"The State Above the Individual": Akhiezer on Russian Hybridism as the Root of Authoritarian Inevitability

Russian imperial ideologues love to claim that Western individualism is a luxury Russia cannot afford.

Russian imperial ideologues love to claim that Western individualism is a luxury Russia cannot afford. With theatrical conviction, they insist: freedom is chaos, and chaos leads to disintegration. Therefore, a vertical of power is essential. A czar is necessary. Sacrifice is sacred. If a citizen is not ready to die for the state — then what kind of citizen is that?

In truth, this is fascism in its purest form — just dressed in fur and strumming a balalaika. It’s the cult of a strong state that devours its own people in the name of "unity." And this is absolutely organic to the Russian political tradition.

As early as the 1990s, Alexander Akhiezer diagnosed this logic as a self-replicating matrix, one that survives regardless of rulers, epochs, or external influences. He wrote about a “System” in which every attempt at modernization ends with the Westernization of elites — and the further enslavement of the masses. It’s a formula for Russian feudal modernity: above — “Europe,” below — “Asiopa.”

“Westernization in Russia is one-sided: its benefits go to the top, while the burden falls on the shoulders of the lower classes, who are driven into a ghetto of 'Asiatic-ness.'”

This was the case under Peter the Great, under Stalin, and again under Yeltsin. Akhiezer identifies 1993 — the shelling of parliament and the authoritarian rewrite of the Constitution — as a point of no return. From that moment, he says, the Russian state shed any remaining moral or ideological constraints, opening the door to a new kind of dictatorship, one stripped of both religious hypocrisy and communist dogma.

“The August regime resembles Peter's coup... a liberation of the ruling class from the limiting censorship of previous beliefs... enabling the expanded reproduction of power — up to and including totalitarian dictatorship.”

Akhiezer describes the future autocrat as a figure who feeds on popular phobias, while relying on an alliance of mafia capital and intellectual collaborators. Word for word, this is how Putin’s regime of the 2000s took shape.

Russia Is Neither Traditional nor Modern. It Is Hybrid

Akhiezer went further, anticipating in the 1990s what Russian political scientists would only start calling “hybridity” in the 2010s. But he wasn’t talking about "hybrid warfare" — he meant a hybrid society, in which irreconcilable mental structures coexist within a single individual.

“To be a non-Western person today means living in a field of unbearable tension... the soul experiences a rift between historical times and systems of values.”

This condition — let’s call it the cyborgization of culture — manifests when a rural Orthodox believer simultaneously trusts Sberbank, Facebook, the Third Rome, UFOs, and a local witch-doctor. No cognitive dissonance. No synthesis. Just a catastrophic dispersion of meaning.

In a strange reversal, the West has become the guardian of Tradition — living by linear time, institutional continuity, and inherited logic. Russia, by contrast, is a society of metaphysical swamp, where no time is fixed, no value stable — only archaic reflexes, mimicry, and sudden violence.

Authoritarianism as an Algorithm of Imperial Survival

Akhiezer was no idealist. He understood that authoritarianism in Russia is not an accident, but a structural solution to the cultural and political incompatibilities within the empire. Trying to integrate Russia into a Western, individualist model is a death sentence for the imperial form. Thus, Russian rulers inevitably return — sooner or later — to the logic of forced cohesion through fear and myth.

“A Russian usurper always has something to rely on: a national tradition where grace is above law.”

Hence the permanent cultivation of enemies, the sacralization of statehood, the disdain for law, and the glorification of suffering. This is where phrases like:
“Let it be hard for me, as long as Russia rises from its knees,”
or
“Freedom is a Western infection,”
find fertile ground.

This is not mere propaganda. It is a deep-rooted anthropological program — honed and selected over centuries.

Conclusion

Russia is not authoritarian by accident. Its authoritarianism is a survival mechanism amid the deep internal rift between elites and masses, between imperial ambitions and archaic realities, between gigantist statism and fragile social fabric.

It is a state in which the individual exists solely as fuel for a metaphysical machine called The System.

That’s why any attempt to “democratize” Russia without dismantling its imperial casing is not only naive — it’s criminal and dangerous.
As one British analyst put it: “You cannot reform a concentration camp — you can only dismantle it.”