Lev Schlosberg’s lengthy interview with Ksenia Sobchak, released last week, predictably kicks off with a discussion of his condemnation of his former allies. In August of this year, Lev Schlosberg lashed out on Facebook at the emigrant liberals who had welcomed the Ukrainian army’s offensive in the Kursk Region, calling writer Dmitry Bykov, journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, and politician Garry Kasparov comrades in the “someone else’s blood” party. His post sparked a freewheeling discussion, demonstrating once again to both onlookers and participants how far apart they were, even though they are still citizens of the same country. While the outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict will supposedly be determined by the newly re-elected Donald Trump, the Kremlin has long since won the war on the invisible front.

It was beyond the strength of the majority to resist the Kremlin’s propaganda. How fortunate for the minority, who had honestly declared before the war that they had no soul, only a paycheck.

Three months later, Schlosberg felt the need to continue the conversation, choosing as his interlocutor Ksenia Sobchak, about whose views on war and peace there can be no two opinions: what Vladimir Putin finds ambiguous also seems ambiguous to the breeding bulls in his herd. But the question is why the veteran democrat Schlosberg decided to hang a huge bell around his neck next to the “foreign agent” disclaimer. Was it vanity or fear? As becomes clear in the first half hour of the high-minded conversation, however, the cause, as always, is run-of-the-mill stupidity. Schlosberg really thinks what he says. It is even sadder to watch his rantings than it is to watch the criminal proceedings against him.

Explaining his stance as a compassionate fellow traveler (which, as we remember, can be summarized in Akhmatova’s famous line about one’s own people, on whose side one should be both in happy times and during the Special Military Operation), Schlosberg recalls Leo Tolstoy’s famous essay “Bethink Yourselves!,” published in 1904 after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. According to Shlosberg, love for a fragile peace distinguishes the authentic Russian writer from the fake one. For this reason, Shlosberg has no hesitation in ejecting Dmitry Bykov from the company of engineers of Russian souls, and, it seems, from the human race altogether. A similar fate befalls the other participants of the Free Russia Forum. Typically, Sobchak, an experienced investigator-slash-provocateur, cajoles Lev Markovich into making public his entire list of traitors to the Motherland (probably to check it against the firing squad list, lest there be an extrajudicial error).

It is worth nothing that all the ideological opponents mentioned by Schlosberg* did not differ much from the great elder from Yasnaya Polyana in their appeals to the silent audience. Since then, however, much water (demagoguery) has flowed under the bridge, along with the lives of millions of people. No wonder that the cardboard humanism of the captive Yabloko Party now looks, if not ridiculous, then simply ugly. Schlosberg and Yavlinsky suggest that we still eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which was chosen as the symbol of their so-called political association. And it seems to have been known for a long time that this fruit is a pure stage prop, a fruit plate from a Moscow Art Theater performance, but its contents continue to rot and to reek, frankly.

We are all victims of this war, Schlosberg claims. Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, the United States and Europe had the same opportunities to prevent the war. “But the mincemeat of history cannot be cranked backwards,” he continues, indulging in inventive parallels, “the cutlet will not turn back into the cow.” Yes, of course, the “Russian World” will never be the same again, but only because thinkers like Schlosberg, as Circe did to Odysseus’s companions, have been turning Russians into ungulates with their pseudo-Christian speeches. It is other people, of course, who have been leading them to the slaughter, but the Yabloko Party, alas, bears a considerable share of the blame.

Dubbing himself “the people,” Schlosberg wants to escort the popular masses on a journey to the end of the night, i.e., he suggests that they wander together until they are blue in the face in the pitch darkness and sprinkle the ashes of their ideals on each other’s heads, even though they should sprinkle “mother earth” on their heads. Schlosberg imagines collective euthanasia as a therapy in which there is no room for hatred. What’s the difference between dying with calls to love one another on your lips and dying while calling for violence? There is a difference, Schlosberg contends. In the first case, our church cemetery will finally become a true “brotherly” [i.e., mass] grave.

Source: Zinaida Pronchenko, “Caution, Schlosberg: how to properly take last communion,” Republic, 11 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

There used to be a Three Hierarchs Street in Kyiv. It was renamed after the October Revolution, of course. In 1919, it was called Victims of the Revolution Street in memory of the Bolsheviks who had been led down it to their executions. The street bore this tragic name until 1955, when someone competent finally showed up at city hall and explained to them how the name was ambiguous. City hall agreed and renamed it Heroes of the Revolution Street. But you can’t fool the people, and so the name “Victims of the Heroes of the Revolution” stuck to the street like glue. Old-timers still referred to it as they had in the old Soviet days. “Can you tell me how to get to the outpatient clinic?” “Go straight down Victims of the Revolution….” In the early 1990s, when the powers that be were getting rid of abominable “Red” place names, the street was given back its old name, Three Hierarchs Street.

I was reminded of this by the recent incident involving Lev Schlosberg, who explained in an interview with Ksenia Sobchak that Ukraine cannot be considered a “victim” [zhertva]. This has happened in the context of the Yabloko Party’s now-familiar cry “Both of you stop immediately!” Here is what Schlosberg said, verbatim:

Ukraine is resisting. State and individuals are victims [zhertva] until the minute, until the second they start resisting. Ukraine started resisting on the morning of February 24 [2022]. It is a resistance supported by dozens of foreign countries with their money, their equipment, their specialists, with everything they have. This had led to the fact that Ukraine has equalized the situation. Today, the military forces — the combined military forces of Ukraine (taking into account the allies, their weapons and their money) and the combined military forces of Russia — are roughly equal. Whoever resists is not a victim [zhertva]. A victim [zhertva] does not resist. A victim [zhertva] allows itself to be killed. The myth that Ukraine is a victim does not fit the historical facts. If Ukraine were a victim, Ukraine would not exist now. It would simply not exist.

Of course, we could go on at length about Shlosberg and the Yabloko applesauce* in his head, but he has gotten enough pushback. He has talked a load of nonsense and still goes on, so God be his judge. “Why do we listen to him? Let’s eat him.” I’m in favor of not listening to anyone at all, since there came a point when everyone started talking in commonplaces. Schlosberg is no exception: his leitmotif is well rehearsed and has long been familiar. But this paragraph about victims and non-victims is peculiar. Not politically peculiar (not at all), but it is quite peculiar as a mirror reflection of illiteracy.

Lev Markovich managed to cram a lot of nonsense into one paragraph, both about equalizing the situation and about western assistance. But that’s not what I have in mind. What I have in mind is the fact that even the well-spoken Schlosberg has no linguistic sense at all, as it turns out. And he’s not alone in having this handicap, although it is not remotely acceptable for him as a politician to have it.

The whole passage about the victim, I think, meant the opposite of what its author was been lambasted. He was rightly lambasted, generally, but he didn’t mean to strip Ukraine of its status as a victim of aggression. “Victim of aggression” and “sacrificial victim” are different things. The concept of the sacrificial victim is as old as sacrifice itself and is widely employed in the Old Testament as an inalienable part of the love for God. The Old Testament is chockablock with sacrifice, beginning with Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac.

It would be odd, of course, to assume that Schlosberg was talking about biblical connotations in his conversation with Sobchak (and it is doubtful the interviewer has ever thoughtfully read the Bible), but it is almost certain that this was the notion of zhertva which he had in mind. A sheep to the slaughter is apparently Lev Markovich’s idea of a textbook victim. The sheep does not resist: that’s a fact. Ukraine has been resisting, and that’s also a fact. From Schlosberg’s point of view, it all makes sense. If he had said that Ukraine was not a victim of aggression, then he would have become a deserving punching bag forever. But he wanted to make a graceful compliment to Ukraine while not deviating from Yabloko Party’s twee “peace and good will to all — just stop shooting!” In the Old Testament sense of the word, Ukraine is truly not a victim: it is a heroic scrapper, a country as hard as nails. But what Schlosberg said was understood as it should have been understood.

A politician should know the value of words and the cost of his linguistic blunders. The Schlosberg incident is such an obvious example of linguistic deafness that it should be included in political rhetoric textbooks — someday, of course, not now. A politician should realize that words addressed to the public are always heard as they are commonly understood, and that few people will use zhertva [“victim”] in the Old Testament sense [of “sacrifice”].

Once upon a time, a rookie journalist was brought on at the newspaper where I worked. His first article was about a theater event that had turned out to be a chummy gathering at which only the in-crowd got the jokes. The article ended with the following sentence: “The result was an event only for those who could get to it through the box office window.” I immediately pictured a man trying to Winnie-the-Pooh his way through a tiny window. When the journalist noticed that I was editing the sentence, he was indignant.“Why?! It’s clear as it is,” he said, “it’s about the people who managed to get their hands on complimentary tickets.” “Yes,” I replied, “it is clear. But not immediately clear, like it should be.” The guy held a grudge against me for a long time, not understanding the point of my objection.

The feeling for language is an innate thing, like a sense of pitch. But if it is weak, it must be trained, just like the sense of pitch. Andrei Mironov, who sang countless songs on screen and on stage, had no ear for music, but he worked until the point of exhaustion, singing the same lines a hundred thousand times until he could hit the notes. Only the people close to him and the directors who worked with him knew that he lacked a sense of pitch.

When I hear an advertisement for “tonal cream” [foundation cream], I am amazed at how one could fail to anticipate that every other person would hear “anal cream.” We can attribute this to a common lack of linguistic pitch, of which there are countless examples. It is essentially a habitual neglect of language, of its purity. “Anal cream” is a harmless example. “Phyto tea for women with hog uterus” [i.e., Orthilia secunda, or wintergreen, whose common name is matka borovaya] is basically harmless, too, just like most of the complete misunderstandings of “how our words will be heard” which we encounter at every turn.

The Schlosberg incident is a quintessential example of the damage which carelessness can do to a public figure. Lev Markovich already has a catastrophically dwindling number of allies, given his inappropriate Leopold the Cat-like appeals and dubious patriotic outbursts. After his latest musings, this number has precipitously plunged. “Alas, they didn’t understand me,” the annoyed Schlosberg must say, playing the victim.

* Although the Yabloko Party‘s name was derived from the surnames of its three founders (Grigory Yavlensky, Yuri Boldyrev, and Vladimir Lukin), the word thus formed, yabloko, means “apple” in Russian. |||TRR

Source: Ekaterina Barabash, “Playing the victim: the Schlosberg incident as a textbook example of linguistic deafness,” Republic, 12 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader