The author draws on Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy to explain the mindset of Russians who have been brainwashed by despicable state propaganda. To this day, many do not understand the connection between the war Putin launched against Ukraine and the Ukrainian drone attacks striking Russian territory and causing destruction and a gasoline shortage.
An old joke (or “anekdot” in Russian) was still circulating in Moscow during my childhood. A mother, whose son is leaving for the front, gives him her final instructions.
“Above all, my dear, don’t tire yourself out too much. Kill a Turk, then sit down and rest. Kill another one, and rest.”
“But Mom,” the son retorts, “while I’m resting, a Turk will kill me.”
“Why would he do that?” exclaims the mother. “What have you done to him?”
This story likely dates back to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, when Russia positioned itself as the champion of Pan-Slavism and the liberation of its Slavic brother peoples from the rule of the Ottoman Empire. This typically colonial war, accompanied by nationalist hysteria—at the end of which Russia gained new territories and spheres of influence—resulted in colossal human losses and was fiercely criticized, notably by Leo Tolstoy.
We are currently witnessing a situation as implausible as the one summed up in that old joke. As they watch Ukrainian airstrikes target strategic infrastructure deep inside Russia—including near Moscow—Russians do not seem to understand why this is happening to them. “What have we done to them?” they ask in unison on social media. Yet Zelenskyy could not have been clearer. Following his numerous peace proposals, he recently sent Putin a letter in which everything is laid out in black and white: desperate to convince the Russians to stop this war—which is theirs—the Ukrainians will shift their war onto their territory. So this is their war—Putin’s, the elected president, and their own—and they are now witnessing its direct consequences in the form of drones flying overhead and an energy crisis, or even a widespread economic crisis, looming over them.
“What have we done to them?” How is such a stupid question, such a childish and irresponsible attitude, even possible? One might be tempted to be outraged. But these are no longer times for outrage. These are times of regression, as French philosopher Marc Crépon so aptly observes in his latest book1: political regression, intellectual regression, and a regression of morals driven by violence, the boundless exercise of power, and capital at every level. It is the desert that seems to be returning—the desert that Hannah Arendt once held up as the very image of political regression.
A collection of texts dedicated to political philosophy2, written by Hannah Arendt in the 1950s, is once again of great use to us. Instead of getting exasperated, we can draw on her brilliant intellect—our best weapon against what is happening to us. In those postwar years, between her reflections on modernity (The Human Condition) and totalitarianism (The Origins of Totalitarianism), the philosopher identified the very object of political science not in humans but in the space between two people—in the in-between. This space, this void between people, is the political realm par excellence, defined by human plurality. The starting point is simple: politics governs the relationships between people who are not alike. But what follows is staggering. Where there is no dissimilarity, where there is a desire for uniformity and the suppression of particularity, there is no politics. Politics is the art of neighborliness, of living together with those who are not like you—and whom you are not obliged to love, but with whom you are obliged to live—which means communicating. Totalitarianism excludes politics from human life. “By crushing people against one another, total terror destroys the space between them. It substitutes an iron bond that holds them so tightly together that their plurality has, as it were, vanished into a single person of gigantic proportions3.” The contrast between a world founded on plurality governed by the political spirit and a unified, homogenized, apolitical world finds its expression in Arendt’s concept of the ‘desert world.’
The world is plurality, discussion, living together/avoiding war; it is the intelligence of neighborliness, but also intelligence itself. To live well in it, one must be present, think quickly, but also be able to imagine what the other is thinking. This is where political philosophy converges with epistemology, and even metaphysics: “[…] no one can grasp on their own and without their fellow human beings, adequately and in all its reality, what is objectively real, because it reveals itself and manifests to them only from a perspective that is relative to the position they occupy in the world and is inherent to them. If they wish to see the world, to experience it as it ‘truly’ is, they can do so only if they understand it as something shared by many, something that exists between them, that separates and binds them, that appears differently to each person, and that can be understood only to the extent that many speak of it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another4”. The world is a mosaic; the pattern only becomes apparent when viewed as a whole.
The desert is the opposite of the world: solitude, desolation, derealization, stupor. Admittedly, there are oases in the desert. But while in the world governed by the political spirit, the oasis serves to refresh people before they return to life and action, in the desert, the oasis absorbs the person who takes refuge there, never wanting to leave. Culture can play this role of an oasis, for example, under a totalitarian regime. Those who lived in the USSR can easily recognize what Hannah Arendt is referring to here. This contrast between the world and the desert explains many things, such as the extreme attachment of elites from the former USSR to ‘high culture.’ Or, similarly, the total absence—even among its most cultured representatives—of any taboo against racist speech.
The political desert in the USSR (as in other countries with similar regimes) killed in people any capacity to conceive of life in terms of relationships, understanding, adaptation, and the sharing of common space. People abandoned even the slightest curiosity, the slightest attempt to consider the other, to coexist with someone who looks different, who does not think like them. Homo sovieticus had mourned the loss of the polis (our parents, prisoners of their oases—their kitchens, museums, and concert halls—were, at best, very proud to be apolitical). Their post-Soviet heirs are striking in their uninhibited selfishness and their pronounced disinterest in anything outside their comfort zones. They don’t listen to others. They don’t want to know anything about them. These others don’t exist. To make themselves heard, these others (the Ukrainians) have to strike hard on their own turf; and then they’re surprised and ask themselves, “What have we done to them?”.
Independent experts who are currently observing and analyzing public opinion in Russia—as reflected on social media or in private conversations—speak of people’s frustration and weariness in the face of the ‘disruption’ caused by Ukrainian strikes. Russians are asking themselves, “When will all this finally end?” It would seem, alas, that one of the answers being put forward by Russian society to this question—aided in this by rampant propaganda—is the nuclear bomb. This response is typical of the desert. “The desert is growing,” as Nietzsche put it, a phrase taken up by Heidegger and later adopted by Hannah Arendt. The threat of a nuclear attack that the Russians are spreading is in itself criminal. This threat is what causes the desert to grow, crossing borders and contaminating the world.
For it is not only the Russians. Certainly, the legacy of the totalitarian regime creates and sustains the political desert and, with it, the stupidity, the sluggishness, the passivity, the deafness, and the blindness of the person-alone-in-the-world. But the apoliticism of the last person, promised by the prophets of the end of history5, does so just as much. Through the abandonment of the public sphere, through apoliticism and the desert it creates around them, through the derealization that this desert brings about, the last person draws the totalitarian reign upon themselves.
Olga Medvedkova is an art historian and bilingual writer in French and Russian. She is a research director at CNRS and specializes in the history of architecture and Russian art. She has authored several books on art history and works of fiction, including Réveillon chez les Boulgakov published in Paris by TriArtis in 2021.