Power

            One friend thinks that avoiding the army will cost $10,000, another says it's $3000, for the first 2 years and then $2,000 to finish the process off. This is a tax of sorts on young men.  The other option is to stay in education until you are 27 years old. Despite this absurdity and the unavoidable evidence of the parlous state of the armed, forces the state continues to celebrate the military with national holidays and posters all over the city, with TV concerts and endless awarding of medals.

Homo-Sovieticus-these are the ones who didn't make good in the years of opportunity that followed Perestroika: drunken, unreliable and defiantly proud, but in awe of those who seem to have real power. And these naked power relations in a land ungoverned by universal law are the determining factor in so many people's life. Bluff will get you so far, but without power itself, or powerful contacts you are and will ever remain one of the little people, buffeted by the storms that sweep through the bleak and unprotected landscape.

 We hear philosophers and politicians speak about the rule of law, but in the west how can we conceive of a land where it does not exist: it runs under everything we are and everything we do, it is the foundation on which we build our lives and we give it no more thought than we do to the earth under our feet, and why should we; it is our right, our birthright.

Here there are no birthrights, nothing is given automatically and nothing is given unconditionally: always there are conditions attached stemming from the fact that the gift is in the hands of a person and not part of an immutable set of laws that supersede the wishes of even the most powerful. here the nurse or the doctor treats you because they want to and, if they don't want to then you will get only the most shoddy attention from them. Hence a bribe is called for so that you might receive the rights that your taxes would have ensured, had they not been stolen and spent on the villas of some civil servant. And quite right from the doctor's point of view: why the hell should he give his life to the common good when the state rips him off weekly.

Only a saint can endure in this context and saints are fools straight from the pages of Dostoevsky.

 So the wise man will get what he can so that he can protect his family and the fool will fix our sink for a few hundred roubles and drink to cover the fact that he is not a real man, that he is a serf one of the losers. Public discourse is controlled by the authorities, as far as they are able anyway. In the lift a notice that was pasted after the Beslan incident. "We will be victorious: Russia against terrorism."

To see the oddness of this one must try to picture the British government organising a rally against Al Quaeda and putting up stickers everywhere, stickers whose content will be endlessly echoed in the news reports. Who decides the shape of things, who decides what Russia is against and by what right?

further, by doing this, by claiming the right to speak the public mind they lose all idea of what the people actually think about anything and then get freaked out when the differences become suddenly apparent, as when a march of 1000 babushki forced them into a climb down over the matter of free public transport.

From my perspective this need to control seems almost pathological so blind is it to its own true interests.

Law is the question too. One will not get very far here thinking in terms of law as it is understood in the west. One must find another category, perhaps power, or the rule of law versus the rule of men.