Tag: Russophilia

Zeitgenossenschaft

almost violence

Judging by virtual and real encounters in recent weeks, Russophonia has been doing its darnedest to descend into a war of all against all.

Thus, at the birthday party of an old family friend, a group of Russian physicians—people who run whole departments of hospitals and even whole hospitals—artlessly segued from running down the birthday boy’s grandson, who was seated only a table’s length away from them, and is one of the sweetest young men I have ever met, to making baldfaced statements such as “Putin is the guarantee of stability,” “There should be more than one currency in the world,” and outright nationalist assaults, prompted partly by the fact I had been introduced to the other guests not by name, but as a “citizen of country X.”

Meanwhile, on the other end of the Russophoniacal political spectrum, which looks a lot like the opposite end, only it is topsy-turvy and striped, a well-known Ukrainian provocateur decided to take a few swipes at me on Facebook by claiming I “defended” Russia.

What he really meant by this, I could not figure out for the life of me, but I gathered that the point of his mostly incoherent remarks was that, since I write about Russia and edit a website about Russia, I was thus inadvertently or even deliberately legitimizing the country.

The problem for professional Russophobes like him is that Russia exists and has existed for a long time. No one can wish it away, just as we cannot wish away climate change, rampant poverty or racism. But we can wish for a world without any of these things or a lot less of these things, and we can make that world a reality.

Russians can also wish for a more democratic, egalitarian Russia and make that a reality, too. If, like me, you are not in a position to engage directly in the country’s democratization by virtue of your nationality, you can at least help people in Russia campaigning for a freer, fairer country by writing about them and, more generally, by providing or seeking a clearer, more detailed picture of what has been going on in Russia, and what the causes of current events in Russia really are, refusing to accept the lazy non-explanations of Russophobes, Russophiles, crypto-Putinists, and bored academics alike.

My Ukrainian detractor was not having any of it, alas. My unwillingness to accept the falsehood that Russians are mostly bad to the bone was more proof I was soft on Russia.

The crux of our disagreement was that I refused to concede that there are inordinately large numbers of bad or stupid people in Russia, as compared with other countries. On the other hand, I do believe, on the basis of long years of in-country observation, conversations with thousands of Russians, and intense and extensive reading of the Russian press and the relevant literature, that Putin’s alleged popularity is an authoritarian construct, not an expression of the popular will.

This is an argument that needs to be made in full, which I have done in bits and bobs over the last few years, often by translating the work of Russian observers who have made similar claims. That is, it is, at least, a rational argument that has a good deal of evidence to support it.

I definitely do not believe in collective guilt, which my Ukrainian interlocutor seemed to think was as natural as the sun rising in the morning.

My detractor believed in lots of noxious things and decided he could dump them down my throat by way of debunking the ten-plus years of hard work I have put in covering Russia from an angle no one else covers it.

Several of my comrades and friends were party to this ridiculous conversation, but instead of defending me or at least pointing out the flaws in the Ukrainian provocateur’s completely blowsy argument, they just let him spit in my face repeatedly, although his only real object was to get my goat and disparage my work.

Here we arrive at an actual—not imaginary—problem in Russia these days: the lack of solidarity among people who should otherwise feel it and exercise it towards each other and, in its absence, the sickening phenomenon of people standing by idly and silently as out-and-out bullies—the police, Putin, NOD, “Cossacks,” Russian physicians, Ukrainian provocateurs, and so forth—beat up other people physically or verbally or both.

In the aftermath of solidarity’s triumph in the Yuri Dmitriev case, a groundswell has been seemingly gathering to support the nine young Penza and Petersburg antifascists abducted and tortured by the FSB, and then accused, absurdly, of being wannabe terrorists supposedly hellbent on causing mayhem during the March presidential election and upcoming World Football Cup.

If the groundswell really does exist, the credit for it should go to an incredibly tiny group of people who decided they had to make a lot of noise about the case at all costs. Most of these people are 100% Russians, whatever that means, and I have rarely been so inspired as I have been by this group of people, most of whom are also fairly young and predominantly female.

In fact, if you read this and its predecessor, Chtodelat News, you will find lots of stories, some of them going ten years back, chockablock with smart, courageous, team-oriented, democratic, egalitarian Russians.

Russia thus has every chance of becoming a democratic, egalitarian country in the foreseeable future. But the same could be said of the United States and a whole host of other countries—the vast majority of countries on earth, I would imagine—that either have strayed too far from the democratic path or never were quite on track in the first place.

Democracy is not an essential feature of some peoples and countries, while despotism is an essential feature of other peoples and countries. If you believe that canard, it will not be long before you are saying the Jews are entirely responsible for the mess we are in, the Palestinians are capable only of terrorism, the Americans are too blame for all the world’s problems (including problems they really did not have a hand in causing) or your own people (fill in the blank) are too corrupt, swinish, and stupid to govern themselves, so a dictator like Putin or Assad has to do the job for them. There is no alternative, in other words.

Democracy is something we do together. We either practice hard and try to make every note bend just right or we don’t practice at all or not often enough, in which case a cynical cacophonist like Putin or Trump gets to call the tune for us. Not because we are inherently racist or authoritarian, but mostly because we are too scared, indifferent, busy, self-absorbed, lazy and sorely tempted not to listen to our better natures and see the good in others.

But we are obviously not essentially good, either. We are the political animals who have the power to make and remake ourselves and our societies in ways that are better and worse. We also have to decide all the time what constitutes better and worse.

If you do not believe this, you do not believe in the power of politics and do not understand the “mystery” of human beings. Ultimately, you think that some humans or all humans are too wayward and disorganized to get their act together, and therefore should be policed.

I did not think up this distinction between politics and policing myself. A far wiser and thoughtful man than I am, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière did, but as the years go by, seemingly becoming nastier and darker, I see how his distinction does get to the heart of the matter.

This is simplifying the matter unforgivably, but you are either on the side of politics or the side of the police.

Politics is messy and usually not particularly satisfying, but it is the only way we have to approximate knowing all the things we have to know to make and enact good decisions that affect us all.

Policing, on the other hand, is easy as pie. Entire groups, classes, peoples, and groups are declared out of bounds and thus subject to police action. If you argue with the police about their inclusion of a particular group of people on its list of “not our kind of folks,” they will say what police always say on such occasions—”Oh, so you’re in cahoots with them?”—and rap you over the head with a truncheon.

In the years I have been editing websites and deliberately misusing social media for the same purposes, I have been rapped over the head with heavy verbal truncheons so many times I am now permanently punch drunk.

Most of the policing, unsurprisingly, has been meted out by Russophones, many of whom really do suffer from chauvinism of a kind that, at best, does not brook the possibility that a non-native Russophone could have anything worthwhile to say about Russian politics and society. The Ukrainian provocateur was from this school of opinion.

Since there are something like twenty people in the world—seriously!—who genuinely support what I do here, I guess I will keep doing it, but the other day’s round of kangaroo boxing left me seriously wary about people whom I had considered comrades. // TRR

Photo by the Russian Reader

Thinking Only of You

The More Patriotic the Patriot, the More Western-Centric He Is
Anton Mukhin
February 19, 2015
Fontanka.ru

Observing ardent Russian patriots, you come to some amazing conclusions. The West occupies a much greater place in their minds than Russia does, although the opposite should seemingly be the case.

For example, crooner and Russian MP Iosif Kobzon, a victim of the malicious West, just called for restrictions on Russophobes traveling outside the homeland. “Slander, spit on, and insult the country and public figures at home. But I wouldn’t let them go abroad,” he said. One cannot but admire the civic courage of a man willing literally to be spat upon by Russophobes by way of preventing them from denigrating Russia from outside its borders. And yet it is surprising, because logically it should be the other way round: the Russophobes should shove off to their beloved Gayropa, to NATO and the Banderites, and not prevent us honest Russophiles from happily living in Russia. But no, the real patriot’s main worry is how “they” treat us.

Now, when war is in full swing, such nuances are barely noticeable. Before the war, this amazing phenomenon was confirmed nearly every day. If an American broadcaster called the monument at the Brest Fortress “ugly,” the Russian Foreign Ministry shot off an angry diplomatic note. When the now almost epic character Jen Psaki showed her ignorance of Russian geography, the patriotic segment of the Russian Internet wrote only about this for something like a week. Foreign heads of state who did not come to Russia for the May 9 Victory Day parade were automatically placed on the list of fascist sympathizers. The only thing that could be worse was mentioning the role of the Allies in the victory over Germany, which in itself diminished our own contribution to the victory. So it was inevitable when the Polish foreign minister trolled us about the Ukrainians liberating Auschwitz. It is always lots of fun to mock touchy people.

Perhaps Russian patriots just have a great respect for their own history and don’t want to let anyone take the piss out of it? But it is not hard to imagine how those folks who suffer when Soviet monuments are moved in the Baltic countries or nationalists hold a rally in Ukraine would react to a neo-fascist march in an African country. They would react the same way they react to top Japanese officials visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, a shrine to Japanese war dead, including WWII war criminals: not at all. They are not interested, although the Japanese war criminals killed Soviet soldiers and were real allies of Hitler, unlike Stepan Bandera. Of course, Japan is far way, and Ukraine is nearby. But the US isn’t exactly round the corner, either, and look how the Russian patriots keep tabs on Psaki, hanging on her every word.

Russian patriots don’t care how Africans and the Japanese relate to them. Only the opinion of the advanced Americans and the Europeans matters to them. And it is only against them that we harbor an age-old resentment. We saved them from Napoleon, but instead of being grateful they attacked our city of Sevastopol. In the First World War we took the German blow on ourselves, but they didn’t help us fight the Bolsheviks. Then (by this time the Bolsheviks were now the good guys) we saved them again during the Second World War, and they paid us back with the Marshall Plan and the “evil empire.” We welcome them wholeheartedly, and they bomb Serbia and send our friend Milošević to the hoosegow.sanctions

Here is the surprising conclusion: the more blatant the patriot, the more Western-centric he is. No matter how much he has daydreamed publicly about the “Chinese way” for the fatherland, his thoughts revolve only round the West. What will they say? Do they respect us? Do they fear us? Do they remember how we shed blood for them? Do they know we were first in space?

We can assume the heart of each genuine Russophile is filled with envy for happy Europeans and an unrealized desire to join the big European family, since Russia historically belongs to the European Christian civilization, and everyone living in Russia feels that there, in the West, is the center of our world, and there is no other center. In psychological terms, the experience of unrealized desire is called frustration. Frustration leads to aggression, aggression leads to alarm, alarm leads to defensive reactions. Which is what we have been seeing.

Photo by The Russian Reader. The text reads, “SANCTIONS! As of March 21, 2014, SP Service, Ltd., has introduced sanctions against the US in connection with the fact that the US does not recognize the legitimacy of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Thus, US President Barak Obama and all members of the US Congress will be refused mobile phone consultations and repairs. March 21, 2014. S.V. Pavlov, Director, SP Service, Ltd.”