The art of not being Russian

I am reading the anthropologist James Scott's "The Art of Being Uncontrollable" (as usual, the book has been lying around at home for a couple of years, but my hands have only just reached it) and at the same time I came across some kind of another whining format "Caucasians dance lezginka on Russian streets, but Russians do not dance national dances ". And just Scott does a good job of explaining why it is so.

Scott describes history as a kind of dialectical opposition between lowland agrarian states and peripheral peoples. Usually this is interpreted as different stages of evolution - they say, civilization is on the plain, and savages roam in the mountains, forests and steppes. But here Scott makes a feint, arguing that this is only a flat look at two equivalent social systems. The fact is that compactly living farmers really create surpluses that can be used to support the elite (i.e. "civilization"), but the life of the average plowman there is very bleak: a monotonous diet, epidemics, hunger, extortions, military duty, the arbitrariness of the elites etc. etc. Therefore, the lowland states somehow enslave the population: in the range from slavery to serfdom. States also impose those types of management that maximally tie people to the territory and facilitate tax collection. The most convenient thing here is irrigated rice growing, so the toughest agrarian despotisms were established in Asia (for Europe, this, apparently, is wheat, more freely, but about the same).

Peripheral peoples prefer an economy that does not tie them rigidly to the land: hunting and gathering, cattle breeding, slash-and-burn agriculture, etc. It produces few resources, but these resources are more diverse and it is more difficult to enslave you - try to catch it again. Agrarian states are at war with peripheral peoples - on the side of the former, disciplined slave armies, on the side of the latter, mobility and inconvenient terrain (and sometimes numbers, if we are talking about nomads). But more often they trade because peripheral peoples are the first source of luxury resources for the lowland elites. The enslaved population often flees from their civilized rulers to the periphery, so military campaigns for slaves are a necessary fuel for the lowland states. Peripheral residents in general are also not cute cats. They raid the plains and each other, including for the sake of capturing slaves (in order, again, to sell to the lowland states in need of slaves). Between all this is a complex policy: the rulers of the plains enter into an alliance with some savages against the second, buy off from the third, and themselves impose tribute on the fourth. In the course of history, people regularly move from one state to another. You were captured - and oops - you became "civilized". There was famine, war, pestilence - you ran back to the mountains, where you quickly "ran wild again."

More importantly, the plain and the periphery build their identities in opposition to each other. The identity of the plains is "we are civilization", which is defined as the opposite of "barbarism" (ie, mountain, forest and steppe peoples). There are many definitions, but in essence it all comes down to one thing: civilized people pay taxes, barbarians do not. The inhabitants of the periphery, for obvious reasons, leave fewer written sources, but their worldview is usually something along the lines of "let us wipe ourselves with burdock, but we don't crawl on our belly, like those from the plains." These relationships are a dichotomy of contempt and envy, where the miracles of civilization are on the side of some, and political autonomy is on the side of others. More importantly, Scott believes that only peripheral peoples really have such a thing as "ethnicity". They are usually few in number and hold tightly to cultural practices that distinguish them from others (especially from the plains). They do not pursue numbers, and therefore they do not engage in aggressive proselytism. Whereas the plains state is interested in accumulating more workers, and at the same time molding the most unified obedient mass from its subjects. So, for example, "becoming" a Han Chinese was quite easy: it was enough to "accept" the identity, but the main thing was to move on to irrigated rice cultivation. The ideal subject loves the sovereign, grows rice, pays taxes, serves in the army, but lacks the identities to organize and escape back to the forest. The way the lowland states grind peripheral peoples is repeatedly described in the sources, but right now and especially for us, the Chinese in Xinjiang are showing it.

Scott writes mostly about Southeast Asia. But it is easy to apply his theory to Russia as well. It becomes clear why "Russians" are a rubber and universal identity. "Russian is Orthodox", "anyone who thinks in Russian is Russian". Peripheral communities, to which Russians usually fled (Cossacks, Siberians, Old Believers) did not consider themselves "Russians", believing this to be a synonym for an unfree person. The Russian elites also preferred to count themselves from the Ruriks and Mamas, to run away to Catholics and Freemasons, it was not very good to be Russian - "sire, make me a German." Why? Because the Russian is the one who supplies corvée, poll tax and recruits. Russians do not have their own ethnic culture. Ethnic culture - it is small-town, local, grassroot. Whereas the meaning of "Russianness" is in maximum universalization - Russians are the same from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. Whereas there are 666 varieties of the Caucasian Lezginka (each people-tribe has its own). Does this mean that Russians have no culture? Russians have a "high national culture" - that is, fragments of local folklore collected by the elites and further reconstructed into a universal "Russian culture". That is, a single "sarafan and kokoshnik", which is in the theater, but it is not in the villages. In fact, this is the story with all the state-forming peoples. The British and French can boast of the best examples of "high culture". But the "ethnic culture" is there in the former periphery: the Irish, Scots, Bretons, etc. Probably, the British looked at street Celtic dances with the same mixture of contempt and envy that the Russians looked at the Lezginka.

If you are a Russian nationalist and have read up to this point, then, for sure, you have already burned something, so you should read to the end to consolidate the result. After all, the best illustration of Scott's theory is ... the Russian nationalists themselves. The current peripheral peoples of Russia evoke in Russians the usual mixture of contempt and envy - like dangerous savages, but also like those from whom one should learn (solidity, aggression, "traditional values"). By becoming Russian nationalists, people are trying to re-construct "ethnicity" for themselves. And they do it intuitively through the opposition of an obedient "plain" identity. For the most stupid, this is grassroots subcultural nationalism, built on opposing oneself to "Russians", "vegetables" and "ordinary people". For those who are smarter - "intellectual nationalism", built on opposing itself to "sovoks" and "noviops". The words are different, but the essence is the same - identity is built literally from "we are not like the majority of the Russian population." At the same time, huge resources have been devoted to denying this very paradoxical process of building "Russianness against Russianness." It would seem that one can simply admit that "Russian" is an identity that was created within the framework of the "autocracy, Orthodoxy, nationality" program. A recruit and a taxpayer, but disenfranchised in the sense that he is not endowed with any institutions other than the "official" ones. But no, instead, you need to build up a whole mythology that, they say, earlier under Tsar Pea there were real Russians, and then the Bolsheviks came with the British and ... In general, everything just to not recognize a simple fact: Russian nationalism today - this is a completely traditional attempt to escape to the periphery (only not to the physical, but to the imaginary).

Mihail Pojarsky 2021-07-22