Russia's Permanent Opposition State

The Liberals and the Cultural Industrial Complex

In the last part, we talked about Putin’s inner circle and friends, which we referred to as the Not-So-Deep State, because it’s really just an open secret to anyone who reads tabloids in Russia. Even grannies enjoy talking about who is who in the wider elite circle amongst themselves. That is, who stole from who, whose daughter is marrying whose son, whoses crashed whoses yacht and how many whookers may or may not have died onboard.

BTW: is it who’s or whose or whoses or whookers?

I would liken the Permanent Opposition to the GOP in America, which are a group of second-class elites, really. I would only add the qualifier that, in Russia, the Opposition is far more feral and motivated to fight against their political opponents that in the US. There also used to be far more in common, before the SMO anyways, between the two/three main factions within Russian than you would assume at first.

For example, regardless of whether or not a member of the upper crust came out as pro or anti-SMO, all of them lived together in central Moscow or in their suped-out dachas in its prestigious suburbs. Their kids studied together, partied together, married one another, cheated on one another, divorced one another, etc. Their parents also work together in various ministries, institutes and so on as well. When they vacation, they even stay at the same fancy hotels in Europe and wear the same fancy suits, watches, and drive the same imported cars.

So you have FSB kids grow up rubbing shoulders with rich people’s families, Chechen warlords’ second families, visiting oligarchs from Europe, artists, entertainers, solicitors and so on. This is done deliberately - it is by design. Also by design: Russia’s golden youth spent most of its years melting their brains with party drugs and are now either safely absconded to the West or stuck getting high in Moscow instead.

Fact is: They’d all rather be in Ibiza or following some group on tour while nursing their mental and emotional problems - all of it a result from guilty consciousnesses really. Self-loathing inflicted on them by the inherited sins of previous generations, or just negligent parenting which encouraged bad habits and personal weakness, which then led to self-loathing that way. You know, I ought to have become a psychologist instead of a bum-blogger. If I want to make a change, I ought to be targeting the youth. The only problem is that below 30s are functionally illiterate nowadays - they just take drugs and complain to their shrinks while feeding the archonic Dementors that stalk them with their despair.

That’s where I would swoop in.

And there’s also a lot of money to be made turning rich kids against their parents. Not that they need much prodding. But more importantly, I could be inculcating an entire generation of sleeper-cell mazhor generational extremists with my propaganda.

Sadly, I took a wrong turn somewhere in life.

And there they are, poised to inherit the country, if it doesn’t collapse first. Not that that any of them wants it though. I have yet to meet anyone from central Moscow who didn’t absolutely loath their country and its people with a burning kind of racism that only Liberal elitism is able to produce. Naturally, they seem drawn to the more cultural professions. Russia’s golden youth predominantly “works” as cultural influencers on social media where they promote tolerance and decadence and enforce it as the overarching supreme moral value to which all the other Russian youth ought to aspire to. They use their obscene wealth and lifestyles as a form of social proof and to get ahead on social media.

And do you know who gets paid next-to-nothing, is forced to travel and live across dilapidated 2nd and 3rd-tier cities with wife and kids in tow, and then asked to lay down their lives to defend their country at the snap of a pair of fingers?

Why, that would be the military caste, of course.

Yes, the Authoritarian-Fascists who are expected to dedicate their lives to their country and then accused of being uncouth, of holding the wrong, intolerant and reactionary views, and of looting the dishwashers from Ukraine by first NAFO and then the media elite of the same country they are supposedly fighting for.

And we all know that good can easily be spotted in society by the attendant qualities of lavishness, opulence and conspicuous excess. To take cue from Protestantism and the Old Testament, decadence is simply proof that God loves you more. I cannot help but agree that a certain god does indeed seem to lavish his followers with material blessings the more absolutely they dedicate themselves to serving his agenda and taking leave of their better senses.

Furthermore, the inter-caste affinity of the elites in Russia (or in most countries probably) is incomparable to the state of polarization that exists among the peasant population in America, where the average people seem pretty damn close to killing one another over what amounts to two conflicting and incompatible moral codes. One group has adapted to and adopted the new moral code promoted by the cultural elites while the other is stuck on an older version of the code and refuses to allow a value system reset and update to get up to speed on the latest morality operating system.

But the elite seems to live by its own moral code and has a lot more class solidarity than you or I.

See, if I like Nationalism, and you like, say, Libertarianism, this means that we are then supposed to become implacable and irreconcilable enemies. Otherwise, we are not principled people, see? Of course, neither you nor I actually have the means to implement either Nationalism or Libertarianism or whatever. We also actually have a lot more in common with one another than we would want to admit because we are both powerless peasants. But, for some reason or other, we seem very keen to ignore all that and stand with our knives at each other’s throats while our social betters seem to pursue a cooperation, instead of a competition strategy.

I think we could learn a thing or two from our betters, but then come to think of it, squabbling with Libertarians on the internet is a lot of fun. And we’ve got nothing better to do anyways. So let’s have at it then.

**

Since the not-war began, we’ve seen some of the more egregious Oppositionists flee the country. It has been a mass exodus, in fact.

Case in point: Prices for rent in Moscow and prices on apartments seem to have gone down for once. Meanwhile, they’ve sky-rocketed in places like Tbilisi. The same thing happened in Minsk while I was there in the aftermath of what has been dubbed by experts as the “Vagina Vostaniya of 2019”. So, the second-class elite exodus in Minsk started before it did in Moscow. But that didn’t stop my sonofabitch landlord from trying to jack up my rates. He was an Oppositionist importing Polish wares, so maybe that had something to do with it. I couldn’t believe his gall and promptly moved into a new place. Then, my next landlord accused me of stealing and demanded I pay him more money or else. All this makes me think that the landlords have a lot in common with one another as well …

Unlike their “opponents” in the Not-So-Deep State, the Permanent Opposition invests heavily into the media. They completely dominate the Cultural Industrial Complex. Museums, TV channels, print and online journals, social media and so on. Being connected to other rich people in Moscow is enough of a reason to get invited on to a political talk show in many cases. Perhaps not onto primetime Channel 1, but still.

And do you know who you will never see in Russia’s media?

Members of the patriotic bloc, actual combat veterans, pretty much anyone with any military background whatsoever. The Not-War has been going on for a year now, and yet, you’d never see anyone who served in Afghanistan or Chechnya called on to share their expertise about soldiering and war. This is probably because these two and a half previous wars were Not-Wars during their time as well. Just policing operations against a few bad apples in the neighborhood, you see. The best film about Chechnya, War, was banned for many years because it was seen as insensitive to Chechens. The director titled it “War” because Chechnya, in official propaganda, was a Not-War, just like this one. He died, suddenly of a heart attack in St. Petersburg. There have been no good films in Russia since.

Anyways, for some reason, the Russian government has been loath to admit that it has enemies that want to destroy it. Perhaps it is too bourgeois or something, that kind of thinking.

Perhaps it is not in line with Our Values. Perhaps it is not Who We Are. And who are we as members of the Rossiyan State? Well we are Justice-Freedom-Equality-Cheburashka-Values-Citizens-Good. And our enemies are just big meanies who watch Looney Tunes, which encourage bad values in the children, which is why the Anglo-West-Crusader-Nazis wants to ban Cheburashka.

I wish I was kidding.

But this is, indeed, the kind of rhetoric that works on and is used on old-timers in Russia. You really have to understand the SovokMindset.exe to make sense of it. Basically, despite what you might think of the USSR, its citizens were raised to be naive children about the world and their place in it. They were not taught at an early age to prepare for a Communist Jihad and to file their teeth down to sharp needles. Far from it, they were told that soon the whole would would be voluntarily holding hands and singing Kumbaya for Communism and that so long as the whole world was forced to watch Soviet cartoons, violence could be done away with once and for all.

Again, I am neither kidding nor exaggerating.

The current Not-So-Deep State, in contrast, does not invest much into new cultural products. They think that “soft” power is inferior to the “real” power that controlling government monopolies on raw resources, large factories and so on brings them. That is why, despite the fact that the Not-So-Deep State controls the lion’s share of Russia’s political and economic power, the media is so implacably hostile to many of the key power-holders in Russian society, including Putin himself.

That is also why Russian media outreach to the West is so subpar.

The Permanent Opposition has also started couching it’s opposition to the Not-So-Deep State in SJW language since about 2016 i.e., the language of Liberalism Militant. Thankfully, because of the SMO, the Russian government clamped down on much of this activity. It is less because the government cares about the future and what kind of messaging is imprinted on the youth’s impressionable minds as it is a skin-saving measure to undermine their political opponents, who began openly mobilizing even before the SMO to take to the streets and overthrow the current government.

Western media, however, is still allowed to operate more-or-less freely.

Furthermore, despite all the hullabaloo about promoting anti-Western values, there have been no serious attempts to create any such media products, other than a re-vamped Cheburashka, of course.

Cheburashka 2: Return From Tel-Aviv

The notable exception, is, of course, Wagner, which promotes itself and its own brand of Patriotism Militant with awesome films.

But other than that, in terms of the culture war, the Not-So-Deep State thinks that such things are beneath their concern and that Soviet cartoons can just be re-run on occasion to placate the sovoks.

As a result, the youth have, even if they are not planning on joining another #FreeNavalny protest in Moscow any time soon, by and large imbibed NeoLiberalism.exe into their soft malleable heads. And if nothing else occurs between now and Putin retiring, then the Permanent Opposition will seize power eventually because they have the 35 and below age demographic firmly in their camp.

There are, of course, counter-cultural youth movements in Russia as well.

But they are smaller than the one in the US, where, through guerrilla meme warfare, a sizeable portion of young men have been exposed to strongly reactionary views on the internet. Many of these Russians have been affected by content coming out of America - in this case, the positive kind. But the fact of the matter is that we have not been as successful among the youth as in the West. This is partially because the reigning political elites are blatantly inept and corrupt but also successfully associated with the Right by their enemies who characterize them as Fascists or Communists or both. Just like it was trendy to be a Liberal in America in the 00s because of how inept and blatantly corrupt and incompetent Bush II was, the same situation exists vis a vis the Kremlin in Russia.

To summarize:

• Permanent Opposition are not underground rebels, but second-tier elites

• Permanent Opposition is pro-West, uses Western talking points against Putin and friends

• They have significant media and cultural clout and continue to invest into these spheres, unlike their opponents

• Do not control key industries, which have been taken over by the Not-So-Deep State

• Were tolerated by the government for decades, only recently have there been clamp-downs

I’ve written so much about Russia’s Permanent Opposition Liberals before that whatever I didn’t cover here, I’ve surely covered on the blog before.

Shorthand translation: They would be the first to be upset if the country got richer and happier. Who would the be able to hate and spit on and mock? There is only one kind of creature that hates Russia with all of its being. - D on Liberals.

In fact, I call them the Permanent Opposition because they have dogged Russia for more than a century now, always yapping and growling and pissing themselves with displeasure at how illiberal and reactionary the country and the people in it have always been.

If you’re new here, take a moment to scroll through the archives before saying that you’re confused and can’t follow. I can’t rehash every single term or overarching theme in every single post. But you will find other posts that go into all the smaller points I make in these larger, more general posts in greater detail.

Also, if you don’t support me as a paid sub, I’d like to ask you to share this or another one of my pieces on social media, the comments section of a Russia blog or just among friends. Growth since New Year’s has been slow and it’s because I haven’t been getting reposted anywhere anymore.

I think it’s because people have either gotten bored waiting for General Winter Offensive to strike or got it into their heads that Russia already won the war or something equally inane and so have declared victory and moved on. Who knows.

Share my stuff, please, and you’ll have my gratitude.