No

The entry for “dictatorship” in the dictionary defines it as a type of political regime enforced by violent means in which — in the absence of any external controls and limitations — power is concentrated in the hands of one individual or a group of people. When we read this, we tend to pay attention to certain keywords like regime, power, and person. But what if we try to take apart this weighted term in a literal sense like we used to do in school?

The term dictator, which comes from the Latin dictatus, implies a kind of forcefulness or violence while the suffix emphasizes that it constitutes a regime based on this violence. In other words, dictatorships are the outcomes of violence, its ultimate result. Violence is at the heart of what’s taking place in Russia at the moment. It’s uncontrolled violence, unrestrained in its heterogeneity.

Dictatorships, from the standpoint of political science, usually have two features: mimicry and the capacity to take swift and decisive action. Therein lies the reason why dictatorships manage to start up so quickly (or relatively quickly) and continue to win (or winning again) today.

As for mimicry, violence masked as care is something recognizable and familiar to many of us. “Be home by 10 p.m.! We worry about you, you might get attacked”, “You won’t leave the table until you finish your food”, “I won’t let you go to the party, you’ll get drunk and be raped”, “Don’t you dare dream of sports — in our family, everyone is a lawyer”, “You’re not going outside until you get good grades”, “Marriage? What love? We forbid it”.

The main idea that people who employ violent means instill in their loved ones is simple: the outside world is dangerous and unpredictable, and only we can en-sure your safety. But on one condition: absolute obedience.

In order to ensure your safety, the grownups have to act quickly and decisively (necessity is always used to justify violence). Close the door, hide the key, take away your documents, deprive you of money. All while engaging in the same classical manipulation: How can you not love your family? It takes care of you. How can you not listen to your elders? After all, they’ve given you everything.

Every dictator fancies himself to be the father of a huge family — the only one who can provide stability and ensure safety. But it comes at a cost, the cost of freedom — the freedom to choose your own fate, the freedom to say “no”. The self-anointed “father of the nation” will, of course, never allow himself to be controlled by his own unreasonable children.

Why do people agree to be submissive and refuse to recognize violence? Just think for a moment about how much care — or at the very least freedom and reliability — people born and raised in the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century have experienced, particularly in Russia. This time period, as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it, left them naked in an existential cold. It’s not surprising that they so easily and naively believed in delusory care. They used the chance they were offered to get dressed, grab a bite, warm up, feel human and stop waiting for death as a deliverance. But they didn’t notice that, for the umpteenth time, the door had been locked behind them, barbed wire put up on the fences, and the security guards had armed themselves and multiplied. And all of this under the incessantly repeated slogan: “We don’t abandon our own”.

It is not only freedom that disappears as a result. Subjectivity disappears as well, turning people into a population, an object of care, or more accurately, an object of violence.

Survivors of domestic violence know that justifying the abuser, blaming themselves for everything, is, unfortunately, a common experience, and a long one at that, for those who have suffered at the hands of any abuser. However, as soon as they find within themselves the strength and courage to admit the obvious, to tear off the mask of the stern but caring “father” from the face of the criminal, all of his past merits and decisive actions cease to trigger anything but disgust and rage.

The same thing happens with state violence, that is to say, a dictatorship. The achievements of these “fathers of the nation” crumble over time and reveal those they were carefully concealing — ordinary criminals.

Galina Timchenko