Evtushenko was not describing a merely current or temporary situation. Seventy-one years after the Bolshevik Revolution, and forty-three years after defeating a by now affluent Germany, Evtushenko’s Russia was still a country of widespread consumer deficits. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the economic situation has only become worse, of course.
How has it been possible for Russians to endure their economic deprivation for so long? The answer, Evtushenko seems to suggest, is a chronically low self-esteem: “Every queue, every shortage shows our society’s disrespect for itself [neuvazhenie obshchestva k samomu sebe].” Custine, too, had noticed the low self-esteem of the Russians when he observed that living in Russia “renders characters melancholy, and self-love distrustful [les amours-propres défiants].”204 A society that thinks so little of itself, says Evtushenko, will tolerate being victimized, or will only grumble mildly at the authorities and avoid real insight into its situation. Above all, it will not act. The authorities alone are not responsible, says Evtushenko, and blaming them is no excuse for inaction. The people (“narod”) themselves are, in part, responsible. They do not respect themselves enough to protest, to support perestroika, to take concrete action against “humiliating queues.”
Anyone who has ever stood in a line for long knows the feeling of frustration that comes with this experience. But for Russians there is more than frustration. There is surrender, surrender which becomes chronically intertwined with self-identity and self-respect.
Evtushenko says that Russians passively accept their bad situation because they feel they deserve a bad situation: “If we put up with it, then we deserve it.” Anyone who accepts humiliation deserves humiliation. Russians ask for it, they get it, and it is appropriate that they get it. Evtushenko approves of the punishment. But he says “we deserve it,” which is to say he invites it for himself as well. He is a Russian, he knows himself, he knows that there is a part of himself that wants to be humiliated. He wants to overcome that part of himself, he wants Russians to overcome that part of themselves. But that masochistic part is nonetheless still there, and as long as it is there self-esteem will be low: “most of all, I want our country to like itself”—which is to say that, at present, it still does not like itself.
Russians love their country, Evtushenko says: “We are proud of its traditions. But not all traditions are good. And priterpelost’ is a bad tradition that must be rejected.”205 National self-esteem is reduced by masochistic priterpelost’. It is only a rather perverse, that is, reactive, concept of national pride that would include a traditional wish to be humiliated.
During the late Soviet and, now, the immediate post-Soviet period there have been abundant discussions of the self-destructive variant of masochism in the Russian press. It is not difficult to see why. Many political, economic, and cultural structures have come tumbling down, as if on purpose, as if their destruction were somehow intended.
An anonymous 1992 editorial in Nezavisimaia gazeta states that society (“obshchestvo”) is in such extreme disarray that “it is capable of only a more or less rapid self-disintegration [samoraspadu].”206 In a poem on the front page of a 1992 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta poet Andrei Voznesenskii declares that “Russia is a suicide” (“Rossiia—samoubiitsa”).207 In a January 1991 issue of the same newspaper Lidiia Grafova speaks of “the bacchanalia of our self-destruction.”208
Perhaps the most eloquent portrayal of self-destructiveness was offered by the former dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In a now famous essay predicting the breakup of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn says:
We have forfeited our earlier abundance, destroyed the peasant class together with its settlements, deprived the raising of crops of its whole purpose and the soil of its ability to yield a harvest, while flooding the land with man-made seas and swamps. The environs of our cities are befouled by the effluents of our primitive industry, we have poisoned our rivers, lakes, and fish, and today we are obliterating our last resources of clean water, air, and soil, speeding the process by the addition of nuclear death, further supplemented by the storage of Western radioactive wastes for money. Depleting our natural wealth for the sake of grandiose future conquests under a crazed leadership, we have cut down our luxuriant forests and plundered our earth of its incomparable riches—the irreplaceable inheritance of our great-grandchildren—in order to sell them off abroad with uncaring hand. We have saddled our women with backbreaking, impossibly burdensome labor, torn them from their children, and have abandoned the children themselves to disease, brutishness, and a semblance of education. Our health care is utterly neglected, there are no medicines, and we have even forgotten the meaning of a proper diet. Millions lack housing, and a helplessness bred of the absence of personal rights permeates the entire country. And throughout all this we cling to only one thing: that we not be deprived of our unlimited drunkenness.209
So: we have done this, we have done that, the destruction is our fault, it is really self-destruction. This sounds very much like masochism. But there is a catch. A society is not a person. The “we” is not an “I”—however much the Russian imagination strives to equate the two (see below, chap. 9). Real masochism is about individual persons, not societies. Russian society may be falling apart in many respects, but the locus of masochism is in its self-destructive citizens—the alcoholics, drug addicts, suicides, overburdened wives, envious peasants, unproductive workers, and so on. And of course there are other reasons for the disintegration of Soviet Russia besides the masochism of individuals. Indeed it could be argued that individual masochism was greater in the more stable periods of Russian history than during Russia’s troubled times, for it was then that individuals knuckled under to authority.
The topic of masochism has even become fashionable, and sometimes even the formerly rare Russian word “mazohkizm” is used in these discussions. In a recent interview in Moskovskie novosti writer VI. Sorokin uses the word to refer to the fondness for the camp theme in the writings of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.210 More often than not the Russian word is used in a metaphorical sense of the self-destructiveness of a group rather than of the individual, as in an article which appeared in Moskovskie novosti in 1991: “We must oppose the masochistic slogan [mazokhistskomu lozungu] about the immediate disintegration of government with a slogan about the freedom of downtrodden nations.”211 Sometimes, although the word “mazokhizm” is not used, that is nonetheless what is meant. For example, a series of articles on “self-destructiveness” (“samorazrushenie”) appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta in 1992. In one article Vasilii Golovanov interviews medical researcher V. D. Topolianskii, who argues that Russia’s totalitarian past fostered self-destructive behavior:
A totalitarian society needs the self-destructive person [samorazrushaiushchiisia], meaning a person who can be controlled. Therefore totalitarianism creates an unusually subtle system for achieving the seduction, corruption, and, ultimately, the self-destruction of the personality. The final product is a person who has so lost track of himself, and has squandered his abilities and attachments to such an extent that he gains pleasure from the fact that he is scum [podonok].212