Not wishing to give orphans or disabled children a decent life in Russia, the state bans foreigners from adopting them, condemning many of these children to death, shocking the West and openly trolling the opposition and human rights activists. And lastly, unable to change the situation on the food market, to halt inflation and supply products to take the place of those no longer being imported, the state orders the destruction of sanctioned foodstuffs, creating the maximum media effect, which is aimed at the West, business and their own population. This changes absolutely nothing. The state looks like some kind of primitive native, performing a ritual dance wearing war paint, crying out, rolling its eyes and beating itself, under the astonished gaze of European tourists. It is no coincidence that the German magazine, Der Spiegel, placed Russia’s action of destroying food on a par with the behaviour of Somali extremists, who burnt foreign products, or the radicals of Islamic State, who destroyed American humanitarian aid parcels dropped in by parachute.
From an anthropological point of view, burning food does indeed have much in common with the traditions of primitive tribes, notably with the Potlatch of the North American Indians. This was a traditional tribal festival, in the course of which, as a demonstration of the ambitions and power of the leader, property was handed out or destroyed without any plan, which sometimes caused irreparable damage to the whole tribe. In order to demonstrate the greatness of the leader and his disdain for wealth, they gave away, threw into the sea or burnt skins, blankets, furs, boats and wigwams, kitchen implements and food reserves. For some time after the Potlatch, the tribe appeared to be on the brink of ruination, which was why such a festival was remembered for years, legends grew about it and were handed down to the children.
The Kremlin is following exactly the same logic of the Potlatch. The first sacrifice was of sick children. Next was the Russian rouble and the prospects of economic growth. Finally, sanctioned foodstuffs were cast into the sacred hecatomb. All this, apparently, has been done to demonstrate the greatness and sovereignty of Russia, its special path, fortitude and disdain for material values.
The French writer and philosopher, Georges Bataille, has called the Potlatch a political and economic expenditure, which is the opposite of the economy of consumption and accumulation. It is a particular religious action that crosses borders and prohibitions, an ecstatic spectacle of death, like the corrida. We are reminded about our own frailties and about the moment when man finally casts off his material shell. In contemporary Russia, the demonstrative destruction of food products is a move from the conspicuous consumption of the oil era to the demonstrative destruction of the post-Crimea era. Being unable to change the world, Russia is trying to frighten it: it is calling up the spirits of the past, digging out the tomahawks and painting its face with mud. It is burning cheese, crushing the carcases of geese and waving its missile at the world.
All we need to do now is wait for the anthropologists.
A REQUIEM FOR ROQUEFORT
Among the losses of recent years – the free press, fair elections, an independent court – what has hurt especially has been the disappearance of good cheese. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities’; and right now, most of all, we have a shortage of luxuries. Going into the supermarket, I plan my route so that I don’t inadvertently walk past the shelves holding Russian-made cheese, because the bright packaging with the pseudo-European names brings on mild signs of nausea: ‘Maasdamer’, ‘Gruntaler’, ‘Berglander’. And underneath this colourful packaging are concealed tasteless blocks, which are a mix of soap, plastic and the Russian national product – palm oil. If you wanted to point out one place to illustrate the fantastic failure of the policy of import substitution, then look no further than the cheese shelves.
This is reminiscent of the writer Vladimir Sorokin, a visionary genius, who foresaw it in his anti-utopian novel, Day of the Oprichnik. In a totalitarian future in Russia, all foreign supermarkets have been closed down and in their place stand Russian kiosks, in which there are just two types of each item: ‘Russia’ brand cheap papirosi cigarettes and ‘Motherland’ (Rodina) cigarettes; Rzhanaya (rye) vodka and Pshenichnaya (wheat) vodka; white bread and dark bread; apple jam and plum jam – ‘Because our God-bearing people should choose from two things, not from three or thirty-three.’ The only product of which there is but one type is cheese – Russian, and the oprichnik, the officer of the security services, struggles in vain to come to terms with the deep and meaningful thought: ‘Why is it that all the goods are in pairs, like the beasts on Noah’s Ark, but there’s only one kind of cheese, Russian?’[13]
There is a logic to the Russian state’s war on cheese, which is understandable and culturally determined. For the state, cheese is a marker of the dangerous Other, a symbol of the decaying West. It is the rot and the mould of that fluid urban class, which, having travelled around Europe, has come to think too highly of itself and demanded not only cheese but also honest elections; and these people went out onto the streets in December 2011, on Chistoprudny Boulevard and Bolotnaya Square, protesting about the falsified elections for the Duma. There is a direct route from ‘Maasdam’ cheese to ‘Maidan’, as the Ukrainian Revolution was called, and evil must be destroyed at its root – at the customs border of the Russian Federation.
If we analyse this, quality European cheese belongs in the territory of the sensible middle class, because it falls into the category of democratic, affordable refinement. Cheese is not one of those luxuries that can be shown off, like Louboutin shoes and lobsters, Breguet watches and Bugatti cars. Russian sales in this particular consumer market have not fallen off in the time of sanctions. Parking his Porsche Cayenne outside the shabby entrance to his crumbling Soviet-era block of flats and buying foie gras and XO cognac to enjoy in his tiny eight-square-metre kitchen, the Russian man can feel that he is taking part in the cargo-cult of the consumer, that he is in communion with civilization: but he has not become a part of it. But a piece of French brie, a bottle of Italian chianti and a warm baguette in a paper bag from a local bakery drew him close to Western values and were acts of social modernization.
Removing cheese from this formula broke the model of consumption, and, in exactly the same way actually, it showed that there was no demand for it in Putin’s model of the redistribution of raw materials and the whole ephemeral post-Soviet ‘middle class’. Striking against cheese was equivalent to carrying out a strike against the quasi-Western idea of normality and bourgeois values, and a return to the strict Russian archetype: for the Russian it is kolbasa, salami-type sausage, that is symbolically valuable, while cheese is simply urban capriciousness, because you don’t follow a shot of vodka with a piece of cheese. So in this sense cheese underlines the narrow dividing line between Russian tradition and our superficial Westernization.
13
Vladimir Sorokin, ‘Day of the