While Russia increases its presence in Africa and takes upon itself the role of the Global South’s defender, inside the country an internal colonization is unfolding, one of the main instruments for which is becoming a targeted deprivation of civil and political rights. How is the Russian government creating shadow doubles for active social activists? For what purpose has the government decided to give up a monopoly on violence and what is the benefit to outsource it? Founder of project «Arctida» Ilya Shumanov spoke about this and more at a seminar of the School of Civic Education in Segovia.
Recently I came back from Senegal, where I performed and talked to people about how Russia, using the premise of an anti-colonial agenda, and trying to press on painful pressure points—linked to French and English heritage—promotes its interests in the Sahel, a region of the African continent. This topic greatly worries local communities. Walking around Dakar, I counted no less than ten billboards of Russia Today—this speaks to the fact that Russia dedicates more and more of its attention to Africa. And this brings results: over the last four years, at least three countries in the Sahel have changed their orientation in a pro-Russian direction.
At the same time, in Russia itself colonialism hasn’t gone anywhere. It simply exists in a form that external observers least expect to see—a harsh internal colonization, which goes hand in hand with constructing a system of legal exclusions.
In today’s Russia, a mass nomenclature of labels exists, affecting the rights of both organizations and every-day citizens. Tacit categories exist—for example «suspicious people,» «wrong citizens,» who do not support Vladimir Putin. A person like this has no formal status, but he is already considered as a potential threat—for example, on the border, if an officer sees him following the «wrong» media. Instantaneously this forces the citizen out of the legal field and brings about a flurry of inspections. If we look at this process as a ladder of repressions, then its first, most wide-spread steps have become formal designations of «foreign agent» and «undesirable organization,» after which follows an inclusion in lists of «extremists and terrorists.» The highest level of this «abnormality» is what happened to Alexander Litvinenko: extrajudicial execution, which happens abroad to so-called traitors.
The goal of all these statuses is not just to punish but to create a system of exclusion, when a person, finding themselves on this ladder, gradually begins losing their rights, and participation in society simply stops being possible. Max Weber wrote of governments as a structure that has a monopoly over legitimate violence. In modern Russia the government has gone further: it constructs a monopoly on exclusion from life, formalized through legal mechanisms. Repressive logic here holds through a formula of political segregation.
This logic now seems like an every-day norm, but if you understand it, then every representative of society has their own shadow double. This double very easily fits into a logic that searches for enemies, escalation, exclusion and persecution. An Indigenous people’s activist—a «separatist,» infringing on sovereignty. Ecologist? «A threat to economic development,» interfering in business operations. Anti-war, pacifist position? «Discreditation of the army.» Immigrants also have a shadow double—a traitor; each person who went abroad for the government is a «traitor.» I do not speak even about the LGBTQ+ community: in this logic all of them are «destroyers of traditional values» and members of «extremist movements.»
Each rung of this ladder of escalation and exclusion takes away concrete rights. A foreign agent is forbidden to teach, to be elected, to observe elections, to do advertising, to write books, to publish something on social media with the label. And, of course, this list of limitations is not closed, it will grow further. Each status has its protocols, respective registries, rules for managing these registries and rules for removal from them. Everything is very formal and regulated, which creates an appearance of lawfulness, even though there is little lawful in the actions of the Russian government. Law transmutes from defending human rights into a direction of excluding human and civic rights. In essence, the government stops acknowledging that a human is a subject with rights.
I wondered: where did a similar system already exist before Russia? The most straightforward point of departure for my search turned out to be Nazi Germany. One thinker of a fascist persuasion, Carl Schmitt, standing at the origins of the Third Reich’s ideology, already in 1936 proposed to label creations and quotations of European authors. At that moment he was afflicted by great criticism from the side of German government officials for opportunism. But the point here is that an attempt to designate a person as an enemy begins first and foremost from language. According to Schmitt’s theory, the sovereign is he who makes a decision in a state of exception, meaning that they possess power to create an exception from the rules. This logic is visible in the Russian context, when the government creates a set of exclusions. And those who have the lever that puts into motion the creation of these exclusions, in essence, are the government.
In the creation of these exclusions there is also a colonial logic: in the Russian political system, the block related to Indigenous people has a double status. On the one hand, the government supports and promotes cultural diversity, considering them as a sort of ethnographic subject. Yet, as soon as real political rights come into question—rights to land, to self-determination, to ecological defense of their regions—their subjectivity is harshly denied. Culture is accepted, but political subjectivity—no. Few remember this, but today around 100 Indigenous initiatives in Russia are labeled as terroristic and extremist. In this sense, for the government there is no difference: from the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, from the Sakha Republic, from the Far East, from Buryatia—it does not matter what kind of initiative. If it is independent, if it wants to be not only ethnographic but also political and oppose the Russian government, it becomes an object of persecution and exclusion.
Concurrently, in Russia a tendency has come about of delegating functions of government violence to proto-governmental or non-state actors. Russia here is not unique, but it seems to me it seems to be a very interesting phenomenon simply due to the fact that formerly, in Russia, everything was held together by very harsh government enforcement. With the emergence of PMC «Wagner,» «The Russian Community,» and other right-aligned forces, this changed. Why is this happening? First and foremost because the fact of violence today is unacceptable for most of Russian society, and we consider it to be a certain alien occurrence. And when the government says «this is not us, it is some community representatives who begin provoking and creating acts of violence in relation to disagreeing and other groups,» it withdraws any responsibility from these actions. Nothing can be demanded of the government in this situation.
All of these communities act as a fill-in for the Russian government, so that the costs of acts of violence are not blamed on the government and so that trust in institutions, which is already uprooted, does not degrade further. Besides this, the appearance of such pro-government activists allows those in power to test the limits of acceptable violence. This means that a certain street initiative can be designated as radical and recalled by the government if needed, without any recognition of it as related to the government itself.
Not so long ago I did a big report-investigation for the BBC, connected precisely to the «Russian Community,» an ultranationalist movement in Russia, which now exists practically in all regions. Of course, it is coordinated by the Russian government. But until our investigation it was not clear who was funding these projects. «Russian Community» really wanted to seem as a bottom-up initiative, which gathers 50 rubles from everyone, and this gives it the possibility to exist. But we found out that behind this stands a sizable Russian businessman Igor Khudokormov—one of the biggest latifundists and agricultural entrepreneurs, sometimes called the «sugar king» of Russia. He is very close to the family of Nikolai Patrushev, an advisor of the president, who was in charge of the FSB for a long time and was Secretary of the Security Council.
When we see that millions of rubles from commercial institutions, connected with security services, go to right-radical initiatives, we understand that this is the form of the government’s support and development of ultraright conceptions and structures. The ultraright are very convenient allies for the Russian government, because they create an image of an enemy from below. It is very convenient to say: «We did not conjure this, the people ask for this. The people ask to punish LGBTQ activists, to crash the party; the people ask to stop publishing books of foreign agents.» It is a means of creating a surrogate of civil society, a civil society of loyal activists and radical public figures.
More than that, I will risk to assume that these structures are developing for the future as well—for the finale of the war. The government will have to face hundreds of thousands of men, coming back from the front. These people with heavy combat experience, who know how to and are ready to kill—it will be necessary to institutionalize them somehow, so that they remain manageable. Ultraright organizations are ready-made cells for the utilization and control of this aggressive passionarity. It is possible that in front of us is a prototype for a future ultraright party of veterans.
To sum up, the concept of exclusion as a model is related to the fact that the government is delegating violence and activity. In this sense, while independent citizens are forced to give up their subjectivity and become in the eyes of the law «images of enemies,» ultraright organizations function as proxy structures—or simulacra of civil society—that start to gain these rights and power. About these shadow functionaries we speak rarely as an independent occurrence. Yet, precisely they can, at some moment, get out of control and become the Russian government.
Translated to English by the School’s summer fellow and Yale University student Yehor Rubanov