Thin Skins and Unqualified Immunity
By the time Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, conservative activists and pundits had already begun their campaign against the apparently foreign value called "tolerance"--or, in Russian, "tolerantnost'." The increasing demonization of tolerance as a pernicious, anti-Russian value is something I deal with at great length in the fourth chapter of Plots against Russia, so I will not go into great detail here. For the purposes of the present chapter, it is worth noting that everything about "tolerantnost'" is framed as foreign: not just the word, whose English/Latin root is plain to see, but the idea of, if not welcoming, then at least not denigrating difference (which would interfere with the imposition and maintenance of allegedly "Russian" values. In 2013, director Nikita Mikhalkov drew his audience's attention to a post by a conservative blogger named Mariia Mamikonian about the dangers of "tolerantnost'" that, in trying to uncover a hidden agenda, was instead revelatory about an attitude she shared with other anti-foreign activists. She explains that "tolerance" is a medical term used to describe a decreased immunological response to a foreign substance. While this is technically correct, her etymological foray amounts to looking up a dictionary definition and starting at the end rather than the beginning. Naturally, Mikhalkov loved Mamikonian's explanation, making the unsurprising leap from biological immunity to what he called "national immunity": “the possibility of resisting anything that could destroy you, your family, your society, and your state."
Mikhalkov does not set Russia's policies (and neither does Mamikonian), but he is one of the important cultural figures who raises or surfaces ideas that either are or will become key issues for public debate and political policymaking. Since 2012, ambient concerns about Russia's cultural hygiene have developed into concerted efforts to minimize the influence of the foreign. This expresses itself in law and policy, restricting the circulation of foreign ideas, language, and people in a concerted campaign to demarcate and demonize the Other. The internal process has been largely the same, but with the directional valences flipped: redefining people and political views within the Russian Federation as fundamentally alien. This has obviously been the case with the LGBTQ community, whose scapegoating followed a very predictable script (limiting queer-positive speech around minors, limiting that speech for everyone, designating the "international LGTBTQ movement" an "extremist organization" fostered and funded by Western enemies, and falling just barely short of declaring open season on queer people. Dissenters are categorized as foreign agents with no due process or mechanism for reversal.
From an illustration about immune response and tolerance. If this is what tolerance really looks like, I’m against it.
This chapter began with a concession to the rhetoric of social hygiene Mikhalkov encouraged: losing borders is like losing skin. If we stay with his metaphor for a moment, the last dozen years of Putinism, despite its typical right-wing rhetoric about strong borders, has not been about developing a thicker skin. On the contrary, Putinism cultivates existential terror that the national body's skin is too thin and too weak, at the same time that the remedy is to expand its reach and swallow up its neighbors in Ukraine. There, Russia is assimilating the foreign by refusing to recognize it as anything other than domestic, as Ukrainians are apparently just Russians who are too foolish to recognize a basic fact about their identity. There is no coexistence with the alien, no compromise with the other; it must be incorporated into the self or rejected entirely.
Next: The Necropolitics of Putinism