The Things They Say

Lavrov said that Prigozhin’s armed mutiny could not be termed anything more than a “scrape.” Well, yeah… After the rebels seized the headquarters of the Southern Military District, which coordinates the main grouping of Russian federal forces waging war in Ukraine, along with Deputy Defense Minister Yevkurov, seized Rostov-on-Don, a city of one million people, and a military airfield, shot down six combat helicopters and one military aircraft, and were a mere 200 kilometers from Moscow; after all the supreme authorities in Russia shit their pants in unison, instituted a counter-terrorist operation in Moscow and three other regions, and were planning to impose martial law, after this total disgrace, after catching their breath and changing their diapers, they declare the whole thing a “scrape.” Amen to that!

Source: Alexander Zhelenin (Facebook), 1 July 2023

On Tuesday, Russia killed three children and nine adults in Kramatorsk. Everyone has probably heard the remark made by Colonel General Andrey Kartapolov, former Russian military commander and current member of the Russian State Duma: “The strike on Kramatorsk showed pizzazz, I tell you. I tip my hat to whoever planned it. It was just like a song—my old military heart rejoices.”

The general was probably referring to “The Death Aria” from the film The Star and Death of Joaquin Murieta: “You have to have pizzazz in this case, / Your own signature style.”

But my old heart and brain refuse to believe that General Kartapolov and I are members of the same species.

Source: Vladimir Ananich (Facebook), 30 June 2023

After Putin podcast: “‘When I grow up, everything will change’:
What schoolchildren think about Russia and why we should listen to them.” In Russian, without English subtitles

We have talked a lot on this podcast about what lies in store for Russia and how to make this future better. Now we will talk about the future with the people who will be tasked with building it—with teenagers.

We met with these sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds a year and a half ago, in the summer of 2021. Back then, propagandists, op-ed writers, and rank-and-file netizens were vigorously discussing why schoolchildren were attending protest rallies. We decided to ask high school students themselves what they thought about the country in which they had been born and grown up, but in which they had not made any of the crucial choices.

In this episode, you’ll hear the conversation we had with these young people in 2021. They talk about whether they see their future in Russia or in emigration, what annoys them most about Russia, and how they talk about politics with their relatives. And we explain what is special about these teenagers and why we should listen to them.

The next episode features a conversation with the same young people, recorded in early 2023. During the intervening period, they were transformed from schoolchildren into university students, and almost a whole year of the war had passed. We asked them what had changed over the past year and a half about their attitudes towards Russia and whether they still saw a future for themselves in their homeland.

You can also listen to this podcast at: https://podcast.ru/1622370694

Source: After Putin podcast (Moscow Times Russian Service), “‘When I grow up, everything will change’: What schoolchildren think about Russia and why we should listen to them,” 5 April 2023 (YouTube). Annotation translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Marina Vasilieva, the moderator and producer of the podcast, for the heads-up.

When Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin started a ‘march on Moscow’ with his Wagner forces, the world—and Russia—was shocked. Was this a coup? A rebellion?

Now Prigozhin is supposedly in Belarus and the Kremlin is trying to retake control of the narrative—all while Ukraine’s counter-offensive grinds on. But how should we understand the weekend’s drama? And what is really going on now?

Join our experts to find out how they’re making sense of the rebellion-that-wasn’t.

Hear from:

🔹Elizaveta Fokht: BBC Russian Service reporter who has reported extensively on the Wagner Group

🔹Hanna Liubakova: Journalist and analyst from Belarus and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council

🔹Jeremy Morris: Professor of Russian & Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Everyday Postsocialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins

🔹Chair, Thomas Rowley: Lead editor of oDR, openDemocracy’s project on the post-Soviet space

Source: openDemocracy, “Prigozhin, Putin and what is really happening in Russia,” 29 June 2023 (YouTube). Don’t forget to donate money to oDR’s crowdfunding campaign to help them keep doing the great work they’ve been doing.

[…]

Boris Groys: We shouldn’t exaggerate the role of the nation in this case. Any nation is a multitude of people who are busy surviving from day to day, and the struggle to survive usually takes twenty-four hours a day. Look at France in the 1940s: there was Vichy, and there was de Gaulle, and each camp had a small group of political supporters. But the bulk of the populace lived as quietly under de Gaulle as they had lived under the Vichyites. It was the same under the Nazis in Germany. The populace usually accepts the regime that history offers it. Ordinary people want to survive, and loyalty to the authorities is part of their strategy for surviving. It is not, therefore, a matter of ordinary people and their subjectivity or lack of subjecthood. The central problem is how a country’s political class is formed and how it functions. Greece and, later, Rome proposed what was, at the time, a completely new mode of forming cultural and political elites—a competitive mode—unlike the Eastern despotisms, in which there was no competitive model for shaping the political class. Accordingly, there was no integration of successful people into the system of power. Note that when someone succeeds in the West, people immediately get behind them and start writing about them. An athlete, for example, sets a new record in the hundred-meter dash. Immediately, companies line up to use the athlete’s name in their advertising. The athlete is invited to appear on CNN and is profiled by the New York Times. That is, there is an immediate positive reaction to any success. In Russia, on the contrary, success elicits only one reaction: “There is probably someone behind it. They should be exposed and totally shunned.” So, there’s not much point in talking about the common folk in this case. It makes sense, rather, to talk about the principles for forming the political class. The current ruling class in Russia is a monstrous sight. The only thing there that more or less functions there, as I said, is the economy.

Andrei Arkhangelsky: In the 1930s, the defining factor in the Soviet Union was the impetus for “life-building” (zhiznestroenie), for remaking world and self, as you write. Nowadays, however, apathy and indifference prevail in Russian society. And yet, is apathy also a kind of energy, only negative, that blocks positive energy? And the second question: does the current energy of “life-building” in Russia remind you more of the 1970s or of the 1930s? Because denunciations and large-scale crackdowns have again become the norm.

Boris Groys: First of all, the current era has nothing to do with the time of Stalin, which was an era of socialism. It was a time when everything was state-owned, and all individuals were the property of the state. Stalin mobilized the populace in order to complete the country’s industrialization at an accelerated pace. The crackdowns were aimed at achieving specific goals. Now, on the contrary, there is total apathy. First of all, because people have been given private property. Accordingly, they have been given things to care for as individuals. When I read the current Russian press, I am usually struck by the argument, which is voiced there especially often, that private property makes a person a political subject. In reality, the exact opposite is the case. The bourgeoisie is always conservative and always serves the regime. The bourgeoisie has a stake in stability, in ensuring that nothing changes. After all, why is the proletariat a revolutionary force? Because it has nothing to lose except its chains. The Soviet Union was in a similar state as it neared its demise: people had nothing to lose and so they had no interest in maintaining the regime. The regime did not guarantee them anything because they had nothing. And it was these people who made it possible for the regime to fall within two days. The current regime, in my opinion, looks different because many people have something to lose. They have something to take care of and something to protect. And they align themselves emotionally with the conditions that guarantee their preserving of this status quo.

Andrei Arkhangelsky: Your argument sounds rather paradoxical. For many years, the principal reproach to the Putin regime was that Russia had not become bourgeois enough. The country’s bourgeoisie, as Victor Pelevin wrote, had emerged from the tiny cadre of people who served the interests of the oligarchs. Russia formally lived under capitalism, but the authorities had suffocated the emerging spirit of capitalism with all their might. The majority of people had received the bulk of their property—their apartments—for free. They thus did not pay for capitalism. But now you say that it is the bourgeoisie, the burghers, who are the glue of stability in Russia.

Boris Groys: In the West, the bourgeoisie and capitalism also originally arose through nationalizations of feudal and ecclesiastical lands; that is, they were also the outcome of revolutionary processes, not of commercial transactions. So, there is no particular difference in this instance. Private property from which people receive a little income is not necessarily bourgeois. I remember how, in the 1970s, people in the Soviet Union idolized their garden plots, not because they brought these people any benefit, but because they gave them a sense that they were theirs and theirs alone. Here is another example: the most massive protest movement in Putinist Russia was sparked by the unwillingness of people to get vaccinated. Why? Because, under capitalism, my body is my property. It may be sick and ugly, but it is mine. And yet the state wanted to invade people’s bodies with a syringe! It was a vivid manifestation of the Russian people’s commitment to the principle of private property. We can say that nowadays the property in question is quasi-private property, which nevertheless also makes the present system resilient because everyone understands perfectly well that this property is guaranteed not by law but by the current political regime. And that when a new order arises, it could easily come and confiscate what people have. It could demand that people give back the very same apartments you just mentioned. It would show up at their doorsteps and say: you didn’t pay for your apartment, so give it back. Is this possible? Of course, it is possible. So, by no means should such a regime come to power.

[…]

Source: Boris Groys and Andrei Arkhangelsky, “‘Russia Has Put Itself in an Impossible Situation’: A Conversation,” e-flux Notes, 21 June 2023. Translated by Thomas H. Campbell

Come Out for a Walk

Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me

We gather freely and walk where we will
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
We gather freely, though we’re a little scared shitless
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
We’ll write the word “Enough!” on the pavement in white chalk
You can take your little sister, my little brother is coming with me
Don’t take toys with you, there are tanks and soldiers
More interesting than walking, there are no more important classes

We gather freely and walk where we will
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
We gather freely, though we’re a little scared shitless
Come out for a walk, just come out for a walk
Let them point a finger at us. So what if we get punished?
So what if we get wet and shiver and get goosebumps?
Don’t be afraid, there won’t be enough zelyonka or poop for everyone
Of course, stay at home if you’re younger

Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me

Squirt guns, nerf blasters and spitball shooters
Don’t take anything, just come out for a walk
Smoke bombs and slingshots, sticks and jump ropes
Don’t take anything, just come out for a walk
There are cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians
Come out for a walk. Why you sitting on the windowsill?
You can do it on roller skates, but we’ll be shooting videos
There are helmets, elbow pads. In noughts and crosses
We play noughts, don’t put a cross on the noughts
If you want to give them a kick in the ass, you’ll get three years in the pen

They will cut us, they will beat us, be patient and calm
You still need to drive, get out of the house
On the golden porch sat the tsar, the tsarevich, the king’s son
They twist and turn the carousel, and you won’t change anything
One, two, three, four, five, here they come looking for me
I didn’t hide—it wasn’t my fault

Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out, come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out for a walk with me
Come out

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriter: Andrei Pasechny

A still from the Kasta video “Come Out for a Walk.” Courtesy of YouTube

Red Red Blood: Kasta’s Video and the End of Post-Soviet Pop Culture
Andrei Arkhangelsky
Republic
December 1, 2020

Kasta’s new video “Come Out for a Walk”—about a riot policeman whose body and even clothes bleed, like the people he beats—has already garnered two and a half million views and tens of thousands of comments. Although the song was written a long time ago, the plot of the video, according to Kasta member Shym, was inspired by the police beatings of peaceful protesters in Belarus.

The idea of the video is painfully simple: everything hidden will be revealed sooner or later. In our hyper-speed age, “sooner or later” means in a couple of hours, days, or weeks, at most. But pop culture artists, as we know, always tell us more than they mean to say. The video’s release says several symbolic things that are vital for all of post-Soviet culture.

In this video, it is not people, but blood that plays the starring role. Blood is a silent substance, but as an image it acts magically on us, because it requires no explanation. It captures our attention, fascinating and hypnotizing us. It is like fire or water in this sense: we can’t get away from it.

This is surprising to hear, of course, if you remember how many liters of fake blood are shed every day, for example, in “patriotic” movies. The blood there, however, does not make such an impression, because in its own context it is “normal,” meaning that it is shed “for a just cause.” Violence in peacetime is something fundamentally different: propaganda tries to hide this, instilling in us the need to live in peacetime under military law. Violence in peacetime makes personable poses, primps and preens, dresses in different guises, including white, and sometimes it pulls it off. The idea that for the sake of the country’s “stability” we can shed a couple of “non–fatal” liters of blood, precisely for educational purposes, was until recently considered an unspoken norm in our country. Now, in the public view, it is wrong. Kasta’s video captures this sea change in the public mood, cancelling the previous unspoken agreements between state and society.

In a broad sense, this ubiquitous, oozing, flowing blood is an even more global metaphor for all Russian popular entertainment of the past twenty years. In fact, this entertainment, starting with the historical series of the noughties (the TV adaptations of Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and even Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle) was a story about the tons of blood spilled by the Stalinist state. However, on screen, this blood was, figuratively speaking, packed in sealed, leak-proof containers and sold to the post-Soviet audience in the form of little hearts—stuffed with love, friendship, loyalty, and so on.

“There was violence, but there were also good things”: this, approximately, is the golden formula of reconciliation (reconciliation with violence, simply put) that worked and still works in popular entertainment. State violence in movies and TV shows is always balanced by a sacrifice made in the name of the common good (the Chekist who committed injustices goes to war and washes away the sin with his own blood) or in the form of a deus ex machina (“the Party sorted the matter out and released the man, who was roughed up but alive”).

All Russian serials about the Soviet era are made with the acceptance of “history as it is,” and with the simultaneous understanding that “this is your motherland,” as former culture minister and current presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky recently suggested. Evoking Kasta’s metaphor, we can say that the blood flows moderately in Stalinist TV series: the Chekist bends over the innocent prisoner and hits him a couple of times, or even kicks him, but he does not beat the man to death. All these series are made exactly in this way: nothing is done “to death.” And so the viewer who watches them gets the feeling that while it is not easy to live with shedding a little blood, it is basically permissible.

Consequently, post-Soviet society has not had a conversation about violence as the vicious underpinning of the former ruling ideology. In contemporary cinema, police and secret service officers are presented as reflective intellectuals, as in the recent TV series Dyatlov Pass. They are tormented by life’s unsolvable problems, not to mention the fact that they are generally positive characters. We should admit that the conversation about violence has been swept under the rug over the past twenty years through targeted ideological work involving popular entertainment.

But the social trauma itself has not disappeared. The habit of violence has remained, and now it has literally leaked out in the form of the real sadism at the jail on Okrestin Street in Minsk, which can be considered a universal symbol for many post-Soviet countries. This sadism is now running down, soaking “through the gold of uniforms”: this is how it could be formulated in a broader context, not only in Belarus.

On the other hand, there is protest. In western culture, it has long been established as a social norm, nor are artists necessarily on the side of the protesters. Pasolini has a poem about police officers who beat up students at a demonstration. It includes the lines, “When you were at the Valle Giulia yesterday you brawled with the police, I sympathized with the policemen!” Then Pasolini explains why:

I know well,

I know how they were as little kids and young men,

the precious penny, the father who never grew up,

because poverty does not bestow authority.

The mother calloused like a porter, or tender,

because of some disease, like a little bird.

The conflict between police and students (protestors) is always unresolvable in some sense, but it is also normal. This paradox is typical of democracy, where, as we know, everything that is not forbidden is allowed. A free society constantly tests the authorities as to what is acceptable and unacceptable, but the very essence of democracy manifests itself in this “qual,” to borrow a term from rap culture.

Popular culture’s natural instinct again, is to discuss and reflect on protest. In Russian movies, however, the topic is taboo or ridiculed. Protest is imagined as a testosterone-fueled fad, something for people with nothing better to do, or as a form of manipulation, but most often protests are not depicted in Russian cinema at all. When we are told that popular entertainment is not to blame and owes nothing to anyone, we should respond by recalling that the silencing of socially important topics today is a way to encourage evil. When we try to answer the question of where this sadism comes from, we can mull over it for a long time in the same old lofty terms: unarticulated trauma, the post-Soviet syndrome.

But there is a simpler explanation. The same riot police officer who beats people because circumstances allow him to do it “does not know,” broadly speaking, that it is wrong precisely because popular culture has never, in the last twenty years, transmitted this simple idea to him. It has not told him that protesting is normal and shedding blood is wrong. What is worse, popular entertainment in Russia has been looking for various sophisticated ways to justify the shedding of innocent blood in the name of higher causes. And since Belarusian and Russian riot policemen have consumed this pop culture in equal measure, the outcome is roughly the same.

Just as the red substance in the video flows from helmets and riot batons, so reality itself today reminds us of its existence despite all the attempts to hide it. While you are controlling the big screen, the truth will leak out on the small screen: this is the video’s symbolic sense. When the time comes, what has been hidden will pour from the screens just as uncompromisingly. It will again be a shock to the audience, like, say, the articles about Stalinism in the perestroika-era press were to readers back then. The blood in the video is a metaphor for truth (or reality) itself, a truth that cannot be canceled in any way. This hidden thing will sooner or later burst the dam, and it will not be subdued, just as it is impossible to stanch the blood flowing in Kasta’s video.

Translated by the Russian Reader