Our cover story this month is an uncompromising attack on Russia’s intelligentsia, the liberals and intellectuals who after 1991, argues Arkady Ostrovsky, were presented with a one-off opportunity to drag their country into the modern world. Instead, they got mired in irony and bad art, and were all too easily seduced by Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist vision of Russia’s future and his exploitation of public nostalgia for Soviet greatness. Communism is dead, and will not return. But the absence of a liberal voice in Russia means that the most powerful force in that country, as the Georgians have just discovered to their cost, is likely to remain old-fashioned belligerent nationalism.
Let us know what you think in the comment boxes below.
This is a really inadequate article, a wishy-washy whitewash. The liberal intelligentsia are dismissed because they couldn’t formulate a vision. That’s why they lost in today’s Russia, because of the metaphysics? Really? What about the murders of dozens of journalists who published the truth, Politkovskaya being the most famous, and the state take-over of the media? What about the killing, imprisonment or banishment of businessmen who insisted on transparency and the rule of law? What about the endless beatings and intimidation and lawsuits against liberal voices? What about the hounding of artists, the seizures of books and paintings, the legal attacks on exhibition organisers? What about the corruption that reaches to the highest places and to which the average Russian, who wishes to live out his two-score-years-and-eighteen in peace, submits, having no real choice? Putin’s isn’t power achieved by having a more compelling vision for Russia, it’s mere criminality and thuggery, dressed up in patriotic verbiage. It’s indicative of the author’s incompetence that he illustrates his article with a picture made in the United States by an artist who emigrated from USSR in 1980 and lives in New York! Yet it is supposed to exemplify the Russian situation! What a joke.
Mike, I don’t necessarily disagree with your points, but I do think Mr. Ostrovsky draws out some nuance, not often remarked upon, in connection with language, art, and tyranny. Other folks have documented chapter and verse all the assaults upon personal liberty in Russia over the past 10 years, and that is important work. I think Mr. Ostrovsky’s aims are subtler. He’s trying to explain how Czarist, then Communist, and now post-Communist Russians are a broken and warped people. It’s as if the entire country is suffering from a form of mass Stockholm Syndrome and, tragically, are now complicit in their own brutalization, for lack of knowing anything else. At least, that’s what I took away from the essay. Doesn’t change the nature of the Russian menace, but it, for me, does induce sympathy for such a blinkered and disfigured people.
Mike, while on to something (more on that below), seems to have misread Ostrovky’s article and misunderstood his intentions as well. Every piece of everyday thuggery which Mike cites as the weapons used by Putin’s administration in its efforts to silence and diminish its opponents is, of course, a weapon of renascent Stalinism. This is the successful, war-winning, empire-building Stalin, not the man who at one time considered himself to be the most correct ideological heir of Lenin (Stalin’s personality required that he be viewed as a “Bolshevik intellectual” as well as the era’s foremost politician and statesman). By the end of his life he tired of such games and hardly made a gesture in that direction, but he never lost his taste for power-politics, motivated by an overwhelming fear of what his loss of power would mean. Like the senescent Mao pondering the final days of Chinese Emperors as the “mantle of heaven” was being lifted from their shoulders, Stalin pondered the fate of Peter the Great and most especially the end of Ivan Grozny. By the end of the war Josef Grozny was his new self-ideal –“grozny” being best translated as “he who inspires awe and terror in the hearts of his fellow-men”. His immediate cronies always spoke of “the Boss” (vozhd), as Hitler’s spoke of “der Chef”. Stalin, like many men from the periphery of a national culture (Hitler, again), was a Great Russian Chauvinist with a vengeance. There are too many parallelisms and echoes between Hitlerism (for National Socialism without Hitler was meaningless) and Stalinism for the phenomenon to be a coincidence – the underlying dynamics of the leader’s personalities and their followers’ behavior are uncanny, regardless of the ideologies they purported to serve. Putin is aware of these dynamics and draws on them cynically.
Mike may be right about one thing – the role and/or failure of intellectuals, especially artists, whose post- 1992 efforts disappoint Ostrovsky. (These are Mike’s “metaphysicians”; his intended irony is oblivious to the fact that Putin’s nationalism has its own metaphysicians). Intellectuals tend to overestimate their actual role in public life and in social and political change. What their true role might be has to be examined in particular detail in any given case. But it is a sad fact the writers, poets, and philosophers involved in the changes of 1989-1992 were already being spurned by the second round of national elections in their own central and eastern European countries. Leaders need followers, and regardless of how brutal and backward Putin’s tactics have been, they do receive a large share (perhaps between 60 and 70 per cent) of popular support.
Why he should complain of the witty Stalin-Marilyn cover is beyond me. Would a “serious” picture of the millions of the discarded busts and statues of the Great Leader of Fraternal Socialism have been more appropriate for the essay, or a pile of bodies of Stalin’s or Putin’s foes? (Mike should know that Stalin was an inveterate watcher of movies in the privileged private venues of the Kremlin and his dacha; he was especially fond of Hollywood cowboy-and-Indian sagas, in which he identified the cowboys with the Russians and the Indians with those marginal “colorful” peoples on the periphery of Russian proper whom he intended to keep subjugated).
The Ostrovsky article is full of conceited contradiction. To give just one instance: while he marvels at the irony of Putin paying homage to Solzhenitsyn, he completely forgets to tell his readers how Stalin launched the pograms against writers and intellectuals, and their disappearance, Osip Mandels’tam being a symbol of that
that murderous repression. How can Ostrovsky compare Putin with Stalin?
And while on the subject on Georgia, why does Ostrovsky relegate to oblivion the provocations perpetrated by Kiaasahvili, a veritable stooge and (the West’s) mummy boy is ever there was one.
Even Ostovsky’s conceptual judgements on aesthetics are most poor; Stalin’s picture with Marilyn Monroe on his lap is a gem of aristic wit and sophistication.
The Ostrovsky article is full of conceited contradiction from one paragraph to the next. To give just one instance, while he marvels at the irony of Putin paying homage to Solzhenitsyn, he completely forgets to tell his readers how Stalin launched the pogroms against writers and intellectuals, often resulting in their disappearance or murder, Osip mandel’stam being a historical victim of that criminal repression.
How can Ostrovsky compare Stalin with Putin?
While on the subject of Georgia, why does Ostrovsky relegate to oblivion the provocations perpetrated by Kiaasashvili, a veritable stooge of the West and a political mummy-boy if ever there was one?
Even Ostrovsky’s conceptual judgements on aesthetics are most poor; Stalin’s image with Ms. Monroe on his lap is a gem of artistic wit and sophistication.
Poor Arkady Ostrovsky — he’s getting lambasted by another reader so choleric in his reaction that he has fuzzy vision.
To whom else in Russian history does Mr. Pardi think Putin should be compared? In a time of resurgent Great Russian chauvinism, the natural models are few: Ivan Grozny, Peter and Catherine the Great, and J. Stalin. Given Putin’s career in the KGB, that peculiar “State Organ” that was Stalin’s preferred instrument of control and intimidation, Stalin is the obvious choice for comparison. Of course Russia has changed sinced 1953, and, after the timely dispatching of Beria, the Party’s leadership placed an implicit ban on executions, especially of each other. Khrushchev, Malenkov, Bulganin, Molotov et al. knew this much: Stalin had used compliant “old Bolsheviks” to liquidate kulaks and other “class enemies”; he then used the new post 1917 members of the party (the new men, which included them) to liquidate the old Bolsheviks, especially those who had been prominent rivals; in the early 1950s he was contemplating another purge in which those who implemented the purges of the 1930s would be liquidated by the “new new men” raised up by World War Two. While never ceasing to use the KGB to police society and snuff out all whiffs of opposition, The Party called a halt to this endless daisy-chain of executions after 1953. Putin’s cynical appearance at Solzhenitsyn’s funeral is in line with Stalin’s similar performances at the funerals of men whom he had bumped off for a wide variety of reasons, including lese-majeste. Putin is no Stalin because the context in which he works his magic has changed, but Stalin will continue to be the role model for resentful, wounded nationalists of Putin’s ilk (and if there was ever a man whose life and works were fueled by resentment and envy, it was little Soso Djugashvili). I know that one is tempted by the ease of response to rush into the battle, but Mr. Pardi should have slowed down long enough to get “pogrom” right and give President Saakashvili’s name a closer approximation to its correct spelling.
It is only people who are as myopic as Ostrovsky and O’Keeffe who would want to keep harping on “similarities” between Putin and Stalin.
Putin saw Solzhenitsyn as the renewed moral force in Russia after it had collapsed and was virtually raped by oligarchs, whereas Stalin sent his agents in the middle of the night to arrest writers and intellectuals and murder them during his reign of terror.
Stalinism could only be compared with Nazism. As Pasternak had precautiously warned as early as 1933 in one of his letters, Stalinism and Nazism were twin movements, on the same level, wings of the right and the left existing “in the same materialistic night”, each instigating the other.
It is only an incurable paranoia still harboured in the West about Russia, as well as the West’s silly notion that after the fall of Communism the world should admit it has reached “the end of history”, that keeps producing cross-eyed opinion about that country.
Incidentally, a slip in the spelling of the incumbent President of Georgia will not change the fact that Saakashvili is a typical stooge of the United States and that he cannot bring himself to admit that the declaration of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is not in the least dissimilar to the declaration made by Kosovo.
Mr. Pardi, in his haste to beat his own drum, seems to be reading right past whatever Ostrovsky actually wrote (the same haste that led him to misspell his favorite Georgian stooge’s name). The idea that Putin is moved by the “moral force” of anyone or anything is risible. His appearance at Solzhenitsyn’s funeral is akin to Stalin’s dalliance with the Russian Orthodox patriarch during the years of WWII when he needed to rally support by any and all means (a kind of game Stalin also played with Jewish relief organizations when he had to, then turning to planning a major anti-Semitic “purge” when he no longer needed them). Putin is a traditional player in the great game of power politics. His KGB pedigree makes him a little sinister. As such, caution is warranted in dealing with him, though I agree with Pardi that this may spill over into irrational paranoia at times; the “end of history” was just one of those frequent delusions of intellectuals who ply the trade of geopolitical theory, and hardly believed in by anyone actually engaged in politics, so why does Mr. Pardi beat this dead horse? (By the way Solzhenitsyn’s moral force, which was real enough in opposition, was rapidly dissipated, or, rather, ignored by most of his countrymen once he returned to Russia.) The old comparison between Stalinism and Nazism is just that — old, and true “as far as it goes”; H. Arendt and many of her peers subsumed them under the new category of “totalitarianism”.
“Materialistic nightmares” or not the two systems of politics had elements in common as well as significant differences. Pardi keeps missing the point — the resurrection of Stalin as a great nationalist and empire-builder by present-day Russian politicians. Lest he thinks this is nonsense I refer him to the report in the NY Times of August 28th, in which D.R. Rogozin, Russia’s representative to NATO, merrily hangs an adulatory Stalin poster in his office. Pardi’s tit-for-tat comparison of the Kosovo intervention with those in Ossetia and Abkhazia falls apart when the details of the two cases are examined.
Russia has never really found a satisfactory and fair way of dealing with its own national-minorities problems (few countries have), but to suppose that Putin hallows anything beyond force and success seems ridiculous. And he is aware that he can only afford to be a “little Stalin”, which is a blessing to his countrymen as well as the rest of the world.
We should all read again “Russka: The Novel of Russia” by Edward Rutherfurd; after researching the history of Russia with concentrated diligence, Rutherford describes how Russian history (since the year 105) cycles through the development of social groups through pseudo-democracy and feudalism, revolution and anarchy to totalitarian states, many times. Since the publication of the book in 1992, Russia has gone through at least 3 new distinct phases, each represented in earlier historic examples in the book. Re-reading it will help us realise that we cannot expect Russia to respond as the more democratic western European states might respond: it is not in their make-up.
Why was their no cultural flowering under Yeltsin? Because while he was bold in opposition, he was a useless old drunk in power. Remember him insulting the Irish by not bothering to get off the aircraft when he was supposed to be visiting them? Minor compared to what he did to his own people.
Under Yeltsin, the Russian economy shrank and the death-rate rose. A lot of the economy became the property of doubtful operators who consumed wealth rather than producing it.
You might also wonder, what sort of world would it be without Stalin’s ruthless but successful industrialisation in the 1930s, which created the strenght that broke Nazi Germany. For that matter, would the USA have ever abolished overt racism or accepted equal rights for women without the Soviet Union there after 1945 as an alternative system?
11 September 2008
The Logical Consequence
of the 2008 Summer Olympics
in Beijing, China
No one can deny that the 2008 Summer Olympics symbolized a crucial dividing point for the world at large—more so than the South Ossetia tragedy—and was the priming set off to sanction the political, economic and social revolution that will horror-strike the worn-out status quo of Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism with us for more than some centuries. This diffusion will be accomplished “without firing a shot” as the Chinese forward motion brings to reality, drop by drop, with abundant doses of Capitalism’s very own medicine, the nightmare of John Kenneth Galbraith: the success of Capitalism is its demise! We must all bow to the ingenuity of the Chinese people and their unwearied and clever leaders. I cite one, Sun Tzu: “Therefore, the skilful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthily operations in the field.” In other words, as empire-watcher Rudyard Kipling was once keen to make note of, centuries-old governmental conglomerates do not go out with a big bang, they depart with a whimper. The Chinese are well aware that the West is not consuming to possess; it is possessed to consume! And the Chinese ersatz Capitalism is at the ready to furnish all the junk that is demanded of them. When Hong Kong law-making officials visited the Chinese mainland to gripe about the pollution drifting from southern China to the ex-British possession, Chinese bureaucrats told them flat out: “Stop ordering all this useless crap!” With true Milton Friedmanish panache, post-Olympic fervour was heralded with a 10% upsurge in wholesale prices for the People’s Republic of China’s items for consumption. One world, one dream! Everyone is doing it, n’est pas? “If you give them enough rope, they will hang themselves,” speculated Karl Marx. And that is exactly what they are doing! Western political and economic hegemony is on the wane.
The principal purveyors of political, economic, cultural and social policy extending heavy-handed rule over foreign countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, The Netherlands, The DisUnited Kingdom, and their kingpin, The DisUnited States of America—now find themselves challenged as never before notwithstanding their often turbulent histories. Having lost any perception of authority and/or authenticity, these Concocters of Consent, their consent!, these Rulers of the Truth, their truth!, these Proponents of Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism, their capitalism!, now have their backs against the wall. Vicious societal agitation against them, duplicitous oligarchic socialists (olisocists), is rampant throughout the world. Uncertainty is a certainty. Foreboding is the order of the day. It is as if a grand conflict, a universal war (World War III/Universe War I) is looming in the inner selves of people—still again! Is an Armageddon between The Haves and The Have-Nots in the offing? A super clash, to outdo all the others, set on its deleterious course centuries ago? Who is going to redeem Western Culture? Who is going to pull The Old World out of its nosedive? Who is going to call the tune for The New Europe? Who is going to skipper us through our Sea of Hypocrisy? John S McCain III? Barack Obama? A paedophilic Pope?
For every action there is a reaction. Have you thought about the atrocities committed against indigenous Canadian children? Hundreds of thousands of aborigines have! Have you thought about the criminal colonization of vast parts of Africa by the French? Hundreds of millions of Africans have! Have you thought about the millions massacred in the Soviet Union by the Germans and Italians? Millions of Soviet families have! Have you thought about the disgusting occupation of Libya by the Italians? Colonel Gheddafi has! Have you thought about the rape of Nanjing by the Japanese? The Chinese have! Have you thought about the millions of Hispanic natives slaughtered by the Spanish? The Venezuelans and the Colombians have! Have you thought about the Indonesian killings perpetrated by the Dutch? The Indonesians have! Have you thought about the worldwide imperialistic control actuated by the British? At least the Indians have! Have you thought about the bombings, which have exterminated millions all over the world, by the Northamericans? The Europeans, the Southamericans, the Asians, those in the Middle East have!
Oh, my dear, wretched Western Civilization, how could you have been so haywire for so many centuries? There is not a crevice in any part of this world into which the blood spilt from your self-righteous violence has not seeped. On each and every one of the continents millions upon innumerable millions close their hearts to your debaucheries, and they crawl into themselves in disgust and foreboding endeavouring to find, in desperation, a reason to believe that this Life has a semblance of Beauty and Promise and Goodwill that has never been allocated to them suffering, starving, solicitous, saddled, sagging, sapped, scared, schizoid, shackled, shamed, shattered, skewered, slighted, soused, sordid, spooked, squashed, stigmatised, strapped, submerged, subordinated, supplanted, systematized…. Will you please tell me who do you think you are hoodwinking rummaging around so? The whole of humanity? A very big part of it? The largest part of it you can get your mitts on?
Oh, despicable, pitiable Western Empire, Land of the Setting Sun, Caldron simmering in hungering desperation to regain the smacks of the Past. You seek to lunge ahead on the energy of Your logic and hopes not yet lionized. You call upon Your histories to lend strength to Your fantasies. You coil up hard on Your proud self wrinkled and weather-beaten. You struggle to nurture new flowers on the dry rot of Your haunted memories. Your youth, sniffed upon by strapped canine squads, rape-hate in Your stadiums striped with electronic rejoinders to press softly-pliant, gaily-tinged plastic buttons. Your elderly curl their ways to bankrupt health ministries where physicians fool with forms and fill in football pools. Your neighbours to the East—brazen, sordid—yank towards You roughly extracting for exacting theirs craved for. You, Western Civilization, sit pickled—soused in the juices of Your scummy heretofore. Your dabblers in politics set flags unfurled and their powers shame—shame!—this Our world.
Oh! Miserable Western Civilization, Your Past just does not want to pass,does it?
Authored by Anthony St. John
Casella Postale 38
50041 CALENZANO FI
Italia
11 September 2008
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