Essay About The Province (Notes About the Lack of Power in Modern Russia)

Abstract

In this article, the author using sketches of Russian culture, tries to understand, how institutions of power can function in the Russian province, and how they can be perceived by the society. The power is distributed unevenly, and this has a full effect on its deficit in relation to provincial political discourse. The Russian example is not an exception. From the author’s point of view, modern practices may have significant cultural grounds, hiding in a special relation to the province, which traditionally accompanied political discourse. The author sees this attitude in various sketches from the texts of Aleksandr Pushkin, Andrey Platonov, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Bunin and other Russian classics. The author’s interpretation of the problem required an appeal to the theoretical works of political philosophers, such as Giorgio Agamben, Albert Camus, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault and Max Scheler. The author believes that in the space of the Russian province there is an objective deficit of institutions of power, which speaks, on the one
hand, of a certain disregard for the province, and, on the other hand, testifies to the strength of resistance to local initiatives and legal nihilism that has become part of the political philosophy of the Russian provincial. In turn, the provision of a person to himself, affects a fairly critical attitude toward the political power. A person is not more capable of trusting the authorities and seeking support from them. His being increasingly assumes an existential character. The policy of the federal government in modern Russia gives rise to serious gaps between the center and the province, which can forms affect the specific perception of power itself, and also affects the formation of anarchic attitudes.