Russia and the Normalization of Violence
The Kremlin is fostering the idea that the world is made up of Russianness and anti-Russianness, and the need to destroy the latter supersedes all legal norms. The consequences are already horrendous
I have wanted for a long time to write about violence in Russian society and how it has become seemingly normalised.
Several things have deterred me so far from posting on this: I am not a sociologist and do not have robust frameworks to analyse trends scientifically. Many of my views on the issue are anecdotal.
The other key (and related) problem, which feeds into an upcoming post that I intend to write soon, is that I – like many other people working on Russia – have not visited the country for some time. (I have not been since 2018, and am unlikely to return there soon, given my small agency’s mission to help work for Ukraine’s victory and support the people currently enslaved by Russia.) This future post will shortly the death of OSINT and consider how to analyse affairs from distance. I am acutely aware of the problem of having to consider Russia from outside, in the evolving context of what some people have termed ‘OSINT’ (publicly-available sources, I’ll go into major problems with terminology later).
Notwithstanding, I shall write here in part about some social media sources that I have been tracking. I do attest that we can make some comments from social media content about an awful slide of parts of Russian society into state-permitted violence and lawlessness. (In addition, I spent much of my time in the Foreign Office building up methodologies in building policy advocacy from social media data, and developing more robust ways to support partial information with wider scientific insights.)
We can piece observed social media anecdotes together with developments in Russian law and news items from established sources. It seems clear that Russian authorities are deliberately pushing a practice of normalising violence throughout society, where it suits their ends. Moscow seems likely intent on permitting that violence where it is directed specifically in ways that support the regime’s key aims. This should worry us all. And it should worry the Russians more than anyone.
One of the many Telegram channels I follow is Dvach, which evolved from an imageboard of the same name. The channel curates largely user-generated content, much of it male-oriented humour. I have noticed several videos on Dvach highlighting acts of violence committed by members of the public which have been seemingly countenanced by the authorities. One of these videos showed an veteran from the war in Ukraine beating up a younger man who had reportedly refused to enlist to fight in Ukraine. Another example showed a young Russian man on a bus attacking a fellow passenger for wearing a coat with a label reading ‘NASA’.
Screenshot from a Dvach video showing a Russian man confronting a fellow bus passenger for the ‘NASA’ label on his coat
I have seen firsthand violence in Russia. The vast majority of the incidents I witnessed were by the police against civilians. Now it seems that if you are the right kind of person with the right intent, you don’t need to be in your uniform to get away with a lot. In fact, it seems you can get away with almost anything.
The background to this is, of course, the unleashing of the unjustified aggression against Ukraine, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin a fraternal people. As the Carnegie Endowment has argued, the war is the ‘root cause’ of a significant shift in Russian attitudes towards the other, and of the ‘normalisation of high levels of violence and brutality’.
'Wave of lawlessness'
It seems to be increasingly common to read reports, even in Russian domestic media, about fighters from the war on Ukraine returning home to exact severe acts of violence against the public, and even their families. Russian investigative outlet Verstka reported in April 2024 that at least 107 people have been killed, and another 100 seriously wounded, by fighters who have come back from Ukraine.
Moreover, the Russian authorities appear to be carving a special place for returning fighters, ensuring they are lionised, rather than demonised. Putin said earlier this year that ‘participants in the special military operation must be viewed as the elite of Russia’. Moscow has also taken steps to include veterans in the country’s governance.
Particularly egregious cases of such veterans include that of child rapist and murderer Nikita Semyanov, recruited from prison to fight in Ukraine, who fought at the front but who subsequently participated in appearances at schools to discuss the virtues of patriotism. There are many similar cases of fighters being exempt from proper punishment for serious crimes.
The war is likely in many cases encouraging criminality, as the immunity from prosecution offered to fighters in certain cases incentivises crime. It is no wonder that the Kyiv Independent describes ‘a wave of lawlessness’ in Russia.
To my mind, it is not just the returning fighters and their willingness to bring back to Russia the extreme violence that they are encouraged to wield against Ukrainians; it is a wider sense that the written law should be subjugated to deeper, innate and national exigencies. There has long been a hostility to the law among some Russian thinkers, as a concept that is foreign, formalistic, and abstract; but the contemporary Russian regime have exploited this tradition in their war against what they see as ‘Western’ values. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mariya Zakharova for one often claims that the law is something the ‘West’ uses for its own purposes to harm Russia, her justification for Moscow defying those mandates and invading Ukraine.
In this new nationalistic argument, all deeds can be justified in a lawless rejection of anything supposedly anti-Russian. The breach of legal norms becomes an issue a pride, on the international level and, by consequence, on the personal and social. And the regime is encouraging this notion that pro-Russian activity is privileged over formalism.
This is perhaps the inevitable result of the Kremlin’s nihilistic anti-Russia rhetoric, that anything that is other to the supposed national interest (as defined by the regime) is inherently hostile and merits destruction. As Temur Umarov argues, ‘the Russian state has already begun to discriminate against citizens for who they are – not what they have done.’ Umarov is discussing migration here, but it is part of the same issue: a division of the world into Russianness and anti-Russianness that are no longer compatible, and the belief of the need to destroy the latter.
This is a development that should worry us all, especially as the war, despite the Kremlin’s initial efforts, seeps further into many aspects of Russian life, including schools and their curricula. There are likely differences of opinion and planning within the Russian leadership about how to tackle the issue of apparent increasing violence. Putin has in the past been measured about how he has discussed Russianness and its relationship to the non-Russian world. Yet the Kremlin has not been able to avoid its war becoming an all-encompassing aspect of social and economic affairs.
The Kremlin reportedly is aware of the growing threat of returning veterans, without having an obvious plan of how to respond. It is likely that some among the leadership see the merits in having a massive cohort of former fighters among the population; the fear of a neighbour who could hurt or kill you with impunity will likely dissuade many from considering protest. Some of my Russian friends (those that will still speak to me despite their anxieties) do talk often of the growing sense of fear that permeates society, and, as I have previously written, and as the Dvach video I discuss above suggests, intimidation is an effective way of conditioning behaviour. Telegram will likely continue to be a key tool for the Kremlin in pushing that.
The issue is, however, that recent history suggest that events tend to run their own unpredictable course, despite the Kremlin’s best efforts to control them. It has set off this new age of violence, and it is impossible to tell which path this will take.