Review: Как убить дракона: Пособие для начинающих революционеров

Как убить дракона: Пособие для начинающих революционеров by Mikhail Khodorkovsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spent a month in a prison cell with Colonel Vladimir Kvachkov, a military intelligence officer and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who became known throughout the country after being accused of the attempted assassination of Anatoly Chubais and even of organising a military coup. We’re people from different worlds and with different opinions; we are, let’s say, fierce opponents (to put it mildly). But when we discussed the question as to why our authorities and our society are afraid of our own special forces – spetsnaz – while the Americans aren’t afraid of theirs, he summed it up in a way that I still remember 15 years later:

“The American special forces’ soldier sees himself first and foremost as a citizen of the USA, and only then as being in the special forces. This is natural. If something happens to him, then he’ll be protected as an American citizen. The Russian, though, is convinced that the opposite will happen. If something happens to you, don’t expect any help from the state. The best you can hope for is that your friends and fellow soldiers will come to your aid. So our officers are special forces’ soldiers first, and citizens only after that, while for the Americans it’s the other way round.”

The Russia of my dreams will be re-established by citizens who want to organise their lives together. People for whom the national interest is more important than that of their estate, their corporation or their tribe. People who understand that it’s better to be together than being apart.

In 2014 Russia swapped one social agreement for another. To the old agreement of “stability in place of freedom”, that had been the case in Russia since 2003, the Kremlin made a significant addition: “greatness in place of justice and prosperity”. So the new social agreement runs as follows: “greatness and stability in place of freedom, justice and prosperity”. Russia’s greatness now justifies all of the regime’s villainy: despotism, corruption, cultural degradation and backwardness. All of this has to be tolerated in exchange for the possibility to attack Ukraine with impunity; to shit on “the American bastards” in Syria and Libya; and to place “our” private armies all over Africa and even, it’s rumoured, in Venezuela.

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