Brain intervention
What's Behind Zakhar Prilepin's "ABCs of Intervention"
Author: Andrey Filimonov
At the Moscow Book Fair (MMKF-26), writer Zakhar Prilepin presented his new book, "The ABCs of Intervention." The title is provocative and should please the commander-in-chief. During the presentation, the writer declared that it would be a good idea to annex "a couple of former Soviet republics" to Russia because "we're running out of Russian men" and there's no one left to fight Ukraine. The former policeman didn't even try to disguise the simple logic of a cannibal: land is needed because it contains bodies that can be lined up and sent to slaughter.
From "Great Citizen" to "We Can Do It Again"
Many were immediately reminded of the 1937 Soviet film "The Great Citizen," in which the main character, Comrade Shakhov, proclaims from the podium at a rally how, in a few years, "after a good war," the Soviet Union will expand to "thirty or forty republics." World War II soon broke out, and after its conclusion, this episode was cut from the film. Comrade Shakhov's fantasies sounded too cynical against the backdrop of tens of millions killed.
Just half a century later, the Russian state began funding the “we can do it again” project, and writers emerged who began to fight for such funding.
Prilepin's new book is written to justify aggression against Ukraine and any other Russian aggression that may begin in the near future.
What is written in the "ABCs of Intervention"
Formally, "The ABCs of Intervention" talks about Russia's enemies, about invaders who come "to rob and kill." It's written right there: "The British and Americans came, killed, and robbed, more than once. We didn't do that to them, but they did that to us."
At the presentation, Prilepin said his father was a historian. This was probably intended to inspire confidence in the author's account. However, the passage about Americans repeatedly coming to Rus' to plunder allows one to define Azbuka's genre as conspiracy fantasy beyond good and evil. And Prilepin's new book is full of such gems:
- In 1918, Lenin proposed that the Academy of Sciences engage in nuclear energy.
- The shells for our artillery that liberated Donbass—in fact, Lenin also delivered them…
- Where monuments to Lenin are torn down, sooner or later people come to the Russian Church for a Russian priest...
The book's central idea is simple: the West is evil, Russia is good, and goodness, according to Lenin, must be achieved through the use of fists. Yet the author articulates virtually no original ideas; he simply stands on the shoulders of the giants of reactionary Russian thought.
Dostoevsky and Messianism: "Constantinople must be ours"
Let's play our trump cards. In his Pushkin speech, Fyodor Dostoevsky uttered beautiful words about the "universal responsiveness" of the Russian people, and in "A Writer's Diary," he interpreted this responsiveness as the right of the strongest: if we understand everyone better than anyone else, then we must rule over everyone else. And Constantinople must be ours! Dostoevsky's messianism grants a license to shoot our neighbors: if you have a special mission, then others, by definition, cannot have one, and these others have no say.
"How can Russia share in the possession of Constantinople on an equal footing with the Slavs if Russia is unequal to them in every respect—both to each nation individually and to all of them taken together? The giant Gulliver could, if he so desired, assure the Lilliputians that he is their equal in every respect, but that would be patently absurd. Constantinople must be ours, conquered by us, Russians, from the Turks, and remain ours forever."
F. M. Dostoevsky. "A Writer's Diary." November 1877
Leontyev and Pobedonostsev: "Freezing Russia"
Another inspiration for Prilepin and all the ardent patriots of the rear was Konstantin Leontiev, a bard of empire who, in Berdyaev's words, harbored an aesthetic hatred of democracy with its ideal of universal well-being. At the same time, Leontiev, as an aesthete, valued national diversity and admired the way dozens of peoples, each with their own traditions, languages, and faiths, coexisted within the Russian Empire. But he valued it purely as ornament. For him, small nations, like the pattern on a royal caftan, should know their place. And if they suddenly wish to be not a folk ensemble but a political entity, then, according to Leontiev, this is a symptom of decay, from which only "freezing Russia" can save. It is desirable that nothing stir in the country without permission from above. Then it will be beautiful. Like Byzantium. Or under Putin.
Incidentally, Nikolai Berdyaev himself noted that "poor Leontiev is always confused with someone else." So the phrase about freezing is often attributed to Konstantin Pobedonostsev. However, the Chief Prosecutor of the Synod did not use such poetic imagery, as he was an official working on how to govern an empire in which a third of the population was non-Russian, and almost half was "non-Russian." The Chief Prosecutor's solution was wholesale Russification and disdain for any representative institutions, which Pobedonostsev called "the great lie of our time."
"Parliament is an institution that serves to satisfy the personal ambition and vanity, and the personal interests of representatives... parliamentarism is the triumph of egoism... the comedy of elections continues to deceive humanity and is considered an institution that crowns the state building... Miserable humanity!" K. Pobedonostsev. "The Great Lie of Our Time." 1896
Fet and the "free song"
For some reason, all Russian reactionaries, both in the 19th century and today, look down on democratic societies as the embodiment of vulgarity. Perhaps this arrogance makes them, in their own eyes, aristocrats of the spirit. These are precisely the sentiments expressed in the poetry of the poet Afanasy Fet, a staunch opponent of the abolition of serfdom. He was friends with Leontyev and shared the chief prosecutor Pobedonostsev's horror at the thought of granting peasants the right to vote. Fet once wrote a vicious poem, "Pseudo-Poet," directed against Nekrasov and civic poetry in general. It ends with the stanza:
Did not ascend piously
You are in that freshening darkness,
Where only selfless freedom exists
Free song to the eagle.
Like, how can you, a "liberal," compare to our spiritual heights? It's clear which eagle is meant. The two-headed one. It's funny how the word "bullshit" is clearly heard in the second line, as if the language itself is mocking the imperial pathos.
Prokhanov and the "Symphony of the Fifth Empire"
However, Russian patriots have never been able to dispense with pathos, verging on outrage. And here, unrivaled is the "nightingale of the General Staff," Alexander Prokhanov, who, in the glamorous 2000s, published his book "Symphony of the Fifth Empire," which explains that the Russian state is a mystical body that requires constant growth, lest it begin to rot and decay. Prokhanov's metaphysics of empire as a growing organism allows Prilepin and other pioneers of the "Russian Spring" to avoid even deigning to explain why "new territories" are needed. Because only in this way, "through great labors," can the "historical creativity" of the Russian people be realized!
Prokhanov's "symphony" is a jumbled mess—Alexander Nevsky and Marshal Zhukov, Dmitry Donskoy and Shoigu, Orthodoxy and the atomic bomb, the Reds and the Whites, Donetsk and Kitezhgrad, Patriarch Nikon and United Russia. Some might say this is madness and delirium. But the author counters: it's a "mystery." And also "messianism" and a "special path." And the "iron curtain" was needed to protect the Soviet paradise from Western rot. It's written right there:
“The Russian otherworldly existence assumed that Russia was a heavenly country, that it was not captured by the world’s corruption, and that it would build the world according to the blueprints of the Kingdom of Heaven.”
In other words, the ballistic missiles and "shahids" flying into Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities at night are imbued with Russian spirituality. Unlike microchips, Russia has plenty of this component.
Eduard Limonov: The Teacher Who Wanted Northern Kazakhstan
Zakhar Prilepin's immediate mentor was Eduard Limonov, the founder of the National Bolshevik Party, who served two years in prison in the early 2000s for plotting an invasion of Kazakhstan. At the time, this was an overly bold idea for Putin's fledgling regime. Prilepin served as Limonov's subordinate, and this largely shaped his worldview. Prilepin himself formulated his program of territorial expansion with extreme specificity and breadth. In an interview with Yuri Dud, he said: "Crimea isn't enough for us. We need northern Kazakhstan, we need the entire Donbas." Even earlier, in 2014, he publicly declared that northern Kazakhstan was "Russian land," prompting the Kazakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue an official note of protest.
Now, after his teacher's departure, Prilepin is carrying on his ideas, risking nothing. Late Putinism encourages those who threaten Russia's neighbors with invasion.
Empire as a Matter of Faith: What They Taught in School
Admiration for the empire's size was instilled in the minds of Soviet children from the 5th grade, when they were given the textbook "Stories on the History of the USSR from Ancient Times."
There were color maps showing the rapid and steady expansion of the Muscovite kingdom in all directions of the world.
Peter the Great cut a window to Europe. The key word: cut. Russia needed the Caucasus after its alliance with Georgia. It was imperative to occupy the lands dividing the two parts of the empire. To fill, so to speak, the territorial gap. The Soviet-Finnish War aimed to push the state border further away from Leningrad—to secure the city. Secure it from whom? And why the peace-loving Soviet state had so many enemies—nobody explained to schoolchildren.
Of course, Prilepin can't explain this either. Because it's not a matter for reflection, but a matter of faith. The first letter of the "ABCs of Intervention" asserts the necessity of seizing foreign land because it's necessary.
The trick is that the old idea is being presented in a particularly brazen manner. Dostoevsky was embarrassed and wrote about messianism. Leontiev wrote about Byzantium. Even Lenin was embarrassed and wrote about the right of nations to self-determination. And Prilepin says something that used to be indecent to say out loud: "We're running out of Russian peasants." Such an intervention. Straight to the brain.
1916: How the attempt to exploit the "native resource" ended
It's strange, of course, that his father, the historian, didn't tell Zakhar about the outcome of one such attempt to use "native resources" for military purposes. This happened at the height of World War I. In 1916, Nicholas II signed a decree mobilizing male "foreign" people for rear-echelon work, digging trenches in the frontline zone. They planned to mobilize 250 men from the Turkestan region and 230 from the Steppe region.
The Kazakh steppe and Semirechye were gradually annexed by the empire, beginning in the mid-18th century, and by the end of the 19th century, a standard colonial administration—counties, governors, and a police department—had been established there. But throughout this period, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz were not drafted into the army, because the empire did not trust non-Kazakhs with weapons. Only in the third year of the war, when there simply weren't enough men, did the government decide to change its policy toward non-Kazakhs.
And immediately received an uprising in response.
On July 4, 1916, the first unrest began in Khujand. A week later, a mob killed the volost governor in the Altyn-Kul volost of the Andijan district. By the end of July, pogroms against colonial authorities numbered in the dozens: 25 uprisings occurred in the Samarkand region, 20 in the Syrdarya region, and 86 in the Fergana region.
In the Semirechye region, the uprising takes the form of a full-fledged war: Kyrgyz troops attack Russian settler settlements and the district town of Przhevalsk (present-day Karakol). Fighting rages on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. On July 17, martial law is declared in Turkestan.
By November, the rebels in the region were estimated to number 50. They were confronted by 30 soldiers with machine guns and artillery. General Kuropatkin was in charge of the punitive operations. His orders for the district included a list of villages in the Semirechye region devastated by troops. Following the suppression, some lands previously belonging to Kyrgyz and Kazakh volosts were transferred to newly established Cossack villages.
What followed next is what has since been called "urkun"—flight—in Kyrgyz. Tens of thousands of Kyrgyz families with their livestock flee through the Tien Shan passes to China, because the main roads are already blocked by troops. Near the village of Tosor on Lake Issyk-Kul, there is a tract called Kyrgyz-Sai, where, according to family memory, almost the entire Chirkey clan, traveling along this route, perished. Today, approximately 170 ethnic Kyrgyz live in Xinjiang—the descendants of those who fled their native lands after the uprising.
The last pockets of resistance in Central Asia were suppressed in January 1917.
And just a month later the Russian Empire ceased to exist.