dominate all areas of social life. Out of many decrees signed by Putin on July 15, 2022 one, seemingly trivial one, was eclipsed by changes to arms industry and space agency leadership: Grigory Leps was awarded the title of the People’s Artist of Russia for his “great contribution to the development of popular arts”. That should not have concerned us much if not for the specific genre, which has catapulted Leps to fame: the 60-year old performer is one of the country’s most popular singers of chanson.
The fancy French term has nothing to do with Medieval French ballads or odes about chivalry love, or the cabaret style a la Édith Piaf or Charles Aznavour. Rather, Russian chanson is a specific genre of outlaw songs about the hardships of urban outcasts that was born in the Tsarist empire among the serfs and criminals and then gained new urgency in the vast expanses of GULAG archipelago. In today’s Russia it has attained vast popularity in and outside prisons, a disturbing symptom of a society thoroughly saturated in violence and guided by criminal norms. It is these criminal attitudes that now manifest themselves in the wanton brutality and lawlessness of Russia’s assault against Ukraine.
In the late 1980s and 1990s chanson contained a powerful strain of rebelliousness and protest against the norms of respected society and was prosecuted by the authorities for its vulgarity and romantization of crime. The 2000s, however, saw domestication of this genre by mainstream radio-stations and TV programs. It became “the true soundtrack to contemporary Russia”.
A student of mine once hitchhiked to the provincial town of Penza, 600 km from Moscow, to visit her family. “Do you know what gives it away when you leave Moscow and enter real Russia?”, she asked me upon return. “In Moscow drivers would mostly listen to pop-music, Russian or foreign, or even jazz. But once you leave the capital, it’s only chanson, nothing else. That’s how you know that you’re in Russia.”
The criminal high culture of chanson
By mid 2000s chanson had traded its subversive elements for the newly gained respectability. One of its most popular performers held a seat in the Duma as a member of Putin’s “United Russia” party, others receive thousands of euros for entertaining private parties thrown by MPs and public officials. The annual “Chanson of the Year” award ceremony is held at the prestigious State Kremlin Palace, which was once reserved for operas, ballets and other products of “high culture”. The export version of Russian culture meant to justify its military aggression still mostly encompasses its “highbrow” manifestations, the proverbial Tolstoy and Chaikovsky, whereas at home the regime has long shed all pretense and unabashedly embraced art forms that are more in tune with the its origins and essence.
The legitimation of criminal genre is doubly ironic as both Kremlin propagandists and quite a few of the regime’s opponents lament the alleged cancelling of Russian culture in the West. Yet few well-wishers question what is it that really constitutes the matrix of Russian culture today besides the oft-quoted inventory of the 19th century classics, which the masses hardly read anyways. Chanson’s popularity with the public and the respectable status granted to it by the authorities betrays an important role that criminal culture plays in both Russian society and power: it shapes its ethos and makes violence its main modus operandi.
There is a purely demographic dimension to this problem. With almost half a million people behind bars Russia still leads Europe in terms of its prison population and incarceration rate, although its size dropped almost 50% in the last 14 years, decreasing from 893,000 in 2008 to 471,490 in 2022. The repressive nature of Russian judiciary – longer sentences for even petty crimes and a miniscule proportion of acquittals (less than 1% in 2021) is coupled with the high rate of recidivism – 63% of prisoners are reoffenders. This means that the prison experience itself, albeit less common when it was in Soviet times, is still extremely prevalent. According to one study, more than 15 million people in the country went through its penal system between 1992 and 2007 – every 10th person, or a quarter of adult male population. According to a calculation of Kommersant-Vlast’, by 2007 18,2% of the population had had a criminal record. The proportion of criminal offenders, former or current, is predictably higher in the poorest regions, which have the highest rate of violent crimes in the nation. Importantly, these are also the regions that send the bulk of conscripts and contract servicemen to fight in Ukraine.
Prison violence seeps back into society
The largest proportion of all inmates in Russian prisons are convicted for murder and manslaughter (27,8%). Unlike other penitentiaries that are prison-based, Russian penal system houses convicts in packed barracks, not cells (detention facilities in remand centers are often crowded as well), whereby facilitating inter-group bullying and socialization of the newcomers into criminal norms and rules. In late 2021, a giant video archive was released by a human right advocacy group documenting torture prevalent in Russian colonies. Footage shows inmates suffering sexualized abuse and beatings at the hands of hardened criminals whom the administration routinely commissions to “discipline and punish” them.
In its systematic reliance on torture and dehumanization of inmates Russian penal system has not changed much since the times of GULAG with one important exception. From everything we know about Soviet and modern Russian penal colonies it is evident that the role of sexualized abuse has grown exponentially to become the key element of control and domination. From prisons it seeps back into mainstream society informing attitudes and norms. Russian homophobia, for one, largely feeds on the criminal concept of sexual intercourse between males as necessarily non-consensual and debasing. More broadly, the idea of sex as a form of violent domination and subjugation detached from personal self-determination fuels official attacks against sex education and translates into a wide range of behaviors, from culturally sanctioned verbal or physical attacks against women and LGBTQ+ to mass rapes in Ukraine committed by Russian soldiers.
With 300,000 people released from prisons annually, Russia’s overcrowded penal system serves as a breeding ground for criminal culture that penetrates different institutions of Russian society and reproduces itself outside prisons through language, practices of violence and specific criminal dogmas (known as “poniatiya” in Russian) that come to replace the altogether shaky ethical and legal norms. Violence and humiliation contaminate every sphere of Russian life: from family to schools, from professional sport clubs to maternity wards, and, of course, the army. Army rituals of hazing and bullying bare marked resemblance to the punitive practices common in Russian prisons, including punitive rapes.
Violence is particularly enduring in state-run closed institutions, such as orphanages, retirement homes and mental hospitals, where people end up against their will and are subjected to prison-like forms of control that strip them of any agency and dignity. Independent media, such as “Novaya Gazeta”, “Kholod” or "Takie dela, have been focusing on the various indignities of Russian life, particularly, in smaller, provincial locales marred by systemic poverty, high crime rates and substance abuse and have amassed ample evidence of widespread violence. It mostly remains unpunished, moreover, domestic violence in particular, was decriminalized in 2017 despite Russia’s staggering rate of this particular crime: according to a recent study, 70% of those surveyed reported that they have experienced domestic violence in the past or are currently experiencing it with their partner, 80% of them women. Language also helps smuggle criminal norms into mainstream society. Criminal argot has made its way into everyday language, contaminating the media and political rhetoric. This criminalization of language received a powerful impetus in the late 1990s when street and gang crime, far from being defeated by Putin’s regime as propagandists decrying the “tumultuous 90s” would like you to believe, was effectively coopted by various institutions of power from the police to the parliament and everything in between. It was during the early years of Putin’s “stability” that former thugs and criminals flocked to power en masse: they became mayors, governors and MPs, bringing with them their idiom and worldview of cynicism, insatiable greed, disregard for legality and rules, machismo, veneration of physical strength and a deeply felt conviction that anyone can be bought and sold given the right price, anyone at all.
Putin himself has resorted to criminal argot from the early days in the office and has since progressed from the promise to “pursue and waste terrorists everywhere, even in the outhouse” to outright justification of rape evoked to explain his invasion into Ukraine: “Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty.” Pollsters consistently show that the Russian public reacts to such rhetoric very favorably: “Putin is a real tough guy, he does not mince his words”. Maria Zakharova, the often inebriated face (although she keeps denying these accusations) of the country’s Foreign Office, whose manners and mannerisms make her increasingly resemble a character of a typical chanson song, has made vulgar thug-speech the trademark of Russian diplomacy.
Excremental assault
By showing the middle finger to the world in a truly thuggish fashion Russian leadership effectively emancipates itself from any modicum of shame, ethics and civility in favor of cynicism and assertion of violence as its only idiom. “We are not ashamed” is the new rallying cry of its war against Ukraine voiced by the country’s Foreign Minister and by the war’s eager supporters on- and off-line. A popular “patriotic” hash-tag reads “Nas rat’ ” – “We are legion”. It is a pun: if read jointly it also means, obscenely: “We shit on that” as in “We do not give a damn, we are not ashamed”. In a telling instance of Russian diplomacy’s haute style, Russian ambassador to Sweden claimed that his country “does not give a shit about the sanctions” (literally: “we shit on your sanctions”).
Reports from devastated Bucha, Irpin and other Ukrainian localities occupied by the Russian army convey an eerie incarnation of this motto as besides the widespread killings, rapes and lootings Russian soldiers have unleashed a real “excremental assault” against Ukrainian private homes: they purposefully leave feces in the middle of living rooms, in beds and kitchens literally defiling and befouling domestic spaces. This behavior, however shocking, is hardly new: we know from memoirs and historiography that intentional befouling accompanied attacks on country estates during the Russian 1917 revolution and the Civil war, later on, churches were not spared either. Piles of feces purposefully left in private homes and looted public offices signaled the arrival of Red Army in Europe in 1945 – as, parenthetically, did rapes and mass lootings, conveniently “forgotten” and denied by contemporary Russians.
Polish philosopher and writer Stanisław Lem reflected on the memoirs of a German doctor who witnessed the doings of the victorious Soviet Army in Germany and described “...the excremental frenzy that … Russians exhibited, clogging and filling the trashed living rooms, hospital wards, bidets, toilets with their excrement, shitting on books, carpets, altars”, “the shitting on the whole world, which they could, to their great joy, trample, crush, shit on and in so doing rape and kill...”. A radical non-believer, Lem concludes, is haunted by the idea that while God might not exist, Satan, probably does, as long as the Soviet people exist: “A giant superpower with falsified ideology (nobody believes in it), with falsified culture, music and literature, education and public life – everything in it is falsified… so thoroughly, under such pressure of repressions, under such police control that one cannot help but think: who can it serve better than the “Lord of the flies” himself (Beelzebul)? I know that he does not exist but in a way it is even worse in terms of the diagnosis due to the absence of the Negative Pole of Transcendence, as well”. As a form of archaic revolt against civility, modernity and culture itself this purposeful befouling comes from a place of extreme humiliation, of subjectlessness, a place where human dignity does not exist as a concept and is denied both the attacker and the attacked as something irrelevant or imaginary.More broadly, criminal mentality rejects any form of norm or rule – legal, cultural or ethical – as something utterly artificial, phony and unjust that it contrasts with a more authentic, free and “sincere” form of being according to the unwritten code of the underworld.
In this sense, Russia that seem hell bent on committing every possible crime in the book in Ukraine from manslaughter to torture and from rape to looting enables its military to experience lawlessness and defiance of norms, legal or ethical, in emancipating terms. Liberation from shame and civility is thus conceived of as a form of authenticity and freedom, the only one accessible to them.The common themes and plots of chanson reveal other features of this criminal mind: protagonists usually romanticize the crime they committed (typically, “forced” to kill or rob by “powerful feelings” or “passion) and are ever eager to shift the blame and eschew responsibility: somebody else is always to blame for their drift into crime. Their worldview is a heady mixture of moral relativism, narcissism, infantile fatalism, propensity to overblown dramatic gestures and aggressive sentimentality: one’s own feelings are promoted to the rank of value and truth, those of others can be simply ignored. This aggressive sentimentality is what Carl Jung in his 1932 essay on “Ulysses” and the atmosphere in Europe at the time termed a “super structure covering brutality.”
