Soviet Roulette

The Miserable Golovlyovs

2012-02-07T14:33:00.012-06:00

In my last post, I briefly speculated about the nature of a Russian novel. The Russian novel is, quite clearly, the best variety of novel. There will never be anything as good as War and Peace or Crime and Punishment in any other language. In fact, one can confidently begin any classic Russian novel secure in the knowledge that one is unlikely to meet up with dull, naive, or optimistic romanticism.

Take Mikhail Saltykov's (aka Schedrin) The Golovlyov Family. As previously stated, most Russian novels are rooted in guilt. This is true of the Saltykov's masterpiece, which seems to be composed of equal parts of satire and tragedy. For the Golovlyov family saga takes place in the context of serfdom. The family's wealth is grounded in serf labor. In some slave societies, the existence of unfree labor is rationalized by the presence of an allegedly productive or useful aristocratic class. We see the mythology in refracted form even today. If America has radical inequality, we should at least acknowledge that billionaires are our best citizens. The nation's greatness is contingent on the energy, innovation, and entrepreneurialism of its leading businessmen.

Using a similar argument, in nineteenth century, the Russian landowning class was often seen as its saviors: if the laboring masses were ignorant and uneducated, its aristocrats were moral, aesthetic, and political leaders. But the Golovlyov's were anything but saviors. They were not involved in the economic life of the countryside, except insofar as family's matron, Arina Petrovna, consolidated property and then skimmed as much wealth from her properties as possible, and had almost no moral or cultural ambitions.

Although wealthy, the Golovlyovs' lives were as brutal and narrow as that of the oppressed workers they so completely ignored. Before or after the legal emancipation of the serfs, the Golovlyovs lived privileged lives of absolutely no utility to anybody but themselves. In fact, Saltykov's vision of rural, landowning life is an example of reductio ad absurdum. For the Golovlyov's take as little interest in one another as they do in their servants or field workers. Their lack of concern with one another is by turns comical and tragic.

And Arina's son and successor, Porphyry, is the embodiment of a shallow, purposeless, miserly, and soulless existence. He's religious, but only in a hypocritical way. For Porphyry, God created the world in all its patent unfairness, so it's practically blasphemous to question his own good fortune. If God had wanted others to be happy, He would have arranged life differently. Porphyry's pathetic, amoral life is made worse by the fact that he constantly lectures those around him. With nothing to say, his endless prattle is pure torture to his unhappy family. One son commits suicide; another winds up in a Siberian prison; two nieces lives a life of alcoholism, lewd acting, and quasi-prostitution; his brother and mother die hating him.

Ironically, the one thing Porphyry never feels is guilt. It's the absence of guilt that comes as the biggest shock to the reader. In this tale of "unmitigated tragedy," the author has created a set of characters who should by all rights feel nothing but guilt for squandering riches and privileges in the service of absolutely nothing, and yet none of them--and least of all the "bloodsucker" Porphyry--feel anything of the sort. This--the absence of guilt in a situation crying out for atonement--is then Salykov's greatest indictment of Russian life.

Guilt and the Russian Novel

2012-02-07T12:40:00.022-06:00

One of the minor tragedies of recent years is the collapse of the Borders bookstore franchise. Where can one sit and work now? Obviously, Borders' business model of selling people a cup of coffee in return for a quiet place to read and write didn't work out. People stayed too long, and destroyed too many magazines without buying them, for anybody to turn a profit. The fact that Borders sold untold amount of random, plastic crap (toys, cheap sunglasses, rulers, etc.) apparently didn't remove the fundamental flaw in Border's business model. Yet there are always opportunities in the midst of tragedy. And so I scavenged among the shelves of more than one store looking for Russian-themed memoirs and novels offered at a seventy-percent discount.

Now, when I read one of these bargains, I feel a sense of guilt. How could I kick Borders when it was down after all of those days I've spent there without buying much of anything? Nothing new there. I feel guilt about everything, primordial guilt. I feel guilt for things I've done, for things I haven't done, for things I've thought about doing, and for things I believe I may do one day. My guilt level seems inordinately high, but I always feel that someday I will do something really terrible and all of the guilt I've felt over these past decades will make sense, all at once, at a snap.

At any rate, one has to hope one will do something terrible or otherwise all of this guilt will seem senseless. I know there are those who believe in previous lives. I'm reminded of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the Sound of Music: "Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good." Perhaps seemingly unwarranted guilt flows from something bad one has done in a previous life. Where did all my guilt come from? Have I suppressed a memory of a salacious criminal life? (I'm watching the First 48 as I write this, so the criminal life is on my mind. And it's interesting, even hardened murderers on the show often display enormous, enfantilizing amounts of guilt notwithstanding their bloody actions--it's as if a guilty ten year old resides inside us all, no matter how brutal and inhuman and experienced the murderer.)

But in my own life, the most guilty action I remember is not helping my mother as she got sick from cancer. Of course, I don't feel objectively guilty about not helping my mother. What can anybody do--but especially a very young teen--in the face of cancer? But they say that kids often feel guilty for emotional events they can't understand or control. Like a newborn baby who doesn't know where his own body begins and ends, a kid may well believe he is responsible for the suffering of others.

I have a couple of isolated memories of guilt related to my mother's illness, though who can tell if I've invented the memory to create a rational explanation for my present day guilt? I remember playing with a friend on a summer afternoon, having fun, staying so late that the sun began to set. And I remember thinking: I should be at home, where my mother is. What if she needs me? What if she's lonely without me? That's all I remember, but it seems logical to assume that I might have also wondered, more generically, and over the four or five long years of my mother's illness, why it was fair for me to be enjoying free time with my friends while my mother was in the slow (but not agonizing) process of dying?

And I did know she was dying. And actually, I'm amazed to remember how guilt is linked even to my first memory of cancer. When my mother came to tell me she had cancer, she told me that the doctors said she would likely have five more years to live. She meant this to be a sanguinary message, but it devastated me. Reacting to my shocked expression, my mother asked me if I wanted to go with her to see the doctor that day for an early treatment. I felt that she wanted me to comfort her, but I said no (probably feeling this trip to the doctor's would make the cancer seem closer, realer) and went to school. At school I felt terrible--guilty--as I still do today when I remember my decision. I suppose cancer and guilt are natural acquaintances.

I also remember being on a trip to Europe, my mother's last treat to herself before she was no longer able to travel or experience life. On the trip, my brothers and I did what we always did, and fought with one another in the backseat of the car. My mother asked my dad to pull over and we did. She sat on a tree branch and cried, telling us that we were ruining her special trip to Europe. I felt terrible, as I still do today, knowing that this really was her last hurrah.

How does all this guilt relate to Russian history? I cannot say. I digressed. I began this blog post intending to comment on the brilliantly titled memoir, My Life as a Russian Novel, by the Frenchman, Emmannuelle Carrerre, which I guiltily discovered at Borders fire sale. The book is Carrerre's attempt to analyze his own crippled love life in the context of a Russian expedition and a Georgian-Russian ethnic and cultural heritage. The book is well-written and honest, but amazingly egotistical and therefore uninteresting: after all, how rare are egotists in one's everyday life?

Disliking the book, I remain impressed with its title. Clearly, Carrerre's life isn't a Russian novel. The life is not intellectual, philosophical, political, or, most importantly, guilt-ridden. It's dark--it opens with the author tracking a Hungarian soldier who stopped speaking and lived anonymously in a Russian mental ward for five decades, and it ends with a double murder and suicide (of the author's documentary film subject and her young son, and the author's cousin, respectively), but it's not really about guilt.

The true Life as Russian Novel is all about guilt. Members of the Russian intelligentsia were obsessed with guilt. They understood that their privileged lives, and the very structure of their state and society, was founded on inequality, oppression, serfdom, the legacy of unfree labor, or indeed on what Marx and his followers would come to call "wage slavery." They dreamed of expiation and redemption, both political and personal. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the ultimate Russian novel, is all about a Russian intellectual's attempt to overcome the very condition of guilt by killing an old woman and learning to live without guilt in the wake of this brutal crime. The novel's Christian ending of forgiveness and absolution is nothing like Carrere's decidedly unphilosophical look at love, insecurity, and jealousy. But so too are almost all other Russian novels. One wonders how damaging guilt can be. Would Lenin have been possible if the nation hadn't read so many guilt-infused novels?

Saints, Rituals, Liturgies, and Heretics

2012-01-17T20:56:00.015-06:00

Patrick Rotman's 1999 documentary, Faith of the Century: A History of Communism, is a wonderful testimony to the transnational appeal of the Russian Revolution. As the title suggests, Rotman describes twentieth century communism as a great religious movement, akin to the explosive early moments of the Christian, Islamic, or Mormon religions. Communism had its own saints, rituals, symbols, liturgies, heretics, schismatics, pilgrimages, and dogmas. And like other great religions, its message of freedom transcended all international boundaries by promising hope and salvation. The Bolshevik Revolution, for all its faults, became a beacon of hope to people throughout Europe and the developing world.

The communist faith threatened to overtake Germany, Hungary, and other nations in the interwar era, and yet ultimately the Soviet Union was left alone before World War II to guard Marx's inheritance in the face of capitalist encirclement. Building "socialism in one country," Stalin stunned the world with collectivization, urbanization, and industrialization. To the faithful, he seemed to have overcome some of the basic problems of capitalism, including inequality, exploitation, unemployment, lack of economic planning and coordination, and boom and bust cycles.

The Soviet Union in the 1930s built gigantic projects and promoted itself as a paragon of public hygiene, military strength, worker volunteerism, and public enthusiasm. It also promoted working class people into the upper echelons of society. Its support of the beleaguered Spanish communists proved particularly attractive to left-wing and moderate Western Europeans, who little suspected that Stalin was capable of eliminating anarchist allies and ultimately signing a non-aggression pact with Franco's fascist ally, the Nazi Germany. The chief message of Faith of the Century is that communism was never limited to the Soviet Union. In fact, communism might have triumphed in the heart of what came to be seen as the democratic West, France.

Chinese Communism

2012-01-17T20:07:00.015-06:00

If Soviet Roulette had any readers, I imagine they'd be asking why we don't place the Russian revolutionary experience within the context of global history more frequently. Why, for instance, don't we talk more about 1789 or 1848? Why don't we talk about the impact of 1917 on the developing world? While the Bolsheviks may not have ignited successful revolutions in Western Europe, they did inspire successful imitators in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and countless other newly independent nations. But of course China remains the most significant communist victory. Its size, strength, and longevity make China worthy of comment.

So too does the fact that the Bolsheviks were involved in China's internal struggles before and after China's communist party defeated its Old Regime, Japanese, and nationalist rivals. But how does a non-expert approach the history of China in the twentieth century? I began with UCLA Professor Richard Baum's Great Courses lecture series, The Fall and Rise of China. In these lectures Baum notes Mao's political intelligence, charisma, and military prowess, but Baum emphasizes that Mao led his party into a long series of economic and political disasters. Under Maoism, the Chinese people suffered mightily, although they almost always attributed their suffering to internal or external enemies. While Mao successfully confronted American military might during the Korean War, and eventually established political and economic autonomy from the Soviet Union, his large-scale cooperatives and frenetic efforts to industrialize the country, led to massive starvation in the countryside and many, many engineering and economic disasters.

The Cultural Revolution, when launched, destroyed any semblance of political or economic order in the country, and only Deng's masterful political comeback and his slow reputation of Maoist economic principles (if not Mao himself) eventually set China on the path to relative stability and economic progress that we see today. When viewed in the light of the Soviet Union's experience, one can't help but think that Lenin and Stalin's worst crime was to inspire the Chinese Communist Party. For the Chinese Communists, for all their military courage and prewar respect for the peasantry, killed many millions as they did away with any semblance of democracy, political dissent, or economic decentralization.

Nothing Heavier Than a Purse

2012-01-16T17:38:00.034-06:00

In some ways the Soviet Union became a cultural wasteland after the brief twilight of experimental enthusiasm that came to an abrupt end with the collapse of NEP and the advent of collectivism and industrialization. The deleterious effects of totalitarianism and socialist realism were impossible everywhere manifest. And yet the Bolshevism continued to encounter some of the world's most brilliant thinkers and artists right up until the empire's dissolution in 1991. Like Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, aka Abram Terz, was one of the world's best minds. His brilliance had aesthetic, moral, and critical dimensions. A novelist, anthropologist, literary critic in the broadest sense of the word, and dissenter, Sinyavsky was famously tried and then jailed in labor campus for publishing his daring work in the West. His notes from prison, entitled A Voice from the Chorus, rank among the best works of philosophical resistance the modern world has ever produced. His censored thoughts are fragmented, perhaps even discordant, but generally related to freedom (or its absence), love, criminality, violence, language, God, ontology, literature, and Russian identity. Sinyavsky's greatest talent is to listen closely to his neighbors, for truth, it turns out, can be found everywhere, even, or perhaps especially, in the Soviet Union's prisons. Indeed, truth is intimately related to form. Thus, the best critics should be analyzing prisoner-told tales and peasant folklore with as much care as they do one of Tolstoy's massive tomes. Most of the quotes below were first uttered by prisoners, but it was Sinyavasky who knew enough to take them seriously, and to hear complexity in even the most brutally straightforward jokes, threats, laments, or epigrams.

Love and Women

She has a house in Rostov and a husband who doesn't drink.

Don't expect a picnic, what have I got but a soul and a prick?

But mathematics I loved terribly, like a wife.

Only whores like a man who smokes in bed.

The girls really loved me: I always let them have a puff on my cigarette.

They were all sorry later that I didn't fall in love with them.

She was more than I could have expected for the likes of myself. But pretty easy she was with everybody, as it turned out.

Nothing but beautiful words should be coming out of her mouth. But she swears like a trooper.

I looked at the dame and saw she was a real doll. But right then I had no times for dames or the flicks because I was on the run.

I added her to my collection.

Is this your girl? God knows! My wife writes and says she is.

If a woman has given a man her heart she will give him her purse. (From Balzac).

Ah wives. Wives. They may have the kindness to lie with you every now and again.

I was lucky to get quite a good husband, I do admit. I'd even agree now, she writes, to having one half as good. True, he was a pretty heavy drinker.

All the same, women enjoy great popularity in this world!

I don't know what a woman is. And my life is over. You may laugh, but it's a fact.

If you want to understand women read the Decameron, and then you'll know what kind of birds they are!

Women of the Madame Bovary type are more to my taste.

Our cashier girl has pink knickers. I saw them in a dream!

Life and Philosophy

When I first heard of death I didn't want to live.

We long to be not ourselves. That is what matters most.

Strange that every time I wake up I turn out to be myself.

We came into this world to understand certain things: very few, but exceedingly important things.

To understand it to go mad.

Me? Interested in a cat? I haven't even got it in my soul to live.

Oh! I did laugh in 1959: a man fell in a hole and then his wife fell in after him.

It is always interesting to speculate how a man will behave after his life has collapsed in ruins.

Man is engaged in a constant process of dying, and yet does nothing but dream of reaching a point where he will really begin to live.

To go through life is not as easy as crossing a field. (Russian proverb).

Sometimes you feel as if you must be reading a book, and that once you have finished it and looked around -- life will be over.

Andrei, what do you think of dragons? I mean, where did they all go?

In the past people did not cling to life as much, and it was easier to breathe.

Criminality

The fortune teller looked at the water and said: "He will live, but it would be better if he didn't."

What I am grateful to the lord for is that I never killed anyone in the whole of my life. And the number of opportunities I had!

Even in his sleep he was all the time trying to prove that he was not guilty.

I managed all this without a mother or a father!

In school me and my brother managed two and a half classes between us.

There used to be more fun in the camp in the old days. Someone was always being beaten up or hanged. Every day there was a special event.

One thief to another, smugly: "I've never held anything heavier than a purse in my hand!"

Art

Art is insolent because it is so clear. Or rather, it is insolent to make itself clear. First it sticks a knife into a table and then says: there you are -- that's what I am like.

The hardiest of all man's creations art turns even death, its enemy, into an ally.

In ancient times death centered around the two extreme poles of human life.

Art, I think, does nothing but turn matter into spirit and vice versa.

A diffident man cannot allow himself to work badly, in slipshod fashion--as a genius can.

Art is thus the intermediary between generations.

Life is more significant than we think, oh yes, more significant than we think.

God and Religion

Oh yes, God exists alright. If anybody says there's no God I'll poke his eyes out.

And at that moment my prayer failed to reach God, because I couldn't take my eyes off that dirty Jew. (Said at Christmas).

The Soviet State

Apropos of the "Declaration of Human Rights" a gaurd in charge of the work-party said: "You don't understand. It's not for you. It's for Negroes.

The doctor was there in his white coat and I said: "I'm going blind." "It's just mania," he said.

Platonov's The Foundation Pit

2012-01-02T19:30:00.023-06:00

Platonov's novel, The Foundation Pit, is a bitter critique of Soviet ideology. In the book, the proletarian enthusiasts are materialist, utilitarian, collectivist, and atheist; somewhat paradoxically, they are also future and death-obsessed. Platonov's foundation pit workers inhabit a world which is appallingly similar to Stalin's historical Soviet Union. The pit workers are virulently anti-individualist, anti-bourgeois, anti-priest, and anti-peasant. They imbibe and spread large amounts of socialist propaganda, the tenants of which are almost all related to the violent transformation of society in the service of a mythological future that almost by definition cannot exist. The absurdity of the central project of Platonov's society, a gigantic housing complex for working-class people, scarcely overshadows the absurdity of Stalin's real-life economic plan, including famine-inducing collectivization, super-centralized and unrealistically ambitious five-year plans, industrial giganticism, mass deportations and slave labor, etc. And yet somehow Platonov's book, as illustrated by some of the strange quotes below, seems to explain something serious about the Stalinist project. Notwithstanding its extraordinary violence, Stalinism proved attractive to many Russians precisely because the Stalinist vision was so absolutist, so eschatological, so future-oriented, and so mythological. To quote the Marxist philosopher Althusser, the future lasts forever.

"Happiness will originate from materialism, comrade Voshchev, not from meaning."

"A man who's never seen war is a woman who's never given birth--soft in the head!"

"After all, we're not animals--we can live for the sake of enthusiasm."

"Sadness is nothing, comrade Kozlov," he said. "It means that one class senses the whole world, and anyway happiness is a bourgeois business. Happiness will lead only to shame."

"...in a year's time the entire local class of the proletariat would leave the petty-proprietorial town and take possession for life of this monumental new home. And after ten or twenty years, another engineer would construct a tower in the middle of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled there for a happy eternity."

"Pruchevsky ensured the indestructibility of the future all-proletarian dwelling and felt comforted by the sureness of the materials destined to protect people who until then had lived on the outside."

"At the time of the Revolutio dogs had barked day and night all over Russia, but now they had fallen silent: Labor had set in and the laborers slept in quiet."

"You're lying, you class superfluity!"

"He even began to doubt the happiness of the future, which he imagined in the form of a blue summer lit by a motionless sun"

"I'll go ahead and knock those shepherds and clerks into working class shape. I"ll have them digging so hard that all their mortal element will show on their bare faces."

"...at the same time he felt deeply agitated: Wasn't truth merely a class enemy? After all, the class enemy was now capable of appearing even in the form of dream and imagination!"

"What kind of nerve-ridden intelligentsia is present here that the least sound grows straight into?"

"...he had calculated his revolutionary merits to be inadequate and his daily contribution to social benefit to be minimal."

"You, Kozlov, clearly live on principles of your own and are leaving the working mass behind while you crawl into the distance."

"The working class isn't the tsar," said Chiklin. "It's not afraid of uprisings."

"The proletariat, comrade Voshchev, lives for enthusiasm!"

"And why are you dying, Mama? From being bourgeois--or from death?"

"Ay, you masses, you masses! It's difficult to organize you all into the gruel of communism!"

"But I didn't want to get myself born--I was afraid my mother would be bourgeois."

"And our Soviet power goes deep indeed if children, even when they have no memory of their own mothers, already sense comrade Stalin!"

"That's enough, you petty bourgeois, of you and your grieving...Do you not realize that sorrow among us has been abolished?"

"He believed in a near-at-hand day when the entire proletariat would take on the image and likeness of its own vanguard; this, he knew, would be socialism."

"We no longer feel the heat from the bonfire of the class struggle, but there has to be a blaze..."

"The womb matrix for the house of the future life was already complete..."

"..afraid of being taken for a man who still lived according to the tempos of the epoch of he economy regime."

"..thanks to the disciplinarian calculation that is it better for a thousand men to take a hundred strides than for one man to walk three miles."

"...suffering torment over the solitary cows, sheep, and fowl, since in the hands of an elemental kulak privateer even a goat can be a lever of capitalism."

"I used to be a priest, but now I've detached myself from my soul..."

"It's no use, comrade, for me to live," the priest replied with reason. "I no longer feel the charm of creation."

"Well then?" patiently said the activist from up above. "Or are you going to stand there forever in between capitalism and communism? It's time to get moving..."

"So are these activists of yours sleeping?" "An activist can never sleep," replied Yelisey.

The Soviet Shining

2012-01-02T18:06:00.032-06:00

I just recently watched my favorite horror movie, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Stephen King's invented term, the shining, indicates a predilection for telepathy as well as a supernatural ability to detect traces of previous events, especially violent crimes. In King's horrific tale, a little boy feels the reverberating presence of a triple murder that occurred in the 1920s even as he witnesses the effect this historical tragedy appears to be having on his own father's menacing behavior. I think the shining is a useful metaphor for the relevance of history as an academic discipline or mode of inquiry. The intermingling of past and present lies at the heart of human existence.

King's story--or at least Kubrick's interpretation of that story--includes more than a healthy dose of psychoanalytic theory. Before ever setting out to manage an isolated hotel, Jack Nicholson's son meets with a psychoanalyst. As it turns out, the boy has developed an alternate personality, an invisible friend who lives inside the boy's mouth and speaks through his finger. Tellingly, this invisible friend only arrived on the scene when his angry father dislocated his shoulder. To my mind, the point is that "the shining," or rather the generic connection between past and present, is more psychoanalytic than supernatural. The past matters to us. I relearn this lesson each December 7th, the anniversary of my mother's death. Each year, as the date approaches, I feel vaguely uneasy, vaguely depressed. In fact, this date seems more potent the less I consciously remember its existential significance.

Revolutions are related to this concept of "shining." The past, and in particular the criminal past, bubbles forth. It only takes a little revolutionary telepathy to conjure up the blood of the martyrs to inspire fresh slaughter. In the movie, the Shining, historical pain is the agent of activity and plot in general. Marx famously said that revolutions are the engine of historical change. They come about as a result of past trauma, or a sensitivity to past trauma.

I'll close by making one more strained, tenuous connection between The Shining and Bolshevik Revolution. Take the movie's most important line, delivered by Jack Nicholson. In response to a terrified Shelley Duvall's desperate request to be given the chance to retreat in order to "think things over," Nicholson replies thus: “You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over, what good’s a few minutes more gonna do you now?” The line is powerful because it's not just menacing sarcasm. It's true on a philosophical level. It's offered as Flannery O'Connell wisdom. Here's the translation: You've lived for years with a violent, sarcastic, and generally evil man, and yet you've never been honest or courageous enough to admit this fact and save yourself or even your defenseless son from me. Why start to live authentically now?

Nicholson's devastating truth reminds me of Andrey Platonov's novel, The Foundation Pit. In The Foundation Pit, communist true believers have long ago surrendered the ability to live honestly or authentically. They are busily constructing an enormous hole which will serve as the base of an enormous workers' housing structure, symbol of the proletarian future. Their lives are empty and boring, filled with parades, propaganda, empty ideology, coercion and violence, and meaningless motion and random activity. Platonov's portrayal of Stalinist Russia seems absurdist, but the cruelty and spiritual emptiness of Platonov's invented world is a close parallel of the real political entity he knew. And somehow the citizens of Platonov's commune, who are so ready to destroy kulaks in order to serve a "future" they cannot know, seem in need of a Flannery O'Connell-style epiphany. Or perhaps the reverse is true? Perhaps they see themselves in the role of Jack Nicholson, using extreme violence to help show the kulaks how empty or useless their lives have been? I remember another Flannery O'Connell line. It goes something like this: "She would have been a good woman...If someone had been there to shoot her every minute of her life." Maybe this is what Stalin, and Platonov's Stalinists were really all about. Maybe they believed that Russians could only be good if someone was there to shoot them every minute of their lives...

The Vysotka Prism

2011-12-31T15:25:00.012-06:00

I've spent the past few years getting to know the Russian Revolution, Soviet history, and Russian history in general. The blog reflects my ongoing struggle to make sense of this enormous and enormously important topic. But Soviet history is slippery. One can approach the topic from the point of view of revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, expatriates, foreign enemies, foreign sympathizers, intellectuals, peasants and workers, male Russians, female Russians, ethnic Russians, non-ethnic Russian Soviet citizens, victims, apologists, or even post-Soviet or "New Russian" citizens. I am often overwhelmed by these diverse perspectives, and I'm overwhelmed without even mastering the historiography of recent years. But I like Anne Nivat's approach to Soviet history, which is to tell the story or revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia through the prism of one of the iconic addresses of Stalinist Russia, the Vysotka, one of seven skyscrapers that housed, and continue to house, some of the most important people in Russia.

In reality, Nivat's essay on Russian history isn't really about this architectural landmark, although she describes its features in some detail, not neglecting to note the role slave labor played in its construction. Rather, Nivat's tale is about the Russian people. Interviewing her neighbors, Nivat discovered many of the fault-lines between old and new Russia. The occupants of the Vysoktka include dissents, intellectuals, artists, Stalinists, former apparatchiks, traditionalists, nouveau riches, and everything in between. In the earliest years of the 21st century, Nivet's subjects are understandably obsessed with economic survival. With the collapse of Communism, many of the Vysoktka's residents are immersed in a complex and ever-shifting economic landscape. Does it make sense to privatize the building? Should one sell off one's address, rent it to wealthy foreigners, or hang on in order to avoid larger condominium fees at other addresses? All in all, Privet's interviews reveal the complexity of Russian history, a history filled with memories of suffering (but also faith in collectivist ideals) and also fears (and hopes) about the un-mapped future.

Omnivorous censorship, Implacable propaganda

2011-12-11T13:49:00.029-06:00

"Horrors Of Making The Mistake of Expecting To Find In Russia What You Elsewhere Find Without Expecting"

"My dear fellow, let me beg you most earnestly not to make the ridiculous mistake of judging by appearances; the thing to realize, that here people run themselves: they are truly--for the first time in human history--free."

I have returned to reading E.E. Cummings' satirical travelogue and modernist manifesto, Eimi. While many other foreign writers came away from Russia with positive impressions of "the world's first proletarian state," Cummings was obviously appalled by what he saw during his sojourn in Moscow. Cummings saw a culture of surveillance, falsehood, propaganda, atheism, bureaucracy, and xenophobia. He also encountered a number of naive expatriate defenders of the communist dictatorship. These sycophants were utterly enthralled with their hosts, and willing to forgive almost everything if it meant that they could continue to believe that the Russian Revolution had brought humankind one step closer to utopia. The quotes below are, more often than not, the apologias of foreigners who decided to see progress where in fact there was only sacrilege, a dearth of consumer goods, an acute housing shortage, a runaway personality cult, torture and murder, a dead artistic climate, and countless other banalities and horrors. Forgive me for stringing such a long series of random quotes together. I sometimes remind myself of the man in my office who underlines every single word of his daily newspaper. The point of Eimi is that Soviet Russia was indeed a brave new world, but it was an absurd and dreadful one.

Soviet Apologia

"You must realize that we, we the Russians, have over us no sovereigns; we are not compelled; we are striving for IDEAS."

"What you've noticed is that each of us has an INNER DISCIPLINE, not a discipline which has been imposed by some outer authority. Let me make this point perfectly plain--people talk of Stalin as if he were a dictator! why, you can't imagine how small he is at a workers' meeting."

"You mean, I presume, that comrade Stalin is not imposing his power on others, but is expressing their power."

"Well, what if prohibition is a failure in America? That's the fault of America's social system: the burdens imposed upon the workers by capitalist society are enough to weaken anyone's character."

"..anyone who still wants to serve The Lord can do so, but the Lord's servant must have a useful occupation or starve; people have awakened to the fact that religion is opium: in a worker's republic there;s no place for parasiites..."

"Well, ten years ago I was born. Do you know what that means? I became a communist."

"Would you like to see the vast industrial plants by which Russia is trying to get her place in the world? Russia is striving; a whole race, a vast part of the earth..."

"...I always feel that we haven't any right to criticize: the point is, you are now in a workers' republic which is bound to make mistakes like anything else; but the mistakes are being rectified as quickly as possible--and after all, the ideal is what counts, isn't it!"

"They're not police at all, they're guardians of the proletariat, and quite the most spending organization in Soviet Russian--altogether noble and unselfish--why I've even been accused of being in the Gay--Pay-Oo myself.."

"Do you realize that without some sort of guidance you will not see anything, let alone understand?"

"Yes, that's a radio: there;s one in every room: the programs are mostly propaganda, but very interesting"

"Of ocurse, I shouldn't dream of living like this anywhere else: the point is, what you spend here enriches the government instead of some private individual who has a great deal too much already.."

"You probably don;t realize that coffee is a tremendous luxury!--not that things aren't getting better every day; it's really nothing short of miraculous, what they've done."

"mymymymymymym, How I envy you, Seeing Moscow for the first time...."

"...he was much impressed and showed a genuine understanding of the basic principles on which this worker;s republic is founded...really. yes...[T]hese mischievous correspondents (at least the Russians are honest thieves) got hold of poor Gene Tunney and they took him to a place where ecclestical refuse of one sort and another was being burnt--not the really good things, of course: the good ones are carefully preserved by the government, it;s extraordinary what they;ve done, really extraordinary.. By the way, this is a dead secret--I'm interested in icons, myself, but from a purely business standpoint, you understand--even my worst enemiescan't accuse me of being religious! O: well, and the correspondents arranged it so that, just as poor brother Tunnney came walking in, a life-size statue of Our Lord Jesus Christ rolled right out of the flames clear to Gene's most Catholic feet. Giggle. At least that's the story. Tunney, of course, was horribly shocked--it spoiled his entire Russian trip."

"Oh well...but we who've seen Russia before--they can't fool us!"

Humble Servants of the Revolution

2011-12-01T20:13:00.027-06:00

"Please, please let me visit him. After all, you're a human being."
"There are no human beings here, Eliena Petrovna, only humble servants of the revolution."

"Try as I would to exorcise it, the knowledge that she was a secret police agent was ever a ghost at the banquet of our affections."

"Within a year Nikopol seemed not so much an industrial establishment as a hunting ground for the police and their secret informers."

"Only a modern Dante in a pessimistic moment could evoke in words that picture of the secret underground factory of the Commissariat of Munitions, operated chiefly with slave labor."

"Thanks, Mother, and don't worry about me. I'll be all right. I know revolution is no picnic."

"Suddenly I found myself among men who could eat ample and dainty food in full view of starving people not only with a clear conscience but with a feeling of righteousness, as if they were performing a duty to history."

"A lush, ripe obscenity is the most striking and sometimes the only reminder of the 'proletarian' origins of our regime."

I had never heard of Victor Kravchenko's brilliant postwar polemic, I Choose Freedom, until I read John Fleming's The Anti-Communist Manifestos. But Kravchenko's autobiographical attack on the Soviet Union was enormously popular, both in the United States and Europe, and did more than almost any other book to undermine Russia's reputation in the West. Fleming is slightly incredulous that French and American Leftists were unable to believe that Kravchenko, a relatively high level Soviet bureaucrat, had personally written the book that so powerfully undermined Western confidence in their erstwhile ally.

However, even today it's hard to believe that a translator--however free the translation--could have transformed the biography of an engineer and bureaucrat into such a perfectly complete indictment of Bolshevism. Yet however much Kravchenko was aided, the autobiography is historically accurate and essentially true. Kravchenko really witnessed what he said he witnessed; and the Soviet Union really was as bad, if not worse, than his testimony suggests. It's only the horrific facts of the Soviet economic and political system that make Kravchenko's story seem incredible today.

Kravchenko's slow rise to bureaucratic prominence gave him a tour de horizon of Soviet malevolence. Over the course of a decade, Kravchenko witnessed collectivization and man-made famine, purges and super-purges, police state surveillance and torture, class warfare and Party privilege, bureaucratic over-centralization coupled with economic chaos, propaganda disassociated from social reality, judicial crimes and slave labor camps, and diplomatic hypocrisy and military incompetence.

8 Pieces of Empire: A Dissent

2011-11-15T13:45:00.005-06:00

Long-time readers of Soviet Roulette are accustomed to Fur Coat's insightful analyses of Soviet culture and politics. But I have to take issue with his reading of Lawrence Sheets' 8 Fragments of Empire.

Fur sounds disappointed at the absence of a comprehensive analysis of the decline of the Communist regime. But I found here a profound evocation of the peculiar change-in-stasis and stasis-in-change that marked the Soviet collapse. Sheets' characters manage to reinvent themselves over the past twenty years, but the cloaks they don are never altogether different from their Leninist-Stalinist models. The Petersburg petty hustler, the Chernobyl tour guide, the thugs of Georgia and Chechnya, even Eduard Shevardnadze and the other post-Soviet satellite leaders, all appear to have internalized the forms and features of empire. Fragments of it get recycled, grafted onto local cultures (even that of nomadic Sakhalian Island reindeer herders).

The chapter on Chernobyl is especially profound: despite the stubborn insistence of a handful of natives to return to the ghost towns lying in the shadow of the blown reactor, we get a creepy reminder that no Soviet monument will survive nearly as long as the strontium and cesium in the soil of Pripyat. One local booster claims that more people died from the resettlement process than from the accident itself. It's hard to imagine a better symbol of the post-Soviet era.

One irony of Sheets' account is that he himself seems frozen in this vast space, incapable of looking away from the horror or seeking out a normal life. As in Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War", the correspondent becomes a victim of trauma and suffers alongside his subjects.

Finally, I have to call into question Mr. Coat's claim that Afghanistan and Chechnya are "ungovernable." That seems to commit a basic fallacy of historical reasoning. The fact that they haven't been governed well doesn't prove they can't be, and I find Sheets' suggestion that empire is both inescapable and yet fated to die more illuminating than piles of politico-economic analysis.

The Soviet Pursuit of Happiness

2011-11-14T11:32:00.025-06:00

"Fortune forever refuses my company."

"Who gave you permission to die all alone? Who gave you the right to an improvised death?"

"If the moujik dies, who will feed Russia?"

Having recently watched Chris Marker's excellent documentary about Alexander Medvedkin, The Last Bolshevik, I was eager to see Medvedkin's 1934 silent masterpiece, Happiness. The quirky film is filled with folklore allusions, slapstick comedy, visual jokes, and satirical depictions of every level of Ukrainian society. In this rural comedy, we see half-naked nuns, watermelon projectiles, a polka dot horse, a woman attached to a tilling harness, a runaway tractor, and dueling holy persons.

According to Marker's film, Happiness was deeply controversial with leading Bolsheviks. It's not difficult to see why: while Medvedkin's Happiness isn't overtly critical of collectivization, the surreal film treats peasants as the subject rather than the object of history. while satirizing almost every aspect of Soviet village life, the hero of Happiness, Khymr, dreams anti-socialist dreams that revolve around food, kingly privileges, and private ownership in an era of mass starvation. While not a kulak or counter-revolutionary, Khymer wasn't originally drawn to the kolkhoz, as prosperous as this kolkhoz turns out to be. Rather, Khymer wants what all peasants want: independence.

Like millions of other peasants who resisted collectivization, we suspect that the impoverished but absurdly stubborn Khymer might risk his own life rather than embrace a Soviet-style version of happiness. At any rate, the transition from Tsarism to Communism did not magically transmogrify Khymer's hardships. Nor did they alter the existential facts of Khymer's life struggle. Khymer, the Ukrainian peasant, confronts his myriad enemies--police, clergymen, bureaucrats, thieves, and soldiers--alone.

Sheets' 8 Pieces of Empire

2011-11-13T10:01:00.053-06:00

"A return to these horrors was unthinkable, save for the fact that nothing in Russia was unthinkable." Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind.

Lawrence Scott Sheets was a foreign correspondent whose beat somehow became the whole of the former Soviet Union. As such, Sheets had a unique vantage point over the disintegration of the "prison of nations." Over and over again, Sheets visited corners of the former empire which were awash in internecine violence. Sheets' account of the conflagration of the last twenty years, entitled 8 Pieces of Empire: a 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse, isn't overly theoretical: Sheets offers neither historical backdrop nor overarching explanation of two decades of murder, mayhem, militarism, neocolonialism, political fraud, religious extremism, and ethnic anarchy. On the other hand, Sheets' deeply personal, war correspondent approach to the topic of post-Soviet history sheds invaluable light on the horror of the Soviet implosion.

Sheets claims that his book deliberately avoids meta-narrative. That is to say, he argues that if one seeks to tell a single story about the Soviet Union's collapse and political aftermath, one has already missed the main point about the former Soviet Union, and that is that the Empire was fragmenting into many more than the "eight" pieces. Although we can't ultimately afford to do without a unifying theory of post-communist collapse, Sheets' fast-moving, journalistic descriptions of widely discrepant ethnic conflicts gives readers a sense of both the complexity and horror of the events he describes. In fact, Sheets' journalistic forays to far-flung ethnic battlefields is in many respects a useful corrective to the existing meta-narrative of Russia's journey through financial and political chaos into the coercive but putatively stable present of Putin and Medvedev.

What are Sheets' 8 pieces of empire? They include the Russian mainland (St. Petersburg in particular), Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Sakhalin Island, and Afghanistan, but almost all of these fragments of empire threaten to splinter (or have already splintered) into even small pieces. The irony of the book's title is that this isn't really a tale of empire or even geopolitics at all, but rather a very personal examination of one incredibly brave war journalist's decent into a wide variety of humanitarian hells. Over and over again, Sheets put himself in harm's way in order to show the world how bad things had gotten in remote areas of the world.

Chechnya, of course, was the worst place of all. In Chechnya, there were no winners. Grozny, like the rest of the country, was almost completed destroyed by two waves of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Almost nothing, either physical or psychological, was left standing. Kidnapping became endemic. Terrorist attacks, both inside and outside of Chechnya, commonplace. Over time, the staunchest rebels forgot seemed to forget what they were fighting for, other than bloody revenge. Indeed, the only semblance of a moral code in the country now seems to belong to the radical Islamic groups. Having overthrown any hint of secularism or traditional Sufism, the radical Islamic groups advocate Sharia law (which ironically has been implemented by Moscow's puppet government) and jihad in the name of some future pan-Central Asia caliphate.

The saddest element of Sheets' life as a reporter has surely been the number of personal friends, professional colleagues, and sources he has lost over the past twenty years. The juxtaposition of personal and public loss is extraordinarily depressing. Sheets often hints at the psychic toll of these losses, even suggesting that he had to leave field journalism as a result of these numerous traumas, but it is probably impossible to explain how these senseless deaths have ultimately changed him. We may or may not know how the accidental or even deliberate death of a single friend or relative can irrevocably change us. How can we approximate the impact of terrorism, torture, air attacks, and genocide on the soul of the reporter who so often "got there first" to report the news back to an indifferent West?

As a memoir of political reportage, the book makes few political arguments. Sheets has somehow maintained an incredible posture of objectivity in the midst of his travels. While he's not shy about pointing out the faults of an Uzbek dictator or Georgian politician, he seldom offers a prescription to end the chaos. As a reporter rather than a public policy expert, one cannot blame him for doing his job. However, Sheets' brief description of the Soviet and early American experience in Afghanistan is an implicit indictment of American foreign policy. How is that America, then or today, could have so completely overlooked the Soviet experience in that country? Like Chechnya, Afghanistan is unconquerable. As Sheets points out, even some of our closest allies in the country have changed sides countless times over the past few decades. And whatever else we know about the country, it is no oversimplification or ahistorical stereotype to assume that Afghans will go on fighting outsiders, and one another, for many, many more years to come.

Romantic Russia

2011-11-12T11:40:00.028-06:00

"Can this be the same Gizella? Where are those joyless, sad, exhausted eyes?"

"All my life I have been searching for death and I have found it in your dance."

"The most sublime peace is death."

Although most of Evgeni Bauer's silent films precede the Russian Revolution, they shed some light on Russian film aesthetics during the First World War. They may also shed some light on the essence of romanticism and its impact on a generation of political revolutionaries. Bauer's films--which are filled with ghostly apparitions and feverish dreams--are powerfully romantic representations of love, but Bauer's idea of love is never very far removed from unhappiness, pain, and even death.

Evgeni's film, Twilight of a Woman's Soul, tells the haunting tale of a lovely but lonely woman, Vera, who cannot seem to find meaning in a life of luxury. That life of luxury is depicted by the backdrop of fashionable outfits and richly decorated homes. The heroine's natural habitat is filled with furs, hats, flowers, rugs, lampshades, well-dressed suitors, recitals, social engagements, elaborate window treatments, and comfortable furniture. Yet luxury does nothing to ease the existential pain of this particular woman. And this existential pain is made worse when she is deceived by one of her philanthropic projects, a shiftless conman named Maxim whose natural habit is the opposite of everything to which Bauer's heroine is accustomed.

The con man's milieu involves cards, alcohol, bad eating habits, and crowded, dilapidated housing. In the end, the forlorn heroine is deceived by this man she is trying to help, even raped for her trouble. This brutality devastates Bauer's already tortured soul, but she is alive enough to fall in love with a wealthy, titled suitor. The tragedy, of course, is that she is too ashamed to reveal her status as a victim. After marrying her true love, she confesses, revealing her dark past. Her new husband is appalled, and refuses to be reconciled to her.

The protagonist does the only thing that is left to be done: she becomes a famous actress and tours Europe to wild applause, still perhaps troubled by her failure to find happiness in the arms of a man. Meanwhile, her husband responds to the disaster as any man would: he lives a profligate life, entertaining women of ill repute.

In the end, the man comes to understand that only true love can cure his malaise and he searches Europe for two years to find his lost love. In the final scene, the heroine--now using a theatrical pseudonym--makes a triumphant return to perform for her native country. By some romantic fate, the deeply depressed husband finds himself at the theater. Seeing his beloved, he makes his way into her dressing room but is, alas, spurned by the great love of his life. For although she continues to hold his memory sacred, she has her pride: it's too late, she tells her husband. "I loved you once. I don't anymore."

The plot of Twilight of a Woman's Soul seems anachronistic, irrelevant to the cynical modern era, but even out of place in the traumatized world that succeeded the First World War. So is another of Bauer's films, Dying Swan. In this darkly erotic film, a speechless ballerina falls for a man who betrays her love by meeting a second woman for a romantic tryst. Devastated, the heroine turns toward her art, winning over her audiences with a hauntingly depressing rendition of, presumably, Tchaikovsky dying swan.

At the same time, an equally morose gentleman, a count no less, is relentlessly pursuing some kind of aesthetic rendition of death itself, painting skeletons to pass the time. When he sees the heroine's perfectly morbid representation of a dying bird, he is smitten, wanting only to capture this incarnation of death on a canvas. Alas, the ballerina's perpetual state of sadness--the inspiration for her art--is broken by a happy reconciliation with her original, and now repentant, suitor. The count, displeased with his model's new-found joie de vivre, kills the ballerina in order to preserve some semblance of her psychological attachment to the netherworld. For the director at least, love is a supremely serious matter: in fact, it's a matter of life and death.

A similar plot structures the Bauer film, After Death. Here, a solitary, bookish man named Andres emerges from his seclusion only to fall immediately and completely in love with an emerging actress named Zoia. The man and woman meet briefly at a park but somehow fail to unite. This, of course, plunges the actress into a deep and unbreakable downward spiral. Notwithstanding her success as an actress, the woman despairs and takes poison right before going on stage. Her death is undoubtedly her most spectacularly successful performance to date. She swoons, and then retreats from stage before being carried to a dressing room sofa where she expires, surrounded by adoring (and Roman garb-clad) actors, who would of course have appreciated the performance more than anybody.

But of course Bauer's romantic theatricality does not rest there. Like a scene from Wuthering Heights, the actress relentlessly haunts her suitor even in death. The hero cannot rest but seeks out his beloved's family to retrieve two mementos of his lover, a diary and a framed picture. Possessing these two reminders of the departed does nothing to help his obsession. His lover beckons him from the grave, and in a recurring dream sequence his lover, clothed in a long white dress and standing in an endless wheat field, calls him to her. Naturally, he doesn't try to resist, knowing that true love demands that he follow his lover to the grave.

It's interesting to analyze the Russian Revolution in the light of this type of unadulterated romanticism. Was the Russian Revolution, or at least its destructive aftermath, a repudiation of this kind of soulful earnestness? Or, on the contrary, did revolutionaries create an unprecedentedly complete social upheaval precisely because they expected their dreams to be tinged with tragedy? Whatever the answer, one suspects that Bauer's brand of dark Romanticism somehow shares some affinity with Russia's revolutionary utopianism.

Holy October

2011-11-09T21:21:00.023-06:00

Although I have been obsessed with the Russian Revolution for several years now, it's only now that I have gotten around to watching Sergei Eisenstein's classic silent film, October: Ten Days That Shook the World. Created in order to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, Eisenstein's great film (now set to Shostakovitch's music) distorts history in order to create a powerful mythology of socialist insurrection.

In October, we see all of the iconography of St. Petersburg, cradle of the Revolution. We see Bolshevik Party headquarters, the Finland Station, the Winter Palace, the Neva River, the Smolny Institute, the Tauride Palace, the Bronze Horseman, the Aurora, the Kazan Cathedral, the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the Nevsky Prospect. We also witness many of the great events of the era, including the February Revolution, Lenin's return to Russia at Finland Station, the July Days, Kornilov's alleged counter-revolution, and the storming of the Winter Palace.

The film chronicles both the February and October Revolutions, although the bourgeois heroes of the first revolution quickly become the villains of the proletarian second one. With the rise of the Provisional Government, we see a sinister but also somewhat clownish Kerensky, whose ambitions are inevitably compared with those of Napoleon who, like Kerensky, cynically betrayed a popular revolution.

Eisenstein's Provisional Government is bourgeois, dictatorial, and closely aligned with church and monarchical ceremony. It's also a little bit ridiculous. As the Bolsheviks are seizing power, the film depicts one of John Reed's most famous vignettes: a parade of old bourgeois dignitaries is turned back by a proletarian solider with the threat of a good spanking. The film also pretends that Kerensky, leader of the Provisional Government, was spending his time in tsarist luxury (he's ensconced in Alexandra's bed for instance) which was only mired by his fear of the Bolshevik future.

In contrast to Kerensky's absurdly isolated antics in the Winter Palace, Lenin, when he arrives at Finland Station, is greeted with overwhelming popular support. As a speaker, Lenin is portrayed dynamic, popular, and steadfast. In the Party's Central Committee meetings, Lenin is bold and decisive. When his proposal to seize power succeeds, we watch as Mensheviks cower and Bolsheviks bravely move toward their date with destiny. And that destiny is encapsulated in the film's ending. As Lenin returns to power, a clock in Moscow--and indeed clocks around the world follow suit--is frozen at 25 October 1917.

Krondstadt

2011-11-09T19:57:00.008-06:00

The two-part documentary, The Russian Revolution in Color, highlights the role of the Kronstadt sailors in the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The island naval fort that protected St. Petersburg from foreign ships housed about 30,000 well-trained and well-armed military men with deeply held socialist ideals, many of whom with revolutionary pasts. The sailors helped to ensure that the tsarist regime collapsed and later guaranteed that the second Russian revolution, the Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government, was successful.

In March 1917, the sailors formed a revolutionary committee that coordinated a bloody overthrow of the hated officer corps. The sailors, committed to direct democracy and radical egalitarianism, formed their own laws, printed their own newspapers, policed their small island village, and supported the Bolsheviks who tried to take power in July but only succeeded in October.

After seizing power, Lenin's authoritarian tendencies further alienated the Kronstadt sailors, who were appalled by the Red Terror, War Communism economics, the Bolshevik monopoly on power, and peasant mistreatment and famine in the countryside. Although the sailors had rallied around the besieged Reds in the Civil War, they weren't prepared to forget that they had participated in t in order to obtain in the first two Russian revolutions in order to obtain freedom, direct and multiparty democracy, Soviet (as opposed to Bolshevik) power, and economic justice. In the end, the tension between the Bolsheviks and the radical sailors led to one final sailor rebellion, which Lenin and Trotsky put down ruthlessly, executing thousands and forcing others to flee to Finland after a heroic resistance.

The Collapse of Western Communism

2011-10-24T19:43:00.040-05:00

I believe that a strong Israel is the best guarantee that peace will someday be possible in the Middle East. If Israel weakens, or is undermined in any serious way, what incentive will its neighbors have to someday end tensions and make a lasting peace with the Jewish people?

Ever since I was politically conscious, I have had a sympathetic view of the nation of Israel. My sympathy for Israel is predicated on the bellicosity of its neighbors but also on the history of the Jewish people, who have suffered frequently and grievously at the hands of non-Jewish Europeans. The holocaust was of course the ultimate expression of Europe's extraordinary capacity to inflict harm on a minority religion. But Russian history, including its tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet iterations, has witnessed countless episodes of egregiously bloody or vicious Anti-semitism.

Of course, my sympathy for Israel doesn't preclude sympathy for the Palestinian people. If European anti-Semitism made Israel necessary, local Arabs--not Europeans--were the ones who were forced to cede territory to the Zionist project, however legitimate that project was. So, although I continue to believe that a strong, secure Israel is a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East, I understand that the Palestinians have strong, legitimate claims against the Israeli state. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are entitled to civil rights, free economic development, and self-governance.

As the tide of world opinion continues to turn against Israel, I wonder about my support for Israel. Will history make my support for Israel seem ill-considered, ridiculous, or even immoral? Will Israel's sins in the West Bank and Gaza, sins related to colonization and police-state regulation, outweigh the sins of the terrorists and belligerent enemy states who oppose her? I continue to support Israel, but nervously, sometimes even guiltily.

By analogy, I think about how liberals and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s continued to support or excuse Soviet Communism in the face of overwhelming evidence of Stalin's brutality. Why were so many Western intellectuals sympathetic to the U.S.S.R. long after it became clear that the world's first socialist state was guilty of man-made famine, bloody purges, the gulag system, and a Nazi-Soviet diplomatic alliance? The answer, I think, is complex and multifaceted, but Western intellectuals generally believed that socialism was the best antidote to a wide variety of evils, including colonialism, militarism, unregulated capitalism, and fascism. They weren't always blind to the evils of Stalinism, but they assumed that the world's first workers' state needed to be protected against its enemies, its flaws overlooked. As the British journalist and Soviet sympathizer Walter Duranty famously said, "you must break a few eggs to make an omelet."

Opposing the sentiments of men like Walter Duranty were a small number of highly influential anti-Communist writers, many recent apostates from the quasi-religious socialist faith. John V. Fleming's beautifully written and exhaustively researched book describes four of the most important books in the under-appreciated canon of Western anti-communism. These books, which include Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Richard Krebs' Out of the Night, Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom, and of course Whitaker Chambers' Witness, help to explain how and why American and even French sympathy for the Soviet Union and its philosophical creed began to wane.

Koestler's book argued that Bolshevism was so inherently anti-humanistic that many of its chief theoreticians rated the Party as inherently more important than self-interest or indeed truth. An anti-Stalinist might be innocent of a specific criminal action against the state, but if he opposed the will of the Party, he was guilty of the larger crime of resisting human progress and the general course of history. In fact, even a loyal Bolshevik might be called upon to sacrifice himself for some broader Party goal, even if that goal was dimly comprehended.

Kravchenko's book, I Choose Freedom, was the autobiography of a Soviet official who defected from the Soviet Union while working as a trade official in Washington, D.C. The Ukrainian Kravchenko had lived through the entire Soviet experience and witnessed the worst aspects of the Soviet dictatorship first hand. His book is an indictment of Bolshevik politics as well as economics, and discusses collectivization, man-made famine, show trials and purges, economic inefficiency and chaos, ruthless Party discipline, and the overall transformation of Communist hope into dark Communist cynicism and despair. Amazingly, Kravchenko was forced to defend the very idea that Soviet Russia maintained prion labor camps in a French libel court. His victory in court--reinforced by a grudging $1 dollar fine to the Leftist French journal that attacked him--did at least give Gulag survivors the chance to testify about their experiences in open court.

The other two books in Fleming's wonderful book are Krebs' Out of the Night, which is an outrageously exciting if slightly fictionalized account of Communist as well as Nazi activities in the interwar years. Krebs' international adventures in communism revealed a highly unsympathetic and decidedly undemocratic German Communist Party, German Communist Party, and Comitern.

Fleming's greatest praise is reserved for Whitaker Chambers conversion narrative. Chambers, the famously controversial accuser of the allegedly communist state department official, Alger Hiss, was a disheveled, overweight, secretly bisexual, former communist spy. But he was also a brilliant and deeply learned writer. It seems hard to credit, but Fleming, a Princeton scholar of medieval literature, claims that Chambers' indictment of communism is a literary triumph on par with the greatest memoirs of all times, including St. Augustine's Confessions. I have yet to read Chambers' Witness to judge whether this is hyperbole or not. But it's certainly hard to understand how anybody connected with Richard Nixon might warrant a comparison with a Church father.

In the end, all of these books are worth reading, if only to remind us that there was a time when ordinary American and European intellectuals had to be convinced that Russian Communism was a positive menace to the most elementary forms of Western freedom. One wonders what, in our own time, is analogous to the war against communism.

The Varieties of Communist Experience

2011-10-17T10:23:00.013-05:00

"Look! A beautiful bourgeois apartment filled with ugly things produced during Communism."

Slavenka Drakulic's exploration of Eastern European communism, entitled A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, A Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven, examines the varieties of post-war Communism through the lens of fiction. Although Draukulic's analysis of Eastern European Communism isn't strikingly original, her fictive device of using animals to narrate important facets of each country's unique national experiences is highly original.

From the mouse, the readers gets a tour of the Czech Museum of Communism. The mouse jokingly suggests that the museum ought to display household items such as diapers, sanitary napkins, and toilet paper, since these things were often extraordinarily difficult to locate in Communist countries. The Parrot, a personal pet of the Yugoslavian dictator, Tito, tells the readers something about Tito's international celebrity and charisma. According to the pet, Tito possessed thirty-two residences and put thousands of his citizens into political prisons, and yet still deserves some recognition for founding the global nonaligned movement and steering his country away from unmitigated Stalinism.

The bear, part of a Roma circus act, is Bulgarian, and tells about more about Bulgaria's first secretary of its Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov. On the whole, Zhivkov's thirty-three year rule was a period of economic stagnation. The dictator was wise enough to allow his charismatic daughter, Lyudmila, to disguise this impoverishment of material conditions with bread and circuses.

In many ways Lydumila reminds one of Imelda Marcos. Like Imelda, Lydumila held many official governmental posts. Like Imelda, Lydumila strongly believed that symbolic and even spiritual remedies could serve as effective antidotes to poverty. If you view a recent documentary about Imelda Marcos, you see that her thousand-plus pairs of shoes were not exactly spontaneous purchases. Instead, Marcos has created a full ideological defense of aestheticism. Believing that the last thing her miserable people needed was a reflection of their poverty, Imelda Marcos went out of her way to project an image of beauty. On a personal level, Marcos always made a concerted effort to live up to her reputation for glamour. And at the level of state policy, Marcos tried to create large public projects related to culture that could deflect the public from focusing--too narrowly in her view--on bread and butter issues. No matter that one palace of culture actually collapsed, killing more than a few of Filipino citizens, in her haste to impress the world. Lydumila adopted a similar approach to politics with her "national program for aesthetic education." Beauty mixed with nationalism could surely prevent the counter-revolution.

Drakulic's other animals have similar tales to tell. The cat describes Poland's difficult path to freedom, and subsequent attempts to come to terms with a legacy of collaboration in the face of Soviet intimidation. The mole points to the absurdity of the Berlin Wall, which humans, strange organisms that they are, often tried to surmount or breech by way of air balloon, tunnel, secret car compartment, or other ingenious devices. The escapes, or attempted escapes, continued right up until the wall came down in 1989. Before that, East Germany employed some 189,000 "informal employees" to ensure the regime's continued existence in the face of its unpopularity and economic backwardness.

The pig discussed Hungary's "goulash" Communism, which was essentially a reversal of traditional Communism ideology. Whereas the Bolsheviks always claimed that "whoever was not with us, was against us," the Hungarian dictator rather generously decided that "whoever is not against us, is with us." In these circumstances, the Hungarian Communist Party could overlook individual opinion and indeed private enterprise, just so long as the state's monopoly of public power was preserved in tact. The Romanian situation is explained by a dog, one of many thousands who roamed the streets of Bucharest as a result of the dictator's brutal decision to raise the homes of their owners. As the dog explains, having made the decision to treat his citizens like dogs, Ceausescu and his wife couldn't quite stomach the idea of inflaming domestic or foreign opinion by killing off this enormous and quite rapid dog population. Such was the absurdity of Romanian Communism, which of course ended with the savage death of the married tyrants.

The book concludes the story of a raven in tiny Albania. The raven witnesses the murder of one of Albania's leading politicians at the hands of his more powerful rival, the first secretary of the Communist Party. According to Drakulic's bird, the man, who was murdered for no other reason than that his son had decided to marry an Albanian with relatives who lived in the suspect West, left the following note, which might serve as an epitaph for any Eastern European victimized by Communism: "Oh, you ravens devouring me, don't touch my black eyes."

A World of Would-Be Communists

2011-10-12T06:31:00.016-05:00

"His was a tragedy of a pure communist in a world of would-be communists."

Chris Marker's documentary, The Last Bolshevik, gives us a window into the creative life of one of the Soviet Union's best early film directors, Alexander Medvedkin's whose adult life corresponds almost exactly with the life of the Soviet state.

According to Marker, Medvedkin was an artist, innovator, atheist, propagandist, Civil War veteran, and, notwithstanding his aesthetic independence, a communist true-believer. Medvedkin is perhaps most famous for his masterpiece, Happiness, which incorporates elements of Russia's long folk tradition to satirize peasant life before and after the Revolution. But his career was filled with aesthetic highlights. For instance, Medvedkin staged the storming of the Winter Palace prior to Eisenstein's famous film, October, attached film cameras to soldiers' rifles, and turned a propaganda train into a miniature film studio. One experimental film sequence seems to incarnate Medvedkin's aesthetic daring: reversing footage of the 1931 demolition of a cathedral in Moscow, the Church of the Christ of the Savior, Medvedkin called attention to the high cost of the Soviet Union's march toward the future, and indeed pointed out that Russia's past might yet be resurrected.

"There were so many surprises..."

2011-10-06T18:44:00.015-05:00

"Today's crooks aren't expected to repent."

"Now I think: Did Vermont exist?"

"There were so many surprises...Because we never knew anything."

"There was a tacit agreement--they delivered dialectical materialism lessons, and we acted like sheep."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn possessed remarkable wisdom and moral courage. He wasn't always right, but he got one big thing right: the Soviet Union was a morally bankrupt, blasphemous enterprise from start to finish.

Alexander Sokurov's television documentary, Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn, gives us a window onto the soul of this brilliant if opinionated man. In the film, we get a snapshot of Solzhenitsyn's rich but tortured life, including his university education in physics and mathematics, his early dedication to socialist ideals, his brave leadership in the Second World War, his trial for slandering Stalin in personal letters to a friend (they burned his war diaries), his eight years in the gulag and exile in a small town in Kazakhstan, his emergence as a powerful new voice in Russian literature, his subsequent persecution as a dissident writer, his eighteen year exile in Vermont, his second marriage and family of three boys, and his dramatic return to a free Russia.

Sokurov's quiet film treats the grand old man of Russian letters with awe and reverence. Sokurov allowed the camera to languidly follow the Nobel Prize winner as he slowly moved along a nature trail or sat at his desk in silence working. We see two studies, an old-fashioned typewriter, hand-written manuscripts, a green and red pen, bookshelves, and windows that overlook a forest.

In conversation, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates his obsession with the Russian language (he says he learned Russian again, in prison, from a dictionary--from the ground up) God, nature, ethics, repentance, Russian literature, and his bitter past. Some of the film's most powerful moments occur when the writer's memories are stirred by some banal topic and he seems to be transported back in time the Gulag, which never seems far away. Solzhenitsyn wife explains that she and the author receive thousands of letters from former political prisoners, and actually systematically contacted former inmates or their families to offer them financial assistance.

Solzhentisyn's second wife is also interviewed. She describes her husband as a simple, quiet, modest, orderly, grateful, and easy-to-please man, a creature of routine. But what a routine!

Stray Dogs Attacked Me

2011-10-03T12:02:00.039-05:00

"Autocracy is a socioeconomic system that exists only to the degree that we are convinced of its inevitability"

"The highest government officials make the very existence of innovation possible only as a result of serendipity."

Alexei Plutser-Sarno's brilliantly original, Notes from Russia, is an semiotic analysis of the collapse of Russian communism. Plutser-Sarno, a lexicographer and folklorist, tells the story of this brutal transition by dissecting the myriad hand-written or printed notes, posters, fliers, and graffiti that covered the walls of Russia's public places in the early 1990s. Although a few of these cris de coeur could be found anywhere in the world, taken in the aggregate, these idiosyncratic messages reveal a troubled, crisis-ridden citizenry trapped half-way between the worst aspects of capitalism and communism. What kind of place was Russia in the early 1990s? Which aspects of Soviet culture survived the political downfall of the Soviet political system, which aspects of capitalism emerged immediately after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., and how did the two elements coexist with one another? Plutser-Sarno's handwritten notes and petty bulletins tell us that everyday life in this period frequently entailed a brutal struggle for survival. The authors of Plutser-Sarno's vast collection of street messages are all conditioned by an assumption that life in Russia was impoverished, unequal, venal, cynical, conspiratorial, bureaucratic, and chaotic. Russia in 1991 was a veritable landscape of despair, replete with runaway inflation, financial scandal, alcoholism, unemployment, ill health, police corruption, prostitution, violence, fraud, and every other form of social malady known to modern society.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the post-Soviet moral economy is that although Russians were actively participating in the marketplace, they seemed to deeply resent capitalism. Consumers resented producers and sellers, but the reverse was also true: store owners had all sorts of nasty things to say to their would-be customers. Post-Soviet Russians were not yet willing to accept the notion that they were obliged to be courteous to others in exchange for currency.

The flip side of the brutality of Russian life in the early 1990s was that many formerly Soviet citizens were desperately naive. I am reminded of the strange sensation I get every time I see a sloppy, hand-written cardboard sign that advertises easy work or a quick real estate sale. I often wonder about the dual naivete of such egregiously unprofessional attempts to make money at someone else's expense. Who exactly deserves my sympathy when I see the uneven lettering on these hastily constructed signs? Is is the potential customer who is apparently so downtrodden that he or she might actually be lured in by such crude overtures? Or is it the would-be flim-flam man who actually pins his own hopes to such transparently unsophisticated ploys?

On hard times:

Peepl! [sic] I hav [sic] a request for you. I just did my term. I was on my way home. Stray dogs attacked me. I'm hungry. Pleez help me out if you can.

I have been informed that the hot water will be cut off for 30 days starting May 6th. Floor Chief.

Attention! The lifts are old and might get stuck. Don't get in with more than four people, because if you get stuck you'll suffocate.

Working breaks from 9:30am to 10:30am, 10:40am to 11:40am, 2:30pm to 3:30pm, and 3:40pm to 4:40pm.

Attention Superintendents of Condominium -- 337! Please write down the apartment numbers where the radiators are not working (no heating): Apt 1, 2, 3, 20, 16, 28, 71, 80, 121, 18, 93, 146, 108... [etc.--the list goes on and on and on].

Looking for a girl with a tent. Will provide canned meat and massage. You should bring hope; sex is not obligatory. Meet me by this message board at 10pm. I look a lot better than I write!

On the marketplace and marketplace values:

In this apartment we don't sell moonshine, buy fish, or know the whereabouts of granny Ann! Now clear off!

Liquidation sale! I am going back to Vietnam for good.

For sale. Ural motorcycle. RUNS. No Wheels.

No vodka sold from 11pm to 8am. And stop cursing and shouting! Don't even ask! We're all in this together.

Announcement. Dear public, so you don't complain, we would like to warn you beforehand that the meatballs are from the day before yesterday. Kitchen Manager.

No entry; Not receiving today; I don't answer questions.

This register only rings up eggs.

Payphone accepts only metro tokens.

If you're still closed tomorrow, you're fucked! I'm not alone. There are many of us. Why fuck do you put up a schedule, if no one's ever there? You should notify people beforehand, like it says in the contract--the one you don't give a shit about. With services like this, we're going to stop giving a shit about you. We can easily put an end to your monopoly. You've been forewarned.

We enforce selective admission. The Management.

To patrons: people wearing tracksuits are not allowed in the bar.

High paying job for slender girls with no problems.

On the Russian culture of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and regulation:

From 10:00pm to 6:00am the life jacket is kept in the chief of lifeguard's office. The key is with the janitor in apt. 43.

If you drown, you're not swimming here again. Ever!

...The minimum temperature of the water for swimming must be 64 degrees Fahrenheit....You must enter the water only on the command of your superior officer and only to the designated depth...you must swim in the direction and manner determined by your commanding officer.

On the general lack of civility in civil society:

Information for imbeciles, morons, and other Moscovites: The Rubbish dump is across the street, 500 meters.

Slam this door and you'll need a disability pension.

No toothpaste protects your teeth better than paying for your ride.

Warning! Don't park your cars near the entrance, or you'll pay with a broken windscreen. The Management.

Stop! Warning! Posting notices on these walls of pavilions is forbidden. A fine of 1000 roubles will be enforced and physical force will be used against those who post ads here! The Management.

Please return the ATM bank terminal for a reward. The Management.

Dogs! Don't allow YOUR OWNERS TO EMPTY THEIR BOWELS in the courtyard.

Gentlemen junkies, please do not throw used syringes and other paraphernalia through the letter boxes!

A note to whoever is stealing the light bulb: I'll kick your your teeth out one by one, arsehole!

Warning! It is a sign to kiss holy icons while intoxicated! If you do so, it will incur the wrath of God!

On Russian politics:

I vow to smash the system of bureaucratic and criminal outrages.

On Russian hopes:

Do you want to talk to God? Call 916-70-09.

Jesus is waiting for you.

Magic and sorcery. Cheap.

We offer an easy ride to other worlds....Materializer of Spirits and Distributor of White Elephants, who kills bedbugs with his gaze and collects empty bottles by willpower alone....

From bathroom messages:

Don't flatter yourself--come closer.

Fellow Pharaohs! Please push your pyramids after you!!!

Attention office staff! Please flush the toilet regardless of goals set and results achieved. The Management. If the result have exceeded all expectations, please use the toilet brush. The Janitor.

Guys visit us all the time, so please wipe off your monthly traces of the Red Army.

This place is cursed. Soiling it will cause impotence and incurable diseases of the prostate gland.

Dear customers. If you are not satisfied with the condition of our toilet, push down the handle to summon assistance. The Management.

It is not just immortal to stand on the toilet bowl with your feet (you could use some toilet paper); it is very dangerous! There have been numerous occasions when feet have slippe--and broken, dirty tiles can cut your arse like butter. A gruesome death from lock-jaw is not worth the price of your ignorance.

Isaiah Berlin on Soviet Russia

2011-09-27T10:03:00.017-05:00

"[Pasternak] had spoken to his sons. They were prepared to suffer."

Isaiah Berlin seems to have gotten Soviet Russia just right. Although the one-time diplomat and long-time Oxford intellectual historian wrote about Russia at the height of the Cold War, his subtle analysis of Soviet culture balanced a clear-sighted critique of the USSR's illiberal political regime with a deep appreciation for Russia's brilliant and enduring literary and intellectual heritage.

Berlin's richly informative essays are collected in the book, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism, edited by Henry Hardy. The essays were composed at various times and for various purposes. The general theme of the collection is that the Soviet regime of the severely restricted artistic and literary freedom in support of Marxist orthodoxy and Stalinist ideology, although the chastened Russian spirit somehow lived on in the form of Pasternak, Akhmatova, and at least the memory of people like Mandelstam--someone who "compromised less than others."

The Communist system undermined the dignity of the Russian people but in many ways it functioned extremely well. The Party made extraordinary sacrifices but preserved its monopoly on power. At first, Communism didn't seem to be antithetical to artistic excellence. The 1920s were a time of experimentation, vitality, energy, and anti-capitalist aesthetic innovation. In the 1930s this restlessness was quashed. The Soviet leadership, Stalin mainly, institutionalized art. The Party's instrument, the Writers' Union, enforced conformism and orthodoxy. The Russian intelligentsia lost contact with the West. The Great Purge and Terror of 1937-38 almost destroyed what little artistic independence remained.

A Ukrainian Alamo

2011-09-26T19:07:00.016-05:00

"But you are Ukrainian aren't you?" "Yes, [but] a worker."

Without commentary from Vance Kepley, noted film historian, Alexander Dovzhenko's Arsenal, a film that depicts a heroic encounter between doomed Bolsheviks and their Ukrainian nationalist opponents, is a difficult film. Created in honor of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Dovzhenko's silent film--which Kepley tells us met with critical acclaim despite its sometimes bleakly neutral depiction of the human cost of civil war--intentionally departs from conventional narrative film-making strategies in favor of allusion, ellipse, and montage. The film has a proletarian hero, Timosh, who realizes that the Bolshevik Party is his friend and soon decides to help that cause. But Dovzhenko often strays from that hero's journey of understanding in favor of interesting if confusing visual and narrative digressions.

The film's story isn't impossible understand. Dovzhenko, who originally supported the nationalist cause, explains the Bolshevik cause in the following way: World War I decimated the country--wounding or killing millions--and clarified the class warfare that pitted peasants, proletarians, and ordinary soldiers against tsars, officers, churchmen, and the bourgeoisie. (In one scene, the director contrasts the difficult life of a munitions worker with the frivolity of Nicholas I who, notwithstanding his supreme authority, is lazily writing in his journal: "Today I show a crow.") After the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian nationalist party cynically attempted to use national and religious sentiment to prop up a regime of bourgeois exploitation. Finally, the workers--led by party workers and proletarian martyrs like Timosh--take a stand against capitalism's apologists and die in the process, only a short while before red partisans might have come to their rescue.

Dovzchenko's artistic vision fell into disfavor soon after this film. Vance Kepley reminds us that his next film, Earth, was harshly critiqued for ideological and aesthetic reasons. Who could ever hope to keep up with the Party's erratically shifting positions? Neither its political message, not its non-narrative style, were quite correct in the context of unmitigated Stalinism.

But even in this film Dovchenko's propaganda film featured some moral ambiguity. One understands from this film that revolution is made from the ground up. It's not party leaders that play a part in Red Ukraine's Alamo. Indeed, none of the Party's leaders warrants even a cameo in this film. Moreover, war, and the Civil War in particular, has obviously destroyed men and women, despite the Red Victory. Men are maimed, machinery falls into disuse, women are listless, and the economy in general is clearly decimated. Kepley tells us that this lack of clarity may mirror the political history of Dovchenko and countless other Ukrainians, who vacillated and switched sides in the shifting and chaotic political landscape that emerged at the end of the First World War.

The film's mythical was more acceptable to the Bolsheviks. The worker hero Timosh takes on the marauding nationalists and, echoing Cossack folklore of the seventeenth century, the bullets bounce off his chest.

Romanov Massacre

2011-09-20T19:21:00.012-05:00

For many people, the brutal murder of the Russian royal family in July, 1918, was the quintessential act of the Soviet regime. It of course a heinous act. With Lenin's approval, the Bolsheviks took almost twenty minutes to shoot and stab to death the tsar, his wife and children, and even a few royal servants. Robert Alexander's novel, The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar, is only the latest in a long series of books and films that deal in some way with this Gothic horror scene. Alexander's book isn't particularly inventive, but it doesn't need to be: people are enthralled by this true crime story above all others. The murder of this Victorian family was bloody, and premeditated, and the only mitigating factor is that the victims didn't really expect to be cut down when they were asked to go into the basement to take a photo in order to prove to the capitalist press that they were all alive and well.

Focusing on the end of the Romanov family is necessarily fascinating. We wonder why the murderers did what they did. We wonder how the Romanovs felt as they contemplated their imprisonment and compared the Special House of Detention, their Siberian jail, with the life they had know in St. Peterburg's multiple palaces. We wonder if the any of the members of the Royal Family knew--whether consciously or subconsciously--that their collective liquidation was a very real possibility. But when we focus on the end of the royal family we seem to forget that Nicholas II and his wife were guilty of dozens if not hundreds of crimes. This of course is the byproduct of despotism: whenever you inherit or assume total power you are ultimately responsible for everything that happens on your watch. Nicholas--decent family man that he was--can therefore be blamed for pogroms, spies, Raputin and everything that he represented, civilian massacres, and perhaps Russia's disastrous participation in World War I. Notwithstanding these mistakes, he didn't deserve the death he got, nor of course did his family and their servants. But focusing on this single act of picturesque inhumanity seems to distract us from that which briefly lay between Romanov and Bolshevik, and that is Liberal Russia. Although we sometimes forget Kerensky, Nabokov, and the Kadets, their destruction during the October Revolution is in some ways a greater tragedy than that of this doomed family.

It's Hard Out There For An Apparatchik

2011-09-16T08:13:00.020-05:00

What was it like to be one of Stalin's henchmen? Did Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Zhdanov, and the others actually enjoy being in power? In the Soviet Union it was always better to be in power than out of power, but life for the oligarchs wasn't all vodka and caviar. The 1990 documentary, I Worked for Stalin: Songs of the Oligarchs, interviews the children of many of Stalin's closest political allies to explain why.

The advantages to being in power were clear enough. The oligarchs received something much better than a large salary. Rather, they received direct and therefore almost unlimited subsidies from the state treasury. They also enjoyed a number of very visible perks in a politically stratified country. One aging official, deputy to Zhdanov, remembers riding around Moscow in a splendid car. Being driven in a certain type of car meant nobody in town would dare to stop you. You were recognized immediately as a member of a very privileged class. Oligarchs had permission to go wherever they wanted, which wasn't of course the case for most ordinary Russians, who required passes to move about the country and were subject to police searches.

The chief benefit of belonging to Stalin's group of chief political advisers was of course power. While Stalin was always in charge, and was called "the master" in recognition of this fact, individual oligarchs often participated in the decision-making process, or could at least promote allies to key political positions, or block the advancement of potential enemies.

The flip-side of power was the risk of losing that power at a moment's notice. During the 1930s, vast sections of the Communist Party were exiled, imprisoned, or shot. In fact, one put one's own family members in harm's way by blindly devoting oneself to Stalin's whims. As the film reminds one, Molotov's wife was imprisoned at one point, as was another Politburo member's sister. Another peril of the job was being forced to attend to an isolated, elderly, and paranoid Stalin's dull dinner parties. At the end of Stalin's life, each of the oligarchs was forced to eat, drink, and watch movies with Stalin into the wee hours of the night to preserve one's political position.

This is the principle theme of the film. The oligarchs worked very hard--sometimes 17 hours a day, sometimes without vacations, and sometimes sleeping at the office--but even hard work could not guarantee one's political future. In fact, Stalin distrusted even his closest colleagues. At the end of his life, he would specifically dis-invite one member of the Politburo to his nightly gatherings. The result of Stalin's distrust was a state of perpetual tension. As his son remembers, Malenkov stood to take Stalin's calls, even though he couldn't be seen. He also made sure never to mention any individual even at home, since the "walls had ears" as every Soviet official knew. In fact, the secret police were never far behind the oligarchs. Even the children were followed by the GPU.

In the end, Stalin's death created one final challenge for his cronies. Everyone was at risk in the new and radically unstable political situation. Beria, who controlled the local guards, frightened his erstwhile comrades most of all, but was famously outflanked by the man this film claims was his own protegee, Nikita Khrushchev. In the end, most of the oligarchs experienced an ignominious political end, although only Beria was executed outright. Malenkov found himself demoted and exiled to extremely remote posts in Eastern Russia. Perhaps, as his son asserts, he was was even killed by secret police posing as doctors.

One political heavyweight who was interviewed in the film sums up the ambiguous testimony of this political group. This man, although sent to prison on trumped up charges, still believed that many of his disgraced colleagues--Yezhov for example--had actually been foreign spies, as the Stalinist legal system so often asserted. And, despite the fact that he himself eventually wound up beyond bars and without friends after years of political service, he felt good about the hard work he had done on behalf of the Soviet Union. Since when, he must have asked himself over and over again over the long years of political isolation, can hard work ever be a bad thing?

Memory Is A Bitch

2011-09-14T21:25:00.014-05:00

"Don't turn a scientific problem into a common love story."

"What a ghastly sight. I can never get used to all these resurrections."

Solaris is perhaps the Soviet Union's best modern film. Based on Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece of the same name, the 1972 film deals with inter-species communication and, more importantly, humankind's relationship to the past. The planet Solaris is home to a living sea, a vast pink fluid with some indeterminate level of cerebral activity or consciousness. The sea has made contact with the men who occupy the station that orbits the planet, but its message is ambiguous, impossible to decipher.

Over time, the scientists of Solaris lost patience with their mysterious host, and decided to irradiate it. The planet's reaction, while not perfectly comprehended, is decidedly hostile: the pink sea enters into the individual memories of the station's crew members, with disturbing results. Shockingly, the planet has the ability to create physical manifestations of a human being's most personal memories. Over time, Solaris' scientists are driven insane by these tangible memories. By the time the film's protagonist, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the station, only two other crew members are left at the station to welcome him. His close friend has only recently committed suicide.

The meaning of the film, Solaris, is as open-ended as the planet's mode of communication. Is the film about how we necessarily fail to communicate effectively with one another? Is it about the power of the past to subvert the present? In the film, Kris Kelvin encounters his wife, Haris, who committed suicide ten years previously. Hari represents the planet's best effort to communicate with Kris, although it's impossible to say whether the planet has a positive or negative message for its most recent visitor: the deceased woman, after all, is both a source of intense joy and intense pain for Kris. Presumably, she reminds Kris of good times, bad times, love, and brutal separation. In any event, Hari incarnates another type of communication, or perhaps miscommunication. This is the inevitable flawed intercourse (pardon the expression) between man and woman. Although Tarkovsky's style is always elliptical, one senses that Kris and the original Hari understood each other almost as poorly as Kris now understands the pink sea below him.

The darkly comic essence of memory in Solaris is encapsulated by Kris Kelvin's doomed efforts to overcome the past by shoving this alien avatar of his ex wife into a rocket in order to ship it into outer space. Needless to say, Kris burns himself in the process. But who wouldn't like to do as Kris did and ship the memory of a beloved girlfriend to a distant star?

Boy Meets Tractor

2011-09-10T07:53:00.018-05:00

"And we'll sing new songs of the new life."

Socialist Realism literary conventions are often derided. Typically, Soviet literary cliches involve masculine heroism, technological progress, capitalist vilification, and reaffirmation of the collective or socialist political project. Boy meets tractor. Boy falls in love with tractor. Soviet films often followed suit. Alexander Dovzhenko's powerful and influential 1930 film, Earth, is a case in point. This silent black and white film revolves around the introduction of a tractor to a small peasant farming town.

When the film opens, the steppe peasants are laboriously bringing in their wheat harvest. The people are poor, although the scene isn't portrayed without charm. Wheat waves beautifully in the wind, sun pours down from above, sunflowers rise up toward the sky, and apples weigh down the nearby trees. The peasants are dignified. The men have beards, their printed idiom is intelligent.

Soon, the local chairmen of the farm soviet has helped to secure a tractor for the people. This tractor is a revolutionary force in the village, which had been employing animals and scythes which had probably been in use for centuries. The tractor is the very symbol of the new socialist order. It's modern, efficient, and purchased for the benefit of the whole town, as opposed to any single individual. The people recognize the tractor's power. They gather around it, examine its part, and laugh in joy and wonderment.

Soon, one man, Basil, takes the tractor out for a spin. It's efficiency is immediately apparent, impossible to underestimate. The whole town floods out to pursue the tractor and its soon apparent that this technological breakthrough will drastically reduce the work of the peasants. Unfortunately, Simon plows over a rich farmer's fence, symbol of capitalist greed. The rich farmer, enraged by the offense and probably aware that the tractor symbolizes his own weakness in a socialist order that the tractor represents, kills Simon.

The film concludes with the funeral of Basil, who has become a martyr to socialist progress. Basil's old father, Simon, appalled by the old order that has killed his son, leads a massive demonstration in memory of his son, and by extension Soviet collective farming. The women are in white, sign of the purity that stems from the people's collective willpower and concerted action. Simon even makes a point of excluding the town priest from participating in the event. The priest, a self-evidently evil figure of superstition who presides in a temple of gold, impotently calls down a curse on the village. The murderer goes insane, obviously driven to desperation by his untenable place in the new world that was ushered in by the arrival of the communist tractor.

"Let's Try the Sicilian Defense"

2011-09-08T19:53:00.028-05:00

"But perhaps love is stronger than chess?"

"When I see a beautiful woman, I too start to hate chess."

"Remember that chess is a danger to family life."

Surely there is nothing so tragic as watching a beautiful woman get dressed. And yet, who among us has not peered over a naked woman's gentle curves to get a better look at one's closest shelf of Russian history and literature books? It's a strange sensation to find one's two dearest passions, physical love, and literary obsession, so proximate to one another. But there it is, the ultimate reminder of the erotic essence of a love for all things Russian.

One is reminded of the early Soviet film, Vsevolod Pudovkin's Chess Fever. This 1925 silent film is the last word in obsession. The film opens with a neurotic protagonist frantically playing both sides of a chess game, forgetting in his madness that he has a date with his beloved. The musical score, created decades later, is manic but also ecstatic. Eventually, the film's hero realizes that he must leave his favorite game, but his checkered clothes--handkerchief, socks, cap--remind him, and the audience, that chess fever will pursue him.

The frenzied protagonist marches toward his romantic appointment but is delayed by a sign in a store which reads: "Halt, chess player." The man obeys the order, and soon finds himself immersed in a hotly contested chess game with the chess store's proprietor, who only comes to life when somebody sits down across from him at the chess board.

Eventually the chess player arrives at his fiancees house. The woman, upset by the delay, feigns anger but then decides to forgive her suitor. Sadly, the supplicant has forgotten the woman he was trying to soothe. Instead, he is studying a chess problem that has fallen from his pocket. Enraged, the heroine throws all of the man's chess problems out of the window. These problems, falling from the window, find their way to various men, who are delighted by them. The whole world, or at least the male portion of that world, are infected with the chess disease.

After stripping her lover of all chess problems, the woman throws him out of her flat. "I love only you. You love only chess," she says. It's all over between us." Distressed by his dismissal, the chess fanatic marches toward the river, ostensibly to commit suicide. He drops a checkered handkerchief into the icy river. The woman, for her part, seeks solace from her enemy, chess. Her father gives a giant book which, he says, has always been a great comfort to him. But alas, the book turned out to be an encyclopedia of ancient chess problems. She runs to another room, but sees that a caregiver is presiding over two children who are just being introduced to the insidious game: "Kolya has just made a Queen's Gambit. I can hardly believe it!"

In despair, the woman rushes to the pharmacy and demands poison. But chess is the order of the day even here, and the pharmacist, engrossed in the game, mistakenly hands her a chess piece instead of poison. When she notices, she screams, but just then the god of chess delivers her from her agony. A world famous chess champion takes her under his wing and shows her the magic of the game. The film closes when the woman and man find themselves at the same chess tournament. "Darling. I never knew chess was such a fascinating game. Let's try the Sicilian Defense."

The Secret Life of Mass Murderers

2011-08-31T09:28:00.018-05:00

Soviet Roulette has a very high regard for Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter. Previously, this blog described Svetlana's gentle book, Only One Year, which chronicled the author's third marriage, journey to India to bury her husband's ashes, and painful decision to defect to the United States in the 1960s. But Alliluyeva's first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, is an even more poignant set of reflections and reminiscences about private life in the inner circles of Stalin's brutal dictatorship. As the author admits, the memoir isn't an objective history of her father's life. As a teenager during World War II, and someone with only limited access to her father at the best of times, Alliluyeva isn't well placed to explain her father's political life. And what kind of a child could have come to terms with a mother's suicide (or perhaps murder) and the quiet elimination of countless friends and family members?

Notwithstanding its lack of objectivity, Alliluyeva's limited perspective is fascinating and perhaps useful in terms of understanding how evil operates. From the author's perspective, and this perspective is contested by some well-placed eyewitnesses, Joseph Stalin had the capacity to behave tenderly toward those around him. In fact, in the first six years of the author's life, Stalin was often happily surrounded by his wife's large extended family. Moreover, Joseph enjoyed the company of children and frequently sent the young Alliluyeva tender notes. According to the author, Stalin felt especially close to Alliluyeva's mother, Nadezhda Allilyuva, although the dictator could be stern and aloof to her as well, until Nadezhda Alliluyeva's committed suicide, isolating Stalin from her family members and perhaps feeding his sense of victimization.

Alliluyeva's portrayal of her father may not be strictly accurate in all respects. In the author's opinion, Stalin was severely manipulated by Beria, who constantly pushed the dictator to destroy Beria's enemies, many of whom were members of the Alliluyeva's immediate family. Even allowing for Allilyeva's natural prejudice, there's a ring of truth about her analysis of the mechanics her father's sinister decisions.

According to Alliluyeva, Stalin had many healthy tendencies, but he simply could not forgive or forget anything that smacked of betrayal. If men like Beria whispered that a close friend or relative of Stalin had turned against him, Stalin turned his back on that person and was unable to change his opinion. One imagines that the independent minds of the Alliluyeva clan sometimes voiced criticism of the Soviet leader, and that even mild criticisms were reported to the cynical leader who then turned the matter over to someone like Beria. As it turns out, Alliluyeva lost dozens of her closest friends and relatives to this strange pattern of destruction. When her brother was captured by the Germans, Stalin couldn't help but believe that perhaps his son was to blame. He felt little sympathy for him, and, even worse, decided that his son's wife must have pushed his son to surrender to the Germans. She was promptly sent to the gulag, as so many others were.

In the end, this gentle, moving memoir demonstrates that Stalin's murderous regime was born of relatively banal impulses. With no culture of democracy or civil rights, why shouldn't one ordinary man's lonely, unforgiving, and suspicious temperament lead to disappearances on a vast scale?

Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

2011-08-24T20:18:00.020-05:00

Stanislaw Lem's acclaimed science fiction book, Solaris, made a huge impression on me twenty years ago. As a rule, I read little science fiction, but this book seemed to say something very meaningful about the nature of knowledge and communication, to say nothing of life in outer space. Unlike most boilerplate science fiction, Solaris is about the failure of species or civilizations to communicate with one another. Resistant to all analysis, the alien presence on Solaris remains inscrutable, subject to human speculation but little more.

Literature in general seldom acknowledges that good will and good intentions doesn't always lead to positive results. But remember E.M. Forster's brilliant exception, Passage to India? In that book--if my hazy memory serves me--the heroine sets out to understand a foreign culture, India, but is soon overwhelmed by the exotic magnitude, feinting in a cave and then, in her confusion and fear, falsely claiming that her Indian minder had raped her. There is a field of human inquiry and action, or several overlapping fields, that deals with the science or perhaps art of compromise, communication, and conflict management. The theory is that negotiation is a skill that can be learned and shared in order to mitigate or end conflict between warring groups.

I've always wondered whether this field is a sham. Aren't there some conflicts or human divisions that cannot be mitigated or bridged? More often than not, spousal wars end only when a brutal external force, the court, intervenes. And when did the Irish really come to terms? Wasn't this great compromise really only the recognition of colonial exhaustion and a different balance of power?

Andrei Tarkovsky is famously concerned with communication, or the limits of communication. His film, Solaris, is his masterpiece on the subject. Yet an earlier film, Stalker, deals with a similar theme. Stalker, a 1979 film loosely based on the short science fiction book, Roadside Picnic, follows three men, "Professor," "Writer," and the Stalker, as they enter a mysterious area known as the Zone. The Zone, cordoned off from surrounding areas by military forces, is alleged to contain an area that grants visitors wishes.

In the movie, as opposed to Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's book, the Zone is not clearly defined. We know little about it. It's unusual, deserted, eerie, awesome, and dangerous. It's also thoroughly unknowable. The Stalker, a term used to denote those unique individuals who risk their lives to take visitors into the Zone, has some rough familiarity with this area. Yet his knowledge is generally not positive. This is to say, the Stalker, for all of his journeys into this center of almost religious mystery, has only learned that the Zone requires its supplicants to behave with humility and respect, if not awe.

The film, I think, acknowledges the wisdom of the Stalker's worldview, which is essentially a religious one. The world is unknowable: we cannot do more that accept the mysteries of life reverentially. As we've said, at the heart of the Zone lies a room that grants its visitors their innermost wishes. However, in order to enter the room, one adventurer--the first to enter the space--must be sacrificed in the "meat-grinder," a space in which the normal rules of physics are suspended long enough for a man to be twisted and crushed by invisible forces. Just as worrisome, the room grants someone their innermost wishes, but these wishes are not their conscious ones, but rather their subconscious ones. And who, after all, can vouch for the health and goodness of one's unconscious?

The Stalker seems to understand the problem. Unlike the men he leads, he personally refuses to enter the room. Does he intuit that in the last analysis people don't know themselves, let alone their fellow human beings? According to Wikipedia, the book upon which the movie is based, Roadside Picnic, gets its title from a striking metaphor. According to the Strugatsky brothers, the Zone is one of six sites of alien visitation, a place of extraordinary mystery. How can human being possibly come to terms with the refuse that the aliens left behind when they departed from the planet? The Zone is like a roadside picnic: when humans stop by the side of the road to eat, they leave behind debris. The human picnickers don't notice the insects all around them when they eat, and the insects don't know what to make of the garbage and other artifacts left behind. The result of the picnic--the Zone--is mystery, the mystery of incomplete communication, which is perhaps the most typical kind of communication on planet Earth.

Where the Crayfish Sleep

2011-08-24T18:17:00.011-05:00

I think proverbs represent the essence of all human wisdom. Effective Soviet politicians, like Stalin and Khrushchev, seem to have had mastery over all of them. When threatened both men could almost always defend their rhetorical position with a choice aphorism or proverb. Below are a few Russian proverbs I've discovered via Wikipedia, Wikiquotes, and MasterRussia.com.

Quality goods advertise themselves

Masha is good, but she's not ours.

Call me a pot. Just don't put me in the oven.

He wants to eat a fish but doesn't want to get into the water.

A bad compromise is better than a good lawsuit.

Bad news doesn't rest.

The further into the woods you go, the more firewood you find.

One can't wash a black dog until it turns white.

Whatever a fool does, he does it wrong.

Whether you hit an owl with a stump, or a stump with an owl, it's the owl who will get hurt.

What fell off the cart is as good as gone.

The cat knows whose meat it has eaten.

You can't hide an awl in a sack.

This story happened long ago, and it's true.

Berry by berry, a basket will become full.

Eggs don't teach a chicken.

I'm not me, and this is horse isn't mine.

It's easier for the mare when the woman gets off the cart.

Poverty is in want of much, avarice of everything.

For a mad dog seven versts aren't a long detour.

God won't give it away, pigs won't eat it.

For a big ship, a big voyage.

A beard doesn't make a philosopher.

Every barber knows that.

Since the times of Tsar Green-Pea.

To show someone where the crayfish spends winter.

Shchi and kasha are our food.

Every sandpiper praises his own swamp.

It's the still waters that are inhabited by demons.

Nobody goes to Tula with one's own samovar.

Only the grave will cure the hunchback.

A goose is not a pig's friend.

God is far up and the Tsar is far away.

Debt is beautiful only after it's repaid.

When you are home, even the walls help you.

Friendship is friendship, but keep your tobacco separate.

I have kvass, but not for you.

A beaten person is worth two unbeaten ones.

Law is like the shaft of a cart, it points wherever you turn it to.

They don't hit you in the nose for asking.

If I knew where I would fall, I'd lay some straw.

The wolves are sated, and the sheep are okay.

You can't drop a word out of a song.

The turkey was also thinking but he ended up in the soup.

One can't spoil porridge with butter.

Beware of the goat from its front side, a horse from its back side, and an evil man from every side.

The less you know, the more soundly you sleep.

I would have had no luck but for misfortune.

The wolf is beaten not for being grey but for having eaten the sheep.

Better 100 friends than 100 rubles.

The place doesn't adorn the man, the man adorns the place.

Don't try to get into hell ahead of your father.

A pig will find mud.

Lion Feuchtwanger and the Festival of Revenge

2011-08-21T08:24:00.041-05:00

"There can be no question that in the great majority of cases this exaggerated veneration is genuine. The people feel the need to express their gratitude, their infinite admiration. They do in truth believe that they owe to Stalin all they are and have, and however incongruous and at times distasteful this idolatry may seem to us of the West, no where have I found anything to indicate that is in the least artificial or ready-made."

"The future lies before them like a well-defined and carefully tended path through a beautiful landscape."

"They are unable to repress the happiness which fills them."

"[Moscow is a] city built from its foundations in accordance with the dictates of sound sense, and the first of its kind since man wrote history."

"Everything is from the first an essential part of an intelligently conceived plan."

"In itself there is nothing remarkable in the unanimous optimism of the Soviet people."

"Stalin laughed a little at those who demanded many written documents before they could bring themselves to believe in a conspiracy; practiced conspirators, he said, were not in the habit of leaving their documents lying around for all to see."

"Many of my friends, who are otherwise intelligent people, find these [the Show Trials], from beginning to end, in substance and in form, tragic-comical, barbaric, incredible, and appalling."

"But when I attended the second trial in Moscow, when I saw Pyatakov, Radek, and his friends, and heard what they said and how they said it, I was forced to accept the evidence of my own senses, and my doubts melted away."

"It at once becomes as clear as daylight that this modest, impersonal man cannot possibly have committed the colossal indiscretion of producing with the assistance of countless performers so coarse a comedy, merely for the purpose of holding a sort of festival of revenge with Bengal lights to celebrate the humiliation of his opponents."

"There is one eternally true legend," [Stalin] said, "that of Judas."

Lion Feuchtwanger, author of Moscow, 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends, was one of Stalin's chief international apologists. To apologize for the apologist, one should remember that the Jewish-German theater critic, novelist, and playwright was one of NAZI German's earliest and most vociferous enemies. With intimate knowledge of Hitler's monstrous villainy, Feuchtwanger is at pains to explain the Soviet Union's antidemocratic shortcomings as a natural outcome of its struggle against fascist Germany and Italy.

Feuchtwanger's description of his ten week visit to the "Union"--his pet name for the U.S.S.R.--is an aggressive, comprehensive defense of the world's first experiment in socialism. Feuchtwanger's apologia makes extensive use of economic and social statistics to tell the story of the revolutionary regime. Although the author admits that Russia suffers from a deplorable lack of adequate housing, he praises Russia for its alleged progress in public transportation, education, new housing construction, electrification, food production, water usage, good reserves, wage levels, and access to consumer goods.

Russia's superiority over its fascist and capitalist competitors is manifested in countless ways. Most importantly, Feuchtwanger believes that Soviet citizens appreciate their place in a fair, secure, rational, and planned society. While even wealthy Westerners suffer from the knowledge of their neighbors' poverty and joblessness, Soviet citizens understand that their modest prosperity is not purchased at the expense of the less fortunate. They know, or at least Feuchtwanger says they know, that they are organically connected to the whole of society, and that Party decisions are made on their behalf, and not on behalf of wealthy individuals. According to Feuchtwanger's vision, capitalist planning--if we overlook the oxymoron inherent in the term--is disorganized, unfair, irrational, and inefficient. But most importantly, capitalist planning is soulless and cruel.

For Feuchtwanger, the 1930s were an exciting time for Russians. Led by leaders of genius such as Stalin, Soviet citizens had just received one of the most progressive constitutions in the world in 1935. While the German writer admits that the 1935 Constitution is not yet fully implemented--a spectacular understatement to say the least--he admires the extent to which the Soviet legal framework asserts broad civil rights and demonstrates the way in which they will be guaranteed. If the Russian people had the right to freedom of expression, the Soviet government ensured that this right was tangible by maintaining public ownership over the press organs. It's a strange logic, but Feuchtwanger is generally content that the Soviet state is at least acting in the interest of its citizens.

Of course, the German playwright is impressed most of all by Stalin. Although claiming to be dissatisfied with crude Stalin-worship, Feuchtwanger argues that Soviet citizens merely seek to praise their country's accomplishments by heaping honor upon honor upon a concrete symbol of their good fortune. Stalin is allegedly a steady man and a builder, in touch with both the peasants and the proletarians. Feuchtwanger claims Stalin is Augustus to Lenin's Caesar, responsible for the defense of Tsaritsyn in the Civil War, and several brilliant socialist theories, such as Socialism in One Country, and the reconciliation of nationalism with socialist internationalism.

Most bizarrely, the author also credits Stalin with magnanimity. In the contest with Trotsky, Stalin claims that Stalin ordered that Trotsky be included in the official, Gorky-edited History of the Civil War, while pointing out that Trotsky spitefully uses all of his writings to defame the great Stalin. We know of course that Stalin erased Trotsky from the history books, and was ultimately responsible for Trotsky's death, as well as his children's deaths, but Feuchtwanger's test belies Stalin's pretensions to goodwill. In this same chapter on Stalin and Trotsky, Feuchtwanger allows that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rydek and others were executed. And yet, he's not ashamed to write: "[Stalin] is supposed to be ruthless, but for many years he has been striving to win over competent Trotskyists rather than destroy them, and it is in a way affecting to see how doggedly he is endeavoring to use them for his work."

Kerensky's Signature

2011-08-19T19:10:00.019-05:00

My copy of Alexander Kerensky's autobiography, Russia and History's Turning Point, is apparently signed by the author around 1965. Kerensky's signature appears along side the hand-written date of 7 August 1917, the tangible reminder of just how close we remain to that seminal event in world history. Kerensky, who was the most important member of the Provisional Government, was one of Russia's most eloquent speakers. His book, released in the 1960s, reflects the intelligence and rhetorical power of its famous author. It's also a fascinating glimpse at the pre-war history of Russia.

Kerensky, a student activist, radical lawyer, and budding politician, makes the convincing case that Nicholas II was personally responsible for at least some of the tragedies that later befell his country. Prior to the war, Kerensky believes that Nicholas supported a blind, atavistic policy of antidemocratic and anti-modern conservatism. To Kerensky's mind, Nicholas II was absurdly attached to a dying political class, the landed gentry, and scattered elements of chauvinistic and anti-Semitic Russian society. More specifically, the Emperor allowed his government to slaughter miners (Lena Fields Massacre), shoot proletarians (Bloody Sunday), and prosecute Jews for the insane myth of the blood libel (Mendel Beylis), while it simultaneously encouraged the police and secret organs of the state to harass, detain, imprison, and otherwise intimidate any hint of political opposition.

Karensky is kinder to Witte and Stolypin, two of the tsar's only competent and forward-thinking advisers, who nevertheless failed to fully embrace the concepts of constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy that alone might have saved the monarchy from its own incompetence. Kerensky's main contention, a contention supported by the novelist Nabokov and many others, is that without World War I, Russia would have, one way or the other, been transformed into an a liberal democracy.

Contrary to the opinion of the Bolsheviks, history was not on the side of radical revolution. After all, even though Russia was officially governed by a man of limited intellectual subtlety, a man who listened to the likes of Gregory Rasputin, Russia was rapidly becoming a country with a healthy public sphere, including active political parties, rising literacy rates, a freethinking student population, and an active Duma. Kerensky's self-interested argument is that a rapidly industrializing country was bound to be at odds with the medieval concept of unlimited government.

One irony of Kerensky's book is that its obsession with the origins of World War I helps one to understand one of the Provisional Government's primary weaknesses. If Russia's peasant masses failed to care about Russia's commitment to the allies, how much less should historians care whether or not Russia's diplomatic posture was correct or not in the Serbian crisis. In the end, the war could not have been good for Russian under even the best of circumstances. But after several years of military and economic disaster, Kerensky's honorable commitment to continue the war may well have been preposterously misguided.

Russia Will Be Russia

2011-08-14T16:38:00.016-05:00

Losing twenty million citizens in the course of a single war makes an impression on a country. It's not therefore surprising that Russia continues to come up with so many war films. The 1997, The Thief, isn't set during the war but nevertheless takes place in the context of the war. In one telling scene, the hero of Pavel Chukhraj's award-winning film, a boy name Sanya, asks his family's communal apartment roommates whether they had children who had been killed in the war. The father shrugs, as if to say that there's nothing about his personal tragedy worth commenting on: everybody in Russia lost their children in the war. Additionally, the film's plot makes sense only in the wake of the war. Sanya's mother Katya is a war widow; Tolyan, a war veteran, exploits his status, and the confusion of the immediate postwar years, to ply his trade as a thief and conman.

If the aftermath of the war provides the context for this twisted love story, Stalin's reign is never irrelevant to it. Stalin appears in communal apartment posters, statues, treasured souvenir portraits, tattoos, and drunken toasts. He is also indirectly influential insofar as his police state requires citizens, and even (or even especially) veterans, to constantly produce their papers in order to justify their movements.

More ominously, Stalin's presence can be felt when the Thief is caught for a small transgression and yet receives seven years in a Siberian presence. In one scene, mother and son await Tolyan in a crowd of women who hope to catch even a fleeting glimpse of their loved ones as they pass between a holding prison and a transport truck. As Tolyan emerges, he is forced to keep his eyes to the ground while moving quickly through what can only be described as a gauntlet of vicious dogs.

In the end, this is a film which, like Tarkovsky's much earlier film, that details the psychic pain Russian citizens have been forced to endure as a result of World War II. Katya eventually succumbs to her psychological wounds, and dies as a result of what may have been a "botched abortion." Her young son, in a scene of overwrought pathos, desperately tries to build a fence around her grave. Later, as if demonstrating that Russia's war wounds will never heal, Sanja emerges from his orphanage to enter a military career. In that capacity, the film shows Sanja facilitating the evacuation of Russian citizens (including wounded children) from some unspecified, war-torn, former Soviet Republic. Leaving this area, Sanja witnesses the summary execution of three men. Whether or not the Soviet Union exists, this film seems to suggest that Russia remains Russia.

Tarkovsky's War

2011-08-14T10:23:00.015-05:00

This blog suffers from one mortal wound--its author's unfamiliarity with the Russian language--and dozens of lesser injuries, which include the author's unrelenting dilettantism in the dozens of fields related to Soviet intellectual history, including music and film. Nevertheless, Soviet Roulette has one merit: it doesn't use ignorance as an excuse for quitting. Thus, this entry, on Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature film, Ivan's Childhood, made in 1962, in the midst of Khrushchev's Thaw.

According to Vida T. Johnson, coauthor of The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky and featured guest in Criterion's Film Appreciation segment of the its DVD of Ivan's Childhood, the Thaw period marked a strong revival of Russian film-making. At the end of Stalin's life, film making was both heavily censored and heavily restricted to older men who had earned the Party's trust. In fact, in 1953, the year of Stalin's death the Soviet Union, only released about 50 or 60 films. During the Thaw, that number had been increased to over 100, with a corresponding increase in intellectual excitement over the industry's artistic and creative potential.

Tarkovsky's film, about a young boy who, reacting the massacre of his mother and and sister during World War II, seeks vengeance against the Germans before (spoiler alert) being tortured and executed in Berlin, maintains some of the elements of socialist realism. As Johnson argues, Tarkovsky's film, while highly inventive and subjective, retains some of the key socialist realist storytelling conventions, including heroism, Soviet patriotism, a clear moral message, and unsympathetic enemies. On the other hand, Tarkovsky, like some of his contemporaries in the Thaw period, was experimenting with different kind of war film than the grand, heroic films of the early 1950s.

In Ivan's Childhood, the war is personalized, and its searing trauma highlighted. Tarkovsky, Johnson reminds us, was about ten, roughly Ivan's age, during World War II. This film is therefore a very personal account of war's impact on the mind of a child who would have been representative of the millions of other Soviet children who lived through the war. Over time, Johnson tell us that Tarkovsky's unique style of film-making became more developed, revolving around complex narrative styles, pronounced subjectivity, dream sequences, cinematic poetry, moody images, and invitations to enter the director's inner world. But even in Ivan's Childhood the director was testing the limits of what a genre war film could be. His story (originally Vladimir Bogomolov's tale) is nonlinear, filled with innocent, light-filled dream sequences which are contrasted with dark, brutal, styled portraits of Ivan's horrific waking life.

The contrast, between life as it should be for a young boy, and life as it is, isn't particularly subtle, but it transforms an action story about a boy hero who risks his life to go on a scouting mission behind enemy lines, into a more intimate description of profound psychological loss. The child-killing enemy remains, and the film doesn't hesitate to use historical footage of the Soviet Union's ultimate victory celebration in Berlin; but Ivan's Childhood is ultimately successful as a result of its personal, subjective account of Ivan's damaged personality. Ivan, courageous and vengeful, is also beset by anger, sadness, loneliness, and, above all, loss. Of course, this mental landscape is beautifully rendered by Vadun Yusov's brilliant visual metaphors, including dark battlefields, ruined natural landscapes (see Yusov's interview in the same Criterion DVD), eerie birch groves, luscious apples, and pristine beeches.

Pugachev the Raving, Raven

2011-08-13T06:25:00.018-05:00

"That's just the beginning. We'll give Moscow a real shaking yet."

"At Ozernaya an old Cossack woman would wander along the Yaik everyday, pulling the floating corpses to the bank with her crutch and chanting "Isn't that you, my child? Is it you, my Stevie? Is it your black curls that the fresh water is washing?" And seeing an unfamiliar face, would gently push the corpse away."

"What's this?" said Pugachev. "You want to betray your sovereign?" "What is to be done?" the Cossacks answered, and suddenly rushed him.

"Who are you?" he asked the pretender. "Emelian Ivanov Pugachev," he answered. "How did you dare, you raving thief, to call yourself the sovereign?" "I'm not a raven," replied Pugachev, playing on words and expressing himself, as was his habit, in allegory; "I'm a raven's chick, and the raven himself is still flying."

Twenty one years ago I read Alexander Pushkin's The History of Pushkin for a Russian history course at Georgetown University. The book stayed with me. Although I couldn't have been impressed with its illustrious author--Russia's most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, a name I didn't yet know--I loved the short book. Who wouldn't have been impressed with this well-told tale of outlandish courage, bloody rebellion, and almost picaresque adventure? Pushkin's The History of Pugachev is a matter-of-fact description the Cossack insurgency which shook the foundations of Catherine the Great's empire at roughly the same time as the American colonies were doing the same to George II's Great Britain.

Emilian Pugachev, pretending to be the murdered Peter III, forged a loose and chaotic alliance between a host of dissatisfied elements in the Russian empire, including Cossacks, serfs, and Asiatic nations such as the Kalymks and Bashkirs. With this alliance, Pugachev managed to conquer the imperial stronghold of Kazan, and temporarily disabled Catherine's authority over the huge expanse of land that lay between the Volga and the Urals. With unbelievable personal daring, Pugachev seemed to be everywhere, and eyewitness accounts often placed him on the front lines of his many encounters with tsarist troops. In Pushkin's awed if condemnatory account, Pugachev's forays in unaffected Russian lands, while ordinarily unsuccessful in the face of regular Russian troops, almost always led to large-scale social upheaval. Wherever Pugachev went, Cossack soldiers defected from Catherine's cause and serfs took revenge on their masters.

As a class, the rural gentry suffered grievously from the great social conflagration. Pugachev, who was never really master over the Cossack leaders who exploited his royal mystique, was eventually defeated, betrayed, and turned over to the crown's representatives to be executed. For all his triumphs, Pugachev, whose forces were disorganized, ill-equipped, and untrained, turned out to be no match for the professional Russian armies sent out from the West to subdue him.

Pugachev's Revolt had a long-lasting impact on Russian history. In the wake of the revolt, which had been contemporaneous with conflict with Turkey and Europe, Catherine turned away from social reform and toward a closer alliance with the nobility. Pushkin, living not so long after Catherine the Great's death, seems to sense the historical import of the episode. While Pushkin's Pugachev is a rogue, his meets with so many successes because the serfs (especially factory serfs) are so mightily oppressed by the local gentry. Were this not so, why did Pugachev (or any of dozens of his representatives) only have to appear in an area for the serfs to rise up to join the insurgency.

Holy, Holy, Holy (Nevsky)

2011-08-11T05:50:00.016-05:00

Nevsky Prospect is the chief artery of St. Petersburg, a straight, broad avenue that bisects the city and runs from the Admiralty Spire and the Winter Palace to god only knows where. On Nevsky Prospect one encounters: Strogonov Palace, Anchikov Palace, Kazan Cathedral, the Moyka and Griboedov and Fontanka canals, bridges, parks, Russian and American fast food joints, open air dining, shopping malls (Gostiny Dvor), metro stations, museums, souvenir shops, pickpockets, street performers, etc.

To talk down Nevsky Prospect is to have something akin to a religious experience. At some point, all of the following must have strolled this same street: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Grigori Orlov, Potemkin, Alexander I, Nicholas II, Alexander III, Nicholas II, Rasputin, Aleksandr Pushkin, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Kuzmin, Fydor Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Aleksander, Aleksander Blok, N.V. Gogol, Osip Mandelshtam, Isadora Duncan, Sergei Esenin, Prokofiev, Vladimir Mayakovski, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Shostokovich, Igor Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Peter Karl Faberge, Kerensky,Feliks Dzerzhinsky, V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Kamanev, Zinoviev, Rinaldi, Rossi, Falconet, Rastrelli, Trezzini, Diagilev, Benois, Andrei Bely, Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Repin, Nikolai Berdaev, Soloviev, Viacheslav Ivanov, Anastasia Verbitskaya, Alexei Tolstoy, Boris Eikhenbaum, Putilov, Olga Berrgolts, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Zhadanov, Yury Lotman, Vladimir Nabokov, Miulikov, Vera Figner, Antsiferov, Victor Schlovsky, Maxim Gorky, Antsiferov, Plekhanov, Ginzburg, Axelrod, Ilya Ehrenburg, Khodasevich, Kornei Chukovsky, Father Gapon, Kroptkin, Herzen, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Tikhonov, Panin, Stroganov, Iusupov, Sergei Esenin, George Balanchine, Lunacharsky, Chernychevsky, Volkov, Mirsky, Aleksander Fadeev, Pavlov, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Briusov, Ivan Bunin, et cetera and so on.

Communist Ruins

2011-08-10T10:48:00.015-05:00

"There will rise, believe me, comrade
A star of captivating bliss, when
Russia wakes up from her sleep
And when our names will both be written
On the ruins of despotism."

(Pushkin to Chadeev, 1818, cited by Orlando Figes in in the introduction to Pushkin's History of Pugachev)

What does the term, ruin, connote? What makes something worthy of being called a ruin? A ruin is something more than a collapsed or demolished building. To be a ruin, something must hold our sentimental attention and call forth feelings of awe and wonderment. A ruin is a collapsed architectural structure--with pretensions to grandeur.

Visiting St. Petersburg, one would expects to find ruins everywhere. Since the city was only founded in 1703, we can't expect to find any building fragments with ties to antiquity. Even so, since we know that one of the world's grandest and most destructive experiments in living was launched here in the city, we expect to see the physical fragments of the greatest social phenomenon of twentieth century on almost every street corner. Surprisingly, these fragments aren't all that easy to find, at least in the historic heart of the city.

Of course, the physical manifestations of seventy years of Soviet rule do in fact exist; they are just less prominent than one might expect, at least in the city's tourist areas. The vast majority of Lenin statues have been removed, though a few still remain. Totalitarian governmental buildings and monstrous housing projects do the landscape, but are overshadowed in the historic heart of St. Pete by the works of Italian and French masters of the eighteenth century. Here and there we notice a socialist realism frieze or statue. Here and there a hammer and sickle or red star adorn a building wall or metro stop. But the era of the Soviet Union isn't all that easy to spot unless you know what you're looking for.

There are a few museums that bear witness to the triumphs and tragedies of the birthplace of Bolshevism. The Museum of Political History, for example, is housed in the famous palace of ballerina Mathilda Kshesinskaya, where the Bolsheviks once convened, and where Lenin once preached to his followers from one of the balconies. But the home of the Petrograd Soviet, the Tauride Palace, is no longer a monument to the Soviet idyll, but rather a working governmental building dedicated to the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States. The nearby Smolny Institute, Lenin's home for a brief period, site of the Kirov assassination, and home to the Bolshevik Party during 1917, still exists. And a Lenin statue there hasn't been removed. But the Smolny Institute, as opposed to the cathedral, doesn't seem to be on anybody's tourist agenda. The guides don't mention the Institute at all.

To be a ruin, something must be much more than merely a remnant of the past. A ruin is a Romantic concept, a monument to a great (though not necessarily good) but defeated cause. St. Petersburg is home to myriad physical reminders of an important era in the life of the nation. However, the Russian people haven't apparently had either the time or the inclination to romanticize their grim past by highlighting the ruins in their midst.

Bruce Lincoln's St. Petersburg

2011-08-10T06:19:00.019-05:00

Readers of the blog will know that Soviet Roulette holds the late, great Russian historian, Bruce Lincoln, in high regard. Lincoln is the author of about a dozen excellent books on modern Russian history. Readable, informative, and exciting, his exciting yet scholarly trilogy on the Russian Revolution and Civil War is representative of Lincoln's huge talent. Lincoln's last book is a testament to his lifelong love affair with Russia's imperials city, St. Petersburg. In Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia Lincoln demonstrates a sensitivity and mastery of cultural history that has wasn't on display in the majority of his treatises on modern social and political history.

In Sunlight at Midnight, Lincoln argues that St. Petersburg's story is simultaneously unique and central to the story of Russia's evolving identity. Lincoln's book is less than four hundred pages long, and yet somehow seems far longer, notwithstanding its scintillating prose. This is because St. Petersburg's history is rich, dense, and complex. This invented city has always been Russia's "Window on the West," which of course means that it has always stood at the very apex of Russia's struggle to come to terms with its divided Eurasian cultural identity. On the one hand, as a result of the geography, St. Petersburg is closer to Western Europe than the vast majority of the Russian or Soviet Empires. On the other hand, St. Petersburg has traditionally been an epicenter of imperialism, and one that necessarily communicated with all of Russia's Eastern, Asiatic, Islamic, Caucasian, and Siberian constituencies. It's strange to note that visitors to St. Petersburg can still feel this divided cultural heritage today. As it turns out, the 19th century debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers is not a cliche. While St. Petersburg plays host to hundreds of thousands of Western tourists each year, its tourist industry seems to depend at least as much on Russian travelers. While anecdotal, the fact that many young Russian workers in the tourist economy--hotel desk personnel, restaurant hostesses, and museum employees--speak almost no English, French, or German, may suggest that the city remains uncertain about the role the West could or should play in its future. The city, like the country at large, remains uncommitted to the West even three centuries after Catherine the Great conducted her famous correspondence with the literary giants of the Western Enlightenment like Diderot.

In the end, the historic significance of St. Petersburg transcends the story of Russia, as important as that story is in its own right. This is of course because St. Petersburg experienced the vertiginous process of industrialization and modernization in unique ways. Although other European capitals had been transformed by factory life and the rise of the bourgeois and proletarian classes, St. Petersburg was practically overwhelmed by social and economic change in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1900, St. Petersburg was not only divided between its imperial and Westernizing destinies, but also by its proletarian outskirts and bourgeois or bureaucratic center.

Part of Russia's inability to gracefully adapt to modernization is related to Russia's historic economic backwardness; after all, the serfs were only legally liberated in the 1960s. But part of Russia's fragility is related to Russia's political immaturity. At first, the Russian autocratic model helped backward Russia to weather the challenge of Western power, but later relying on autocracy led to severe class tensions. With no legitimate avenue to effect political change through democratic processes, proletarians and even bourgeois often turned to radical or even violent forms of dissent. St. Petersburg's Church of the Savior of Spilled Blood, which marks the spot in which the Tsar Liberator Alexander II was assassinated despite his efforts to reform and modernize the state, is one testament to the impasse Russia confronted as early as the 1880s.

Bruce Lincoln doesn't attempt to explain the October Revolution in this book. The First World War obviously deserves a great deal of the blame for this event. Had Russia not suffered so grievously against German armies, who can say that a liberal revolution might not have succeeded? Lincoln indirectly suggests that St. Petersburg's cultural experimentation at the turn of the century--the Silver Age--is in some way related to radical political experimentation. The causal relationship between the poetry of the Straw Dog and Isanov's Tower and the political decisions of Lenin and Trotsky doesn't exist. Even so, Lincoln, following Marshall Berman, know that cultural radicalism may at least be a reflection of the kind of pressures that eventually legitimate radical political innovation. Certainly Andrei Bely's modernist novel, St. Petersburg, foreshadowed confusion, disorientation, and even disaster even before the First World War.

Mawkish Literary Museums in St. Petersburg

2011-08-10T04:34:00.025-05:00

To visit St. Petersburg is to confront its monumental and almost undifferentiated architecture of grandeur. Whether neo-classical, baroque, art deco, or Stalinist, St. Petersburg's vast catalog of historic buildings--most in the process of being architecturally refurbished in some way--seem to resemble one another in their heaviness, height, and scales. And why not? The city was created out of thin air, and unlike Paris or Moscow or almost all other European cities had no centuries-long process of natural and therefore haphazard architectural evolution. Notwithstanding decades of relative decline vis-a-vis Moscow, St. Petersburg remains the imposing capital of its energetic founder, Peter the Great, and his immediate successors, especially Catherine the Great.

St. Petersburg--or at least its "historic heart"--is a city of palaces, governmental buildings, and elegant but intimidatingly large apartment buildings. It's also a city of bridges, canals, monuments, and the great Neva river. Having ironically lost its vitality in the wake of its own historical moment October Revolution, St. Petersburg has somehow evolved into a city of museums. The Hermitage, most famous of all Russian museums, and one of best museums the world has to offer, is the centerpiece of St. Petersburg's obsession with the past. The fabulous State Russian Museum, repository of so much of Russia's unique artistic heritage, is another of the city's most important historical treasures. But it's the smaller cultural museums--not Yusupov's Palace (magnificent site of Rasputin's legendary murder), not the Stroganov Palace (now a wing of the State Russian Museum), not the Menshikov Palace, and not Peterhof or Tsarskoe Selo (just two of the tsar's multiple Versailles-like retreats)--that ought to attract our attention.

At the risk of appearing too sentimental about an unsentimental town, St. Petersburg's greatest museums are perhaps its smallest ones, although one wonders whether cynical tourist authorities have invented a few of these museums to pray on the heightened emotional sensitivity that Russophiles must always feel when visiting the city of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. The Pushkin museum, for example, features five small pieces of wood that Pushkin allegedly collected from the gallows used to execute five friends who died as a result of their participation in the Decembrist Revolt against tsarist tyranny in 1825. Did someone make this up? It seems almost too moving to be true. And should one experience a sense of awe and wonder, or merely check for one's wallet, when one notices a box of cigarettes on Dostoyevsky's desk (at the writer's own museum) on which one of his children has written: "Papa died today..."?

St. Petersburg's many wonderful apartment museums are filled with similar touching if mawkish artifacts. Alexander Blok's museum, which takes up space on the second and fourth floor of a still-in-use apartment building, contains copies of some his earliest publications. Anna Akhmatova, patron saint of suffering in a town that has known more than its share of trauma, has her own museum, which prominently displays the coat of her second husband, who was taken away to die in the gulag, and calls attention to the hallway in which her son was forced to shelter due to the brutal facts of communal living. The museum reminds us that Akhmatova suffered through the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad, saw her son taken away to the gulag more than once, suffered from the Bolshevik execution of the man who had been her first husband, Gumilyov, in 1921. Most affectingly, Akhmatova's museum presents us with her famous letter to Stalin, in which she implores him to release her son from imprisonment, as well as the newspaper articles that viciously and officially denounced her writing following World War II. Of course, the heart of St. Petersburg's literary nostalgia industry is Pushkin House. Here one can see a hundred artifacts and photos of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Belinsky, and all of the other great figures of Russian cultural achievement.

Petersburg phobia conquered?

2011-07-29T12:02:00.004-05:00

Readers of Fur Coat's most recent post may wonder whether its author ever actually made it to St. Petersburg. That detail appears ambiguous. It all calls to mind Freud's famous Roman phobia, as recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams. For years, Rome was the city that most fascinated Freud, the basis of the classical education his psychology borrowed so much from, and the destination of several abortive journeys. Freud claimed that what repeatedly turned him back, once just 50 miles from the city, was an identification with Hannibal and an antipathy for the Catholic Church due to its persecution of Jews.

Will the same fate befall Fur Coat? After years and years of intense identification with Russian culture and the Soviet experiment will physical proximity overwhelm him? Will he turn back at the Finland Station or press on across the border? We can only wait and see.

St. Petersburg Rules

2011-07-28T09:26:00.016-05:00

Is there any better tourist destination than St. Petersburg? To read Bruce Lincoln's last book, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, one would expect "Piter" to outshine all other European cities, including Moscow. After all, St. Petersburg is a city of lovely canals and embankments and splendid baroque and neoclassical architecture. More than this, St. Petersburg is a city of tsars, revolutionaries, and, above all, poets. This is the city of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas I, and Alexander the Tsar Liberator. It's the city of Lenin, Trotsky, Kirov, and the Russian citizens who held out for 900 days against Nazi encirclement. And ultimately it's the city of Pushkin, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Blok, Bely, Gumilyev, and so many others.

But on a practical level, where should one go to find out what actually awaits the visitor who would like to see the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, the Bronze Horseman, Peterhof, the Nevsky Prospect, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Neva River, the Admiralty Spire, The Mariinsky Theater, Church of the Savior of Spilled Blood, Kazan Cathedral, Yusupov's Palace, Smolny, the Mikhailovsky Castle, Tsarskoe Selo (Pushkin's Village), the Tauride Palace, the Finland Station, the Stray Dog Cafe, and other physical reminders and architectual moments of St. Petersburg's brilliant but tortured past? For clues, why not see what Mara Vorhees, the author of the Lonely Planet's Petersburg City Guide has to say?

As far as this blog post will go, let's just say that Vorhees recommends some Internet resources related to the city's past and present. These include the following:

www. encspb.ru
www.eng.gov.spb.ru
www.hermitagemuseum.org
www.nevsky-prospekt.com
www.petersburgcity.com
www.st-petersburg.com
www.sptimes.ru
www.mariinksky.ru

Politics, War, and Faberge Eggs

2011-07-18T10:22:00.021-05:00

Solomon Volkov's Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under The Tsars delineates the complicated and evolving relationship between Russian autocracy and Russian cultural genius between 1613 and 1917.
This is a self-described prequel to another work, the Magical Chorus, which treats the same topic during the Twentieth Century. See my earlier blog post on this wonderful book.

Romanov Riches is a short book, and Volkov cannot claim to have analyzed any of the tsar's aesthetic predilections or cultural policies in any detail. Even so, Volkov manages to say something interesting and original about Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II, and even Lenin. In just slightly more than 200 pages, we tract the collapse of imperial authority in the arts. Where the emperors once dominated almost every aspect of the art market, Nicholas II's patronage was often spurned by liberal or radical artists for ideological reasons. Moreover, by the turn of the century, wealthy bourgeois patrons competed with the tsar for role of taste-maker and patron of the arts. Volkov is well established as once of the most balanced and knowledgeable experts on Russian culture, and feels equally at home analyzing trends in ballet, music, theater, fine art, poetry, and prose.

This book, like his treatise on the influence of Stalin on Shastokovich, is filled with insights into the influence of high culture on state policy. How did Pushkin and Nicholas I use one another and who got the better end of the bargain? Why was Pushkin's death, as well as that of Lermontov, a political problem for the tsars? How did the government use Dostoevsky and Gogol, and were the risks of relying on these Slavophiles to make their case to the literate classes? And who couldn't be fascinated by the way autocrats read and understood Tolstoy? Tolstoy, of course, interpreted the Franco-Russian War of 1812 for the Russian public, but he also shaped public perception of the Crimean War with his Sevastopol Sketches, and of course had a lot to say about how Alexander III dealt with his father's murderers.

All in all, the Romanovs come off rather well in Volkov's history. Although military and political matters necessarily dominated their worldviews, most of these conservative autocrats were sensitive, well-read, polyglots with serious personal interest in participating in the arts. Some were even educated by Russia's greatest authors, including the historian Karamzin. Volkov's point is that political leadership of the Russian nation necessarily entailed cultural fluency if not cultural mastery.

Oblomovshchina

2011-07-04T11:28:00.012-05:00

"God grant tomorrow be just the same!"

"Work is life's form, content, element, and purpose--at least mine. You've driven work clean out of your life, and what has come of it?"

This blog was partly inspired by the movie, Julie and Julia, in which blogger Julie Powell describes cooking 524 recipes from Julia Child's famous cookbook in 365 days. Although I loved the concept of Powell's obsessive blog as soon as I heard about it, I only saw the movie a couple of days ago. Loving Meryl Streep as I do, I enjoyed the movie a great deal. It also uncovered hidden memories of watching Julia Child's bizarre show with my mother when I was a child. It was hard to know what to make of Julia Child, with her powerful but unidentifiable accept. Without the benefit of a VCR, who could follow her complex recipes? I still wonder whether her show taught women how to cook or merely helped people to touch base with a deep sense of loss about the fact that they no longer knew how to do what she did, or even had time to make the attempt to cook real food.

Watching the film, it's time to reflect on the nature of this blog. Why did I decide to follow Powell's example and write about my evolving obsession with Soviet intellectual history? To my mind, blogging was an attempt to escape the fate of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov. See Elaine Blair's article in a 2010 edition of the New York Review of Books, entitled "The Short Happy Life of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov for an abbreviated description of that life: the novel is well over 500 pages long Ivan Goncharov's iconic character, Oblomov, retired from the civil service while still in his thirties. At this point, he devoted himself to leisure--not leisure in the ordinary sense of drinking, gambling, duals, and other equally pointless aristocratic pursuits, but leisure in the extraordinary sense of purposeful repose. Avoiding both work and entertainment, duty as well as pleasure, Oblomov does almost nothing from one day to the next and dreams of one day attaining an even purer state of indolence by perhaps living in the countryside. Eventually, although he drifts gently into family life, Oblomov dies, having "quietly and gradually fit himself into the simple and wide coffin of the remained of his existence." In some ways, the story of Oblomov is a metaphor for anyone who loves to read, since reading is one of life's most seductive forms of escapism. While Oblomov actually rejects literature in favor of an even more passive attitude toward life, reading is probably as close as most of us will ever come to the Oblomov's idyl. Blogging, of course, is a close relative of reading, and certainly blogging isn't any substitute for a plot in one's life, but it's at least an attempt to lift oneself off of Oblomov's comfortable bed from time to time.

Shklovsky's Revolution

2011-06-30T10:57:00.024-05:00

Viktor Shklovsky's memoirs, A Sentimental Journey, cover the author's energetic participation in World War I, the February Revolution, the October Revolution, the Russian campaign in Persia, and the Civil War. Shklovsky's unorthodox approach to autobiography is ironic, poetic, and elliptical. His observations seem to reveal the essence of this revolutionary epoch on both the microscopic and macroscopic levels. The current of clever but understated cynicism that runs through A Sentimental Journey seems to perfectly portray the madness and horror of that extraordinarily fluid period in Russian history. Although Shklovsky, a Social Revolutionary in these years, ostensibly sympathized the Bolsheviks in their contest with the counter-revolutionary forces, his detached, sometimes indirect critique of Bolshevism is ultimately more damning than even Ivan Bunin's memoir of the period, Cursed Days. If this is how a young Leftist intellectual saw Lenin's Party, how much worse must they have been?

Shlovsky on the Nature of Revolution

"You'll see. Our Revolution will save the world."

"Everything was fine. We were all being swept along by a river and the whole of wisdom consisted in yielding to its current."

"I was happy with these crowds. It was like Easter--a joyous, naive, disorderly carnival paradise."

"In general, and Easter mood prevailed; everything was going well and it was believed that this was only the beginning of everything good."

"The streets seethed with impromptu meetings. Private life seemed pallid."

"One soldier said, "I don't want to die." With desperate energy, I spoke about the right of the Revolution to our lives. I didn't despise words then, as I do now."

"The Revolution had engraved its norms on his soul. He was like an Orthodox Christian."

"They hastened to inform me that they were for the commune. What they meant by that I don't know. Perhaps only communal pastures."

"The regiments knew nothing about freedom of speech; they regarded themselves as a single voting entity. Those who opposed the majority were beaten up."

"Why didn't we understand that we can't fight with such crap at the front?"

"Comrades, what are you doing! Is this really the way to fight capitalism? Capitalism has to be fought efficiently."

"If you don't believe that there was a revolution, go and put your hand in the wound. It's wide."

"The laws had been repealed and everything was being revised."

Shklovsky on Suffering

"When I arrived in Moscow on the nineteenth of this month and brought some bread (ten pounds) to a close friend, he began to weep--He wasn't used to bread."

"Hunched over, with mechanical gesture of a tired animal, they picked through the garbage looking for something edible."

"...the others died as quietly and slowly as only the infinitely steadfast human being can died."

"There's a Cossack. In front of him lies a naked baby, abandoned by the Kurds. The Cossack wants to kill it. He hits it once and stopds to think, hits it again and stops to think.
They tell him: "Finish him off."
And he: "I can't. I feel sorry for it."

"The commander, Ivanov by name, defended himself for a long time with a saver before they cut off his head and gave it to the children to play with." (Referring to the Kurdish campaign).

"One morning when I got up and opened the street door, something soft fell to the side. I stooped down and looked...Something had left a dead baby at my door. I think it was a complaint."

"...the way the city had grown quiet. Like after an explosion, when it's all over, when everything's blown up. Like a man whose insides have been torn out by an explosion, but he keeps on talking."

"In general, it was a time of local power and local terror. People were killed on the spot."

"There was cholera in St. Pete, but people were't being eaten yet."

"I saw a beggar pull a piece of bread out of his sack and offer it to a cabby's horse. The horse turned it down."

"Once beef was issued. What a fantastic taste it had! It was like the first time you slept with a woman. Something entirely new."

"Our hardships kept piling on; we wore them like clothing."

Shklovsky on the Bolsheviks

"A man should worry less about history and more about his own biography."

"Who are you for--Kaledin, Kornilov or the Bolsheviks?" Task and I would have chosen the Bolsheviks. However in a certain comedy, the harlequin was asked, "Do you prefer to be hanged or quartered?" He answered, "I prefer soup."

"The show "Russia" was over; everyone was hurrying to get his hat and coat."

"The Bolsheviks were very weak, too, but the ship was listing on their side."

"When the Boksheviks left the front wide open without signing the peace treaty, they were hoping for a miracle, but the man consumed in fire didn't rise from the dead. And the Germans walked through the front door."

"And so some cracked safes, some headed east to joint Wrangel and Denikin, others were shot and still others hated the Bolsheviks with a hatred so salty that it kept them from spoiling."

"And on the horizon, promising to crush us all, loomed the hungry Bolsheviks."

"Bolshevism thrives in foreign climes"

"It was said that the French had a violet ray with which they could blind all the Bolsheviks..It was said that the English had landed in Baku aa heard of apes trained in all the rules of warfare...People held their hands about two feet off the ground to indicate the size of the apes. They said that when Baku was taken, one of these apes was killed and it was buried with a band playing Scottish military music and the Scots cried. That's because the instructors of the ape legions were Scottish."

"His father had died after the October coup. His uncle had shot himself. He left a note: "The damn Bolsheviks."

"It's fantastic how much more stupid a state is than an individual."

"The Bolsheviks entered a Russia that was already sick, but they weren't neutral--no, they were a special kind of organizing bacillus, but of another world and dimension."

"The Bolsheviks held out, are holding out, and will hold out, thanks to the imperfections of the mechanism which they control. However, I am unjust to them. Just as unjust as the deaf man who looks at people dancing and thinks they're insane. The Bolsheviks had their own music."

"And at this moment, with my life in fragments, I stand before the ordered consciousness of the Communists."

"It was like two voids attacking one another. There were no Red and White armies. That's no joke. I saw the war."

"A nation, however, can be organized. The Bolsheviks believed that it's the design that matters, not the building material. They were willing to lose today, to lose biographies, in order to win the stake of history."

"They wanted to organize everything so that the sun would rise on schedule and the weather would be made in their chancellery. It's easy to see how the Bolsheviks made the mistake of mapping out a plan for the whole world on paper.

Shklovsky on Russia

"It was Russian imperialism--what's more, Russian imperialism, which is to say, stupid imperialism."

"Russia was beginning to break down into its primary factors."

"People will ask, how did Russia permit such things to happen?"

Shklovsky's Guide for Living

"It's good to live and sniff the road of life with your snout."

Mandelstam Versus Stalin

2011-06-29T12:55:00.017-05:00

"Mandelstam sailed through life with a cargo of manias. He lived in terror of his muse and his erection one day deserting him. He lived in everlasting fear of fear."

"Russia, the running riot we know and loathe and love and fear, is reserved for Russians."

"You have to have lived through the thirties to understand, and even then, you don't understand."

"Where are the swans? They went away, the swans. The ravens too? They stayed, the ravens." Marina Tsvetaeva, cited by Robert Little.

In life, Stalin triumphed over everyone; his brutal victories over his rivals was, more often than not, complete. He was once quoted as saying that there was no greater feeling in life than slowly and carefully plotting the destruction an enemy. The evidence of Stalin's capacity to deliver vengeance on his real and perceived rivals is everywhere; probably Stalin annihilated more opponents than any other figure in human history. Trotsky was killed with an ice pick; Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamanenv died as a consequence of elaborately staged show trials.

Hitler, Stalin's ultimate enemy, suffered at the hands of Stalin too. Oliver Hirschbiegel's German-language film, The Downfall, shows just how bad things got for the Fuhrer and his allies. In the final tens days of his miserable existence, Hitler was reduced to berating his generals in a small bunker for their inability to carry out his brilliant strategic decisions in the face of overwhelming odds. According to the film, which is based on a great deal of first-hand accounts by bunker survivors, Hitler even praised his nemesis, Stalin, for having the foresight to liquidate his military leadership prior to the advent of hostilities. Soon, even Hitler recognized that, despite his best efforts at averting the perceived catastrophe, the German people as a whole had been bested by a ruthless opponent, the Russians, who would soon overwhelm the decadent Western powers as well. "I didn't just do this for the Germans. Not just the Germans."

Stalin died, apparently, of natural causes. Stalin lived by the sword but did not died by the sword. Rather, he wet himself and lay paralyzed for hours, starring up in wrath--as his daughter tells us--at those who eventually surrounded him.

While he was alive, very few people can be said to have voiced any opposition to Stalin's reign of terror and lived to tell about it. Khrushchev, Stalin's greatest historical opponent, was a fawning admirer--one of Stalin's closest advisers--while Stalin lived. Osip Mandelstam, the unlikeliest of heroes, did oppose Stalin, although he, like so many others, died for his troubles. His act of defiance was odd, a simple epigram or satirical poem, repeated to a number of literary friends despite the omnipresence of political informers in every segment of Russian society. The poem, which became known to Stalin almost immediately, read as follows:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders--
Fawning half-men for him to play with.

The whinny, purr or whine
as he prates and points a finger,

One by one to be forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.

According to Robert Little's The Stalin Epigram, a novel which relies heavily on the memoirs of Mandelstam's widow, Mandelstam's poem was a courageous act of existential defiance by an artist who believed that art and truth-telling were nearly synonyms. The novel, which is told from the point of view of multiple actors, including Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and his wife Nadezdha, but also Stalin and Stalin's personal bodyguard and others, tells the story of Mandelstam's decision to speak out against mendacity despite the danger and, more importantly, despite his own innate cowardice. Of course, Mandelstam suffered grievously for his bravado, being arrested, interrogated, banished to Voronezh, intimidated into writing pro-Stalin poetry, arrested again in 1938, and allowed to die in a transit camp.

On Russian Bureaucracy

2011-06-24T11:20:00.025-05:00

"If you tell my story, make it funny. Don't make it pathetic, like the way it was..."

Lovers of Tsarist or Soviet literature will be relieved to know that Russian bureaucracy isn't dead. Take the experience of a friend who wants to go to St. Petersburg for an academic conference in late July. This woman, let's call her Madame S in the spirit of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, realized that she's required to secure a visa. This seems like an odd request: Americans and Canadians rarely need a visa to travel anywhere, and certainly not anywhere in Europe. Still, the visa request is reciprocal; and one can't quite blame Russia for demanding that foreigners are treated as poorly as its citizens are treated abroad. But see how difficult the request can be. When my friend went directly to the Russian consulate to secure this visa, she ran intro trouble--nothing dramatic, just low-level bureaucratic noise. The consulate, beautiful and stately on the outside, is dim, windowless, and unadorned on the inside. On Madame S's first visit to the consulate--and the forlorn guests of the consulate told her nobody ever avoids at least a second visit to the consulate before securing a visa--she encountered an old woman who refused to answer any questions, and a skinny, pale-faced man with sad eyes, black hair brushed down over his sickly forehead, and the general countenance and demeanor of a serial killer.

This insouciant and sickly man, who became Madame S' bureaucratic tormentor, spoke neither English nor French very well, and took frequent smoking breaks. While never overtly rude, his mournful eyes seemed to mask a simmering anger. The play between tormentor and tormented occurred in four acts. In act one, Madame S was informed that the consulate did not have any visa applications and so applicants needed to go home first to print one off. Fortunately, one of the consultates supplicants, who had her own tale of woe predicated on the fact that her bank couldn't issue an acceptable certified check or something similar, offered Madame S an extra visa form to fill out. But even this didn't do the trick: Madame S' passport photo was deemed too large to qualify for the application and she was sent back out into the street.

Almost two hours later, our heroine returned to the consulate with a completed application and new photo. Fortunately, even with the absence of nearly two hours, her number hadn't even been called yet. When it was called, Madame S dashed up to the Russian official but, alas, he strode out of the room without apology to smoke. Upon his return, he announced that the new passport photo was not valid either; apparently propriety demanded a different ratio of head to background space. As the workday was ending, Madame S left the consulate and returned the next day, but sadly there was no way to know that the consulate was now closed for two days on account of a national Russian holiday. On her fourth visit to the consulate, Madame S arrived forty-five minutes early but this time was told that, contrary to previous information she had received from Russian academic authorities, she could not easily receive a tourist visa since she was, at least partially, traveling for business reasons.

Not even the required hotel "invitation" was enough to satisfy Official Russia. Madame S did what many of us would have done: she cried like a baby and left the consulate, and Montreal, without a visa. The story isn't unusual: nobody in the consulate had a more satisfying encounter with the visa process. Moreover, while waiting in line, Madame S learned from ethnic Russian travelers that she should expect more of the same, or worse, in Russia itself. Apparently the land of the Hermitage was no tourist paradise. One needed a minder, or guide, to navigate the city. One shouldn't even talk in public for fear of letting others know one's vulnerable status as an outsider.

If Russia has such esquisite appreciation for bureaucracy, its no wonder that she also has connoisseurship in the art of the queue. During the Soviet era, people lined up to wait for goods and services with superhuman patience, as if people could receive religious absolution at every store, government depot, or street corner. Vladimir Sorokon's novel captures the spirit and existential meaning of the Soviet queue. According to Sorokon, Soviet citizens spent, on average, about one third of each day waiting for something. In such conditions, money was meaningless: only time, and your place in the line, mattered. As Sorokon points out, both Russia's private and public history is related to standing in line. In 1896, Nicholas II was coronoted but 2,000 people were crushed to death as a monstrous line for "coronation gifts" spun out of control. At Stalin's death in 1953, history repeated itself, although nobody can be sure exactly how many Soviet men and women died in the orgy of mourning. Russians are accustomed to waiting in line. As Orthodox believers, they stood for services that could last several hours. As Soviets, they waited for "food, goods, tickets, vacations, toilets" and even prison beds.

In Montreal, Madame S experienced the queue as a demeaning expression of the bureacrat's power, and certainly Soviet citizens felt demeaned by the scarcity that pervaded their lives. In Sorokin's fictional queue, Russians resent the store employees who are lackisasically distributing the goods, hate those who precede them in line and therefore diminish their chances for receiving anything,, and despise those that enviously follow them and watch for opportunities to cut in line. On the other hand, Sorokin's queue isn't without merits. At the local level, those in line help each other by trading information--or at least wild rumors--and holding places for comrades who wish to step outside the line to buy alcohol or even simultaneously take up a place in a second line. The line was also a place for political or philosophical discussion. As one person in the line reminds those around him, one shouldn't be so quick to admire either the American economic or political system. In America, one can criticize Ronald Reagan freely but be fired for critizing his boss. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the hegemony of the queue collapsed. Now people were confronted with radical consumer choices. Where once people made due with three types of sausage, they now had 333 sausage selections. The downside to this consumer paradise is that many people can no longer afford that which is theoretically available to them.

Gogol's Magic Chaos

2011-06-23T12:18:00.016-05:00

"So what is the incomprehensible secret force driving me towards you? Why do I constantly hear the echo of your mournful song as it is carried from sea to sea throughout your entire expanse? Tell me the secret of your song. What is this, calling and sobbing and plucking at my heart? What are these sounds that are like a stab and a kiss, why do they come rushing into my soul and fluttering about my heart? Rus! Tell me what do you want of me! What is this strange bond secretly uniting us?"

"What does this limitless space portend? And since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born?"

"And pray, find me the Russian who does not care for fast driving? Inclined as he is to let himself go, to whirl his life away and send it to the devil, his soul cannot love speed."

"Rus, are you not similar in your headlong motion to one of those nimble troikas that none can overtake?"

"Is that my home looming blue in the distance? Is that my mother sitting there at her window? Mother dear, save your poor son! Shed a tear upon his aching head. See how they torture him. Press your poor orphan to your heart. There is no place for him in the whole wide world! He is a hunted creature. Mother dear, take pity on your sick little child...And by the way, gentlemen, do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a round lump growing right under his nose?

Once upon a time I worked in an adult undergraduate degree completion program, With limited space, I shared an office with a fellow English instructor. Our small office also served as a repository for homework assignments and final exams. One science faculty member regularly asked students to turn in a poster-sized description of an ecosystem. The assignment seemed a little juvenile, but almost all of the students turned in carefully crafted visual representations of complex natural worlds, whether they were bogs, forests, prairies, or everglades. Generally speaking, the posters contained about 30 or so separate ecological units or natural entities. We marveled at the type-A personalities who had labored over so many hours to create such beautiful and accurate descriptions of life on planet earth.

And yet, all science students are not created alike. Inevitably, one student's assignment fell far below the standard of the class as a whole, a testament to human inequality and the science of statistics. One such retrograde assignment caught our eye. Where all other students had drawn and labelled dozens of flora, fauna, and biological processes, one student was pleased to turn in a poster-sized picture of a crudely drawn and utterly solitary turtle. Beyond a round circle meant to symbolize a puddle, and a short stick, the turtle sat alone, like some kind of prison tattoo or cosmic Hindu presence. To my mind, the turtle represented failure, but not just any failure. Here was the visual proof that one student had failed to live up to what would surely be the professor's normal academic expectations. Of course, expectations are predicated on context. If the professor had received thirty simplistic "turtle" drawings, perhaps he or she would have accepted this one as "C" or even "B" work. But this hadn't been the case: the turtle stood out as a spectacular example of low performance.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the student's putative ecosystem, the turtle. Did the student who had drawn know she had produced such crap, or did he or she imagine that most of the other students were either incapable of, or unwilling to, create something better? It was hard to say. But anybody who has ever watched American Idol knows how often people live in denial about their competitiveness. Indeed, many American Idol contestants scarcely know they lack an iota of talent even when the celebrity judges are bluntly telling them they are horrendous singers.

The pathetic moment is often captured with plaintive statesments like this one: "I know I am good... At least I think I am....My mother says I could be a star..." Perhaps the man who created the turtle still didn't know he wasn't academically competitive. Maybe the teacher gave him an inflated grade; maybe he thinks that all other students failed the assignment too. More troubling than the student's naivitee, is the recognition of my own. How many "turtle" assignments had I turned in in the course of a lifetime? It's one thing to embrace defeat, but quite another to turn in an assignment or performance without any sense of whether the result will be mocked by those who are charged with evaluating it.

Every time we create we risk churning out a turtle. The trick is ignoring the possibility of failure. Nikolai Gogol turned in few literary turtes in his creative lifetime, though his admirer Vladimir Nobokov isn't shy about denigrating almost everything he wrote except for his masterpieces, Dead Souls, Part I, The Inspecter General, and the Overcoat. Nabokov admires Gogol's creativity, absurdity, and prose, but thinks his talent developed late and ended rather early. Nabokov celebrates neither Gogol's famous St. Petersburg Tales--he thinks them trite--nor his polemical writings, which include surviving fragments of Part II ad Part III of Dead Souls. However, Nabokov's praise for Gogol's masterpieces is unbounded.

As a master stylist himself, his belief that Gogol had created richly complex, almost superhumanly inventive verbal worlds is high praise indeed. "Pushkin wrote in three-dimensional prose," Nabokov wrote, "but Gogol wrote in four-dimensional prose, at least." He meant that Gogol isn't merely funny or clever. He is also not merely a good writer. He's one of the father's of Russian prose, as profound as Russian life, or much more so. He doesn't merely capture the essence of life, he exceeds it, elaborates upon it. Gogol hasn't written literature, he has created "magic chaos," captured rare moments of "irrational perception," and delineated the literary equivalent of the curverature of the space-time continuum. Nabokov writes that the Overcoat, for instances, shows that "parallel lines not only may meet, but they can wriggle and get most extravagantly entangled..."

Zhivago's Private Life

2011-06-13T21:37:00.013-05:00

"No doubt they will sing in tune AFTER the Revolution."

"Farewell pleasures of the flesh."

"You're attitude has been noticed. Oh yes, it's been noticed."

"Besides, I've executed better men than me with a small pistol."

I first saw the film version of Doctor Zhivago many years ago. Aside from the snow and Omar Sharif's magnificent eyes, I remember only one detail from the film, and that is that, upon returning from service as a doctor at the front, Zhivago was obliged to share his home with several other families. It's strange that a housing crisis disturbed me more than a dozen scences of blizzard, military revolt, refugees in overcrowded trains, and Civil War. The house, or at least most of it, had been requisitioned by the Bolshevik government. Zhivago, although a liberal man, perhaps originally even a fellow traveler, is prepared to adapt to the new environment. He knows the old regime was deeply flawed, and sympathizes with the egalitarian spirit of the times. But when he arrives home to find strangers in his home, and obligingly welcomes these families, he's curtly told that the welcome isn't appropriate since the communal home no longer belongs to him.

The scence captures the banal side of the Soviet tragedy. Apart from war, famine, and strife, ordinary Russians lost their privacy. My only comparable experience with sharing a communal house occurred when I was a teenager. At this time, my father married a second time and, like the Brady Bunch, two very different families--my dad had three children, my stepmother two of her own--suddenly found themselves eyeball to eyeball in a single living space. Who were these strangers? They were good people, but they were aliens. They had their own words, customs, foibles, and material preferences.

We encounter difference everywhere we go, but we can almost always escape this difference when it threatens to pierce or overwhelm our fragile identities. Not so with stepfamilies. They encounter us everywhere we go: in the kitchen, watching t.v., playing ping pong in the basement, speaking with our parents, or hanging out with friends. Living with a stepfamily, for all of its social benefits, is akin to embarking on a foreign exchange experience, but one that never, ever ends. How hard was it for the bourgeoisie to share their homes with strangers? It can't have been easy for men and women who had been accustomed to a large amount of privilege and privacy before the Revolution. Indeed, it turned out that even the lower classes hated the absence of private life that remained the hallmark of the Soviet Union for most if not all of its seventy year existence.

Chekhov in 1960

2011-06-13T09:06:00.013-05:00

Iosif Kheifits' 1960 film version of Anton Chekhov's classic short story, Lady with a Dog, captures the essence of the tale's tragic dimensions. In the film, a suave, sophisticated Dmitri Gurov, courts a a forlorn, bored, and beautiful Anna Sergeyevna. The backdrop to this adulterous affair is Yalta, depicted as a dull, slow-moving yet still stunningly picturesque coastal town. At first, the two protagonists are strangers to one another: the woman, little more than a distraction for Gurov, can only be seen as a "lady with a dog." But Gurov wastes little time in exploiting Anna's sadness, and we later learn, his own-- and the two consummate their romantic infatuation with one another in his seaside hotel room. Their parting is tender, but the director gives viewers no inkling that Gurov has been as affected by the vacation fling as Anna has been. He's kind and correct to her, but no more than kind and correct.

Next, we get a fuller glimpse of Gurov's normal life. He's a wealthy businessman, but his wealth stems from his heiress wife. Gurov's wife has no discernible flaw. An excellent mother to her children, who spends her time educating then, Gurov's wife is obviously very much in love with her dashing husband. She even loves her husband's gift for music, although she can't know that his passion for music reveals the lack of passion he feels for his current life. In attempt to divert himself, Gurov spends time at clubs, but to no avail. His brooding silence speaks volumes about his existential loneliness. The film never tells us whether Gurov's anguish stems from the fact that he is increasingly aware that he has fallen in love with Anna, the "lady with a dog." However, one suspects that Gurov's infatuation with Anna is the result and not the cause of his moody dissatisfaction with his present life. Why else was he taking a cure at Yalta, sans family, in the first place?

Chekhov used to say that life stories, unlike ordinary fictional ones, had no endings. People die of course, but death is usually not the end of the meaningful component of a person's life story. In the film version of Lady with a Dog, Iosif Kheifits is true to Chekhov's attitude toward plot. When Gurov finds Anna in her small town, rural hell, the two resume their affair. Yet it's entirely unclear how this affair will end. The two are in love, but they don't live in the same city, and who can say whether either Gurov or Anna will ultimately be willing to sacrifice their respective positions in society in the service of love?

And isn't this the nature of many an adulterous affair? The cheater is often paralyzed for months or even years at a time, unsure whether sexual satisfaction, or even love itself, is worth more or less than stability or moral or religious obligation. And of course many an adulterer never does make the kind of choice that would serve as a convenient plot point for a Hollywood movie ending. More often than not, the cheater's transgression is discovered. But does this discovery constitute a true ending, if it was never chosen by the protagonist? From the point of view of the cheater, it may be that irresolution and uncertainty is a more realistic "fade to black" ending than deliberate decision.

Russia is War

2011-06-08T20:01:00.007-05:00

The story of Russia is the story of war. Elem Klimov's 1985 masterpiece, Come and See, captures the fury and horror of Russia's worst war, World War II, as experienced in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The story is told from the point of view of a young boy, whose journey through the battlefields, villages, partisan-filled forests, and wetlands of the Belorussian SSR is the visual equivalent of a journey through hades. The boy, and a young female counterpart, experience as much of the apocalyptic landscape of World War II's Eastern Front as they are mentally capable of processing. In fact, the terrifying events of the war drive each of them, but the boy in particular, to the brink of madness, if not further. The film's method of depicting war is, paradoxically, both naturalistic and surrealistic. The Janus-face of war is probably like that. An ordinary object falls from the sky into an ordinary village, but the resulting carnage is utterly unbelievable. The film moves between gruesome scenes of genocide--stacked bodies, Germans burning villagers alive in a church, a violated woman shuffling, unnoticed, among other sufferers--and the boy's rapidly aging, shocked face. The film, released in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Germany, doesn't ignore Soviet heroism. In fact, we get a glimpse of partisan soldiers, a heroic Soviet guerrilla leader, and boys digging in battlefields to discover weapons with which to combat the invading marauders. But the film is, first and foremost, a testimony to the capacity of men and women to inflict damage on one another, and to suffer.

Anna Akhmatova's Muse

2011-06-08T15:34:00.028-05:00

"Neither despair nor shame. Not now, not after, not then."

"That late-night dialogue turned into the delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows."

"And that door that you left half-open I don't have the strength to slam."

My life story, like yours perhaps, could theoretically be told 100 different ways. But I can only tell my story one way: from the perspective of someone who lost his mother at a relatively early age. If I were to write my memoirs, the memoirs of a Russophile blogger, I'd essentially be telling the tale of my mother's absence. By exiting the story when I was only 14 years old, my mother, paradoxically, became the central figure of my life. The chapters of this tale are fragments of a tragedy, dimensions of loss. Accordingly, I couldn't write my autobiography chronologically. I'd need to write the same story ten times over. In chapter one, I'd describe the delightful evolution of chronic gastrointestinal ailments related to the psychosomatic impact of my mother's departure. The characters--my angry stomach, my self-pitying small intestine, my sorrowful large intestine--would be lively and sympathetic.

In chapter two, I'd describe how my past and present lives never seemed to get along: a long-standing and bitter feud between my hopeful present and devastated past always seemed ready to erupt. Chapter three would be a catalog of worry: the reader, who might well regret the absence of plot points and character development, might nevertheless enjoy a long and leisurely tour of everything in life one can be frightened of if only one surrenders to an all encompassing anxiety about the future. Chapter four, which is really a continuation of chapter three's rich theme, would detail how an ordinary person can, under the right circumstances, move through life despite often crippling levels of cowardice. What of chapter five through ten? Well, truth be told, they are not so cheery as the previous four chapters and are, therefore, too personal to relate. The whole work will have to be fictionalized for this one to come out.

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's life story is, objectively speaking, tragic even when measured against the high standards many other famous and not-so-famous Russians previously set in this lamentable category of human achievement. Her first husband, Gumilyov, was executed by the Bolsheviks on trumped-up charges. Her second husband, Nikolay Punin, perished in the gulag, where her son spent the prime of his adult life. Akhmatova self fell victim to a sustained, state-sponsored attack on her poetry and her person. She was called, famously, part nun and part whore, which somehow doesn't now translate in anything one could possibly be ashamed of. No matter--the term wasn't meant as a compliment and she knew it.

The triumph of Akhmatova's life is that, despite one or two regrettable odes to Stalin's grandeur written under duress, she never really compromised with the Soviet regime, either on a political level of at the level of her art. They say that Pasternak was like this: notwithstanding all of the horrors of the Soviet twentieth century, Pasternak didn't let either pessimism or cowardice or fear distort his essentially objective artistic outlook. Is perspective the essence of a poet's genius? Notwithstanding the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, life remains a spectacular mystery, bigger than any mortal's catalog of complaints, no matter how long or grim.

Aside from poetic imperturbability, Akhmatova possessed a powerful imagination. It's in this context, that her complex and artistically charged relationship with Isaiah Berlin should be seen. Berlin, a Russian Empire-born diplomat turned Oxford intellectual historian and philosopher, only met Akhmatova a couple of times. The principle meeting, which caught the attention of the Russian secret police and perhaps led to Akhmatova's ostracism by Soviet cultural authorities, was ill-starred. It was impermissible for Russians to meet with foreigners, and especially foreign diplomats, under any but the most tightly controlled and scripted scenarios. Still, according to the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Dalos' subtle book, The Guest From the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, Berlin emerged from the first meeting with a profound respect for the poet who had once almost personified Russia's Silver Age. And Akhmatova, the artist, came away with something more: a new muse.

In her vivid imagination--which would seem absurd if the poems didn't demonstrate the honesty and profundity of her ideas related to Berlin--the meeting with this "Guest from the Future" had profound personal as well as cosmic implications. This Guest was both her lover and a symbol of the West, which had once again become anathema to Moscow in 1947 . The meeting itself, she told others, inspiring the Cold War. The exaggeration, if that's the right word for it, seems forgivable in the context of artistic creation. In any event, as Dalos demonstrates, Stalin and other leading Soviet authorities did in fact take a direct interest in Akhmatova and Russians then and now seem to accept that somehow Akhmatova's version of events, no matter how poetic or literary, trumps the truth of her detractors.

Yury Olesha on History's Darlings

2011-05-26T10:59:00.004-05:00

"We weren't born yesterday. We too have been history's darlings."

"Oh, if only they'd kicked his kidneys in soccer..."

"And so I wander, the last dreamer on earth, on the edge of a cesspool, like a wounded bat..."

When I was in high school, my sister and I were obsessed with a soap opera called Santa Barbara. On winter break we seldom missed an episode. More particularly, we liked to watch the show’s graying patriarch, C.C. Capwell, boil over in anger at everyone around him. Capwell was interesting because he only had one emotional tone or trope, and that was anger. Capwell could brood or sulk or rave, but he was always angry about something or someone. He only had one note on the piano of his feelings, one channel on the television of his emotional range, and that was uncontrollable fury.

Even when Capwell was in love, he seemed to be visibly upset at the object of his affection, and irritated by the unbalanced, uncertain state of romantic arousal. In some ways, Capwell was an emotional cripple. He couldn’t feel what others felt; he was never truly worried, joyful, envious, sad, or hopeful—whatever was going on at the time, Capwell just felt pissed about it. On the other hand, I wondered whether Capwell had developed a special relationship to his pet sentiment, anger. After all, isn’t it true that almost every situation calls for some level of anger if examined closely enough? Perhaps it takes a savant like Capwell, someone specially attuned to rage as a bloodhound is specially attuned to fox or raccoon smells, to register the annoyance that lurks in every human interaction or encounter with the physical universe.

At first glance, one might expect that some human experiences lie entirely outside of the purview of rage. Not so! How exactly did Capwell’s special sensitivity to anger work? Here’s a hypothetical example. A woman, perhaps even Capwell’s daughter, announces that she’s graduating from college. Ordinarily, you’d expect a father to be filled with pride over the achievement of his progeny. Not C.C. Capwell. He’d focus on the negative. Shouldn’t his daughter have gone to a better school? Shouldn’t she have achieved a higher G.P.A.? Shouldn’t others—her aunt for example—have attended this once-in-a-lifetime ceremony? The possibilities for anger, if we are truly open to the emotional experience, are everywhere.

C.C. Capwell has nothing on Nikolai Kavalerov, the drunken, intellectual antihero of Yuri Olesha’s masterful 1927 Soviet novella, Envy. But whereas Capwell was a maestro of irritation, Kavalerov is a virtuoso of another kind of resentment, envy. The ostensible target of Kavalerov’s spite is Andrei Babichev, his benefactor and a successful Soviet bureaucrat to boot. The broader target of Kavalerov’s envy is the entire Soviet order ushered in by the Revolution. Although on the face of things, Kavlerov seems to accept the claims of the champions of the Soviet system--that Soviet cultural life is orderly, modern, and efficient—his venomous envy deconstructs the myth of the new regime. Even as despicable antihero, Kavalerov’s mockery undermines the rhetoric of revolution and defends that which preceded it. If there is a new Soviet man, Homo Sovieticus, should we not mourn the death of the old man? If the new system is more rational than the old one, or more technologically progressive, should we not continue to value the beautifully irrational or delightfully human elements of the old system? Kavalerov, for all of his unenviable qualities, lays out a ridiculous but nevertheless persuasive case that the Revolution, for all its glory, has jettisoned some of the most sublime aspects of the human experience.

Kavalerov's chief complaint is that revolutionary logic has overthrown the reign of human emotions. "The buttercup of pity, the lizard of ambition, the snake of jealousy--these flora and fauna must be driven out of the new man's heart." Kavalerov laments this extinction. As Kavalerov melodramatically complains, "I have been given the honor of conducting the last parade of old-fashioned human passions..."Emotions apparently have something to offer men and women, though he doesn't quite say what. Perhaps they make life more beautiful, perhaps they simply make life more varied and interesting.

It's interesting to note that Kavlerov mourns the defeat of human emotions but seems to hold out the possibility that they will take their revenge on the new order of things. Is it possible to vanquish that which makes us truly human, no matter how reasonable the cause? In 1927 Russia communism must have felt fragile indeed. The Revolution was only a decade old; the Civil War less than that; and Lenin was dead and gone. Notwithstanding the optimism and certainty of the Bolsheviks, many Russians still remembered pre-revolutionary Russia. Conspiracies and revolts were not out of the question. Olesha, although a revolutionary writer, seems to suggest that a backlash might still succeed in overturning the Bolshevik regime. "...I want to gather a multitude around me. So that I have a choice and can choose the best, the most vivid of them, to form a shock troop, sort of a...shock troop of emotions." "Yes, this is a conspiracy of emotions, a peaceful uprising. A peaceful demonstration of emotions."

In the end, Envy isn't really about Kavalerov's envy of Babichev. Rather, it's about the envy of one whole generation of Russians, or one historical epoch even, for another. Even as new Soviet citizens recognized that the absurdly atavistic Old Regime had been flung, in Trotsky's words, onto the "ash heap of history," these same Soviet citizens knew that something valuable had inevitably been lost in that ash heap. Wasn't there a part of every ethnically Russian Soviet citizen--the Russian part perhaps--that envied the future itself? Kavalerov's speech sums up this ambivalent feeling about Bolshevik progress: "Everything flows from this, the new era, everything is drawn to it, it will get the best gifts and exclamations. I love it, this world that's coming toward me, more than life, I worship it and hate it with every fiber of my being! I sob, tears gush from my eyes, but I want to poke my fingers in its clothes and rip. Don't outshine me! Don't take away what might have belonged to me!"

Anxiety, Khrushchev, and the 1950s

2011-05-25T17:43:00.000-05:00

My anxiety is almost always related to money. Since my father had a stable job and my parents never worried about how they’d pay the mortgage, I don’t know how or why I came to worry so much about money. Perhaps my fear of poverty can be linked on some level to my mother’s cancer. As she grew sicker, did I conflate the existential fear of being left alone with the more mundane fear of facing economic destitution? However unrealistic that fear of poverty might have been, it was would have been easier to confront that then the approaching death of my mother.

At age 16 I got my first job as a waiter. I remember spreading out the tip money on the bed, tangible reminder that I was, at least on one level, safe and sound. As I grew older, I developed a neurotic attachment to money. I joked that I could sniff out the net worth of anybody, and I developed a theory of economic valuation and labeled it the “kidnapping theorem.” If you want to know how much somebody is truly worth, you have to calculate how much money friends and family would part with in order to get them back.

Chekhov divided his life into two parts: in the first part, he was beaten; in the second part, he wasn’t. Similarly, I divide my life into two parts: in the first part, I had a problem with economic production; in the second part, I had a problem with economic consumption. At first, my jobs as a waiter, production assistant in Hollywood, graduate assistant and adjunct professor, could barely sustain my membership in the middle class. This was a problem with economic production.

Eventually, I emerged from the long shadow of graduate school and gained my first full-time professional jobs. At last, I made a reasonable salary and had access to healthcare and other benefits. Even so, I felt like an East German at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I had access to the labor market, but I also had years of pent up consumer demand. All at once, I felt like I needed to placate what Zizek once called a “plague” of previously dormant consumerist fantasies. More than that, I needed to shoulder the burdens of a bourgeois citizen, so I took lower-paid colleagues out to lunch, bought wedding gifts for friends, and started a family. Whether in the production or consumption phase of my life, I remained anxious about money.

There are essentially two types of people in the world, savers and spenders, by passing through the two phases of my life, I now identify with both. When I earned almost no money, I hoarded what I did make, and felt an almost sensual satisfaction in seeing my modest bank account grow. Although a gentle breeze of misfortunate would have erased my savings from the face of the Earth, I took pride in the account, only fretting that it wouldn’t be enough to ward of ill fortune. Now, taught by others, I realize that I am also a consumer, someone who makes money but derives little satisfaction from anything other than spending. Is it better to be a saver than a spender? I’m not sure. I suspect that they are both the products of a different kind of anxiety. We either decide to try to ward off death by accumulating cash, or we make a play for eternity by buying our way into the existential insulation that things seem to provide.

I am thinking about the nature of anxiety because I’ve just read Peter Carlson’s book, K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushche, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist. K Blows His Top takes us into the heart of America in the 1950s, when, perhaps ironically, America suffered from terrific existential anxiety in the midst of unparalleled economic prosperity and technological progress. Of course, America really was on the edge of a potential nuclear abyss. So there was real rather than neurotic cause for concern. Be this as it may, America has almost always been on the verge of some sort of millennial or eschatological collapse, and we’ve always had enemies who seemed to threaten our existence on at least a political or ideological level.

The 1950s were a unique age, and might have been even without the invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons. We had triumphed spectacularly over the Germans and Japanese, but we still seemed to be powerless in the face of socialist revolution and decolonization. Ignoring our suburban paradises, the world seemed to be appalled by us. Khrushchev, in his three visits to the United States during this period, encapsulated the Janis face of 1950s America. The witty, mercurial dictator pointed to Sputnik, beat his show at the U.N., and promised to bury us. We responded truculently, but the truculence of ordinary Americans who hated Communism masked a deep vein of insecurity. We worried about Khrushchev’s countless quips about the size and range of his missile armada. We also worried that he might have a point when he said that “we”—and he meant white America--weren’t that popular in China, Cuba, the Congo, Harlem, or the Deep South.

It is a truism to say that Khrushchev was motivated by profound insecurity. He was a peasant from a still-developing country who had personally assented to heinous crimes against his own people. He had much to be embarrassed about. But Khrushchev, neurotic genius that he was, was no more neurotic than the country he was visiting. We were, after all, the home of puritan farmers as well as Hollywood decadence; the land of segregation as well as liberty.

The Falseness of Happy Endings

2011-05-24T19:42:00.032-05:00

"People often die. We all do. I am warning you. This fact surfaced in literature."

You're sitting alone on a park bench on a perfect day thinking that the world is extraordinarily simple. There's the sky, the grass, and you. But you lay your head down to look at the sky and notice a plane passing overhead. Why is that plane there? Where is it going? How many passengers are on board and where are they each, separately, headed? You avert your gaze but notice a tree between you and the airplane. How old is the tree? Is it younger or older than the park? How long will it continue to live? There's a bug on your arm. Does it know it's on your arm? Is it happy there? There's a bag stuck in the tree. Who lost that bag? What did the bag hold? You put these questions--all of them--aside but are immediately confronted by the sound of a dog barking and the happy screams of children who are playing in the park nearby. Does the dog have a story? Do the children? You can't answer those questions; you haven't got the time. For two flaneurs meander past you, discussing something extraordinarily complex and meaningful. One of them is corpulent. Why can't he get his weight under control? Perhaps he's got a medical condition; perhaps he's greedy. To whom or what should you address yourself? The park is alive with colors, smells, sounds, signs, words, objects, movements, and meanings.

Even in its simplest form, the world is complex. It's plot, and only plot, that pins it down and holds it together. We therefore owe a lot to our storytellers and myth-makers, the writers and novelists who help us to make sense of the chaotic world. We owe almost as much to the literary theorists who help us to make sense of the plot-makers. Thank Viktor Shklovsky, the Soviet novelist and literary theorist who penned The Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot in his final years. Shlovsky's treatise on the relationship between plot and creative genius isn't always easy to follow. But it does point the way toward a clearer understanding of the genius of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Cervantes, Pushkin, Boccaccio and others in the Russian and Western Canon.

What, specifically, does Shklovsky have to say about plot? I'm not sure I'm equipped to say. What fascinates me is the way in which Shklovsky sets out to describe creative genius by demonstrating it, exemplifying it. It's as if he wants to tell us that authors such as Tolstoy, the greatest "commander-in-chief of plot," pick up the old but strangely invisible threads of plot and begin to improvise, jazz-like, on the old themes. Tolstoy understands his literary inheritance on a very deep level, but this understanding somehow allows him to transcend it. The result is new avenues to truth, new doors of perception.

Shklovsky explains all this by showing rather than telling his readers that art, even literary criticism, is open-ended, unexpected, lively, and recursive. Shlovsky's writing, like the writing he describes, is brilliant, complex, contradictory, highly original, and intent on the search for meaning rather than its polished presentation.

Here are just a few of his epigrams:

Crossing the sea that is Lev Tolstoy is not an experience that can be explained in brief.

He said that everybody is guilty and then it turned out that nobody was at fault.

Heaven, as Mark Twain guessed, was a boring place. It was overcrowded.

She lived in the land of the happy.

In Hadji Murad, in the Caucacus, the Chechen says: The rope should be long, the speech--short.

He wrote Hadji Murad all his life. He wrote it better each time. More poetically.

Theirs was a compassionate generation. They felt the falseness of happy endings.

But it helped them as much as a funeral service helps a dead man.

Humankind in the multiplicity of its fate is typecast in contradictory ways, that's the chief method of developing a character. The blacksmith in Pushkin (in Dubrovsky) locks the door of a burning house; then the same blacksmith risks his life to save a cat on the roof.

Sancho Panzo used to say how he preferred to hear the answer first and then the riddle.

Russian literature, great literature, doesn't have endings.

According to rumors, even geniuses, more than others, depend on the very traditions they're violating, they depend on the choice of words, the choice of denouements.

There are as many morals as there are stars in the sky.

The infant has no memory. The infant, Tolstoy said, "is used to the eternity."

The history of literature is the history of the search for heroes.

[Tolstoy] points out that the death of one hero transfers are interest to other heroes.

Tolstoy teaches us that events exist before they are discovered.

Trotsky in Mexico

2011-05-19T15:46:00.013-05:00

The case of Trotsky decline and fall has been told many times, and why not? The story is one of the most compelling ones of modern history. Leon Trotsky, one of the most gifted and talented men of the twentieth century, was one of the most influential men of both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions, to say nothing of the Russian Civil War, which he personally helped to bring to a close as Commissar of War and military chieftain of the Red Army. Although a Menshevik before the October Revolution, Trotsky quickly became the most visible Bolshevik leader during the 1917 insurrection, the principle lieutenant of Lenin.

Trotsky’s career as an agitator, revolutionary hero, and finally Politburo member has been well documented by Isaac Duetcher and others. It’s a tragic story insofar as Trotsky’s dynamism, personal courage, revolutionary fame, intellectual prowess, and oratorical gifts, were ultimately no match for Stalin’s political gifts and bloodthirsty tenacity. However, as Bertrand Patenaude, author of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, makes clear: Trotsky never really had a chance. Notwithstanding his public grandeur and ability to perform heroic feats in a revolutionary context, Lenin’s right hand man had severe limitations when it came to factional struggle. He could be vain, haughty, inflexible, and unfriendly—utterly incapable of forming political groups or even maintaining many close friendships. His past as a European revolutionary won him few friends among the Party’s rank and file, most of whom—and especially those promoted by Stalin--had never left Russia. Neither Trotsky’s Jewish ethnicity nor his fetish for Party unity helped him either. Patenaude ascribes this fetish—which prevented him from trying to make any overt bids for personal power--to Trotsky’s attempt to overcome his well-known past as a Menshevik.

Trotsky’s defeat at the hands of Stalin may therefore have been foreordained. What’s perhaps more interesting is the way he operated in exile. Banished from Russia, Trotsky did some things extremely well, and failed at others. Until his death at the hands of Stalin’s assassin in 1940, Trotsky maintained an extraordinarily vigorous schedule as a professional revolutionary and intellectual. His historical and autobiographical writing were inspired. His political analysis was sometimes trenchant (he predicted that Nazi Germany and Communist Russia would become temporary allies), sometimes convoluted--twisted by the strange imperative of defending the Soviet Union as a proletarian state while attacking Stalinism, the historical manifestation of bureaucratic degeneration. His attempts to form a new political order—a Fourth International—hampered by his uneven interpersonal skills and limited organizational capacities as well as by his political isolation in exile.

Nothing about Trotsky’s years in exile are as interesting as his time in Mexico. In Mexico, Trotsky learned of the disappearance of a beloved son, held an affair with Frida Kahlo right under the nose of his benefactor, Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, and contested Stalin’s Show Trials by means of the Dewey Commission and a relentless series of articles, speeches, and press releases. His time in Mexico revealed all of the celebrity’s strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, Trotsky managed the affairs of the Fourth International ineptly, alienating many of his American followers by ideological blindness and interpersonal insensitivity. On the other hand, Trotsky continued to fight Stalinism and Nazism (but also liberal democracy of course) even as he was forced to live a highly regimented and restricted life due to the constant threat of political assassination at the hands of the GPU or even the Mexican Communist Party and its allies.

The threat to Trotsky’s personal safety, as well as that of his wife and grandson, was always very real, if not always believed by his myriad political traducers. Near the end of his life, Trotsky almost fell victim to a paramilitary assault led by the famous muralist Siquieros. In retrospect, it seems almost incredible that Trotsky’s fairly unprofessional security regime could have protected him for so long. One wonders why Stalin didn’t kill him earlier, although Patenaude seems at one point in the text to allow for the possibility that at some point Stalin may have tolerated a living Trotsky to act as scapegoat for everything that went wrong in Communist Russia or abroad.

In the end, Trotsky died courageously, true to his reputation as a man of courage and action. Struck in the head with an icepick by his alleged friend, Jacson, Trotsky cried out and did battle with his assailant. Sadly, the attacker outlived his time in a Mexican jail and eventually found his way to the Soviet Union, where he was rewarded in secrecy for his treachery. The talented Siquieros too outlived his act of cowardice, even today known to the world as a revolutionary artist of the highest order.

Of course, Trotsky is no innocent martyr. He took the sins of October to his grave. As Patenaude remarks, in his last days he protested against the American government for presuming to meddle in his personal affairs, appalled at the thought that a mighty state might take an intrusive interest in the personal affairs of a private individual. One of the leading architects of the Soviet police state saw no irony in his protest. Trotsky’s legacy was at least partially redeemed by his wife, who outlived him by twenty years. Over time, and despite Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union—even in its attack on Finland—Natalia, Trotsky’s great love, defected from Trotskyism, denouncing the Soviet Union and its many client states in Eastern Europe in the process.

Everyday Stalinism

2011-05-19T15:35:00.004-05:00

Every ordinary office environment is a window into Soviet political despotism and tyranny. Historians spend an inordinate amount of time asking why radical political ideas associated with liberty and egalitarianism degenerated into political violence and Stalinist terror. But this misses the point: human nature is the natural ally of unmitigated despotism.

Not all men and women are necessarily potential tyrants in the making; but, if given the chance to be political leaders in an undemocratic government, surely one out of every ten office bosses—the despotic tenth to misquote DuBois—has the capacity to set up show trials, launch political purges, and exile or assassinate enemies. Think of that greatest of all office movies, Glenngary Glenn Ross. As Alec Baldwin arrives from “downtown” he strides into the office to terrorize and humiliate his subordinates, and demands that the seasoned salesman played by Jack Lemon put his coffee down, because coffee is reserved “for closers.” Lemon and the rest of the sales staff are incredulous, yet Baldwin proceeds to berate them. “You think I am fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.” In fact, Baldwin tells his hard-working crew of flim-flam men that they’re all fired, but have one week to try to sell enough bogus properties to redeem to regain their jobs.

The film is filled with similar scenes of unbridled masculinity and sadistic insults. Al Pacino’s brazen attack on his weakened supervisor his typical: “Who ever told you that you could work with men?” Kevin Spacey, chastened by his star salesman, has no reply whatsoever. He’s utterly defeated. His only recourse will be to eventually take pleasure in the fact that another salesman, Jack Lemmon, is weaker than he is, made vulnerable despite years of experience, by falling sales figures and a sick daughter who requires care and financial support.

The office, everywhere and at all times, is a playground for the powerful. Why did Bolshevism degenerate into Stalinism? Why did Stalin overcome his rivals? Why was he allowed to create ever more outlandish schemes for disciplining his party and the nation as a whole? Did Stalin suffer from some form of degenerative mental condition that led him to kills friends as well as enemies on a hitherto unimagined scale? These questions are beside the point. To intentionally misquote what a movie producer told a screenwriter in the movie, Barton Fink, we might say the following: “You think you’re the only Stalin around here? I have twenty Stalins on staff.”

Indeed, every office space houses a plethora of hidden dictators, waiting only for the opportunity to thwart conspiracies or anything that even smacks of public opinion or democratic sentiment. More than this, every office houses dozens of potential Molotovs, sycophants ready to praise and support the worst tyrannical tendencies of the newly powerful. If it seems hard to imagine that you’ve overlooked a potential dictator in your own tranquil office of Dilbert cartoons and cat calendars, consider this: not even Stalin was Stalin at first. In fact, if it seems hard to believe that Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamanev and the others overlooked Stalin’s worst tendencies, take comfort in the fact that they weren’t really there. While Lenin’s last testament shows that he was alert to Stalin’s political power and propensity to rudeness, Stalin was generally seen to be a capable and even moderate “team player,” often the most reasonable person in the room. It’s just that over time Stalin gained more power, and came to realize that there were no longer any checks to his own ability to reorder the political world to suit his own neuroses, no matter how fanciful.

Of course, many office leaders terrorize those around them, but even so, they’re brutality is usually tempered by fear: fear of potential lawsuits, whistle-blowers, or governmental or corporate scrutiny. It’s nice to eliminate rivals without cause, but why risk one’s own job security or retirement benefits if there’s a shadow of a chance that the victim will be able to retaliate? But, given the chance that Stalin had, to mete out extreme punishments without any fear of negative consequences, what petty office dictator wouldn’t launch a bloody purge or two?

Shkolvsky on Authentic Love

2011-05-18T06:28:00.034-05:00

"Life tailors us for a certain person and laughs when we are drawn to a person unable to love us."

"My fate was completely predetermined. But everything might have been different."

Heidegger and the existentialists have something to teach us about love. Love is linked to authenticity. At first, we fall in love, but in a superficial, inauthentic way. We don't realize how random the process of linking our lives to the lives of others can be. We are attracted to someone and make ourselves believe that we could never have loved anyone else. But this isn't true. We might just as easily have fallen for the charms of a thousand other people. Over time, if we're honest and brave enough to deal with this existential fact, we admit that love is not blind but, worse than that, arbitrary. At first, this knowledge terrifies us: am I really in love with this person in front of me, or did I fall into this state by happenstance? In the end, if we're courageous enough, we accept or even embrace the fact that we can love a woman passionately even in the knowledge that there are fifty-seven other women on E-Harmony who fit our search criteria equally well.

The whole delusion of love reminds one of Heidegger's theory that most of us have never examined the lives we live and therefore live inauthentically. A small subset of the human race eventually awakes to the fact that our truest selves have been artificially constructed, the product of chance rather than choice. Notwithstanding our most cherished desires, we realize upon examination that we inherit our lives rather than make them. In response to this realization of the "given" nature of our personal existential dilemma, we make some effort to outrun or escape fate. We move to other states, adopt artificial music tastes, renounce familial political or religious affiliations, and throw ourselves into relationships that seem, at least initially, to be unwise or surprising--the lifestyle equivalent of wildly waiving one's arms in the air to prove that nothing has been foretold, nothing is preordained. Eventually, the attempt to escape from the arms of fate fails. And we recognize this failure. However, we don't merely return to our original, unexamined lives. We now live these lives bravely and honestly, with the sometimes awkward knowledge that our lives are not purely the product of our own heroic freedom.

Vicktor Shklovsky's epistolary novel, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, touches upon the artificial nature of love. Shlovsky, one of the Soviet Union's best literary theorists, wrote Zoo as testimony to an unrequited love. The book is filled with aphorisms by this master stylist.

I have wound my whole life around you.

I need you you; you know how to bring me out of myself.

Your love may be great, but it's far from joyful.

Foxes have their holes, the prisoner is given a cot, the knife sleeps in the scabbard, but you had nowhere to lay your head.

The Roman soldiers who pierced the hands of Christ are no more guilty than the nails. All the same, the crucified feel much pain.

Sick birds don't like to be watched.

And it is easy to be cruel--one need only not love.

The stag uses its antlers in combat, the nightingale does not sing in vain, but our books avail us nothing. This wound will not heal.

Moving diagonally like a knight, I have intersected your life.

When I was not yet thirty and did not yet know loneliness..

I thought Grzhebin cruel for having gulped down so much Russian literature.

...like a rejected suitor who ruins himself buying flowers to turn the room of his unresponsive beloved into a flower shop and who admires this absurdity.

Don't be surprised, Alya, we are all capable of raving--those of us who really live.

There is no harm in loving.

Love Alya, but not your love of her.

When you've wanted a certain dress for a long time, it doesn't pay to buy it--you've memorized it to tatters.

Naturally a thing has only itself to blame if it doesn't know how to become loved.

Here I sit, as much in love as any telegraph operator.

I sit here with my malady; I think about you, about automobiles. (The combination helps.)

We were in a hurry to get life in our clutches. But we lacked the necessary words; we thought you could grasp a woman like a thing--by the handle.

It's better to live all of life to the sound of a guitar.

I just don't care. I know one thing: You won't even put my letter in the basket on the right side of your bed.

For me, Berlin is encircled by your name.

Don't be surprised when I cry out--even when you're not hurting me.

We talked to each other about many things, all of them bitter.

Life is hard for every man who loves a woman or his trade.

She has a porcelain face, with eyelashes so big that they drag down her lids. She can slam them shut, like the doors of safes.

I was bound to be broken while abroad and I found myself a love to do the job.

I lay at your feet like a rug, Alya!

You write about me--for yourself; I write about myself--for you.

This book is being written for you, Alya; writing it is physically painful.

Set my words free, Alya, so they can come to you like dogs to their master and curl up at your feet.

She is the only island for you in your life. From her there is no turning back for you. Only around her does the sea have color.

I want to break into pieces and scatter throughout the city the fact that I love you. If only I knew how!

To live in any real way is painful.

Quit writing about "how, how, how much you love me," because at the third "how much" I think about something else.

And yet, at this moment, an enormous, almost authentic moon is peering into my window.

The past is no more. The circles, rings of love, have receded, moving toward the shore.

If I had owned an extra suit, I would never have come to grief.

The stud (Anatol Kuragin) is not destined for unsuccessful love affairs. His path is strewn with roses; only utter exhaustion can terminate his romances.

I am very sentimental, Alya. That's because I take life seriously.

It seemed to me that, of the two of us, probably only one was human.

It's all a question of "how much." All my letters are about "how much" I love you.

Tunisian Deserter

2011-05-08T13:42:00.063-05:00

The Russian Revolution was of course a unique historical event but all revolutions have something in common, if only a certain demonic energy or a natural rhythm or etiology of revolt. Recently a North African friend told me about her indirect experience with contemporary revolution. She said that the Tunisian Revolution signified the overthrow of boredom as much as it signified the triumph of a new type of politics or economics. Under a dictator who rules for decades, one no longer expects that one day will be different than the next. The experience, I imagine, is like living in Phoenix, Arizona: you may well be comfortable with sun and heat, but you can't be anything other than bored when you wake up on a Saturday morning and stroll outside to see a perfectly blue sky. For better or worse, one day is exactly like the next.

So, among other things, revolution represents an end to boredom. Of course, when my Tunisian friend expresses her confidence in the future, and joy about the birth of a new, democratic order in her homeland, I cannot help but to think about how happy almost everybody seemed to be when the Provisional Government first took power in Russia, or indeed how happy almost all Iranians were when the Shah first fled the country. The point, it would seem, is that revolutions are unpredictable, or worse than that: they inevitably degenerate into violence and radicalism. Or do they? We do well to remember that we were all revolutionaries at some point. The British, the French, the Americans, the Latin Americans---what people doesn't owe its allegiance to a revolutionary moment of some sort?

Today I thought about the Tunisian Revolution when watching the 1933 sound film, Deserter. Deserter, set in Hamburg amidst one of the worst strikes in Wiemar Germany's tragic history, attempts to document just how truly international the Bolshevik Revolution was meant to be. In its early sequences we see a poor German worker attempting to steal a prime cut of meat from a bourgeois restaurant table. Caught in the act, he flees the scene, hounded by angry bourgeois citizens and policemen. Faced with either the crowd's justice, or his own bleak plight as a proletarian, he chooses to commit suicide by throwing himself into a busy street. Soon he's nothing more than a bloody stain on the street, an inconvenience to the rich who are forced to pause momentarily in their open-air cars to allow for the clean-up.

The man's act of desperation symbolizes the revolutionary moment in Germany, just as a poor Tunisian man's self-immolation in the face of adversity and corruption symbolized the revolutionary moment there just a few months ago. Like Gladwell's immensely overrated work, The Tipping Point, one struggles to understand just what it is that turns the slings and arrows of everyday dictatorship into something so intolerable that self-immolation begins to seem like a rational act as opposed to the bizarre act of a madman.

Deserter, originally designed to be a product of collaboration between Bolshevik Russia and Social Democrats in Germany, is about a long and grueling German strike at the shipyards. It's the usual story of strike breakers, fat capitalists, and brutal policemen engaged in a conspiracy to keep hard-working proletarians from enjoying the fruit of their own labor. Opposed to the forces of reaction are the customary heroes of labor, including a feisty and beautiful woman who passes out copies of the Red Courier in spite of police harassment. The twist is that one man, the film's hero, "deserts" the cause of the strikers. Underwhelmed by the logic of class struggle or unconvinced that he bears personal responsibility for the victory of the strikers, one man, Karl Renn, abandons the strikers to their fate at the hands of armed police and at least one tank. Ashamed of his failure to do his duty, the strike council decides to send him (as three other workers who are unable to physically help the cause) on a journey to the Soviet Union to accompany a ship the German workers have constructed.

Once in the Soviet Union, Karl quickly realizes that he hasn't fully understand the world in which he lives. In Russia, Karl and the other German workers see an enthusiastic, healthy, and happy Russian citizenry celebrating a Red Army parade and welcoming them to the country. Scenes of Russian industrial power and mechanized processes imply that Karl is caught up with the romance of Russian economic dynamism. In any case, Karl begins to take note of the international nature of the class struggle. Sensing that he has much to learn from the one nation on earth where the proletariat have taken charge of the mechanisms of power, Karl volunteers his technical expertise to work in a Russian factory. Once there, he makes a name for himself by working hard to help his comrades to achieve their difficult production quotas.

It's unnerving to see just how accurately the film propaganda mirrors what actually took place in the Stalin era. Although Karl is ultimately successful in helping his Russian colleagues to increase production by a factor of 350 percent in 30 days, the film seems to suggest just how insane this production goal or similar goals must have been. The diesel factory montage shows pistons moving feverishly, workers scuttling from one section of the factory to another sweat pouring down their faces, and pressure gauge arrows moving excitedly.

The film also features workers who engaged in self-criticism over the pace of work. Capitalist bosses are not necessary in Communist Russia: when the fate of a proletarian nation is at stake, the production quota simply must be met. We know from history, the five year plans were a recipe for industrial confusion and human disaster. If one looks closely at the factory scenes in this film, one can almost sense the tragedy of industrialization under Stalin. In Communist Russia, work was the equivalent of warfare. It mattered not how many people suffered or died to meet the nation's industrial objectives. And if failure occurred--and how could it not in such a frenetic rush?--then saboteurs must be to blame.

Notwithstanding the madness of Russian-style industrialization, Karl is impressed by what he sees. A portrait of Lenin watches over his deliberations about his future and he ultimately returns to Germany as an enthusiastic supporter of the international class struggle with few doubts about the righteousness of his cause or the inevitability of ultimate victory. Karl has seen the future--the Soviet Union--and it works.

Filming the Myth of October

2011-05-08T10:26:00.036-05:00

Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1927 silent film, The End of St. Petersburg, is a masterful telling of the central myth of the October Revolution. It begins, where Russia begins, amidst the foil of the new revolutionary order: the dirty, squalid peasant countryside. Here we see poverty, lethargy, a dust storm, a dying mother, field laborers, and a baby who will grow up poor and someday need to move to the city in order to survive.

After getting a glimpse of the sickle, Pudovkin takes us to see the hammer: the factories of St. Peterburg. In the city, we see smoke, hard working, sweating proletarians, and the symbols of late Tsarism, including monumental architecture, the statue of the Bronze Horseman, slum housing for the working class, a bustling stock market, and wealthy and corpulent shareholders.

In old Russia, capitalists are fat and idle, and their markets dynamic but inhuman, methodical, greedy, and impersonal. In contrast, St. Petersburg's workers are strong, hard-working, muscular, and action-oriented. Yet the personal lives of the lives of workers are also circumscribed by poverty, wage slavery, and political oppression. In the tenements, clothes are perpetually drying on the clotheslines, tenement rooms are persistently crowded, dark,[ and windowless, and strike breakers are always at hand to quash labor unrest.

When the rural boy, now turned man, arrives in St. Petersburg looking for work, he's taken in by folk from his village who have migrated to the city previously. Gradually, the naive young man figures out that the system is stacked against ordinary men like him, and that the police, factory owners and bosses, members of the legal caste, and scabs collude to keep working men in brutal circumstances.

The director next takes his audience on a tour de horizon of the First World War, contrasting the enthusiasm of the governing classes with the spectacular suffering of ordinary soldiers. Following Lenin's reasoning, war in general is the product of vampiric capitalist machinations, designed to increase profits while distracting workers from their own class interests.

Eventually, the war leads to the first phase of the Revolution, but the director is completely unsympathetic to the Provisional Government, which maintains the war effort for the benefit of the propertied classes. Scenes of war dead in the flooded trenches are interspersed with scenes of happy bourgeois toasting the fall of the tsar and the rise of the bourgeois phase of the revolution. And Kerensky, leader of the coalition government, is portrayed, not without historical evidence, as something of a clown. He's isolated, attempting to use dramatic rhetoric alone--theater essentially-- to convince soldiers to overrule their own interests to quash the Bolshevik insurrection. They resist the temptation to fire on their brothers and instead march on the Winter Palace.

The movie concludes with the triumph of the revolutionaries, as one woman (apparently the same woman who starred in Pudovkin's Mother) marches through the cold, majestic Winter Palace to find her husband, a worker, soldier, and loyal Communist. The Revolution has transformed this woman who, while originally only immersed in a private struggle to help protect her immediate family, has recently begun to help comrades engaged in revolutionary struggle. And of course the Revolution has transformed ath city itself, which has been reborn as Leningrad. Brief but real historical of Lenin's oratory helps to reinforce his presence in this film which was, according to a writer for the Sense of Cinema, commissioned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Radicalism: It's a Good Thing

2011-05-04T21:12:00.017-05:00

Do we get closer or farther from the truth over time? Does time give us the benefit of perspective or the handicap of distance? Revolution in Russia, As Reported by the New York Tribuine and the New York Herald, 1894- 1921, suggests that historiography is overrated. In truth, contemporary American reporters, for all of their ideological and national bias, seem to have gotten the Revolution right on most counts. The American press understood the importance of the Revolution, and also seemed to had a reasonable good grasp of its component parts as they unfolded in real time.

Of course, not until the Civil War came to an end did foreign observers know whether or not the Bolsheviks would ultimately triumph over their diverse opponents, who included socialists, anarchists, tsarists, liberals, Germans, Poles, Japanese, Ukrainian nationalists, and so many others. Even so, they knew who Lenin and Trotsky were, and how they came to power. As Edward Pearlstein's edited volume of New York reporting on the Revolution makes clear, Americans knew that the Bolsheviks were not, as modern historians often suggest, the unlikely beneficiaries of a chaotic and unpredictable situation. Instead, they were the actors who were best suited to the extraordinary times in which Russians found themselves. Although they represented a tiny part of the Russian political spectrum, they had some tremendous political advantages. They were disciplined, organized, well-lead, ruthless, geographically concentrated, and closely allied with the ordinary soldiers and workers who had the power to determine the fate of the Revolution. Or, to put matters differently, in an unrelentingly radical situation, only a radical party could hope to survive.

So, although Lenin's decision to collaborate with the German government in order to arrive in St. Petersburg would ordinarily have severely compromised his political reputation, in turbulent, miserable, war-weary Russia, it was Lenin's ability to articulate a totally novel future for the country that mattered most. Whatever disadvantages Bolsheviks labored under, they wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the past. Most concretely, this meant that Bolsheviks advocated radical land reform and an immediate end to the war. But more generically, this meant that the Bolsheviks could say to the country that they alone understood just how completely the ancien regime had failed. Better to start over with a new and alien political party and economic philosophy, than to adopt any part of the old way of doing business.

Militant Bolshevik Atheists

2011-04-08T11:50:00.014-05:00

As mentioned previously, Alexander Yakovlev's diatribe against Bolshevism, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, breaks down the Soviet Union's crimes against humanity in the following categories: the assault on childhood, Jews, intellectuals, fellow travelers, peasants, and the clergy. With respect to the clergy, Yakovlev succinctly outlines his case against the Bolsheviks, a case which is more systematically investigated in another book, The Plot to Kill God.

The attack against the Church was brutal and opened as early as 1918 when forty-seven clergymen in the Yekaterinburg diocese were shot, axed to death, or drowned. As the Civil War raged, scores of Church leaders were murdered, and often in unspeakable ways. Some clergymen were frozen in ice water, others castrated. In some cases, the churchmen were placed into boiling water, burned, strangled, scalped, tied to paddle-wheels, or even crucified, with the naked corpses sometimes being strung up on trees as a gruesome message to other would-be religious leaders. According to Yakovlev, 3,000 priests were killed in 1918 alone, and a great many of these murders occurred with deliberate religious sacrilege. The murders were sometimes spontaneously conceived by local communists, but Lenin directly encouraged the bloodshed, on one occasion asking that a religious holiday celebration be suppressed by violence.

In 1919, the Bolsheviks toyed with the idea of establishing a Red Church, a version of the traditional church that would be loyal to the Communist Party and the goals of the Revolution. But the effort failed, largely because Soviet ideology was so vehemently anti-religious. The assault on religion also took the form of a large-scale confiscation of church property in 1922, which had predictably disastrous consequences for Russia's cultural and historical heritage. In the end, 2.5 billion was stolen from the Church, but the money never went to famine relief as promised. That same year, the Church's patriarch was arrested, allegedly for fomenting rebellion. 32 archbishops and metropolitans were executed in that year. Patriarch Tikhon ultimately died in the purges of 1937.

The Communist Party's war on religion was formalized with the creation of the Union of Militant Atheists as well as the Degliryal society, which presided over actual five-year plans for atheism. The Soviet government also attacked religious bodies--including Islamic and pagan ones--by implementing draconian taxes on religious bodies, and policies related to collectivization, purges, urban planning and building, and ethnic displacement. Famously, the war against religion was relaxed during World War II, although Stalin's end came in the midst of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the 1960s, anti-religious persecution resumed, unaffected by the so-called Thaw.

Rachel Polonsky's Russian Obsession

2011-04-04T20:09:00.023-05:00

Rachel Polonsky's book, Molotov's Magic Lantern, is a long series of poetical reflections on the nature of Russian leaders, artists, places, and ideas. Here are just a few quotations drawn from the book. Note that her own prose is almost as magical as that of the poets and writers she quotes so liberally and admires so greatly. She seems to capture the essence of the Russophile obsession and bibliophilia that pervades this blog. Here are a few gems in Polonsky's own words:

"Is there a set of secret maps to be found among a person's books, a way through the fortifications of the self?"

"Old books are objects of a mysterious and compulsive kind of desire, fed by a stubborn intuition that the past might yield its secrets to the touch, as though some further meaning or spirit dwells in their very matter."

"Each place I have explored has beckoned me towards the next, toward some further arrangement of landscape, politics and myth, which I have reassembled in this book of travels. All my expeditions have been half-blind shadowings of the pursuits of others, sometimes tracing lines leading to places of exile, quest or crime..."

"Thinking about the meaning of the scene on the staircase, I sense that this house was not merely a setting for history, but a player in the drama. These apartments were velvet cases fashioned for the families of the bourgeoisie, for love and peace and the accumulation of possessions."

"They register the fear of all those who face the prospect or the memory of years spent over books: the fear that their reading might be no more than a sterile game, an escape from life, leading nowhere, as thought dissolves to nothing with the passing of time."

"In the intimate relationship of ownership, a person lives inside his possessions, makes a dwelling place for his spirit."

"The nonreading of books, as Benjamin said, is characteristic of collectors, who can become invalids if they lose their books and, in order to acquire them, can easily turn into criminals."

"A weary impatience with the unknowability of other people is sometimes a characteristic of the bibliophile, who loves with fervor publication dates and catalog numbers, all the categories of exact knowledge that a book can be made to represent.."

"In a city dizzy with fashion, this library is a carnival of anti-fashion."

Perhaps Polonsky is on to something about why I love books so dearly. Perhaps book collecting is a mild form of Asperger's syndrome or another kind of mental dysfunction. Certainly reading in general draws one away from one's social obligations or dating opportunities. How much worse is it to collect books one doesn't even have time to read? What does it signify, especially in the age of the Kindle, when one fills every nook and cranny of a home with unread books on arcane subjects? Polonsky's quotations offer many convincing explanations for the mania, but I am convinced that book collecting is ultimately related to a fear of mortality. For somehow it seems unlikely that we will die before we have a chance to complete the books we've purchased. So if we purchase enough books to last us the next fifty years, surely the Grim Reaper will, out of respect to learning if nothing else, be patient and hold off on executing his appointed task.

Before I finish this post, let me just cite a few random passages Polonsky quotes in her adventures through Russian time and space:

"After all, an entire nation consists only of certain isolated incidents, does it not?" Dostoevsky from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.

"Everywhere the soul of Onegin

Involuntarily reveals itself,

Whether by a brief word, by a cross

Or by a question mark..." Pushkin.

"A body has been given to me, what am I do to do with it?

So single and so my own?" Osip Mandelstam from Stone.

"Ask me my biography and I will tell you the books I've read." Osip Mandelstam from a letter.

"You know, Moscovites are a people who, more than any other, like to talk about their city--the streets, the ice rinks, the houses, the Moscow River.." Varlam Shalamov from the short story, "Dry Ration."

"The state is not pure spirit." Leon Trotsky.

Mankind will leap from "the kind of necessity" to the "kingdom of freedom" where the "extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself." Frederich Engels.

Socialists believe that historical materialism "leads inevitably to the crumbling away of historical reality." Berdyaev. The Meaning of History.

Molotov Meets Chekhov

2011-04-01T06:51:00.004-05:00

I am not sure when I first decided to go to graduate school to get a master’s degree in history. But it must have happened when I was waiting tables in Washington, D.C.. Perhaps the moment of crisis came when I was so burned out on waiting tables that I actually followed a smug customer out into the street to inquire whether it was on account of poor service that I had been left no tip on a bill of several hundred dollars.

Of course, as a dean of arts and sciences at a community college, I still have occasion to use my experience as a waiter in my day-to-day life. For instance, just yesterday I apologized to an esteemed colleague, a biology faculty member, for not giving her more information about a decision I had made the previous week. What else could I tell her but that I had been “in the weeds”?

At any rate, I did go to graduate school, escaping to Montreal where I hoped to get some semblance of a feeling that I was living the life of an adventurer and expatriate. Once there, I did lead an interesting life, but academically I did very little more than read several hundred books. These books fell into a bifurcated but extremely predictable pattern. First, I read dozens upon dozens of incredibly outdated biographies and memoirs of completely irrelevant British politicians of the 19^th and 20^th century. It’s “ghastly” (to coin a British phrase) to contemplate how similar these books were: everybody went to Eaton and Oxford, adopted one of two (or perhaps three) political philosophies, and then exploited aristocratic and business connections in order to accept a long series of political and diplomatic appointments.

Although I picked up a few wonderful turns of phrase, and still call people “damp squibs” or refer to easy teaching assignments as “rotten boroughs,” I learned very little of substance from my early years in graduate school. However, my autodidactic tendencies extended to another form of biography, that of poets and authors of the twentieth century. So my readings in Castlereagh (“I saw death on the way, he had a face like Castlereagh”), Palmerston, Gladstone, and Disraeli, were closely shadowed by parallel readings in Kerouac, Genet, Gide, Joyce, and Burroughs.

If I had a split personality, I once tried to reconcile these opposing trends by writing a dissertation proposal that rather pretentiously and unrealistically claimed that I would one day apply the tools of literary theory to analyze political rhetoric as if it were the modernist prose of Virginia Woolf. Of course, British political figures were closely aligned to their artistic counterparts: The Bloomsbury Group included John Maynard Keynes, for instance, and he was not without political juice in the Interwar years.

At any rate, the project of unifying my own interest in politics and arts was a failure, which is why I appreciate Rachel Polonsky’s new book, Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History. Molotov’s Magic Lantern is a strange but pleasant mixture of travel writing, history, literary theory, unbridled Russophilia, and autobiography. The premise of this work of creative nonfiction is that Polonsky, living in Moscow, once gained access to the personal library of Stalin’s evil sidekick and onetime Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Molotov. By gaining this access, reading widely in Russian history and literature, and travelling to cities such as Vologda, Archangel, Ulan Ude, Novgorod, Rostov-on-the-Don, and Taganrog, Polonsky breathes life into the whole sweep of (mostly) modern Russian history, a history that is alive in interlocking and tragic political and literary drama.

Communist Camp Songs

2011-03-27T10:16:00.012-05:00

One of the more interesting aspects of communist camp life, as revealed in Paul Thorez's Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves, is the myriad camp songs that expressed the ideological hopes of the U.S.S.R. for its emerging citizens, the youth who were, according to socialist teachings, perfectly malleable. Here are a few of these songs:

Such joyful laughter

Such flames in the eyes

Down there--it's the changing of the guard

It's the Communist youth, the Young Leninists.

Pioneer, don't waste a minute

Don't leave time on your hands

When the sun comes up

Salute it with your Pioneer sign

Salue the sun of the Motherland

Rushing, powerful,

Invincible,

My homeland,

My Moscow.

It's you that I love above all.

When night falls across the sea,

At Artek it's bed for me.

All over the world,

In Russia, In China, in Hungary,

The sun is shining on everyone.

The winter is over.

Flag of the nation

Flag of the people

Leading the country

On to victory.

Georgian, Estonian, Russian, and Uzbek

We're all one great big family

Him, her, you, and me

Artek, Artek!

On nights like tonight

In the campfire light

We will hear the story

Of our country's glory

And of workers and heroes

Building a new world.

The seagull flaps its wings

Telling us to hurry

Comrades, friends, Pioneers,

Follow me on another journey.

Russians and Chinese are brothers forever,

Moscow-Beijing, Beijing-Moscow

The people are advancing

Stalin and Mao are at our command.

We believe in the cause of Lenin and Stalin.

In the vast territories of our marvelous land

Tempered in battle and in toil

We have written a song of joy

Of Stalin--of the Guide

Stalin--our glory in battle

Stalin--our youth in song

Victorious ever, a song on our lips,

The people are on the march,

With Stalin at the fore.

Communist Camp

2011-03-27T09:22:00.016-05:00

Paul Thorez, son of longtime French Community Party leader, Maurice Thorez, has had a long and complex history with the Soviet Union. For Paul Thorez's parents found refuge in the country during the Second World War and maintained close contact with Moscow, the epicenter of global communism, in the post-war world. In fact, Maurice Thorez made frequent political as well as health-related visits to Russia until his death. Not surprisingly, Maurice's sons grew up in the shadow of their father's (and mother's) affection for the motherland of proletarian revolution. Paul's small book, Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves, examines one concrete manifestation of this affection: his father's decision to send both sons to the U.S.S.R.'s most famous youth camp, Artek, located long the coast of the historic, scenic Crimea.

The pan-Soviet camp, which always admitted fraternal guests from around the socialist world, was a workshop for the production of faithful communists. Camp members exercised, watched thinly veiled propaganda films, learned socialist songs, and deepened their commitment to personal hygiene, collective responsibility, atheism, socialism, Party-loyalty, and pan-Soviet patriotism. Pan-Soviet patriotism was a key dimension of camp life, since the Soviet Union, even in the aftermath of the war, was riven by ethnic and linguistic divisions. At camp, the children were constantly reminded of everything that made the country great, including its vast size, peaceful disposition, military strength, and putative sophistication in the realm of science and technology.

At the time, the children earnestly believed that Russians had invented almost everything, that Lysenko's twisted genetics would revolutionize Russian agriculture, and that the U.S.S.R. was poised to win a third world war, since everybody knew that the First World War had led to the emergence of the first worker-state, and that the Second World War had led to a communist bloc that extended from China to East Germany.

The camp even prepared young people for communist politics. As Paul Thorez describes camp elections, power operated in mysterious ways. Somehow, behind the scenes, a select group of children were nominated for official positions. Somehow, in an aura of mystery, no more than one child actually ended up running for any one office. So, in the end, all elections were unanimous, and the children as a whole believed that they had participated in a genuinely democratic political process, but one that had the merit of expressing the unanimous will of the collective.

The Language of the Revolution

2011-03-22T07:09:00.028-05:00

Andrei Sinyavsky's brilliant treatise on Soviet culture, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, reminds us that revolutions are linguistic phenomena as much as they are political ones. It's not surprising then that the Bolshevik victory in 1917 led to linguistic changes in the Russian language that rival those of Peter the Great's momentous reign in the early eighteenth century. What were those changes? As a folklorist, Sinyavsky is well-placed to analyze and categorize these changes. He says that the Revolution unleashed a plethora of new words, expressions, metaphors, phrases, slogans, and literary constructions.

The linguistic revolution had both positive and negative implications. On the one hand, it led to new and sometimes startlingly original literature, as exemplified by the Blok's poetry and Zoshchenko's prose. The vernacular, as connoisseurs of Hip-Hop and Rap music know, is alive, endlessly inventive, and refreshingly spontaneous.

But as the language of the street entered into the central discourse of the Russian political and cultural elite, it had a coarsening effect on public life--"[c]rude words corresponding to the language of the street; sometimes very apt and exact, sometimes word monsters." Moreover, the violence and absurdity of the new language were one of the worst aspects of Bolshevik rule, responsible in part for many of its tangible and therefore sanguinary crimes. As Sinyavasky reminds us, the very term, Soviet Union, makes little sense, or worse, is an Orwellian construction signifying the very impotence of the workers' councils, or soviets, that acted as rubber stamps for the Politburo or Party Leader's decisions and played no part in the formulation of Soviet policy at any point in Soviet history.

As a revolutionary state, the U.S.S.R. came up with neologisms for everything. Old terms associated with the bourgeoisie, church, former military order, or tsardom in general, were no longer acceptable. Ministers became people's commissars and almost everything was given the prefix, Soviet, to differentiate the new from the old. Indeed, the term, "man," was now seen to be inadequate, or redolent of everything that was outdated or wrong in the world. In contrast, the phrase "Soviet man" connoted everything that human beings were striving to become through enlightenment, education, industrialization, and socialism. And what of the simple, hoary term, Russia? It too was seen to be inadequate and was of course replaced with the infinitely more complex term, Russian Federated Socialist Republic or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Over time, the language of the Soviet state became almost nonsensical, filled as it was with strange-sounding acronyms, neologisms, and novel new Bolshevik names for ancient Russian cities. Even ordinary Russians were likely to receive new names. In Sinyavasky's example, the Revolution almost put an end to common Russian names such as "Ivan," which seemed too atavistic to be employed by good, future-oriented Bolshevik parents. Better to name one's child after the heroes of socialism such as Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, or even a symbol of socialist accomplishment such as electrification or the tractor.

Other linguistic trends included the new passion for terms associated with modernity, including mechanization, modernization, industrialization, "chemicalization," and electrification, and the creation of myriad scientific-sounding terms for non-scientific phenomena, such as idealism, materialism, Trotskyism, "deviationism," and so on. Sinyavsky sees the strange expression, "I-don't-give-a-damn-ism" was emblematic of Soviet discourse. The term, like so many others, absurd and illustrates his argument that Soviet citizens began to speak in "word signals" rather than words, since no one, "not even themselves," can explain their meaning.

As Soviet rule wore on, Soviet language ossified, its bureaucratic underpinnings becoming ever more apparent. Khrushchev sees to exemplify its increasingly boorish essence. Although both clever and populist, Khrushchev's verbiage was often violent, crude, and semi-literate. Khrushchev also mixed peasant constructions with an impoverished Marxist, sloganeering, brand of agitprop and officialese.

In the end of course Soviet language became so divorced from reality that it practically signified its opposite. In other words, one could often read state newspapers or listen to public broadcasts and determine that the reverse of whatever was said was in fact true. It seems that Soviet language and Soviet reality had, at long last, veered too far apart to be sustainable.

Tarkovsky's Soviet Ecstasy

2011-03-12T08:36:00.013-06:00

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 cinematic masterpiece, Andrei Rublev, can be read as a metaphor for the individual's tortured plight within the ideologically stifling atmosphere of the world's first socialist society. For the film's protagonist, Rublev--a character perhaps only loosely based on few facts we have about the real-life biography of the fifteenth century icon painter--wrestles with the meaning of art in an age of violence and spiritual crisis. The metaphor was alarming enough to halt its distribution in the Soviet Union after a single Moscow airing, according to Wikipedia. After all, the director had chosen a religious man as the hero of his film in officially atheist Russia. Worse, he had tried to capture the genius of an icon painter, when the Bolsheviks had so viciously attacked icons as a symbol of pre-socialist decadence.

Rublev's film is divided into seven loose episodes, framed by a prologue and an epilogue, but these episodes are only loosely related to one another. As a Harvard film professor tells us in the film's Criterion commentary, Tarkovsky believes the juxtaposition of these seven episodes will make his film complex, more subject to the viewer's own meaningful interpretations. In fact, Rublev is not the protagonist of every episode, and doesn't even appear in some of these at all scenes. For instance, it's not Rublev who invents a flying machine in the film's brilliant opening sequence, it's just a creative man whose innovation is challenged by the obscurantist medieval mob who attack his assistants. The beautiful film, which is black and white save for the brilliant icons that appear in the film's epilogue, is multi-layered but never veers too far away from creativity or religion and the quest for meaning. What's interesting is that Tarkovsky seems to be saying that Rublev's calm, serene religious faces were the perfect if paradoxical artistic response to the medieval cruelty, persecution, and torture depicted throughout the film.

Communism on Trial

2011-03-07T21:35:00.035-06:00

One of the hallmarks of communist regimes, and the Soviet Union in particular, is its egregious disregard for justice, especially with respect to political opponents, schismatics, and dissidents. With this in mind, it's not surprising that so many legal tragedies are featured in the book Great World Trials: The 100 Most Significant Courtroom Battles of All Time, edited by Edward W. Kappman.

Which Russian communist or other communist trials made the list? It should be no surprise that the Moscow purge trials of 1936 to 1938 made the grade. Here, famously, Stalin explained the logic of the Great Terror to the world, inviting about 30 foreign guests and journalists to witness communist justice first-hand. In the first trial, which set the tone for the other two, a number of Old Bolsheviks with impeccable revolutionary credentials waived their "right" to defense attorneys and publicly confessed to coordinating (or in one case merely passively encouraging) a massive conspiracy to assassinate Kirov and Stalin, and overthrow the Soviet state. The other two trials saw the fruits of continued terror, intimidation, torture, and ideological persuasion, and other Soviet leaders publicly confessed that they bore direct responsibility for economic failures, Trotskyite plots, and foreign intrigue. Almost all of the accused were shot almost immediately following the trials, although a few perished in the gulag, as millions of less famous victims of Soviet justice did throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and, to a lesser extent, thereafter.

Other, less famous, trials were equally politicized and unrelated to credible evidence. In Hungary, the editor thought that Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty's trial deserves to be remembered, since this Catholic anti-communist was arrested in 1948, tortured, forced to publicly confess to plotting to overthrow the government, and sentenced to a life in labor, although he was freed during the Hungarian revolt against communism in 1956 and remained at the U.S. legation for fifteen years before agreeing to move to Rome in 1971, where he died fourteen years later.

In Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas' trial is of course noteworthy. Djilas, the former Yugoslavian Politburo member and one of Tito's closest collaborators World War II, had become increasingly vocal in his opposition to Soviet-style political rule, and was eventually and repeatedly tried and jailed for allegedly slandering his country in the foreign press.

In Cuba, Castro's 1959 revolutionary tribunals followed a similarly disturbing pattern, with Batista's officers receiving little if any legal due process. Indeed, after three officers were convicted and killed in a show trial atmosphere, a court acquitted 44 airmen for alleged "genocide", but Castro personally overturned the verdict and re-tried the men, despite a lack of evidence against them. Soon, Castro had eliminated any pretense to an independent judiciary. However, it should be noted that Batista's 1953 trial of Castro and his fellow rebels, was no model of legal normalcy either, insofar as many of Castro's fellow conspirators had been tortured after they had been captured by the military.

Communist legal philosophy, which privileged political or moral considerations and devalued putatively bourgeois notions of fairness and due process, was put into practice with disastrous results throughout large portions of the world. In Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was repeatedly tried and punished between 1977 and 1989 for allegedly undermining state interests through his advocacy of civil rights and freedom. And of course China's legal system was, and remains, deeply flawed, although Great World Trials only mentions the Gang of Four Trial, which thrust four notorious Chinese communist leaders into their own show trial in 1980. The verdict, which did not benefit from a legitimate legal process, nevertheless helped China to put an end to the worst aspects of Mao's disastrous political legacy, much as Robespierre's down's fall during the French Revolution, or Beria's arrest and summary execution following the death of Stalin, led to positive political changes notwithstanding the hypocrisy of the judgments. Not that the farcical Tianamen Square trial doesn't also garner a mention in Great World Trials.

In addition to the above-mentioned examples of a profoundly flawed approach to justice, communism has frequently been on trial, directly or indirectly, in many of the West's most famous trials of the twentieth century. Think of the trial of Rosa Luxenburg's murderers in Germany following World War I, the Nazi case against those accused of setting fire to the Reichstag, the Rosenberg trial in the United States, or Victor Kravchenko's case. Kravchenko, the author of a vehemently anti-Stalinist memoir, decided to defend the legitimacy of his opposition to Stalinism by suing a Paris journal, Les Lettres Francais, for defaming him. He won the suit but his libelers, freedom fighters during the era of Nazi occupation of France, emerged unscathed.

Russian War Film

2011-03-06T10:42:00.016-06:00

No doubt Girgori Chukhrai's 1959 black and white film, Ballad of a Soldier, found a large audience in the Soviet Union. It's a simple story about a young villager, Alyosha (played by the spectacularly handsome Vladimir Ivashov), who goes off to war, single-handedly destroys two tanks, and wins the honor of returning home to see his mother. Along the way the soldier enjoys the camaraderie of fellow soldiers, sees the devastation of the countryside at the hands of marauding Germans, falls in love with a beautiful young woman, saves some (but not all) homeless train passengers from a German attack, and returns, very briefly, to see his peasant mother before returning to the front where he will die. Ballad of a Soldier reminded Russians of their victory in the Great Patriotic War, but didn't underestimate the costs of the war.

In a nation which had suffered the loss of perhaps twenty million citizens to Hitler's madness, the war could not have been sugarcoated anyhow. People remembered, and always would remember, how much they had suffered at the hands of the enemy. Unusually, the romantic film begins and ends in tragedy. In the opening credits, the soldier's forlorn mother looks out upon the small village road her son had taken to rejoin the struggle against Germany. As the narrator explains, others will honor the sacrifice of this brave soldier, a promising young man who could have become "a builder of socialism," but his mother will feel nothing but grief at the loss of her beloved son. And really, the film highlights the nation's loss on a personal as well as cosmic level. The German invasion has killed the film's protagonist, and decimated the country as a whole. Although civilians work to erect barricades against the German tanks, and soldiers bravely resist tanks without adequate weapons, the country is laid waste in the process. Fields burn, innocent girls die, cities crumble, soldiers lose limbs, and the women are left alone to till the fields in the absence of husbands.

East Germany, Nostalgia, and Spreewell Pickles

2011-03-05T20:56:00.030-06:00

The plot of the German film, Goodbye Lenin!, revolves around a patriotic East German woman's coma, which takes place in the final days of the Erich Honecker's G.D.R. In a coma, the woman misses her country's dramatic political revolution and transformation into a constituent part of Helmut Kohl's democratic, capitalist version of the German nation. Upon awakening her children, who have seen their mother destroyed by the putative defection of their father to West Germany many years earlier, struggle to protect their mother's fragile health by hiding the changes that overtaken their countrymen.

Just what are those changes? The film invites its viewers to ponder what has actually been gained or lost with the fall of communism. What did communism represent? The son has to think hard about what exactly might tip his invalid mother off about the end of her beloved country. What is first to go? The son, and a rather more reluctant sister, immediately exchange trendy Western fashions for older, shoddier, garments. Did we really used to wear this crap, the girl asks her brother? The children are incredulous, but put on their old clothes. And where exactly did the Che Guevara poster used to hang? And where can we put our new rock albums? The next step is to visit a supermarket to see if they can find any of the old, second-rate food brands their mother will recognize. Does the store still carry the old brand of pickles--Spreewell Pickles to be precise--the son asks? The grocery clerk is appalled: why would we do that when there's been a revolution?

More outlandishly, the son helps to set up fake political news, read monotonously in the style of the old regime. In this apartment, if no where else, communism wins, and events are reversed at the Berlin Wall, which is torn down by exploited Westerners who flood into East Germany in order to seek a better, fairer life. The East German state, now forty years, opens its arms to help its oppressed brethren.

The possibility that socialism might ever defeat capitalism now seems absurd. But how absurd is it? Surely the fact that East Germans publicly shouted in praise of West German currency, or flocked to see West German fast food joints and pornography shops, is not less absurd. What is it about capitalism, after all, that makes its triumph so desirable? Time plays tricks on us. The film reminds us that many ordinary men and women in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe used to imagine the triumph of their civilization, and at least sometimes believed that their governments were on the right side of historical progress. It's easy to forget that there were two sides in the Cold War.

The film has a few surprises. Near the end of the film the mother confesses that her husband did not, in fact, defect without her knowledge. Although her enthusiasm for socialist reform was apparently genuine, she reveals that her husband had been persecuted by the state and had actually asked her to go with him to the West. She feared that even an application to leave the country would lead to the loss of her children, and so she chose to remain in East Germany, devastated by the loss of her husband, but close to her children.

The tragedy of this separated family is emblematic of the tragedy of the nation which was itself bifurcated. What's interesting about the mother's revelation is that the malevolence of the East German State did not necessarily mean that she isn't capable of mourning its absence. This is something we would all do well to remember: we can be deeply nostalgic even about bad personal choices or historical roads that led nowhere.

Laminating the USSR

2011-02-27T08:09:00.024-06:00

When I was a child my two brothers and I played endless boardgames such as Dungeons and Dragons and Risk, and read endless fantasy and science fiction novels such as J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Frank Herbert's Dune. This decidedly geeky comportment will surprise those of you who understand that writing a blog about Soviet intellectual history in one's more mature years is the quintessence of chic and modish behavior. One day, thirty some years ago, my brothers and I purchased a map of some mythical and quasi-medieval land that was redolent of the imaginary cartography of the Lord of the Rings. This was wonderful. My brothers and I gazed at the mountains and oceans for hours upon hours. Then, without warning, my father announced that as a high school teacher he had access to a lamination machine that would allow us to draw on our map with erasable marker, thereby moving elf and monster armies into complex and ever-shifting strategic displays. At that moment in time, my father's job seemed like the most important position in the world. Would a fireman or astronaut or president have access to a lamination machine like my father did? My father is now seventy. But this year, he and my stepmother gave me a map of the USSR for my birthday and, once again, it was laminated. The laminated map reminded me of how much I love my father and am awed by him. He may be a retired high school teacher rather than a movie star or army general, but there is dignity in all work, and I am reminded this year that not everybody has the privilege of working in a position that grants special access to laminating machine...

This map is of the USSR in its final years, in the era of Glasnost and Perestroika. It highlights the ethnographic, linguistic, political and features of the country, and contains some smaller sub-maps of historical periods in the history of Russia and its neighbors. The map explains that the USSR was made up of the following major linguistic groups: Indo-European (Baltic, Slavic, Iranian, Armenian, German, and Greek); Uralic (Ugric, Samoyetic, and Finnic--Estonian, Finnish, Karelian, Lapp ),; Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus); Caucasian (Georgian, Dagestan, Chechen, Ingush); Paleo-Siberian); Semitic; and Siberian. It also documents various historical eras, including that of Slavic expansion, Kievan Rus, the origins of the Russian state, the growth of Muscovy, Western growth, Eastern colonization, war and revolution, and Russia at the height of its power and influence in Asia and Eastern Europe.

The larger constituent republics, and some of their identity problems, are also featured. The National Geographic map makers say the following about the USSR republics: The Russians feel resentment for having paid for Soviet industrialization and modernization; the predominantly Lutheran Estonians regret their lack of independence but now share their republic with ethnic Russians who make up a third of the population; Roman Catholic Lithuania remembers its glorious history as one of the most powerful states in the 1700s; industrial, urban Latvia also recalls its inter-war autonomy; forested Byelorussia, which has never previously been independent in modern times, was a component part of the Soviet Union as its birth in 1922, and lost a quarter of its population during the Second World War; the Ukraine, the second largest republic by population, accounts for only three percent of the USSR's territory, but was enlarged at the end of the Second World War and in 1954 with the addition of the Crimea; ethnically Romanian Moldavia was forced to use a Cyrillic alphabet until 1989; Armenian identity revolved around the Armenian Apostolic Church; Shiite Azerbaijan maintains cultural affinities with Iran; Kirghizia only came under Russian domination in the 19th century; environmentally degraded Uzbekistan is the country's third largest ethnic group, and joined the USSR in 1924; Turkmenistan, suffering from a lack of national identity or ethnic solidarity, is 90 percent desert; Iranian-speaking Tajikistan has the highest population growth in the USSR; Turkic-speaking, ethnically Mongolian Kazakhstan was home to the Virgin-Lands campaign and grows one-third of the country's wheat.

Revolutionary Adjectives

2011-02-27T06:23:00.011-06:00

How does one describe a revolution? What are the best adjectives to capture the essence of one? Let's examine the words of the brilliant dissident author used in his Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History. Sinyavsky intermittently uses the following adjectives, among others, to explain the Bolshevik Revolution to his readers: elemental, volcanic, revitalizing, organic, wild, irrational, creative, explosive, bursting, nonsensical, senseless, chaotic, murderous, spontaneous, emotional, primitive, powerful, metaphysical, sensuous, sublime, inspiring, popular, passionate, spontaneous, anarchic, visceral, atavistic, cataclysmic, seductive, miraculous, expansive, and rapturous.

What's interesting about listing revolutionary adjectives in general is that they fall into three categories: some are positive, some are negative, and some are value-neutral. To his credit, Sinyavasky, a severe critic of the Revolution and its historical legacy, uses a large number of neutral descriptors to capture the essence of Revolution. The Revolution may have hurt Russia, but it was akin to a natural disaster as much as it was the work of a malevolent conspiracy of amoral or immoral men. Moreover, it had a life or dynamic of its own that is not reducible to the intentions of any or even all of its component parts, the revolutionary and anti-revolutionary actors.

Use Their Skulls As Ashtrays

2011-02-23T19:38:00.015-06:00

Andrei Sinyavsky's book, Soviet Civilization; A Cultural History, provides us with one of the most sophisticated analyses of the Evil Empire ever written. The book's arguments will be examined in future posts. For now, here are a few of the quotations Sinyavasky uses to explain the essence of the USSR for his readers.

Leon Trotsky. "If the symbol is a concentrated image, then the revolution is the supreme maker of symbols, since is presents all phenomena and relations in concentrated form."

Aleksandr Blok. "To smoke the nobs out of their holes we'll light a fire through all the world, a bloody fire through all the world--Lord bless our souls!"

Aleksandr Blok. "To redo everything. To organize things so that everything will be new; so that our lying, dirty, ugly life will be just, pure, merry, and beautiful."

Feodor Dostoevsky. "Here, my dear, a new religion is coming to replace the old. That's why there are so many soldiers about."

Vladimir Kirillov. "We're drunk with a rebellious, brutal passion; Let them scream: "You are the hangman of beauty, In the name of our tomorrow, we'll burn Raphael, Destroy museums, crush the flowers of art underfoot."

Yury Olesha. "We young poets didn't understand what a frightening world we were living in. This world hadn't been explained as a world. Now I lived in an explained world. I understand the causes. I am filled with a feeling of enormous gratitude, expressible only in music, when I think of those who died to make the world explained, to explain it and reconstruct it."

Konstantin Balmont. "You were utterly mistaken: your beloved people are not at all the people you dreamed of, not at all."

Mayakovsky. "We'll destroy you, old romantic world! In place of faith in our soul we have electricity and steam. In place of misery, pocket the riches of all worlds! The old men? Kill them! And use the skulls as ashtrays!"