It has been 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It has been 104 years since the Russian Revolution, which gave birth to the Soviet Union.

The author published “Lessons from 100 Years of the Russian Revolution” (Kindle edition) in 2017. Here, I would like to summarize the current state of the Russian Federation, 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, based on the fourth section of this third chapter, “Putin as Russia’s Blatnoi.” In order to do so, it is necessary to analyze the situation from the perspective of “Russia’s Blatnoi.”

 

Russia’s Blatnoi by Gosuke Uchimura

In the past, my supervisor, Professor Yoshiaki Nishimura of Hitotsubashi University’s Institute of Economic Research, taught me the importance of analyzing “philosophy,” “theory,” “institutions,” and “reality” separately. This perspective still forms the backbone of my research.

The “reality” of the Soviet Union can never be understood by studying the “ideology” of socialism, the “theory” of Marxist economics, and the “system” of socialism as its practice. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, these ideas, theories, and institutions related to socialism seem to have disappeared into oblivion. However, if we have the perspective to look at the “reality” from the time of the Soviet Union, it may be a good tool to analyze the “reality” of the Russian Federation, the successor state after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I believe that, in order to analyze Russia in the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is good to use the book, Roshia Burai (Russia’s Blatnoi), written by Gosuke Uchimura, who was interned in Lhageri from 1945 to 1956, as a starting point. This is because it accurately captures the “reality” of the Soviet Union at the time. I am convinced that many people who are obsessed with “ideals,” “theories,” and “systems” are actually just “big-headed” and do not know the suffering of people living in “reality.” I am convinced that such people will never be able to understand the Soviet Union or today’s Russia.

 

“Blatnoi”

Uchimura’s breakthrough came in discovering in the “real” Soviet regime a characteristic that would lead to a Blatnoi.

In Russian, the term “blatnoi” or “vole” is used to describe an unreliable person. The latter is used in the form of “law-abiding bandit” and is close to the meaning of “bandit.” The former, according to Uchimura, means “a person of brat (connection),” “a person who is tied together,” or “a person of blood.” The word “brat” originated from the Jewish word “yiddish” and was first used in the 19th century in what is now Odessa, Ukraine. Later, it was Russianized, and the heads of the criminals created an organization that spanned all of Russia. The solidarity among the Blatnoi is strong, and they defend the Blatnoi, literally, with their lives. The Blatnoi group will continue to grow as the group recruits new members. However, they will not consider the offer on the part of the applicants. It is the existing Blatnoi who propose to join. The Blatnoi despise “law” and their own unwritten rules become the “law” for them.

Uchimura writes that the Soviet regime “has fought tirelessly since 1917 and continues to do so today” against the solid blatnoi world of well-organized solidarity. However, this does not mean that the Soviet regime and Blatnoi’s world are dissimilar. Rather, the two are remarkably similar.

Uchimura’s point is interesting: “Blatnoi believe that the law is there to protect their unique human dignity, but when you look at the principles that establish the law, the first thing you see is totalitarianism.” Blatnoi is characterized by totalitarianism, with no exceptions based on the principle of unanimity, and “once you enter a totalitarian society without recourse, you cannot leave it unless the whole is united.” That’s why the Soviet Union goes by the name of “Russia’s Blatnoi.”

It is the principle of non-production that underlies all of this. “Both the Blatnoi and the Communist are alike in the principle of non-production.” They also share the principle of unanimity. It is well known that the Soviet Union had a virtually unanimous “democracy” known as “democratic centralization.”

The origins of “Russia’s Blatnoi” are closely related to serfdom. The word “Cossack” comes from the Turkish word for “daredevil,” and the famous Don Cossacks were a group of armed Russian Orthodox Christians who fled the oppressive rule of Ivan IV. In Russia, freedom meant flight, and some of these fugitives never made a living again. According to Uchimura, this may have been the beginning of “Russia’s Blatnoi.” This runaway is stateless, so to speak, and loses any rights such as ownership. You could say they are the ones who have lost their human rights themselves.

 

Lenin was an “unemployed Russia’s Blatnoi” and Stalin was a gangster

What I would like you to understand next is the “reality” that the leaders of the Russian Communist Party were indeed “Russia’s Blatnoi.” Let me introduce Uchimura’s description:

 

“The gangster who violently plundered the bank was the Stalin of his youth (in June 1907, Stalin and his men attacked a carriage transporting huge sums of gold from the National Bank). With the tribute, Lenin lived abroad. Trotsky, who earned his living with a single pen, had a profession and could not tolerate Stalin’s tactics. Lenin and Stalin did not earn money with their own hands like Trotsky did, they did not have a profession, and they made revolution their only business. They called themselves professional revolutionaries or something like that, but there is no doubt that these “professional revolutionaries without jobs” are related to the “unemployed Russian bourgeoisie” in their beliefs and methods.”

 

“Lenin said, “There is no law that binds the Bolsheviks.” The Bolsheviks are the Communist Party of Russia, led by Lenin, and they do not recognize any laws when it comes to themselves. “All is forgiven,” he says, in the manner of Dostoevsky’s Smerdyakov. It is the Bolsheviks who make the absence of law, or lawlessness, the new law of the 20th century.”

 

The Chekists are at the heart of the “Russia’s Blatnoi”

Uchimura’s view of “reality” converges on the point that “Ham himself, the Chekist, is the bosom knife of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, the party of the unreliable.”

Let me explain. The Ham of the Old Testament is one of Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, famous for Noah’s Ark. Noah, who succeeded in growing grapes for the first time in the world, drinks so much that he ends up naked. When Ham saw this, he told his other brothers, but both Shem and Japheth turned their backs on their father’s abomination and did not face him, and also covered him with their upper garments. In other words, Ham manifested his rebellion against authority by exposing the blunders of authority figures. That is why, when Noah learned of the response of his sons, he cursed Canaan, the son of Ham, and predicted that Canaan’s descendants would be slaves of Shem and Japheth. The intention was to curse not Ham but his youngest son, Canaan, so that the descendants of Canaan born after Canaan would also be cursed.

Because of these circumstances, Ham is like “rude and iron-faced squared together.” On top of that, Uchimura declares that the aforementioned “Ham himself, the Chekist, is the bosom knife of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, the party of the unreliable.” In this context, “Chekist” means “Cheker’s person.” As we can see here, the core of “Russia’s Blatnoi” lies in the “Chekists,” the “Cheker’s people” who supported the Russian Communist Party behind the scenes. The “Cheker” is the “All-Russian Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissar Soviet on the Struggle against Counterrevolution and Sabotage,” set up by the People’s Commissar Soviet in December 1917 to combat anti-Bolshevik strikes and sabotage. The name would change many times after that, but the violent device would come to be known collectively as the “Cheker.” They were like the secret police, and this bloodline would later be passed down to the KGB and now the Federal Security Service (FSB).

 

Russia’s Blatnoi = Bolshevism

In Shinichiro Munechika’s Poetica/Economica, Munechika summarizes Uchimura’s monologue as follows:

 

“In my opinion, the “Russia’s Blatnoi” started with Bolshevism, which was the first to incarnate the dialectic of history in reality, the undefinable “people of freedom” wandering around Russia, and became the bearers of criminal socialism, which used violence and oppression through the order and justice of the “party,” and in the 21st century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they became the hard power of a small number of oligarchs, who cleverly monopolized “ownership” in a way that betrayed the basic ethos of ownership and production, and the Putin regime, which suppressed the oligarchs. In the twenty-first century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a small number of oligarchs who cleverly monopolized “ownership” in a way that turned the basic ethos of ownership and production inside out, and the hard power of the Putin regime to control the oligarchs. Isn’t this an irony to the painful dialectic or materialistic dialectic?”

 

In this sense, it is important to review the Russian Revolution from the standpoint of “Russia’s Blatnoi” in order to understand today’s Russia. However, this Blatnoi is not necessarily unique to Russia. In the French Revolution, too, there was an unreliable man named Robis Pierre.

 

What is Blat?

Next, I would like to consider “blat” as the origin of “blatnoi.” Blat refers to “the use of social networks and informal contacts to solve various life problems as well as to receive scarce goods and services (see Барсукова С.Ю. , «Блатной Советский Союз, или экономика взаимных услуг.», Неформальная экономика: от чтения к пониманию, или неформальная экономика в зеркале книг, 2012).”

In a sense, it is referring to mutual aid through the use of connections. Barsukova, who I quoted, considers blat to have become widespread during the Soviet era when the Soviets ruled, as “blat was a reflection of the structural constraints of Soviet society.” This was widespread in response to the realities of Soviet society, where, despite an approach that affirmed “design from above” based on planning, things did not work out as planned and informal connections had to be resorted to in order to mend the damage.

To be more specific, the “reality” of not being able to get the goods and services you actually need, even if you have the money, became a constant during the Soviet era, and the Soviet people were forced to make do with blat. When trying to prepare caviar for a birthday celebration, it is hard to find, so they manage to find it using a chain of connections. Or, when there was a desperate need for scarce medicines, asking blat for help was a much more reliable method than relying on official channels. Here was the “reality” of the people during the Soviet era.

It is important to note that the Soviet Union’s five-year and annual plans were enacted as laws, and their implementation took the form of law enforcement. In this sense, the people in a sense ignored such a law, because they knew that such a law could not be put into practice anyway. When the Bolsheviks, that is, Russia’s Blatnoi, came to rule through the Russian Revolution, they spread their characteristic disregard for the law throughout the country. From the unanimous principle of Blatnoi, the evil of non-reliance and the tradition of “lawlessness is law” spread throughout Soviet society.

 

  Putin= “Russia’s Blatnoi”

  As Munechika indicated, in the twenty-first century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Russia’s Blatnoi” has been linked to the hard power of a small number of oligarchs (new conglomerates) who have cleverly monopolized “ownership” in a way that turns the basic ethos of ownership and production inside out, and the Putin regime’s control over these oligarchs. For more information on the history of the Russian Mafia, see Russia: When the Russian Mafia Rules the World by Hiromi Teratani.

There is no shortage of evidence that Putin, a KGB graduate, is “Russia’s Blatnoi (For more information, please refer to my book, Russian President Vladimir Putin and His Friends: Background of My Abduction by the KGB).” His unreliability is evident in his “criminal” behavior. The fact that he managed to become president is merely a story of his success in covering up his past crimes.

It is precisely because he is such an “Russia’s Blatnoi” that Putin is now trying to rewrite even history. In an article, “Trying to Blur Memories of the Gulag, Russia Targets a Rights Group: Prosecutors are trying to shut down Memorial International, Russia’s most prominent human rights group, as the Kremlin moves to control the historical narrative of the Soviet Union,” published by the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/world/europe/russia-memorial-prosecution.html), the dirty tricks of the Kremlin have been introduced.

 

Two-sidedness of Blatnoi

Thirty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and yet the rule of the “Russia’s Blatnoi” seems to be the same as it has been since the Russian Revolution. How is this possible? In order to understand this, we must realize the two faces of Blatnoi.

In order to understand this duality, Blatnoi’s translation into the Japanese, the meaning of Burai, is helpful. Burai has the connotation of “independence and self-respect without depending on anyone,” so it can be said to have an inherently admirable aspect. This is an important point. Burai, that is, Blatnoi, is associated with the “spirit of independence,” which in itself may be praiseworthy. On the other hand, from the point of view of those whose existing order is disturbed by such a spirit, it is imagined as “evil.” In other words, Burai or Blatnoi has a duality that can be evaluated differently depending on one’s position.

One of the best novelists, Ryunosuke Akutagawa was well aware of this duality. In 1927, the year he committed suicide, a character who may have been Lenin is mentioned in “33 Heroes” in “The Life of an Idiot.” “A short Russian man was persistently climbing the mountain path…… Remembering the Russian who climbed that mountain path,” he wrote, and then the following poem was written:

 

You who have kept the Ten Commandments better than anyone else

　　You are the one who broke the Ten Commandments more than anyone else.

You loved the people more than anyone
You despised the people more than anyone else.

You were more idealistic than anyone else
You knew the reality better than anyone else.

 

In other words, Lenin, who was Burai or Blatnoi, had two sides to him. In other words, the Russian Revolution itself has this duality. It is this duality that has enabled Putin to maintain his position as president.

 

Russian Peculiarities

Finally, focusing on the “Russia’s Blatnoi” raises the question of whether there are peculiarities unique to Russians. So, by thinking about Russians themselves, I would like to think about the people who live the “reality” of Russia. The book that immediately comes to mind is “Russian Man” written by Toshihiko Izutsu, my beloved teacher. In the book, Izutsu writes as follows:

 

“For Western European intellectuals of the past few centuries, detachment from primordial nature has meant no loss of self whatsoever. On the contrary, it meant the self-establishment of man. Isn’t the true purpose of human beings to conquer the chaos of nature, which is irrational by nature, step by step and gradually turn it into a bright light and a rational order (cosmos)? The Russians are not like that. For them, a departure from primordial nature means a loss of self, a loss of humanity. Russians have a blood connection with Russian nature and Russian black soil. Without it, they are no longer Russians or anything else. This is where the deep-seated rebellion of the Russian people against Western culture comes from. They feel the need for culture more acutely than anyone else, and they crave it, but at the same time they hate it and cannot help but rebel against it. This attitude is unique to Russia. In a country like this, Western culture and humanism cannot bring happiness to the people.”

 

This unique Russian sensibility is brought about by the raw joy of the Russian people, who dance and sing without thinking, even in the midst of a blizzard, in the extreme cold of Siberia, where even tears freeze. It “reminds me of the fierce oblivion of a person possessed by an evil spirit,” says Izutsu. Hence, this joy of the Russians is not cheerful, but unusually gloomy. The joy of Russian man is the joy of nature’s life, his anger is the anger of nature itself, and his melancholy is the melancholy of nature itself.

Behind the apocalyptic spirit of the Russian people is the tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church, which fully cooperated with the Czar, believing that Russia is the place of the coming Second Coming of Christ and that Russia will save the world. At the time of the Russian Revolution, that sense of messianic mission to become the savior (messiah) of all mankind in the world was manifested through “faith” in communism as messianism for the salvation of mankind, with Russia as the central axis.

 

“Salvation through obedience” = “Kenosis”

What is very important here is the idea of “kenosis,” the idea that “obedience” (slavery) leads to “salvation.” Let me explain it in simple terms. In Orthodoxy, God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit (the Trinity) make up God. The Holy Spirit is the medium that connects God and man, and it is through the Holy Spirit that Jesus is said to have dwelt in the body of the virgin Mary. In Orthodox Christianity, the Holy Spirit is said to come from the Father, so the order of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is clear, but Russians have a strong affinity for Christ in human form. The unusual obedience to the human Christ is similar to the spirit of slavery to the Czar and the absolute leader, Stalin. This is what might be called the kenosis temperament of the Russian people.

What is noteworthy at this point is that salvation in the sense of kenosis is possible without the mediation of atonement or repentance. That would mean that the salvation that is supposed to come from God could be usurped by humans. It would also not preclude the possibility that slavery to Lenin or Stalin, rather than obedience to God, could lead to salvation. What this means is that the Russians’ unique way of life is to use submission as a lever to try to stay on earth. The aforementioned Shinichiro Munechika writes as follows:

“By passively accepting the unreasonable reality, there is no other way but to go through it, and on the other side, the harsh reality will appear again. However, the world established by being thoroughly passive allows for an everyday anecdote (Russian small talk). Just as the “laws” of the Revolution masqueraded as Christianity, so the Ironies masquerade as jokes!”

The reason this joke can be a joke is that the Russian Revolution was accomplished by a “Russia’s Blatnoi” who is far from being a god. The fact that the peculiarity of Russia as “Russia’s Blatnoi” reached the position of “God” through the unique spirit of Russian people called kenosis has continued to influence Russia since then. This is not an exaggeration.

Before Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin decides to preserve his corpse as an immortal body for Lenin worship as a decision of the Party Central Committee. You could say, “We have created an immortal Marxist god (see Radzinsky, Edvard, Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives, 1996).” This idea was supported by a gaze that regarded the Communist Party as the same as the Church. Hence, Radzinsky makes the following interesting points:

 

“Their party, like the church, still remains sacred even when its servants make mistakes. This is because at the foundation of the Party, as in the case of the Church, is set the Marxist scripture, which does not allow the Party as a whole to err, and does not allow sinful partisans to change its sacred essence.”

Furthermore, Stalin also reached the status of a “god.” Stalin, who died in March 1953, was enshrined in the Lenin Mausoleum alongside the doll-like Lenin for eight years until 1961. Khrushchev, known for his criticism of Stalin, succeeded in burying Stalin in a separate tomb from this mausoleum, but Boris Yeltsin, who collapsed the Soviet Union, did not finally get around to demolishing Lenin’s mausoleum. In 1991, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sapchak, proposed that Lenin be buried in St. Petersburg, where his mother and others are buried. However, Yeltsin was unable to achieve this due to the militant opposition of the remnants of the Communist Party, who worshipped Lenin as if he were a god. In 1999, during his second term as president, a clear plan for Lenin’s burial in St. Petersburg would be prepared. However, this plan would eventually be abandoned.

I wonder if this kind of kenosis still exists among many Russians in the 21st century. From the perspective of Russia’s history of “reality,” it is clear that the slavish spirit of the Russian people may turn to Putin, the “Russia’s Blatnoi.” This is because even 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Russian people” are not likely to change so easily.