“The party of power gained the result it needed by discrediting political institutions and the very party itself…the elections turned into a mockery of the people and showed a deep disrespect for their voices”.

This is how Mikhail Gorbachev, once a qualified supporter of Putin, summed up the results of the recent regional elections in Russia, in which the incumbent party just happened to have “won about 80 percent of all contested positions in some 7,000 districts around the country”.

Yet despite the state controlled media, it’s not like the population is ignorant of the blatant fraud: a recent survey found that only 3% of Russians believe the elections to have been free and fair.

And they certainly harbour no illusions, either: a respected Levada Centre poll found just 4% who believe that Russia is a democracy.

Yet while some opposition leaders, such as the Communists and the centre-right Yabloko party (which amazingly received 0 votes in a district in which their own candidate Mitrokhin had definitely cast one) were furious, most ordinary Russians might have actually cheered.

That’s right: although 95% of Russians polled by Levada believe that they have no control over their political destinies, a whopping ‘26% believed that democratic governing was not suitable for Russia’.

In fact, when asked whether they a) either completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is needed or b) completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is wrong for Russia, the proportion narrows to just 50:31.

Moreover, “the majority (60%) also said it would be better for Russia if the president controlled both the courts and the parliament…and nearly 25% said the Soviet Union had a better political system that the current Russian model (36%) or that in Western countries (15%)”.

The following Levada Centre graph illustrates the Russian approval of three political systems: the Soviet one, the current one, or Western style democracy (the fourth line, in green, is marked ‘other’).

Contrary to almost all Western political science thinking, the most popular system from 1996 to 2007 was the Soviet one (blue), consistently winning the approval of 40-45% of the very people who were supposed to have rejected it in 1991, and twice as popular as the Western style democracy (red) they were meant to have favoured.

But the most interesting journey is marked by the yellow line indicating “the current system”. Under Yeltsin’s supposed golden age of democracy and freedom, this yellow line never rose beyond 10%. But as soon as Putin came in, in 1999, it has shown a steady rise. In 2007, it finally beat the front runner, the Soviet system, and continues to grow.

Most importantly, for the first time since the fall of the USSR, an overwhelming plurality of Russian citizens prefer their current system to either an idealised Soviet past or an increasingly demonised ‘Western alternative’.

In fact, this picture of contentment seems to demolish the liberal idea of Russians cowering under an increasingly authoritarian regime, just waiting to be rescued back to democracy.

Other polls show that Russians aren’t particularly impressed with the government’s handling of the financial crisis; nor do they support Putin’s increasingly overblown vendetta against Khodorkovsky (59% think the trial is designed to line the pockets of those benefitting from Yukos’s collapse, and 75% oppose keeping him in prison for life).

So, is there just some sort of weird masochism at play in the Russian soul?

But if so, then why should Putin falsify elections that he could have expected to win anyway?

That is the central question. Why on earth did the Kremlin bother to delete Mitrokhin’s vote for a party, Yabloko, whose popularity had never risen above the low single digits even in free elections? What’s the point?

Similarly, much has been said about the ‘rehabilitation’ of Stalin. And yet, authorities have been cracking down on organisations and academics that have been researching the gulag and the deportation of Germans - measures that I can bet actually increase Stalin’s popularity in the eyes of his current fans, so why hush them up (especially in the internet age)?.

What is the Kremlin’s game? Seriously, I’m Russian, but I have no idea what is going on.

“Our future is certain; it’s the past that keeps changing’ was how Soviet dissidents lamented the re-writing of history.

If only they knew what was coming! Today’s Russia may have lost the certainty of a Communist future, but certainly not the state’s stranglehold over the past.

Russia is not alone, of course. The teaching of history is highly political in every country, including the US, where textbook publishers are caught between the  ‘conflicting desires to promote inquiry and indoctrinate blind patriotism’, according to James Loewen in his book ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’.

‘The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation. Such titles differ from all other textbooks students read in high school or college’, Loewen writes. ‘Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule’.

Such propaganda can be found in countries as diverse as Turkey, Israel and Japan, the last recently accused of officially white-washing the WWII era crimes committed in Okinawa.

Yet Russia stands out for its government’s increasingly zealous and paranoid backtracking on an issue so central to the very raison d’etre of post-Communism: the reclaiming of history by the people.

Nowhere has this symbolism been stronger than in the recent spate of attacks on Memorial, a human rights NGO that was started during glasnost to unearth and catalogue the victims of Stalin’s Gulag.

Break-ins into its archives and seizures of hard-drives have culminated in the shocking murder of Memorial member Natalia Estemirova in Chechnya earlier this month. While Estemirova’s death was likely a result of her role in investigating much more recent history, the fact that groups like Memorial, which formed the avant garde of the Soviet democracy movement, are being targeted threatens one of the few tangible achievements of the post-Soviet system.

Recently, an Orwellian ‘Historical Truth Commission’ has been established, and the parliament is considering ‘legislation that would make it a criminal offence to “infringe on historical memory in relation to events which took place in the Second World War”‘.

Meanwhile, in addition to banning independent history websites, Putin-Medvedev have launched a chilling probe into history textbooks.

This is not the first time that the leadership has taken issue with textbooks; what is most shocking is that the book currently under fire was itself a government-mandated re-write.

When it appeared in 2007, that edition of ‘Russian History from 1945-2007′ provoked a massive outcry for, among other things, designating Stalin ‘an effective manager’.

Today, in a plot twist worthy of the Great Manager himself, the toady authors responsible are being summoned by the very people who endorsed them two years ago to explain the book’s abject lack of patriotism.

Russia’s current War on History is worrying for many reasons, not least because of one unnerving trend: unlike in most other countries, where anti-American, anti-Western and pro-authoritarian feeling tends to be concentrated among the poor and uneducated, in Russia the more affluent and educated are also the most anti-American.

A recent article notes this ‘paradox of the educated Russian — education and professionalism do not translate into a wish for a greater democracy in Russia. Most Russian yuppies wholly embrace the Kremlin’s official interpretation of national ideologies’.

Certainly, many Russians have a legitimate reason to feel aggrieved by the dominant ‘Western’ narratives about the events of the 20th century, written, as ever, by the ‘victors’.

Who can deny that the likes of John Lewis Gaddis are responsible for gross ideologically driven inaccuracies relating to Russia’s role in WWII and the beginnings of the Cold War?

Yet there is enough actual history out there to compete with these silly mainstream narratives, and the last thing that sophisticated, independent scholars like William Appleman Williams, Walter La Feber and Stephen Cohen need is a helping hand from the Kremlin.

The ‘Russian account’ of history can speak for itself, thank you very much.

Who is Artyom Loskutov, and why should we kiss his babushka?

While the industrial victory in Pikalevo (however Pyrrhic it may yet prove) hogs the headlines, the fate of this 22 year old performance artist from Novosibirsk has shown the stark limits to people-power in today’s Russia.

Largely ignored in the mainstream media, Loskutov’s summary arrest nearly a month ago and continued detention have electrified the Russian internet, overwhelming the social networking site Livejournal and setting off a hunger strike.

Loskutov heads a left wing, situationist-style artist collective called “Babushka After the Funeral”, which uses irreverent pranks and roudy street performances to oppose the government’s trend towards cultural and political chauvinism.

Inspired by the French surrealists, 1968-era philosophies of Baudrillard and Badieu, and the anti-globalisation movement, their manifesto reads:

When we listen to politican’s speeches,
When we face protest action,
When we go for election we cannot get rid of a feeling that everything is just a performance, a play.

Babushka have been holding successful annual demos called ‘Monstrations’ on May 1. But things first turned nasty at this year’s rally, “when an authorized 300-strong Pirate Street Party that they were organizing was thwarted by the OMON [swat team] before it started” on the grounds of ‘extremism’.

This despite the fact that Mostration’s organisers explicitly instructed participants to avoid any political speech in favour of dada and nonsense-slogans: “Fantasy is welcome! Political slogans and slogans which make sense are not welcome”.

Later, on May 15th,  Loskutov, whose phone had been tapped since April 28, was siezed in the street by plainclothed officers who then claimed to have found 11 grams of weed in his bag. However, he and his supporters maintain that the drugs were planted. This assertion is made all the more credible by the fact that that very morning, Loskutov had been telephoned by  “an officer of CPE (Center for Extremism Prevention), demanding him to show up for a ‘chat’”, which he refused to do in the absence of a warrant.

In the weeks before his arrest, Loskutov was subjected to a campaign of harassment by the Center for Extremism Prevention : he was ” summoned to the Center for “discussions”; his parents were also called and told that their son was a member of a dangerous sect”.

According to Chto Delat, a coalition of anti-capitalist and anti-Putin intellectuals,  the arrest was inevitable:

” Since its mission is to prevent extremism (whatever that means), [the CPE] has to find, interrogate, and intimidate “extremists”, even if there are no real extremists to be found…Thus, young anarchists who want to advocate the free distribution of information are charged with jaywalking (on a street crowded with police and other May Day demonstrators). Likewise, in order to show free-spirited young people in Novosibirsk that their Monstrations are a nuisance to “public order,” Center “E” arrests one of the people associated with this terrible nuisance and charges him with narcotics possession, a crime that is not even in their remit”.

Olga Kopenkina writes that “since the creation of so-called Centers for Extremism Preventions (or Department «E» as it was nicknamed), as a part of the government wide-scaled anti-crisis campaign and fight against terrorism, the arrests of journalists, students, environmental activists, leaders of labor unions, and artists have become routine in the country”. In fact, she estimates that over 10000 artists and intellectual opponents of the regime have been blacklisted by the Centers).

(The fact that the Centers were an outgrowth of the war on terror should give Americans pondering the wisdom of expanding their own national security infrastructure some food for thought as well).

Already, a group of leading artists, spiritual leaders and intellectuals have signed an open letter calling his arrest an “act of intimidation against all contemporary Russian artists” and “another step toward the suppression of freedom of assembly and expression guaranteed by the constitution.”

Or, as one of Monstration’s absurdist slogans put it: “Pull the blanket, cut the pies!”

**

[READ AN EXCELLENT PIECE ABOUT THE CRACKDOWN ON FREE EXPRESSION IN RUSSIA HERE ]

Why is “the man regarded by some as the patriarch of the dissident movement…almost forgotten at home”?

So asks a recent AP profile of the legendary Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalyov.

After all, wouldn’t the very people who campaigned hardest to end Communism have benefited most from its downfall?

Predictably, the author blames the Putin regime: Kovalyov ‘is not seen on major television networks, which are state controlled’, while  liberal journalists are reluctant to give him airtime for fear of ‘the unknown assassins who have shot, beaten or poisoned several of them’.

Tempting as it is in light of the Kremlin’s antics, this explanation is wide of the mark. By blaming “the government structure that Putin built during two terms as president”, it ignores the first decade of post-Soviet rule.

For by the time Putin had even arrived at the scene, the old dissidents were already finished.

Look at Kovalyov’s own biography. The founder of the iconic NGO ‘Memorial’ dedicated to chronicling GULAG prisoners, resisted the 1991 coup to become Yeltin’s chief human rights advisor.

But only 3 years later, he resigned in disgust at the president’s cruel war in Chechnya.

In his self-exile from the new order, Kovalyov joined other prominent Soviet dissidents such as Elena Bonner, Boris Kagalitsky, Vladimir Bougrine and many others who suddenly found themselves witnesses to an Animal Farm scenario.

Their disillusionment should come as no surprise to all but the most credulous consumers of the ‘Democrats vs Communists’ narrative of the USSR’s demise.

After all, according to Andrew Wilson, author of Virtual Politics, ‘the representation of late Soviet politics as a struggle between reformers and die-hards, democrats and authoritarians, good guys and bad, was the greatest illusion of all’.

This is because, unlike the revolutions of 1989 (except, perhaps, in Albania), the Soviet Union never underwent a classical regime change.

“In Poland,” wrote Alexander Yakovlev, a senior architect of Perestroika, “the instrument of change was the opposition….In my country, it was the ‘apparatchiks’: We created an opposition to ourselves”.

Nowhere is this statement more true than in the composition of Yeltsin’s own government, where 75% of the posts were occupied by members of the former Soviet elite (according to political scientists Kotz and Weir). The same pattern repeated itself in the transition to Putinism, which is bolstered by many of the Yeltsin-era elites such as Anatoly Chubais.

That held even more true in the economic sphere, where, according to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, ‘90% of the prosperous people in business originated in the old nomenklature structures and those close to them’. Needless to say, Khodorkovsky himself once headed the Communist Youth organisation.

Because Putinism is the culmination and streamlining of a trajectory established by his predecessor in 1991, could it have been possible to envisage anything but the end for such principled fighters as Kovalyov?

In the words of another marginalised dissident, Boris Kagalitsky, post-Communist Russia was from the outset controlled by “a new elite formed on the basis of the old bureaucracy”, not the opposition/dissident movement.

Yesterday, a Moscow court slapped the wrists of ultranationalist leader Alexander Belov with an 18 month suspended sentence for hate speech at a rally of his Movement Against Illegal Immigration.

Belov, whose name fittingly means ‘White’, agitates to cleanse the country of non-Slavs under the slogan of ‘Russia for Russians’ (his movement’s logo, a black cross with a white border on a red background, closely recalls Nazi insignia).

The authorities’ kid glove sentencing of Belov illustrates their nonchalance about surging race crimes. “In 2008, Russian police registered 460 extremist crimes committed by youth groups, but in the first quarter of 2009 alone, 187 have been registered,” according to a state prosecutor quoted yesterday.

Indeed, “around 200 extremist groups with over 10,000 members have been identified in Russia, many of which are involved in race-hate crimes”, he said.

Notwithstanding these harrowing official statistics, however, authorities appear to be much more concerned with dissident political action than violent race crimes.

Compare, for example, the courts’ treatment of the neo-Nazi Alexander Belov with that of opposition political leader Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik who along with Kasparov and Kasyanov had headed the liberal ‘Other Russia’ coalition.

Limonov, a radical left wing intellectual and civic activist, has served more than 4 years in prison for protesting Putin’s abuses of power, despite declaring that “in the West [the National Bolsheviks] would occupy a place between Greenpeace and Amnesty International, being a legal party and real political force”.

In January of this year, he was once again detained at a rally protesting the government’s handling of the economy. By contrast, Moscow City Hall ‘has authorized nationalist Russian Marches — where Belov made his incendiary comments — three out of the past four years’.

Even Robert Amsterdam, hardly a supporter of Limonov’s far left populism, noted that “the Natsbols are numerically the largest group of prisoners being persecuted by the authorities with political motives. And although many, including human rights advocates themselves, may have issues with [their] motives…the persecution of this group of people who do not agree with the course of Putin’s regime is taking place precisely with political motives”.

So for all the Kremlin’s concerned talk about race crimes, it is clear that it views the real extremists to be the political opposition, not the skin-heads.

“Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months”

- Opening lines of Highrise, by JG Ballard.

JG Ballard, who died today, was one of my favourite writers.

It is not entirely surprising that this English author straddling science fiction, dystopian lit and surrealism should strike a chord with a generation coming of age amidst the embers of the former USSR.

In Ballard’s novels, objects suddenly take on meanings and applications very different to those intended by their usually utopian planners and designers.

In this way, a high rise apartment building promising futuristic easy living descends into a morass of primal violence. Doctors and executives become killers, elevators travelling mortuaries, stairwells stalking grounds. In some respects, this represents the triumph of the buildings’ and objects’ essences over the plans of their creators. Is it only a matter of time until every elevator, every swimming pool, every parking lot, defaults to its inherent, structural promise of violence?

Jeff Manaugh, architecture-philosopher and curator of BLDGBLOG, nails down Ballard’s aesthetic:

“Ballard deals with “architectural space: highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human…You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form”.

In a darkly poignant reward for their obsession with literature, it was precisely the newly-ex-Soviet citizens waking up on the morning of Thursday, December 26 1991 who were destined to live out Ballard’s novels.

What happens when overnight, familiar objects and rituals become denatured? And what happens when objects get given meanings at odds with their original purpose?

Ballard himself never consciously used Soviet or post-Soviet motifs in his fiction, telling Zinovy Zinik that “I haven’t referred to the Soviet experience… because I’ve never been there, and chiefly because I’ve been more interested in the latent pathology of the consumerist West, which is where the entire planet seems to be heading.

And yet, in his focus on those questions, Ballard’s books are at least as important to understanding modern Russia and its psychology as any report from the Carnegie Russia Center.

JG Ballard
15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009

Is Stalin being rehabilitated in Putin’s Russia? That’s the fashionable question being asked by the middle-brow press and fanned by such big name historians as Simon Sebag Montefiore and Orlando Figes.

A few days ago, even the BBC’s Laurie Taylor jumped aboard and invited Mikhail Ryklin, “one of Russia’s most significant intellectuals” now living in the West, to talk about the current influx of Stalinist sympathies in Russia (audio at Sean’s Russia Blog).

Granted the radio segment very likely did not do his views justice, but I took issue with much of what was said.

“According to exiled Russian academic Michail Ryklin, Putin’s Russia is turning the clock back and rehabilitating the most famous demon of the Soviet Union.

In a new book, he claims that although the Soviet Union proclaimed itself an aethist state, communism functioned as its religion, and when faith faded it was replaced by mass terror. But now memories of the terror and bloodshed have receded and Stalin is being reclaimed”.

In a March interview published in Eurozine, Ryklin says that Stalin “is widely regarded as the greatest politician in Russian history, instrumental in defeating the Nazis, the most important event in the 20th century for Russians. The pact is forgotten, the mass murders are dismissed as part of the big modernisation project preparing for the war, explained away as something that was necessary. Lenin has been blackened, made a scapegoat. Stalin has been scrubbed clean.”

Ryklin’s argument about Communism being a religion is neither original nor convincing.

Taking the Weberian definition of “religion as a kind of totalising experience, something for which people are prepared to sacrifice everything and which makes sense of their entire lives”, Ryklin reasons that “by this definition, of course, communism is religion. For millions of people the sense of their lives was defined by communism as a set of beliefs. Communism was real religion.”

Of course, if one defines any comprehensive and definitive belief or idea as a religion, then liberalism and democracy would also join these ranks. So apart from this rather tautological suggestion, what judgment is Ryklin making about Communism when he calls it a religion?

Given that his wife organised the famously vandalised atheist art exhibition “Caution: Religion”, much of the comparison is intended to be pejorative: If religion is bad and communism is religion, then communism is bad. Another aspect of it is the issues of blind, irrational faith of the true believers, such as Bertold Brecht, who continued to believe in Communism even when confronted with the horrors of Stalinism.

Perhaps ironically for a someone claiming that Communism is a religion, Ryklin does not seem very preoccupied with its actual philosophical prescriptions and sets of beliefs. In fact, he ends up reducing Communism to a structure, a way of thinking rather than a set of ideas (which is a valid way to see Marxism, a form of analytical thought, but not communism, an idea-based societal organisation). When he reviews the motivations behind the prominent Western fellow travellers’ - Brecht, Benjamin and Russell – embrace of Communism, Ryklin describes Stalin’s policies but makes little attempt to situate them within the Communist idea-universe.

Could it be that these philosophers identified with the ideological tenants of communism on purely rational grounds?

For example, as Sean mentions his blog, Ryklin notes during the radio show that while millions perished under Stalin, for other groups it proved to be a period of social mobility, perceived order, and most importantly, Russia’s victory over its external enemies.  “There are very different images of this time depending on what group in society your family belonged,” Ryklin tells Taylor.

So, if it was a case of winners as well as losers, a more positive judgment of Stalinism could be a perfectly rational, non-religious response by members of society who had benefited from it. And if particular intellectuals aligned their sympathies more with those groups than the system’s victims, then it seems understandable that they should have attempted to justify the excesses. What makes things even more complicated is that the lines between victims and perpetrators was often blurred; as Figes writes in The Whisperers, many families that lost members in the repression remained faithful for a mix of other reasons, including fear, patriotism, ideology and personal interest. This is true even for my own family, where my great grandfather had been murdered during the revolution while my grandfather had worked in the NKVD.

It is worth remembering that Soviet socialism, especially during Stalinism, was unique among dictatorships precisely in its victimization of societal elites: the educated, the nobility, the wealthy, the talented.

Exactly the opposite held for the Nazis, who forged an incredible symbiosis with the German aristocracy. Indeed, according to Christopher Clarke’s fascinating article in the London Review of Books:

“The Nazi movement acquired supporters as high up in the traditional social elite as it was possible to go. Among Hermann Göring’s close associates was Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, son of the Kaiser, who became interested in Nazism in 1926 and joined the Stormtroopers in 1930. Through August Wilhelm, Göring gained access to his brother Crown Prince Wilhelm von Preussen, and to the princes of Hessen, Christoph and Philipp. Göring was renowned (and resented by some Nazis) for his sycophantic attraction to the high-born, but he was not alone. Himmler, too, targeted the nobility, in the firm belief that they embodied the principles of selective breeding espoused by his SS. By 1938 nearly a fifth of all senior SS officers were titled noblemen (the figure for the lower officer ranks was 10 per cent). From a sample of 312 families of the old nobility, the Freiburg historian Stephan Malinowski found 3592 individuals who joined the Nazi Party, including 962 who did so before the seizure of power in January 1933. These noble Nazis included members of the oldest and most distinguished East Elbian families: the Schwerins supplied 52 party members, the Hardenbergs 27, the Tresckows 30, and the Schulenburgs 41”

Likewise in Italy, Mussolini enjoyed the support of the king, and virtually every South American regime from Pinochet to Peron to Fujimori enjoyed the backing of the aristocracy and wealthy middle classes.

While Stalin’s Russia may have perverted the communist ideal in practically every other possible way, it did stay roughly true to its essential class allegiances. Stalin and all of his henchmen hailed from poor backgrounds; they were very often badly educated, untalented and crude.

In contrast, the people against whom they committed unspeakable atrocities were often noble in more ways than one: gifted and principled academics, soldiers, scientists, poets and musicians. And in all the individual human tragedy and extreme injustice, there echoed the undeniable ring of big-picture class justice inherent in the image of a pockmarked, lame Georgian man, born a Russian colonial subject, now indiscriminately terrorising innocent people who had previously towered over him racially, intellectually, financially, and morally.

Even his murder of Trotsky carried that same perverse school-ground justice; a clumsy, misplaced, floundering revenge for all those times that the elite-educated cosmopolitan revolutionary condescended towards the awkward prole named Koba, whom Trotsky disrespected, marginalized and kept as a lowly secretary, making Stalin risk his life robbing banks for the revolution all the while looking down his nose at him.

Stalinism was thus the political equivalent of the Columbine massacre, on a national scale.

Indeed, the current quest by liberal historians and intellectuals to explain the ‘re-Stalinisation’ of Russia bears a stark similarity to the media’s agonizing search for the ‘reasons’ behind the notorious school shooting. Why did they do it?

And just as the Columbine shooters Harris and Klebold, according to the journalist Mark Ames, “are literally heroes to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of American kids”, so Stalin continues to be broadly admired by many ordinary Russians.

These people aren’t psychopaths. They admire Stalinism not just because of the victory in WWII but also in the same way that they relished the inherent underdog justice of the fat, balding, uncouth, peasant Khruschev standing up to the elegant Harvard educated Boston Brahmin JFK, even if it might have led to a nuclear apocalypse; in the same way that a part of you can’t help cheering for Sharikov in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog; in the same way that Harris and Kelbold’s rage against a school bully, Rocky Wayne Hoffschneider, despite claiming 12 totally innocent lives, nevertheless inspired so many bullied American school kids who have had enough; that rage is as vague as it is righteous, and for this reason it is so often destructive and violent against all the wrong people.

That’s the problem with fighting a system through personal reprisals: its most visible beneficiaries, representatives and supporters are seldom personally guilty of any abuses. On the contrary, they are often thoughtful, charitable people, often even inclined to hold liberal, compassionate beliefs.

Yet in its primal and crude reaction against a deep yet opaque injustice, it should not be so hard to understand how Stalinism and Soviet Communism could hold at least some appeal for radical intellectuals.

And it’s therefore a cop-out to blame it on blind religious fervour.

The holocaust drama The Reader edged out Waltz with Bashir, a film about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, for the Oscar because “Hollywood likes its Jews… hunched over and dressed in rags”, not waging morally ambiguous wars, Bradley Burston wrote in Haaretz.

Similarly, America likes its Russian artists defecting from their home country and condemning its leaders, not supporting it and working with them.

How else to explain Arthur Lubow’s bizarre cover story in Sunday’s New York Times magazine, about the acclaimed Russian-Ossetian conductor Valery Gergiev?

Superimposed on a scary black and white photo of Gergiev, piercing of eye and brooding of brow, a sophomoric pun thundered: “An Overture to Russian Nationalism”.

“What does it mean to wield cultural power in an increasingly autocratic state?”, the teaser demanded. And that was just the magazine cover!

The inside headline, “The Loyalist” (only a pejorative when applied to non-Americans?) was titillatingly subtitled: “Can Russian music be distinguished from Russian power?”

But like a trashy teen movie that promises hot unhinged sex but delivers only a cheap tease, Arthur Lubow’s piece jettisoned the conspiratorial pitch after just a few decidedly soft-core paragraphs.

You see, Gergiev performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony in the ruins of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, in the wake of the Russian repulsion of Georgia’s offensive there last summer.

He thereby insolently condoned Russia’s actions when “Western observers…condemned Russia’s invasion of Georgia as a return to the hegemonistic (sic) ambitions of the Soviet Union, [and] wondered whether, in his use of the Leningrad Symphony, the conductor had lost his send of proportion.

Never mind that those actions were later vindicated – including by the New York Times itself – as a reactive response to Georgian adventurism.

And never mind that Gergiev – himself an Ossetian, and with an Ossetian wife – might be permitted some ‘disproportion’ in his response to the devastation of his homeland by Georgian troops. (To take up a favoured American analogy, what would Lubow have done if he were the conductor at the Met and New York had just been bombed by the Canadians?)

How else is Gergiev complicit in Russian autocracy? Well, he and Putin “have been friends since 1992”.

And that’s where the trail grows cold. Why would a conductor try to cosy up to an authoritarian president? Surely there is some nefarious conspiracy?

Alas we learn, in the same article, the very prosaic and pragmatic thread tying Gergiev to the Russian premier: “they share a deep attachment to St. Petersburg, and Gergiev has relied on Putin’s support for his threater”.

That support has been far from trivial: “By meeting with Putin and two cabinet ministers, he received approval for the [$500 million] expansion” of the Mariinsky theatre.

Speaking of his relationship with Putin and Medvedev, Gergiev says: “It is not personal, this is in return for that. They understand the importance of the Mariinsky”.
Hardly an autocratic cabal then.

And yet, even as the article mentions the comparative stinginess of Yeltsin, who was deaf to the cries of a Mariinsky theatre on the verge of post-Soviet collapse and reluctantly threw Gergiev $20 million after much pleading, it continues to question the reasons behind a theatre director’s loyalty to a very supportive patron.

Perhaps Gergiev’s nationalism lies less in politics than in his repertoire?

That reasoning also falls flat. We read that Gergiev has been refreshingly and consistently apolitical, free-spirited, and above all, Western-orientated in his choices.

In fact, Gergiev first began the staging of foreign operas in their native tongues, something unheard of in Russian theatres prior to his tenure at the Mariinsky’s helm. “His production of Parsifal, the first time that Wagner’s final opera was performed in the German language in Russia, is one of his signal achievements”.

–He both enthusiastically staged works that were suppressed in Soviet times, such as Stravinsky, and rehabilitated the overly political pieces that were cast aside as vulgar propaganda after 1991, such as ‘Zdravitsa (Toast to Stalin)’.

–He was the first Soviet musician to sign with a major Western label – Philips, in 1988.

–He is currently the chief conductor at the London Symphony Orchestra.

To any objective observer, such a solidly cosmopolitan CV should easily demolish any charges of nationalism and vindicate Gergiev’s view that “he is resurrecting great Russian music regardless of its political content”.

But not to Lubow, who steadfastly refuses to give up the ghost.“This is itself a political position”, he proclaims with the doggedness of a 9-11 truther, which “can serve the purpose of ultranationalists”.

What?!! I’ve lost you there; where did ultranationalists suddenly come into all this?

The entire article is written in this vein: an otherwise competent and well-researched work of journalism unnecessarily pieced together solely by cheap innuendo and guilt by association.

Having run out of any facts of Gergiev’s ‘dark side’, Lubow drops such nudge nudge wink wink suggestions as “He is a Shostakovich personality, not a Bellini personality. In other words, he responds to epic power, not delicate trills”.

You see?? EPIC POWER! AUTHORITARIAN power. And is it any coincidence that POWER and PUTIN both start with P and have 5 letters? I think not…..

Or this vignette, when Gergiev gets annoyed at being stuck at Heathrow airport: “His was not the mien of a conductor whose bassoonist had flubbed a solo; it was more the way Czar Nicholas might have reacted to the news out of Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War”.

Now it’s obvious!! Gergiev –>Nicholas II –>War with Japan –> Pearl Harbour –> 9-11 –> Gergiev wants Putin to nuke America!

What is most mystifying about the article, however, is the author’s irrational attachment to a hyperventilating Gergiev-Putin-Ultranationalism conspiracy theory even as his own factual reporting consistently disproves this flimsy allegation.

Had he not read his own piece?

Or can the US media just not stomach the sight of a Russian composer staying on in his country, being successful in the West without defecting?

In fact, reading this article, it is Russians who should suspect a conspiracy.

A pattern begins to form: Stravinsky, Solzhenitsin, Nabokov, Rostropovich, Vadim Repin and Evgeny Kissin, who defected, are much more loved in the West than Prokofiev, Sholokhov, Gergiev,Gorky and Svetlanov, who didn’t.

It begins to seem that Gergiev is criticized and smeared not for some nefarious link to Putin, but because of his achievement and patriotism. Is what really bothers Lubow the fact that Gergiev put an end to the debilitating trauma and brain drain of the 1990s, when talent “was leaving the country like water pouring through a hole in the dyke”? That he has put Russian music back on the map with a vengeance? That he stayed behind?

Ironically, articles like this make the best fodder for the real ultranationalists who want to prove precisely that the West wants to bring Russia to its knees.

In his Haaretz piece, Brad writes that Hollywood should realise that Jews are not “cutesy, comedic Yiddishers nor noble, chiseled, ascetically moral kibbutzniks. They bear as much resemblance to Zohan as Adam Sandler does to Tzipi Livni. Israelis are complicated, angry, unhappy, family-oriented, insular, often flawed human-beings”.

Just so, it’s time for Russia watchers to come to terms with the new reality of Russia; no longer a vanquished foe, a hapless victim, an apprentice, a blank canvas, a human experiment, a failed state, or a source of brains and female genitals.

Like today’s Israel, today’s Russia is complicated, assertive, angry, healing, creative, proud, forward looking, and contradictory. But above all, it is a state with its own destiny for its people, outside of Western control.

Get used to it!

In any good horror movie, the psychopathic killer is decidedly ordinary, even a little boring. Entering a sleepy hamlet quietly, he slaughters his unsuspecting victims without fanfare, and is unmasked all too late.

Similarly, the recent appointment of an obscure Stanford academic to Obama’s foreign policy team garnered only a few lines in a handful of local papers, and a paragraph from a Politico blogger (thanks to FPA Russia Blog reader Simon Radford for bringing it to our attention).

Yet the words “Michael McFaul will serve as…senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council” should strike terror into the collective heart of all sane Russia observers.

So how can a second rate professor with a Rod Blagojevich hairdo and a grammar problem destroy US-Russian relations? Read on to find out….

WHO IS MICHAEL MCFAUL?

Iraq war cheerleader, advocate of Russia’s catastrophic economic shock treatment and apologist for Yeltsin’s authoritarianism: McFaul was indeed a man of many jobs.

But for anyone who has served time doing Russia studies over the last decade, McFaul is best remembered as the author of ‘Russia’s Unfinished Revolution’, that vile textbook stuffed down the throats of newbie Kremlinologist wannabies. John Dolan’s definitive review of the book is here.

A mediocre political scientist but a consumate bully, McFaul cashed in on the euphoria surrounding the economic and political ‘democratisation’ of Eastern Europe. Peddling mass privatisation and the manichean narrative of ‘Plucky Democratics vs Evil Revanchist Communists’, he became a useful academic salesman for the Clinton administration’s policy of shock therapy and the political support of its guarantor, Boris Yeltsin.

In his role, McFaul came to rival Stalin’s airbrushers in his talent for politically motivated historical whitewashing by extolling the virtues of the “’shock therapy’ of the mid-1990s, which has recently been documented in the Lancet to have “led to 3 million premature deaths in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Russia in particular rapid privatization was a continuing factor to the five year drop in life expectancy between 1991 and 1994, resulting in an estimated 1 million premature deaths”.

But the worst thing about McFaul is his complete absense of any convictions, beliefs or moral code. While he is instinctively a middle of the road liberal, McFaul is the archetypal chameleon, grovelling to whoever happens to be in power, shifting his views to acquire fresh patronage.

Here is an excellent summation of the way in which McFaul, previously a big Clinton insider, disavowed his previous appraisals and radically changed his views to accomodate the then new Bush administration’s more aggressive stance on Russia.

Perversely, McFaul’s utter sychophancy gives me some hope. He is too spineless, too beholden to whichever direction the wind is blowing, to redefine any existing policy or intellectual atmosphere. Instead, he will safely pander to the ruling ideology and produce the requisite ‘academic’ works to bolster it.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Larry Summers, another high profile Obama man with a decade long history of screwing up Russia (who deserves a post all for himself).

That was how the liberal Novaya Gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya’s old paper and one that recently lost another of its journalists to a contract killing, summed up today’s “not guilty” verdict in the trial of Chechen brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov as well as Moscow ex-cop, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, for the murder of opposition journalist.

Yet, at the same time, the verdict gives a sigh of relief. As the LA Times’s Megan Stack had noted earlier today,

“If the verdict is guilty, nobody will be looking for the real murderers,” said Murad Musayev, lawyer for Dzhabrail Makhmudov, the younger Chechen brother. “They will mark the Anna Politkovskaya case closed. I’m sure that’s what they’re trying to do.”

At least now it will be harder to do that, and the editor of Novaya Gazeta, Sergei Sokolov, pledged to continue with their own internal investigation.

He accused the authorities and secret services in colluding to actively sabotage the investigation “as soon as it became known that members of the law and order services and their countless secret agents were drawn into this whole story”.

The trial was very flawed. For example, Luke Harding in the Guardian writes that “during the investigation vital pieces of evidence disappeared, including mobile phone SIM cards, computer discs and a photo of Rustam Makhmudov, who apparently fled to western Europe using a false passport. Crucial video footage showing the assassin entering Politkovskaya’s apartment block went missing”.

At the same time, Sokolov acknowledges the difficulties involved, especially considering that “nobody in Russia is paying much attention. The Politkovskaya case drew a bigger reaction in the West than in Russia”.