What time is it in Russia?
Moscow is now the most expensive city in the world, at least according to a recent, widely publicized report. Teenagers walk down Tverskaya Boulevard with stylish new cell phones pressed to their ears; they stop before shop windows that could line Madison Avenue; they treat themselves to ice cream and coffee at a wide spectrum of new foreign and domestic establishments. Restaurants of every sort serve every kind of food from pizza and hamburgers to sushi and the finest pre-Revolutionary lamb. “Moo-Moo,” with its enormous polyethylene black and white Holstein out front, “Shesh-Besh,” “Shashlyk-Mashlyk,” “Yolki-Palki” with their colorful ethnic trappings in full display announce themselves where but ten years ago nondescript storefronts presented signs that read simply: “Shoes,” “Furniture,” or “Women’s Clothing.” Ordinary shops are packed with expensive foreign goods. Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and mammoth SUVs converge on all the boulevards, and, in traditional Moskvich style, do not recognize the rights of pedestrians to enter their privileged world of speed and power.
All this is clear evidence that Vladimir Putin’s plan to “consolidate the vertical power of the government” is paying off: the oligarchs are intimidated, in jail, or in exile, and much of their carefully constructed empires has fallen into government hands. The ruble is more or less stable, and vast wealth is beginning to pervade Russian society, at least the top strata of Moscow society.
Little of this opulence is evident in the countryside, however, where economic depression, social malaise, and severe depopulation, particularly of men, continue unabated. Villages are often so devoid of men that the old women who remain are simply unable to transport the heavy sacks of potatoes at harvest time into their cellars. In some areas paper money is not even used to purchase goods—there isn’t any. In July, a suggestive, if dubious, article appeared in a Moscow newspaper about a man who had petitioned the State to allow him to marry his cow. Why? There were no women left in his village and he needed companionship.
In Moscow, however, women are available day and night at bargain basement prices, some advertised to look just like famous Russian tennis stars and beauties. But the sad truth is that for every ten women today there are only seven men and of these seven, two or three are alcoholics. Real estate is as expensive in Moscow as in New York, perhaps more so, but scruffy packs of wild dogs run everywhere, along the sidewalks and in the parks. Outside the percolating center one feels the oppressive weight of many years of destitution and neglect in the unkempt squares and shabby high-rises whose inner courtyards are lined with entryways that resemble bank vaults rather than doors through which people come and go, intent on normal daily affairs, where mangled children’s play equipment rusts amid heaps of broken glass, and broken-down cars are worked on in the shadows.
The astounding contrasts between opulence and poverty recall the opening pages of Crime and Punishment in which Dostoevsky describes St. Petersburg with the houses of the rich on one side of the street and hovels for the poor on the other. A glass of beer can cost 7 USD, but the salary of a professor of history at any Moscow university may be no more than 150 USD per month.
Under these conditions, it is no wonder that despite Putin’s efforts at stabilization Russian society is still experiencing grave uncertainties about the future. Behind this remains the huge underworld of its unexamined past. When Putin recently rebuked President Bush at the St. Petersburg G-8 meeting by saying that he didn’t wish democracy in Russia to resemble what had been achieved in Iraq, he scored political and rhetorical points around the world. But the kind of democracy he does wish Russia to achieve remains in doubt.
The divide in Russian society, however, is not simply between rich and poor, democrat or Communist, the haves and the have nots. Economic stratification is not simply a matter of economics, and wealth does not signify simply the amassing of worldly goods, prosperity, and well-being. It signifies an orientation much more fundamental. Wealth is the future. Age-old Russian poverty is the past. Between past and future lies a deep and perilous gulf.
This is by no means the first time Russia has found itself plunged in a period of temporal dislocation. In 1918, the Empress Alexandra kept careful note of this turmoil in the changes brought about by the Revolution during the royal family’s confinement in Yekaterinburg, prior to their execution. On May 22, according to the Old Calendar (but June 4 according to the New—a transition noted daily by Alexandra), she duly recorded yet another change imposed by Lenin to wrench his country into the modern world: “Lenin gave the order that the clocks have to put [sic] 2 hours ahead (economy of electricity) so at 10 they told us it was 12.”
The next day, the Empress wrote: “Supped at 8, but Baby [the Tsarevich, then 12 years of age] only went to his room at 10 (8) as too light to sleep. Played bezique—to bed at 11 (9).”
Time was truly out of joint: “at 10 they told us it was 12.” It wasn’t really 12, nor was it really June 4. Something fundamental, elemental, essential in experience was now thrown into question: what time is it?
I had to ask this question on a recent visit to the Moscow Circus. “My Old Circus, My Love,” as the colorful brochure calls it, was founded in 1880 and has an honored place in Moscow cultural life. The performance I attended had at least 40 to 50 percent foreign visitors, many if not most Americans and of these many undoubtedly were Jews. When the chimpanzees came on stage, their antics immediately produced hilarity, but when one of them appeared in a white Jewish yarmulke, wearing awkwardly improvised peyas and danced the Hora around the stage to traditional Jewish music, the hilarity became awkward and self-conscious. I was not alone in disbelief before this spectacle, and my first thought was the scene from Cabaret with the Jewish gorilla. Had other ethnic groups been held up to comparably gentle sub-human mockery the deep intake of breath at the sight of the Jewish Chimp might have been gratefully released, but this was not forthcoming. No simian Russian Patriarch, Imam, Polish priest, or Vozhd followed.
After the Hora, another chimp dressed in traditional Russian village garb appeared, but not to sacred music or in the context of an extinct culture. Were these two acts symmetrical? Not at all. The overt intent was clearly not anti-Semitic in any vicious sense. But the past inevitably intruded with all its unexamined premises and unexpected consequences.
The Jew has been the object of hatred, ridicule, oppression, castigation, and murder for a thousand years in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Depicting the Jew as an ape is precisely what the Nazis did in the 1920s and the Russian fascists do to this day. The village peasant has suffered no such stereotyping or humiliation. And yet was the chimp’s Hora not designed to demonstrate that Russian society can now laugh at stereotypes of a bygone era? Stereotypes, moreover, that no one any longer believes in or cares about and therefore can be laughed at precisely because the danger is far removed—like seeing a man-eating tiger in its cage? Has not Russian anti-Semitism been put in its cage in the new Russia?
Alas, the answer is no. The Fascist Party calls for restrictions on Jews in all walks of life proportional to the percentage of Jews in the general population. An acquaintance of mine who is Jewish but also a “People’s Artist” and star of Russian film was invited by an Italian movie company to play the Tsar in a forthcoming joint movie production. When the Russian co-producers learned he was a Jew, it took four months of negotiations to reach agreement that such a person could play that role. When the head of publications of the Comintern archive appeared on television some years ago to discuss Stalin’s crimes of the 1930s, the producer mysteriously blacked the show out—it was live—when he realized to his horror that, despite his guest’s completely Russian last name, a decidedly Jewish face appeared on screen.
To this day, the Holocaust remains a relatively unknown and untaught aspect of twentieth-century Russian history, and Holocaust denial remains alive in the very fertile cultures of Russian racist thinking and fascist propaganda that are not confined to the 200 openly anti-Semitic newspapers, published daily throughout the country. In 2000, 107 Deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation voted to condemn the anti-Semitic outbursts of General Makashov; 120 voted against the resolution. In 2001, the motion to condemn anti-Semitism was again rejected by the Duma, and in April 2001, Vladimir Zhirinovsky and other deputies protested vigorously against observing a minute of silence in the Duma to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust on Russian soil—approximately one half the total of all those murdered by the Nazis. Even now, no one knows whether Stalin had prepared a vast deportation of Jews in 1953 from the major cities of Russia that was averted only by his mysterious death.
The awkward and ambiguous place of Stalin in Russian public life and private “mentality” further testifies to the degree to which the past is by no means past in Russia’s future. The relatively innocent antics of the Moscow Circus’s world-famous monkey show was matched by a box of chocolates on display at the Duty Free Shop at Moscow Airport.
At the top, the box reads in English: CHOCOLATE SOUVENIR FROM RUSSIA. It is produced by “Dilan +,” a chocolate manufacturer located in Moscow that also produces boxes of souvenir chocolates with wrappers depicting the glories of St. Petersburg, Russian Palekh lacquer art, Gzhel porcelain, and portraits of Russian Emperors. The box I happened upon in the Duty Free Shop is labeled simply, Plakati—or posters. The back of the box reproduces a poster of Stalin from the 1930s showing him at the helm of the ship of state. The wheel is inscribed with the capital letters SSSR —USSR. Above the wheel, to the left of Stalin, in the direction of his steady gaze, and set in the background of the red Bolshevik flag are the words: the captain of the country of soviets leads us from victory TO VICTORY!
Stalin’s powerful hands grip the wheel. Above his head to the right, the sky is blue, but he peers intently toward the bottom left hand corner where dark storm clouds gather. Benign and confident, Stalin steers the ship of state into this uncertain future.
The other side of the box displays the chocolates individually wrapped in miniature reproductions of famous Soviet posters —as well as some heroic American posters from World War II that testify to the happy moment when Soviet and American interests were united against a common enemy. In the bottom left corner, however, another typical iconic figure appears: the bourgeois capitalist with his pudgy, beringed hand on a pile of gold coins. The piggy, black eyes set into the fat, neckless head, the thick brutish nose, and the sensuous lips raised above a cavernous mouth reveal the cynical identity of this bourgeois as none other than the traditional Jewish banker whose heartless greed is ironically signaled by the heart-shaped pendant dangling from his enormous belly.
Is the subliminal message of this juxtaposition that the common enemy of both Stalin, the Great Helmsman, and the Americans, who joined him in the battle against Nazism, was not Hitler, but the Jew clutching his pile of gold? One can shake it off with a laugh—as no doubt is intended—and say, look at how foolish the past was, how far we’ve come: this box of sweets is making light of the great bugaboos of the Russian past. The Great Leader on one side and the Great Enemy on the other. We’re beyond all that, it seems to say. But are we?
Lenin and Stalin made Russia a great power with military might second to none after World War II. The human cost was both enormous and criminal, but the power and the glory could fix themselves in the Russian psyche with absolute assurance for many years. Ironically, the newfound wealth of the oligarchs, the streets teeming with commerce, the expensive foreign cars, the billboards of sexy tennis pros prancing and pouting all over Moscow, the shimmering gambling casinos and slot machines in every available location, the “gentlemen” clubs, and the Swiss chalets going up in traditional Russian dacha communities all serve to put the image of that power and glory into question and stir up for those who remember it very troubling and humiliating cultural anxieties that are well represented on the billboard, some years ago, for a major Moscow bank: Beneath the slogan “Come with us into the future” was a picture of a Russian knyaz on his massive charger, with lance poised at an invisible enemy.
Many Western and Russian commentators have noted with dismay Putin’s apparent rehabilitation of Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest murderer in all of Western history. His brutalities and evident sadistic pleasures surpass those of Hitler. Had Stalin, not Hitler, lost World War II, his name would be banned and everything connected to him would be illegal. But today his image and name appear throughout the Russian nation.
The name of the city once known as Tsaritsyn illustrates how tangled are the threads of past and present, cultural heritage, national pride in the blind charge into the future. In 1925 this sixteenth-century city became known as Stalingrad—an ironic fact, considering Stalin’s hapless generalship of the Red Army in that city during the Civil War of 1918–1922. In 1941 it became the site of one of the greatest battles of World War II and of all history. As many as two million people died in this battle that raged from August 1942 to February 1943. It was truly a military turning point in the War and became a symbol of indomitable Russian fortitude and power. In 1961, after Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization initiatives, the name of Stalingrad was changed again, this time to Volgograd. Even the plaque commemorating the heroic defense of the city had been changed to Volgograd. Putin has restored the name of the city on the plaque to Stalingrad, but the larger question is whether he is in the process of restoring much more than a name. His recent positions on Iran suggest that he is. Putin argued plausibly that Stalingrad was the city’s name and the battle is known throughout the world as the Battle of Stalingrad, not the Battle of Volgograd. All of this is true. But the question remained: should the name of the greatest tyrant in history be resurrected even under the cover of historical accuracy?
A sense of what else Putin may be restoring in connection with Stalin’s name is suggested in Stalin’s November 7, 1937, toast on the anniversary of The October Revolution. Stalin declared:
The Russian tsars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interests of landowners. But they did one thing that was good—they amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state. And for the first time, we, the Bolsheviks, have consolidated and strengthened that state as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of landowners and capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers, of all the peoples that make up that state. We have united the state in such a way that if any part were isolated from the common socialist state, it would not only inflict harm on the latter but would inevitably fall under foreign subjugation.
As war became inevitable with Germany, Stalin appealed to age-old Russian honor and nationalism and, again under the cover of historical accuracy, asserted the continuum between the Bolshevik state and the tsarist empire. But his final words are well worth pondering:
Whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities—that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the USSR. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin! (Approving exclamations: To the great Stalin!)
In 1937, the year of this speech, at least 950,000 people were arrested, according to secret police records; some 330,000 were shot and most of the others died in other ways. It was the height of the Great Terror and this toast, three-and-a-half years prior to the Nazi invasion in 1941, marked Stalin’s self-conscious return to the nationalistic fervor of his tsarist forebears.
For many in Russia today, it is still November 7, 1937, but with the qualification that the disaster Stalin foresaw has been realized: despite the proud smashing of Nazi fascism, despite the murder of millions upon millions in the Purges, they have lost those ancestral Russian lands bequeathed as their inheritance from the knyaz depicted on the billboard of the Moscow bank! But not by war—rather, by peace.
In daily affairs, these large concerns, of course, matter little except to the avowed Russian nationalists, fascists (a party that is not simply a fringe phenomenon), and Communists. Those stylish young people on Tverskaya care nothing for Stalin’s toast of 1937; many know little if anything about Stalin at all. And yet an aura hangs about their lives, unarticulated and ill-defined, in which such emblems of the past make their freaky appearance in a circus monkey show or on a box of duty-free chocolates and retain their fascination and fetishistic power.
Like all societies making the economic transition to “developed nation” status, Russia must undergo a transition to a more modern culture. But it is the only developed nation and former superpower making this transition. Its need to reinvent itself cannot occur at the expense of its self-image as a great power.
Before his death, Alexander Yakovlev warned that “over Russia hangs the cloud of bureaucratic arbitrariness” and authoritarianism, and he begged Vladimir Putin in an open letter that forms the last chapter of his memoir to renounce his policies of closed decision-making in favor of openness and an open society. Putin shows no sign that he is willing to consider this. Democracy may well develop in Russia, but if it does, it will be in the context of secrecy and the concentration of power in the hands of the few—an unlikely formula for true liberal democratic reform. Does the picture of Stalin on the box of chocolates reflect intoxicating nostalgia for the old system or is it a sign of liberation from the image of a world that has become mere decoration? Does the fat Jewish capitalist on the reverse side represent hatreds long forgotten or those again to be savored?
What time is it in Russia? Twilight, Yakovlev’s memoir seems to tell us.
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