The deathcamp realism as a source of putinism. On the platonic hierarchy of human faculties in Varlam Shalamov’s gulag stories

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The deathcamp realism as a source of putinism. on the platonic hierarchy of human faculties in Varlam Shalamov's gulag stories

Bakirov Denys Ruslanovych

PhD student of Philosophy, Teaching Assistant

(Faculty of Philosophy),

Department of Theory of Culture and Philosophy of Science,

V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine

Summary

In this study, I expedite Varlam Shalamov's testimony from GULAG to illuminate the Platonic hierarchy of human faculties (appetite, will, intellect) with the help of the key "characters" of Stalin's death camps: blatar, silovik, politik. I hypothesise that at the heart of Putin's regime lies a "friendship" between crime syndicates (blatari) and secret police (siloviki) against the intelligentsia (politiki); an alliance of "law-breakers" and "law-enforcers" against "law-makers". The contrast between blatari and politiki is that between two kinds of freedom: between freedom of choice and political freedom. It is the political freedom that allows us to recognize social life for what it is -- a game that is arbitrary because its rules were "spoken into being"and therefore can be renegotiated for the benefit of all "players". In absence of this freedom to see the extant game as transient we run the danger of confusing it with an eternal state of affairs and thus turning it into a war to be won by all means necessary. I argue that the ultimate zero-sum-game of the death camp gave birth to the cynical ideology of Putin's regime. However, Shalamov shows us how participation in the infinite-sum language game -- poetry -- allowed him and some of his fellow inmates to remember an alternative form of life and thus to imagine their way out of the scarcity mindset of the death camp.

Keywords: Shalamov, Plato, Putinism, silovik, GULAG, philosophy, politics, theology. Blatari and Politiki

In 1937 Varlam Shalamov was sent to the coldest place on Earth and the grimmest part of GULAG -- Kolyma. It was the year of unprecedented political purges, the year when Stalin sent countless members of the educated civil society, or simply intelligentsia, to the labour camps there to be terrorised by thugs of the criminal world. Perhaps it was a first instance of an industrial scale cleansing of the state from the civically responsible citizens, a first "politidde".

Shalamov's Kolyma Stories and Chronicles of Criminal World offer (for my money) the starkest witness to the forms of life that embody the difference between two distinct forms of freedom: the freedom of choice and the freedom of legislation. He shalamov hierarchy human facultie

refers to these as pertaining to two types of people found in Soviet Russia: the blatari and the politiki к Blatari were thieves with a vulgarly Nietzschean code of conduct I use the word politiki in an idiosyncratic fashion. Politiki is a derogatory term for the victims of political repressions used by the blatari. (The other term for the members of intelligentsia is Ivan Ivanovich). Not all politiki in this sense - by all means - refused to bow down to the authorities and other pressures of the camp. Quite the opposite - many of them were the first to cave in to what I call the 'death camp realism'. I will later in this text consider the idea of humans as political animals at length and argue that this is where human nature passes its test for 'authenticity': those are the true political animals, true politiki, the ones who refused to participate in the imposition of will. And the thing that distinguishes politiki, I guess, is not the great willpower that allows them to stand their ground in GULAG but their prosocial and cooperative attitude, their faith in the possibility of non-zero-sum relationships. The so-called 'Thieves' Law', Rus. Vorovskoy zakon. that legitimised their crimes on the grounds that it was a matter of justice for the strong to impose their will upon the weak. In contrast to this, politiki, the victims of political purges, refused to impose their will or the will of the authorities on their fellow inmates because they knew that by participating in coercion they would betray their human essence, their nature as political animals.

The politiki, as Shalamov insisted time and again, were the only people who 'stayed human' in GULAG. It was their memory that a different life is possible, a memory which, in the darkest hours, was preserved only by recitation of poems remembered by heart, that allowed politiki to be a part of a conversation, a language- game, that freed their imagination from a zero-sum-game of the 'death camp realism'.

It is crucial to see that both 'politicians' and 'thieves' are defined by their freedom in relation to the law, but in ways that are the exact opposites.

Lawmaking and Lawbreaking

Let us consider two kinds of freedom.

First, the freedom to choose among a given set of choices. Say, to choose among the products on a supermarket shelf. Second, the freedom to legislate a different set of choices. Say, to reason together about the laws that should regulate the market so as to nudge our behaviour closer to what we agree on as a life worth living. The freedom of choice is a basic but private kind of freedom because although it secures the sovereignty of the customer's choice against material constraints and moral concerns, the range and arrangement of available products remains outside her control and is always already manipulated so as to maximise the profit of the seller, not the consumer's wellbeing.

The freedom of self-legislation is of higher order because it allows me to examine the form of life into which our choices coalesce and then to politically renegotiate our relationships so as to make the desired form of life possible, so as to maximise our wellbeing. Thus, political freedom legislates the context in which our freedom of choice takes place. Just like thinking legislates the context of willing by allowing me to say 'these are not my only choices!', so does politics legislate the context of private lives, allowing us to say 'this is not the only form of life we can have!' From the Jewish perspective, to collectively imagine a form of life that differs from the one we conduct now and to renegotiate our relationships so as to bring it closer, is the highest form of

freedom. This is the freedom of political debate to which humans are called by Yahweh: 'Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord' (in Isaiah 1:18).

But what happens if this hierarchy of freedoms is inverted?

If I only have the freedom of choice I lose creativity: I am cursed to choose between many cliches. I don't care if all my options are flawed or trivial, all I care is the power to decide for myself, to choose what I will. And if I want to secure the sovereignty of my will, if I want to ensure that my choice stems from my own volition and stays unconditioned by things outside my control, then I want to widen my choice to the extent of pure arbitrariness -- so that people can't wrap their heads around why I did what I did, can't put a finger on anything that determined my course of action -- except my will.

Although it may appear as though freedom of will makes me creative, it does not. I don't invent unexpected solutions to the problems we're faced with, I just make defective choices that break the necessary level of trust and reciprocity on which the problem-solving could have been accomplished. Instead of devising a way for the team to win the game, I cheat at the expense of teammates. I don't create anything new, I break the laws of cooperation and tear social fabric apart. According to St Maximos the Confessor, to encourage the freedom of choice of the deliberative will (gnome) is to encourage the "hesitancy toward the good" (Opusculum 1, (PG 91:29D-32A)).

The point of acting arbitrarily is not to experiment with mutations that grow out of random acts -- acting at will is not the same as acting at random. The point of acting arbitrarily is to prove that I am the arbiter, I am the one who decides -- not any other principle or agent. Thus the more my choice is in revolt against the context that might have determined it, that is in revolt against reality itself, against laws of nature and laws of the state, the more I prove the freedom of my will.

In contrast to this, thinking means letting the will be disciplined by reality (including the reality of my natural desires) until I no longer have to choose and my will becomes at one with the truth -- "Until with thee I will one will"1. Whereas the will's claim to freedom lies in having as many choices as possible, thinking in essence means narrowing on just one choice -- the truth. Reason's claim to freedom lies in its attunement to reality -- "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free"

(John 8:32). This is why, after a certain point, the emphasis on the will's freedom to choose at the expense of political freedom becomes the emphasis on freedom not to think and, ironically, on freedom not to be free.

In this essay I argue that there is perhaps no greater threat to a society than the subordination of political freedom of self-legislation to private freedom of choice because, once it happens, thinking becomes subordinated to willing. Although it may sound inconsequential, it is the essence of fascism, which, 'in all its varieties, was a triumph of will over reason' Edwin Hatch. (1878). Breathe on Me, Breath of God. Timothy Snyder. (2022). We Should Just Say It. Russia is Fascist. New York Times International Edition. Friday, May 20, 2022. Opinion., the national decision "by doing ill to prove that we possess free will". W. H. Auden. (1940). The New Year Letter. In Collected Poems, Vintage International. 1991. New York. Page 209.

Enforcement of Lawlessness

Politiki go 'beyond the law', they upgrade the current legislation so as to make it fairer, whereas the blatari 'go against' and 'break' the law because they think it is too fair -- that it prevents them from doing whatever they want with the weak. Politiki used peaceful civil disobedience, activism, for the sake of changing the status quo. Blatari used violent disobedience, criminal offences, to advance within the current status quo.

In the Soviet death camps, scarcity made communal self-legislation, exchange of names and mutual representation, impossible, for the inmates were even stripped off their names. And since this meant that human relations were shaped by brute force, intellectual and communicative faculties that constitute political freedom became useless and powerless -- politiki and their humanist education were turned into objects of simultaneous envy and ridicule. At the same time, the blatari, the thieves of the underworld, saw their dream come true -- once the constraints of the law were lifted they were finally freed to have their way with yesterday's judges and prosecutors, professors and politicians, lords and landlords. The world has turned upside down.

To understand how this could happen, it is necessary to consider a form of life that has neither freedom nor trouble with regards to the law -- the so-called siloviki, 'strongmen'. Their task is to enforce the current law, regardless of how corrupt it is. Siloviki have no quarrels with the present order as long as they stay in the position of dominance. They were, to use Cornel West's indispensable adage, 'well adjusted to injustice' -- and any threat to the regime is a threat to their privilege. I hypothesise that in the state built upon pure dominance, in the state whose ruler himself was a convict, the authorities had realised that the blatari pose less threat to their regime than politiki precisely because politiki's critique of unjust dominance undermined the pillars of the order based on unjust dominance in ways that blatari never could. The targets of blatari were the weak. The targets of politiki were the authorities. Blatari, although they were breaking the laws, were doing it for their private sake and had neither complaints nor grudges against the authorities. Since they understood only sheer dominance, criminal syndicates were perfect partners for cooperation with the corrupt state -- easily bribed, they could be used as deniable assets to do the dirtiest job. Politiki, on the other hand, strived to hold authorities answerable to the form of life people dreamed of, a natural humane life endowed with abstract ideals like freedom, decency, dignity, distance and privacy that make room for graceful relationships, relationships whose participants have a say in current affairs -- all the things which a dictatorship can't provide.

It's as if the security servicemen, the people who were called to enforce the laws devised by the political conversation between the citizens and to protect these citizens from the zero-sum impingements which would have made them susceptible to putting their private will above the common good, betrayed their calling and forged alliance with the thieves whose parasitic crimes constituted the greatest threat to the integrity of that conversation. Thus, at the time when politiki targeted as 'the enemies of the people' were tortured and slaughtered, the blatari who tortured and slaughtered them were dubbed 'the friends of the people' These terms, vragi naroda and druzia naroda, are historical facts. and gradually 'befriended' by the law-enforcement. The first fruits of this friendship were the piled up corpses of destroyed intelligentsia. It was the textbook example of the descent into tyranny from Plato 101: the will (thymos) becomes allied with the appetite (eros) against reason (logos). If the politiki were essentially cerebral, were governed by the intellect, and siloviki were personifying heroic traits like courage and loyalty, were guided by the will, pursuit of honour, blatari were neither people of language nor people of honour. They were the people of the body -- blatari 'dance' through their life path, they are guided by their carnal appetites. One of the funniest of Shalamov's descriptions of a typical blatar is that he could 'dance' a newspaper article. The intellect, the will, and the appetite are all 'good' if their hierarchy retains this natural order, but when the appetite and the will subjugate intellect, the desires, instead of being rationally articulated, become insatiable and degrade into passions. Conclusions

Once the room for self-legislation is reduced to the closed cabinet of the autocrat, our reason becomes reduced to our will, our faculty of renegotiating the laws of contest so as to make competition more graceful and mutually beneficial becomes reduced to our faculty of winning the contest by beating the hell out of our current competitors. On the individual level, it corrupts our capacity to critique the current order and addicts our attention to securing our dominant position within it -- no matter how unfair, irrational or even dysfunctional the status-quo is.

The limit case of this zero-sum ethos is the 'death camp realism' expressed in the blatar saying "You die today, but I tomorrow". In absence of the instruments to imagine and legislate a different context for our lives, we cave in to the idea that "this is how the real world is" -- we must either play by its rules or die.

With regard to the society writ large, when it loses the ability to self-legislate, relationships within it come to be defined by the powerful -- by those who can impose their will through the exercise of force. They come in two species, siloviki who have power to enforce the law and the blatari who have power to break it. But, once they merge, lawlessness and law-enforcement mutate into 'enforcement of lawlessness' (Rus. proizvol, arbitrariness). Once people entrusted to serve the law had put the law at their service, the state fell into the hands of 'thieves-in-law'. The cooperation between blatari and siloviki led to the state where the law was identified with the interests of the powerful and, at the end of the day, with the interests of the powers that be. The arbitrary will of the sovereign became the law-of-the-land -- no matter how far it was divorced from reality and morality, no matter how harmful to the common good.

References

Auden, Wystan Hugh. (1940). The New Year Letter. In Collected Poems, Vintage International. 1991. New York. Page 209.

Belton, Catherine. (2020). Putin's People. Harper Publishers.

Boym, Svetlana (2008). ""Banality of Evil," Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject: Varlam

Shalamov and Hannah Arendt". Slavic Review. 67 (2): 342-363.

doi:10.1017/S0037677900023561. JSTOR 27652847. S2CID 171437517.

Hatch, Edwin. (1878). Breathe on Me, Breath of God. In Anglican Hymnal Canterbury Press. Canterbury, 1936.

Shalamov, Varlam. (1978). Kolyma Tales. Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd. London.

(For English translation: Shalamov, Varlam (2018). Kolyma Stories. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 9781681372143.)

Shalamov, Varlam. (1978). The Chronicles of the Criminal World. Recently translated as The Essays on the World of Crime. Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd. London. (For English translation: Shalamov, Varlam (2020). Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 9781681373676.)

Snyder, Timothy. (2022). We Should Just Say It. Russia is Fascist. New York Times International Edition. Friday, May 20, 2022. Opinion.

Maximos the Confessor. Opusculum 1, (PG 91:29D-32A).

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