Life in wartime, as Thomas Hobbes put it in his 1651 work, Leviathan, is “nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes saw this conclusion as a natural consequence of society that lacked any functioning government. His answer was to advocate absolute government.
Throughout much of the world, man battles to establish civilisation where nature roams wild. He has learned that, in snows, he must be equipped with sleds and snowshoes; in jungles, he must ward off poisonous snakes; and, in the waters of Australia, sharks threaten him. The barren desert welcomes but the most habituated, and, in Canada, bears, they do plunder.
With ingenuity and savvy, man learns to tame the wildest of environments, even to master them. But one thing above all others allows him to deploy his skills in obviating the dangers that the natural world poses for him: his rule of law. For it allows him to lower his guard and to band with others of his species in maintaining a cooperative joint front against the natural threat. It is a joint front that is for the most part absent in one country in particular: Russia. Brazil is not far off, and in neither of them is this analysis what can be called comprehensive. Brazil is essentially lawless beyond the encircling band that marks its coastal cities. It is that which encourages the rapacious “pioneer” lifestyle in the Amazonian interior, where each makes his own laws, and defends what he cares about with savagery, for no Riot Act was ever read there. The supposed indigenous “savages”, as they were once dubbed, are the sole civilising element among the bandits that roam free among them, and take their lives for mere sport.
For many years, I have been interested enough to observe Brazil and, especially, Russia from afar and a conclusion long since dawned on me. The Russians, who, for all that, I admired intensely, must preserve warmth in the coldest of winters and survive throttling heat in the searing summer. But, all the while, they keep their guns trained on perhaps their greatest fiend: their fellow citizen.
Russia is ungovernable except it be done with an iron rod, a tight fist and a great deal of violence; these are aspects that debouch into a callous contempt for life, a zany mistrust of institutions and a view that progression, in order to be worthy of the name, must be constituted of power to extort and to procure benefit, however small the position held. Russia cannot exist without corruption. Corruption there is not entrenched or embedded; no, it is an integral function of that society, which knows no moral limits by which to set boundaries for conduct: one pushes one’s own limits until another’s are impinged upon, whereupon a fight ensues and he who lacks bravado loses his life. In Russia, recklessness pays. The unconscionable acts, of murder, torture, and rape, discovered in outlying districts of the Ukrainian capital upon their being liberated, do not come as any surprise to rural Russians.
It is the utter absence of functioning morality and judicial wisdom that propel this vicious circle. There are parts of Russia where the writ of the law simply doesn’t run: he who wields the biggest weapon rules the roost. Some there simply don’t understand this war: if Ukraine had only surrendered compliantly, then nobody would have ever died.
There is an irrefutability to this logic, although one must understand, and it can be hard to do that, but you must appreciate: it is predicated on an absence of any form of rule of law, which is the one feature of western nations and of the bulk of the world that keeps us all from each others’ throats. There, we rely on a fair judge being balanced enough to be capable of amicably settling the disputes that arise.
The Winter Palace in the then capital, Saint Petersburg, was stormed in 1917 and the success of what that started is down to one, single factor: a vacillating, weak-willed and, oh, so dear man, devoted far more to his darling wife and cherished children than to his entire nation, Czar Nicholas II. It was his failure, so easily won, that secured the success of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Any recent protests in today’s Russia have been, and are set to be, ineffectual (and that is to be kind). The same storming as in 1917 by the same crowd today would be annihilated within the hour and, seated regally at his breakfast table, dipping soldiers into his soft-boiled egg, Mr Putin would decorously dab the corner of his mouth as an equerry reported its outright defeat, with an admiring smile, of course. Well, a notion perhaps imbued with a hint of fantasy from another time (the storming, not the soft-boiled egg): nobody trusts anybody enough in Russia to even suggest revolution. Everyone, but everyone, looks over their shoulder in the Federation. And, with no trust on which to build, and no rule of law to ensure you a fair trial if you were to seek change by legitimate means (and what are they?), there is no home front to challenge the ruling elite, nor will there ever be. Never.
Russia is a country that sends satellites into space and fuels much of the world; and it is bogged down in a way of thinking that we in the west abandoned in 1600, and whose abandonment led to Hobbes setting about reordering the world in books like Leviathan. Russia is the supreme apogee and zenith of absolute government. And, as its citizenry is only too aware, their lives in that most absolute of absolutisms is, contrary to all Thomas Hobbes’ expectations, the nastiest, most brutish and shortest of all. Perhaps Hobbes forgot “a spoonful of benevolence, to help the medicine go down.”
Mr Putin rules Russia as it cannot but be ruled. Bravo: his one success. The mountebank can also tame bears.
His error is to think the rest of us can be ruled the same way.
Image: Imprisonment - as a bootcamp?
In Russia, a baleful stare is best avoided by crossing the road. These are prisoners at a former gulag in Krasnoyarsk. They’re being reformed to prepare them for the onward onslaught through life’s meanderings, which, admittedly, could now offer the exciting career prospect of moving forward with a rifle in their hands: on the Ukrainian front. There are two options of what to shoot on the Ukrainian front: that which is preferred in Moscow is to shoot the enemy. But, many are increasingly choosing option two, which is to shoot the guy giving you the orders. A twin-front dilemma for Wagner officers. They ask for it. But, otherwise, generally get the girl.
Private security is also a tempting option, and comes with benefits: a girl in every port, for some who sail that ocean. Being a mobster’s moll in Russia is paling in allure, as the downside of risking the man’s displeasure can increasingly entail receiving less a stern stare from his eyes and more the hot, sharp end of his Kalashnikov. In Russia, life is cheap; and cheap life is even cheaper.
This photograph dates from the year 2000 or 2001 and is by Carl De Keyzer, who is a better man than even Gunga Din: for seven months he lived among these cherubs in their incarceration and occasionally got an ocular reprimand for daring to snap their images. They are Russia’s future.