Russia

“In America, there are many fewer good journalists than in Russia”, said Exile editor mark Ames before barely escaping with his life.

So now that the Exile has relocated to Panama and gone global, who will fill its gaping ulcerous void?

The FPA’s Russia Blog is launching an ongoing project to expose promising new alt-journalist talent to virgin Western eyes.

What sort of things are we (ie. just me, blogging alone in my windowless office, after work) looking for? Ideally, a toxic mix of non-preachy social consciousness, wry observation, sophomoric antics, modern aesthetics, political engagement, eclecticism and investigative reporting.

A tall order? Well, the Exile had set the bar high, but there are plenty of reasons for optimism. Russia has a burgeoning young literary scene, but one we in the West seldom hear about amidst all the din surrounding the state’s repression of the ‘respectable’ media, the sort of New York Times-style papers that would never have had the guts to cover such original protests as this , with or without government censorship.

So where do these fellows hang out? One place is Bolshoi Gorod (Big City) magazine. It’s a uber-cool mix of nightlife, style, literature and politics, with pieces like this but also some rather thought provoking social reporting. For example, the most recent issue carried a provocative series of interviews with the ‘invisible faces’ of nightclubs–the wardrobe attendants, cleaners and security guards.

BG’s sparse and ironical prose turned a potentially leaden and sanctimonious homily into an edgy and open-ended commentary on modern Moscow.

You get the idea.

This series will be frequently updated, so please send any tips this way!

What writers, magazines or papers would you nominate?

The recent spat with America and Britain over Zimbabwe and Russia’s continued intransigence over the US AMB shield in the Czech republic have dashed the hopes of many in the West that Medvedev would make a qualitative departure from Putin.

The Guardian’s Luke Harding put it just so:

Medvedev’s hardline comments in one of his first major speeches on foreign policy since his inauguration in May are likely to disappoint western observers. They had hoped that his presidency might usher in a more conciliatory era in relations with the west.

However, whether one defines Russia’s position on these issues as anti-Western grandstanding or pragmatic self-interest, one thing is clear: the Russian press has been covering many sides of the story.

In the immediate wake of the Zimbabwe brouhaha, much of the reaction in the Russian mainstream news was refreshingly critical of the government’s policies.

For example, Vremya Novostei, a liberal but pro-government paper, contextualised the veto with a recap of recent moves by Russia to protect Burma and Sudan against Western reprisals. Then, it quoted Sergei Oznobischev, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies as saying that appeasing pariah states is a sure recipe for conflict with the West, and that the key to Russian great power status lies not in Burma, Zimbabwe or even China, but in partnership with Europe and the US.

Naturally, the government has not loosened its grip on the media, and that fact alone makes the appearance of such articles all the more interesting.

In a recent interview, former White House rebel Vladimir Ryzhkov drew a tentative parallel between Medvedev and Gorbachev. Gorbachev started out as a liberal, not a democrat. He wanted to democratise institutions in order to promote his vision of liberal humanism, not to have a free for all. Similarly, he started off with very cautious economic reforms, that began with a tinkering around the edges and concentrated on efficiency and market accounting mechanisms.

Medvedev has certainly started to tinker. Earlier this month, he announced that Gazprom, Putin’s Koh-i-Noor, would have to start sharing its pipelines with other companies. This was a pretty important announcement, as one of the things that made Gazprom such a threat to Europe was its ownership of both gas and pipelines: EU monopoly regulations forbade such things for its own companies, who ended up outflanked. Today came the news that Gazprom would lay off 500 executives, or 10% of the staff, at its head office.

It is too early to say whether Medvedev has any plans for a full fledged Perestroika. As the closure of the Exile has revealed, he’s not one for free for alls. Yet the critical press line and gentle economic restructuring may point to a liberal impulse that, like with Gorbachev, not only may come to fruition with time, but also be eventually overtaken by events.

The exile is back…sort of. Newly reincarnated as the exileD, it is run out of “Putin-proof” Panama.

Fuelled by paypal donations from readers, the first edition came out on July 14, Bastille Day.  

Exile fans can be reassured, at least for now: despite bitter avowals to quit Russia for good, the issue contained the familiar by-lines of Edward Limonov, Mark Ames and War Nerd, a typically hard hitting article on political prisoners, and plenty of photos of scantily clad Russian girls, covered in mud.

Gone are the heady heroin nights of the nineties, and with them, many of the expats who had come East to trade in the drudgery of their suburban lives for a more visceral, tragic version of humanity.

Now that the country brims with the Toyota Priuses (Prii? Priux?), hipsters, libel laws, Time Out Magazine, nuclear families, decent sushi and the other assorted petit bourgeois nightmares of back home, what’s the point of putting up with a scary government and summary bureaucracy?

Indeed, to witness non-oligarchs holidaying abroad, taking up sales and marketing jobs and driving new model Ladas or even Peugeots can be very bittersweet. No matter how clichéd, the question begs asking: has the well-adjusted middle class life that has enriched the hitherto threadbare existence of so many (though still not even remotely the majority of) Russians cost us that self-destructive, protean, brooding, extremist yet spiritual truth seeking poetry - borne of suffering, longing, deception and isolation?

Has Russia lost, in a word…its SOUL??!

More chillingly, has said Soul been sold to a rentier state whose petrodollars drown questions of illegitimacy and oppression in the warm, moist umbilical fluid of light sweet crude?

Not quite! And here’s why:

1. The 90s Paradox:

The libertinism of moral clarity and/or cheap drugs, anarchy and play that the expat rebels revelled in proved catastrophic for their Russia’s own Rimbauds.

In fact, the Soviet enfants terribles of the 1980s: young guys trapped in obscure think tanks penning underground verse or music, hippies and political dissidents who shocked and shamed their bankrupt system in the same way that the Exile shamed and shocked its own, could not survive in the new climate.

Their rock music – filigreed, cryptic and high maintenance - didn’t stand a chance against Aerosmith or the Spice Girls. In a country drowning its collective sorrow in endless re-runs of Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful, no-one had the time or money for their now-permitted protest literature. Their well paying research jobs, at which they could comfortably sit and write, disappeared. Many sold out; for others, despair and the dulling embrace of heroin replaced the creative kick of vodka and kombucha tea.

By the end of the 1990s, the Soviet intellectual, dissident and underground scene effectively disappeared. In 1998, Claude Frioux had written its obituary in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Russia’s intellectuals are now entirely absorbed with questions of material survival, paralysed by a fear of displeasing somebody, and confused about how to deal with the mafia face of power….They are no longer the small islands of lucid dignity that they once were. They are now an amorphous mass, and outside observers comment dismissively on their cynical lack of concern and their total absorption in the business of making ends meet.

Even in Russia, people sitting in unheated flats and using furniture for firewood eventually switched from questions of philosophy to questions of finding scraps of food; undoubtedly in an homage to Bakhtin.

2. Biting the Hand that Feeds You:

A cursory look at instances of mass intellectual awakening/rebellion reveals that such events generally follow periods of increased material wealth and stability. 1968 is the obvious example. In Russia, it was no different. The impoverished and hellish 1930s and 40s gave way to the staid, authoritarian and materialistic 1950s. Yet before the decade was out, Khruschev’s famous Thaw began. Similarly, the wealthy, even ‘decadent’ years of Brezhnev’s stagnation (few in the West realise that Soviet living standards peaked in the mid 1970s, and that it was the time of every baby boomer’s life) preceded the grass roots rebellions of the late 1970s and early 80s that eventually paved the way for Gorbachev’s glasnost.

History shows that as soon as (but not a moment before) a country raises a generation of reasonably well fed, educated young people in an ordered, stable society, they will immediately proceed to do their best to undermine and destroy that society, tear up its sick, fraudulent and oppressive underbelly, and seek freedom. Before long, they will become bankrupt and bitter or ‘grown up’ and responsible, and the cycle will continue.

Thus, is it any surprise that after a decade of abject poverty and national trauma beginning in the late 1980s, Russia now witnesses an era of a materially comfortable, socially conservative authoritarianism?

Indeed, it would be useful to keep in mind an article by Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov that appeared in today’s Grani.ru newspaper.

In it, he writes that Putin’s authoritarian system will be overturned not by the impoverished masses, but by a growing wave of educated disaffected youth feeling stifled and demanding philosophical rather than material freedom. Thus, unlike with the masses, the regime’s capacity for delivering the goods economically would no longer be enough to save it.

So where is this new ‘class for itself’, these islands of lucid dignity? We don’t hear much about them in the West, but they are definitely out there. In the field, one group is Limonov’s own National Bolshevik Party foot soldiers, frequently arrested on trumped up sedition charges, and even occasionally killed. On the intellectual front, someone to watch is Kirill Medvedev, a young dissident writer, poet, activist and blogger whose work has recently been profiled by the dashing Russian-American factotum and animal lover Keith Gessen in his own thick journal n+1. What kinds of things can we expect from this new generation? Well, a recent essay posted on Medvedev’s site quotes the following poem:

Literature Will Be Tested
—
Entire literatures consisting of subtle turns of phrase
will be tested to prove
that where there was oppression,
there were also rebellions.
By the prayers of earthly creatures to heavenly beings
it will be shown that the early creatures trampled one another.
Their rarefied verbal music will testify
that many did not have enough to eat.

Don’t write off Medvedev’s Russia quite yet.

Edward Lucas, the Economist’s Eastern Europe correspondent, raises a provocative point in his recent article for Standpoint Magazine.

It is certainly true that the worst aspects of the Russian system are often a concentrated form of our own worst shortcomings. Indeed, the West has largely lost the moral authority that it enjoyed during the last Cold War. Once it was the Russian elite who feared us, and ordinary Russians who admired us. Now the elite despises us for our corruption and weakness, and ordinary Russians see little difference between one lot of rulers and another.

So, after making such a nuanced, astute observation, what does Lucas go on to conclude? That Russia’s experience reveals some inherent, underlying flaw within modern society? That the West must seriously re-examine its own moral-philosophical underpinnings?

Nah!

How about: “just because we have many flaws does not mean that we are always wrong, or that somewhere else can’t be worse”.

That’s right! We might be greedy, corrupt and decadent, but there’s no case for moral equivalence with Russia, because they’re worse!!

Lucas brings up two cases in which the West has been charged with hypocrisy. Critics assert a double standard in the West’s push to for Kosovan statehood and its refusal to recognize the pro-Russian break-away regions of Transdniester and Abkhazia. Lucas recognises that this is one factor leading to the erosion of the West’s moral authority. So does he suggest a more consistent approach? A new politics of neutrality that could eventually transcend the east-west divide?

Erm, not quite:

“(the EU) is incomparably better than the thuggishness and mischief-making that are the hallmark of Kremlin policy in its former empire. We do not want Transdniester to become independent, because it will be like Russia. We do want Kosovo to be independent, because it will eventually be like us. Again, that is a blunt message, but one better spoken proudly than left unsaid.

Bottom line: We may be greedy, imperialistic, corrupt and undemocratic, but by jingo, our greed, imperialism, corruption and authoritarianism are still morally superior to Russia’s! Just because!!

Of course, there is a more reflective and reasonable, if alarming, lesson to be drawn from all this.

In his groundbreaking work Modernity and the Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman concluded that, far from being an irrational aberration, an “interruption in the normal flow of history”, or a “momentary madness among sanity”, the holocaust may in fact have been an inevitable outcome of an advanced, technological society in which politics had become decoupled from social controls.

“The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture”, he writes.

Likewise, the traits that Lucas and others criticise in modern Russia are not some kind of gross aberrations from Western norms: instead, they lay bare the problems and contradictions of Western society, civilization and culture.

Over the last 17 years, Russian society has undergone a condensed and accelerated version of the West’s slower, less extreme but equally steady drift towards greater intrusion of the market into politics and society, concentration of power and a weakening of civil society and democratic participation in politics.

Thus, far from providing smug confirmations of Western superiority, the excesses that Lucas sees and justly condemns in today’s Russia might just be warnings from our own future.

I’m not the nationalistic sort. I count in my head in English, I think Ukrainians are alright, at heart. Even the Georgians, when they behave. I quietly enjoy the good news from back home and decry the bad, with the equal dose of ironic detachment and self-referential mockery demanded of my generation.

Yet I’d just lost my voice after two hours spent in a delirious jingoistic orgy as Russia devastated the Dutch. Watching Russia’s mesmerising play unlocked something primal in me, something dark, smouldering, bloodlustily beautiful.

60 minutes in: caught myself trying to superglue a small Russia flag to my neighbour’s front door.

10 minutes into overtime: searching Aeroflot’s website, rearing to go liberate my brother Slavs in Kosovo and Estonia.

But enough about me: what does this success say about Russia? Two important parallels stand out:

1: The last time Russia triumphed under the closest thing to a Dutch coach was when Peter the Great applied what he learned in Holland to drag his country into modernity. He studied ship building in Amsterdam, kept a Dutch mistress and in addition to technological advances tried to introduce to Russia a protestant spirit of hard work and self reliance. Yet in many ways, Peter’s reign was a culturally repressive one. Peter’s contempt for indigenous Russian traditions and institutions meant that it was only during Pushkin that the Russian language and culture had begun to shed their aura of inferiority.

2: The last time Russia faced the Dutch in a European championship was 1988, at the heyday of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, which remade the country’s social and intellectual fabric. Incidentally, the inspirations for Gorbachev’s reforms were also Western European. Perestroika and ‘new thinking’ were heavily influenced by Italian Eurocommunism and Gramscism. Unlike Peter’s reforms, however, Perestroika ended up being a dismal failure in economic, military and technological terms. Yet it produced an immense cultural and creative awakening.

So was the match a metaphor for a national renaissance, and if so, which kind?

From a purely sporting standpoint, the renaissance of Russia’s team transcends these historical parallels. Hiddink did not remake the squad in the Western European image; in fact, he achieved what had eluded both Gorbachev and Peter the Great – using Western know how to activate and enhance inherent Russian strengths. In his brilliant piece in the Guardian, football historian Jonathan Wilson writes that “Russia’s thrilling commitment to fluidity represents a return to the fundamentals of their own footballing heritage”: after years in the wilderness, Arshavin and co have revived the authentic ‘total football’of the young Soviet side of the 1940s.

Russia is clearly experiencing a re-birth. Its massive sporting successes (whether in women’s tennis, the Olympics or hockey) after over a decade smarting from the horrors of transition only complement its economic and geopolitical re-assertion. Russia is in the news.

Putin’s rule, like Peter’s, aggressively sought Western engagement and know-how, and embraced with zeal its business (if not political) institutions. These instruments, however, were not used to ‘undo’ or ‘over-ride’ Russian culture as in Peter’s day. In fact, the Putin era was marked by a strained synthesis of economic and commercial Westernisation coupled with a peculiar, artificially inseminated nativism.

The state sanctioned fetishisation of the Soviet Union in popular culture, the Putin-inspired brand of laddism and machismo, the return of the traditional family, the constriction of press freedom, the growing ethnic prejudice and nationalism have been the repressive corollaries of this technical modernisation. Yet in one sense, the net effect is the same as in Peter’s day: a growing austerity and social intolerance. The current renaissance is neither deniable nor progressive.

In Euro 1988, the USSR lost to Holland. Like its squad, the Soviet Union itself had run out of steam. Yet the defeat coincided with the flowering of Moscow News, Ogonyok magazine and other independent media, and the general culmination of glasnost, or openness.

The booming, assertive and proud country that won against the Dutch yesterday could not be more different from its beleaguered, teetering predecessor of 20 years ago. Not least because that win came on the heels of the closure of yet another newspaper.

“Russia Silences Tabloid”

By Carl Schreck

The National (UAE)

“The fall of The eXile, which launched the career of Matt Taibbi, a political correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, marks the end of perhaps the world’s most unique publishing project.”

“Irreverent mix of vicious humour, sharp political analysis and shameless hedonism”

“11 years of scorched-earth Gonzo journalism and taking down every sacred cow in sight”

“Sophomoric pranks on Russian government officials and western businessmen, savage criticism of western journalists covering Russia, and misogynistic club reviews informing male readers which clubs were optimal for finding overnight female companionship”

“The eXile once paid the handlers of Mikhail Gorbachev to convince the former Soviet leader to act as “Perestroika Co-ordinator” for the then-struggling New York Jets and give pep talks to the American football team”.

Moscow newspaper which mocked the powerful closes

Reuters

The Exile’s style of reporting blurred the line between comic and mainstream by tackling serious issues — crime, corruption, poverty and politics — with a harsh, jabbing humor. It also targeted Moscow’s foreign community and Russians with practical jokes and stunts.

“Raucous Russian Paper Closes Amid Kremlin Scrutiny”

By Alan Cullison

Wall Street Journal

Ribald pranksters

The paper’s club reviews advised which bars were frequented by violent thugs and which were popular with adventurous Russian women.

Michael McFaul, professor of political science and director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a frequent target of attacks from the Exile, said he was “sorry to see the paper go” though he didn’t always agree with its politics. The Exile frequently assailed Mr. McFaul for his 1970s-style haircut.

The Exile assailed Western academics and journalists, whom it accused in the 1990s of understating the misery caused by the free-market reforms of President Boris Yeltsin.

Russian Bureaucrats Smother the World’s Best Alt-Weekly

Mother Jones

“Stormed into the Moscow bureau of The New York Times and threw a pie filled with equine sperm into the face of the bureau chief after accusing him of soft coverage of Russia’s political elite.”

Sorry for the silence! Been away celebrating Russia’s Independence Day…from itself.

(It is true: 12 June marked the secession of the Russian republic from the USSR. Not only is the occasion modishly Freudian, but it’s also simply a matter of justice: the US has an independence day, and so is Russia to be left without one?)

I’ll be writing a few proper posts filled with reflection (surely ‘invective’?-ed.) over the weekend but here are some things to keep you busy till then!

INDIE DAY:

Not content to celebrate Russia Day by relaxing with a crate or two of Soviet Champagne and a Brat 2 DVD, a rather energetic lot of Left wing democracy activists attended street rallies condemning the government’s treatment of dissidents.

EXILE AGONY:

The beleaguered organ is holding a paypal donations drive to replace its cowardly sponsors. The Moscow Times has the (hopefully exaggerated & premature) obituary!
The epic danse macabre, previously confined to this Blog and a select few other organs, is finally getting picked up in the mainstream English language press, with a vengeance.

Here is a rather good Radio Liberty piece that sums up and contextualises the event.

Mark Ames continues to chronicle the whole dismal affair on Radar Magazine. Read his latest “Russia Independence Day” post here, and weep sardonic tears.

TNK-BR VS RUSSIA BRAWL:

Follow the dirty energy confrontation over oil, foreign drilling and Russian sovereignty! Articles here and here.

Today, Mark Ames, the editor of the embattled Russian dissident paper The eXile (whose plight this Blog has been morbidly following) writes for the first time about the harrowing ordeal in an article for Radar Magazine. It is required reading.

In addition to the Limonov factor, he sheds some more light on the possible causes for Federal complaints against the often terrifyingly obscene newspaper.

Ironically, of all the reasons why a paper as brazenly scandalous as the Exile, whose content could have easily got it into trouble in even the most liberal of democracies (its masthead once read: ‘Making use of Russia’s lax libel laws’); reasons like his last article, which stated “that the Exile ‘farts in Russia’s face’ and that Medvedev is so liberal our paper can “urinate into the president’s mouth without any fear of consequences,” and he’s so small he should be “zipped up in a squirrel costume and put in a Habitrail”; of all those reasons,

Ames believes that the crucial factor in the probe was not the paper’s affronts to Medvedev (or occasionally racist, pornographic content), but its lack of seriousness:

In my opinion, this is the real reason they’re moving to shut us down. What offends the Russian elite more than anything about the Exile is its aggressive refusal to play by the “serious” rules. The authorities can deal with serious print-media criticism of the Kremlin—so long as that media outlet makes everyone look serious and respectable, with serious dull language quoting serious dull think-tank analysts. These days, Russia is all about getting serious and respectable. And it’s also in the grips of a national persecution mania, in which grievances and complexes about the West have exploded into a kind of mass grievance obsession, a frenzied Easter egg hunt for evidence of Western disrespect or unfairness in order to feed this grievance jones. The fact that our paper has also exerted a lot of bile in savaging the West’s Russophobe industry is irrelevant to them, even annoying; all they care about is sifting for evidence of humiliating Russia…

…The Russians I consulted with before and after the audit all came to the same conclusion: The authorities are planning to either tame us or shut us down. There’s no more room for the Exile in the new serious/respectable Russia, the Russia of fanatical consumerism and materialism and vile conformism. This is a country where two separate magazines launched proudly billing themselves as the “New Yorker without political reporting.”

So there you have it. I had written earlier about the creeping spectre of seriousness stalking Russia. It seems that it is now striking painfully close to home.

So now we know the real reason behind the Federal hounding of the Exile, courtesy of good reporting by the Moscow Times: its associations with dissident leader Eduard Limonov.

In my earlier post, I noted that Limonov was a columnist for the paper and that his radical opposition movement had had scores of its members arrested and detained as political prisoners. The latest probe is the latest chapter in the story.

“Federal officials visited the offices of The eXile on Thursday and asked about the newspaper’s relationship with Eduard Limonov, a Kremlin critic who writes a column for the notorious English-language tabloid.”

Read the whole article by Alexander Osipovich here.

And it was good to hear Editor Mark Ames in characteristic fighting spirit:

“Despite his pessimism about The eXile’s future, Ames said he will not tone it down or stop publishing Limonov.

“Hell no,” Ames said when asked whether the column would be canceled. “Limonov was one of the inspirations for this paper.”