We have seen this armed column move up towards the Russian capital without being bombarded, and barely fought, rally regular soldiers, loot the arsenals of Rostov, mingling with the civilian population, while Moscow was preparing to face the hurricane, and that Vladimir Putin stormed on television. For a few hours there was a sort of fatality in all this, like a Russian destiny advancing inexorably, ready for the unknown, not to say the abyss.
Despite its abrupt end, the event opened the floodgates to chaos. Anarchy is here. Anomie won. The sorcerer’s apprentice, who in February 2022 decided to invade Ukraine, unleashed dark forces of which he is not about to regain control. Until the last few days, troop movements on the borders of Ukraine were carefully scrutinized, and now the scene has suddenly changed: it is no longer a military situation, but the spectacle of a faceless turmoil which rushes towards the worst.
We were at Clausewitz. Here we are with Dostoyevsky. All that warfare, even irregular, requires in method and patience has been shattered. All that remained of reason and therefore of predictability evaporated in favor of instincts and powers of which we know nothing. The secret negotiations, the inner springs of this rebellion are not yet known to us. But the springs are almost familiar to us: Dostoyevsky’s novels revolve almost exclusively around this moment when the human spirit yields to the death drive, and goes to the end of its new madness, abandoning itself to crime, to sacrilege. , to the ultimate experience of terrorism and nothingness. Then, Heaven becomes a prospect all the more desirable and mystical as it has become inaccessible, nourishing a moral and spiritual nostalgia which only heightens the madness.
madness of men
Vladimir Putin and Evgueni Prigojine are no longer historical figures acting within the framework of a concerted military conquest: overtaken by the madness they wanted and fed, they are its living prey. Their fate is no longer theirs. It is entirely in the hands of chance, of the madness of men, of the instincts which will arise here and there in the Russian population, in the ranks of the oligarchs frustrated with power and influence, in the more or less wise reactions of the allies of yesterday who witness with horror this immense pandemonium from which, until the end, they had thought they could stay away, but which will also burn them. When the sinister hierarchs bound by a semblance of political order are succeeded on the world stage by the Karamazov Brothers, madly delivered to impulses which exceed them, we have hardly any reason to be very optimistic.
It is singular that our West is confronted with the awakening of these dark forces at a time when it is preoccupied with so much ardor by “safe spaces”, micro-aggressions, morality police with hints of cul-benisme 3.0… By dint of to coat itself in the triple layers of glucose of its Manichean good conscience, does the West still have the measure of what could be unleashed in Russia? Already the war in Ukraine has tested our moral resources as few events have in a long time. The Russian civil war, which will have several episodes, could force us to raise our understanding of the world as it is still a notch, and to leave behind the padded certainties of which our daily lives are woven. It will no doubt be necessary to regain awareness of the fair price of freedom and to rediscover the memory of the battles that made it possible. Prigojine’s initiative has for the time being been cut short, but it is the painful reminder that History only becomes tragic again insofar as men get rid of all the safeguards of common rule and deliberation. , and indulge in the dark joy of devastation.
Generally, this type of fire is not contained. It is probably not by chance that Prigojine chose to name his organization Wagner. In The twilight of the Gods, the pyre of the pure and upright hero, Siegfried, sets the kingdom of the gods ablaze and destroys, before the Rhine rising from its bed overwhelms everything, and this apocalypse returns the world to its first morning. A similar twilight is brewing if we allow this armed nihilism to spread.