And third, the story with the flowers on the bridge is a battle for memory, which in recent times has become the scene of the sharpest political confrontations. ‘The Memorial Era’, the arrival of which was declared by the French historian Pierre Nora, turned out in Russia to be an unprecedented attack by the state on the historic memory of the nation, a vociferous battle with ‘falsifiers’ and ‘vilification’, the censoring of intellectual discussion. The country is presented with an edited version of Russian history, which is simply a chronicle of victories and accomplishments in praise of the state, in which there is no place for victims, human suffering or the question of responsibility for the crimes of the regime – from the Stalinist repressions of 1937 to the shooting of the Polish officers at Katyn in the spring of 1940; from the invasion of Prague in 1968 to the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In exactly the same way, the propaganda wipes out the memory of the newest victims of hatred, the political murders of the past thirty years: the journalists Dmitry Kholodov and Vladislav Listyev, Yury Shchekochikhin and Anna Politkovskaya; politicians Sergei Yushenkov and Galina Starovoitova; the editor-in-chief of Russian Forbes magazine Paul Khlebnikov, and the Chechen human rights’ defender Natalia Estemirova; the secret service agent Alexander Litvinenko, and the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. This roll-call of martyrs can be continued, and Boris Nemtsov is simply the latest, and perhaps the best-known, victim on the list. But each of these cases has in common the state’s desire not to allow any public reaction.
They started to trample on Nemtsov’s memory within the first few hours after the tragedy: in the words of President Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, Nemtsov was ‘little more than an average citizen, and he didn’t represent any political threat’; the Duma demonstratively refused to honour the memory of Nemtsov with a minute’s silence (only the deputies Dmitry Gudkov and Valery Zubov stood up); no member of the leadership, or any high-ranking city official, attended the memorial service or the funeral. In the same way, the sweeping away of the flower memorial on the bridge by anonymous cleaning staff and hooligans from the patriotic movement SERB[35] (they are the ones who vandalized Nemtsov’s grave in the Troekurovsky Cemetery, throwing away all the flowers and portraits that had been placed there) bears witness to the fact that the state is afraid of the people’s memory. That fear also led to pressure being put on the largest clubs and open spaces in Moscow so that they would refuse to hold a concert with some of the biggest names in Russian rock music in Boris Nemtsov’s memory on the fortieth day after his death.
The story of the flower memorial continues. And if the ghost of the ‘colour revolutions’ lives on only in the frightened heads of the inhabitants of the Kremlin, or still stalks places far away from Russia, if the authorities can win the battle for the city only by administrative bans and police barriers, then they have already hopelessly lost the battle for memory. The meme ‘Nemtsov bridge’ went viral on the Internet, a memorial plaque was put up on the house where Nemtsov lived, a movement is growing to name a street in Moscow after the murdered politician, and the memorial on the bridge has already been firmly established in the Moscow topography of protest. They can ban it and put a permanent police guard on the bridge – but if they do, people will simply take their flowers elsewhere, or to a third place: there are many places in Moscow linked to Boris Nemtsov. Perhaps they could ban the sale of flowers in the city (which, incidentally, the Russian authorities are more than capable of doing…). The paranoia surrounding the clearing away of the flowers and prevention of the concert from taking place, and the agreement of the leading figures in the state to remain silent, all indicate that Nemtsov was far from being ‘an average citizen’. The state fears him more after his death than they did when he was alive – which only goes to show the size of his personality and the significance of Nemtsov as a figurehead.
WHO’S AFRAID OF SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH?
The inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, simply couldn’t have imagined what sort of bomb he was placing under the Russian mass consciousness when he introduced his Nobel Prize for Literature. Of the five Russian language laureates of the twentieth century – Ivan Bunin in 1933, Boris Pasternak in 1958, Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970 and Joseph Brodsky in 1987 – four of them were persecuted in their motherland. ‘White Guard’ Bunin;[36] ‘Anti-Soviet’ Pasternak; ‘Traitor’ Solzhenitsyn; and ‘Parasite’ Brodsky: their Nobel Prizes were seen in the USSR as a political provocation, leading to them being defamed in the press and judged by the masses (Brodsky was slightly less affected by this than the others, since the Soviet era was already ending). If we add in the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to the dissident Andrei Sakharov in 1975 and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, a year before the collapse of the USSR, then we see a very clinical picture: instead of being proud of its laureates, on each occasion Russia rejected them, united not by joy in the country’s achievements, but by hatred for the West. Or, more precisely, by an eternal paranoia, a conviction that the outside world is doing this simply because it is plotting against us.
In this sense, the Nobel Laureate for 2015, Svetlana Alexievich, is in worthy company with authors who are recognized by the world but indignantly rejected by their own country. Yes, she’s actually a Belarusian writer born in Ukraine, but her books tell of our general Soviet and post-Soviet experience, about the merciless millstones of the empire, so therefore she belongs also in equal measure to Ukrainian and Russian history and culture – and the offended attitude towards her in Russia shows that she is considered to be one of our own, but an apostate who is washing our dirty linen in public.
Why do the indignant Russian ‘patriots’ denounce Svetlana Alexievich? On the whole, there are three objections: first, they say, she is hardly known in Russia; second, they attack her because, they say, what she writes ‘is not literature’ (it’s documentary prose); and, third, their main objection, is that she is a ‘Russophobe’, who plays up our problems and ‘does PR on someone else’s grief’. All three of these accusations indicate one thing: Russia does not like, is unable and is simply afraid to talk about its traumas. And it is, namely, the trauma and memory that cannot be expunged of the tragedy of Russia’s terrifying twentieth century that comprise the overriding theme of Alexievich’s books, and she has chosen the cruellest and most uncomfortable genre: documentary prose, where you can’t hide your pain behind fiction. If Flaubert called himself ‘the pen-man’, then Alexievich calls herself ‘the ear-woman’: she listens to the noise of the street and picks out the voices of people and their personal stories. Her mission is to testify (in the high, biblical sense); she is here in order to speak about the trials and tribulations of the individual. Alexievich herself spoke about this in an interview she gave to the magazine Ogonyok:
35
The extremist ‘South East Radical Bloc’ (SERB), which started up in Eastern Ukraine when the war began in March 2014, and has since been active in parts of Russia.
36
‘White Guard’ refers to the Russian Civil War of 1917–22, when ‘the Reds’ – the Bolsheviks, who had carried out the Revolution in November 1917 – defeated the supporters of the former Tsarist system and anyone else who opposed them. Collectively, they were known as ‘the Whites’ or ‘the White Guards’. Bunin hated Bolshevism and left Russia in 1920, never to return. He lived most of the remainder of his life in France, until his death in 1953.