It happened that after visiting Moscow, Santa Claus flew further to the East, to Kazan and Astrakhan, to Kzyl-Orda and Mongolia, to the source of the Onon River, where some other grown-up children, descendants of another great state of the steppe, had asked him to reassess the results of their own geopolitical catastrophe – the collapse of the Mongol Empire of the great Genghis Khan.
With whoops and laughter, the horsemen disappeared in a whirlwind of snow, much to the amazement of the stunned legislators. In their light cashmere overcoats and Italian shoes, and with their silent iPhones in their hands, the senators stood dumbfounded in the frost. Above their heads the twinkling stars of the boundless Eurasian night shone down with indifference.
THE HOLIDAY OF 5 MARCH
Every year at the beginning of March, Russia experiences a traditional folk amusement, as crazy as it is destructive: the burning of dry grass. Never mind the warnings of the authorities or the appeals of the ecologists, the grass-burning season is open. The coastal region is ablaze, soon the South of Russia will start to burn, then the flames will spread towards the Central Region, destroying tens of thousands of hectares of meadows and forests, whole villages and estates, even taking people’s lives.
Also at the start of March, we give ourselves over to another national amusement, just as pointless and merciless: discussions about the role of Stalin in Russian history. What’s more, the further we get away from the day of his death (5 March 1953) the louder grow the arguments, with explosions of emotion and people foaming at the mouth. Rather like the burning of the grass, arguments about Stalin are yet another variation of our peculiar Russian masochism, when people take pride in humiliation: it would be difficult to find a nation on this earth more ready to dance on the ashes of their own homeland.
This argument is absurd, endless and completely useless. It’s absurd because discussing the role of Stalin is rather like arguing over whether it is worth washing one’s hands before eating or whether you should steal the silver spoons when you’re at someone’s house. There are things one does not talk about in polite society, ethics that are axiomatic; this is not a question of morals, but of hygiene. The fact that we have not experienced de-Stalinization in the way in which Germany has gone through de-Nazification, and that we regularly return to the question of how we should relate to the figure of Stalin, merely bears witness to the archaic, pre-rational and mystical condition of our national consciousness.
The Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadaev, spoke about this in his ‘Philosophical Letters’ of the 1830s, asserting: ‘We stand, as it were, outside of time, the universal education of mankind has not touched us.’[2] According to Chaadaev, Russia has no history, no ‘wonderful memories’ like other nations. Russia lives only in the present, its culture is imported and imitative, which is why there is no point of balance in the country. In Russia, Chaadaev writes, what rules is ‘the pointlessness of life, without experience and vision’. And that is precisely why the arguments about Stalin are endless: they take place in a space where there is no historical memory, indeed, with no historical reflexion, just the absurd endlessness of total amnesia.
Finally, arguments about Stalin are absolutely useless, because they are based on a void. Stalin is a simulacrum, a sign without reference, the smoke of a long-extinguished pipe, empty boots standing on a pedestal. And all the different political forces pour their contents into this void: those who support the state talk about Stalin’s modernization (economists have long ago exposed this myth for what it is, showing that Stalin’s economics produced even worse results than would have been the case under the tsar, and much worse than the Japanese in the same period); and they talk also about the Great Victory of 1945 (another myth, this was achieved by the humongous human sacrifice of the Soviet people in order to cover up Stalin’s strategic blunders). The Eurasians talk about Russia’s ‘special path’, which Stalin embodied in the twentieth century. Liberals speak of the Russians’ ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (when hostages begin to identify their interests with the terrorists who are holding them captive). Each group concentrates on its own interests – but they use Stalin as the final argument. And both supporters and opponents end up using the same words, the very same appeal to 1937, the year that was the peak of Stalin’s repressions. ‘Are you an entrepreneur? In 1937 you would have been shot for that’, say one group. ‘You’re stealing from the budget? They shot people for that in ’37’, retorts another. This discussion is not about Russia’s past, it’s about today’s Russia; but the only arguments and language we have are ‘1937’ and mass executions. The country thinks of itself in past categories: we are unable to tear ourselves away from the discourse of Stalinism – it remains our grammar, the language we use to describe everything. A country that is endlessly going round in circles judging Stalin has no future.
Way back in 1984, on the eve of perestroika, the film Repentance hit our cinema screens from the Georgian film director Tengiz Abuladze. Naive and honest, like all films of that period, the subject revolved around a single metaphor: the recently buried corpse of a dictator, bearing the characteristics of both Joseph Stalin and his powerful security minister Lavrentiy Beria, was dug up from its grave every night and taken to the home of his son. This is exactly what is happening to us now: for sixty-five years we have been digging up the corpse and dancing around it, with ritual curtsies, curses and declarations of love.
We ought to bury this corpse, drive a wooden stake through its heart, raise monuments to his victims over the whole of Russia, and declare 5 March as a national holiday, the Day of National Salvation. How many lives were spared because Stalin died? How many people were able to return from the camps? In mid-March 1953 the antisemitic ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was due to start (it is rumoured that Stalin had already prepared a list of Jews who were to be sent to camps in the Far East). There was bound to be a new wave of repressions, a new twist in the Cold War, and the paranoia of the dictator who was rapidly losing his judgement could have resulted in nuclear catastrophe. What a joy it is for mankind that Stalin didn’t live to see the thermo-nuclear bomb! And if a national idea is possible for the Russia of the future, then – albeit with a delay of seventy years – this should be de-Stalinization, just as de-Nazification became the idea of post-Hitler Germany.
THE OBLOMOV AND THE STOLTZ OF SOVIET POWER[3]
Nothing stirs up passion in Russia more than the battle for our own past. Taking down and replacing memorials, renaming streets and towns, retouching photographs and wiping out names from history books: these are all part of the favourite national game. Here’s a current example. In Moscow, on the famous House No. 26 on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, they have reinstated the memorial plaque to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. The plaque was up on the wall for ten years after the leader’s death, but was taken down during the anti-Soviet 1990s, and for a long time all that remained was a dark patch and four holes, before the building was refurbished. Now it has been decided to smooth over this historical injustice.
At about the same time as this became known, we learnt that a group of left-wing activists had put forward a proposal to strip Mikhail Gorbachev of the Order of Andrei Pervozvanny, which he had been awarded by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in honour of his eightieth birthday. Social media exploded with the usual abuse directed at Gorbachev, who ‘sold out the country to the Americans’. Sociology confirms that the people have fond memories of Brezhnev, but they don’t like Gorbachev. According to a poll conducted by the Levada Centre, Russians named Leonid Brezhnev as the best leader of Russia in the twentieth century (56 per cent replied positively, 28 per cent negatively). At the other end of the scale, Gorbachev came out top: 20 per cent considered him positively, 66 per cent negatively. It should be remembered, too, that when Gorbachev stood in the Russian presidential elections in 1996 he received only a humiliating 0.5 per cent of votes.
3
Ilya Oblomov and Andrei Stoltz are the two main characters in the nineteenth-century Russian novel