VIENNA – Most of the discussions of the ethnic violence that flared in the Karelian city of Kondopoga ten days ago continues to be apocalyptic, but one analyst argues that these clashes – and particularly the way they quickly passed from a bar fight to communal violence – may generate demands for positive change.
In an essay posted online on Friday, Nikitia Garadzha, the editor of the politics department of the “Russkiy zhurnal” Internet portal, suggests that in order to see that, one must understand not only precisely when the situation in Kondopoga got out of hand but also why it developed as it did (http://www.russ.ru/docs/128209....
The Kondopoga events happened, Garadzja argues, “after the state capitulate[d]” and society as a result “inevitably turn[ed] to the criminal world” which alone, the population believed, was in a position to help in a reliable fashion to “organize the social space.”
“In the Kondopoga restaurant ‘Chaika,’ ‘everything began’ not at the moment when ‘the fights started’ but when the barman called bandits rather than the militia [to deal with them], knowing that ‘these people’ would be able to cope with the situation and ‘the other’ would not.”
And in response, “’the local people’ in turn adopted precisely the same logic, ‘having gotten involved in a fight’ and regretting initially only about the lack of the necessary means for self defense at the needed moment.”
If that had been all that happened, Garadzha continues, few would have paid much attention to this clash. After all, such clashes have happened before and likely will occur again. But the situation changed when both sides – including the criminals – found that “criminal self organization” was not working and demanded the government act.
This “demand for the state,” the Moscow analyst continues, represents an important step forward, but responding to it will not be something that the Russian authorities will be able to meet quickly or easily.
“A criminal order is quite a bit less expensive than a legal order,” he suggests. “But it produces social well-being only for limited groups of the population, and therefore criminal ties cannot be organized vertically, that is so that they will reach all strata of society.”
Consequently, Garadzha argues, “the vertical organization always is born as a result of the crisis of horizontal models of organization when everyone benefits from the presence of a space defined by the same rules for all. When people are ready to turn for the resolution of their problems not to the criminal world but to the state, the criminal norms lose their functionality and the state takes their place.”
Before Kondopoga, people in Russia thought, he says, “that criminality was destroying the state.” But now, Russians understand that “a sick society has ceased to be a comfort zone for asocial groups. For the criminal world here, there is nothing personal, only business.”
Indeed, what makes the Kondopoga events so important is that the Russian criminal world there showed that it does not want to fuse with the power structures of the government or replace them. That world simply wants “to live according to its own laws,” rather than try to impose even its own kind of order more generally.
But “for those who try to maintain a civil legal order in the country, the signal [that they should have received from Kondopoga] is despite all its contradictory nature indicates that the movement toward the restoration of a legal order has become irreversible. Although no one promises that this path will be without blood.”
Could some good come out of Kondopoga?
Archived Articles | 11 Sep 2006 | Paul GobleEWR
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