Oxana Timofeeva

WHAT IS A PEOPLE?

On March 25-26, a massive fire destroyed the mall and entertainment complex “Zimnaya Vishnya”
[Winter Sourcherry] in Kemerovo, Siberia. Flames engulfed 1,600 square meters, resulting in the
collapse of the walls and floors. When the fire started, approximately 1,500 people were visiting the
mall. Some managed to flee, others were saved by firefighters, others still were hurt in the ensuing
stampede or tried to save themselves by jumping from the windows. According to official numbers, 60
people died, 41 of them children. Most of the children suffocated or were burned alive in Movie Theater
No. 2 on the fourth floor. They were watching an animation movie when the fire started, but the main
exits as well as fire exits were locked. Other than shops, playrooms, and movie theaters, Zimnaya
Vishnya also contained a petting zoo, whose employees quickly gathered all relevant documentation,
fled the premises and closed the door behind them, leaving the animals inside. Around 200 animals of
25 different species perished — foxes, racoons, pairie dogs, squirrels, rabbits, dwarf goats, hedgehogs…

For almost two days, the state-run media failed to react to these events. The main tv channels were
busy preparing for yet another Putin-inauguration, airing a mix of entertainment and propaganda.
Information on the tragedy spread via social media and on some independent outlets. An acquaintance
from Kemerovo got in touch with me via Telegram Messenger: his mom lives in a building across from
Zimnaya Vishnya and she saw people jumping from the fourth floor. Somebody else wrote that the
victim numbers were not in the dozens but in the hundreds, and that the mass media were intentionally
keeping silent or misreporting the matter. People were asking, “Why hasn’t the president said
anything?” and “Why isn’t the country in mourning?”

Putin only traveled to Kemerovo on the morning of March 27. The police chased away the crowds and
cordoned off the nearby square, so that he could place flowers on the spontaneous memorial that had
arisen when inhabitants of the city gathered and brought stuffed animals, candles and balloons. The
governener of the Kemerovo oblast’ Aman Tuleev stayed away from the scene of the tragedy entirely
and offered Putin an apology that “something like that happened on our territory.” An official day of
mourning all over Russia was announced on March 28, only after a entire wave of civic memorials had
swept the country. People went into mourning without waiting for the government to react. It started
with a simple post “I declare a national state of mourning,” then spread by reposting. One and all — we
were the ones to declare a state of mourning nationwide.

The first action took place on the evening of March 26 in Beslan. By March 27, memorials had sprung up
in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Chita, Khabarovsk, Nizhnekamsk, Penza,
Voronezh, Krasnoyarsk, Murmansk, Krasnodar, Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, Novorossiisk, Volgograd, Kirov,
Nizhny Novgorod, Osmk, Yaroslavl, Perm’, Samara, Chelyabinsk, Smolensk… In Kemerovo itself, the
memorial quickly turned into a mass protest. People were demanding access to information on the dead
and wounded, and explanations of why the fire exits of the movie theater had been blocked when there
were children inside. They also called for the punishment of the guilty parties and decried the
government for its inaction. The slogan “Our country is Zimnaya Vyshnya, and we’re like the animals in
the petting zoo” spread from city to city. I went to an action in Petersburg: surrounded by a police
cordon, the crowd silently gathered around the Eternal Flame on Mars Field to lay down flowers and
toys. When the cops started calling for the crowd to disperse and to stop this unpermitted gathering,
the people started chanting “Shame, shame!”
General spontaneous mobilizations carry an unbelievable emotional charge. It is as if some levee
suddenly breaks, unleashing a huge wave to wash over us. In mourning or rage, we ourselves become
this wave, which the police and OMON troops then try to stop, forming cordons of raised riot shields. I
rushed to the action on Mars Field from Liteiny Bridge, slipping across uneven dirty ice, past a bunch of
police vans for prisoners standing in a row. A line from a song by the rock band Grazhdanskaya Oborona
from 1989 kept running through my head: “We’re ice under the feet of the Major!” The song says that
we are the ice upon which “the Major will slip and the Major will fall.” Who is this we? Suddenly I
understand with my mind and my heart that we are “the people.” Not the Russian people, neither
nation nor class nor the populace of a particular territory nor the sum of a particular state. It is not
society, not the public sphere, and not a multitude. Beyond all those familiar interpretations, “the
people” has yet another, less obvious meaning, which one can better understand if one looks at the
mass transition of empathy to solidarity and mourning to indignation that happened in Russia in March
2018.

I had either participated in or witnessed quite a few spontaneous popular movements until then. They
all had the character of protests, however, expressing a negative response to concrete actions by the
state, be they neoliberal reforms, ballot rigging, political repressions, corruption, bureaucratic abuses or
police brutality. In contrast, that moment in March was not as reactive. Instead, people were actively
stepping in against the inactivity of the state. One could, of course, limit oneself to acknowledging that,
in the case of Kemerovo, empathy and grief morphed into massive discontent, conclusively revealing the
insoluable conflict between the Russian state and society at large. Such an explanation only scratches
the surface, however, and does not further a full appreciation of this conflict’s political aspects. Politics
manifests itself not when people suddenly understand that they are locked into a confrontation with a
state that openly demonstrates its lack of respect for the lives of its citizens, but when this
confrontation transforms society, the populace, the sum total of citizens from a diverse multitude in a
people, it acts like a spontaneous force, manifested in a constitutive ritual gesture - the declaration of
national mourning.

That is precisely what frightened the police as it appealed to people to leave the unsanctioned memorial
and to go to the official one, hastily organized by city authorities not far away. The president was also
frightened as he demonstratively laid flowers on a square swept clean of people. To declare a day of
national mourning is usually a governmental prerogative. The head of state or the government can
decide to fly flags at half-mast, or to cancel or limit entertainments and other events. This is an
exceptional powerful ritual: the state officially defines the boundaries of a common affect of mourning,
uniting the populace, that is, everyone living on a given territory, everything alive, around the dead.

In Russian, the words “victim” and “sacrifice” are one and the same (zhertva), and its ubiquitous use in
such cases (victims of the tragedy, the terrorist attack, the catastrophe etc.) is no coincidence. It refers
us back to the social function fulfiled by sacrificial rituals since the most distant antiquity. These do not
just entail mourning and commemoration, sacrificial or placatory offerings — including such
foundational sacrifices as Christ’s crucifixion on Golgotha. The national state of mourning declared by a
government is heir to these ancient rituals; the gloom of mourning’s solemnity obscures a forgotten,
repressed history of sacrifices that gathers a community around a dead body or bodies recognized by
the community as their own. The victims are innocent; they die for us or in our place, and we are left
with a feeling of guilt and a desire for penance. That is the anthropological mechanism at the root of all
commemorative ceremonies, when individual experiences dissolve in collective affects.1 The death of
the children in the flames of the locked movie theater provoked an emotional storm, immediately
generating a multitude of horizontal links via social media that then served as a platform for self-
organization for people from different cities. By taking over the government’s exclusive right to initiate a
sacrificial ritual of mourning, the populace turned itself into a people.

I will try to explain which meaning I attach to this word, which is one not everybody likes, and why I
think that it should return to our contemporary lexicon even if we have long since given it over to the
Right, the conservatives, the nationalists, the reactionaries and the dictators. In political philosophy, the
notion of “the people” first becomes meaningful in the Renaissance, as a nascent bourgeois society was
forming against the backdrop of the struggle with absolutism. Thomas Hobbes writes about the good of
the people as the supreme law of the state,2 while John Locke sees the people as the sole source of
political power, allowing it to topple a government if it is unhappy with the latter.3 Jean Jacques Rosseau
further develops this idea of popular sovereignty as the basis of direct democracy in a republican state. 4
These three rather different conceptions are often conflated in so-called social contract theory, creating
a direct link between the people and the state. Whether citizens draw up a social contract to put an end
to the state of war of all against all, as in Hobbes, or due to natural law, itself in need of ordering, as in
Locke, or through the common will, as in Rosseau - in all cases, the people is represented as a unified,
steadfast, homogenous political body with its organ of power.

The principle of the social contract provides the basis for the majority of democratic nations today. As
Carl Schmitt emphasizes, the unity of these democracies or their equality of equals, is achieved by
identifying and excluding those who are unequal; someone is always left out from the people. 5 If ethnic
identity is the criterion of unity, representatives of other ethnic groups (migrants, Jews etc.) are subject
to exclusion. Russia’s Day of National Unity, which was introduced in 2005 and has been the darling of
the ultra-right ever since, presents the paradigmatic quintessence of the patriotic idea of national
homogeneity. One should not forget that it was introduced by the Russian state to replace the
anniversary of the October Revolution, celebrated for the previous seven decades. This holiday also
declared unity, but one of a different kind - that of the Soviet people, whose notion was backed up by a
specific history linked in turn to the initial understanding of a people in the Marxist sense - not as an
ethnic group, but through the notion of class. The revolutionary takeover of power through the workers
assumed that they would form institutions of popular self-governance, exerting a dictatorship of the

1
See, for example, Elias Canetti. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart (Continuum 1962); Marcel Mauss.
Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (University of Chicago Press 1964).

2
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed.
by Ian Shapiro (Yale University Press; 2010)

3
John Locke. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett.(Cambridge University Press 1988)

4
Jean-Jacques Rosseau. Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings. Ed. Christopher Bertram. Trans. Quintin
Hoare (Penguin Books: 2012)

5
Carl Schmitt. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. (MIT Press 1985), p. 9. See also Chantal Mouffe. The
Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000, pp. 36—59
proletariat as a transitional phase in the construction of socialism. Yet Stalinist ideology affirmed that
the transition to a classless society was already immanent, replacing class with the multi-national Soviet
people. Non-equals become a broad category of “enemies of the people,” and it is against the backdrop
of their exclusion that there arises a picture of the unity of the people and the state, the Party and the
people.

So, in fact, both in really existing socialism and under capitalism, it turns out that the people is a
territorially locable human resource whose postulated unity guarantees the legitimacy of power in a
given state. It is a biopolitical unit, an administrable and demographically predictable population united
by common laws and national symbols, as well as a common culture, language, tradition, and customs.
This history, language,tradition and customs compose a culture, or as Hegel would say, a people’s spirit.
There is no point in denying its existence. We are always already inside of our own culture, our own
people — be it the Soviet, Russian, Khanty, Apache, German, Nganasan, American, Elf, or mouse people,
as in Kafka. Neither socialist internationalism, nor liberal cosmopolitanism, nor capitalist globalization
can neutralize the spirit of the people as long as at least a few of its representatives are alive. But it can
be appropriated and attributed or transformed into a power base or a material-demographic resource.
The appropriation and transformation of the people from the sole source of power into the base of its
legitimacy — a near-indiscernible transition from sovereignty to subservience — is an inevitable result
of the imagined unity of the people and power. The unity of the people is a running board onto which
any power at all can jump, then immediately assuming the role of the train’s conductor.

This is precisely why some contemporary philosophers - for example, Antonio Negri or Paolo Virno -
suggest we abandon the compromised notion of the people and turn instead to the multitude as an
actual political force. In his book The Grammar of the Multitude, Virno writes that people and multitude
are polar opposites. The former goes back to Hobbes, the latter to Spinoza: “For Spinoza, the multitudo
indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of
communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of
motion.” 6 This is why Hobbes “detests” the multitude, as Virno puts it. To Hobbes, the people are
inseparable from the state. State and people form a unified political body while the multitude is a
natural state preceding its emergence. With the appearance of the state, the multitude makes way for
the unity of the people, though it can return at times of crisis. As a “regurgitation of the ‘state of nature’
in civil society,” 7 Hobbes’ multitude is a force directed against both people and state. For his part,
Spinoza sees the multitude as “a permanent […], not an episodic or interstitial form, […as] the architrave
of civil liberties.” 8 Virno and Negri return to this unjustly forgotten notion, successfully using it to
describe conditions immanent to contemporary society: the multitude is always already here, and it
resists power. It will not be gathered up as one or swallowed whole.

Another Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, places his choice with “the people,” but turns to a
different interpretation leading back to Marxism, Russian revolutionary populism, and the leftist

6
Paolo Virno. A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotexte 2004). p. 21

7
Virno, 23

8
ibid
tradition as a whole, but also to Christianity - to the understanding of the people as the oppressed and
dispossessed: “Any interpretation of the political meaning of the term people ought to start from the
peculiar fact that in modern European languages this term always indicates also the poor, the
underprivileged, and the excluded.”9 Agamben points at the ambiguity inherent to the notion of the
people: “The same term names the constitutive political subject as well as the class that is excluded —
de facto, if not de jure — from politics.”10 Noting that the people already contains “within itself the
fundamental biopolitical fracture,” Agamben supplies an extreme example: “We ought to understand
the lucid fury with which the German Volk —representative par excellence of the people as integral
body politic— tried to eliminate the Jews forever as precisely the ter- minal phase of the internecine
struggle that divides People and people.” 11 Minor peoples stood in the way of Nazi unity — and these
included not only Jews but also Gypsies, a people to which I partly belong by descent, and “other
unassimilable elements.”12 Minor peoples, as opposed to major ones, are nomadic, forever disappearing
or inventing themselves in the moment of exodus.

Such an itinerant people appears in Andrei Platonov’s novella Dzhan [Soul] (1936). Its chief protagonist,
Nazar Chagatayev finishes his education in Moscow and sets off to Central Asia on party orders to seek
out a lost, impoverished nomadic people called Dzhan or soul. “The nation included Turkmen,
Karakalpaks, a few Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Persians, Kurds, Baluchis, and people who had forgotten who they
were,”13 explains the Party Commitee secretary in Platonov’s novella. “I know this nation,” Chatagayev
answers, adding “they were runaways and orphans from everywhere, and old, exhausted slaves who
had been cast out. There were women who had betrayed their husbands and then vanished, fleeing to
Sary-Kamysh in fear. There were young girls who came and never left because they love men who hahd
suddenly died and they didn’t want to marry anyone else. And people who didn’t know God, people
who mocked the world. There were criminals…”14

Dzhan is a generalized personification of the Soviet people, as well as an unexpected metaphor for the
Jews (wandering around the desert in search of freedom). It is also a literary figure that gathers under
the name of “nation” all the unhappy and lost humans and animals. Chatagayev literally leads this minor
people through the desert to finally “teach it socialism.” This is a people that exists and doesn’t exist at
the same time, always fluctuating on the border to non-existence. Its description fits perfectly with the
one Gilles Deleuze supplies for a people “still lacking,” invented by literature: “This is not exactly a
people called upon to dominate the world. It is a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becoming-
revolutionary. Perhaps it exists only in the atoms of the writer, a bastard people, inferior, dominated,

9
Giorgio Agamben. Mean with an End. Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of
Minnesota Press 2000), p. 28

10
Ibid.

11
ibid, p. 34

12
ibid

13
Andrey Platonov. Soul and Other Stories. Trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler (New York Review of Books
2004), p. 23-24

14
ibid
always in becoming, always incomplete. Bastard no longer designates a familial state, but the process or
drift of the races. I am a beast, a Negro of an inferior race for all eternity.”15

Deleuze’s bastard people is a utopian one. It does not exist in unity with power, there is no power over
it, not yet, or already. Maybe it has fled or maybe power itself has rejected or forgotten about it,
confirming itself in its monumental unity with some phantasmic giant-people. How does this utopian
people differ from the multitude? — In its revolutionary becoming, through which it gathers and gives
itself a name. Deleuze never wrote about such gathering, of course, but I am assuming we need to keep
it in mind if we want to understand how a utopian people becomes real. It can give itself a name, like in
Platonov, where “Dzhan” means “soul or little life,” it can call itself “the ice under the feet of the major,”
or simply “we,” thus gathering up the entire diffuse potentiality of the multitude. It is not power that
names or constitutes the people, only the people itself.

That, then, would be the new meaning I suggest we give to the notion of “the people.” This would be a
people that gathers itself in revolutionary becoming - neither major nor minor, neither the people of
ideology nor the people of utopia, both of which are non-existent in various manners. It follows that we
first need to separate our notion of the people from that of the state, and second, think it not as a static
formation but a dynamic process, as something that constitutes itself from a multitude and actually only
exists in the moment of such self-constitution. Only then can we, for example, understand how the
people can declare a national state of mourning, or, more broadly, appear as an active force of history:
it is the people and not power who make revolutions. This is neither a major hegemonic people nor a
minor subaltern people, but a people that names and gathers itself. In Leninist terms, this naming or
immediately actualization of the people presents the materialist miracle of a dialectical unity of
sponteneity and organization. The actualization of the people is backed by an unprecedented,
momentary collective decision: we are the ones with the power here. It’s just a single moment, and
already it’s gone, and we already dissolve back into a multitude and return to everyday life. There is no
way of documenting or protocoling that moment, nor of affixing it to a territory as a static unit, it is
impossible to tie down with any “spirirtual bonds,” as Russian official propaganda tries to do. At a
certain moment, society simply explodes into a people, before or after someone else manages to
trample it down. It’s happened many times before, and it will happen again.

15
Gilles Deleuze. Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (University of Minnesota Press
1997), p. 4