Today in the hero-city[12] there’s a carnivaclass="underline" the main figures of this new Russian discourse strut their stuff, such as Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov, and the leader of the patriotic bikers, Alexander ‘the Surgeon’ Zaldostanov, along with Cossacks and war veterans. Alexander Prokhanov praises the Russian President to the skies as ‘Putin Taurida’,[13] and ecstatic commentators talk about ‘the beginning of new Russian conquests’. Inspired by the success of the Sochi Olympics and charged with a messianic role, Russia decided to rewrite the global rules of the game and reconsider the whole global architecture built after 1991 – and even what came out of Yalta in 1945. Sensing the West’s impotency and disunity, the crisis of leadership in America and the weakness of the European Union, Moscow decided to stake everything and throw down the gauntlet to the modern world order. At first, Russia simply criticized the West for its moral degradation, and built up its own protective barrier against homosexuals and liberals. Now, Russia has decided to spread the borders of the empire, doing so, what’s more, on the same conservative and moralistic foundations it has used to create order at home.
Will this new Russian crusade be successful? In the final analysis, it is based on a romantic myth, not on sober calculations. At its root is an irrational impulse, just like the German Blut und Boden, ‘blood and soil’, which today has brought millions of Russians out in solidarity with Crimea, but which has very few resources or institutional foundations. In contrast to Stalin’s USSR, today’s Russia does not have the army, nor the technology, nor – and this is crucial – an attractive ideology to present to the outside world, which was the case with socialism. Analogies with Iran in 1979 don’t hold water, either. Putin is not Khomeini, Patriarch Kirill is not Khamenei, and Moscow’s Orthodoxy does not have the mobilizing potential of Shiite Islam. It’s just as impossible to create Holy Rus’ in secularized, urban Russia as it is to create ‘the Russian world’ on bayonets, or to unite Orthodox civilization according to Samuel Huntington’s principle[14] – if, of course, you don’t count as such the gathering of the ‘age-old Russian lands’ of Crimea, Trans-Dniester, Abkhazia and Ossetia.
History repeats itself twice. What is happening today in Crimea is the final act of Russia’s imperial drama, which in a tragi-comic way is eliminating its Soviet legacy. It is somewhat frightening to observe this exorcism, when the Kremlin has breathed the cold of the grave and the spirit of the past has arisen. But this is just a wild and unrealistic chimera, shadows, a superficial simulacrum, be it of rusty Cossacks or Orthodox bikers. Right now in Russia it is nighttime; we simply have to wait for the cock to crow for the third time.
DRUM SOLO
In my Moscow childhood long ago, there was a map of the world hanging in the kitchen of our flat. It hung there partly to educate me, but partly to cover up the paint that was peeling off the walls. In the upper right-hand corner, the most beautiful country in the world stood out in red. As I ate my porridge and listened to the children’s radio programme, Pioneer Dawn,[15] I thought how unspeakably lucky I was to have been born in the happiest and biggest country in the world; what’s more, in its capital city! And I dreamt about the future, when we would grow even bigger and stronger, and we’d probably incorporate Mongolia, Bulgaria, perhaps Romania and Hungary as well (after all, they were brotherly countries); then we could take in Afghanistan, and Alaska… Outside the window dawn had not yet broken, and huge snowflakes were falling, the kind you get only in childhood; clear children’s voices were delivering a Pioneer song on the radio, and the future looked wonderful.
Forty years have passed since then. The country creaked when it made a final imperial charge to the south,[16] began to crack up on the Berlin Wall and finally crumbled in a cloud of dust. We Soviet citizens became used to living with new borders; we built our own states and began to visit each other. We learnt the new global rules of the game, engaged in talks about disarmament, set up new rules and institutions for ourselves, gained access to new countries and joined new markets, and opened up for ourselves a world that was much more complicated, colourful and interdependent. It seemed that we had begun to appreciate that great powers are determined not by their size, not by having hundreds of warheads and millions of square kilometres of territory, but by their GDP per capita, the openness of their society and the attractiveness of the country. It seemed as if we had cast aside our childish geopolitical romanticism and messianic dreams and were becoming a grown-up country.
But today, looking at the masses rejoicing over the annexation of Crimea, seeing the flags on the balconies and the celebratory fireworks over Moscow (as if this were May 1944, as if Sevastopol had been liberated from actual – rather than imaginary – fascists); and watching how the Politika talk show on Channel One finishes with a collective rendition of the Russian national anthem, I once again hear the theme tune to Pioneer Dawn. And when I read the note which the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia,[17] Vladimir Zhirinovsky, sent to the Polish foreign ministry suggesting that Russia and Poland should divide Ukraine between them, and I see the plan he drew up for the suggested occupation of Ukraine, showing Russia extending across the whole of the Black Sea coast from Adzharia in the east to Bessarabia in the west (and the jester, as everyone knows, comes out with things that the king would never dare say out loud), I once again see the red map of my childhood on the wall and remember the joke about the Soviet schoolchild who went into a shop and asked for a globe of the Soviet Union.
All this reminds me of the novel by Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (and the superb film of the book, directed by Volker Schlöndorff). The hero of the story is a small boy, Oskar Matzerath, who is living in Danzig in the 1930s. Oskar is appalled by the adult world around him and decides not to grow up. It is only thanks to the cheap tin drum which his mother has given him that he is able to cope with reality. The little lad beats his drum day and night as he watches the storm clouds of history gather, and the adults around him turn into heartless children, smashing up the Jews’ shops and greeting the nascent fascism, as the Third Reich annexes the Free City of Danzig and the Second World War begins.
This phenomenon might be dubbed the mass infantilization of public consciousness, when childish romantic dreams burst forth along with ideas of historical justice. People want some sort of gift here and now. The adult world, with all its ideas of norms and laws and procedures, seems unbearably boring and dull, and those who constantly bang on about the need to observe the rules are so irritating. Why do we need routine when it’s springtime and we’re enjoying a holiday? When the drum beats and history is being created?
The infantilism of the Russian consciousness has been treated at length by the Soviet Georgian philosopher, Merab Mamardashvili, who understood it to mean the weakness of both individuals and social institutions; avoidance of accepted behaviour; the intrinsic nature of Russian culture and Orthodoxy as a whole. His wise voice resounds today as a warning:
12
A number of cities in the USSR were given the title of ‘hero-city’ because of the battles that took place there during the Second World War (or ‘Great Patriotic War’, as Russians call that part which involved the Soviet Union). Sevastopol is one such city.
13
The favourite of Empress Catherine the Great, Grigory Potemkin, is credited with conquering the southern territories and incorporating them into the Russian Empire, including Crimea and a region therein called Taurida. As a result, he was given the name ‘Potemkin-Taurida’. Prokhanov believes that Putin should have similar recognition for seizing back Crimea from Ukraine.
14
Samuel Huntington was an American political scientist, best known for his 1993 theory, the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. He argued that post-Cold War, future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to world peace.
15
The Young Pioneers organization educated children between the ages of nine and fifteen to be loyal to the dictates of the Communist Party and the Soviet motherland. Most children belonged to the Pioneers.
16
The euphemism, ‘the final charge to the south’, was used by the nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as the title of his book on the invasion of Afghanistan, which began at the end of 1979, and which he foresaw as ending with Soviet soldiers ‘washing their boots in the Indian Ocean’. In fact, it ended with the Soviet Army pulling out of Afghanistan in February 1989 with its tail between its legs and a legacy of disillusion and discontent, which contributed to the collapse of the USSR a little over two years later. See note 17 for a reference to Zhirinovsky.
17
The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia was the first political party to register after the Communist Party’s monopoly on power was removed from the Soviet Constitution in February 1990. Led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a fanatical Russian nationalist, the party was reportedly created by the secret police, the KGB, with the express aim of discrediting in the eyes of the Russian people the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. The party was and remains neither liberal nor democratic.