Ilya Kukulin: Dostoyevsky, Kundera, and the Culpability of Russian Culture

A house sign on Dostoyevsky Street in Petersburg, 10 October 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader

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.

It’s not clear whether one should argue with Klimeniouk. This is a scathing newspaper column, published, albeit, in one of Europe’s most influential papers. As for Klimeniouk’s attack on Desnitsky, the composer Boris Filanovsky has already offered an excellent response on his Facebook page. Is there anything we must add to his objections?

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?

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.

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.

Source: Ilya Kukulin, “Dostoyevsky, Kundera, and the culpability of Russian culture,” Colta.ru, 11 September 2023. Translated by Ainsley Morse and Maria Vassileva. I am grateful to them for their fine translation, and to Mr. Kukulin for his permission to publish it here. ||| TRR

^[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.

Copyleft

Alexander Blok

[Response to a questionnaire]*

I have no objections to the abolition of literary estate rights.

In a person who is really alive, that is, who is moving forward, not backward, any sense of ownership should of course weaken over the years; all the more should it weaken in the intellectual laborer, and especially in the artist, who is absorbed in finding forms capable of withstanding the pressure of incoming creative energy rather than in scraping together capital, finding support in this endeavor from his loved ones, if they are indeed his loved ones.

When I die, may only hands that can best convey the products of my labor to those who need them be found.

1 January 1918

* Originally published in Novyi vechernii chas, 3 January 1918. The questionnaire was prompted by a December 1917 decree of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, ceding to the state the exclusive rights to the literary estates of writers after they died. In addition to Blok’s, Novyi vechernii chas published the responses of Fyodor Sologub and Dmitry Merezhkovsky in the same issue: arguing that the decree was “gibberish” and “inadvisable,” they called on writers to unite in protest. The responses of Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, Teffi, Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, Alexander Kuprin, Alexander Amfiteatrov, and Mikhail Prishvin were published in subsequent issues of the newspaper.

Source: Sergeyev’s Theater Library. Photo of the ramp in the constructivist tower of Laboratory Building “E” at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MEI) courtesy of Elena Krizhevskya/porusski.me. Thanks to Alexandra Vorobyova for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

The October Revolution’s Other Party

Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova (center, wearing glasses). Photo courtesy of Getty Images and Russia Beyond the Headlines

October’s Number Two Party: Who Helped the Bolsheviks Prevail?
Yaroslav Leontiev
Vedomosti
December 8, 2017

The First All-Russian Congress of the Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Internationalists) took place a hundred years ago in St. Michael’s Castle in Petrograd. The Left SRs were the second largest force in the October Revolution, providing the Bolsheviks with support in rural areas and amongst rank-and-file soldiers. Sixty-eight SR organizations gathered in the building where writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, physiologist Ivan Sechenov, and engineer Pavel Yablochkov had once studied. [From 1823, St. Michael’s Castle housed the Russian Army’s Main Engineering School. Now a branch of the Russian Museum, the castle is thus still alternately referred to as Engineers’ Castle—TRR.]

“Our party’s first congress was, in effect, not a congress, but a hasty review, as it were, of representatives of a certain mindset,” Prosh Proshyan, a Left SR leader and congress attendee, recalled later.

“If I had not been in Petersburg in 1917, the October Revolution would have happened—if Lenin had been present and in charge. But if neither Lenin or I had been in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution. […] If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I would hardly have managed. […] The revolution’s outcome would have been in doubt,” said Trotsky.

Yet if Maria Spiridonova, Boris Kamkov, and other Left SR leaders had not been in Petrograd at the time, it is by no means a fact the revolution’s victory would have been secured at the All-Russian Congresses of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. And victory itself for the Bolsheviks would have been a dubious proposition without allies, if we have in mind the Russia beyond the two capitals and the major industrial cities.

After winning the majority of mandates at the Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies in November 1917 (Spiridonova was elected its chair), the Left SRs were heavily involved in the events leading up to the revolution. When the Military Revolutionary Committee was established in Petrograd on October 12, 1917, Pavel Lazimir, an army paramedic and Left SR, was elected its chair. The field headquarters of the Military Revolutionary Committee, headed by Bolshevik Nikolai Podvoisky, would be established later, right before the armed assault on October 25.

In many cities, Left SRs were heavily involved in coups and the armed seizure of power. This forced the SR Central Committee (which had not yet split into factions) to dissolve the Petrograd, Helsingfors (Helsinki), and Voronezh party organizations. In certain cases, Left SRs themselves headed revolutionary committees, in particular, in Kharkov and Pskov. The chair of the Astrakhan People’s Power Committee, which had taken over the region, was Ensign Alexander Perfiliev, a Left SR. In Smolensk, the Bolshevik-dominated revolutionary committee, which included two Left SRs and one anarchist, joined with the provincial congress of peasant deputies and elected Dr. Yevgeny Razumov, who had attended the founding congress of the Left SRs, head of the local Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars). The chief of staff of the revolutionary military units who took power in Tashkent was Pavel Domogatsky, a Left SR and private in the First Siberian Reserve Rifle Regiment. In Kazan, Left SRs organized and headed the revolutionary committee, which competed with the Bolshevik revolutionary HQ in the battle for the hearts and minds of the masses. During General Kornilov’s attempted putsch in September 1917, the Central Staff of the Red Guards in Moscow consisted of seven Bolsheviks, six Left SRs, six Left Mensheviks, and three independents. Ensign Yuri Sablin, a Left SR member of the Moscow Revolutionary Committtee HQ, commanded a special detachment that advanced from the Strastnoi Monastery to the Nikitsky Gates and captured the mayor’s building on Tverskoi Boulevard. Another famous Russian Civil War commander, Vasily Kikvidze, a Left SR and volunteer in a Hussar regiment, was deputy chair of the Military Revolutionary Committee on the Southwestern Front during the First World War.

The_Soviet_Union_1970_CPA_3921_stamp_(Vasily_Kikvidze)

1970 Soviet four-kopeck postage stamp memorializing Left SR Vasily Kikvidze as a “hero of the Civil War.” Image courtesy of Wikimedia

The Left SRs had a huge influence on the sailors of the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets.

“The only Mensheviks and SRs in our midst were left-wing and internationalist,” midshipman and Bolshevik Fyodor Raskolnikov described the circumstances.

Consequently, the Left SRs headed the Kronstadt Soviet. The main bulwark of revolutionary forces in Petrograd, the Kronstadt Soviet commanded the detachment sent to storm the Winter Palace and to the Pulkovo Heights against Krasnov’s troops. The commander of the Petrograd Military District at the time was the future rebel commander of the Eastern Front, Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Muravyov, and the city’s air defense was headed by NCO Konstantin Prokopovich. Both Muravyov and Prokopovich had joined the Left SRs.

Although the Left SRs did not immediately join the government (the first Left SR to be authorized by the peasant congress, on November 19, to join the government was Andrei Kolegayev, appointed People’s Commissar for Agriculture), they did share responsibility for the seizure of power with the Bolsheviks: there was one Bolshevik and one Left SR in each of the thirteen departments of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. At a plenary session of theCentral Executive Committee on November 6, seven Left SR leaders, including Spiridonova, Kamkov, and Mark Natanson, were elected to its presidium, and Grigory Smolyanksy, former chair of the Left SR committee in Kronstadt, was appointed one of the Central Executive Committee’s two secretaries. On December 12, another five prominent Left SRs were added to the Central Executive Committee’s presidium.

1920px-Совет_народных_комиссаров_(Ленин,_Штейнберг,_Комков,_Бонч-Бруевич,_Трутовский...),_1918 A meeting of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars), circa December 1917–January 1918, featuring (from left to right) Isaac Steinberg, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, Boris Kamkov, Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, Vladimir Trutovsky, Alexander Shlyapnikov, Prosh Proshyan, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Alexandra Kollontai, Pavel Dybenko, E.K. Kosharova, Nikolai Podvoisky, Nikolai Gorbunov, V.I. Nevsky, Alexander Shotman, and Georgy Chicherin. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

The second non-Bolshevik member of the government, appointed by the Sovnarkom on November 25, was engineer Lev Kronik, who was made a member of staff at the People’s Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs. During December 1917, the Sovnarkom and VTsIK appointed seven more Left SRs People’s Commissars. Prosh Proshyan, only son of the classic Armenian writer Pertch Proshyan, was named People’s Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs. Isaac Steinberg was named People’s Commissar of Justice. Vladimir Trutovsky was appointed People’s Commissar for Local Self-Government, and Vladimir Karelin, People’s Commissar for the Republic’s Property. Two more Left SRs were made people’s commissars without portfolios, working on the staffs of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and the People’s Commissariat of Military and Naval Affairs, respectively. They had the right to vote at sessions of the Sovnarkom.

Later, in January and February 1918, the Left SRs increased their presence in the central government and local governments. They joined nearly all the regional governments (Moscow Region, the Ural Region, the Siberian Soviet Government, etc.). Alexander Malitsky, who headed the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Railway Union, was appointed to the staff of the People’s Commissariat of Railways. Other Left SRs joined the staff of the People’s Commissariat for Food and held key posts in the Red Army, having literally put their hand to the decree founding the Red Army. Left SR Vyacheslav Alexandrovich (Dmitriyevsky) was Felix Dzerzshinsky’s right-hand man in the Cheka, and would be one of the first Left SRs shot by his ex-colleagues in July 1918. The influential Left SR Anastasia Bitsenko was, practically speaking, the first female Soviet diplomat: she was an official member of the Soviet peace delegation at the negotiations in Brest. Meanwhile, Spiridonova was essentially Yakov Sverdlov’s deputy on the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets. She chaired its peasant section, which had its own staff and published the newspaper Voice of the Working Peasantry (Golos trudovogo krestyanstva). It was in the Voice and the party’s central newspaper, Banner of Labor (Znamya truda) that the whole of Russia read the revolutionary poetry of Alexander Blok and Sergei Yesenin, who supported the Left SRs.

But the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition proved fragile: it did not last long. In January 1918, when, at the behest of the Left SRs, the All-Russian Congresses of Workers’ and Soldier’s Deputies, and Peasants’ Deputies merged, and the Left SR “Basic Law on the Socialization of Land” was adopted, nothing foreshadowed the imminent break between the allies. Rejection of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsky and anti-peasant Bolshevik decrees would move the Left SRs to engage in peaceful and, later, armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. On July 6, 1918, after Left SR uprisings in Moscow and the cities of the Volga region, a full-fledged war broke out between the erstwhile allies. But this is another story.

Yaroslav Leontiev is a professor in the Faculty of State Management of Moscow State University. Translated by the Russian Reader

The Two-State Solution (Racism and the Russian Intelligentsia)

Boris Akunin:

In Russia, two distinct, completely dissimilar peoples live side by side, and these peoples have long been bitterly hostile towards each other. (May the Byzantine double-headed eagle that Ivan the Third selected as the country’s emblem go to hell in a hand basket.)

There is Us and there is Them.

We have our own heroes: Chekhov, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Sakharov.

They have their own heroes: Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and now Putin.

Members of the two nations recognize each other at first glance and experience a pang of acute dislike that selfsame second. We do not like anything about Them: the way They look, talk, carry themselves, rejoice and grieve, dress and undress. Their favorite singers, films, and TV shows make us sick. They pay Us in kind, and with interest.

Apart from Us and Them, there are just plain folk, who make up the majority of the population. We and They are constantly trying to win over this neither-fish-nor-fowl, to introduce them to our values.

What do you think should be done with this reality? Should we kill each other?

—Excerpted from Boris Akunin and Mikhail Shishkin, “Conversation between a Novelist and a Writer,” July 30, 2013

While there seems to be a fair amount of self-irony, in the comments, above, by the famed Russian detective novel writer Boris Akunin, I cannot help laughing when I read such exercises in self-praise by the so-called Russian intelligentsia and, at the same time, recall something that happened to me several years ago when I was running a summer study program in Petrograd for an American university.

Our students lived with Russian host families, and fitting student to host family was not always a snap, but it was mostly doable. That particular summer, however, more students had signed up for the program than ever before, and our limited resources were stretched thin. So I was taking recommendations from whomever I could get them, rather than relying only on the list of potential host families provided by our partners at the state university here in town.

That is how found myself visiting a couple in their flat somewhere in the city’s Central District. It was in a Stalin-era building, but the couple proudly informed me right away that Oleg Basilashvili, a well-known screen and stage actor and liberal intelligentsia icon, was a neighbor. They, too, were members of the creative intelligentsia. One of them was a theater critic, while the other had something to do with the Conservatory, I seem to remember.

The point, as I had already told them over the phone, was that I had one student left to place with a family, a male student. They, it transpired, had a teenage daughter. Would it be a problem for them to have a male student living in the same flat as their daughter? No, it would not be a problem, they told me.

Given the reputation of the university I was representing, they might have imagined I would be setting them up with a blond scion of New England old money, so if their daughter was whisked off her feet over the summer or merely made useful connections in high places, what could be the harm?

As we were wrapping up our conversation at their flat, having ironed out almost all the practical details, the couple thought to ask me what the young man’s name was.

“Diego,” I said.

My answer literally sent their eyes spinning in circles and smoke shooting from their ears. All it took was the “wrong” name for them to imagine a summer of their daughter basking in the glow of old American money with a patina of academic respectability turning into the constant threat of rape and ravishment at the hands of a “hot-blooded Latino.”

And they told me that in so many words, all the while denying that they were what they were—racists.

The funny thing was that Diego was gay in every sense of the word: fun to be around, a kind, sweet-hearted young man, and no “threat” to their precious daughter. But since Oleg Basilashvili’s neighbors had already outed themselves as racists, I did not want to hang around and find out whether they were homophobes as well.

I was more naïve than I am now. Although I had already had many encounters with “casual” racism and anti-Semitism Russian style, Petrograd had not yet arrived at the bad part of its mid noughties, when more proactive racists than my intelligentsia couple would ever want to be began assaulting and murdering immigrants, foreigners, anti-fascists, and members of Russian ethnic minorities in especially large numbers.

But I was not naïve enough to try and plead Diego’s case to these assholes. I immediately left their precious den of culture-vulturehood and hit the streets, cursing them out loud while also trying to think of a back-up plan.

That it is when I thought of our long-time acquaintance F.A., who had nannied the young son of a friend for years, and even had cooked for our family for a short while when we were in a bad spot. By no means was F.A. a member of the ballyhooed intelligentsia, which was not to say that she was uneducated or crude or anything but kind, loving, funny, smart, warm, and one of the best cooks I have ever met in my life. Besides that, she had worked in a factory her whole life, doing quality control, and she was Jewish.

When I telephoned her and told her what the deal was, she did not hesitate a second to welcome Diego into her home.

Needless to say, Diego and F.A. hit it off and had a great time in each other’s company that summer.

So when, a while later, I was asked to find temporary summer accommodation in Petrograd for another young gay Latino man, I could think of no better hostess than F.A. They also hit it off famously.

This is my roundabout way of saying something that has only been confirmed ten thousand times since by experiences both personal and vicarious: the liberal Russian intelligentsia is not all it is cracked up to be. It is often not particularly liberal or progressive, and is just as likely to be as Putinist or more Putinist than Putin’s mythical alleged “base” among industrial workers and peasants in the “Russian heartlands” or the “simple folk” in the big cities. If anything, my own experience has been that, on the contrary, these simple folk are not so simple and not so automatically inclined to putinize the world around them, much less racialize it.

There are just as many bigots and racists among the “Russian liberal intelligentsia” as there are among the Russian lower classes, maybe more.

Whatever the case, the fact that many Russian liberals have loose reactionary, racist screws in their brains has become apparent from the rabid reactionary discourse that has sprung up within Russia’s talking, thinking, and writing classes around the “refugee crisis” in Europe and the fresh clashes between Israelis and Palestinians.

Yegor Osipov and Kirill Kobrin’s attempts, below, to counter this utterly irrational discourse might seem mild outside of this context, but they are welcome contributions to a debate that is most remarkable for its near-total absence from Russian public life.

Humanizing Palestinians
Yegor Osipov
October 21, 2015
Radio Svoboda

“Maybe Israel does not behave perfectly in the Occupied Territories, but this is no justification for terrorism.” This comment on Facebook is nearly the most moderate gesture of support for Israel in connection with the new wave of Palestinian terrorism. Despite the fact that nothing justifies terrorism, the situation requires clarification.

Unfortunately, Russian commentators often forget the fact that Israel occupies around 60% of the West Bank and has been building settlements there for its own citizens. (Despite the fact that the Oslo Accords stipulated this state of affairs was only temporary.) They forget the Jewish settlements are built so as to significantly impede the movement of Palestinians between their towns and prevent the expansion of these towns. They forget that between 2000 and 2012 Israel demolished over two and a half thousand Palestinian buildings, buildings for which it, as the occupying power, had not issued construction permits. They forget that Israel restricts the access of tens of thousands of Palestinians to water, forcing them to pay much more for it than Jewish settlers living nearby. They forget that the IDF keeps troops in the West Bank who are engaged only in maintaining the occupation: a noise grenade there, a noise grenade here, searches of houses (women to the right, men to the left), and so on every other night. This tactic is called “mak[ing] our presence felt,” and sometimes it leads to innocent victims. Without knowing this, you might think that Israel and the West Bank were different planets, but in fact both political entities depend on each other. The West Bank depends on virtually everything that happens in Israel, while Israel (and this becomes clear during waves of terror) depends on the social climate in the West Bank.

The situation with the Gaza Strip, about which Russians also do not know very much, is quite different. In 2005, after the withdrawal of Israeli settlements and military personnel, the Gaza Strip was declared territory to which Israel had no obligations because it had “ended the occupation,” although it continued to implement land, sea, and air control of the Strip. After Hamas came to power and began rocket attacks on the southern part of the Jewish state, Israel proclaimed the Strip a “hostile entity” and established a blockade of the area along with Egypt, essentially locking around 1,800,000 people in an open-air prison.

In July 2014, in response to the murder of three Jewish teenagers by Palestinian terrorists, Israel launched an operation in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 2,200 people. Last summer, Jewish terrorists tossed Molotov cocktails at an Arab house, burning alive three members of the family who lived there, including an 18-month-old baby. Israel has yet to indict the terrorists. Some people manage to include this in the “Jewish people’s struggle for survival.” I think it only plays into the hands of anti-Semites the world over. But anti-Semitism, according to a newly released US State Department report on levels of religious freedom in the world, is once again on the rise, and the bias of the UN Security Council and the world’s leading media in favor of Palestine [sic] has not gone away.

Whether Israel will cope with the current wave of terror is a big question, because what is happening is not an intifada, which involves the coordination of armed protest. Today, we are seeing one-off attacks by ordinary Palestinians in no way linked to terrorist organizations. This is desperation after nearly half a century of occupation and the continuing colonization of Palestinian lands by Israelis. Last Friday, Benjamin Netanyahu, who during the recent elections declared there would be no Palestinian state on his watch, urged Mahmud Abbas to negotiate. But it is very likely that, as Israel’s main partner (just compare Abbas and Arafat), Abbas will be unable to help calm the situation. According to reports by Israel’s security services, the leader of the Palestinian Authority has been trying to resist the current wave of violence as it is. All this only shows that the situation is critical.

However, for the Russian intelligentsia, Israel continues to be a place it prefers to discuss with eyes wide shut and using generalizations like the “clash of civilizations.” Divided, like Europe, over the issue of taking in refugees, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Russian intellectuals, with few exceptions, adopt an uncompromising pro-Israeli stance. Reposts of videos from Israeli hospitals showing “ungrateful” Arabs are accompanied by captions such as “Watch this!” or “Read this!” Others post pictures of the Israeli flag emblazoned with the slogan “Yes! I stand with Israel! Share if you do, too!”

The rising wave of support for Israel points to the Orientalist bent of Russian minds, with the classic traits of Orientalism. The eastern, Arab world of Islam is incapable, allegedly, of solving its own problems. This world must always be guided by an “intelligent” West, a role that is often assigned to Israel, because Arabs are fundamentally incapable of changing themselves and their societies. The great Edward Said writes in the preface to Mourid Barghouti’s book I Saw Ramallah that the novel’s translator has done her job excellently, and in the English translation “[t]he Palestinian experience is therefore humanized and given substance in a new way.” Russian intellectuals, however, are not yet willing to humanize Palestinians. Indeed, what difference does it make that Asraa Zidan Tawfik Abed, who tried to stab a soldier in Afula and was gunned down, is a mother of three who holds a degree from Technion University in Haifa?

It is unclear how the conflict will end. It is clear only that the conflict is likely to be another turning point in Israel’s history, the next step after the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. What can the Russian intelligentsia do if it wants to help Israel deal with these as-yet-unclear new realities? At the very least, it should cease losing its self-control and speaking the language of the “clash of civilizations,” see, finally, what the Palestinian territories are like and how closely bound the West Bank is to Israel, realize the gravity of the situation in the Gaza Strip, and try and work out a positive agenda. In the end, it is this that has not happened the last twenty years. The occupation of and crimes against the Palestinians are, alas, not the problem. The problem is talking about the occupation and crimes of the Jewish state.

In his popular book Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, Yossi Klein Halevi, once a member of the radical fringe of American Jewry, describes the process of his transformation from an ultra-rightist radical to a centrist. When Halevi’s first daughter, Moriah, was born in 1985, he moved all his books about the Holocaust (which had once played a key role in his life as a member of the second generation) onto the upper shelves of his bookcases. He noticed that he put away even books with no pictures. He writes that this was his way of saying to himself these books were no longer the center of his life. Just as Halevi put away books about the Holocaust, the Russian intelligentsia needs to remove the imaginary radio broadcasting news either about the Six-Day War or Yitzhak Rabin’s murder and replace it with two maps: a map of the Middle East and a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories. The old threats to Israel are ever fewer, while we have a hard time imagining the new threats.

Yegor Osipov is a Russian journalist living in the Netherlands.

The Intelligentsia and Racism
Kirill Kobrin
October 23, 2015
Current Time

Nationalism was born two hundred years ago. At first, it was the theoretical labor of the early Romantics, poets, folklore compilers, and forgers of nonexistent ancient epics of their own peoples. Only then was it put into practice: amidst the gun and cannon smoke of the Napoleonic epic, in the secret Carbonari societies, on the revolutionary barricades.

In the late nineteenth century, nationalism generated several new nation-states. They became more numerous after 1918, not to mention the post-1945 period.

The process of carving countries up according to ethnicity continued even after 1991. The further disintegration of big countries into small countries, and small countries into tiny countries, was just barely avoided. And yet, until recently it was thought that nationalism in today’s Europe was the bailiwick of football hooligans and political outsiders. However, as recent events have shown, many, many people think in terms of “blood and soil.”

It has transpired that there is no vaccine against nationalism and even racism not only for so-called ordinary people. Wordsmiths, intellectuals, and even liberals chronically suffer from them as well. Russian liberals have proven especially vulnerable, or rather, members of the educated class who consider themselves liberals. We are not engaged in political analysis in this column, but we will look at the ethnic mindset of current Russian liberals as a historic phenomenon.

Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war has excited many people dissatisfied with the Putin regime, even those who resisted the Crimean temptation. For example, one well-known Internet figure, who has somehow passed for a political expert, shook the air with bloodthirsty calls to kill as many Syrians as possible, since they are Arabs and, therefore, enemies.

Whoever bombs Syria today, I very much welcome it, and if it is wiped off the face of the earth I won’t be the least bit disappointed. I will only say thank you.
—Anton Nossik

Many have voiced a slightly more restrained variation on this viewpoint, and one progressive media outlet has published an article that discusses, in particular, the indisputable superiority of Jewish men over Arab men in the sense of devotion to their families and courage. In connection with the influx of Syrian refugees, concern for the purity of European is voiced. The article in question is permeated with hidden and flagrant sexual motifs. The subtitle refers to “Raped Europe,” and in the opening paragraphs the author complains it is unfair that “girls love” starry-eyed defenders of refugees rather than defenders of European values.

Fear and loathing towards an alien tribe (the authors of such texts usually do not distinguish Arabs from Kurds, Kurds from Turks, and so on) and an alien religion, Islam (whose sense and essence they are too lazy to understand) have reached a fever pitch. Like all hysterics, Russian “racialist liberals” have been winding themselves up, and the noise level has been steadily increasing.

We are faced with a typical nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century mindset. Take, for example, the motif of the “raped motherland” (or “native culture”). Motherland and Fatherland had become a “mother” back with the Romantics, and later, Alexander Blok, a Late Romantic congenial to proto-fascist views, even proclaimed Russia his wife.

Oh, my Russia! My wife! Painfully / Clear to us is the long road!
—Alexander Blok

In this scheme of things, any outsider is seen as a threat to the mother’s purity, to her sexual serenity. But war and other hostile (or seemingly hostile) actions are attempted rape. Curiously, the identification also works in reverse. An ordinary woman belonging to “our” people is treated as the Mother, the symbol of the nation.

The further we go into the twentieth century, the clearer the purely ethnic and biological features in the countenance of the Woman/Mother become. She is sexually threatened by telltale-looking strangers: Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was chockablock with depictions of handsome blonde beauties harassed by swarthy apelike creatures.

For current Russian liberals, the role of the Mother threatened by violence is now played by the whole of Europe. It is strange that these folks so rarely invoke the mythological motif of the rape of Europa, in which the maiden Europa is abducted by Zeus in the shape of a bull, who spirits her away—across the Mediterranean!—to Crete, where has his way with her. The discussions of the newfangled national-liberals about the “rape of Europe” naively retell the myth in the most unpretentious racist manner. The “rapist,” “alien” or “suspicious Muslim” crosses the Mediterranean and, once in Europe, rapes her, meaning he bends her to his will. Just imagine that not so long it was said that classic Freudianism and Jungianism were half-forgotten things of the past. But now it turns out that all these things (combined with Social Darwinism and racial theory about the “inferiority” of certain nations) are alive and dominant in the minds of people, moreover, the minds of people whose job it is to reflect on things and generate meaning.

You can, of course, seek out the historical parallels, for example, the steady rightward drift of the liberal segment of the first Russian emigration or the fascist sympathies of such champions of freedom and justice as G.K. Chesterton. But all historical analogies obscure the essence of the matter. And the essence of the matter is this. Suffocating nationalism, moreover, on both sides of the current Putinist divide, is the principal legacy of seventy years of Soviet rule. While preaching internationalism, the communist ideology and the communist regime were weaker than the primitive xenophobia and fear of outsiders that permeated the minds of the Soviet intelligentsia. The collapse of ideology has brought these sentiments to the fore. Aside from everything else, another thing has become clear. The Russian intelligentsia, which considers itself liberal, knows no more about the world than their predecessors from some Turgenev novel.

By the way, have you heard there was a decisive battle on the Danube? Three hundred Turkish officers killed, Silistra has been taken, and Serbia has declared its independence. Don’t you think that you, as a patriot, should be thrilled? As for me, my Slavic blood is just boiling! However, I advise you to be more cautious. I am sure you are being watched. The spying here is horrible! Yesterday, a suspicious person came up to me and asked whether I was Russian. I told him I was Danish.
—Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve

Everything was clear then: we were fighting for our “fellow Slavs” and wishing death on the “bloodthirsty Muslims.” The only difference is that today the names of the people we should be protecting from the villains are very different. We are witnessing a cynical pathetic remake of the novel On the Eve.

Kirill Kobrin is a writer, historian, journalist, and editor living in London.

The texts by Boris Akunin, Yegor Osipov, and Kirill Kobrin were translated by the Russian Reader.

Kommunella Markman: Death to Beria

Kommunella “Ella” Markman was born in 1924 in Tbilisi. In 1943–1944, Ella Markman and her friends were members of the underground youth organization Death to Beria. In 1948, all members of the organization were arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years forced labor. Markman served seven years in the Inta camps (Komi Republic), working on logging and construction sites. In 1957, she married an ex-inmate she had met in the camps and returned to Tbilisi. She was rehabilitated in 1968. She lives in Moscow and writes poems.

My dad was a very committed communist and made me the same way. From early childhood, Dad taught me this principle: “What do you think your enemies want? They want you to feel bitter, be in a bad mood, and get you to throw up your paws. If you don’t want to make your enemies happy, always keep your chin up!”

Ella’s father, Moisei Markman, was a senior official in the Transcaucasian Soviet government. In 1937, he was arrested and shot. In 1938, Ella’s mother was sentenced to five years in the camps as a “family member of a traitor.” She served her sentence in a camp in Kazakhstan.

Dad was arrested. They left Mom alone then. She went around looking for work. She would go somewhere and say, “My husband has been arrested. I have two kids and I’m looking for work.” They would tell her they would think it over and to come back in five days or so. She would come back in five days, but there wouldn’t be a single person left there: everyone would have been arrested. Stalin did not like Georgia, and he particularly disliked Tbilisi.

I was at a very good school. Six of us were tried for organizing [Death to Beria], and then two more friends of mine were tacked onto the case just like that because it was convenient. Of those young folks, three of us, Tema Tazishvili, our leader, Yura Lipinsky, and I, were in the same class. Shura Baluashvili was in the class above us. Meaning that four of the six, and I was the fifth, were from the same school.

We were very good friends. What was really valued in those days was the willingness to do something heroic. Everyone just wanted to end up in a situation where they could do something heroic. For example, my friends brought this doggerel back with them from the Literary Institute [in Moscow]:

I’m talking like I’m crazed.
For this I am to blame.
I’d like to set your house ablaze
To save you from the flames.

In 1943, I was in Tbilisi. I met up with my classmates from school, and we decided we could not go on living in fright, our tails tucked between our legs, that something horrible was going on in Georgia. We hated Stalin and Beria furiously. No one believes that at the age of nineteen [we could do these things]. But I am surprised that at the age of nineteen—how should I put it? It was strange not to have seen what was going in. And we decided to fight. We posted leaflets and agitated where we could.

In the late 1930s, clandestine anti-Stalinist youth organizations emerged in the Soviet Union. Their members, high school upper classmen and university students, set themselves the ambitious goal of changing the existing regime. However, in practice they only managed to produce and distribute leaflets before they were arrested, sent to the camps or executed, and their organizations were shut down.

We just made plans. There could be no question of murder, of course. The only thing we could have done was kill Beria, since he was fond of pretty young women, and I was young and had a very good figure. I’ll show you the photographs. I said I would be ready to do that [i.e., seduce him] just to kill him. Beria could have been killed. But my dream was to kill Stalin, too. We all knew it was only a dream, so we called our organization Death to Beria.

Our organization existed only in 1943 and 1944. In 1949, I was arrested, arrested in Batumi and brought to Tbilisi. What was the reason for my arrest? They told me to tell them about my “anti-Soviet activities.” Now I thought, what anti-Soviet activities of mine are they talking about? Since we had not been caught either for passing out leaflets or agitating, I was certain this was not the reason. So much time had passed—1945, 1946, 1947. It was only in April 1948 that we were arrested.

So we could not figure out how they had found us out. We learned this much later, during the trial itself, when Dormishkhan Alshibayev stood up and said, literally, “I ask the esteemed Special Council [of the KGB] to take into account that on April 7”—we were arrested in late April—“that I myself went to the KGB and told them everything.” I was simply stunned!

Yes, we made quite dramatic speeches during the trial. One of us said, “We hope that our blood will show people how those who stand for the truth are punished!” It was something like that. And then suddenly the judge said, “There won’t be any shedding of your blood.”

The judge said, “Although your acts wholly fit the death penalty, it has now been abolished, so [you are sentenced to] twenty-five years in the camps.”

So I ended up in a camp. And it was great, I mean that seriously! I would have never learned so many valuable things otherwise.

I said to myself I wouldn’t do any easy work in the camp. That is not how Dad taught me, I said to myself. And from the first day to the last I always did the work everyone else did.

At first, I worked quite poorly. The first time I swung a pick I nearly hit someone in the head. I was incredibly tired at first: I couldn’t even go to the mess hall. Lyuda busted her guts for me and brought me lunch. This (taking food out of the mess hall) was also forbidden.

All the girls would get tired. Our main job was building roads.

Then one day, I came back [from work] and felt I was tired, but no more tired than the others. And from that day everything became easier and easier. I started doing other people’s work for them.

In 1952, Minlag [Mineralny Camp Directorate, Komi Republic] tightened the rules for prisoners. The books they kept now had to undergo mandatory inspection. Books that passed inspection were marked with a stamp from the camp’s cultural and education unit.

I had this big book by Lermontov. Two female prison wardens came in, one of them normal and decent, the other, a disgusting warden we called the Rat. The Rat took a look at my books, grabbed the Lermontov, and said, “Confiscate this!” The other one said, “But that’s Lermontov!” And the Rat said to her, “Just look at his tsarist epaulettes! Confiscate it: we cannot leave it.” So they confiscated my Lermontov book.

In the evening, I had to go upstairs to the mess hall on some business. We were not allowed to go to the mess hall for no reason. I think I had forgotten something—either gloves (although I don’t think it was cold yet) or a handkerchief—and went looking for it. After a while, I saw the Rat sitting there and reading. She was moving her lips, because she was semiliterate. I glanced at what it was: she was reading [Lermontov’s poem] “The Novice” line by line. And she was crying! That is when I realized what poetry was.

You cannot imagine what a source of support it has been to this day.

We would be building a road in winter. I would recite, for example, four lines of some light verse, Blok, say:

Song will be song forever,
And someone in the crowd always sings.
There is his head on a platter,
Handed by the dancer to the king…

The girls would be carrying their handbarrows thirty meters, all the while repeating [the lines]. Then they would come back, and I would test them to see if they knew it. And so the whole camp was learning poems all the time. Wasn’t that clever of me?

And then, after Stalin’s death. . . Just you try with all your imagination to picture what was going on with the KGB leadership, KGB officers, and our wardens after Khrushchev’s speech [at the 20th Party Congress in 1956]. Stalin’s death was a very, very convenient time for freedom.

Beria was shot. The whole camp knew about my hatred of Beria. I heard something about “enemies of the people,” “Beria,” etc., on the radio. I could have put two and two together, but I didn’t. At first, I thought that 1937 had begun all over again, and Beria had strengthened his power.

Our work team, which had been out cleaning, was coming back [to the camp], and I saw a crowd standing around the doors, by the guard post. I walked in, and there was applause and joy!

But most important is that it’s not so easy even for a force like the KGB to eradicate humanity in human beings. What was the camp meant to do? In Stalin’s time, it was supposed to reform us, to make us tremble before power. They needed to make us submissive. Oh, how they failed!

I have been lucky in life. I had support from poems and from the fact that my parents had taught persistence and told me there could be no greater happiness than overcoming difficulties. So we need difficulties to be happy.

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Editor’s Note. This is one in a series of short films made by Petersburg filmmaker Alexander Slobodsky, based on material from the Virtual Museum of the Gulag and video interviews recorded by the Memorial Research and Information Centre, Saint Petersburg.

My thanks to Evgeniya Kulakova for providing me with the Russian transcript to this film.