Failure or Success? Social media discusses the results of the April 21 rallies

In their publications on Wednesday's rallies in support of Alexei Navalny, skeptics claim that they have demonstrated the weakness of the opposition, while optimists express, albeit cautiously, the opposite opinion.

Thus, network analyst Andrey Nalgin, summing up the results of the protest action dedicated to Navalny, designed to become a decisive event in his life, drew attention to the numbers. Supporters of the opposition said that according to their calculations, about half a million Russians should have come to the rally, but in fact there were much fewer protesters. So, out of 100 thousand Muscovites who had previously announced their readiness to support Navalny, 5-10 thousand turned out to be on the street, as in St. Petersburg, and in the rest of Russia - in aggregate about 10 thousand. That is, 5-10% in capital cities, and on average 4% in regional ones. And this is in the 146 million country.

Consequently, the rally failed, Nalgin is sure. So, we can assume that in the all-Russian elections Navalny's electorate would not be more than 3-5% will not come out. Is this not evidence that the fate of the oppositionist is seen as sad, both politically and personally? - sums up the analyst.

However, there is another point of view. It, in particular, was stated in his blog by analyst Mikhail Makogon, who was just surprised that so many people took to the streets of Moscow:

“The format of protest events set by the authorities looks like you should be ready for big trouble, already for the very fact of going out on the street in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

It's not even about the truncheons. Although in them too. The main thing is that you must be ready for detention, a fine, and what is worse - a lengthy administrative arrest.

The prospect of a criminal case and a real term for several years also exists, but its chance is minimal.

Falling completely out of life for 10, 15 or 30 days is a real threat. A real threat in a country where, by the most optimistic account, 8 out of 10 citizens are low-paid employees, without savings, living from paycheck to paycheck".

None of this happened yesterday in Moscow. But it was expected. Everyone who went to Manezhka yesterday could not help but realize that on January 31 or February 2, with a general screw and conveyor supply of administrative days to everyone in a row, they would rather repeat than not.

If I worked 40 hours a week for a typical corporation that does not care about any circumstances of a financial product sales manager, if I had a mortgage to pay, children to feed, it’s not at all a fact that I would go out somewhere.

Repost and donate, of course, would help, but..."

Political scientist Alexey Chadayev made a detailed explanation of the reasons and consequences of the emergence of the Navalny phenomenon in Russian social and political life.

1. The first and foremost thing that it would be desirable to admit to all - and especially to the political opponents of Navalny - that he is a truly major politician and a major phenomenon even on the scale of Russian political history.

This is not a "nobody", not a "blogger", not an ordinary "critic of the regime." This is a man-event, and in the entire history of the "Putin period" he is one of the brightest and lasting events in it. And there is nothing more stupid than stubbornly building a poker face, propagandistically portraying it as something like an annoying fly, thereby, according to the well-known law of propaganda inversion, just blowing an elephant out of it. He and the political direction he created deserve the most serious attitude to himself and the most serious political analysis. Moreover, the “direction” is even more serious than he himself.

2. At the moment, there are only two political projects that have taken place that have arisen in the Putin era.

These are "Fair Russia" and Navalny. "United Russia", by the way, is not one of those - it genetically inherits the "parties of power" that arose in the Yeltsin times, that is, the People's Democratic Republic, the OVR, etc. "Fair Russia" was created in the second Putin's term initially as a "second" or " reserve "party of power", in order to keep the United Russia in good shape, which has become a taste for political monopoly. But it gradually slipped into the niche of the “left-populist spoiler of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation,” “the most systemic of the systemic opposition,” and even in this capacity, in the current cycle, at best, it will fight for political survival; she has no chance of claiming anything more. Other projects that emerged during Putin's times are either "startups" or "former startups" that have turned into "finish-downs" - in contrast to the quite stable "pre-Putin" Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party and even, with reservations, Yabloko. In the so-called. There is also a whole synclite of political pensioners who are simply written off or written off and play no significant role in the “non-systemic” opposition. Navalnism, on the other hand, is the only political project of the Putin era, which, in contrast to the same SR, can be considered unconditionally taken place, and still remains promising in a sense.

3. I did not mention SR for a reason, because the history of its creation and subsequent degradation largely explains the success of Navalny.

It was created on the basis of certain ideas about the structure of the political spectrum, which even at that time did not correspond to reality. These were, probably, gleaned from somewhere in the Soviet newspaper "Za rubezhom" ideas about the classical party system in bourgeois democracies. Where there are, relatively speaking, "right", "centrists" and "left". Since all of our institutional engineering bore a distinct flavor of a cargo cult, the then Kremlin also wanted everything to be “like people’s”, and with this Procrustean ruler it outlined the party system. It turned out that there are purely "rightists" - these are, therefore, the remnants of the "old democrats": SPS and Yabloko (what kind of "right" they really are, especially Yabloko, another question: in the minds of our "architects", once an anti-communist means "right"). There is a "right center" - it should be occupied, in fact, by the "party of power": about fifteen years ago, Putin, almost spitting from internal disagreement when reading a text written not by him, uttered the epithet "center-right" in relation to the ideology of United Russia. There are "leftists" - all the so-called. "Populists", and not only the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its even more radical rump, but also all national populists from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia to Rogozin's "Rodina". Well, and the new party was supposed to occupy a kind of empty niche of the "left center".

All this was vegetable oil garbage - for one single reason: by that time, the real political spectrum had lined up around completely different poles and in a completely different logic. Putin himself has become the main spectrum-forming factor. And the spectrum, accordingly, was distributed not along the "right-left" axis, but along the "for Putin - against Putin" axis. This finally took shape in time for 2008, when the party model appeared in the configuration that has remained unchanged until now. The EP is, even now, and is "unconditionally for Putin." All the others also settled down on this scale: SR - "generally for Putin, but with reservations", LDPR - "in general for Putin, but with even greater reservations", the Communist Party of the Russian Federation - "with the most intricate quirks, but by and large also not against Putin ". Further down the scale, a "non-system" zone began - those who were simply not allowed anywhere, due to the unacceptable distance from the Main Pole.

But the fact of the matter is that a magnet always has two poles. And it was only a matter of time when and where the second would appear. In general, he could - before Navalny - "get together" at any, arbitrarily exotic point - and at the good old Communist Party, if not for Zyuganov's "trauma of 1996", which dragged the party into an endless "agreement" and "termination" with Surkovskaya AP; and at the Limonov NBP and its "Strategy-31"; and at the goy-pride party of the "Russian Marches"; and even, you will laugh, at Medvedev, whom, if anyone has forgotten, the fairly respectable public in the spring of 2011 almost begged on their knees "Dima, fire Vova", and when this did not happen, they awarded him the epithet "pathetic" and went to Bolotnaya ... And at the "Constitutional Court of the Opposition", if the good-hearted knew how to negotiate at least among themselves.

But in the end he got together on Navalny. Who managed to stake out for himself - now and, as they say, "on a global scale" - the status of "the main Anti-Putin". The most unconditionally and unconditionally "anti-system", and therefore already defining the entire coordinate scale. That is, the "Putin-Navalny" line describes about the entire existing political spectrum.

4. There are many reasons why this happened, both objective and subjective.

The first of them is this: in the post-Soviet political reality, the personality, not ideology, is the nucleus of crystallization. That is why "for Putin - against Putin" is much clearer and easier to fit in the minds than any "right-left", "liberal-conservatives", "communist-democrats", etc. etc. This means that if there is a "leader" at that pole, then sooner or later a "leader" should have appeared on this one. Navalny is often compared to Yeltsin, but it seems to me much more productive to compare him with Zyuganov of the sample of the first half of 1996, when for some time he became the nucleus of crystallization for "everything that is against Yeltsin" - but, by and large, did not pull precisely the public role of the "leader". As a result, the confrontation fell to the "present-past" axis, "post-Soviet Russia against the restoration of the USSR", and in it the "past", however much desired by many again against the background of the hell of the 90s, did not have a single chance. Let us note that Navalny also tried in 2018 to play a "conflict of eras", now according to the "present-future" model - this is his then meme "beautiful Russia of the future"; but for him, like for Zyuganov, it did not work very well. However, it seems that Navalny has learned his lesson and again steered into the “I and He” paradigm - now his narrative is no longer about the PRB, but about “the grandfather from the bunker”.

The second - if you like, "class". Navalny was the flesh and blood of the "kreakliteta" of the 2000s, a general acquaintance of the time and a regular visitor to the Moscow LJ political party. This parasitic, in fact, layer with an extremely heated CSW was grown in a test tube in the logic of the same cargo cult, and in the political language of its time it was called the Middle Class. It was believed that it was precisely its growth, strengthening and political representation that was the main insurance against what the Yeltsin and then the early Putin regime considered a key threat to its existence: the so-called. "Red-brown revenge". Let me remind you that when the banking crisis hit in 2008, Surkov came up with the programmatic text "To save the hegemon" - its essence boiled down to the fact that the urban middle class is the main value and main achievement of the regime, with the death of which it will again become vulnerable , and therefore it is him who must be saved at all costs. In a sense, we can say that the Regime succeeded: starting with Bolotnaya it became clear that from now on, the "protest" will not only be "communist" or "nationalist" there - it will now be the most "pro-Western" and even, whatever that means, "liberal." Bachily eyes, kupovaly: when today they shout "we are in power here!", This is just returning to the Regime its own thesis of fifteen years ago - "you are in power here!" But the regime's eldabaoths never imagined that these lovely children would take them so literally.

The third is generational and environmental. When the teeth grow and itch, they need to be sharpened against something. The generation of Kreakles grew up in the terry Pelevinism that reigned in the heads of the elders, in the paradigm that "PR" is the most important of all political arts. The virality of the content, the signal strength, the depletion of the message, the looseness of the communicative style. I remember the early FEP, the tops of which - and many of them were not even 30 then - lived with the feeling that they had caught God by the beard and were one step away from ruling the world. I remember the breakdowns and even broken fates of those of them who believed in it seriously and tried to play something on their own. The system quickly put such untied people in place; but there are exceptions. Alexei Navalny is from the same breed of Pelevin-political public relations and spontaneous Nietzscheans, but from the very beginning he was distinguished from the whole crowd of the capital's majors by some kind of peasant cunning: if necessary, we will fuck everyone. I am sure that now he thinks the same about his Western friends, and therefore is internally invulnerable to any propaganda that describes whose agent he is now. In his head - always only his own. And, of course, he was always sure that he could do everything that any Kremlin agitprop can do, and not worse, but better than they; and there are some reasons for this - he is really a really talented PR man, with a fantastic sense of virality. What is important here is something else: like the rest of the generation, he grew up in the conviction that PR is the main, if not the only technology of political action and even the technology of power. Hence the idea with the video about the Gelendzhik palace - for some reason presented as an almost absolute weapon against the System. But there are thousands and thousands of those who also think so; as well as those who for some reason are sure that the “color revolution” is when a crowd gathered in the central square with lanterns takes and suddenly sweeps away the rotten regime in a festival manner, and the police, gifted with carnations from beautiful girls, sincerely go over to the side of the people; and the main thing is to gather and lead such a crowd into the street at the right time. The funny thing is that this belief is also a kind of cargo cult.

There are at least five more, but I'll sort them out separately later.

5. The key component of Navalny's success is that he managed to become not just an "oppositionist", but literally, according to Karl Schmitt, an "enemy" for the System. As we remember, the state of enmity is mutual; both sides recognize each other as enemies and from that moment on, they treat each other that way. It is important here that our man never understood the conventions of political struggle in "bourgeois democracies", and sincerely considered and considers it to be some kind of trickery when people pouring their last words on each other behind the scenes sit down and negotiate peacefully while drinking tea. These decorations of the "society of the spectacle" are alien to him. He is ready to participate only in a real, total, severe struggle for a just cause, on the side of the forces of good against the forces of evil. And then there is a purely question of self-determination - which of the parties he considers the side of good and why. Navalny made a unique offer to the country that no other politicians could make: he proposed a fight to the end, an absolute enmity in the spirit of a civil war, albeit waged by more or less conventional means (the creaklite is simply not ready for others). And, of course, this immediately distinguished him as "the only real" - against the background of the others, which can henceforth be safely recorded as extras.

In connection with this, the following happened with the System itself. As we know, the division of politics into “systemic” and “non-systemic” within the System itself runs “by area”: the first is the President's Administration, the second is the special services. As long as the “non-system” part consisted of a handful of low-influential marginals, the role of “services” in the political process was, strictly speaking, “service”. But as Navalny acquired a grassroots asset, propaganda channels, connections in the West and support at the level of world leaders, the role of "services" in the System grew symmetrically. Paradoxically, he turned out to be a real gift for them: the more resourceful his machine works, the more it involves people, channels, resources, etc., the greater the influence of silovikov on Russian internal political processes. Now we are already heading straight into a situation where only “poles” remain in the clearing, and the System, accordingly, is simplified to a trivial “police state”.

In theory, the antidote to this could be the maximum expansion of the "systemic" clearing - including through greater freedom of action for all "systemic" parties. But Putin's system has a critical Achilles' heel: it cannot function well in the face of low ratings and a significant opposition presence in parliaments. Yeltsin was much more stable in this respect: she existed for years with almost zero ratings, and even in conditions when "the majority in parliament belongs to the opposition" (one German acquaintance in 1998 almost broke his head in front of my eyes, trying to understand that it means when ours explained it to him). It needs more than just controllability, but constantly reaffirmed hegemony. That is why the role of systemic opposition parties was reduced from cycle to cycle to an openly decorative one - both in elections, turning a relative result into an absolute one, and in the Duma itself, "pushing" consensus votes even when the majority of the "party in power" was quite enough to make a decision. Thereby, of course, unwittingly clearing a clearing for this very "second pole".

Now we see how this plot is moving towards a climax. Navalny produced a truly chic, dramatically authentic Calvary: poisoning (or "poisoning", depending on the picture of the world) - deportation - sermon (in the form of a film) - return - prison - hunger strike. He is now a victim, a martyr, the owner of an impeccable, reinforced concrete moral position. Putin complained that after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, there was no one to talk to - well, be afraid of your desires. Well, of course, yaka power - such are the mahatmas; but this is the scale taken.

6. Personal. If it gets to the point that these brothers, with their balloons at the ready and with their leader (or his icons) in their arms, will go to storm the Kremlin, even if all the cops and officials really scatter, I will get in her way, even if I find myself at all one. For me, Navalny and Navalnism are much worse and worse than the System. I don't think I need to explain why; all explanations were given long ago. But one cannot fail to notice, however - including from my reconstruction - that the System itself raised him, nursed him, created for him a place-time-opportunity; he is, in a sense, her flesh of flesh; the embodiment of all her complexes, fears, secret and explicit desires. He is a golem who comes to Frankenstein with the phrase "hello, dad".

And this means that, yes, something is rotten in the state of Denmark (English: "something's rotten in the Danish kingdom" - Shakespeare).