The incident with Alexey Navalny and his fellows in Anapa on May, 17 can be divided into the following stages:
1) Cossacks meet Navalny’s hipsters and pour milk over them;
2) An elderly man is standing beside the people in Cossack uniform, saying something to Navalny’s hipsters. Suddenly, one of the hipsters hits the elderly man in the head without warning.
You can see it in this video (titled “Brawl with Cossacks was started by Navalny’s ‘minions’ “):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_6qFiqUl-Q
3) After the strike, the hipster, who hit the elderly man, rushes into the midst of Navalny’s team, Cossacks try to grab him, and a minor brawl occurs.
Full video “Navalny was shown out of Anapa with milk-1”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAZX0oSMAn8
Then Navalny’s hipsters keep pouring water over themselves for a long time and refuse the Cossacks’ proposal about getting whipped. In case anybody’s interested, the video is here.
To sum up, the fight started with a masterful provocation by a Navalny’s hipster, who hits the elderly without warning. But the fight was preceded by:
a) Pouring milk over Navalny’s team;
b) Cossacks meeting Navalny and his fellows
Subsequently, representatives of the Cossacks in Anapa said that they had nothing to do with people pouring milk over Navalny, and they only broke the fight up. In any case, the Cossacks, whose number after the incident had miraculously “increased” from 10 to 40 people (Navalny first said that there were only 10 of them, now he claims there was 40), still, for some reason, met Navalny’s hipsters at the airport. What did they do that for?
In what way were Navalny and his hipsters dangerous in Anapa? They flew there, what next? What could they really do? Go to the beaches and start campaigning among the tourists? They could only start a public provocation by presenting themselves as “victims of the regime”. Which they did masterfully. If not for the Cossack “greeters”, no stealthy attack skills would have helped Navalny’s hipsters and there would have been no provocation (so far they are afraid to attack the police). So why did the Cossacks meet them? What did they want to achieve?
In fact, such actions, like cakes and brilliant green for Michail Kasyanov, in the end, lead to one thing – to the introduction of the same low-level political culture, which was shown by Maidan supporters in Ukraine in 2013-2014, into political and public life of modern Russia. This kind of political culture allowed later legitimizing punitive forces against people of Donbass. Such accidents always starts with light actions, accompanied by “ha-ha”. Then there will come the real punitive forces, who will scare away the clowns and start spilling blood. This is what happened in Ukraine, where the meme “titushky” (supposed thugs for hire) was used to legitimize violence against civilians by pro-Maidan Bandera’s militants. Pro-Maidan forces first claimed that they wanted to punish only “titushky” (it would be cossacks, if we draw a parallel to the accident in Anapa), but by punishing them Maidan militants legitimized violence as a tool to use against people, who didn’t agree with their politics. Finally it became the mainstream of Ukrainian politics, when the members of Ukrainian parliament and Ukrainian minister claim that massacre in Odessa, when 48 pro-Russian Ukrainians people were burned and killed, is the day of glory for Ukraine.
One of the members of “Essence of Time“ movement Torbadusta summarized it very accurately (here is translation of his post in Russian):
“If you think that Maidan is when people are ‘for’ America and anti-Maidan is when people are for ‘Mother Russia’, you are very mistaken. ‘Maidan’ is a special psychological and intellectual state of a population turned into a trashy mob that is crawling over the political dumpster. The inhabitants of the dumpster can be turned to any direction: pro-West, anti-West, the movement itself will still be destructive. After all, it is impossible to escape the dumpster by acting according to its logic, seeing it as something acceptable.
By attacking a licensed representative of the political dumpster, the members of the aggregate Anti-Maidan do not really fight against him. They organically complement the caricature public image of a “damn liberal”and “national traitor” with a no less caricature-like image of the “patriot”, bellowing the famous phrase to the masters of the game: “How dumb are you-u-u-u-u!”
To win, you need to set your own rules and maintain a high level of political culture as one of these rules. Otherwise, Russia will be destroyed by the patriotic schizophrenia to the ultimate satisfaction of their Bandera Nazi sworn brothers”.
The buffoonish attacks on Navalny, Kasyanov and others like them, give new life to these politicians who managed to sink to the level of freaks, bringing some kind of drive to their lives, and at the same time lowering the attackes to the same level – the level of freaks. Do we want to live in a country where public politics is a contest of freaks? This is a kind of fun we will have to pay for. Such carnival clashes serve to heating up the Maidan activists in Russia. They are trying to awaken bloodlust in the “sheep”, as Navalny affectionately calls his supporters. The “sheep” already crave blood, but as of yet — at a distance, while the enemy’s task is to make them want it “here and now.” To do this, it is necessary to dehumanize their political opponents, the nation and the country in their eyes. And that is what they are trying so hard to achieve. For example:
Translation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Facebook post above: “The modern Russian state completely corresponds to the description of a fascist state (not to be confused with Nazism). The political theory predicts the introduction of “stormtroopers” as the next step. What you can see now is just the first step.”
We do not believe that preconditions for Maidan in Russia are already there. Not quite yet. But only yet. Sooner or later there will be Russian radicals (it would call itself Russian “Right Sector”), who will be released into the public space (hipsters will be happy to see them) as the decisive factor for the street action. The way for releasing this beast is already being paved. The escalation of the spiral of violence is what our political enemy needs.
On the other hand, expressly respectable manner of defeating the enemy in the public discourse and rigidly defined high standards of political culture in the country is what our enemy is afraid of. So it is the only appropriate way for us to act.
Source: ‘Friend’ livejournal – one of “Essence of Time” bloggers
