23.07.2007 Chekism: Its Genesis and Evolution. Culture and devilry. Dull Septennium

Today we can only speculate on the nature of Chekism. One of the speculations was suggested by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, when he wrote about “the fiends”. It is a mythopoetical image, but what reality stands behind it? Apparently, there are levels of being still unknown to us, including those related to collective unconscious. It is highly probable that peculiar forms of mental life do exist. Karl Gustav Jung called these the archetypes. Among them there may be Dostoyevsky’s fiends. Let’s call them archetypes of non-existence. Taking root in individual or collective unconscious they become conductors of thanatophilia, imposing on their victim a program of behavior that leads to death.
With Chekism we will associate “the fiends of Russian revolution” (N. Berdyaev). The name is conventional. We consider it preferable because the will towards non-being was most openly and widely realized by the Cheka*. Chekism has become a major calamity for Russia. Millions of victims, culture extermination, terrible degradation – that is the price we had to pay as a result of a sudden epidemic caused by mental virus of Chekism.
It is a disease! And an appalling one. We still have to find means to fight it.
Chekism is older than Cheka. (An abbreviation for the Extraordinary Commission (established 1917) – a Bolshevik repressive body; secret police, that became the father of later GPU (Chief Political Board), NKVD (People’s Commissariat for the Interior) and KGB. “Chekist” is a conventional informal name for “a member of repressive state security service”, not quite obsolete even today. (Note by translator)). The explicit symptoms of it we see in the upheavals of Razin, Pugachyov, in terror by the 19th century revolutionary raznochintzy. As any disease, Chekism first of all requires compassion; we must find strength for it despite the aversion this lethal illness arouses. Chekism deforms and cripples human soul beyond recognition. What is leprosy compared to it, but a common cold! However, we must overcome this basic reaction. Here a categorical imperative of humanism must be working.
Let’s sum up what we know about Chekism.
1). The disease can come out in an explicit form. Then average people can quickly and easily turn butchers. Mass arrests and executions cause one part of society to shudder, the other – to gloat over them. The zeal for destruction comes over masses of people. Temples are being blown up, books are being burned. The outbreak results in a crisis, which includes a perspicuous mechanism of self-destruction: chekists exterminate each other – the revolution devours her own progeny.
2). The illness enters a latent phase, boosting the atmosphere of suspicion and fear. We have to keep our mouths shut. A poster with woman pressing her finger to her lips expresses the essence of this period. Enemies are all around. Society goes mad over enemies. Base sneaking and treachery become a law. You have to pay for any attempt to say the truth and not merely by being repressed: Chekism will find the way to break your life. The main features of this phase have found the embodiment in Y.V. Andropov.
3). As we can see, the genes of Chekism can mutate, adapting to the changing environment. One phase of Chekism can eliminate another. It makes a seeming of some qualitative change. But it is seeming. In reality there is an implicit continuity. Though, sometimes the continuity is more than explicit – one have only to recall that the word “Chekist” has not become an anachronism, but is still in use, denoting modern state security servants, or the portraits and busts of F.E. Dzerzhinsky, decorating the premises of enforcement offices: it is an invariant of all phases of Chekism, its binding link.
4). Let’s make some syndromes of Chekism clear:
- active repulsion towards freedom;
- an aspiration to isolate the country from the outer world, combined with attempts to export the illness abroad;
- myth-making aimed at creating illusory enemies inside and outside the country – Chekism can’t do without them;
- hostile attitude towards culture;
- deep immorality;
- inclination to treachery;
- cruelty.
5). Chekism is hostile towards Logos. That’s why it impedes the intellectual development of citizens, striving to give this process an exclusively pragmatic direction. People with extraordinary thinking will be exterminated or oppressed by Chekism. Chekism loves all that’s mediocre and standard. Don’t raise your head above the ranging line! You’ll be put down. It is entropy that is acting through Chekism. Though it cannot bring energy to the zero point, it gradually diminishes it. The maximum entropy is inevitable, which will herald the triumph of thanatophilia.
6). But is such end really inevitable? I think it isn’t. It is easy to notice that Chekism which tried to make all people obedient and stupid, is becoming more and more stupid itself. Nowadays adepts of Chekism are astonishingly primitive in their thinking, which prevents them from acting successfully in dynamic modern world. Chekism is likely to die out through natural process. But we can’t count on such favorable outcome. In the process of its decomposition Chekism is apt at playing unpredictable tricks. One can forecast their extremist character. This may be an agony not to Chekism only, but to life on Earth. Therefore the perils of Chekism must be realized on global scale.
It seemed sometimes that Chekism was passing away from Russian history – but it has always gained revenge, reborn in a new form. The new forms prevented from seeing its true core, disguised this way. The viruses of Chekism are both stable and flexible, which makes it so difficult to heal this Russia’s fatal affliction. It is sad to say that the metastases of Chekism have penetrated even the Church. It has recently gave birth not only to new martyrs but also to new traitors. It makes the healing more difficult. But one wants to hope that our foundations are still healthy.
That’s why the hope for total recovery is not groundless.

Culture and devilry

The abbreviation Cheka is the bastard of the October revolution. But the phenomenon I call Chekism has deeper historical roots – the Bolsheviks made a latent pathology an explicit one, gave it the status of a norm. I think Chekism is connected with nihilism, which had variously shown itself in Russian history. The blood-thirstiness of Ivan the Terrible – the sadism of serfdom – Leninist concentration camps: here one can trace a single line, through which thanatophilia – an unconscious though incredibly powerful will towards non-being – shows itself. Appealing to the vocabulary of M. Heidegger, we can say that nihilism annihilates, implicitly pushing the world down to the funnel of the ontological null. I feel that on Russian ground thanatophilia has emerged into thanatogony – an unprecedented in its outcome generating of non-existential forces.
We are entitled to speak of social pathology. Chekism is one of its most dangerous forms. F.M. Dostoyevsky tried to explain the etymology of this dreadful disease in a language of mythology. I mean his concept of “the fiends”. But what is beyond this concept? I think, it is the negative archetypes of K.G. Jung – the attractor ideas which are sucking all being in the pit of non-being. Penetrating into the souls of the living persons and the whole nations, these archetypes feign positive ideals, deceiving their bearers. Hideous as the adepts of Chekism may seem to us, in the ethical dimension we must proceed from the assumption that we face the victims of a horrible metamorphosis when humans become monsters. Alas, this disease is incurable, and we have to rely on the mechanisms of self-destruction imminent to any evil. Unfortunately, this self-destruction is usually far from being total – and the hidden sources of infection liven up quickly, once again ensnaring the social organism with the net of its metastases. A vaccination of culture can prevent the penetration of deadly archetypes. But it is culture the fiends strive to dominate in the first place.
The “elan vital” of H. Bergson has its strongest expression in culture for it challenges oblivion, death and chaos. What is the root of Chekism? It is the physical extermination or isolation from the native ground of the most outstanding people of culture. The intellectuals were being stroke down. If Russia will recover from this stroke, this will happen generations after now. A more terrible damage was made to the folk culture. It was blotted out completely. A unique, striking peasant cosmos has sunk into oblivion. This cannot be brought back. V.I. Lenin hated the peasants. But now we understand that the world of a Northern Russian peasant was much deeper and richer than Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirical Criticism”, which contains nothing but venomous salvia.
The crimes of Chekism are so monstrous that we can’t react to them adequately. Our perception is simply maxed out – our senses cannot react to the piles of corpses. It is a tragedy we were not touched by the “GULAG Archipelago” by the great Solzhenitsyn, for our indifference plays for Chekism. It’s keen on cultivating and preserving this sentiment. How can we calmly walk by the brand new monument to Y.V. Andropov? What accounts for the persecution of Saharov? The humiliation of Lyubimov? The violence towards Lihachev? – As all that never happened
Chekism is changing its tactics. Being kin to fascism, it is more flexible than the latter, which makes resistance more difficult. The efforts of Chekism were always directed on the washing out of the spiritual values. Today this tendency has many ways to represent itself. The genuine is substituted by the surrogate. Young souls are nurtured by cynicism, violence and mercantilism. A cultured person is sensible to lies. Lies is the principal weapon of the fiends, therefore an unprecedented scale of relativism propaganda in epistemology, aesthetics and ethics is being carried out. Before Chekism only eliminated those out of favor – now it strives to castrate its potential opponents.
But the positions of Chekism are weakened by the changes in the world. How the fiends hate Internet! But they have to put up with it. Despite and regardless of the efforts of Chekism our country witnesses the beginning of a new cultural renaissance. Editing is thriving, though the circulations of good books tend to diminish from 1000 to 500 to 300 copies. They are read by few people. But the critical mass has been already reached. Analogies can be traced in other spheres of culture. In spite of usual repressions, here acted the mechanism of economical suppression. The culture suffered great losses. But it has won the battle.
Chekism is doomed, though its agony may last for a very long time. It is positive that the whole global community has realized the perils of Chekism, for it bears threat to life itself, sprouting its tentacles through the deep genome structures. The blockade has circled the font of disease and it is gradually diminishing in scale.
The favorite Russian archetype of Serpent-fight is now topical again. The chthonic nature of Chekism is evident. Evil has permanently represented itself in world history, but in its very modification that we call Chekism it has shown new unique points: generating chaos, it is still capable of organizing itself in a formally remarkable stable system, able to reproduce itself and evolve. Chaos in a uniform of order – that is Chekism’s main paradox! But what makes Chekism ordered? – The flows of negative energies. Their redistribution may last for a very long time – but not infinitely! The fight of Russia and Chekism mirrors the fight of life and death, energy and entropy.
On Russia’s side we find culture, on the side of Chekism – boorishness. Chekism has accumulated all base and hideous tendencies. For some time it prevailed over the people’s natural immunity. It has corrupted its faith. The intoxication of social organism has reached out beyond any limits. Nevertheless, Chekism cannot fully cut the flows of grace, empowered by Andrey Rublev and Nikolai Roerich, Boris Pasternak and Dmitry Schostakovitch. Whatever mocking Bulat Okudjava and Vladimir Vysotsky suffered from Chekism, it is to them the monuments in Moscow are erected, not to the Kremlin and Lubyanka scum.
Culture can’t be exterminated.
Chekism’s ambitions of world domination were from its very start paranoiac.
Noosphere will reject Chekism.

Dull Septennium

Seven years of a new millennium elapsed. There is a good reason to tally up the total. In the Apocalypse seven is a number of fullness. Deplorably, our septennium shows no specter, neither gamut, only a single gray and dim continuum. There are my seven disappointments.
1. A salutary for Russia friendship with the West has died out. Ministry of Foreign affairs is once again swarmed with degenerates. The opposition of our country to the other world revived. The restarted arms race threats to decrease standards of life. This race can actually squash the people for good.
2. The launching of creative economical mechanisms failed. Economy remains entropical. Some palliatives give positive effects. But there are no decisive changes. A lot could be done in seven years, while very little is done indeed.
3. The scale of corruption exponentially increases. Its rottenness has reached the top. Talks of fighting corruption look more and more cynical and hypocritical. It is social cancer, evolving towards lethal outcome.
4. Russian state power in all its metamorphoses retains repeatability. Anti-popular spirit is immanent to it. But never has this spirit correlated so explicitly with the possibility of a demographical catastrophe. In its advent Russian women and children become exported abroad. It is terrifying.
5. Scarce democratic conquests of the previous period are dismantled. State power becomes criminalized in various forms: it is being sold and bought, gained in bloody frays or becomes the means of dirty machinations. There are no mechanisms to fight the corruption.
6. Social injustice has never been so striking. On one hand – a handful of insatiable nouveau riches, on the other – a crowd of paupers and the homeless. The country with its great resources is alienated from its people. The vultures are circling over it.
7. The dull septennium is marked by a speeding moral regress. Giving a foul example to the youth, state power pests it with its greediness and absence of principles. A devaluation of values has occurred and this is the worst of all.
Seven years – seven deadlocks – seven cesspits.

YURI LINNIK,
doctor of philosophical sciences, poet, Russia’s honored worker of science