"Failed state", collective responsibility and post-war reparations

Joke on the subject: "Father and son are walking on Red Square.

And there on Lobnym place is the gallows.

And Putin hangs on the gallows in a line,

Shoigu, Surovykin, Kadyrov, Gerasimov, Medvedev...

And the son asks the father,

— Papa, why are all the uncles swaying in the wind, but Putin is not?

"And he didn't have time for swinging even during his lifetime."

This is not the first time I meet Russians, including the so-called "good Russians", the idea that collective responsibility is unfair and illegal. Some part is even convinced that there is no such normative concept of collective responsibility. I'm in a hurry to disappoint, yes. Moreover, both in civil and criminal law. In civil law, this is subsidiary liability of shareholders for the actions of the management corporation of a joint-stock company. In the criminal case, membership in the organized crime group (organized criminal group) and terrorist organizations. The question is, can the entire political nation of a country bear collective responsibility for the crimes of its government?

Not only can, but must. For example, Germany as a state paid compensation for the crimes of the Nazi regime from the taxes of its citizens. The state has no other money. The last payment was made, it seems, in 2011, that is, those who were not born then and those who were against the Nazis were paid, including from taxes.

It turns out that a German, who spent the whole war in a concentration camp for his anti-Nazi position, goes to the store and buys a vacuum cleaner, and the value of the vacuum cleaner is subject to VAT, and he pays compensation from his own money (even two cents from the price of 200 euros) for crimes against which he protested and even sat for this protest. Because the task of reparations is to compensate the victim, not to punish those who were not even born at the time of the events.

It's not fair. But this injustice is already within Germany.

German society had to distribute the burden of compensation payments, first of all, to the accomplices and beneficiaries of the regime. And about 80% of this happened. A significant part of this financial burden was placed on the industrial concerns that were the beneficiaries of the Nazi regime, Volkswagen, Bosch, Mercedes, etc. And in the same vacuum cleaner produced by the Bosch concern before 2011, not two cents, but much more was included in the price compensation payments for the crimes of the Nazis.

At the same time, about 20% of the collective responsibility was distributed randomly, in other words, distributed, including to random people. So no one explained that "descendants of the victims will compensate the damage." Ideally, the internal legislation of the state should create a situation so that reparations fall on the beneficiaries, it will not work 100%, but at least 90%.

Be that as it may, I treat collective responsibility as a given. She just exists. Justice, probably, would consist in the fact that it should be borne by the guilty and those who ideologically supported the guilty. But this is impossible in events of this scale.

Hence the collective responsibility. When an athlete of any country takes part in the Olympic Games, he is its representative, therefore, if he wins, the whole nation celebrates the victory, not just him and his family.

The same is the case with military aggression and combat actions - the army fights. There is subjectivity, which means that this subjectivity already presupposes responsibility. In my opinion, everything is simple: if there is no collective responsibility, what remains? Collective irresponsibility (not collective irresponsibility, this is the next step after irresponsibility).

I perfectly understand why the Russians are afraid of having to pay compensation for crimes of the Putin regime. Precisely because in the Russian situation, 99.999% of this financial burden will fall not on those who gave and executed criminal orders, but on "the people". And the Russian officials, plowmen of all ranks and stripes, are still getting fat and rich on the payment of these compensations. And the inhabitants of some Buryatia are even more impoverished.

But this situation is not the result of the implementation of the norms of international law, but the result of the Russian "failed state", when the political power in the country is seized by an alliance of Chekists and the mafia, an alliance of executioners and thieves.

And here the concept of "sovereignty" is of great importance. The Russians themselves must free their country from the power of the Chekist-mafia gang, and if they don't do it, no one is to blame, except the Russians themselves.

Because sovereignty is not only the right to decide one's political destiny, but also the responsibility for a pleasant decision.

Usually, when I discuss the topic of collective responsibility, I am asked questions that are repeated. Such questions become something typological. Therefore, I will give the most frequent ones.

First, the analogy with the joint-stock company and the OPG does not quite work (by the way, no analogy at all can be a logical argument), since in both cases membership there is voluntary and presupposes self-reporting on the possible consequences of being a member of such groups. In the nation, this only works in the case of voluntary acceptance of one or another citizenship.

Secondly, I insist that no political nation exists in modern Russia. How can you prove the opposite? A reference to Putin's sociological services, talking about "everything as one" and other nonsense? Well then, why don't we believe the other Kremlin propaganda? And what else? Personal experience. But he cannot be relevant. Everyone has their own and it depends on a large number of subjective factors.

I will answer all given and stylistically similar objections as follows. If there is no political nation in Russia, then there is no sovereignty. Because sovereignty is inherent only in some objectivity. If there is no sovereignty as such and there is no bearer of this sovereignty, then the OPG must be repressed, and the territory will be divided between the occupation administrations. How was it initially supposed to be done with Germany in 1945.

In 2012, the Russians submissively allowed an alliance of executioners and thieves to seize political power, to the lulling cooing of "political fools", such as Katya Shulman и similar audience, if this power itself is gradually democratized. It is possible to believe in such nonsense, only if someone is ready to undergo an operation to remove appendicitis.

At the moment, I don't see anything mops "cool down". Moreover, more and more liberal babbling is increasingly seen as a mistake. If Russians do not recognize themselves as a political nation and do not want to be responsible for their choice, then they are simply not worthy of having their own state. And this is a natural process of history, like the death of Byzantium or the Inca Empire. And there is nothing to blame on the mirror when the face is crooked.

Many people initially perceived and now perceive themselves in the Russian Federation as foreigners. They did not pay taxes, worked "in the seruyu", did not participate in elections. What did these people have to do? Now we already know for sure that - to emigrate! To find a place where they could feel themselves as full-fledged citizens and achieve this citizenship. The term "internal emigration" is deceptive. But it was fashionable, and many consoled themselves with it, rationalizing their laziness and weakness.

In previously written texts, we argued that there is no point in wasting one's life on the arrival of a chance (only a chance!) for the Russians to build a normal state, so that they would give it away again, puffed up by "great spirituality", in exchange for sausage scraps and a sense of greatness.

But from the idea of ​​the impossibility of building an adequate state in Russia (which, if someone has forgotten, the classics of Ukrainian nationalism wrote about), let's smoothly move on to the topic of post-war reparations. I think that the shares of state-owned companies such as Gazprom or Rosneft will go to them, but they may not be enough. And the fact is that now these are dead assets. The oil market is lost forever. Siberia was de facto gifted to China.

And then where to take the money to pay for international obligations? Most likely, reparations will be carved out of these pitiful 250-dollar Russian salaries and 100-dollar pensions. Moreover, I am confident that EdRo will manage. The Buryats will take off the last underpants, but they will pay.

Let's return to our previous thesis. So far, there is no political nation in Shvabrostan. It's sad. let's see what will happen next.

And during the analysis (of varying degrees of depth and breadth: from "highly academic" to sofa) the following objections usually arise. They say, the question of non-dignity of Russians is not relevant here at all. It is as if it is obvious (who is interested, such idiocy comes to mind at all) that no one will occupy and divide a country riddled with nuclear weapons. Impossible scenarios can only be seen in fantasy films. In reality, some other solutions will be sought, but what exactly they are, is not specified.

I will say yes to all this. It is precisely for the sake of the safety of the world that it is necessary to take control of all nuclear weapons, and not wait for them to be taken over by moral monsters like Prigozhin or Kadyrov, who will come to power through stagnation failed state under the name "Russian Federation".

And the recent episode with Palestine showed that this is necessary. Palestine does not have nuclear weapons. And the Russian Federation has. And in the event of a real threat to its existence, not defeat in Ukraine, namely existence, it will certainly be used. Therefore, no one, neither NATO nor Ukraine, will go for it. I don't see the point of wasting mental energy on unrealistic scenarios. I'm not a fan.

And I will give an example of exactly how reparations took place after the Second World War. By the way, this is a very interesting fact. As part of reparations, the USSR took out the equipment of many factories (and several concentration camps) from Germany, but this is not the subject. As a result, already in May 1945, a resolution of the Soviet of People's Commissars of the USSR was adopted on the deployment of the Moskvich small car factory on the basis of the KIM plant. In 1947, serial production of Moskvich-400 passenger cars began. This model was developed on the basis of the German "Opel Kadett" model of 1938 and was produced on trophy equipment exported from Germany, after repairs, drawings were also obtained. And, as usual, German machines turned out to have an insane margin of safety and did not break down for a long time, which made the modernization of production practically impossible. In the conditions of a planned economy, this is even less possible.

But in Germany, the situation went the other way. The machines were taken away, but the brains and hands remained. And new cars were created on new, improved machines. And the German auto industry became recognized as one of the best. At the same time, the Chinese "Moskvich" even without the French "Lada-Grant" components (which are given, or were given, as "burial" (money) for the "death of a hero") will never reach the quality of the German auto industry.

I will give another similar example. In Zaporizhia, they used Siemens equipment from 1936 as reparations until the 2000s, I don't know how now; But I gave my opponents the example that the Germans developed production and modernized after the Second World War, while the Soviets, on the contrary, used hundred-year-old equipment and condemned themselves to technical and technological backwardness. From this follows the conclusion that reparations to Ukraine should be taken in money.

Let's return to the topic of collective responsibility of Russians. In the first weeks of the Great War, I told Russian "friends" that the responsibility for atrocities in Ukraine lay not only with their insane leader, but also with all citizens of the Russian Federation. This caused them undisguised irritation, and they deleted me from "friends".

The Russians are not afraid of responsibility, they are so famous for their hyper-masochistic patience, I think that there will be moss, like the North Koreans, just to preserve the illusion that they can terrify Washington with a conventional or real (this is not important for them) nuclear weapon But just recognizing yourself as guilty as the Nazis (whom they consider themselves to be the opposite of in everything) is a heavy psychological blow. He pays reparations like the Nazis - horror-horror. And where will their famous "getting up from their knees" be then?

Martin Skavronsky, Russian scholar,

dr. hab. for Newsky.