Caucasus Wedding on wikileaks

Image via Wikipedia

Reading during a short break some recent wikileaks documents, I found one very useful for somebody interested in the history of the former communist space, but also in perceptions and misperceptions. This is the cable about a wedding in Dagestan, with short sociological and historical observations about the society, the puzzle of ethnic minorities, the origin of the new stake-holders.

Old posters

from pre- and Soviet Russia.

When the memories of the past

are different and contradictory and apparently as alive as the present.

The misleading names of post-communist parties

For example: the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

It was created in 1989.
Among its "aims":
- Capital punishment for those convicted of terrorism, premeditated murder, and other serious crimes;
- The abolition of "non-traditional" and "fanatic" religious sects in Russia;
- Control of all agricultural land by the state

Mentioned just a couple of example, prooving the full contradition between the name and the practical objectives. The leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is currently mentioning the need to reinforce the "Russian power', "accusing" its political opponents of being "Jews".

Once again, in order to open the ways of understanding the post-communist world, it is necessary a very careful lecture and decyphering work of words, expressions and attitudes.

The Case of the Missing Russian Crime Novel

An interesting feature published by Radio Free Europe.

Putin vs. the Truth

Orlando Figes

The New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009

Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia

by Jonathan Brent

Atlas & Co., 335 pp., $26.00

In 1991, during the last days of the Soviet Union, I was working in the Military History Archive in Moscow. The archive complex was in a crumbling state. There were broken windows and stray cats on the staircase to the reading room. The desk lamps had no lightbulbs and there was no heat. Half the archivists had left because of poor pay. In the courtyard of the complex stood, surreally, a Soviet army tank. The director told me he had bought it very cheaply as an attraction: it was part of his "business plan" for the archive. Last year I returned to the archive. The buildings were not much improved, and the staff were just as rude as I remembered them from Soviet days. The tank had gone, but in its place was a shestyorka, a Mercedes S-600, the standard car of the minor oligarchs, brand new with tinted glass. I was told that it belonged to one of the archive's directors.

The collapse of the Soviet regime gave the heads of Russia's archives new commercial opportunities. In the first chaotic years of the Yeltsin government, when they were allowed to run their archives as their personal fiefdoms, there was money to be made from the journalists and publishers who flocked to Moscow (and very rarely to St. Petersburg) in search of secrets and sensations from the vaults. There were tales of Western publishers buying up exclusive rights to the archives, of deals being made to reserve parts of them for certain Western researchers,^[1] and even rumors that precious documents were being sold.^[2]

For scholars too there were real gains. Intellectually, the end of communism was a liberation for historians. They could travel to Russia, work in the archives freely, and publish what they liked, without fear of retribution from the Soviet authorities.

To understand this liberation, one has to appreciate what it was like to work in the Soviet archives as a foreigner. From 1984 to 1987, I worked in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR), now the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), for my first book, on the peasantry in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. There were no more than a handful of foreign historians working in the archive at that time. We had no access to the catalogs (it was only in 1986 that they began to be made available) so our only information about the contents of the archive came from the footnotes of Soviet publications. The system worked on the principle of preserving everything but admitting the existence of only those materials cleared for publication by Soviet historians.

All our requests for documents were vetted by a woman from the KGB. As foreigners we had to work in a separate reading room, without access to the canteen, so that we would not come into contact with Soviet historians or archivists, who might help us with our work. There was just one flaw in the system: the reading room for Soviet researchers shared a toilet with the room for foreigners. In those days I was a smoker, so I'd go there frequently and chat with Soviet historians and archivists, who liked my Western cigarettes and were happy to find out for me the numbers of the files I needed for my work.

1.

Jonathan Brent is the editorial director of Yale University Press. In January 1992, he arrived in Moscow for the first time, and with the help of a young American scholar, Jeffrey Burds, he tried to persuade the heads of Russia's most important central archives to do business with him. Brent's plan was to publish a series of volumes of selected documents from the newly opened Soviet archives, employing American scholars and Russian archivists as editors—a project that became the Annals of Communism, of which so far twenty volumes have been published (and another ten are in preparation) on various themes in Soviet history. In the first part of his engaging and well-written memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives, Brent tells the story of the project's genesis. He conjures up the Moscow of the early 1990s, a time when the Russians were struggling to recover from the loss of the old certainties following the collapse of the Soviet system and adapt to a market-based economy. On his first visit to the former Party Archive, Brent notices "a small glass vase of fresh violets" at the feet of a statue of Lenin; on a later visit he notices that these have been replaced by plastic flowers; and then the flowers disappear.

There were rival Western publishers who would perhaps pay more for sensational material from the archives. But the affable American was guided well by Burds and his friends in the Russian scholarly community, who advised Brent to emphasize his scholarly intentions and show respect for the Russians. "Don't come on like a conquering hero; don't be a smug American; don't look down on them because their system failed and ours triumphed." Sitting down for his first meeting with the archive officials, Brent did something he had been told to do by Burds: he opened a fresh packet of Winston cigarettes, offered them across the negotiating table, and accepted the counter-offer of a packet of Russian cigarettes as a gesture of respect. And then Brent made a naive speech about how he had "grown up under the sign of the Cold War" and had lived in fear of nuclear attack; how he had also grown up listening to his "father's record of the Red Army Chorus and had marched around our apartment to their glorious melodies"; how he had thought that "people who could sing such songs...could not possibly be my enemy"; and how he had now come to Moscow "with the hope that we could negotiate in good faith and reach an understanding that would enrich both sides of the table."

I may have gone on too long, but I wished to make clear that for me this was not simply a business deal: it was a quest for understanding an enigma that was not a set of academic or political questions but the context of my life experience and that of my generation of Americans.

One can only wonder what the heads of Russia's archives made of such a speech, but what persuaded them to do business with Brent was relatively straightforward: he promised that as editors of the published volumes they would be paid royalties in dollars on equal terms with the Americans. Once it became clear that they would make some money for themselves—and that the researchers of their archives would be paid as well—they readily revealed the riches of the archives and negotiated contracts for their publication in America. Brent's initial list of subjects (the Great Terror, the Church and the Revolution, the Comintern and the repressions of the 1930s) was soon supplemented by other volumes on the Russian Revolution, the last diary of the Empress Alexandra, the murder of the Romanov family, and Soviet espionage in the US. There was not much that Brent was not prepared to buy.

What remained unclear was whether Yale would have exclusive publishing rights outside Russia, as he insisted it should have (in fact, there are lots of cases of the Russian archives selling the same documents to several publishers); whether there would be a Russian publication of all the documents (and, if so, who would pay for it); and whether other researchers, from Russia or abroad, would be allowed to make use of the archives while they were being prepared for publication by the American academics selected as editors by Yale (there were plenty of complaints by scholars on this score). Brent recognized

that it was vital the books be available in Russian for Russian readers; otherwise, was it not some form of plunder? Otherwise, how would this knowledge penetrate Russian society? And without this knowledge, how could a new society begin to be constructed?

This was an important admission to make because at the time there was a widely publicized protest by Russian nationalists and Communists about the "theft" of Russia's archives by foreigners accused of wanting to blacken Soviet history by focusing attention on its darkest spots. As Brent explains, a potential problem was avoided by negotiating subsidies for the Russian publication of the volumes in the Yale series, leaving it to the individual archives to decide what documents to add or take away from each volume, though so far only fourteen of the twenty volumes in the Yale series have been published in Russia.

2.

The Annals of Communism is an admirable enterprise. In it, some of the most important revelations from the former Soviet archives have been published for the first time.^[3] Many of the volumes have successfully combined the publication of new materials with original analysis.^[4] But others have been less successful, either because the documents themselves are relatively insignificant,^[5] or because they include jargon-ridden academic commentaries.^[6]

In the second half of Inside the Stalin Archives, Brent gives a summary of some of the books in the series (though without giving any details of their authors or even a list of the titles in a bibliography). The series, we are told, will culminate in the publication of several volumes of documents from Stalin's personal files. In a final chapter, Brent has some interesting reflections on Stalin's notes in the margins of the books in his private library:

As I looked at page after page of Stalin's corrections, annotations, and commentary, I realized that while he professed a worldview set radically against metaphysics and Kantian idealism, Stalin was an idealist in the sense that he believed completely in the primacy of ideas. This represents a radical, if almost invisible, reorientation and revision of Marx's philosophy and is the key to understanding Stalin's threat to "mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, by his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state."

Stalin's personal archive was opened on the initiative of Alexander Yakovlev, the Party's last propaganda chief and the main intellectual force behind Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program, who after 1991 championed the cause of victims of repression and campaigned for a moral reckoning with the crimes of Soviet history. Until his death in 2005, Yakovlev was the chairman of the International Foundation of Democracy, established by President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, which has so far published no less than eighty-eight volumes of documents from the Soviet archives in its outstanding series Rossiia: XX vek (Russia: The Twentieth Century).

This represents by far the largest and most important series of published documents in Russia, although there are several smaller projects that have also brought to the attention of a Russian academic readership damning new material from the archives on the repressions of the Stalin years.^[7] Some of the volumes in the Yakovlev series have been published with the help of Western institutions, including the Hoover Institution and Yale University Press. Unfortunately, Brent does not discuss the impact of these Russian publications on the public debate about Stalinism in Russia, although it was evidently part of his mission (as it was of Yakovlev's) to help Russian society democratize itself through a better understanding of its recent history.

These were very much the goals of Russian democrats in the 1990s, when organizations like Memorial, a human rights and historical research center representing millions of victims of Soviet repression, were at the height of their authority and often discussed in the public media. It was widely assumed that, if Russia was to become a democracy, if it was to renounce the authoritarian habits of its Soviet past, there had to be a genuine cultural and moral reform of the nation that could only start with an unflinching recognition of the crimes committed in its name during the Stalinist era.

In the 1990s this was understood as an act of national repentance, an exorcism of the past, in which it was tacitly recognized that the whole of society had been collectively responsible for the murderous policies of its leaders. As the Russian historian Mikhail Gefter wrote, it was no good blaming everything on Stalin, when the real power and lasting legacy of his reign of terror was "in the Stalinism that entered into all of us."^[8]

Many Russians felt uncomfortable about being confronted with these inconvenient truths about their past. They preferred not to think about the past at all, to live their normal lives and think about the future rather than to dwell on what they or their parents might have done to survive the Stalin years: the moral compromises they had made; the people they had lost, forgotten, or renounced; the questions they had never asked. This, after all, was how people had been forced to live in the Soviet Union, and these habits of conformity continued to affect the way they lived after 1991.

Others were resentful about being told they should be ashamed of their country's history. They had been brought up on the Soviet myths: the liberating power of the October Revolution, the great advances of the Five-Year Plans, the victory against Hitler in 1945, Soviet achievements in culture, science, and technology. Why should they feel guilty about what had happened under Stalin? He had made mistakes, but he had won the war and made the Soviet Union a great power. Why should they tolerate the "blackening" of their history by foreigners? These were the sentiments of Russian "patriots," and they are the core of the nationalism that underpins the regime of Vladimir Putin.

From the start, Putin understood the importance of historical rhetoric for his nationalist politics, particularly if it played to popular nostalgia for the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union was felt as a humiliation by most Russians. In a matter of a few months they lost everything—an empire, an ideology, an economic system that had given them security, superpower status, national pride, and an identity forged from Soviet history. Soon after the Soviet collapse, the Russians had fallen into poverty and hunger and become dependent on relief from the West, which lectured them about democracy and human rights.

Everything that happened in the 1990s—the hyperinflation, the loss of people's savings and security, the rampant corruption and criminality, the robber-oligarchs and the drunken president—was a source of national shame. This was the soil in which nostalgia for the Soviet Union grew. Polls in the year that Putin came to power showed that three quarters of the Russian population regretted the breakup of the USSR and wanted Russia to reincorporate "Russian" territories that had been lost, such as the Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Putin quickly built up his own historical mythology, combining the Soviet myths (stripped of their Communist packaging) with statist elements from the Russian Empire before 1917. His regime was connected to and sanctioned by a long "Russian tradition" of strong state power—going back to the founder of the empire and of Putin's native city, Peter the Great.

Through this mythology Putin fostered the idea that Russia's traditions of authoritarian rule are morally equal to democratic Western traditions, and that Russia will follow its own path of "sovereign democracy," without lectures from the West. Indeed his supporters often say that Russians value a strong state, economic growth, and security more than the liberal concepts of human rights or democracy, which have no roots in Russian history.

3.

The rehabilitation of Stalin is the most disturbing element of Putin's historical rhetoric—and the most powerful, for it taps into a deep Russian yearning for a "strong leader." According to a survey in 2005, 42 percent of the Russian people, and 60 percent of those over sixty years of age, wanted the return of a "leader like Stalin."^[9]

Putin's regime has not denied Stalin's crimes (he has made several speeches acknowledging the victims of the Great Terror of 1937–1938) but it has argued for the need to balance them against Stalin's achievements as the builder of the country's "glorious Soviet past." It is part of the regime's broader struggle to impose its "patriotic" narrative of Soviet history on the nation's historical consciousness and to marginalize the collective memory of the Stalinist repressions, perhaps so that people would not draw from it to question the return of authoritarian rule.

At a national conference of high school teachers in Moscow in June 2007, Putin complained about the "mess and confusion" that he perceived in the teaching of Soviet history and called for "common standards" to be introduced in Russian schools.^[10] The following discussion then took place:

A conference participant: In 1990–1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of human values.... It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done....

Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.

Participant: In the past two decades, our youth have been subjected to a torrent of the most diverse information about our historical past. This information [contains] different conceptual approaches, interpretations, or value judgments, and even chronologies. In such circumstances, the teacher is likely to...

Putin (interrupting): Oh, they will write, all right. You see, many textbooks are written by those who are paid in foreign grants. And naturally they are dancing the polka ordered by those who pay them. Do you understand? And unfortunately [such textbooks] find their way to schools and colleges.

In his concluding speech to the history teachers, Putin said:

As to some problematic pages in our history—yes, we've had them. But what state hasn't? And we've had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as it was in Vietnam, for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt....^[11]

Four days after the conference, the Duma introduced a law, which was quickly passed, empowering the Ministry of Education to decide which textbooks should be published and which should be used in Russian schools.

The history textbook favored by the government was heavily promoted by government officials attending the conference. Indeed it later turned out that The Modern History of Russia, 1945–2006: A Teacher's Handbook^[12] had been directly commissioned by the presidential administration itself, which had issued the following guidelines to the textbook's authors about how they should evaluate the leaders of the period:

Stalin—good (strengthened vertical power but no private property); Khrushchev—bad (weakened vertical power); Brezhnev—good (for the same reasons as Stalin); Gorbachev and Yeltsin—bad (destroyed the country but under Yeltsin there was private property); Putin—the best ruler (strengthened vertical power and private property).^[13]

The main author of the textbook is Alexander Filippov, the deputy director of a foreign policy think-tank closely connected to the Putin administration. But the chapter on "Sovereign Democracy" was written by Pavel Danilin, the thirty-one-year-old Kremlin propagandist and editor in chief of www.kremlin.org, a man without a history degree or experience of teaching anything. Danilin said in an interview:

Our goal is to make the first textbook in which Russian history will look not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instill pride in one's country. It is precisely in this way that teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud.^[14]

In his blog (where he goes by the name of Leteha) Danilin warned any history teachers who might be unhappy about the imposition of this positive message:

You may ooze bile but you will teach the children by those books that you will be given and in the way that is needed by Russia.... It is impossible to let some Russophobe shit-stinker (govniuk), or just any amoral type, teach Russian history. It is necessary to clear the filth, and if it does not work, then clear it by force.^[15]

The first use of force in this ideological battle came on December 4, 2008, when a group of masked men from the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor's Office forced their way with police truncheons into the St. Petersburg offices of Memorial, which for twenty years has pioneered the research of Stalinist repressions in the Soviet Union. After a search the men confiscated hard drives containing the entire archive of Memorial in St. Petersburg: databases containing biographical information on more than 50,000 victims of repression; details about burial sites in the Petersburg area; family archives, memoirs, letters, sound recordings, transcripts of interviews, photographs, and other documents about the history of the Gulag and the Soviet Terror from 1917 to the 1960s (including the materials I collected with Memorial in St. Petersburg for my book The Whisperers^[16]). Among the confiscated items was the entire collection of materials in the Virtual Gulag Museum (gulagmuseum.org), a much-needed initiative to rescue precious artifacts, photographs, and documents from more than a hundred small exhibits under threat across Russia (a country where there is just one substantial museum of the Gulag, Perm-36, in the Urals).^[17]

There is no mistaking the intended message of the raid. It took place on the eve of a large international conference in Moscow on "The History of Stalinism: Results and Problems of Study"—the first conference on such a scale—organized by the commissioner of human rights for the Russian Federation, the Yeltsin Foundation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Institute for Scientific Information for the Social Sciences, the publisher Rosspen (which has published many of the document collections from the Stalin archives), and the Memorial Society.

Meanwhile, there were two articles attacking Memorial in the December special issue of Russkii zhurnal (Russian Journal), "On the Politics of Memory," published to coincide with the opening of the Moscow conference, where it was distributed among the delegates. The articles signaled the beginning of an ideological struggle against Memorial and other "anti-patriotic elements" that had tried to "weaken Russia" by burdening it with a sense of guilt over its own history. "Russia has ceased to be the sovereign of its own historical memory, which is now in danger of being taken over by foreign inventions," wrote Gleb Pavlovskii, the journal's editor and an adviser to Putin,^[18] in one of the attacks on Memorial, an article entitled "Bad with Memory—Bad with Politics."^[19]Russkii zhurnal is closely aligned to the Kremlin's thinking on foreign policy and ideology. Danilin is a frequent contributor to the magazine. His book Vragi Putina (The Enemies of Putin ) was published by Pavlovskii.^[20]

Whatever the intentions of this disturbing campaign, it is unrealistic for the current regime in Russia to attempt to alter the historical record of Stalin's crimes. The opening of the archives, the publication of their documents by international initiatives like the Annals of Communism, and the work of organizations like Memorial have made that impossible, and although the archives have begun to close again in recent years, they cannot return to the way they worked in Soviet days. However, as long as the regime continues to supress the collective memory of repression and seeks to replace it with its "patriotic" myth of the Soviet past, there is little hope of Russia confronting its Stalinist inheritance, or becoming a genuine democracy, at peace with its neighbors and the world. For the moment, all the West can do is show support for Russian institutions trying to preserve the memory of repression in the Soviet Union. This year, for the third time in three years, the Memorial Society has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps it is time for it to win.

—April 1, 2009

Notes

^[1]The best-known case involved Allen Weinstein, who at that time was president of the Center for Democracy, with close ties to the Republicans. For his book The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, coauthored with Alexander Vassiliev (Random House, 1999; reviewed in these pages May 11, 2000), his publisher was reported to have paid a group of retired KGB officials a substantial sum (Weinstein talked of $100,000) for "exclusive" access to the relevant KGB documents (see Jon Wiener, "The Archives and Allen Weinstein," The Nation, May 17, 2004). This was a clear violation of the code of ethics of the International Council on Archives, which calls for "the widest possible" access to documents. Despite protests by many scholarly organizations, including the Society of American Archivists and the Organization of American Historians, Weinstein was appointed the ninth archivist of the United States in 2005. He resigned from the post on health grounds in December 2008.

^[2]Several times in my recent researches in the Military History Archive I was told by staff that documents containing the Tsar's signature had been lost.

^[3]See, for example, Stalin's Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936, edited by Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, and with a foreword by Robert C. Tucker (Yale University Press, 1995), reviewed in these pages, March 6, 1997; The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, edited by Ivo Banac, translated from the German by Jane T. Hedges, from the Russian by Timothy D. Sergay, and from the Bulgarian by Irina Faion (Yale University Press, 2003); The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, edited and annotated by Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov, with an introduction by Joshua Rubenstein and translations by Ella Shmulevich, Efrem Yankelevich, and Alla Zeide (Yale University Press, 2005), reviewed in reviewed in these pages, October 20, 2005.

^[4]See J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, with translations by Benjamin Sher (Yale University Press, 1999); William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939, with translations by Vadim A. Staklo (Yale University Press, 2001); Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, with translations by Marian Schwartz (Yale University Press, 2007).

^[5]See The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, edited by Richard Pipes with the assistance of David Brandenberger, and with translations by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (Yale University Press, 1996); reviewed in these pages, March 6, 1997.

^[6]See Stalinism as a Way of Life, edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei K. Sokolov, with documents compiled by Ludmila Kosheleva, and with translations by Thomas Hoisington and Steven Shabad (Yale University Press, 2000); reviewed in these pages, November 29, 2001.

^[7]For example, the series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii ( Documents of Soviet History), established by the late Franco Venturi (Moscow: Rosspen, yr TK), or the five-volume series of documents on collectivization, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie: Dookumenty i materialy v 5 tomakh, 1927–1939, edited by the late Viktor P. Danilov, Roberta Manning and Lynne Viola (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999–2006), which will be published in three volumes in the Annals of Communism.

^[8]Mikhail Gefter, "V predchuvstvii proshlogo," Vek XX n mir, No. 9 (1990), p. 29.

^[9]Moscow News, March 4, 2005.

^[10]What Putin had in mind had been signaled at a meeting with historians in November 2003 when Putin said that textbooks should "cultivate a sense of pride in Russia's history, a sense of pride in the country, especially in young people." Shortly before his speech on that occasion, the Ministry of Education had withdrawn approval from Igor Dolutsky's Otechestvennaia istoriia XX veka dlia 10-11-x klassov (National History of the Twentieth Century for 1910 and 1911), which had sold more than half a million copies in multiple editions since 1994 and served as a textbook in high schools throughout Russia. Dolutsky's textbook was a model of Western pedagogical standards: it used archival documents and presented different views at the end of each chapter. But it drew comparisons between the Stalinist and Nazi systems of repression and invited students to discuss whether Russia had become a democracy after 1991. Such provocative questions had prompted the ministry's ban, with one official quoted as saying that the textbook "encourages contempt for our past and for the Russian people."

^[11]Cited from the translation in the excellent article by Leon Aron, "The Problematic Pages," The New Republic, September 24, 2008.

^[12]Alexander Filippov, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 1945–2006: Kniga dlia uchitelia (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2007).

^[13] Kommersant—Vlast', No. 27 (371), July 16, 2007.

^[14]Aron, "The Problematic Pages."

^[15]See leteha.livejournal.com; cited from the translation by Leon Aron.

^[16]On March 2, 2009, the Moscow publishing house Atticus Group (Inostranka) canceled a contract to publish The Whisperers in Russia.

^[17]See my letter on the raid in these pages, January 15, 2009. On January 20, 2009, an appeal against the raid (which was carried out with a number of illegal irregularities) was upheld by the Dzerzhinsky Regional Court, which ordered the return of all the confiscated materials to Memorial; on February 24, this decision was overturned by the City Court of St. Petersburg after an appeal by the Procuracy of St. Petersburg. At the time of writing, the confiscated archive remains in the hands of the police.

^[18]In 2005, he was accused by the Ukrainian authorities of organizing the poisoning of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, an accusation Pavlovskii has denied.

^[19]Gleb Pavlovskii, "Plokho s pamiat'iu—plokho s politikoi," Russkii zhurnal, December 2008.

^[20]Pavel Danilin, Vragi Putina (Moscow: Evropa, 2007).

The Writer in Russia

By Kirill Medvedev
Dissent

Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in part by some of the violent reaction elicited by his poetry, he experienced a sharp leftward turn. In 2003, he announced that, given the conditions of the Putin regime (which he read as a mutant continuation of 1990s neoliberalism rather than as a backward step toward Soviet-style statism), he would no longer participate in literary life—he would neither publish nor give readings nor participate in round tables. In the years since, Medvedev has continued to develop his stubbornly independent position, more recently joining the nascent socialist movement Forward as a contributor to its Web site and as an activist. In all his writings, he has questioned the orthodoxy of the previous generation of Russian thinkers, the vast majority of whom were programmatic free market liberals. Medvedev is at the forefront of a new generation of Russians who are beginning, very gingerly, warily, and humbly, to apply the European left’s critique of postwar capitalism to their native situation.

In this essay, Medvedev attempts to connect some tendencies he sees in current Russian art, poetry, and politics. What he finds there is “the new emotionalism,” an appeal on the part of poets and politicians alike to personal experience and authenticity. In part this apparently inward turn is a natural reaction to a situation in which all public debate (about capitalism, about Putin) has been eliminated; but it is also a necessary condition for the current regime to remain in power. Followers of the American literary scene—with its rash of memoirs (including fake ones), continued but debased identity politics, and frequent appeals by even the least memoiristic writers to their “sincerity”—as well as followers of the American blogosphere, with its shrill self-assertions and self-promotion, will find much that is familiar in the world Medvedev describes.


The essay was originally published as “Literatura Budet Proverena: Individualny proekt i ‘novaia emotsionalnost’” or “The Situation of the Writer in Russia: The Individual Project and the ‘New Emotionalism,’ ” in Medvedev’s self-published volume of essays Reaktsiya Voobshe, Moscow, 2007.
—Keith Gessen


The intelligentsia’s will, and their desire, was directed, intentionally, at isolation. This is how they thought about the government: “You are cretins, leave us alone—we will study higher math, theoretical physics, and semiotics. And everything will be fine.” They failed to understand that in fact they were violating their own political conscience. They lacked the audacity and the will to recognize themselves as a political force. And when perestroika began, they were completely disorganized, intellectually, because they could not help but feel—instead of “they” I could say “we,” it’s merely a question of style—we could not help but feel that this very isolation, this very “leave us alone”—it was the same old “intelligentsia garbage.” We need to formulate at least an approximate political ideal.
—Alexander Pyatigorsky


THE FEATURES ascribed to the liberal intelligentsia by the philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky surfaced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then that all discussion of “socialism with a human face” was thrown overboard and a resurgent labor movement found itself under the heel of “democratic” reformists. This was the intelligentsia’s first capitulation. The second began in October 1993, with their almost total acquiescence to the shelling of the Duma, and it ended in 1999 with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. During this time, in the context of a politics of complete capitalist restoration, a renunciation took place: not just of any oppositional attitude to the neoliberal model, but even of a more or less critical approach to it. (There were individual voices opposing this; they were drowned in the general chorus of loyalty.) The political opposition to Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s consisted largely of the Communist Party, a decrepit left-patriotic monster incapable of doing anything on its own, which nonetheless managed to become, for many years, a conduit for various moods of protest, even as it always performed the same exact ideological function: to be a scarecrow to the liberally minded elite. In this capacity it won Yeltsin a second term in office in 1996. A few years later, Putin was anointed king. At this point the liberal intelligentsia split psychologically and socially in two: one half became directly engaged in servicing the structures of capital—banks, publishing houses, corporations, and so on—while the other decided that regardless of all the hardships—the impossibility of working in one’s field, the cultural degradation, the vulgarity and pettiness of the new overlords—it would be wrong to grumble, to express discontent, to make demands. It was futile and unattractive to go against the time. And then, early in this decade, came the rise of the national-patriotic “red-browns,” who would be “even worse” than the current rulers, just as the Communists would have been “worse” than Yeltsin. As a result, the two halves of the intelligentsia formed an ideal consensus. At that moment, any possibility for real opposition, real discussion, and real political life in Russia disappeared.


We’ve now reached another turning point, because the red-brown scare is finally fading into the past. And a task that was wholly bungled at the beginning of the nineties is once again taking center stage: the creation of a real left-wing movement, based on workers’ autonomy, on independent labor unions, on the cooperation of grassroots movements and organizations.


And how does the Russian intelligentsia confront this challenge? With another capitulation, its third in the last twenty years. Any discussion of capitalism is off limits. Capitalism is irrevocable and self-evident. The younger generation, even in its best, most artistic, intellectual manifestation, already fights tenaciously for its right to a private life, to freedom from any talk of “politics,” “ideology,” or, even worse, the “proletariat.” These words are associated with the beginning of the Nineties; today they seem hopelessly archaic, although in truth the political paralysis that destroyed Russia in the 1990s continues.


AN OLD liberal maxim still haunts the minds of the intelligentsia: it states that “everyone should mind his own business,” in a conception of the artist as a private person most lucidly articulated by Joseph Brodsky in his Nobel Prize address. Yet it is obvious that Brodsky himself, as a poet chosen and put forward by his own social circle, participated in certain bargains, had certain privileges, was published by certain houses, thus directly or indirectly supporting certain powers and ideologies. But poets like the idea of “purity,” and one is supposed to acquiesce to the fiction that the poet is alone and that his texts, his political position (or its absence), and his personal qualities are in no way interrelated. And everyone should mind his or her own business—why meddle in someone else’s private life? The person of letters should write, the politician should politic, the engineer should engineer, and so forth.


The idea that follows is that in a “normal” society, various strata would get along independently of one another: large corporations would be fine independent of the proletariat working in its mines and oil fields, bohemia would be fine independent of the large corporations whom it serves, and so forth. At the same time, nearly every person (especially every artist) wants to be considered unique, separate, independent of general norms and perceptions, disconnected from conditions of, God forbid, “the relations of production.” And the most important idea of all: that the current situation, whatever you wish to call it—“celebrity,” “capitalism,” “the Putin regime,” and so forth—is total, that there is no escaping it. These ideas, which seem natural, but which date back to concrete historical conditions, explain the almost absolute hegemony of the “right” in Russian culture and politics today. These are a set of specific, deeply metaphysical ideas about the unshakable foundations of human nature. In their extreme-right, reactionary form, they are manifest in perceptions of the eternal characteristics of ethnic groups, races, nations; in their more or less liberal variant: of the irrevocable expansion of the market, which is impossible to wholly describe, to which one can only resign oneself, and within which the best one can do is find a tiny little niche.


It’s as if, within this system, the artist were indulged as a vessel for a particular kind of political innocence: this is his social role. For the people (or just a small group of them), the artist represents the idea of timeless, “apolitical” categories, of great masterpieces, of existential freedom. A poet is even freer than others, because unlike the artist, musician, or theater director, the poet doesn’t need any capital to create works. The conditions of production are so cheap that a poet can believe his or her work is connected directly to the fabric of life, that it prevails over its context and circumstances. On an individual level this perception is perfectly reasonable and can be productive. In truth, the belief that your work can escape the stagnant social fabric is very important—it is a major stimulus to the production of art.


But when one idea comes to be shared by all poets, it looks suspicious. Right now, not only is the idea of the “private project” shared by all poets, it is also the rallying cry of artists, critics, and other intellectuals.


Some examples of the touching innocence that characterizes our leading cultural figures illustrate this: a former star of the punk underground is honestly surprised that he should be criticized for performing at a rally for “Nashi,” the Putin youth brigade; a fashionable theater director criticizes the president in Aesopian language and is simultaneously the main guide of the Kremlin’s cultural politics: he reads lectures under the aegis of the United Russia party. [1] The theater director Alexander Kalyagin signs a letter against the imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky [2]

, in exchange for which he receives a theater in the center of Moscow, where he will, of course, stage his incorruptible oeuvres, where he will even stage Brecht—ars longa, vita brevis!

I recently found myself puzzled by one poet and critic who wrote a sympathetic article on “leftist poets” for a Kremlin-financed Web site. He even expressed a kind of solidarity with the leftist poets, cheerily urging them on toward direct political action(!), and he did this not only from the right (it would not be notable if this were in the pages of the liberal journal Znamya) but from a space that was created by the Kremlin expressly to strengthen its power via the smokescreen of “parliamentary polyphony.” When I wrote to say that I was surprised, he answered: “What difference does it make where the article is published; what matters is what is written in it”—again confirming my worst fears regarding the condition of the minds of even the most advanced and talented representatives of the intelligentsia.


What motivates these people is irrelevant: whether it’s really political naïveté or just ordinary cynicism and prudence. It’s impossible to separate one from the other, and I’m not posing a question of moral judgment. Russian culture as a whole has acquired (very much at the wrong time) the possibility of palpable autonomy, and now each individual artist sincerely defends his or her innocence and independence. But it is precisely through this kind of “innocence” and “sincerity” that works of art become commodities—not because the artist believes himself a spineless, prostituted insect, ready to do anything for publicity, but exactly the opposite: because he values himself and his work very highly and believes that media appearances won’t do him any harm.


Terms like “innocence” and “sincerity” frame the current mind-set to a remarkable degree. In all its dimensions—cultural, sociopolitical, and so on—the climate is determined not so much by “money” and “celebrity” (as is widely thought), but by the “new sincerity.” It is President Putin and contemporary poetry and the broadcasters on television. It is Alexander Lukashenko admitting that his party falsified the elections—lowered Lukashenko’s numbers from 93 percent to 80 percent—because, Lukashenko very sincerely confessed, “the European Union wouldn’t have accepted the results otherwise.” This is simultaneously unbelievable and symptomatic. The new sincerity is the blogosphere, with its absolutely sincere poets in one corner and its equally sincere Nazis in the other.


The “new sincerity” emerged in the culture as a reaction to the mind-bending moribundity and abstraction of postmodern theory on the one hand and to a confused and conflicted (post-)Soviet consciousness on the other. There came a moment when direct expression—an appeal to biographical experience as a zone of authenticity—was the tool that could force open at least two discourses: the rough, ideologized Soviet one and the ascetic, bodiless, nonconformist underground one. Today, the trend toward “sincerity,” “emotionalism,” and “direct expression,” with its appeal to biography, has become more and more reactionary.


The new sincerity or, more precisely, the new emotionalism, has rejected the worst aspects of postmodernism: its unintelligible, elitist jargon and its opposition to grand narratives and global concepts. But it has also rejected its undeniably positive qualities: its irrepressible critical outlook and its intellectual sophistication. And if, in spite of its initial critical power, postmodernism in the end only gave cover to an idealized consensus between the goals of “diversity” and the interests of the global marketplace, then the new emotionalism reconciles those same market interests with the resurrected figure of the author, bringing forth today’s endless stream of ventriloquism (lyrical, essayistic, “political,” whatever), in which any effort at analysis, any possibility of differentiating positions and actions simply drowns. It’s a stream in which it’s impossible to separate sincerity from hack work, because one is in the employ of the other: emotions cover up ideological bankruptcy (and the death of rational argument), and ideology in turn excites emotions and captivates the masses. It’s not hard to influence a person filled with emotions. The authorities are afraid of this sincerity, but they feed off and take advantage of it. Let young neo-Nazis scare the peasants with their sincere hatred, simultaneously keeping them in line. Let young poets and actors scream and curse from the stage of the Polytechnic: “Do whatever you want,” the new commissars tell them. “You are free, independent artists. Just don’t worry your pretty little heads about politics; after all, you’re smart, you know yourselves that it’s a dirty business. Your art will obviously outlive us all. Just leave the politics to us.”


The new emotionalism never fully grasped the ambivalence of postmodern theory; now it rejects the idea of the death of the author and replaces the dead author with the uniquely living, all-consuming “I,” granting it the right to say anything at all, whatever strikes one’s fancy. After all, if Marx is dead, everything is permitted. If “during postmodernism” language itself (as a system) spoke through the (dead) author, and embedded within this language were “schizophrenic” (liberating) possibilities, then in the new situation, when a long-repressed freedom of expression mingles with neoliberalism, it is God again who starts to speak through the poet. And this God is nothing but the rumblings, the convulsions, the subterfuges of capitalism itself, similar to ancient Fate, which all must inevitably confront, regardless of where they try to run.


Given this context, poets’ lamentations about their condition sound touchingly naïve. Why, they ask, don’t we have normal literary criticism? I have a simple, vulgar answer to this question: because all the major critical theories of the West in the twentieth century passed, in one way or another, through Marxism. All took something from it, altered other things in it, invalidated something else. Until the same happens in Russia, there won’t be any criticism at all—not of poetry, not of the authorities.


THE AUTHOR of the most brilliant individual project of the last few decades is named Eduard Limonov. [3]

Throughout the 1990s and until quite recently, it was almost impossible to find a position from which a critique of Limonov would sound convincing. To take moral issue with him for excessive “sincerity” made you a hypocrite. To incriminate him as a “fascist” meant pretending that Yeltsin was a “democrat.” Those who tried to belittle him or confront him with overt hostility were doomed to find themselves immediately in a system of coordinates created by the self-same Limonov, in which the critic invariably (by an aggregate of data: as a writer, as a politician, as a man) was found to be beneath the great poet. Limonov had charm and a heroic persona and a remarkable biography, but there was also something else in play—under conditions of the “individual project,” any criticism is automatically followed with an answer from a position of experience: live my life (that is, visit as many cities and countries, write as many books, love as many women, create an equally independent and passionate political party), and then we’ll talk. All of Limonov’s heroes, even those more famous than he (Salvador Dali, for instance), eventually become just sad and transitory characters in the brilliant, vivid novel of Limonov’s life.

Yet I think the era of Limonov’s cultural hegemony (in which, undoubtedly, together with National Bolshevism and brown-red quasi-fascism, there were also progressive elements) is coming to an end. Today his political activity plays the reactionary role of subordinating all oppositional (and leftist) politics to Limonov’s life project—his cult of personality, strategies of media-scandal, and so on. Leftist groups in Russia today work in the shadow of Limonov’s NBP and its spectacular media events. With a cocktail made up of Nietzscheanism, nationalism, and “leftism,” mixed in with autobiographical authenticity, Limonov has managed to subsume an important segment of the youth protest movement under his own banner.


Baudrillard believed that the revolution of ’68 was defeated by overexposure in the media. The narrative of art-activism, the direct action of the nineties, has either led to the spectacular, partly fascistic activism of the NBP or to today’s crossroads, where left artists choose between a job in the art market or a search for alternative strategies attempting to answer a question also faced by leftist political groups: how does one clothe the message in an adequate and legitimate form, simultaneously avoiding vulgar, spectacular excesses?


Today an artist who wishes to consider himself a leftist ends up trapped between these two positions. He wants to influence society, a fact he does not conceal, which is why he is skeptical in his approach to the concept of “pure art.” On the other hand, he does not want to transmit himself directly through the media’s mechanisms and needs to approach them carefully and critically.


For me, an important experience was a protest I staged against the Kalyagin theater during the premiere of Brecht’s Drums in the Night. [4]

It was conceived as a picket (that is, a maximally democratic means of expression, accessible to all and with no pretense to artistic value or novelty) in a series of other pickets organized by the socialist movement “Forward.” It was interpreted, however, as an art action, partly because of the skirmish with the guard, partly because the reaction from right-liberal critics involved almost exclusively biographical realities—facts of Brecht’s biography, facts of my biography, and facts of the critic’s biography. What one witnessed was a characteristically nonreflexive impulse: instead of a conversation about the enterprise as an effective or ineffective civil/political gesture, truthful or half-truthful or openly false facts from one’s own or someone else’s biography were pulled in. The critic would write, for example, that, in fact, “Brecht skillfully utilized capitalist mechanisms” or, in fact, “the picketer has rich parents” or “in my youth, I myself lived in a proletarian area, and I know what the proletariat is.” OK.

I was born in 1975. My father was a journalist and a bibliophile. My mother worked as an editor at Soviet Writer, a publishing house. My father blossomed during perestroika. He conducted interviews with cultural figures in the magazine Ogoniok, which was then widely read. In 1991, he and I went to “defend the White House [against the failed Communist putsch].” At the start of the nineties, he hosted a show about culture on television. To be honest, his blossoming did not last long. My father became addicted to roulette and soon lost everything: his real estate, our apartment, his library. He ran up a huge debt to the mafia. We lived in portable apartments, under constant threat. One time, I was taken as a hostage. In 1994, running from the mafia, my mother and I spent a month in Israel. Then we returned to Moscow. In Moscow I got a job as an ice cream vendor. (Once, I came to work the morning after my birthday. I had been drinking the night before and had lost my voice. All the customers thought that I had eaten too much ice cream. It was funny.) In addition to this, at the time, I also worked as a loader and a book vendor. I would describe the Moscow of that moment through the gaze of a sleepless, almost homeless young man, a stranger to anything and everything. Sometimes I spent the night at home, more often with friends, but I basically lived on the streets because it was only on the streets—immersed in a crowd—that I felt free. Around me, on the one hand, there reigned an unhealthy, entrepreneurial chaos; on the other, poverty, hunger, cynicism, disintegration, and agony. Between 1992 and 1996, I studied history at Moscow State University. Between 1996 and 2000, I studied at the Gorky Literary Institute. During this period, I worked as a journalist and critic, wrote reviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, translated. Gradually I came to see that not only as a journalist, but even as a translator, I could not fit into this new reality, a fact I announced in the first line of my first intelligible poem, at the beginning of 2001. Now, from time to time, I do editing work, which is given to me by a publisher friend. I live on money earned by my girlfriend. Until recently, this was $700 a month; now, after an exhausting battle, they raised her salary to $1,100. The three of us—with the child—live on this money. Recently I was thinking about the boundary between what I could and couldn’t afford, and I realized that if I take a pastry as an example, then the boundary is around twenty rubles. Now, this does not depend on an actual amount that I can spend during a single day, and it does not depend on how much money is lying in my pocket. But psychologically, I’m left with this twenty-ruble pastry as the border between . . . Aye-aye-aye!!! What conclusions follow from these facts? Do they have any meaning—these occasionally amusing, occasionally incredible or tearjerking facts? Do they justify or discredit my position? Do they confirm one or the other of my grievances and do they discredit the positions of others?


It’s interesting to note that the use of gossip fits perfectly well with stale declarations about the irrelevance of Marxism, and so on. And somehow these kinds of facts are always accompanied by the fake moralism that surfaces when certain media strategies are criticized from a post-underground perspective—when people inevitably start talking about “self-promotion” (the self-promotion of the picketer) in juxtaposition to “pure art.” This position made a certain amount of sense during the 1970s and early 1980s, when working for a narrow, underground audience was actually a form of political action. But today the autonomy of the artist, by which is understood his freedom from any external ideology (he’ll contemptuously call this, appealing to the old categories, “the party line”), is the central bulwark to the myth of the bourgeois artist and his “individual project.”


The artist is connected to his environment, stratum, and community through a collective experience—bodily, historical, cultural. In the artistic act, this connection manifests itself voluntarily, which is why it is a moment of freedom. An artist can think, reflect, and deduce as much as he wants outside the artistic act. But only in the act of creation, only voluntarily, having become a kind of blind, insane vessel, can one create a form—a form that connects a person with his biography, with his experience, with those unilluminated, chaotic, power-hungry clots in which his history joins up with the collective one. Only in this way can one break through to reality—to force someone to hate you or to express solidarity, to make someone think, to make someone experience collective oppression alongside you. This is why terms like “form,” “sincerity,” and “personal, biographical experience” are still, I think, significant even in politicized art, because manipulation either of one’s own or of someone else’s personal experience (as in art, so also in politics) ultimately leads to chaos, creating a deceptive unity—that is, yet another ideology or “individual project” in which even private or cultural experience only justifies powerlessness or conformism or a set of sentimental bromides. Please don’t talk to me about your “historical experience” of Soviet oppression: It’s not your experience, it’s the experience of Mayakovsky (a Bolshevik), of Shalamov (a Trotskyist), of Mandelshtam (a Socialist-Revolutionary), of others. We must live our new, actual political experience, and if the goal of the “leftist” actionists of the 1990s [5]

consisted in bringing themselves and their bodies into the media’s field of vision, then the goal of today’s left artist must be to use one or another link to the outbursts of the oppressed and their underground movements—to discover his link to history, to those artists, philosophers, and fighters who have been cast aside or castrated in the contemporary “post-political” world.

Many of the twentieth century’s “criticisms of cultural production” were based on the notion that through his stratum, class, or community, each person is connected with every other person, and having realized that his labor is expropriated and used against him and others like him, he can stop working, leave the game, and disrupt the machine. Conscious of the historical situation and, above all, intolerant of it, he can try to change that situation.


In Russia right now, the intelligentsia’s old default position—the “unextended hand,” the supreme gesture of liberal impatience, based on the notion that any political/ideological opponent (in other words, a “Communo-fascist”) was just a scoundrel (or, at best, crazy)—is falling further and further into disrepute. The new default position is a flaccid tolerance: Why make a choice at all? Why divide people into “reds,” “whites,” or what have you, if there’s something familiar and interesting in everyone? Thus “postmodern sensitivity” lives on in the new era. In the face of private human feelings (love, loneliness, the fragility of relationships), any act of “debunking” or criticism, any pretensions toward truth, “objectivity,” and “meaning” resemble blasphemy. Don’t ask the artist what he meant to say and whom he works for—he shouldn’t think about that! What talk can there be about analysis or theory if it’s a question of feelings—love, happiness, understanding—all so hard to attain in this world? How can you blame an artist for making people feel good? How can you blame a director who entertains people who are tired after a hard day’s work? However false and deceptive the “national ideology,” regardless of whose interests are behind it, what’s wrong if it gives people at least an illusory feeling (but a feeling nonetheless) of confidence and community? Finally, can one blame “sovereign democracy” if it alone allows us to retain a fragile balance, quieting real hypocrisy and thus avoiding even more serious catastrophes?


Taken to its extreme, it comes down to a single question that today hangs over our country and our world: What does it matter that a fraud took place if everyone’s happy?!


But far from everyone is happy, and that means the final fraud hasn’t happened yet.


IN THE Woody Allen film Match Point, a kind of remake of Crime and Punishment, the main character gets away with murder: he kills his mistress and an elderly neighbor who witnessed the crime. The detective on the case sees the truth, but only in his dreams. The murderer goes on with his life, and his wife finally gives birth to their long-awaited child.


With great clarity and subtlety, Allen compares Dostoevsky’s era to our own. In Dostoevsky, madmen and grand inquisitors kill each other, but the world is ruled by a higher, divine justice that can only be deferred for so long before it reasserts itself with frightening force. However well everything goes for the criminal, sooner or later truth, verity, and justice break the chain of accidents and enter the world, restoring balance; in the Christian Dostoevsky’s version, balance takes the form of a plea for forgiveness, not a punishment. The detective becomes a mediator of this higher, God-like fairness. In Woody Allen’s postmodern world, there is no higher justice, only a game where everything depends on happenstance, on where the ball will fall (thus, “match point”). This sense of a fragile reality on the edge undoubtedly dominates today’s world and makes up what is called the “neoliberal” consciousness, with its—for the moment—almost complete political paralysis.


For the last few years, prophesies of an upcoming catastrophe have lingered in the Russian ether: the collapse of the country; a possible all-out civil war; a foreign intervention; the appearance of a violent, repressive force; and so forth. Many recent novels feature some form of violent shock. A characteristic example is Sergei Dorenko’s 2008, in which, in the midst of a triumphant, stable, and governable political landscape (there are three loyal forces in parliament: United Russia, “social democrats,” and Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party), Chechen terrorists blow up a nuclear power plant outside Moscow, the capital empties, and Limonov and his cohort slide seamlessly into the Kremlin and establish a bizarre dictatorship. The consciousness of the writer reflects—fantastically and dismally—the myth of revenge that has haunted the minds of many Russian citizens since the 1990s. Translated into more or less intelligible terms, it sounds like this: For the past fifteen years, reality has been broken and stomped on; so many legal, moral, and human commandments have been violated; so many people were involved in so many hideous deeds (using their intellect, their power, their knowledge, or simply their stupidity, their uselessness, their cynicism) that NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF IT. And the longer the day of reckoning is delayed, the harder it will hit when it arrives. That’s why even today’s relative happiness looks threatening. The authorities, the Kremlin, whoever, can of course postpone the inevitable and prolong the illusion with the help of oil money and a pliant media—but not forever. In the context of this myth (which is not all that far from the truth), the “fascists”—for example, Dorenko’s Chechens—become a unique weapon of reckoning, of the restoration of justice. They suggest that you can use the people and lie to them as much as you want—but not forever. The truth will out, and it may be a lot worse than the lie. For today’s loyal intelligentsia, these perceptions are channeled into yet another capitulation: let things remain as they are, they say, so long as we keep at bay the “red-browns,” or the “fascists” (or Muslims, Chinese, and so forth).


But today, an alternative to both “wise” capitulationism and somber, epic “retaliation” can only be a demand for “truth” in its totally concrete, everyday meaning—a fight for it, and for the formation of distinct political demands.


At the turn of the century, the mass antiglobalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, which wounded neoliberalism, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center, put an end to the cultural hegemony of the postmodern. Once again, a question was posed to capitalism, and a new era of critique began. At the same time a new reaction emerged—the conception of civilizational conflict, the axis of evil, and so forth. In this way, the opposition between metaphysics (the idea of “the eternal”—ethnic, national, confessional, civilizational values) and dialectics (the ideas of fluidity, interdependence, and the interchangeability of things) became relevant again.


THERE IS a very heavy imprint of metaphysics on Russian life and thought. The metaphysical consciousness of the artistic intelligentsia is based, as I’ve said, on the idea that any product of nonmaterial labor exists outside its context and speaks for itself. Today, such ideas unite the majority of active politicians and successful artists, who have nothing against participating in official art projects, presuming that one can and should negotiate with the authorities. Of course you can try to fool them, taking their money and promoting something oppositional. These ideas percolate in the consciousness of even very enlightened people, and, added to the authorities’ penchant for sponsoring oppositional political figures, they lead to the absence of real competition within the political field.


The opposite position argues that a civil society does not emerge from any “mutually beneficial” agreement with the authorities, even the most sympathetic authorities. It emerges only from the bottom, only as a call, a resistance, a demand. And culture—as a reflexive field—also only emerges in this way. Because action, production, and thought are determined to a large degree by circumstances, conditions, and context. You cannot critique the Putin regime without assessing your own place in it, whether as critic or artist.


It’s impossible to criticize an authoritarian Russian democracy without also assessing the role of the United States and its allies, without mentioning the worldwide division of labor, without recognizing the extent to which the situation here is a continuation of worldwide processes. It’s impossible not to understand the extent to which your own consciousness determines your social existence, forces you to accept as “obvious” one or another set of perspectives. “It’s impossible to be free from politics”: this is the banal truth that one must now grasp anew. Political passivity also participates in history; it too is responsible.


The liberal intelligentsia, which has claimed for half a century that the subject of civil society is the quiet owner of his private life, is now confronted with a situation where the private life of the conformist and apolitical middle class is blooming in a previously unimagined array of colors in Russia while political life exists in a state of total nullity. All that’s left here of the liberal-Western project are empty, wordy frills—complaints about “this country,” our “bloody regime,” and our forgotten “universal values.” In truth, the general rejection of the 1990s unites the entire loyal electorate, and those same liberal 1990s reforms (privatization, monetization of benefits, and so on) pass much more successfully under the banner of moderate patriotism and soft authoritarianism than under the slogans of inclusion in the “civilized world.” Today, part of the intelligentsia shifts to the right, leaning toward ideas of a “clash of civilizations,” trying to rely on “eternal”—national, ethnic, confessional, civilizational—values. Another part still insists that Russia has again turned from the path of civilized, Western capitalism.


THE REAL need now is for the emergence of a new stratum of leftist intellectuals who have mastered the history of leftist thought, leftist politics, leftist art of the twentieth century and who have, through Western Marxism and neo-Marxism, recognized their participation in the international socialist project. This is, undoubtedly, the cultural and political goal of humanity—because it is precisely a participation in self-government on as broad a scale as possible—and not the possibility of a career, pure art, or a private life—that is that next step, without which humanity is doomed to moral and physical degeneration. The old slogan “socialism or barbarism” has become unbelievably relevant. Because in order to keep open the possibility of remaining a private citizen, more victims will have to be brought forth; we will have to move further to the “right,” become more embroiled in our individual projects, private territories, and narrow specializations demanded by the market. More protections once won by the Enlightenment and civil society will have to be sold to corporations, media conglomerates, and political marketing. We will have to fear the “radical” Chinese and Muslims more intensely and further insist on the totality of capitalism, the end of the working class, the end of class warfare, the end of politics (all concepts that envelop a person in a long, dreary sleep, in which he sees himself simultaneously a hero of cultural resistance, the last item up for sale, and an independent private person). Only roused from this sleep can a person realize what the world looks like shorn of any glamour, where again and again people who did not read Marx or Benjamin answer the call to resistance, to action, to an understanding of the shared interests of the collective, of the class. Whereas capitalism’s violent reaction to every collective demand, every independent union, seems irrational, it is actually completely logical and justified—because the frontline is right here: the most narrow point where something happens that rarely occurs in poems, novels, or movies: a fight for reality. Only having realized the reality of this battle will we be able to speak of separation, of individualism, of the possibility of genuine diversity, of a civil society, of a competition of ideas, forms, poetics. Only then can we believe in “apoliticism” and “privatism” as risky and culturally productive personal demands and not as banal projections of individualism, apathy, and lunacy. Only then will we be able to use the blogosphere, which undoubtedly possesses much progressive, even socialist potential, but which for now is a mechanism emerging directly from current conditions (which, we should notice, are entering back into it), meaning that in the best case it will be a way to spend some leisure time and in the worst it will become (like “direct democracy” as a whole) a weapon in the hands of the most highly ideologically active strata—neo-Nazis, for example.


I am convinced that without understanding the aforementioned things, the Russian intelligentsia too will remain, indirectly and directly, an agent of dark reaction.

Translated from the Russian by Mark Krotov. Edited and annotated by Keith Gessen.

FOOTNOTES:

• [1] The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
• [2] The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
• [3] Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
• [4] Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
• [5] This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).