Viktor Kogan-Yasny special for the Yabloko web-site, 10.01.2022

Photo: Viktor Kogan-Yasny / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The current era has two destructive (and somewhat interconnected) social traits that make it very dangerous. First, the behaviour of people in their everyday life can be compared to that of a primitive bureaucrat, an ignorant functional introvert, filled with defensive reactions, to put it simply, a person following his self-interests. Second, the breaking of ties and contacts, their formalisation, and falling out of the “sentimental” tradition. This leads to the triumph of narrow-mindness, the substitution of content in the most essential issues by daily routine.

If we talk about the civilisation of the post-Soviet states, then, despite the incomparable extent freedom and personal opportunities, there is a dangerous regression in comparison with the period of the late USSR: there was a kind of multiculturalism there and, based on ideology, an idea of ​​the continuity of history, therefore, the inhabitants of Tyumen respected the aesthetics of Vilnius or Lvov, and it was an unacceptable tone to declare disregard for the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy. All this was miserably totalitarian, but provided a basis for opportunities. However, they were not used. In some places, there emerged a democracy of procedures to a greater or lesser extent, but it has become a prisoner of formal logic and its ignorance.

Now history is not needed to build one’s own future, or it is needed only as a fetish, and knowledge of the culture of neighbours is almost completely meaningless from the point of view of personal accomplishment. In general, the personal and the public are infinitely divorced in the “space” of everyday life – until an irreparably destructive crisis, striking in its logical absurdity, occurs.

If there is democracy, but personal democracy is not accepted, then it is worthless: it will always be captured into the net of errors of formal logic. And one can only shout out from one’s own ten meters: do communicate, do not be so cold and practical, strategically practicality always makes mistakes and loses, but who wants to hear it when it is more practical to act differently at a given second, from the point of view of everyday routine…

***

The ability to get stuck in issues incommensurate to the scale of the surrounding world and make them the key ones at the level of their actions without regard to tastes, relevance, timeliness, sense of proportion – this is a “universal”, in terms of any post-Soviet social environment, legacy of the habit of Soviet sorting things out in relations, which was ingrained in everyday life and passed into the public sphere. I am afraid that this, this pettiness, will bring along many tragedies turning into caricatures, and caricatures turning into tragedies.

VICTOR KOGAN-YASNY

is an Advisor to the Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party. Head of the public organisation “Regional Civil Initiative – the Right to Life and Civil Dignity”. Candidate of chemical sciences.

VICTOR KOGAN-YASNY

is an Advisor to the Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party. Head of the public organisation “Regional Civil Initiative – the Right to Life and Civil Dignity”. Candidate of chemical sciences.