Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta União Soviética. Mostrar todas as mensagens
Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta União Soviética. Mostrar todas as mensagens
domingo, 24 de março de 2019
segunda-feira, 16 de janeiro de 2017
"Kalmykia’s long goodbye" - Badma Biurchiev
Every 28 December, Kalmyk families light lamps to commemorate victims of their mass deportation. In late 1943, the Soviet authorities exiled more than 90,000 Kalmyks to Siberia — most of them women, children and elderly people. More than 14,000 died on the way and during the winter. In 1944, roughly 15,000 Kalmyk troops were withdrawn from the Soviet front line, mainly to be interned in the Shiroklag forced labour camp. Here, they were set to work building a hydroelectric power plant. Their alleged crime: mass collaboration with the German invaders of their homeland in 1941.
The Kalmyks’ exile lasted 13 years, and in that time their numbers dropped by half. Those born in Siberia barely knew their own language or traditions. The accusation levelled against them in 1943 was no less traumatic.
Although the survivors returned to their homeland in southern Russia in 1956, the feeling of collective guilt forced on them by the Soviet government haunts the Kalmyks to this day. This psychological trauma, forced into the public’s subconscious, still has a considerable bearing on Kalmyk citizens’ relationship to the Russian state.
The trauma of “treachery”
The fight happened near our village’s war memorial — an eternal flame and a wall displaying the names of local fallen heroes. My opponents were two members of the local pioneer troop, named after Tamara Khakhynova, a Kalmyk partisan who had died heroically not far from our sovkhoz, or state farm.
Soviet propaganda was based on the carrot and stick approach. On the one hand, Kalmyk heroes were commemorated; on the other, our collective guilt was intensified by public trials of former members of the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps (KKK), a German volunteer unit formed in 1942. Between 1960 and 1970, there were seven trials, and one more in 1983.
My paternal grandparents didn’t survive to see Glasnost in the 1980s. It was only as an adult that I learnt Sarang Biurchiev, my grandfather, was sent to the Shiroklag forced labour camp from the Karelian Front in 1944 and convicted in 1945. He had been called up at the time of the “Winter war” against Finland in 1940 and worked as a clerk in the General Staff.
After a few drinks, my grandfather would mourn for his brothers and sisters who died during the famines of the 1920s and 1930s. They had been orphaned as children and only two survived into adulthood, Granddad and his younger sister. Famine was also a taboo subject in Soviet times. Yet every now and then, unlike memories of Shiroklag in the early deportation years, that pain would break through.
My grandfather arrived in Siberia in 1946, when the Kalmyks had survived their first, harshest winter and were gradually adapting to life in exile. In Tyumen he located his sister (his only family member alive at the time) and met my grandmother Tsagan Boskhaeva.
As a result, my grandmother and her sons travelled in two different train convoys, and as the Kalmyks were scattered across Siberia, they ended up in different places. One boy died, and the other was placed in an orphanage. My grandmother managed to get back to Tyumen, where my uncle was born in 1947, followed by my father in 1949. They already had their elder brother, who became the core of the new family.
My family didn’t discuss the deportation openly until well into the 1990s, and I only began to get a fuller picture when I was started work as a journalist.
In some cases. local Siberians finally realised that the newcomers were normal people, not “cannibals” as they had been told, so shared food and clothing with the “special settlers”, despite this being strictly forbidden.
It was around this time that I came across “Absence”, a poem by Polish Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska. I can still remember the shiver that ran through my spine when I got to the last verse:
If it hadn’t been for the deportation, my maternal grandfather Erdni Muchiryaev wouldn’t have married Zemfira Kozlova, a girl from the Urals. My mother wouldn’t have been born and neither would I.
For a moment, I realised what it would have been like had Granddad Biurchiev’s ten brothers and sisters not died of starvation. Family ties are a valuable resource in Kalmykia. Would my father have become a teacher, and I a journalist?
All this may be speculation. But when the events are still fresh in family memory, you have a keen sense of history and fate, the trajectories that have led to your birth.
One of my family lines is connected to those who tried to survive between two deaths, the other, with those who were condemned by the Soviet government to humiliation and starvation. If either of these were erased, the contours of myself wouldn’t be quite right.
But what trace did the trauma leave behind? And has it been reflected in people’s civic consciousness?
The worst thing, Guchinova believes, is the fact that Kalmyks have got “hung up” on the illegal public trials of KKK members. The government has certainly got us to believe in our collective guilt.
The deportation, as Guchinova reminds me, is still a delicate, family tragedy for Kalmyks. This “intimate” character is what marks it out, not only freeing it from the banalities of “official” speeches, but taking it out of a narrow civil rights framework. On 28 December, thousands of people gather at the “Exodus and Return” monument in Elista, while on 30 October, a maximum of ten civic activists meet at the memorial stone from Shiroklag on the day commemorating the victims of Soviet political repression.
“In both Siberia and Central Asia, Kalmyks tried to assimilate. Like the interned Japanese, they proved their innocence through an excess of enthusiasm and diligence. The Chechens and Ingush, on the other hand, according to the American historian Michaela Paul, ‘resisted in every way they could’: they refused to take part in elections in 1946 and avoided working for the state’. Lidia Berdenova, who took part in a survey of mine, was almost robbed by Chechens – they returned the things they had stolen when they discovered she was a deportee.”
Guchinova dismisses any idea of an innate mindset in one ethnic group or another as pure racism. The religious factor she talks about is not just a question of Buddhist refusal to meet evil with violence. In the 1920s and 1930s all the most influential Buddhist priests were shot, and the rest of the monks were either sent to labour camps or forced to abandon their spiritual activity. (Japanese teachers and priests were also the first to be arrested in the USA in 1942.) And in the USSR all the Buddhist temples in the steppe, the main centres of education and social organisation, were destroyed.
In the mountains, Muslim spiritual leaders remained influential; the old traditions continued to flourish. Also, the peoples of the north Caucasus, unlike the Kalmyks, were all deported together, which meant they could develop a different strategy for survival.
We have lost and reclaimed our statehood more than once. For a nomadic people with no allies other than Russia, exodus was the only possible reaction to ideological conflict with central government. As Nikolai Palmov, the historian of the Kalmyks, notes, for those who stayed behind “any thoughts of protest never went further than a dream of returning to the past and the traditional structures and customs of Kalmyk life.”
Kalmykia’s leaders of public opinion today are equally nostalgic for the old days. It’s hard to figure out any more promising means of dialogue. People in Kalmykia are very wary of open opposition, especially in relation to the Kremlin. Moreover, when the need arises, our politicians don’t hesitate to resort to blatant manipulation of public opinion, playing on these subconscious traumas.
An order from Khlopushin triggered the first violent break-up of a peaceful protest action in independent Russia. The squads of riot police and internal troops brought in from neighbouring regions didn’t even spare women and elderly people, one protester was killed.
In Kalmykia, people prefer not to attract any attention from the federal authorities. Occasional clashes with neighbouring Astrakhan over disputed areas along the border established after the deportation never last long and are quickly forgotten. In contrast, the clashes over the Prigorodny area of North Ossetia, which housed a small Ingush community and was the site of armed clashes with Ossetians in 1992, is more of a matter of principle. So too was the reestablishment of Aukh, a Chechen enclave in neighbouring Dagestan.
To a large extent, the focus on principles is linked to population density and shortage of land. But Kalmykia’s history also developed very differently from that of the Caucasus. The mountain peoples of the Caucasus fought long and hard against the Russian Empire. They boast of their past as the heroes of the resistance to the Tsars, and, after the collapse of the USSR, as the “elusive avengers” (as a popular film has it) who challenged Soviet rule. The legends of the Abreks, Caucasian mountain bands who fought the Russians in the 19th century, put the subject of deportation in the context of colonisation and anti-colonial struggles. And the 1991 law on “rehabilitation of repressed peoples” has been seen as a step towards the restoration of historical justice in a wider sense.
Indeed, in Chechnya, there is a de facto ban on marking the Day of Memory on 23 February, the date in 1944 when whole populations were deported from the North Caucasus — it coincides with the Russian public holiday, Defender of the Motherland Day. Such a minor offence might land you in prison, as happened in 2014 with Ruslan Kutaev, the organiser of a conference devoted to the deportation of the Kalmyks and Ingush.
It’s surprising, but Kalmyk social network users even praise Kadyrov to the skies, while criticising their own republic’s leadership. T-shirts bearing portraits of Stalin no longer awake antagonism on the streets of Elista. Kalmyks, both pro- and anti-government, agree that Kalmykia needs a “strong leader”.
These feelings aren’t just a sign of some vague mood of protest, they also reflect Kalmyks’ lingering deportation trauma. An inner taboo on dissatisfaction with the politics of “party and government” is sublimated into criticism of the puppet regional authorities and a myth of a leader who could return dignity to their nation.
sexta-feira, 9 de dezembro de 2016
"Russia’s role on the world stage: a Soviet foreign policy without the USSR?" - Kirill Kobrin
A country that most of the world wished well, a country that became fashionable for a time, a country that received humanitarian aid — and a country that was assumed to have a glorious future before it — has turned, if not into a pariah state, at least into a global “scarecrow”.
Many people Russia are proud of their country’s newfound role and status, but we mustn’t forget what this word means. It conjures up a hastily cobbled together puppet, dressed up in old rags, its scary face designed to see birds off from crops, fields, gardens and vegetable patches. A scarecrow can be seen from a distance, and does its job well, but nobody is going to use it to build a house or to protect that house from robbers. It’s just a straw doll wrapped in hand-me-downs to terrify the short sighted, and that’s all it is.
So how could a promising new state, proud of the fact that it had voluntarily abandoned its role as a monster, shaken off the yoke of an authoritarian regime and announced a new era in its existence and that of its neighbours, have come to this?
Back to Brezhnev?
We cannot, of course, believe everything that was said about Russia in the 1990s, or indeed what is said today, but those claiming that the bombing of Grozny in 1994 (or in the early 2000s) and the bombing of Aleppo today are basically the same thing, are mistaken.
The obvious difference is that Aleppo lies outside the borders of the Russian Federation and that, strictly speaking, Russia has no business meddling in Syria’s affairs. Basically, the west took its eye off the ball, and here we are. It is reminiscent of the logic of the Cold War, when the two sides were quick to exploit any conflict in the “third” (and not only the “third”) world as an excuse to open yet another front.
As a result, the entire world was a field of action, in any part of which one could find particles “charged” by the west and particles “charged” by the east. This was, indeed, the source of most of the catastrophic international problems that have arisen since the collapse of the USSR — the fact that both sides recruited allies on the single basis of their potential use in the game against their archenemies.
It’s the same principle as “this guy is a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard!” However, when the Cold War ended, all these various “bastards” stopped being, supposedly, “ours” and began their own game — Bin Laden, the Taliban and so on. Some, however, preferred to remain (for want of any remaining backers) in their own splendid isolation — Cuba led this type of existence until recently; North Korea still does.
The old principle of “our bastard” is being imitated today by Russia’s leaders, who have refused to understand what’s going on and what goal this or that client of Moscow may be pursuing — the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, Venezuela’s Chavez and so on. They are important as figures in a game with the strategic enemy, but Russia has no interest in what they are made of. It reminds one of the blessed “Soviet era” when Khrushchev banged his shoe on a table at the UN and prepared to turn our planet into a cloud of radioactive dust — and all because of a newly converted friend of the USSR, a “bastard” from Cuba whose services the USA had stupidly declined not long before.
It seemed odd even then: to blow the world to bits in order to build a better future for it. But it was all done in the name of, at the very least, “a better world” and “a glorious future”. Whereas today all Russia has to offer the world is an ugly present. And it persistently tries to make this present even more ugly, unpleasant and dangerous.
A new state for a new world
But let’s cast our minds back to the early 1990s. When a new state comes into being, it starts to seek out a place for itself in the existing world.
The Russian Federation had to go through this process, but the conditions for it were eminently favourable. It’s true that the Soviet economy had collapsed; the USSR’s armed forces were almost disintegrating. But the advantages were much greater, and in particular the sympathetic international support that Russia enjoyed in the early Yeltsin years. The question was how to use that window of opportunity — that combination of circumstances couldn’t last long, as many in Russia realised. But that required an answer to the question with which we began: what was Russia’s place and role to be in the modern world?
It was not an easy question to answer — especially since that role was evolving out of many different levels of international relations. The highest level, the closest relationship, was with republics of the former USSR, although only some of them (Ukraine, Belarus and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan). The second level was with the Transcaucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the third with the Baltic States — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. After that, in fourth place, came former Warsaw pact countries of Eastern Europe, with Yugoslavia and Albania occupying a slightly separate place, followed by the rest of Europe, basically the EU.
The sixth level of relations was with the former USSR’s client states around the world, from Cuba to Vietnam, and the seventh with the countries of the “third world”, with China and India considered a separate category. And on the eighth level were major economies outside the EU (although not the USA) — Canada, Australia and Japan (the last also with a slightly separate relationship). And finally, the ninth, lowest level was occupied by Russia’s former archenemy, the United States. I have omitted another half dozen sub-levels, leaving them to specialists in international politics to complete the tally.
Moscow’s relations with each of these levels required specific tuning or retuning, entailing long, painstaking and meticulous work, like any real diplomatic process. But even the best results of this tuning would have been unthinkable, had they not emerged out of the total, general “tone” of the external politics of this new Russia, which needed to be newly considered and defined.
A new problem
This was where a difficulty arose: a difficulty that lay behind the first post-Soviet stage of the Russian Federation’s international course.
What has been the basis of any country’s external politics over the last two centuries? What considerations — apart from the personal qualities of its leaders and diplomatic corps — have defined these policies? There are a number of these, all of them clear. Economic interests, however they may be understood, from those of the ruling classes to those of the masses. Ideology, of both the sacred and secular kinds. Another very important factor is tradition: the centuries-old customs and manners of one country or another that still count for a lot, however old fashioned and unnecessary they may appear. And last but not least, internal politics: the interests of the current system of government and so on.
All these factors, apart, perhaps from ideology, are only very rarely actually thought about. It’s more a question of a vague set of perceptions of how to conduct oneself on the international stage, a kind of energy field of the possible and the acceptable through which the people who lay down their country’s international direction mostly feel their way, reacting to outside events as they go.
In other words, what we see here is a fluid pragmatism that is nonetheless bound by certain objective factors. As for the declared aims of international politics, these declarations are usually imposed from above and made post factum. Each individual case is a matter of balancing objective reality with accident, awareness of long-term factors with the needs of the moment.
This is how Russian external politics worked between 1992 until quite recently — 2008, or even 2014. This stage may be known, if only post factum, as part of the post-Soviet project. This was a time when Russia’s international relations, as opposed to its internal politics and nationbuilding, looked pretty logical, sophisticated, well-considered and even based in part on common sense.
Its main thrust was as follows: realising that the west was not going to accept the New Russia as either an equal partner or, even less likely, an ally, and that the neoliberals in charge in the west at the time had lost all touch with reality to the extent of attempting to “export democracy” to regions that had absolutely no desire for such a gift, Russia (and here I refer to the later Yeltsin years and the first 10 or so years of Putin’s rule) instinctively distanced itself from what was happening and adopted the position most advantageous to itself.
This position was that of a critically inclined observer, always happy to remind unlucky global players “Don’t say we didn’t warn you”, while otherwise minding its own business. It was a pragmatic course of action that reflected its own economic vulnerability, its technological backwardness and dependency and its totally rational certainty that nothing would come out of “exporting democracy” to Serbia and Croatia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
And Kremlin was right: the world had become a much more dangerous place than it had been before these schemes. They did, however, provide cover for Russia beginning to strengthen its links with some former Soviet republics, increase its influence — both political and financial — in some other countries and develop new economic partnerships and revive old ones (with Brazil, China, India) and, most importantly, to do this in such a way as to prevent other countries interfering in its own affairs.
This, indeed, was the crux of the post-Soviet Russian international relations project — to end up being untouchable. In that sense, Russia very sensibly followed the example of India and, especially, China.
But Russia is no China
The only problem is that Russia is not China. Despite the ubiquitous corruption in that country and the lack of transparency in its political, social and economic life, the People's Republic of China has long since consciously embodied an image of a “great power”, consisting of a blend of old Imperial concepts, Maoist ideas of a Third Global Power and the rigid pragmatism of the technocrats. Inside the country there is an unspoken consensus that this is the only possible and right road, the one best aligned with its “national interest”.
This is the image of a country that is dynamically developing today, but whose high point is yet to come. And this is what drives Chinese foreign politics, which are very cautious in matters that do not affect it directly, but very forceful in everything else. And the line between the two is dictated by the selfsame “national interest”.
Russia’s leaders, on the other hand, have not succeeded in creating any rational concept of “national interest” that would be shared by its people.
This is related to its specific nature: it is not a failed state, but a fake state that masks a group of half a dozen or so clans, now already hereditary, which exploit their own country as though it were a colony. On the other hand, it is also linked to the extreme atomisation of post-Soviet society that we discussed in a previous article. This kind of society is incapable of consensus on any issue, let alone something as abstract as “national interest”.
Russia’s “national interests” have been much discussed, but each time the list of interests have been different, as have the issues surrounding them; this strange, fluid, changeable national interest is one of the main characteristics of the post-Soviet stage of Russia’s history.
Another new reality
It was all going to end sooner or later — and most people who followed Russia’s role and place in international politics more or less knew how and why it would come to an end.
Several factors came into play. The first was that the “export of democracy”, which angered the Russian government (not known for its democratic tendencies) from the start, reached Russia’s close neighbours (the so-called “colour revolutions”). This was a very “soft export”, more a case of western political and media campaigns in support of the various “colour revolutions”, but in the Kremlin it was seen in the context of what had happened or was happening in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and so on. Then in 2011-2012 a wave of mass protest began in Moscow, and the Russian government’s suspicions turned into certainty, even paranoia. The “Chinese model” of external politics was abandoned, along with common sense, and the “Soviet model” was revived.
Only in the Russia of 2012 there was no longer any “Warsaw Pact” or military parity with the west, let alone “bastards” (with the odd exception) around the world, military bases, money or — most importantly — anything that could be offered as encouragement to potential allies. The USSR educated specialists of all kinds from countries with a “socialist orientation”; sent its own specialists to these same countries; installed the latest technology; invested enormous sums in their economies and, finally, promised them a bright future without neo-colonialists and capitalists. What can Russia offer today? The best it can do is slip some local dictator a bribe and send an aging aircraft carrier to help him murder his own population.
A Soviet foreign policy without the USSR, the Soviet bloc, Soviet ideology or any chance of Soviet economics or technology — this is what has turned Russia into an international bogeyman. It is also what has ended the post-Soviet period of its existence on the world stage. Russia is feared, not surprisingly, as it has a large army and nuclear weapons, but everyone, especially in the west, is well aware that it has not much in the way of options.
So it can be used as a disgusting, aggressive figure in any number of internal and external political and media games, from the USA presidential campaign to intricate plots in the Near and Middle East. Russia’s leaders have no alternative but to follow the road recommended by stronger powers — to become even scarier and even more disgusting; to make friends with bastards like Assad; to give money to right extremists in Europe and to play dirty tricks on the west whenever they possibly can.
The Kremlin apparatchiks think they are behaving like Brezhnev during the Cold War, but they don’t realise that they are more like old woman Shapoklyak, the evil character from a 1970s Soviet animated series who sings: “Helping someone is a waste of time/ You won’t get famous doing good deeds.”
If you replace “get famous” with “build”, you have the crux of a wonderful new era in the history of Russia that is replacing the post-Soviet project in front of our very eyes.
domingo, 20 de novembro de 2016
"The Eternally Wonderful Present, or Russia’s need for a new culture" - Kirill Kobrin
The experiment in creating a “national culture” has worked in some places and not in others, but I think it is only in Russia that it has been completely successful. Here, of course, we need to define the concept of “national” in this context, not to mention the concept of “success”.
In this series of essays I have often referred to Lenin and to his ideas — we can’t talk about “post-Soviet” in isolation from the person who created the “Soviet”. Our discussion of the ideological and social elements of the “post-Soviet project” has already touched on the fact that “post-“ in this context actually means “anti-“, albeit disguised under a sense of continuity with the previous period.
But where culture is concerned, these relationships are more complex.
Let’s start with Lenin
In one of Lenin’s best known works, his 1913 article “Critical Remarks on the National Question”, there is a statement that is depressingly familiar to anyone whose childhood, youth and even part of their adulthood was spent in the Soviet Union. Here it is: “We say to all national-socialists, ‘there are two nations in every modern nation. There are two national cultures in every national culture. There is the Great Russian culture of the Purishkeviches, Guchkovs and Struves – but there is also the Great-Russian culture represented by the names of Chernyshevsky and Plekhanov’.”
If you dust these statements off and forget that they were used to mentally abuse several generations of Soviet citizens, you will find their content exceptionally interesting. On a superficial, banal level, Lenin divides national culture into “the culture of the ruling classes” (reactionaries such as Vladimir Purishkevich, a member of the “Black-Hundreds”; the “Octoberist” Aleksandr Guchkov and the former Marxist turned “liberal conservative” Pyotr Struve) and “democratic culture”, represented by the democratic revolutionary Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Marxist theoretician Georgy Plekhanov.
It is interesting that Lenin refers to “the culture of the ruling classes” as a whole, disregarding the huge political gulf between, say, Purishkevich and Struve. In this, Lenin was amazingly insightful, as though he knew that Struve would towards the end of his life adopt an ultra-monarchical vision reminiscent of Purishkevich (although without the open nationalist and racist element).
So here we have “two national cultures” — the undemocratic culture of the oppressors and the democratic culture of the oppressed. This distinction ignores everything else, including the contrast between “high culture” and “low culture”. Also, the "popular culture” so graphically described by the philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin bears no relation to Lenin’s definitions — neither the intellectual Chernyshevsky nor the intellectual Plekhanov have any relevance to it.
What Lenin effectively does is describe two kinds of “high culture”: the culture of educated people, such as reading, writing, reflecting on various matters using the instruments traditional to this social caste. The only difference is that one culture “transmits” the wrong values and world view to the masses; the other - the right values and views.
These were what initially formed the basis of Soviet culture: it was less a question of “who” than of “what line they took”. The cultural revolution proposed by Lenin after the October Revolution and the Civil War assumed the extension of the country’s “cultured class” to include its entire population.
Thus, the Bolsheviks’ mass literacy programme was mainly aimed at making communist propaganda accessible to all, exemplified by a picture of a peasant reading the party newspaper “Pravda” in his spare time. This was why cinema was hailed as “the most important of all the arts” and eminent Bolsheviks were involved in the development of radio services. “Culture” as a mass propaganda tool with no intrinsic value in itself — that was Lenin’s legacy to future generations.
After Lenin, this vision was transformed in, moreover, a reactionary, romantic direction. The “national” element returned — it was tolerated only within strict limits, and required to serve the ultimate goal, but it was nevertheless permitted and given official support.
Lenin’s vision of a homogeneous international Soviet culture was replaced by a patchwork quilt stitched together out of multicoloured national pieces. “Soviet” disappeared as an intrinsic “content”, and instead became a framework, a horizon, a goal, an ideological intent.
But one national culture, that of Russia, was designed to stand out in the pattern of the quilt — placed in the middle, it defined the positions of the other elements.
Nostalgia for Soviet pop culture
If we, however, return to the idea of “high culture” and “low, popular culture”, in the USSR’s later years the first category seemed to embody a purely “national” idea, and the second an “international”, indeed properly “Soviet” one. Classical literature and classical music, “serious” theatre and visual art all enjoyed incredibly high status, bookmarked as “cultural legacy”. The classics were not just dead stuff, but things produced within a national culture (Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian or whatever).
The fact that the Russian people were the “big brothers”, and so their culture was higher and more important than other peoples’, was another matter. What it meant was a total rejection of Lenin’s conception of culture, a much more serious rejection even than those relating to economic and social issues.
If “the classics” consist of dead stuff elevated to inaccessibly aesthetic and moral heights, the USSR’s “pop culture” was, on the other hand, lively and international. This is the culture behind the “Soviet” image that inspires the nostalgia we find among people living in the post-Soviet space today.
These people don’t elegise the ostensibly Soviet Hermitage and Bolshoi Theatre, or academic collected editions of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky’s works — no, they long for the return of 1970s comedies and romcoms, the Samotsvety pop group and the young Alla Pugacheva. This was the sphere where Soviet internationalism worked best, mixing everyone and everything — a young Moldavian singer from Ukraine with a Leningrad film director, a Georgian song with the inside of a Moscow restaurant.
Here everyone was equal and the ubiquitous slogan about “the friendship of peoples” rang true. And it couldn’t be otherwise, for pop culture has to aim at universality — otherwise, it’s not “popular culture”. The hatred and contempt of “Russian patriots” of the time, such as “serious writers” from Viktor Astafyev to Vladimir Chivilikhin, towards popular music and other symptoms of decadence was a reaction to the lively outpourings of the custodians of the corpse of “Great Russian culture”.
It’s strange that these late Soviet naysayers had no idea that their “great culture”, which in their opinion was something special and elevated, was dreamed up by Stalin in the year of the country-wide commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death, otherwise known as the terrible year of 1937.
These people don’t elegise the ostensibly Soviet Hermitage and Bolshoi Theatre, or academic collected editions of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky’s works — no, they long for the return of 1970s comedies and romcoms, the Samotsvety pop group and the young Alla Pugacheva. This was the sphere where Soviet internationalism worked best, mixing everyone and everything — a young Moldavian singer from Ukraine with a Leningrad film director, a Georgian song with the inside of a Moscow restaurant.
Here everyone was equal and the ubiquitous slogan about “the friendship of peoples” rang true. And it couldn’t be otherwise, for pop culture has to aim at universality — otherwise, it’s not “popular culture”. The hatred and contempt of “Russian patriots” of the time, such as “serious writers” from Viktor Astafyev to Vladimir Chivilikhin, towards popular music and other symptoms of decadence was a reaction to the lively outpourings of the custodians of the corpse of “Great Russian culture”.
It’s strange that these late Soviet naysayers had no idea that their “great culture”, which in their opinion was something special and elevated, was dreamed up by Stalin in the year of the country-wide commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death, otherwise known as the terrible year of 1937.
All this finally ended in 1991, when a new, very different era began. The 1990s, and particularly the first half of the decade, were the backdrop to an exceptionally interesting experiment when one type of culture — rather complex, hierarchical and subject to strict controls — was replaced by something totally unlike it, decentralised, focussed on pure profit and, most importantly, alien.
Western pop culture, which had grown out of a specific public-political and socio-cultural context, tantalised Soviet citizens as something distant and barely accessible. It embodied their secret dreams about real style, real beauty and real sexual freedom. As an object of desire seen darkly in bad photos through the glass of Alexandr Kukharkin’s ideologically unsound book Bourgeois Mass Culture and the few songs, novels and films that somehow got through the Iron Curtain, it looked wonderful.
But the image of this culture changed when it arrived in the former USSR and settled down as though it owned the place. It was a culture that appealed to general, universal, mass-produced people. But post-Soviet people suddenly found themselves longing for something special. Post-Soviet man and woman wanted to define themselves through culture — and reading War and Peaceand listening to Prokofiev’s opera based on it didn’t do the trick. So they had to create their own, national pop culture.
There was nothing new in this — the same thing happened long ago in India and Japan, and a little later in China. In the countries of the “first world”, even in Europe, pop culture, or mass culture as it is also known, has become not just “national” — it is a marker of national identity and even nationalism. The mass readership tabloid press and lowbrow TV channels are cornerstones of xenophobia in today’s world. In this sense, post-Soviet Russia is not exceptional. In today’s world, pop culture is rooted in universal principles, but its content is national.
The main condition for creating or constructing a pop culture is a general consensus on a number of issues. Firstly, it’s a question of aesthetic and ethical values and perceptions, and also measures of social identity. This consensus is usually a result of long tradition, though it can also be a consequence of recent turmoil, as in post-war Germany.
Post-Soviet Russia has not gone through anything along the lines of German denazification and rejection of the horrors of the past. There was no “old Russian pre-revolutionary tradition” to fall back on, whatever romantically-minded Russian patriots may say.
But there was a consensus, and it was based on Soviet pop culture — the only real living value inherited by post-Soviet Russians (and most post-Soviet people in general). So this is what provided the content for the new post-Soviet mass culture. It’s amusing that a former cornerstone of Soviet internationalism should have turned into an embodiment of our national identity.
Soviet culture is a finite resource
This culture is “lowbrow”, “mass”, “popular”. But what happened to “high”, even “highbrow” culture? In contrast to what was happening before 1991, this suddenly became international, a part of “world culture”. In fact, highbrow culture, which is by definition “anti-democratic”, paradoxically became a haven for those (both its creators and its small audience) who espoused democratic, “liberal” values.
Here post-Soviet Russia can take pride in its avant-garde credentials — this process started earlier here than it did in the west. The British have only just got their heads round the fact that sophisticated intellectuals, Guardiannewspaper readers who despise the tabloid press, pulp fiction and Justin Bieber, are the chief defenders of the “people”. The “people”, meanwhile, aren’t interested in defending themselves and see no need to: they’re too busy reading the Sun, watching soap operas and hating foreigners.
If we substituted the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta or the Colta.Ruonline journal for the Guardian, and Komsomolskaya Pravda or Life.Ru for the Sun, we would see that in Russia this all happened a lot earlier.
Television journalism is, of course, the exception. In Russia it’s as though the ultra-right populist Fox News has become the state broadcaster, aired as it is, with a few variations, on every channel. (I can imagine how Lenin would have hated it.)
This is the main reason for considering the post-Soviet period at an end in terms of culture. It has been 25 years since the collapse of the USSR. The very concept of “Soviet”, and Soviet pop culture in particular, is wearing thin — both in terms of a physical space and as an essential element of national identity. It can’t last forever, especially since the exploitation of this late-Soviet cultural resource is as barbaric as that of Russia’s natural resources.
Most of the heroes of this pop culture are no longer alive; nor are their fans. Their function has been assumed by the “1990s” and even the “2000s”. (The perestroika years were too traumatic for Russia’s national consciousness and so have been relegated to a distant corner of collective memory.)
Finally, our present rulers have also realised that this particular seam of cultural value has been exhausted and is looking back into the past in search of something new. Some of them are trying to find a consensus in the Stalin era; others to revive sentimental rubbish about “eternal Russia, destroyed by the non-Russian Bolsheviks” and call for a return to “the Russia we have lost”.
The Russian Federation’s multi-ethnic population is, however, unlikely to buy into the idea that this “we” has anything to do with them. Having rapidly exhausted the cultural reserves left over from the Brezhnev era, post-Soviet Russia will now have to either a) dig deeper into its history or b) cobble together a conception of an “Eternally Wonderful Present”.
The first option won’t hold anyone’s interest for long: who needs rusty tin cans? The second requires an enormous gift for self-persuasion, or more precisely, an enormous gift for persuading the public. It’s clear that the “present” of this poor, backward Russia, split by social inequality, is not eternal and is far from wonderful. And it seems unlikely that Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky and his minions possess the gift of persuading the public — this kind of talent isn’t something you can find in an amateur dissertation by a nobleman, defended at a serf academic council.
However, whatever kind of culture we end up with, it will, like the society it serves, no longer be a “post-Soviet” one. And bearing in mind the huge gap between the rich and poor in Russia, I would advise a close re-reading of Lenin’s “Critical Remarks on the National Question”. And not just to residents of Russia.
Kirill Kobrin
quinta-feira, 17 de novembro de 2016
"The roots of Russia’s atomised mourning" - Kirill Kobrin
A casual observer should be amazed at the gulf between publicly expressed emotions and the reality of life in Russia over the past 25 years.
Almost immediately after the fall of the USSR, Russian society was gripped by an obsession with all things Soviet, but this obsession combined with support for the most anti-Soviet economic and social policies you could think of. With the catchphrases of everyone’s favourite late Soviet comedies on his or her lips, the post-Soviet individual busied himself with building a life that excluded both the heroes of those films and the possibility of making those films again. It was, in effect, like watching a Bolshevik-era militant atheist destroying a church brick-by-brick while singing psalms at the top of his voice.
From the viewpoint of the public consciousness, the post-Soviet period embodied this schizophrenia. Moreover, I’d even say that the “post-Soviet project” itself was based on this schizophrenia. But was this really schizophrenia as such? Or can these contrasts between sentiment and real life be connected? Is it possible they even came from the same place?
“The breakdown is not in our bathrooms but in our heads”
If you put together a glossary of a post-Soviet person’s most frequent phrases, especially if the person in question has a certain income and certain expectations of society, the following expressions would likely be the most popular”
“A thief must sit in jail!”
“I do not love the proletariat”
The first phrase belongs to the manly hero of Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1970s police serial “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed”. The hero was played by Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky, which immediately made this phrase sound 100% convincing. The second two expressions are lifted from Vladimir Bortko’s TV movie (and adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov) “Heart of a Dog”, used by the jovial Professor Preobrazhensky, a dedicated foe of the Soviet government and, at the same time, a doctor who treats and takes care of Soviet leaders.
The publicly expressed worldview of the post-Soviet person, especially a person who lived through perestroika at a conscious age, is almost entirely summed up by these three lines.
Instead of the law, you have a faceless tautology. Nobody says that a thief “must be put in prison” — this implies the existence of people who will do the judging and jailing. Instead, we see a purely abstract thought that pretends to describe how things really work. A thief must be in prison. If I’m not in jail, then I’m not a thief. What’s also interesting is the archaisation, typical for that miniseries. The word “thief” is used in its old, Russian meaning - “criminal”. So those who are in jail are criminals, those who are free are not criminals, everything happens on its own, without police, judges, or the state. That’s just how it happens.
As we have seen, there is no contradiction here — you can be a real thief, conman, corrupt official and criminal, and you can argue that thieves should be in jail, because if you are free and are allowed to speak out, then you are not a thief by definition. This is why there are so many security/law enforcement officials, ministers, Duma deputies, businessmen, journalists and regular people, who repeat this mantra daily without it being, in the strictest terms, an expression of doublethink or schizophrenia.
If you put together a glossary of a post-Soviet person’s most frequent phrases, especially if the person in question has a certain income and certain expectations of society, the following expressions would likely be the most popular”
“A thief must sit in jail!”
“I do not love the proletariat”
The first phrase belongs to the manly hero of Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1970s police serial “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed”. The hero was played by Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky, which immediately made this phrase sound 100% convincing. The second two expressions are lifted from Vladimir Bortko’s TV movie (and adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov) “Heart of a Dog”, used by the jovial Professor Preobrazhensky, a dedicated foe of the Soviet government and, at the same time, a doctor who treats and takes care of Soviet leaders.
The publicly expressed worldview of the post-Soviet person, especially a person who lived through perestroika at a conscious age, is almost entirely summed up by these three lines.
Instead of the law, you have a faceless tautology. Nobody says that a thief “must be put in prison” — this implies the existence of people who will do the judging and jailing. Instead, we see a purely abstract thought that pretends to describe how things really work. A thief must be in prison. If I’m not in jail, then I’m not a thief. What’s also interesting is the archaisation, typical for that miniseries. The word “thief” is used in its old, Russian meaning - “criminal”. So those who are in jail are criminals, those who are free are not criminals, everything happens on its own, without police, judges, or the state. That’s just how it happens.
As we have seen, there is no contradiction here — you can be a real thief, conman, corrupt official and criminal, and you can argue that thieves should be in jail, because if you are free and are allowed to speak out, then you are not a thief by definition. This is why there are so many security/law enforcement officials, ministers, Duma deputies, businessmen, journalists and regular people, who repeat this mantra daily without it being, in the strictest terms, an expression of doublethink or schizophrenia.
This manifestation of a total lack of belief in institutions — in the law, in the state, as well as the rejection of social responsibility for an individual — is widespread in an atomised society. You have the individual and then you have Fate, and How Things Really Work, which will either send this person to jail and make him into a “thief”, or leave him alone.
The expressions taken from “Heart of a Dog” (“The breakdown is not in our bathrooms but in our heads”; “I do not love the proletariat”) transfer this problem to the level of society. The reasoning behind the “breakdown” is not a philosophical maxim that calls on your fellow citizens to get their own thinking in order. It’s a doctor who says it — a doctor who pretends that he is above the new Soviet life that surrounds him, even though he owes his position to those who built this life and govern it.
The expressions taken from “Heart of a Dog” (“The breakdown is not in our bathrooms but in our heads”; “I do not love the proletariat”) transfer this problem to the level of society. The reasoning behind the “breakdown” is not a philosophical maxim that calls on your fellow citizens to get their own thinking in order. It’s a doctor who says it — a doctor who pretends that he is above the new Soviet life that surrounds him, even though he owes his position to those who built this life and govern it.
Kindess, mutual assistance, justice?
Here we see a typical pattern of behaviour for two groups in post-Soviet society — the urban intelligentsia and public officials, especially officials at the top. The first group was almost always ready to serve a state it despised. The second group was forced to demonstrate a passionate love for “simple people”, so that it could keep squeezing those simple people for resources in order to support itself.
Professor Preobrazhensky helps rejuvenate Soviet party higher-ups, but gets a disdainful look on his face whenever he hears the very word “Soviet”. A liberal post-Soviet culture worker will travel abroad on the government dime (assuming he is invited), but will avoid being photographed next to culture minister Vladimir Medinsky.
A post-Soviet official with Swiss bank accounts, a house in Nice, and a daughter studying in Oxford is sometimes forced to travel to some factory and meet “the workers” there. He will even eat at the factory canteen, while straining from sheer disgust, but when he escapes to his official vehicle, he will wash away the taste of that eternal Soviet chicken cutlet with single malt whiskey from his flask.
This isn’t hypocrisy, no, this is a conscious separation of the different aspects of life, one aspect has nothing to do with the other — there is no schizophrenia here. It is here that an important truth about modern Russian society is buried.
Repeating, for the hundredth time, that line about a “breakdown in the heads,” the post-Soviet individual is talking about something else — this is his or her refusal to stop the breakdown taking place in the bathroom, wanting others to take care of it instead (“Nothing in my head is breaking down!” he or she believes, just as Professor Preobrazhensky did). The “breakdown” is not about me, it’s about other people. I have nothing to do with it.
The situation is the same as with the line about the thief who “must sit in jail.” It’s about others. Other people can be thieves, sit in jail, have a breakdown in their heads, clean up bathrooms, but I will stand off to the side, separately, I will take care of my own stuff and keep logic chopping. This is a social conscious that is completely free of any social, or even anthropological, solidarity.
This becomes evident in that third line about the proletariat. In my home neighbourhood of the town of Gorky, this would be known as being a cheap show-off. If Professor Preobrazhensky said that he doesn’t love the proletariat back in 1918, if the Red Army showed up at his door, then he would know that if you say the wrong word, the armed proletarian will tear you to shreds.
But in his new, stable, hierarchical Soviet world, protected by paperwork from the Central Committee, he can say whatever he wants to these funny dreamers from the local residential committee, say it directly to their faces with the disgusted grimace of a lord. The professor is just being rude.
The infamous post-Soviet rudeness, rudeness that exists on all levels of society, from top to bottom, is contained in its entirety in a single phrase — and it this rudeness which was behind the most despicable, brazen, inhuman phrase that Putin ever used when, referring to the tragedy of the Kursk submarine, he simply responded to the question of “What happened?” with “It sank”. This is the luxury of the cynical tautology, uttered by a powerful person who doesn’t have to pretend as he addresses the weak. Yes, I don’t love the proletariat — this is the truth that you can do nothing about, just as you can do nothing to me. Yes, the Kursk sank and we lied to you about it — this is the only truth in this story about a monstrous lie, but you can’t do anything about it or about us.
Here is something else that’s interesting: if you don’t love the proletariat while living in a country built by the proletariat and for it, you’re a coquettish hypocrite. Russia’s post-Soviet project was precisely hypocritical and coquettish, it enthusiastically used everything physically or culturally valuable that was built up by the Soviets, but pretended that this had nothing to do with anything, that this inheritance sort of fell out of the sky.
Soviet nostalgia was the other side of that, it was a kind of psychological compensation, an essential detail of the project — or else there wouldn’t be balance. As the years went by, the balance was destroyed — as Soviet infrastructure aged and crumbled, and as feelings of belonging to the previous epoch crumbled too.
As post-Soviet society moved further away in time from the Soviets, the nostalgia grew, because unmediated notions of what was “Soviet” was disappearing from collective memory. The balance was no longer needed. For new generations, Soviet infrastructure was just there — it wasn’t even Soviet to them, it was just the weather-beaten material ontology of life. Soviet life, which looked restored and nicely done up in Soviet films, began to replace Hollywood images. At this point, the post-Soviet project within Russia’s public conscious dies — it cannot exist without the balance.
The infamous post-Soviet rudeness, rudeness that exists on all levels of society, from top to bottom, is contained in its entirety in a single phrase — and it this rudeness which was behind the most despicable, brazen, inhuman phrase that Putin ever used when, referring to the tragedy of the Kursk submarine, he simply responded to the question of “What happened?” with “It sank”. This is the luxury of the cynical tautology, uttered by a powerful person who doesn’t have to pretend as he addresses the weak. Yes, I don’t love the proletariat — this is the truth that you can do nothing about, just as you can do nothing to me. Yes, the Kursk sank and we lied to you about it — this is the only truth in this story about a monstrous lie, but you can’t do anything about it or about us.
Here is something else that’s interesting: if you don’t love the proletariat while living in a country built by the proletariat and for it, you’re a coquettish hypocrite. Russia’s post-Soviet project was precisely hypocritical and coquettish, it enthusiastically used everything physically or culturally valuable that was built up by the Soviets, but pretended that this had nothing to do with anything, that this inheritance sort of fell out of the sky.
Soviet nostalgia was the other side of that, it was a kind of psychological compensation, an essential detail of the project — or else there wouldn’t be balance. As the years went by, the balance was destroyed — as Soviet infrastructure aged and crumbled, and as feelings of belonging to the previous epoch crumbled too.
As post-Soviet society moved further away in time from the Soviets, the nostalgia grew, because unmediated notions of what was “Soviet” was disappearing from collective memory. The balance was no longer needed. For new generations, Soviet infrastructure was just there — it wasn’t even Soviet to them, it was just the weather-beaten material ontology of life. Soviet life, which looked restored and nicely done up in Soviet films, began to replace Hollywood images. At this point, the post-Soviet project within Russia’s public conscious dies — it cannot exist without the balance.
Final countdown
These processes were meant to conceal the great catastrophe happening to society — its final atomisation. The history of Russia of the last two centuries and a half can be viewed as a series of social catastrophes, which destroyed horizontal ties in society, which connected the overwhelming majority of the population together. Serfdom abolished, urbanisation follows, the village community falls apart. The 1917 Revolution and the subsequent destruction of the social system. Stalinist industrialisation, collectivisation, and mass repressions.
A break began only in the second half of the 1960s and lasted for twenty years. For various reasons, the government left the Soviet people alone for a while. Beyond that, the government gave these people living spaces, some limited abilities to build up posessions, a settled way of life — and a wide spectrum of social connections, from nepotism and cronyism to collecting stamps, from chess clubs to learning Esperanto. Stalin wanted to kill esperantists, but Brezhnev couldn’t care less about them.
The end result was an unofficial, horizontal social world, which combined personal interests, territorial, professional and other social interests, and even that thing that almost disappeared under Stalin, which was solidarity. Crazy capitalism, which was set loose in Russia in 1992 and the absolute absence of social policies within government ripped up this world into pieces, into atoms. There were just phantom memories of alleged “kindness”, “mutual assistance” and “justice” that ruled the USSR. And if there was mutual assistance and solidarity on the personal level there — they were expressed by very different people. In either way, what we have is the last component of Soviet nostalgia as expressed by post-Soviet people.
As a socio-psychological or socio-cultural phenomenon, nostalgia can only exist privately, unofficially, as a process, and not as a complete entity. For several years now, Soviet nostalgia is being used as an ideological instrument and (for a longer period now) as a commercial strategy. From a sentiment, it has morphed into officious rhetoric and even “high style” — bringing an end to the kind of public conscious we could call “post-Soviet”. When nostalgia becomes a cast-iron slogan, it became apparent that post-Soviet atoms are not held together by anything – not even phantom sentiments.
This is where the danger lurks. The disintegration of social cultures and the atomization of society is the main reason behind the disasters plaguing several of the world’s regions, in Africa, in Central Asia, and, for example, in today’s Donbas. If you need to stop a war of everyone against everyone, to stop a prolonged catastrophe, you must lean on stable social structures — if they don’t exist, your efforts are meaningless.
The Russian state, which has taken up ultra-conservatism and traditionalism with a vengeance, knows this. The state is trying to create (while insisting that it is actually “re-creating”) these social structures, but with its other hand it destroys all timorous beginnings of a new, horizontally connected society which arise in contradiction to the government’s will.
By doing this, the government pushes both society and itself toward greater troubles. Attempts to avoid these troubles will, judging by how things are going, will come to define the next period of Russian history.
These processes were meant to conceal the great catastrophe happening to society — its final atomisation. The history of Russia of the last two centuries and a half can be viewed as a series of social catastrophes, which destroyed horizontal ties in society, which connected the overwhelming majority of the population together. Serfdom abolished, urbanisation follows, the village community falls apart. The 1917 Revolution and the subsequent destruction of the social system. Stalinist industrialisation, collectivisation, and mass repressions.
A break began only in the second half of the 1960s and lasted for twenty years. For various reasons, the government left the Soviet people alone for a while. Beyond that, the government gave these people living spaces, some limited abilities to build up posessions, a settled way of life — and a wide spectrum of social connections, from nepotism and cronyism to collecting stamps, from chess clubs to learning Esperanto. Stalin wanted to kill esperantists, but Brezhnev couldn’t care less about them.
The end result was an unofficial, horizontal social world, which combined personal interests, territorial, professional and other social interests, and even that thing that almost disappeared under Stalin, which was solidarity. Crazy capitalism, which was set loose in Russia in 1992 and the absolute absence of social policies within government ripped up this world into pieces, into atoms. There were just phantom memories of alleged “kindness”, “mutual assistance” and “justice” that ruled the USSR. And if there was mutual assistance and solidarity on the personal level there — they were expressed by very different people. In either way, what we have is the last component of Soviet nostalgia as expressed by post-Soviet people.
As a socio-psychological or socio-cultural phenomenon, nostalgia can only exist privately, unofficially, as a process, and not as a complete entity. For several years now, Soviet nostalgia is being used as an ideological instrument and (for a longer period now) as a commercial strategy. From a sentiment, it has morphed into officious rhetoric and even “high style” — bringing an end to the kind of public conscious we could call “post-Soviet”. When nostalgia becomes a cast-iron slogan, it became apparent that post-Soviet atoms are not held together by anything – not even phantom sentiments.
This is where the danger lurks. The disintegration of social cultures and the atomization of society is the main reason behind the disasters plaguing several of the world’s regions, in Africa, in Central Asia, and, for example, in today’s Donbas. If you need to stop a war of everyone against everyone, to stop a prolonged catastrophe, you must lean on stable social structures — if they don’t exist, your efforts are meaningless.
The Russian state, which has taken up ultra-conservatism and traditionalism with a vengeance, knows this. The state is trying to create (while insisting that it is actually “re-creating”) these social structures, but with its other hand it destroys all timorous beginnings of a new, horizontally connected society which arise in contradiction to the government’s will.
By doing this, the government pushes both society and itself toward greater troubles. Attempts to avoid these troubles will, judging by how things are going, will come to define the next period of Russian history.
Kirill Kobrin
terça-feira, 1 de novembro de 2016
"Welcome to the post-post-Soviet era" - Kirill Kobrin
Soviet ideology didn’t so much transform as gradually fade away. After all, ideology is never an add-on – it is something that precedes political practice, defining its direction and discourse. It leaves its print on the slightest gesture by rulers and on every response from the ruled.
The gravediggers of the revolution
Stalin was the first to deal a powerful, effectively fatal blow to Soviet ideology, by turning a series of temporary measures introduced by Lenin into the basis for his permanent internal and external policies. Lenin resorted to terror to win a civil war, so limiting it in time; Stalin introduced permanent terror. Lenin saw the coexistence of a socialist state with a capitalist world as a temporary measure; Stalin reconstituted the historic Russian Empire and played international politics by imperial rules. Lenin was forced to implement his New Economic Policy, recreating a class-based society and labour exploitation; Stalin created a new caste-based society with an enormous material gap between the new elite and the rest of the population, especially workers and peasants.
Lenin, again for tactical reasons, also supported national autonomy movements that destroyed empires; Stalin initiated a nationalist political course – but only for Russians. And in some areas he went further than Lenin: in anti-Semitism, for example, and in an alliance with the semi-official Russian Orthodox Church.
But the crux of the matter was that Stalin, for all the pseudo-Marxist babble of his tame ideologues and the grandiose cult of Lenin, attempted to create a new ideology that was not an ideology at all. It was, instead, a combination of political, socio-economic and cultural instruments, picked out of everyday political practice and given the status of fundamental and unchanging pillars of the “state”. The state was key, for Stalin never saw “society” as something with an independent existence. Stalinism tried, and still tries, to look like an ideology, but in fact you are more likely to find it in a ruler’s travelling bag than a library of political literature. And its ruthlessly practical nature has made it much more hardy and resilient than Marxism-Leninism.
Soviet citizens were offered not “communism”, but “socialism” – again, something previously seen as a temporary, half way stage on the road to a classless society. Communism was talked about endlessly; the ruling party was the “Communist Party”, but from the early 1930s on, behind all the discussion of Marx and Lenin, a system typical of the time was taking shape. For external purposes, it was a superpower dividing the world into spheres of influence with other superpowers; for internal purposes it was a repressive regime where everything was state-owned and evolved social politics were under constant threat.
The following 50 years were devoted to honing these key points, which had no relation to ideology as such. The only blip was Khrushchev’s short-lived but colourful attempt to return the Soviet state and Soviet society to what he saw as real communist ideology. It was this attempt, and not his ridiculous administrative measures and unpredictable behaviour, that was, I believe, the main reason for his fall.
The Brezhnev years were a synthesis of these two previous periods – a combination of (watered down) Stalinist principles and Khrushchev’s basically social democratic measures (a massive housing programme and increase in other social benefits, a more egalitarian wage structure). But the main thing was that in the second half of the 1970s the Brezhnev government quietly dropped any idea of aiming to achieve communism. A new concept of “developed socialism” appeared, to be followed by “the perfecting of developed socialism”.
Anyone who could be bothered thinking about these new slogans would instantly see that the process they described could go on forever. In other words, communism would never happen.
By the beginnings of perestroika, Soviet society had given up on any prospect of communism, so in the early 1980s the idea of a “communist ideology” was also extinct and lay, embalmed in millions of pages of party books and leaflets, in the mausoleum next to its creator. It could have been the final scene from Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”. The mummy, however, came in handy during the first years of perestroika.
Stalin was the first to deal a powerful, effectively fatal blow to Soviet ideology, by turning a series of temporary measures introduced by Lenin into the basis for his permanent internal and external policies. Lenin resorted to terror to win a civil war, so limiting it in time; Stalin introduced permanent terror. Lenin saw the coexistence of a socialist state with a capitalist world as a temporary measure; Stalin reconstituted the historic Russian Empire and played international politics by imperial rules. Lenin was forced to implement his New Economic Policy, recreating a class-based society and labour exploitation; Stalin created a new caste-based society with an enormous material gap between the new elite and the rest of the population, especially workers and peasants.
Lenin, again for tactical reasons, also supported national autonomy movements that destroyed empires; Stalin initiated a nationalist political course – but only for Russians. And in some areas he went further than Lenin: in anti-Semitism, for example, and in an alliance with the semi-official Russian Orthodox Church.
But the crux of the matter was that Stalin, for all the pseudo-Marxist babble of his tame ideologues and the grandiose cult of Lenin, attempted to create a new ideology that was not an ideology at all. It was, instead, a combination of political, socio-economic and cultural instruments, picked out of everyday political practice and given the status of fundamental and unchanging pillars of the “state”. The state was key, for Stalin never saw “society” as something with an independent existence. Stalinism tried, and still tries, to look like an ideology, but in fact you are more likely to find it in a ruler’s travelling bag than a library of political literature. And its ruthlessly practical nature has made it much more hardy and resilient than Marxism-Leninism.
Soviet citizens were offered not “communism”, but “socialism” – again, something previously seen as a temporary, half way stage on the road to a classless society. Communism was talked about endlessly; the ruling party was the “Communist Party”, but from the early 1930s on, behind all the discussion of Marx and Lenin, a system typical of the time was taking shape. For external purposes, it was a superpower dividing the world into spheres of influence with other superpowers; for internal purposes it was a repressive regime where everything was state-owned and evolved social politics were under constant threat.
The following 50 years were devoted to honing these key points, which had no relation to ideology as such. The only blip was Khrushchev’s short-lived but colourful attempt to return the Soviet state and Soviet society to what he saw as real communist ideology. It was this attempt, and not his ridiculous administrative measures and unpredictable behaviour, that was, I believe, the main reason for his fall.
The Brezhnev years were a synthesis of these two previous periods – a combination of (watered down) Stalinist principles and Khrushchev’s basically social democratic measures (a massive housing programme and increase in other social benefits, a more egalitarian wage structure). But the main thing was that in the second half of the 1970s the Brezhnev government quietly dropped any idea of aiming to achieve communism. A new concept of “developed socialism” appeared, to be followed by “the perfecting of developed socialism”.
Anyone who could be bothered thinking about these new slogans would instantly see that the process they described could go on forever. In other words, communism would never happen.
By the beginnings of perestroika, Soviet society had given up on any prospect of communism, so in the early 1980s the idea of a “communist ideology” was also extinct and lay, embalmed in millions of pages of party books and leaflets, in the mausoleum next to its creator. It could have been the final scene from Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”. The mummy, however, came in handy during the first years of perestroika.
The triumph of PR over ideology
First of all, the legitimate social disaffection of a Soviet population faced with constantly falling living standards was swiftly attributed by the government of the time to “Soviet ideology”, Marxism-Leninism and the idea of communism per se. The “protagonists of perestroika” may have initially demanded that Lenin’s pure doctrines be cleansed of their Stalin-era stains, but this process quickly rebounded on the founder of the Soviet state. The sole beneficiaries of this were nationalist movements within the USSR and the enemies, not of long-dead communism, but of “developed socialism”.
As well the idealistically inclined intelligentsia, who never suspected that they would lose their own social status and way of life along with the Soviet regime, the main players in the perestroika game were the amorphous “petit-bourgeois elements” to whom the begetters of Marxism-Leninism devoted many pages in their works. Eventually, this element merged with a nationalism more typical of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, and the USSR collapsed.
In most areas of the former USSR, the “post-Soviet project” has been based on these two pillars – nationalism and extreme social egotism, characterised by a surprising blend of embarrassment and awkwardness about their own roots. In the 1990s, both nationalism and extreme individualism bordering on social cynicism were not comme il faut in public life, so fine new, civilised, convincing and right-on expressions had to be coined to distract people’s attention from the only too obvious content of the “post-Soviet project”, and where possible away from the present state of the country and its people.
Therefore the attempts initiated by Yeltsin in the 1990s to formulate ideological reference points on which to build a wonderful new life, proposed something beyond this –across either geographical borders (i.e. the west) or time: “the Russia that we lost” – i.e. 1913, before the revolution. This new ideology was, again, not an ideology at all – it was created post factum to justify the state of affairs at the time.
In the end – in our 21st century – it is not philosophers, historians or even political scientists that have been required for its creation, but “political strategists”, whose job is to foist their political wares on an indifferent, and sometimes hostile, public. This new type of political product is not an ideology, but some kind of ideological sentiment designed to be inculcated in Russians mainly through the medium of images, on either a TV or computer screen.
In other words, any talk of a “revival of Soviet ideology in Russia” is meaningless: like Lenin, it can only be revived in some “Lord of the Rings” - type fantasy. What today can be called an “ideological convention of (late)-Putin rule” is merely a public mood sustained in practice with the aid of PR tricks, an amorphous conservative sentiment carefully extracted from any administrative-governmental or economic sphere of activity (which in Russia amounts to much the same thing).
What we have here is rhetoric worthy of Russia under Nicholas I, Alexander III or Leonid Brezhnev, slightly updated to match the intellectual level of today’s consumers and fed to them in the form of commercial advertising.
In the 1990s, Russia’s “Imperial Bank” commissioned a series of comic TV commercials on historical subjects — with of course, an imperial theme to reflect the bank’s name. Today, this type of advertising, playing with journalism, cinema and literature, is used to advertise the Russian state itself.
First of all, the legitimate social disaffection of a Soviet population faced with constantly falling living standards was swiftly attributed by the government of the time to “Soviet ideology”, Marxism-Leninism and the idea of communism per se. The “protagonists of perestroika” may have initially demanded that Lenin’s pure doctrines be cleansed of their Stalin-era stains, but this process quickly rebounded on the founder of the Soviet state. The sole beneficiaries of this were nationalist movements within the USSR and the enemies, not of long-dead communism, but of “developed socialism”.
As well the idealistically inclined intelligentsia, who never suspected that they would lose their own social status and way of life along with the Soviet regime, the main players in the perestroika game were the amorphous “petit-bourgeois elements” to whom the begetters of Marxism-Leninism devoted many pages in their works. Eventually, this element merged with a nationalism more typical of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, and the USSR collapsed.
In most areas of the former USSR, the “post-Soviet project” has been based on these two pillars – nationalism and extreme social egotism, characterised by a surprising blend of embarrassment and awkwardness about their own roots. In the 1990s, both nationalism and extreme individualism bordering on social cynicism were not comme il faut in public life, so fine new, civilised, convincing and right-on expressions had to be coined to distract people’s attention from the only too obvious content of the “post-Soviet project”, and where possible away from the present state of the country and its people.
Therefore the attempts initiated by Yeltsin in the 1990s to formulate ideological reference points on which to build a wonderful new life, proposed something beyond this –across either geographical borders (i.e. the west) or time: “the Russia that we lost” – i.e. 1913, before the revolution. This new ideology was, again, not an ideology at all – it was created post factum to justify the state of affairs at the time.
In the end – in our 21st century – it is not philosophers, historians or even political scientists that have been required for its creation, but “political strategists”, whose job is to foist their political wares on an indifferent, and sometimes hostile, public. This new type of political product is not an ideology, but some kind of ideological sentiment designed to be inculcated in Russians mainly through the medium of images, on either a TV or computer screen.
In other words, any talk of a “revival of Soviet ideology in Russia” is meaningless: like Lenin, it can only be revived in some “Lord of the Rings” - type fantasy. What today can be called an “ideological convention of (late)-Putin rule” is merely a public mood sustained in practice with the aid of PR tricks, an amorphous conservative sentiment carefully extracted from any administrative-governmental or economic sphere of activity (which in Russia amounts to much the same thing).
What we have here is rhetoric worthy of Russia under Nicholas I, Alexander III or Leonid Brezhnev, slightly updated to match the intellectual level of today’s consumers and fed to them in the form of commercial advertising.
In the 1990s, Russia’s “Imperial Bank” commissioned a series of comic TV commercials on historical subjects — with of course, an imperial theme to reflect the bank’s name. Today, this type of advertising, playing with journalism, cinema and literature, is used to advertise the Russian state itself.
A new international
There is, however, one problem in the way of the Russian “post-Soviet project” as a distinct historic-ideological period. As I have already pointed out, the common perception of a lack of some all-embracing ideology arose out of a desire to hide the true foundations of the post-Soviet society and state – nationalism and petit-bourgeois elements. But this odd political and public embarrassment about its own appearance is now a thing of the past.
To speak of a lack of ideology is now quite conventional, not just in “wild Russia” but in “enlightened Europe” and all “democratic states”. There is, of course, nothing new in a blend of nationalism and rampant populism: one has only to remember Marx’s classic analysis of this combination in his essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”. This analysis is still considered the foundation of political life in the Western world.
In post-war Europe the ruling elites did all they could to, on the one hand, “educate the common man in humanism” and make him (or her) progressive, tolerant and “open”. Simultaneously, they denied the masses any direct influence on political decision making (they were, not without reason, suspected of entertaining destructive emotions).What we now see in the UK, the USA and some other countries is at once the collapse of the “post-war humanist education of the masses” and a catastrophe for the ruling class.
Nobody is happier to see this than the Russian government and public. When Donald Trump spouts dangerous nonsense of a type that the average American never imagined they would hear in their lifetime; when the British Conservatives continually push the boundaries of good old xenophobia – why do we Russians need to hide the fact that the only things our country and people recognise are perceptions of our own supremacy and our ability to fleece our weaker neighbour?
But there is one serious problem. Both these traits are of no use in relation to the popular issue of our day, national identity, as “foreigners” have them as well. These traits are universal in our modern world, in new and contemporary history. As a result, a new, incredible International of xenophobic “common people” is taking shape before our eyes: an International in which American, British, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, German and many other people are uniting in homespun hatred for one another.
As for the recently so influential neoliberalism, globalism and other powerful theoretical constructs of this fading era, they are already being hastily mummified with the works of economists Hayek and Friedman, to be taken to the same mausoleum where two mummies of communism, the physical and the intellectual, have been lying for over 80 years.
Kirill KobrinThere is, however, one problem in the way of the Russian “post-Soviet project” as a distinct historic-ideological period. As I have already pointed out, the common perception of a lack of some all-embracing ideology arose out of a desire to hide the true foundations of the post-Soviet society and state – nationalism and petit-bourgeois elements. But this odd political and public embarrassment about its own appearance is now a thing of the past.
To speak of a lack of ideology is now quite conventional, not just in “wild Russia” but in “enlightened Europe” and all “democratic states”. There is, of course, nothing new in a blend of nationalism and rampant populism: one has only to remember Marx’s classic analysis of this combination in his essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”. This analysis is still considered the foundation of political life in the Western world.
In post-war Europe the ruling elites did all they could to, on the one hand, “educate the common man in humanism” and make him (or her) progressive, tolerant and “open”. Simultaneously, they denied the masses any direct influence on political decision making (they were, not without reason, suspected of entertaining destructive emotions).What we now see in the UK, the USA and some other countries is at once the collapse of the “post-war humanist education of the masses” and a catastrophe for the ruling class.
Nobody is happier to see this than the Russian government and public. When Donald Trump spouts dangerous nonsense of a type that the average American never imagined they would hear in their lifetime; when the British Conservatives continually push the boundaries of good old xenophobia – why do we Russians need to hide the fact that the only things our country and people recognise are perceptions of our own supremacy and our ability to fleece our weaker neighbour?
But there is one serious problem. Both these traits are of no use in relation to the popular issue of our day, national identity, as “foreigners” have them as well. These traits are universal in our modern world, in new and contemporary history. As a result, a new, incredible International of xenophobic “common people” is taking shape before our eyes: an International in which American, British, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, German and many other people are uniting in homespun hatred for one another.
As for the recently so influential neoliberalism, globalism and other powerful theoretical constructs of this fading era, they are already being hastily mummified with the works of economists Hayek and Friedman, to be taken to the same mausoleum where two mummies of communism, the physical and the intellectual, have been lying for over 80 years.
domingo, 30 de outubro de 2016
"The death of the post-Soviet project in Russia" - Kirill Kobrin
As the end of 2016 looms, you can’t help but look back and discuss what’s happened. You make acerbic jokes about Trump, sigh over Brexit, and hope that Germany’s post-war immunity to brazen populism remains intact. Eventually, it becomes obvious that these topics are, at least, worth discussing — as opposed to the situation in Russia. Russia is boring because, well, everything about Russia is clear.
Having said that, what does “clear” mean? At first glance, the situation in Russia is growing stranger and more dangerous: fairy-tale like parliamentary elections, musical chairs in the government, the bombing of Syria, the death of the liberal opposition, the pathetic helplessness of national legislation when it comes to Chechnya, and so on. Add an economic crisis, growing working class discontent, the slow-motion failure that is “import substitution” — all of this is just the dull background for bigger dramas taking place beyond Russia’s borders. Why? Because all of these unpleasant things have their roots in a previous period of history.
I am convinced that the period of history known as “post-Soviet” in Russia is over. This is why the personalities and processes of the previous period are no longer relevant. They are still in the news, and they still act, sometimes dangerously, but discussing them is as relevant as discussing laws passed by pre-revolutionary premier Pyotr Stolypin in 1919. Today’s changes aren’t as quick and catastrophic as they were then, but then history doesn’t repeat itself, not even as farce.
What has changed? The public agenda. The hierarchy of what’s important and what’s not for Russian society. What is appropriate and desirable. And, most importantly, the project of the present and the past. The old post-Soviet project, once relevant back in 1991, is over. It has achieved its aims. It’s just that nobody’s rushing to pronounce what has happened as the “natural, logical results” of this process.
Maybe now it’s time to sum up (tentatively, of course,) the results of Russia’s post-Soviet project — this is what this series of essays is devoted to. The post-Soviet project began with a public gesture of rejection of Soviet ideology. It ended when it drowned in the pseudo-ideological swamp of conservatism. Ideology, culture, public life in general, these are the things we must concentrate on to understand what happened in 1991-2016.
In this introduction, I will look at the history of Soviet ideology, which was allegedly spurned by the freedom-loving Soviet peoples in the late 1980s, and which supposedly formed the foundation of the “Soviet empire.” In the next part of the series, I will discuss what happened to this ideology, discuss the possibility of new ideologies, and draw some conclusions about the state of the public mind in modern Russian society.
Part one: The portrait of the ideology as a young man
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze,” the ever artless Doctor Watson asks the observant Mr Holmes:
"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident.”
If you ask people who were old enough to consciously experience the most impetuous and troubled period of the late Soviet Union — the three and a half months in 1991 between the failed August putsch and the Belavezh Accords — about what role Soviet ideology played back then, they will all answer much in the same way. Soviet ideology played no role. And nobody “did” anything with that ideology in mind.
The object (and content) of political struggle in Russia, Ukraine (which left the Union on 24 August, 1991), Belarus (which did not leave the Union until after Belovezh), Turkmenistan (left 27 October, 1991), Tajikistan (9 September, 1991), Kazakhstan (16 December, 1991) and Kyrgyzstan (31 August, 1991) was the national independence scenario, the status of the republics, the future of the USSR, of how the parent state viewed its surroundings — it had nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism.
On one side of the barricades (thankfully, mostly rhetorical), there were speeches on Russian colonialism, Moscow’s imperial mind-set, and the unmatched qualities of the titular peoples of the respective republics. On the other side, there was talk that Russia “feeds” everyone, and that nations A, B, C and so on never existed to begin with. That these nations were inorganic administrative units, that their languages were just dialects of more important languages, that the great Russian culture far outstretched “local” culture.
This rhetoric is typical for the breakdown of a multi-national empire and the building of ethnic nations grounded in modern realities —you could hear such talk in Hungary in 1848, Poland of 1918, India of 1947 and so on. This is a phenomenon of modernity, of the period which the previous generation of historians called “Modern history”.
The thing is, the fall of the USSR feels like an event from a different epoch. The end of the Soviet Union is seen today as the end of an ideological project, the fall of communist ideology, a postmodern event — most explanations of what happened in 1985-1991 say this.
My task here is not to introduce a new concept of how the USSR fell apart. This is a separate topic of discussion. What I’m interested in is this: how did the “absence” of Soviet ideology in the events of 1991 and, if you think about it, in the events of the previous two-three years, influenced its continuing absence in the 1990s, and how this absence influenced the current Russian regime to remodel (or even reconstruct) this ideology in the last 16 years.
This is no idle question. If dealing with a society that, due to unknown reasons, “lost” an all-powerful ideology, the desire to fill the ideological vacuum is understandable. In that case, the ideology-building of the Putin years acquires the qualities of a natural process.
If there was no viable ideology when the USSR’s allegedly “sudden collapse” took place, then talk of an ensuing “ideological vacuum” in Russia makes no sense. Then we can claim that the post-ideological epoch began on the territory of the former USSR earlier. In this case, it is beneficial to look around Russia, as opposed to peer at its Soviet history — the current happenings in Europe and the US give us much food for thought.
For the 70 years that the Soviet state existed, what was “Soviet ideology?” It’s no secret that, in this case, it is difficult to speak of just one ideology — there were several successive ones that had the same name. The foundation of the history of Soviet ideology is clearly classical Marxism-Leninism, which combined the utopian vision of a future classless society with effective political instruments for practical adaptation.
But unlike the Marxism of the mid-19th century, Marxism-Leninism was not eschatological. Lenin did not prophesise that “history will end” after communism triumphs. The classless society of the future would be created, it was said, and then not only the character of human society would be changed, but human nature.
Lenin avoided futuristic visions, and made do with ascertaining that there will be no class under communism, no exploitation, and no private property, and only that will result in universal justice. Lenin rarely used the word “happiness”, which can be found frequently in the works of the utopian socialists of the 19th century, as well as his romantic contemporaries and allies in the main revolution of the 20th century. The main theory of Marxism-Leninism, the starting point of the history of Soviet ideology, was the idea of universal justice, which was treated as something mystical, even religious, though to Lenin this seem like a practical concept. In order to reach this daring, but, as the Bolsheviks saw, attainable goal, the old world in all of its economic, social, political, and cultural foundations had to be destroyed, so that a new world could be created on a new foundation.
As for the realisation of these aims, each involved a furious debate, but all sides agreed that:
1. The state, being a class-based oppressor, will wither away
2. Property will have universal ownership
3. All people, regardless of provenance, gender and nationality, will be equal and will have equal opportunities
Debates mostly concerned the means of reaching this desired outcome. Lenin’s point of view, which combined the most practical methods with merciless pursuit of the utopian end goal, won out.
Tactically speaking, Lenin was ready to sacrifice a lot. But he never overstated the importance of the transitional measures and institutions that had to be tolerated (or introduced) so the Bolsheviks could retain their grip on power and the country could continue on its path to communism. Peace and trade with the imperialists instead of a global revolution. New Economic Policy, or NEP. Giving land to peasants for individual use. Using “fellow travellers” in science, industry, and culture (or propaganda, to be exact), in the government apparatus and in the army. Finally, there was the recognition of national movements as “revolutionary allies”, with all of the conclusions for policy this entailed.
If we look at “Soviet ideology” circa 1984, right before the beginning of perestroika, we will see that pretty much nothing of Marxism-Leninism remained. Soviet ideology had undergone a grandiose transformation. The principal loss during 70 years of Soviet rule was the idea of creating an absolutely just society — this was why the state and its citizens existed, after all.
And this idea was lost long before the Soviet Union was also “lost”.
Kiril Kobrin
domingo, 21 de agosto de 2016
terça-feira, 26 de abril de 2016
domingo, 10 de abril de 2016
domingo, 9 de novembro de 2014
Foi há 25 anos
Há 25 anos caiu o muro de Berlim.
A queda do Muro de Berlim, um marco do fim da Guerra Fria e símbolo do desmantelamento do bloco socialista do leste europeu, completa 25 anos neste domingo (09/11). Antes desse aniversário histórico, conheça 25 fatos sobre a barreira que dividiu a Alemanha por 28 anos:
Numa data para celebrar há, infelizmente, quem não perceba nada do que aconteceu: para o PCP a queda do muro é a chamada "queda do muro de Berlim".
Não há estatísticas sobre o nº de mortes dos que tentaram passar o muro. Mas há trabalhos como este que, de alguma forma, fazem justiça àqueles que tentaram viver em liberdade.
Não percebo como é possível que esta organização política seja contra o horroroso muro de Israel com a Palestina e tenha esta posição.
quinta-feira, 26 de dezembro de 2013
quarta-feira, 21 de agosto de 2013
segunda-feira, 22 de abril de 2013
quarta-feira, 14 de novembro de 2012
"Ethnic Germans: A Forgotten Genocide"
A forgotten genocide: the ethnic German cleansing. Germans migrated down the Danube in three major waves beginning more than 700 years ago, and settled in mountainous areas of Bohemia and Moravia.
These Ethnic Germans became very prosperous and those in Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia were known as Danube Swabians.
1939 the Czech President expelled German minority to be executed with utmost brutality resulting 1 million sudeten Germans losing their lives. Many Ethnic Germans settled in St. Louis, USA.
Through interviews with survivors, the memory of this sad period in human history is preserved, and hopefully provides peace to the almost 15 million souls lost.
These Ethnic Germans became very prosperous and those in Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia were known as Danube Swabians.
1939 the Czech President expelled German minority to be executed with utmost brutality resulting 1 million sudeten Germans losing their lives. Many Ethnic Germans settled in St. Louis, USA.
Through interviews with survivors, the memory of this sad period in human history is preserved, and hopefully provides peace to the almost 15 million souls lost.
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