I think that most of us have not yet understood that the world of Russia has once again, like a century ago, split in two, like an iceberg, and its two halves, the bigger and the smaller, are rapidly drifting apart. It’s just that the split happened less dramatically, without the crowding onto the last steamship, without the “we departed from Crimea amidst smoke and fire” [lines from a poem by White émigré Nikolai Turoverov]. The split has been dragged out in time, and the crack wasn’t so wide at the beginning. Some people are still hopping from one iceberg to the other.
“Endless War”
And yet—that’s it. There are two Russias again. Many people—in both halves—cannot or are afraid to recognize this. It’s time to stop hopping, otherwise you’ll leap to one side and won’t be able to hop back again.
Hopes for the swift fall of the rotten regime (also just like one hundred years ago) have been disappointed. It’s plenty rotten but rot, as everyone knows, spreads.
Last time it took seventy years to root it out. This time it probably won’t take as much time; time moves more quickly in the twenty-first century, but you still have to unpack the suitcases and settle in for a long wait.
“Anticipation of White Nights”
What will happen with the ‘little’ Russia, scattered across different countries, is pretty clear. [Russians] who are younger or more active or more professionally cosmopolitan will assimilate with varying degrees of success. [Russians] who are older and professionally tied to the language and culture will sadly sing “while the light has not gone out, while the candle burns” [a line from a famous Mashina vremeni song] and will support that little flame as long as they have the life and strength for it. This work of theirs is not pointless or in vain, because in ‘big’ Russia there are still a great many people for whom that light will be precious and necessary.
In the mother country—goddamn déjà-vu—things will soon be utterly unbearable. In the longstanding two-hundred-year struggle between the Asiatic state and European culture the Horde has triumphed once again, now zealously working to asiatize the culture. (There is nothing malign about Asia and its culture, which of all people I, a specialist in Asian studies, should know; I am talking about political Asia, in which the state is everything and the individual is nothing.)
The culture of the mother country will be censored, hollowed out, thrust onto all fours and taught to wag its tail. We’ve seen it, we remember. Later, of course, a counterculture will take shape, [yielding] virtuosos of Aesopian language and furtive rude gestures. We remember that too: we had plenty of it. The emigres will coo condescendingly over any vivid manifestations of censored culture—like Nabokov did over Okudzhava. Those in Russia will secretly pass around tamizdat editions. And publish in the West using pseudonyms.
How dreadful and boring this all is, ladies and gentlemen. Russia’s national anthem: “We sowed and sowed the grain, we will stomp and stomp the grain” [lines from a Russian folk song].
For some the price will be their profession, for others poverty or emigration. The most noble will give up their freedom. And even their lives. The higher quality the person, the greater the cost.
And it is all worth it. This is what I’ve been thinking and why I wrote this text, not at all because I wanted to drive you into even greater despondency.
More so than all of us together, each of us individually is facing a big test. We can’t flunk.
Stop referring to “Asia” and “the Horde.” Why insult millions of people in the world and in Russia itself? You are not helping the “little” Russia” in any way.
I see that Akunin has again written something about Asia (where “the state is everything and the individual is nothing”) defeating European values in one particular country.
The point is that Russian intellectuals are, historically, not so fond of anything as repeating German vulgarities. And “Asian” metaphors are the favorites of Germans, and there is no degree of blatant idiocy at which they would stop.
For example, Adenauer explicitly claimed that the “Asian steppes” begin east of the Elbe. (He considered Prussia to be Asian, and so Bismarck’s triumph was an Asian conquest of Germany. Adenauer added the steppe by association.)
No matter how many decades have passed, the pre-war German spirit cannot be taken out of the Russian pamphleteer, and the fear of appearing ridiculous is as alien to them as it was to their mentors.
Quite correct thoughts in general, but there is one big catch.
How does Akunin (Chkhartishvili) differ from those Sieg Heiling in Russia when he starts using “Asia” in such a context, in such a comparison, even with a caveat? Maybe someone will say that I am wrong to try and compare him with the Sieg Heilers. Let me put it another way, then. How does a very good writer differ from those who are called white supremacists in the west?
I recently listened to a very interesting lecture on racism. The lecturer made a rather loose, but interesting ranking, singling out the racism of Soviet people as a separate species.
For some reason, some Europeans, when speaking about Asianness, “forget” about the Inquisition, concentration camps, and many other terrible events in history. Or are these also manifestations of Asianness?
We should also not forget that the current world order is also largely a product of European civilization with all its pros and cons.
One last thing, about why I decided to react in this way to Akunin’s statement, which are quite congenial to my own thoughts. It seems to me that a respected public figure should always think about the consequences of their words and deeds.
[…]
Source: Asya Rudina, “‘The world has split in two:’ the Runet discusses Akunin’s post about the two Russias,” Radio Svoboda, 1 April 2024. Translated by the Fabulous AM and the Russian Reader. The reactions, above, to Akunin’s outburst were not typical. Most of the best-selling author’s fans echoed his sentiments. The photos, above, by our friends V and M, were taken today at an exhibition currently on view in the former swimming pool and catacombs in the so-called Petrikirche on Nevsky Prospekt in downtown Petersburg. They suggest, I think, that the reality on the ground in “big Russia” (and “little Russia” as well) is slightly more complicated than Akunin would have us believe.||| TRR
Vocals – Vera Egorova, Double Bass – Anton Krasikov, Guitar – Yuri Yurov, Drums – Ivan Laptev, Saxophone – Anton Seryogin
Description
The lights of the city in evening, the music, the vibe… under a Paris sky!
Stage Magic Agency invites everyone to be inspired by the romantic motifs of France in the light of the crystal chandeliers at the Palma Mansion on October 14. The evening’s programme includes treasures of French pop and chanson as performed by the extravagant Vera Egorova & The Big Buddy Band. We will make a genuine French voyage from Zaz’s contemporary hits to such symbols of the era as Edith Piaf and Yves Montand.
Vera Egorova & The Big Buddy Band are musical hooligans from St. Petersburg and the musical project of singer and actress Vera Egorova. The band has performed more than 500 concerts in Russia and abroad and taken prizes at various international competitions and festivals. Each of their performances is a ton of drive and an endless stream of emotions.
Well, bon voyage! See you at the Palma!
Concert programme: Zaz – Je veux Zaz – Paris sera toujours Paris Zaz – demain c’est toi Edith Piaf – Padam Padam Edith Piaf – La vie En Rose Joe Dassin – Les Champs Elysees Charles Aznavour – Oublie Loulou Paolo Conte – Via con me Yves Montand – Sous le ciel de Paris Patricia Kass – Mon mec a moi Julie London – Fly me to the moon Madeleine Peyroux – J’Ai Deux Amours Osvaldo Farres – Quizas
Duration: 1 hour 15 minutes
Source: Bileter.ru (via the website’s 5 October 2023 email newsletter). The “concert programme” is reproduced here as it appeared in the original.
I could detect almost no actual French in this so-called cover of a French song by the “musical hooligans from St. Petersburg,” making it a perfect illustration of the cargo cult character of “world culture” as imagined and appropriated by xenophobic Putin-era Russians. ||| TRR
Dozens of people, including a 6-year-old child, were killed in a Russian attack that hit a cafe during a wake service in a village in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine on October 5, according to Ukrainian officials. RFE/RL visited the village a few hours after the deadly attack.
— Why is the issue of colonialism nearly absent from the Russian opposition’s agenda?
— It’s an unpopular topic because it forces us to look for the root of our troubles not only in the Putin regime but in ourselves as well. It forces us to look at our behavior and change it, and that’s an unpleasant process. No one likes admitting they’re wrong. No one likes admitting that their behavior or they themselves are racist. No one likes admitting they’re a xenophobe or colonialist.
— What must we do to rid ourselves of the colonial and imperial mindset?
— First of all, we must understand that Russians have to do this work themselves. Because if someone else from the outside does the work to decolonize Russians, they won’t like it. We don’t have to agree with every position 100%, we can argue on some points.
Changing a mindset is not an instantaneous thing. Unfortunately, we just don’t have time, because if we are going to discuss for another twenty years whether it is possible or not to use slurs in reference to ethnic minorities, nothing can help us anymore. We will turn other people’s lives into hell, and our own, too. But, of course, Russian colonialism won’t let itself be deconstructed without putting up a fight.
— This begs the question about another pattern you described—complaints about Russophobia. Why do you think they are unfounded? And do you consider, for example, banning cars with Russian license plates from entering European countries to be Russophobia?
— Of course, this is a very unpleasant situation. Russian liberals support one of the most important narratives of the Putin regime and of Russian colonialism in general, which boils down to the claim that Russians are victimized. I don’t think that banning Russian cars from entering [the EU] is a manifestation of Russophobia. I think it is a manifestation of the reaction to [Russia’s] full-scale invasion [of Ukraine], which, by the way, is still ongoing. The reaction is going to affect people who themselves have not been involved in the invasion in any way. Moreover, people who are least guilty may suffer from it—for example, activists who have been fighting the Putin regime all their lives.
This will continue, because the citizens of the Russian Federation were unable to oppose what is happening in any way, and in the eyes of the world, most of them fueled this invasion economically, politically, and rhetorically. Precisely because we don’t resist, we have to pay for it somehow. For example, we are in no hurry to separate the criminals from those who have not committed crimes.
A house sign on Dostoyevsky Street in Petersburg, 10 October 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader
1
Since the second phase of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine began on 24 February 2022, there have been heated debates in the press and social media about the extent to which Russian culture—not Soviet culture, but precisely classic Russian culture, starting with the nineteenth century (if not earlier)—is culpable for what has been happening. The accusers say, for example, that all of Russian culture and its leading figures have invariably been infected by the imperialist spirit and the oppression of other countries and cultures. The objections raised against this view can be grouped into several lines of argument. Some opponents say that we shouldn’t ascribe today’s problems to classic writers, while others argue that an entire culture cannot be blamed for this aggression, even if it is supported by the political elite and a considerable portion of society. A third group claims that the Russian officers hurling missiles at civilian settlements or the Russian soldiers looting occupied villages have hardly been immediately influenced by any books whatsoever, so the question of culture’s culpability is entirely irrelevant. Some of the people who object to the notion of a “single and unified” Russian culture hold that those who allege its unity are unwittingly playing into the hands of Kremlin propaganda, which also asserts that Russian culture in its entirety is founded on a “code” and immutable “values,” which the state is supposedly taking great care to uphold by bombing neighboring countries and arresting all dissenters.
I would argue that these debates about culture’s culpability are a psychological trap that takes us back to the early twentieth century, when the humanities were dominated by essentialism—that is, a view of society founded on the absolute certainty that, for example, women and men, or sexual minorities (see Vasily Rozanov’s People of the Moonlight, 1911), or different nations and religions have an immutable essence that predetermines the behavior of individual members of these groups. In the early twentieth century, essentialism was used as an argument in favor of inequality: the “innate characteristics” of women were supposedly such that women should not be allowed to vote, and the “innate characteristics” of colonized peoples were such that they did not deserve the right to self-governance. It is no accident that the twentieth century witnessed the unfolding of two deeply interlinked processes: one social—the fight for the civil and political rights of marginalized groups (feminism, anti-colonialism, queer emancipation), and one in the humanities and sciences that sought to overcome essentialism and affirm the view that the self-consciousness of men and women, the self-consciousness of large cultural or racialized groups, etc., is internally variable and always the result of a long process of historical evolution. Today, we seem to be plunging back down the ladder onto an older rung. As cultural studies scholar Jan Levchenko has astutely noted, Putin’s hostility toward modernity and his rejection of the idea of the future has unleashed an archaization of consciousness in several countries. It is important to resist this process.
A distressing example of the new essentialism can be found in a column published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 8 September 2023 by the Berlin journalist Nikolai Klimeniouk, titled “Sie wollen, dass wir sie ‘lieben’” (“They want us to ‘love’ them”).[1] Klimeniouk claims that contemporary Russian culture (or all Russian culture? his article does not make this clear) is supposedly founded on the idea of a non-consensual love that does not respect personal boundaries and demands reciprocal “consent” from those nations who were subjected first to Soviet and now to Russian aggression. This belief in the unimportance of other people’s boundaries, Klimeniouk argues, is shared by the intellectuals of Russian descent who defended Andrei Desnitsky, the biblical scholar who was recently fired from Vilnius University following a heated public campaign in the Lithuanian media. The organizers of that campaign took Desnitsky to task for publishing an article in 2012 about the 1940s Soviet occupation of Baltic countries in which he made statements that, in spite of all his caveats at the time, have been read in today’s context as an expression of sympathy for the occupiers.
In his discussion of Desnitsky, Klimeniouk makes an unexpected logical leap. First, he rehashes the viewpoint of the scholar’s supporters:
“The journalist [who wrote about Desnitsky – I.K.] was [not a journalist but] a denouncer. The decision was undemocratic. Desnitsky is an important scholar who brought renown to the university. This would never happen in a civilized country. In Lithuania, they punish you for expressing your opinion, and Russians are hated everywhere.
“This framing is frighteningly similar to a discussion of significance to contemporary Russian culture, which began in 1985 on the pages of the New York Times Book Review, and, it appears, was never concluded.”
Klimeniouk then summarizes two essays which appeared in The New York Times Book Review at that time: “An Introduction to a Variation,” by Milan Kundera, and “Why Milan Kundera is Wrong about Dostoyevsky,” a response by Joseph Brodsky. The turn to this older polemic is symptomatic: Klimeniouk believes that it is possible nowadays to make arguments of the same sort that these two writers exchanged almost forty years ago—although, truth be told, these arguments already sounded quite outmoded even at the time. That’s why it is worth going over these essays in more detail than Klimeniouk provides, since his column revives a debate that already proved unfruitful once.
Milan Kundera’s essay begins with the tale of how, in 1968, a Soviet military patrol stopped him—expelled from all Czechoslovak institutions, his books banned—as he was driving from Prague to Budějovice. The officer in charge tells Kundera, “It’s all a big misunderstanding, but it will straighten itself out. You must realize we love the Czechs. We love you!” This strange declaration of love by an officer of the occupying army makes Kundera recall Dostoyevsky, with his irrationalism and fetishization of strong emotions, as well as Solzhenitsyn, whose Harvard commencement speech criticized the spirit of the European Renaissance. In his essay, Kundera positions himself as a defender of the European cultural values that emerged during the Renaissance: self-consciousness, rationalism, irony, and playfulness.
Joseph Brodsky, already famous in the States but not yet а Nobel Prize winner (that would happen a year after the events described here), took it upon himself to defend Dostoevsky against Kundera on the pages of the New York Times Book Review. However, he also resorted to the same kind of essentialist rhetoric—perhaps to an even greater degree—as his opponent, and to top it off, he also tried to humiliate Kundera, possibly out of sheer irascibility. “[Kundera’s] fear and disgust [toward the occupiers] are understandable, but soldiers never represent culture, let alone a literature – they carry guns, not books. […] Mr. Kundera is a Continental, a European man. These people are seldom capable of seeing themselves from the outside.”
These are more or less the kind of thoughts, according to Klimeniouk, that can be found in the minds of today’s Russian émigré intellectuals, which is why they defend Desnitsky and refuse to entertain the idea of a connection between Russian culture and Russian aggression—they don’t see a link between “guns” and “books” either.
Klimeniouk devotes the rest of his column to a discussion of statements made by Russian writer Maria Golovanivskaya on the topic of love (in an interview with Lev Oborin on the website Polka) and a now-deleted Facebook post by Tatyana Tolstaya (rather unconscionable musings about the rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers). Finally, he quotes a new history textbook for the eleventh grade, written by [former Russian culture minister] Vladimir Medinsky and Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) rector Anatoly Torkunov, before concluding, “[In contemporary Russia,] high culture has once again lost the battle with state repression.”
This conclusion seems to me both illogical and, perhaps, formulaic: it seems to follow from a different argument than the entire preceding column. In order for culture to “once again [lose] the battle” with the state, there must be a conflict between the two, and Klimeniouk had so far tried to show that there was no conflict whatsoever between Russian culture and the Russian government. What is more, Klimeniouk ascribes to Russian culture “perennial” motifs that can be expressed with equal success using quotes from Brodsky, Golovanivskaya, or Tolstaya. These same “perennial” motifs underlie, in his view, the connection between Russian culture and today’s war of aggression.
I think that we should analyze the psychological stance underlying Klimeniouk’s article. These days, this approach threatens to spread much farther than a single newspaper article, and not just in the media, but also in scholarship. This is precisely why I think that what matters now is not whether Klimeniouk is interpreting Brodsky correctly, or even what all this has to do with Andrei Desnitsky getting fired. What matters is methodology. How can we contextualize and explain this rhetoric of “love” that Klimeniouk apparently considers something akin to an incurable (or, at any rate, intractable) disease of Russian culture?
2
A newspaper column certainly has its own generic rules: it is meant to quickly convince readers that the author is right. Nevertheless, even taking these rules into account, it is surprising that Klimeniouk does not bring in several rather obvious nineteenth-century texts in which the “love” rhetoric he describes is most effectively expressed. Looking at these texts, however, makes it clear that this rhetoric is an expression of a specific historical-evolutionary line that can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century, rather than reflecting universally shared qualities of Russian culture. This line could be called expansionist universalism. The texts created within its framework became a crucial intellectual resource that facilitated the emergence of the Russian state’s current rhetoric of war—but not as texts per se, but because this rhetoric was later substantially reworked by late-Soviet Russian nationalists.[2]
The first example is Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem “Two Unities” [“Dva edinstva,” September 1870). Addressed to the “Slavic world” (the same sort of ideological construct as the “Russian world” is in our time), with its famous second stanza pointing to Otto von Bismarck as the “oracle of our day”:
«Единство, — возвестил оракул наших дней, — Быть может спаяно железом лишь и кровью…» Но мы попробуем спаять его любовью, — А там увидим, что прочней…
“Unity,” declared the oracle of our day, “Can be forged solely through iron and blood.” But we shall bond our unity through love, And then we shall see which of the bonds gives way.
Tyutchev called for the creation of a Slavic federation led by Russia, which was to be founded on “love.” The famous Czech poet and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821–1856) once wrote about this “love”: “Russians call everything Russian Slavic in order to later call everything Slavic Russian.” But Havlíček did not mean all Russians when he said “Russians”; he meant the Slavophiles, who were unwittingly playing along with their government. And, while Havlíček criticized the Slavophiles and the Russian state’s autocracy, he also translated Gogol and Lermontov into Czech.
The second example is Dostoyevsky’s “Pushkin Speech,” delivered in 1880. It declares love as the basis of the Russian people’s “world-scale kind-heartedness”:
«…Мы [русские] разом устремились <…> к самому жизненному воссоединению, к единению всечеловеческому! Мы не враждебно (как, казалось, должно бы было случиться), а дружественно, с полною любовию приняли в душу нашу гении чужих наций, всех вместе, не делая преимущественных племенных различий, умея инстинктом, почти с самого первого шагу различать, снимать противоречия, извинять и примирять различия, и тем уже выказали готовность и наклонность нашу, нам самим только что объявившуюся и сказавшуюся, ко всеобщему общечеловеческому воссоединению со всеми племенами великого арийского рода…»
“Indeed, we [Russians] then impetuously applied ourselves to the most vital universal pan-humanist fellowship! Not in a spirit of enmity (as one might have expected) but in friendliness and perfect love, we received into our soul the genius of foreign nations, all equally, without preference of race, able by instinct from almost the very first step to discern, to discount distinctions, to excuse and reconcile them. Therein we already showed what had only just become manifest to us—our readiness and inclination for a common and universal union with all the races of the great Aryan family.”
The third example is Alexander Blok’s poem “The Scythians” (1918), which literary scholars have noted was directly influenced by the “Pushkin Speech”:
Да, так любить, как любит наша кровь, Никто из вас давно не любит! Забыли вы, что в мире есть любовь, Которая и жжет, и губит!
Мы любим все — и жар холодных числ, И дар божественных видений, Нам внятно все — и острый галльский смысл, И сумрачный германский гений…
Yes, to love the way that our blood loves, None of you has loved in countless years! You have forgotten that there is a love That burns and wrecks and wakens fears!
We love it all—the sear of ice-cold numbers, The gift of divine illuminations, We grasp it all—the sharp-edged Gallic wit, The gloomy genius of the Germans.
The version of universalism on which Tyutchev, Dostoyevsky, and Blok insisted assumed that practitioners of Russian culture, who had arrived late to the dialogue of European culture(s), could occupy a central place in that dialogue because they (speaking as it were on behalf of “Russians”) could allegedly understand everything, and this ability to understand was underpinned by the unique Russian capacity for “love.” Mastering a foreign culture, as based on this universal “love,” becomes a form of self-affirmation for the “lover.” This rhetoric was a means of alleviating and masking the constant tension between two images of Russia produced in the press and in government publications, a tension felt ever more strongly over the course of the nineteenth century: Russia as the nation-state of Russians and Russia as a multi-ethnic empire. But this task of “all-conquering love” was not declared on behalf of the government, but rather on behalf of society. While the “we” in Tyutchev’s poem could still encompass the and society, in Dostoyevsky’s speech and Blok’s poem the “we” points first and foremost to a society that was ready, in their opinion, to bring about cultural expansion in place of the state.
Some of their contemporaries sharply criticized this rhetoric. For example, the well-known critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky noted very soon after the publication of the “Pushkin Speech” that Dostoyevsky’s calls for a “united Aryan tribe” had anti-Semitic undertones.
If we examine the examples given by Klimeniouk with a view to older history, it becomes clear that the Russian intelligentsia’s universalism has not always and across the board had an expansionist character. There have been at least two variations. The first is westernizing, which assumes that Russian culture is too archaic and that it can and must be renewed with the help of transfers of Western European culture into Russia. This thinking was, for instance, foundational for the translation strategy of the Russian Symbolists, who were able in the 1900s and 1910s to “catch up” to French poetry, which was developing rapidly at the time. This westernizing conception influenced the program of the World Literature publishing house, founded by Maxim Gorky in 1919. At a different historical stage, westernizing universalism manifested itself in a passion for Polish culture (jazz, poetry, fashion magazines) among the nonconformist intelligentsia in the 1950s-1960s; Brodsky himself was a Polonophile in his youth. Of course, Thaw-era Soviet Polonomania was rarely marked by a deep interest in the other; it was often just the urge to imagine an alternative, better life for oneself, but cultural transfers often occur in exactly this fashion.
The second, rarer variation is philanthropic, whereby the popularization of different cultures in Russia served to express sympathy and moral support for the bearers of said culture(s). In 1916, immediately following the Armenian (and Assyrian) genocide in the Ottoman Empire, an enormous book of translations entitled The Poetry of Armenia from Ancient Times to the Present Day was published under the editorship of the prominent poet and critic Valery Briusov. The translators included other well-known poets such as Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Konstantin Balmont, Ivan Bunin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladislav Khodasevich—and even Alexander Blok, author of “The Scythians.” The anthology did not have colonial or expansionist intentions, however; instead, it voiced Russian civil society’s solidarity with a people subjected to genocide (even though that word didn’t even exist yet). Briusov took on direction of the project only after he gave himself a crash course in basic Armenian and read several books about the history of Armenian literature.
The anthology was the first in a series of translated compendiums of ethnic minority literatures of the Russian Empire, for whom the catastrophes of the First World War were particularly hard. These anthologies were of major philanthropic significance and were edited by Briusov, Maxim Gorky, and several other Russian writers. They included An Anthology of Armenian Literature (Sbornik armianskoi literatury, Petrograd: Parus, 1916, edited by Gorky); An Anthology of Latvian Literature (Sbornik latyshskoi literatury, Petrograd: Parus, 1916, edited by Briusov and Gorky); and An Anthology of Finnish Literature (Sbornik finliandskoi literatury, Petrograd: Parus, 1917, edited by Briusov and Gorky). Adjoining them is an anthology of translations from then-contemporary Hebrew poetry, The Jewish Anthology, published in 1918 by the Moscow publishing house Safrut, and edited by Khodasevich and Leib Yaffe.
In the Soviet context, beginning in the mid-1930s when Stalin veered into isolationism and “Russocentrism” (David Brandenberger’s term), universalism became a stealth-oppositional attitude. It expressed—to use Osip Mandelstam’s coinage—a longing for the world culture beyond the “iron curtain,” and was a way of resisting the notion of Russian culture as something absolute, self-important, and completely adapted to Soviet conditions. There was a reason why in late Stalinism any attempts to study the influence of Western literary traditions on Russian literature were subject to persecution. Research of this sort was stigmatized as “cosmopolitanism” and “kowtowing to the West.”
In the late Soviet period, there was an official universalism in which the rhetoric of “love” à la Tyutchev or Dostoyevsky was invoked only rarely, but which reproduced a construction typical of their texts: “the primacy of the one who loves.” The Russian people were to be understood as an “elder brother” implicitly united with the Soviet state (“The unbreakable Union of free republics / was bound all together by Great Rus,” as the first line of the Soviet national anthem declared).[3] This Soviet official universalism appears to be exactly what the officer whom Kundera encountered was relaying: “we” love “you,” the Czech people, and this is exactly why we saved you from the Prague Spring, from the “pernicious” desire to live as you wish. And this paternalistic, protective, colonialist universalism, ramped up into a sort of cargo cult (“we will repeat what was said then—and it will be as it was then”)is replicated by Margarita Simonyan in one of her tweets (13 July 2023), in which she writes:
“What did you not like about living with us? What was so bad about it? Most of you have us to thank for statehood, you got culture thanks to us. Who was oppressing you? Who messed with you?”
This Soviet version of universalism is exactly what today’s stylistics of “re-enactment” has been replicating, and it is one of the intellectual resources driving Russia’s war against Ukraine. The people who have written and write in this tradition can certainly be held responsible for what is happening today. But there are other forms of universalism that have been preserved and survive in Russian culture. Understanding universalism as a complex, evolving discursive system containing many variations makes it possible to look at Russian culture not as a single, unified, and timeless whole invested with a unified, singular culpability, but as a space open to polemics in which different ideas grapple with each other.
3
Let me move on from the discussion of the varieties of universalism to more general thoughts on the methodology of the contemporary humanities and social sciences. They might seem trivial to my colleagues in history, but over the last year and a half these basic tenets of the profession have seemingly been overshadowed, and it would behoove us to recall them.
A historian is not required to forgive or rehabilitate the figures they write about, but it is important to understand these figures within the context of their own time—what they could or could not think about, what concepts they used, what kind of knowledge or resources were available to their characters, or to whose questions they were responding. This paradigm of historical knowledge was established by the French historians of the Annales school and further developed by the intellectual historians of the Cambridge school—e.g., John Pocock and Quentin Skinner.
Proponents of historicism are sometimes accused of enabling relativism: general rules do not exist; each era has its own norms. Still, the example of late-Soviet humanities scholars—of figures such as Sergei Averintsev, Aron Gurevich, and Mikhail Gasparov—shows that they did not think of historicism as a branch of relativism but as a tool for understanding people from different eras and cultures, and this work of understanding (especially for Gasparov) enabled them to grasp the limitations of the cultural conventions of their own time. They developed their concepts of historicizing interpretation as a tool for understanding over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, and this approach was one of the most significant advances in the late-Soviet humanities and social sciences in terms of both its scholarly and existential utility.
This interpretative sequence—understanding the other so as to better understand one’s own situation and, by reflecting on one’s own situation, gaining an even more accurate understanding of the other—was laid out by proponents of the philosophical school of hermeneutics. Yet neither the hermeneutic philosophers (Paul Ricœur and Hans-Georg Gadamеr) nor the unofficial Soviet humanities scholars directly inquired into the consciousness of an interpreter belonging to a repressed or silenced societal group (even though unofficial humanities scholars in the USSR certainly belonged to such a group), or to one identifying their own sense of self with those in an unprivileged position. (Yuri Lotman’s persistent discussion of the history of the Russian intelligentsia as a stigmatized and marginal group shows that he understood the position from which he was speaking quite well.) In hermeneutics, the interpreter of the world appears as a kind of “default subject” (implicitly, a white European man), so it may seem as if hermeneutics were at odds with critical theory and its closely affiliated approaches—feminism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies. But the current intellectual state of affairs shows that these approaches can be synthesized.
Critical theory teaches researchers to ask themselves questions—and not just about their own privilege (“check your privilege”), but also about the conceptual tools they are using. For example, I myself should consider whether my mind retains the traces, the discursive debris, of the expansionist universalism which I discussed earlier.
Today, when we talk about history as the result of human efforts with specific social, discursive, and conceptual parameters, feminist, queer, postcolonial and decolonial theory all help to focus our gaze more sharply. But these methods could also benefit from the acuity afforded by historicism, because the human conflicts and interactions they study have differed in different eras and took on a particular shape in each specific instance. Now, let’s turn to why this kind of synthesis is necessary.
In 2011, Stanislav Lvovsky wrote that, sooner or later, Russian culture would have to be reconstituted on new foundations. It is now obvious that he was right. When undertaking this project, it will be important to take stock of the resources available to сultural professionals in their fight against the tendencies that Russia’s leaders have let proliferate and become dominant—no matter how many states emerge out of the ruins of today’s regime at the end of the current political cycle. I think that if we examine the different versions of Russian universalism historically, using the methods developed by the Annales school, we will find that, alongside the passive-aggressive tradition observed by Kundera, Russian culture also has resources for resisting the state’s rhetoric of “paternalistic love.” These resources are primarily found in works of unofficial literature and unofficial scholarship.
I dearly hope that Ukraine wins this war, but a mere military victory would not be enough for me. At the end of the Second World War, scholars in different countries set to thinking up ways to undermine the intellectual foundations that gave rise to Nazism. (Many years after the war, Michel Foucault’s foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus called the book “an introduction to non-fascist life.”) Today, people in many different countries also have reason to think about how they can subvert the intellectual foundations which are producing an aggressive right-wing populism that stigmatizes minorities. When right-wing populism is implemented by former security-service officers gripped by ressentiment, you get the nightmare that is playing out in Russia today.
I think that the future of humanity lies not in national but post-national states—societies organized as federations of different minorities. The methodology of the contemporary humanities and social sciences can function both as a common language that different minority groups can use for collective action, and as a crucial tool for understanding the other, and others.
[1] The excerpts from Klimeniouk’s article quoted here were first translated from the original German into Russian by the author himself, and then rendered in English by the translators.
[2] See, for instance, the uncensored version of Stanislav Kunyaev’s poem “Okinu vzgliadom Severo-Vostok,” [“I will cast a gaze at the North-East”], which was first published in 1986: “Let the Mansy salute Yermak, / And it is meet for the Uzbek to praise Skobelev, / for the fact that we now have gas and timber and cotton, / and have room for lots of missiles.”
[3] Text by Sergei Mikhalkov and Gabriel El-Registan.
Veterans of the special military operation and combat veterans will be able to teach the new subject “Fundamentals of the Security and Defense of the Motherland” in schools after undergoing retraining at the State University of Education (GOOP), according to Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov, who was speaking at a plenary session during the Russian national pedagogical forum “Memory Is Sacred.”
“A center for retraining veterans of the special military operation and combat veterans as teachers was created this year at GOOP to implement a new subject area with a priority on practical training in the new subject ‘Fundamentals of the Security and Defense of the Motherland,'” Kravtsov said.
According to the minister, the basic military training module would be enhanced in this subject, which is being implemented as part of the “Fundamentals of Health and Safety” curriculum. The new subject would be trialed this year, and it would be taught in schools beginning in the next academic year, he added.
On June 30, Kravtsov said that, as part of the subject, schoolchildren would gain knowledge of the “role the defense of the country plays in its peaceful socio-economic development and the current complexion of our our Armed Forces.” Schoolchildren would be introduced to concepts such as “military duty” and “military service.” The minister emphasized that the load on schoolchildren would not increase—the number of classroom hours would remain the same.
GOOP’s acting rector Irina Kokoyeva told Vedomosti that the Apex Center for Military-Patriotic Education had been operating at the university since September 1. One of the center’s focus areas is the professional development and retraining of special operation veterans as coordinators of military-patriotic clubs and teachers of the subject “Fundamentals of the Security and Defense of the Motherland.” “We plan to recruit a pilot group in this focus area. Information about the conditions and criteria for recruitment will be posted on the university’s official website in the near future,” she added.
Tuition for veterans of the special operation will be free, Olga Kazakova, head of the State Duma’s education committee, told Vedomosti. According to her, the program at the training center will help veterans who don’t have the requisite knowledge in the fields of child psychology or pedagogy. The deputy also recalled that it was the education committee’s initiative to establish the center. “Together with the State Duma’s defense committee, we are forming a working group on the teaching of this subject. And, of course, we will be directly involved in the process of preparing the curriculum, teachers, and the facilities and resources for these lessons,” she added.
All people, regardless of whether they were involved in the special operation, must undergo special psychological tests to be cleared to work with children, says clinical psychologist Ilya Gavin. “It is good practice to check any category of people working with children. People come in all shapes and sizes, including those with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” the expert said.
Per the Health Ministry’s standing order No. 342n, all teaching staff are required, as of 1 September 2022, to undergo a psychiatric examination to be cleared to work with children. Previously, teachers were only required to undergo an annual medical examination, as well as an examination when applying for a job. Prior to 2022, employees of educational institutions underwent psychiatric examination at least once every five years.
According to Gavin, the time it takes to recover from PTSD and return to everyday life directly depends on the severity of the disorder, because it can also be accompanied by the emergence of addictions. “The rehabilitation period can vary from three months to a year. The PTSD treatment protocol also includes ten to fifteen sessions of work with a psychologist once a week,” Gavin concluded.
GENEVA, June 15 (Reuters) – A group of U.N. experts said on Thursday they had written to Moscow raising concerns about the use of torture by Russian military forces on Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war.
The U.N. experts said in a statement the torture included electric shocks, hoodings and mock executions and had been carried out to extract intelligence, force confessions or in response to alleged support for Ukraine’s forces.
It had resulted in damage to internal organs, cracked bones and fractures, strokes and psychological traumas, they said.
A spokesperson for Russia’s diplomatic mission in Geneva did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moscow has previously denied torturing or mistreating prisoners of war and says it does not deliberately target civilians in Ukraine.
While torture allegations have previously been levelled against both sides in the 15-month conflict, the team of U.N. independent experts said Russian forces’ methods may be “state-endorsed”.
The consistency and methods of alleged torture suggested “a level of coordination, planning and organisation, as well as the direct authorisation, deliberate policy or official tolerance from superior authorities”, according to U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Alice Jill Edwards, who sent the letter on 12 June alongside several other independent experts.
“Obeying a superior order or policy direction cannot be invoked as justification for torture, and any individual involved should be promptly investigated and prosecuted by independent authorities,” she said.
Under the U.N. system, a government has 60 days to give a formal response.
This ad for a “big stadium concert” by the Russian nationalist pop singer Shaman, scheduled for 7 p.m., September 9, at Petersburg’s Gazprom Arena, showed up this morning (for the second or third time in the last mont) in the weekly email newsletter I get from Bileter.ru, a Russian online retail ticket vendor. The aesthetic here is both strikingly fascistic/nationalistic and pointedly un-Russian. I would say it’s almost American in its inspiration, if I didn’t know better. ||| TRR
This showed up in my mailbox today too:
За последние две недели в редакции произошли изменения. У нас теперь новый руководитель редакции, а потому скоро вы ощутите изменения, которые make Inc. great again.
Here’s my translation:
There have been changes to [our] editorial board over the past two weeks. We have a new editorial director now, and so you will soon feel the changes that [will?] make Inc. great again.
These days, all “progressive” Russians are fluent in English, supposedly, and this is often how they signal their “progressive” values to each other: by shouting out their true reactionary colors in Rusglish.
In this case, the progressive reactionaries hale from Inc. Russia, “a magazine for entrepreneurs [that] focuses on small and medium-sized businesses, advanced technologies, and the people behind it all.” Founded in the US in 1979, the Russian edition has been in existence since 2016.
The passage that I quoted and translated, above, led off Inc. Russia‘s weekly email newsletter.
Immediately after Russia’s brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Inc.ers were openly dismayed by the sudden turn of events in their otherwise entrepreneurially progressive country—without, however, ever going so far as to oppose the war explicitly. This dismay and confusion gradually and visibly diminished as the war continued. Now, apparently, Inc. Russia has come full circle: they are determined to show that they and their readers live in nearly the best of all possible entrepreneurial worlds. They’ve definitively stopped paying any mind to their country’s breakneck plunge into fascism, much less to the war itself.
And yet the new realities occasionally puncture Russian Inc.‘s otherwise now-placid surface, as in this news item published on their website earlier today:
English to become optional in the subway
It may become option to duplicate information in subways in English. The Transport Ministry has published a law bill addressing the matter. The Moscow subway stopped duplicating [station] names back in 2021, while Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan do not plan to give up English until instructions are received.
As reported by Kommersant, the Transport Ministry has published a draft law on amendments to the orders regulating the “standard rules” for the use of subways, monorails, funiculars, and suspended cable cars.
Carriers are currently required to duplicate all information on diagrams, signs, inscriptions, and station announcements in English. The Transport Ministry proposes doing away with this obligation, leaving the decision to the regions.
The proposal was prompted by “numerous appeals from citizens and [regional governments], due to the considerable informational burden on passengers and taking into account the socio-political situation.”
Moscow’s Metro, Central Circle, and Monorail stopped announcing stations in English back in 2021, after a drop in the number of tourists due to the pandemic and “passenger complaints about additional information.”
Oleg Yaushev, director of the Nizhny Novgorod Metro, said that none of the city’s residents had complained about the English dubbing in the city’s subway, so the company does not plan to remove it.
“We installed this information system relatively recently and spent a lot of money on it. Why remove it now? Tourists who are native English speakers travel to the city. The language is widely spoken, and we welcome them. Of course, if there is a directive to remove everything and leave it only in Russian, we will comply. But it’s not worth freaking out about it,” he said.
Kazan’s Metroelectrotrans also expressed its willingness to execute the order, “if it is issued.” However, local residents there have also not petitioned the company to cancel the dubbing of station names in English.
Russian streaming service Amediateka (thanks to the good offices of sanctions busters HBO) keeps its viewers comfortably ensconced in an alternate reality dominated by the Great Satan’s pop culture:
The second season of the sports series “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” recounts the period between 1980 and 1984. It deals with the rivalry with the Boston Celtics, as well as with the personal lives of the players, which prove no less emotional and striking than their play on the court. Jerry Buss wants to get his sons involved in working with the Lakers, Magic Johnson learns to be a good father, and Larry Bird plunges into family squabbles. Won’t this prevent the lads from becoming NBA champions?
Source: Amediateka email newsletter, 14 August 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader
Finally, here is yet another reflection of the Russian petite bourgeoisie’s (and, hence, Russian officialdom’s) peculiar love-hate, cargo-cultish relationship with the “collective west” (i.e., the United States) and the English language.
Don’t turn off your TV set. Keep watching the “most exciting World Cup ever.” While you do that, actual Russians and some non-Russians (i.e., Oleg Sentsov) are suffering horribly for the near-absolute power Russia’s Emperor of Ice Cream and his retinue have acquired over the last twenty years.
It was this same power (and the money that comes with it) that made it possible for the Emperor of Ice Cream and his pals to buy off FIFA’s bid committee and win the right to host the 2018 World Cup. They invoked this same power to spend more on preparations for the World Cup than any other host country has ever spent.
But instead of doing what enlightened despots have been known to do on such occasions — declaring amnesties, pardons, and ceasefires during Olympic Games and other such celebrations and great sporting events — the Emperor of Ice Cream’s repressive and imaginative secret services have seemingly notched up their civil war against their own people while you stay glued to your TV set, pretending it is possible to separate sports from politics.
Tell that to Yuri Dmitriev, rearrested and recharged for a crime for which he had recently been acquitted. Tell that to the Penza-Petersburg “terrorists,” all of them tortured by the FSB (KGB) into forcing them to give the testimony the FSB wanted to hear, never mind that it is total nonsense, the sick fantasies of the FSB itself, which sees or, rather, pretends to see a “terrorist” hiding under every rock. Tell that to Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and resident of Crimea, sentenced to 20 years in a maximum security correctional facility in Russia’s Far North for the thought crime of opposing Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
It’s frightening how “natural” absolutely neo-Nazi-like racialism has come to seem to so many folks in the Former East. It really beggars the imagination. What went wrong?
And it’s all reproduced and disseminated, whether in private conversation or more impersonal forums like Facebook, with such aplomb and confidence, as if literally no else in the world has thought or could think otherwise. Even broaching, in the most primitive way possible, the idea that races are a “construct” used to dominate some “races” while advantaging others, not something “natural,” will only expose you to instant derision.
What “race” is this bird? Is it white or black? In fact, it’s black, white, and several shades in between. Obviously, this is an absurd conversation, since we superior beings don’t attribute “race” to birds.
But we do attribute it to each other, missing somehow that the whole point, the only point, is power. Natural’s not in it.
One of the keys to successfully translating contemporary Russian avant-garde poetry into English is having absolutely no sense of colloquial English. The translations should sound leaden, awkward, and dull, as if they had been written by a manager in the Flint, Michigan, water department trying to justify his criminal negligence in an impenetrable and evasive letter to the EPA, to wit:
More fascists at today’s LGBT Pride event in Petersburg, as photographed by the intrepid Sergey Chernov. He reports that a few of the fascists brought small children with them so that it would be possible to charge the LGBT activists with violating Petersburg’s fascist-inspired law against “gay propaganda” amongst minors.
Fascists posing as “Cossacks” at today’s LGBT Pride event in downtown Petersburg, where all the gay activists were arrested by the police, unlike the 200 or 300 fascists, who apparently enjoy near or complete immunity for crimes that would get anyone else arrested. Photo by one of the few faithful friends of freedom left in Petersburg, Sergey Chernov.
Photo by Sergey Chernov: “St. Petersburg LGBT Pride event: fascists.”
The second explanation that also immediately arises is the persistent sense of victimhood, which is embedded in the language: “we are victims of the West”; “we are victims of the Horde“; “we are victims of the authorities and the regime”; “we are victims of immigrants”; “we are victims of the capitalists”; “we are victims of circumstance”; “we are victims of revolution and war”; “we are victims of the Soviet era”, “we are victims of the 1990s”; and so on and so on. Again, this wide range of culprits who have victimized us enables us to integrate the image of victim into any ideological matrix. But all of these versions of victimhood are united by a sense of resentment, a sense of mediocrity, a sense of lacking something, and these feelings are constantly reproduced and cultivated. This language has no room, of course, for a critique of our own history and culture’s imperialism. We are not to blame: we are victims ourselves, our history is a victim, our culture is a victim. How can our sense of victimhood be squared with the fact that we ourselves have victimized others? The perception of ourselves as victims is one of our privileges, one of our special rights; it is our manifest destiny. However, the criticism of imperialism, the emergence of voices who declare themselves our victims, who want to discern our history and culture’s violence, subjugation, and injustice towards them, undermines this language’s entire foundation and our image of ourselves as victims. It undermines the foundation on which we stand, our privilege of being unique. And this triggers pushback and resistance, of course.
The generation of scholars who started studying the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s were also shaped by their firsthand experience of the country. When they travelled as foreign students to Moscow, they found impoverished people. Empty shelves and pervasive poverty made Russians look like victims of the Soviet regime, and financially, Soviet Moscow seemed more like a European periphery than an imperial metropole, which they associated with material affluence.
The wave of decolonisation in Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, which started after World War II, was accompanied by rigorous academic discussions and scholarship of colonial legacies and tools of violence.
By contrast, the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union did not result in similar scrutiny of the Russian imperial legacy.
For metropolitan Western Europe and the United States, Europe stood for metropolitanism – a place from which the world was colonised, not a place of colonisation. Accepting colonial history within Europe made little sense, so the colonial nature of Russia remained unchallenged.
In Russia itself, the dominant narrative was one of victimhood. Russians learned to see themselves as a special nation that sacrificed its own wellbeing for the sake of non-Russians in the Soviet Union. “Let us stop feeding them” was the slogan Russians used to explain Moscow’s decision to let the colonies go in 1991.
A recent article from the American Political Science Association (APSA) examined how the words used to describe Central Asia sometimes reinforce the region’s image as being part of Russia or the Soviet Union. Amid growing awareness of Central Asia’s colonial history, some argue it is time to move beyond terms such as “post-Soviet,” “near abroad,” or “Russia’s backyard” when referring to Central Asia today. Join host Bruce Pannier for a thought-provoking conversation on decolonizing Central Asian discourse with the co-authors of the APSA article: Botakoz Kassymbekova, a lecturer and assistant professor of modern history at the University of Basel; and Erica Marat, a professor at the National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs.
Putin’s propaganda builds on seeing Russia as both victimized by the West and entitled to regional dominance over Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus. Russia’s sense of its lost greatness in 1991 after the demise of the Soviet Union fuels a sense that it is the innocent victim of outside powers. Its shrunken geography and collapsing economy made post-Soviet Russia economically poor compared to the wealth accumulated by Western colonial metropoles. Soviet socialism as a global anti-capitalist force had failed to bring the same level of prosperity. Russian intellectuals became preoccupied with their own imagined marginal position vis-à-vis the West fueling the denial of the true colonial nature of the Soviet regime.
At the same time, Russian political elites expect loyalty from former Russian colonies that includes knowledge of the Russian language and political loyalty, and unity in opposition to Western influence. According to such an imperial view, Russian rule over non-Russian populations is not colonialism but a gift of modernity. It is a deeply altruistic act for the sake of backward people. Rejection of Russian cultural dominance, including building independent foreign policy and contesting the Russian view of Soviet history, is an act of political disloyalty. In Central Asia, for instance, Russian ambassadors routinely condemn states’ prioritization of indigenous languages as attempts to limit the rights of the ethnic Russian population. Such search for independence triggers a sense of victimhood in Russia, as if disagreement with the Russian imperial self-image is an attack on Russian cultural greatness.
Putin coupled Russia’s innocent victim narrative with a historical self-image of a civilizing power against former Soviet republics that sought closer ties with the West. The Russian imperial myth allows identity mobilization around militant patriotism while also helping the state keep the public passive and uncritical. Putin recently spoke about Russia’s imperial identity when announcing the military attack on Ukraine: “It was necessary to immediately stop this nightmare—the genocide against the millions of people living there, who rely only on Russia, hope only on us.” Western leaders’ naming atrocities in Bucha a genocide further deepened the Russian regime’s sense of victimhood. The Russian Defense Ministry stated that the West is collectively attacking Russia. Feeling humiliated by the West, the Russian public was simultaneously supporting Russian aggression in former Soviet territories. Economic hardships can be reframed as a burden unjustly borne by a victim-savior or as an imperial duty of those who humanely seek to liberate the world from evil.
Russian President Vladimir Putin took part in a ceremony to raise the flags of the Russian Federation, the USSR, and the Russian Empire in St. Petersburg Tricentennial Park.
The head of state arrived in the area of the Gulf of Finland near Lakhta Center on the yacht Okhta. He watched the ceremony from the water.
On board the yacht, the head of state was welcomed by Elena Ilyukhina, deputy general director of Gazprom Neft and general director of Gazprom Lakhta LLC.
“St. Petersburg’s aquatic area and maritime facade,” she said, waving her hand at the view. “It’s beautiful. I understand that you have finished this complex,” Putin said, pointing at the 462-meter tower of Lakhta Center. Ilyukhina briefly told the president about the project, and also announced plans to build a 555-meter skyscraper next door.
[…]
“I understand that today’s event is connected with the fact that one stage [of the project] is ending and another beginning,” Putin said. Ilyukhina explained that the flag-raising ceremony, whose guest of honor of was the head of state, commemorated historical dates: the 165th anniversary of the Russian imperial flag, the 100th anniversary of the Soviet flag, and the 330th anniversary of Peter the Great’s tricolor.
Ilyukhina underscored that the choice of banners was not accidental: each flag represented a certain historical stage, marked by feats of heroism, victories and achievements. “The raised banners are a tribute to our history,” she pointed out, saying that Gazprom had erected the three 179.5-meter-high flagpoles to form the world’s first ensemble of flagpoles of such a height built on water. “The trinity symbolizes the continuity of our history,” Ilyukhina emphasized.
“It’s beautiful,” Putin said appreciatively. His interlocutor also noted that as part of the comprehensive improvement of St. Petersburg Tricentennial Park’s shoreline, hydraulic works had been designed to protect the coastline from erosion. A pedestrian bridge would stretch from each of them to the shore. The project’s development and implementation required complex engineering and design solutions and innovative construction techniques.
When the Russian national anthem rang out during the ceremony, Ilyukhina continued her story. The president stopped his interlocutor’s narration with a gesture of his hand, however. He put his finger to his lips, thus asking for silence as the national anthem was played.
After [the anthem was performed], the flag of the Russian Federation, the flag of the Soviet Union, and the flag of the Russian Empire soared into the air. The raised banners are remarkable for their immense size: each width of cloth is slightly larger than half of a football field: sixty by forty meters. Each flag weighs almost half a ton.
St. Petersburg Tricentennial Park is the youngest in the city. It was founded in 1995 to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding [which did not occur until 2003]. [The then-Petersburg mayor] Anatoly Sobchak and future president Vladimir Putin each planted a tree.
According to Ilyukhina, as part of the project for improving the city’s coastal area, they are now planning to work on the park’s shoreline, including building a water sports base and equipping the beach, sports grounds, and walking paths.
I had visions, I was in them I was looking into the mirror To see a little bit clearer The rottenness and evil in me
Fingertips have memories Mine can’t forget the curves of your body And when I feel a bit naughty I run it up the flagpole and see who salutes (But no one ever does)
I’m not sick but I’m not well And I’m so hot ’cause I’m in Hell
Been around the world and found That only stupid people are breeding The cretins cloning and feeding And I don’t even own a TV
Put me in the hospital for nerves And then they had to commit me You told them all I was crazy They cut off my legs, now I’m an amputee, God damn you
I’m not sick but I’m not well And I’m so hot ’cause I’m in Hell I’m not sick but I’m not well And it’s a sin to live so well
I wanna publish ‘zines And rage against machines I wanna pierce my tongue It doesn’t hurt, it feels fine The trivial sublime I’d like to turn off time And kill my mind You kill my mind, mind
Paranoia, paranoia Everybody’s coming to get me Just say you never met me I’m running underground with the moles, digging holes Hear the voices in my head I swear to God it sounds like they’re snoring But if you’re bored, then you’re boring The agony and the irony, they’re killing me (whoa)
I’m not sick but I’m not well And I’m so hot ’cause I’m in Hell I’m not sick but I’m not well And it’s a sin to live this well (One, two, three, four)
Yulia Slavyanskaya is a Russian singer of spiritual and patriotic songs. In 2002, she recorded her first album Wake up, Soul!, which was a real success! The singer attracted numerous fans who value spirituality, a positive attitude, and patriotism in music. Yulia writes her own music based on the poems of contemporary poets and classic poets.
Even the youngest listeners like the songs of this beautiful performer of contemporary songs [sic] about the soul and for the soul, songs about love for each other and for one’s Motherland. Her extraordinary lucid voice cannot be confused with anyone else’s!
For many years, Yulia Slavyanskaya has been performing solo concerts all over Russia. She has been joyfully welcomed in Donetsk, Gorlovka [sic], Belarus, Serbia, Abkhazia, Kirghizia [sic], and Montenegro.
She has been a prizewinner at many Russian and international festivals of spiritual song. She was awarded the Republic of Abkhazia’s highest honor, the Akhdz-Apsha (“Honor and Glory”) medal, in the third degree, and has received numerous awards from municipal, public, and religious organizations in Russia and other countries.
Yulia Slavyanskaya’s concert and performances can be viewed on the TV channels Spas, Soyuz, A Minor, and My Joy. You can also get to know her work on the website юлия-славянская.рф and social networks on the Internet.
Yulia Slavyanskaya’s concerts are attended by whole families. Her work is filled with amazing light and purity! At the concert in St. Petersburg, Yulia will perform songs from all six of her released albums.
By tradition, the little children who attend Yulia Slavyanskaya’s concert will become its active participants.
Source: Bileter.ru, via their weekly email newsletter. Ticket prices for the concert range between 700 and 1,500 rubles. Translated by the Russian Reader
“Encounters at the Lavra,” Soyuz TV (562K subscribers), 2,055 views, Mar 29, 2021. Priest Anatoly Pershin welcomes Orthodox singer and composer Yulia Slavyanskaya. The program features songs based on the lyrics of Archpriest Andrei Logvinov: “The Martyrs’ Candles Were Lighted” and “So Much Is Given.” Father Anatoly performs the song “How I Want Purity.”
All the swindlers are fleeing Russia:
They have property in the West.
The bandits and sodomites are fleeing
And all those killed by their conscience.
The Judases are running, all going there,
Where there is no love, where there is no Christ.
Where there are gay parades and Nazis,
Liberals and globalists.
God is cleansing Holy Russia,
He protects it himself like his own daughter!
He will not let the evil ones torment us,
May God grant that we keep our faith.
Only an ignoramus doesn't understand
Russia as the last hope.
Let the enemy shout that Putin is bad
And under him all in Russia is bad.
If the whole herd of fleas is mad,
Evidently our Putin has done everything right!
