REVOLVING CIRCLES

It's the Sixties week in the Dutch cinemas. The decade when we all thought it would turn out good for the world, the TV commercial said. In the sixties, the word R e v o l u t i o n sounded sweet.

Many keep speaking of revolution today. And since in most of my columns I can't help but slide back into monologues about Russia, my ethnic motherland about which my heart continues to ache, if you play the association game with me, the word R e v o l u t i o n brings the same old Russia to my mind.

Not because Russia was the home to one of the word's bloodiest revolutions, and even not because I was born to witness another revolution in Russia in 1991. But because I have come to see Russia as a country of non-stop

R

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in the original sense of the world or, going around, in circles.

Any revolution is simply a way to re-legitimize control, one contemporary Russian writer has stated about the Bolshevik Revolution, and alluding to the more recent one. Any such re-legitimization first brings extreme forms of anarchy along, only to justify the terror afterwards.

What Russia 's current controlling elites fear are the so-called Orange Revolutions – population demonstrating distrust to their rulers by pouring massively into the streets – breaking out with different degrees of success in the bordering states, the ex-colonies. Because of this fear, the Russian federal and local governments are going out of their ways and bending over backwards to prevent real mass demonstrations all together. Different measures are summoned, from officially banning gathering in groups of more than two people per square meter in Moscow and not issuing the obligatory licenses to demonstration organizers to arresting the prominent partakers before the demonstration even begins. Also popular is inviting police regiments from remote regions of Russia and ordering them to join the local police in quite ruthless beatings of peaceful demonstrators, even the elderly, living below any comprehensible survival standards.

A recent invention has been to stage fake mass demonstrations by bringing in hundreds of ignorant young people to the centre of the Russian capital, dressing them up in colourful uniforms and making them sing, dance and distribute pro-Putin leaflets. All that presumably in return for a modest payment. Street traffic was blocked to allow the act to flow freely. Also allowed are extreme right and monarchist demonstrations as ones having no prospect of gathering many supporters.

The demonstrations, or marches, as the Russians call them, have literally engulfed Moscow and a couple of other cities in the European part of the country and remained unreported and unheard of in the rest of its vast territory. Only one TV channel, REN-TV, covers the opposition marches. Two more opposition marches, although officially forbidden, will take place this upcoming weekend in Moscow and St.Petersburg.

I don't like the word March. I know the opposition have borrowed it from the title of the earlier fascist Russian March, for the purpose of juxtaposition. But the word smacks way too much of neglect for the individual and loyalty to a mass.

I have deep respect for the opposition marchers. For the famous chess wiz kid Garry Kasparov, Khodorkovsky's friend Marina Litvinovich and even the brilliant provocative writer and the leader of what I see more as a flash-mob theatrical group of youngsters Edward Limonov (by the way, a Russian newspaper is now boycotted by all political parties in power for simply having interviewed Limonov). I marvel the opposition marchers' bravery.

The question is only: what happens when their slogans do lead to yet another revolution? Will they too become swallowed and crashed in the anarchic and then dictatorial waves that, philosophers like Berdyaev say, are always bound to follow?

The rich are too notoriously, too in-the-face-of-the-poor rich, and the torturers practice too insolently for another wave of revengeful bloodshed and plunder to keep waiting.

Revolution means going around in circles.

Maybe it takes longer, but I just believe so much more in underground enlightenment (think of the Samyzdat, those who know what I mean) and the spread of the Internet (which is currently in regular use among just about 4 percent of Russians).

So how long will it take? Is it because of Russia 's media and technological retardation that revolution may once again prove to be the only act of change to fit in our lifetimes?

In that sense, the behaviour of the corporation in power is suicidal.