Radio Liberty, apparently.

Yesterday, the first of their three part series exploring the middle class across the former Soviet bloc was dedicated specifically to ‘what it means to be middle class’.

Yet without ever defining the slippery concept of middle class itself, Charles Recknagel concludes that, unlike their supposedly heroically liberal and democratic Western counterparts, Russia’s middle classes “don’t endorse the values of democracy and liberalism. They support the social, political, and economic order that has been formed over the past decade in Russia”.

Because the middle class in America and Europe surely don’t “support the social, political, and economic order” there?

(Actually, one subset of the US middle class certainly didnt - the tea party protesters. But somehow I doubt that is who Recknagel is holding up for emulation).

The article berates the fact that “in Russia the stage today is dominated by politically loyal entrepreneurs” and that “there is a widening gap between the wealthy ruling elite and the poor majority”.

Yet this is just as true of America, where I am yet to see a dissident entrepreneur and where “income inequality… is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez”.

What did Recknagel hope to find, anyway?

Expecting to stumble across the depositories of Russia’s revolutionary or emancipatory energies amidst the ranks of boring, risk averse, status-obsessed, insecure, conformist, careeristic straight-laced businessmen and upwardly mobile professionals would be like trying to catch a glimpse of Solzhenitsin at a Politbureau meeting.

If he was looking for rebels, Recknagel should have done the obvious and looked in the same places you’d expect to find them in America or Europe - the underground arts scene.

The sort of people who listened to punk legend Viktor Tsoi at unofficial concerts in the Soviet Union, attended Caryl Churchill plays in 80s London or saw Dario Fo perform in Italy.

Thankfully, another Radio Liberty report did just that.

Byron Asher chronicles the “small but significant coterie of gritty, alternative theaters that eschew the mainstream Russian classics — Anton Chekhov and the like — and are dedicated to producing only new, socially relevant plays by young playwrights… tackling social and sometimes political issues that nobody else will”.

“The main goal is to revive a type of theater than can change people, that can transform them in the space of an hour and a half,” says one such new playwright, Maxim Kurochkin, author of Vodka, Fucking and Television. “We haven’t had a chance to see such theater lately. I’m interested in theater that is dangerous for society, that is destructive and brings transformation.”

Who cares about Recknagel’s beloved middle classes?

As Tsoi sang:

We hear: ‘They won’t take risks
Because they’ve got it all
They’ve got a home, with an electric light’
And I don’t know which of us is right.
Rain awaits me out in the street; dinner awaits them at home
Shut the door behind me; I’m leaving
But if you get sick of your cosseting light,
You’ll find a place here among us
Where there’s enough rain for everyone.

Like James Dean, Yegor Gaidar lived hard and died young.

But unlike Dean, the only victim of whose reckless driving was himself, the man who privatised Russia’s economy in the 1990s took his entire young country on a deadly joyride that wrecked millions of lives.

That’s no hyperbole: The Lancet has determined that the Gaidar-engineered mass-privatisation led to a 13% increase in the death rate, leading over 3 million people to die prematurely.

As if that wasnt enough, even Luke Harding points out that “in January 1992 [Gaidar] abolished state control of prices, wiping out the rouble savings of millions of ordinary Russians overnight. His reforms were described as shock therapy. They paved the way for the dubious state privatisations of the 1990s and the rise of the oligarchs”.

Predictably, the Voice of America’s headline for the obituary reads: Gaidar died believing in the inevitabiliy of Russian democracy”.

A man like Gaidar could only have emerged from the muck of Hobbesan early 90s Russia, a rancid petrie dish incubating malignant strains of bandits and opportunists.

But in fairness, he was not a bandit like Alfred Koch, or a bandit-opportunist like his stablemate Anatoly Chubais.  A minister in his early thirties, he was a romantic, Randian megalomaniac; carried away, like many smart young people, not by malice but by a conviction in his own infallibility and that of his free market shibboleths.  Chillngly, the young Gaidar was a lot like Larry Summers.

Like his grandfather, the Bolshevik and Soviet children’s writer Arkady Gaidar, Yegor believed that he was ‘on the right side of history’; but whereas Arkady’s writing provided some counterbalance of empathy, Yegor quickly lost any connection he may have ever felt towards those on the receiving end of his theoretical postulates.

Yet today’s Russia remains built in his image, evidenced by the fawning official reaction to his death: Putin called Gaidar’s death a “heavy loss for Russia.”

But Gaidar, ‘who served as acting prime minister for just six months in 1992 before public anger forced Yeltsin to fire him’, continues to be despised by most Russians, so there was no populist gain to be had in singing his praises. And yet today the Kremlin finds itself on the same side as its favoured liberal punching bags Nemtsov et al. Why?

Because the Putin government is the direct descendant of the Gaidar-Yeltsin right-wing economic philosophy. Thus it came as no surprise to read that “after leaving politics, he remained influential behind the scenes, offering informal advice to Vladimir Putin on a range of economic issues”. Or that his daughter had become a cog in Putin’s power vertical.

Because, for all the political animus between Putin’s siloviki and the liberal democrats, they are bound together by their Gaidarist love for capitalism and contempt for the people.

So what to make of the man Mark Ames eulogised a decade ago as “the frog-faced architect of ‘reform’ and ’shock therapy’ and every other curse word associated with capitalism in Russia…the guy responsible for shaking down the entire russian population and handing over their belongings to a few well-placed comrades, [who] will go down in Russian folklore as one of the most terrifyoing villains ever to set foot on Mother Rus - [and whose] name will be invoked by parents to scare children into going to bed and brushing their teeth.”

It’s about time Russians started taking care of their teeth.

In the 1990s, the Russian film landscape had come to resemble something straight out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with stray dogs wandering through Mosfilm studios in Eisenstein’s footprints and actors and directors stumbling around a menacing no man’s land in search of money and meaning.

What happened before, and after, is the subject of an engrossing (and plenty flawed) BBC documentary entitled Movie Nights in Moscow on Radio 3, in which Oxford professor Rana Mitter travels to Russia and speaks to directors, academics and viewers to determine the state of cinema in Russia today.

This state can best be summed up by the following exchange between rising auteur Alexey Popogrebsky and renowned Soviet director (and current head of Mosfilm) Karen Shakhnazarov.

For Popogrebsky, the 2004 fantasy blockbuster Nightwatch was the turning point for Russian cinema, when

Young people said: maybe its not so bad to go watch a Russian film, because in terms of the return on their money, they were getting as many special effects per square foot as any other Hollywood blockbuster. Because people want to be entertained, they want to be impressed.

But for Shakhnazarov, who directed the iconic Glasnost youth movie The Courier and whose new film The Vanished Empire evokes 197os USSR, that is precisely the problem with modern Russian cinema. Speaking with an accent that lends heightened poetry to his words, he lays the blame even more on the viewer than film-maker:

In Soviet period, we had Idea. You can say it was bad idea, ok. You can say it was good idea, somebody says that. But it was an Idea. Around this idea was the fire; some life was around this idea. Somebody support this idea, and others not support it, those called dissidents. But, I mean, this was the really big idea. Now, it’s vanished. And so we have, in my opinion, our society have no anything to live for. Because its impossible to live just for have a lot of sausages in the shops. There’s no real idea for the people, you see?

I don’t think [viewers today] are searching for something like the Idea, I suppose. Or, very few of them want to find in cinema something that is called Idea. Just they want to go to see entertainment.

Of course, Mitter delves into the recent high quality Russian art-house fare such as the internationally acclaimed Paper Soldier, Volchok (Wolfy) and The Return.

But at a time when even commercial movies are seen only by elite upper middle class audiences who can afford to spend $10 on a ticket, the viewership of such ‘idea-films’ is so negligible that they can not hope to speak to the population at large.

And while Mitter proclaims the new cinema to be a renaissance equal to the colossal flowering of creativity and boundary-pushing under Glasnost in the 1980s (which he doesnt spend nearly enough time talking about!), he is wrong.

This is because the cinematic awakening under Glasnost was truly inclusive, rather than elitist; challenging films that today would be the preserve of art house audiences involved the general public in dialogues about their own pasts and debates about their futures.

Millions of ordinary people flocked to cinemas to see movies banned since the 60s, such as Kommissar and Abuladze’s anti-Stalinist Repentance, or new social realist films depicting the dark undersides of ‘Socialist utopia’ such as Little Vera (first Soviet film featuring nudity!); or films that re-examined the place of young people in society, such as Bykov’s The Scarecrow, Shakhnazarov’s The Courier, Igla (a film about drug abuse featuring Soviet rock legend Victor Tsoi) and the groundbreaking Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young.

While many of those films were heavy and depressing, (their darkness serving as a political rebellion against the culture of official cheerfulness that marked Socialist Realism), so many quality films were not: for example, the above-mentioned Courier or the satirical comedy Kin Dza Dza.

And there was not the same kind of apartheid between highbrow ‘chernukha’ like Wolfy and commercial trash like Night Watch that we see today.

They were for the most part politically engaged and philosophically committed.

In the final scene of The Courier (2:55 in), the main character, Ivan, a high school senior, is watching some dudes breakdance in the park and asks his pal Basin: What do you dream about in life?

-Buying a winter coat

-What kind of dream is that?

-Winter is almost here and I’ve got nothing to wear; I went last winter without one and was sick all the time

-Cant your parents get you one?

-My dad’s paying alimony but my mum won’t give me a penny. Says I don’t need money. She is a sick person, there is no doubt. But what can you do?

At which point Ivan gives Basin the new jacket that his dad had just given him, and says:

-I won’t be needing it: I’ll get drafted into the army soon anyway. Wear it, and start dreaming of something greater.

He could have been addressing the new Russian cinema and its audiences.

“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.