With Putin's dirty war against Ukraine, Russia did only one thing - disenchanted itself in the eyes on the world. And especially in the eyes of normal people, writes Ivaylo Noisey Tsvetkov.
There are at least two Russias. There are probably more, but for me the main ones are really two - the Russian "spiritus" and the Russian "imperium".
Brodsky himself spoke of such a division, though not in my terms, and in the context of the USSR, but I don't think much has changed. What do I mean? It is not complicated - one is the Russian spirit and culture, and the other is the Russian eternal imperial statehood.
The first includes the flight of the Russian mind and talent, through which we also fly into the exosphere, and the second is more or less something dark - "verticality" of the very understanding and attitude towards and from the authorities since Ivan the Terrible. Then, in the 16th century, there was no great Russian philosopher or thinker - the first, in general, was Tatishchev, influenced by the Enlightenment, in the 18th.
Great minds have always been in conflict with Russian statehood
"The Spiritus" as if he always had to overcome the difficulties of the "empire". Great Russian minds always seem to have had to contend with imperial statesmanship. We are not just talking about Platonov, Chekhov or Rachmaninoff, but how Russian statehood is consolidated from Grozny onwards, which tends to overshadow the intellectual outburst in all its iterations. And that's why the regent Tsar Boris Godunov always makes me laugh, although Mussorgsky's opera sometimes makes me want to pick up a musket and defend the then new Russia.
But don't mind me - I'm the same guy who wants to measure things with a tape measure at the beginning of The Marriage of Figaro, humming. By which I suggest that I know almost everything about culture. Of course, I say this with a wink.
However, I do not know and do not understand the following: how is it possible that relatively intelligent people and my contemporaries do not make this obvious cultural difference regarding today's Russia? How is it possible to love both that - the Tyutchev - about the infinite Russian soul, that Russia could not be understood by the way of reason, and at the same time, through your same reason, not understand that today's Putinland is a pure military aggressor? How can you simultaneously read about Raskolnikov and the key problem of guilt, which is tearing apart the soul there, and the world, but at the same time you cry to yourself: "Ihaa, the Russians are a big deal”, even if you assume that "your grandfather Ivan will still save us"?
I say it with some sadness, because everything Russian is, as it were, a hostage of a wannabe ("trying to be" - n.b.) imperial regime. Why wannabe? Because the entire contemporary context is at odds with the neo-fascist and aggressive thinking of today's Russian leader. He himself wants to, but he cannot be someone from the Rurik dynasty, or someone from the Romanovs, or even his idol - the original monster Stalin.
Even today this imperium still silences and kills
Propaganda, nostalgia and pride in the victory over Hitler are finding it increasingly difficult. Wider sections of the Russian population, already outside the big cities, are beginning to realize that the idea of the eternally guilty and hostile West is simply a scarecrow, as it was in Soviet times, and Russia is in dire need of an enemy. Of course, the gag reflex is still impenetrable.
But why am I sad? I love Russia, I speak their language quite well, I know their history in detail from Kievan Rus and the Varangians. Let's not start about the culture, that it will become endless...
The sad thing is that for the umpteenth time the Russian imperium has not only liquidated the leader of the formal opposition Navalny (at least not this time with a pick in the head in Mexico), but has also smeared every big or small person who allowed to scream. From Dostoyevsky to Mandelstam, this imperium does the same thing - silences and kills. Often literally. Serebrenikov seemed to say it best, and Zvyagintsev showed it to them in the cinema - this country, in which the state is everything, still behaves as if it were 1937.
Let's talk about sadness again: with Putin's dirty war of invasion against Ukraine, Russia, the eternal and holy cultural Russia, did only one thing - disenchanted itself in the eyes of the world. Not only in a classic Maxweber way ("Entzauberung" but mostly in the eyes of normal people, excluding our Putin apologists.
I get it, that's why I'm sick
A severe cultural shift or change is underway. For nearly 70 years, the USSR (ie Russia) was the Hero of WWII, with a capital letter, including in the Western mind. The Soviet Army, the West's ally against Nazism, gave millions of casualties and, despite the horrors of Stalinism domestically, prevailed over the other great evil. But now, with the new plan "Barbarossa" in Ukraine, the image of Russia as the savior of humanity ended. Today we are in the eye of the digital storm, times are different, and despite targeted Russian propaganda with armies of digital trolls, you can no longer excuse the fact that you have become what you defeated - namely, an aggressor who terrorizes absolutely innocent Ukrainian citizens, just because you think this territory belongs to you.
To be honest, I'm sad because I love a cultural imaginary Russia. I understand all the motives behind Putin's attempt at an already quasi-empire, I also understand all the "arguments" of the pro-Russian in our country, I embrace you, come all of you. But I am still disturbed by the swift and merciless crushing of any attempt at opposition in Russian reality, not to mention the new censorship laws. Plus you can't be normal and justify an aggressive, seemingly banal medieval attempt to seize an independent state. This was not the case even under Stalin.
And this is the same people...
Here I will have to call for help two of my rebellious favorites - Venichka Erofeev and Varlaam Shalamov. I consciously avoid Solzhenitsyn, so as not to step into the meaningless "Russia-West" dispute, I leave aside Sakharov, and even Lev Nikolayevich himself, who was also crushed by national propaganda in the end. After all, it is generally good to read before commenting, as Ivan Viripaev, with whom I had the honor to communicate, said peacefully.
Venika with his obsession with the word "catalepsy", Barlaam with the great goodness of the unanointed from the Gulag.
By the way, let me recall something that seems to explain in some meta-sense why I am talking about another disenchantment of Russia - on March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin and Sergei Prokofiev died at the same time. Behind the coffin of the first are lined up "mourners" somewhere around 3 million, and behind that of perhaps the greatest composer of the 20th century - THIRTY. And this is the same people.
Putin's Russia is slowly and ingloriously leaving
Finally, to put your mind at ease - I follow the posts in several languages and there really is a disenchantment of all things Russian in the western world. I don't know how it is in China.
You loved Stalin because of the Victory before you knew what a freak he was;
You loved Russia too bros before Putin started killing civilians in Ukraine;
And now you hate everyone - as it has always been ever since the rejected intellectuals like Herzen and Chernyshevsky.
However, I still love Chekhov, Zvyagintsev, Brodsky, Akhmatova, Vysotsky and Shalamov. Oh, and that Moscow brat - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. And I think that Putin's Russia disenchanted everything with its neo-fascism, invading Ukraine and before that Abkhazia.
In the eyes of the world they:
No longer the Winners. There is no Red Army, smeared Hitler, nonsense.
They are now just another neo-imperial attempt that will not succeed.
And this crushes me, because there are still broad masses of people who do not understand it, do not perceive it, information does not reach them. And it is very simple: Putin's Russia is slowly and ingloriously leaving, unless it sends our whole planet to hell in its sad sunset.
And this is the most unbearably sad for many of my acquaintances from Peter and Moscow, which are "one of the two Russias" with which I started. They also tremble for our common life, which depends - to be perfectly honest - on one freaky little thing.
These are my cultural peers. They know that Godot will not come.