“Monster Factory”: Indifference, the Glue of Russian Society

With the help of teachers and writers, rejection of empathy in the USSR, and then in the Russian Federation, became a civic virtue

Everyone knows that the Russian Federation does not admit its crimes. Therefore, the release of videos showing open torture of Tajik men suspected of thes terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall in Moscow caused bewilderment among many. In the video, security forces cut off one detainee’s ear and force him to eat it, while another one is tortured with electricity. Footage from the court where the suspects were taken shows that their faces were swollen from beatings. One of them was brought there unconscious and with a catheter (his kidneys were probably damaged as a result of punches).

Many commentators suggested that the videos were released to intimidate potential terrorists. While this is possible, the ruling gang of the Russian Federation also has another agenda — to teach the population not to feel sympathy, even when a person is being tortured before their eyes. Putin’s main propagandist Margarita Simonyan spoke about what the “correct” way to react to the sight of brutal tyranny is: “I never expected this from myself, but when I see how they are brought into court crooked and even this ear, I feel exceptional satisfaction.” The pro-government journalist Pavel Danilin voiced a direct ban on pity: he said that anyone who “tells you something about a few bruises and a torn ear” can “feel free to beat... He won’t understand otherwise. He doesn’t deserve anything else.”

Danilin’s threats are aimed at a small group of dissenters. For the most part, Russian society reacted to public torture in the same way as to war — with indifference.

The origins of this indifference and moral apathy can be found in the culture of the first decades of the USSR, at the time when Soviet ideologists dreamt of raising a new person with new moral qualities. Soviet educational theorists relied on the ideas of the English philosopher John Locke, who believed that a person is born as a blank slate, and his entire character and moral qualities are determined by upbringing. Inspired by Locke, Soviet educators sought to create a person indifferent to personal good, disciplined and courageous. Cowardice was defined as one of the main vices. (Modern psychology denies the idea of a “blank slate,” but recognizes the influence of upbringing and external factors on a person’s character.)

Anatoly Lunacharsky, People's Commissar of Education, and Anton Makarenko, chief Soviet teacher, wrote about cowardice as an evil. But the meaning of “not being a coward” was formulated vaguely. Then Mikhail Zoshchenko, the then most widely read author in the USSR, was called to action. He was commissioned to write stories about Lenin's youth and childhood, where he had to clearly formulate a new morality. (Almost all people who grew up in the USSR knew from this writer’s stories about how, for example, Lenin ate an inkwell in prison.)

In one of these stories, entitled The Little Gray Goat, Zoshchenko explained to Soviet children what courage is. This story boils down to the following: when Lenin was little, his family gathered around the piano and the children sang songs together. But when the children sang a song about a little gray goat that was eaten by wolves, Lenin’s younger brother Mitya always cried. Little Lenin was very angry about this. In the end, he forced Mitya to sing about the goat and not cry. Children, Lenin told the little girl, must be brave. Mitya’s courage in the story lies not in overcoming fear for herself, but in overcoming compassion. Zoshchenko, fulfilling a government order, winks at the readers of his circle. He describes the death of the goat in terrible words: “The little goat did not listen to his grandmother — he went into the forest for a walk. And there gray wolves attacked him, tore him to pieces and ate him.” By adding to the song the image of the painful death of the little goat, Zoshchenko justifies Mitya’s feelings. But Mitya’s victory over compassion is all the more significant: “The children sang this song again. And Mitya bravely sang it to the end. And only one tear flowed down his cheek when the children finished the song: “They left horns and legs to the grandma.”

Carrying out the order of the Stalinist state, Zoshchenko probably relied on the ideas of Nietzsche, who saw only weakness in pity. But what was a tempting theory for Nietzsche became a terrible reality for the inhabitants of the USSR. The story was written in 1939. By this time, dozens of Zoshchenko’s friends and acquaintances had already been arrested and shot. It was possible to sympathize with those arrested or their families only at the risk of one’s own life. Compassion had become the most unwanted and dangerous feeling in the country.

So what happened to the children who grew up with the new communist values? The answer to the question is given by the famous writer and politician Eduard Limonov. Limonov formulated especially clearly how to treat violence in his novel Teenager Savenko, published in Paris in 1983. In the book, Limonov recalls his Soviet adolescence in Kharkiv in the 1950s. (Limonov’s father was Ukrainian, but Limonov considered himself Russian.) The novel describes two days when the 13-year-old hero wanders around the city in search of money — he needs it to get to a party where he wants to come with the girl he is in love with. During these two days, the hero drinks liters of alcohol on a dare, takes part in a fight with stoned soldiers and commits an unsuccessful robbery of a canteen. This is a typical “education novel.” The hero grows up before our eyes, in addition to hooliganism and fights, he talks about music, literature and politics. He eventually gains recognition as a poet when he recites poetry at a city poetry competition; engages in sexual intercourse; becomes disillusioned with love and leaves his city, which has become too small for him.

Not only the hero of the novel receives education, but so does the reader. In the novel, the theme of violence grows, and by the end of the novel the reader must get used to violence and take it for granted. In the first part of the novel, in order to take revenge on the girl for her “arrogance,” the narrator and his friend catch her cat and kill it “by hitting it against the wall,” and then tie the cat’s corpse to the door handle of her apartment. The girl's reaction to the cat's death is calm and ironic. And her friend, surprisingly, remains on friendly terms with the hero. The topic of sexual violence is also at first only mentioned as gossip that one can turn away from. But by the end of the novel, cruelty turns into a tsunami. The hero finds himself in a company of bandits who beat a random passerby to death and rape two girls whom this man was escorting home. For the main character, the scenes of gang rape and murder are not terrifying, but exciting.

The novel ends on a lyrical note: the hero is on the train, he is thoughtful and open to the future. There is no mention of murder and gang rape that happened a few pages ago. He also does not remember that he rapes his girlfriend before leaving. Limonov's narrator is a Nietzschean superman that Zoshchenko could not even dream of. Limonov's hero is more talented, braver and more ruthless than his compatriots, whom he calls the “goat tribe.” The reader, if he wants to join the force, and not the “goat tribe” that the wolves dine on, must join the narrator and, like him, forget about pity for the victims of violence.

Ruthlessness and indifference to human life are characteristic features of authoritarianism. “After all, Hitler was a great man... although he was our enemy... do you agree?” says the young hero of the novel to a friend. It is not surprising that in 1993, Limonov, together with the future Kremlin ideologist Aleksandr Dugin, founded the neo-Nazi National Bolshevik Party (NBP) and until his death in 2020 supported the separatists of the so-called DPR and LPR. Putin's authorities treated Limonov negatively as a person, but his ideas became mainstream.

Today, the most successful and widely read author who instills inhumanity in readers is Limonov’s admirer Zakhar Prilepin, also a former member of the NBP and an enemy of Ukraine, who took part in the fighting in Donbas on the side of the separatists. Already in 2004, his novel Pathologies about the war in Chechnya conveyed a familiar message: a victim of violence should not evoke pity. The narrator and a group of special forces detain six Chechen men on foot in Grozny. One is beaten with a rifle butt; another is kicked on the head when he falls. They then shoot up a truck they come across, killing the driver. But not finding any weapons in the truck, they shoot all seven people as potential witnesses. The deaths of these people, about whom the narrator knows nothing and does not want to know, are presented in such a way as to prevent the reader from identifying with the victim. These are not people with their own lives, blood and flesh, but objects with something incomprehensible inside: “... it’s as if a jar of jam is broken on the chest: a black thick liquid and glass from the windshield stuck to this mess.” The blood of another murdered man on the face and clothes of the killer is described as paint from a “damp paint brush,” which the special police officer who shot the man “looks at with disgust.”

“I understand. There’s no need to talk about this,” the hero of the novel declares in the next chapter, and he never returns to the death of these people, diverting the reader’s interest from this war crime.

The classic techniques of normalizing violence and dehumanizing the “stranger” used by Prilepin fell on prepared ground. Russian readers and critics, accustomed to not reacting to violence, received Prilepin with enthusiasm. Prilepin has won more than 20 literary awards, his works twice took first place in the ranking of the best-selling books of the year, and in 2019, according to voting results on Colta.ru, Prilepin was recognized as the most influential writer of the decade.

Western philosophers from Adam Smith to Richard Rorty have believed that empathy, the ability to put oneself in another's shoes, is essential to a healthy society. Meanwhile, the Russian propagandist culture has been eradicating the normal sense of compassion in the population for almost a hundred years and is focused on producing monsters rather than trying to create a humane society.