Diplomacy at Pushkin House

The other day I met a friend I had not seen in over twenty years.  Insofar as this blog is centered on history and nostalgia, I don’t mind dwelling upon such encounters, even when they aren’t ostensibly related to Russian history.  However, this friend, a pleasant reminder of the distant past, reminded me that I have been enthralled with Russia for longer than I care to admit.  Talking with my friend, I am reminded that Russia has been with me for since early adulthood, if not before. A single dinnertime conversation reminded me of the complex circuitry of obsession.  Long, long ago, this friend had given me a copy of my first Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed.  That book was of course a revelation to me.  At the time, I was stunned that anybody had been able to publish a book like that—full of fire, sexual depravity, and dark nihilism.  The fact that tsarist Russian censors had let the book pass seemed even more incomprehensible, but I suppose conservative aristocrats and radical intellectuals each have different takes on Dostoevsky’s treatment of conspiratorial murder in the service of atheism, nihilism, and revolution.

The evening’s Russian leitmotif doesn’t end there.  This friend had introduced me to Ayn Rand, although she currently denies any affiliation for the Russian objectivist.  At the very least, this friend taught me how to pronounce the thinker’s name, a unique talent in my shady corner of a small Chicago suburb.  Unconvinced that I can stretch my theme even further?  My friend had a brilliant father who invented a popular board game called Diplomacy, a game in which the Russian Empire loomed large.  The game is set in Europe on the eve of the First World War.  In this game, up to seven players attempt to manipulate others into helping to upset the balance of power.  The game depends on the near-equality of all seven Great Powers, which included Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Italy, Turkey, and of course Russia.

As always, Russia was unique.  While all other countries began the game with three armies (or navies as the case may be), Russia alone was granted the privilege or responsibility of fielding four military units.  Looking back, this anomaly seems fitting.  When you played Russia, you were inevitably forced to think in multi-dimensional ways.  Specifically, you became involved in the Balkans and, at the same time, you moved again foes in the Baltic and Northern Europe.  The strategic and symbolic effect of Russia’s position in the game mirrored that of historic Russia, which often balanced forces in these two areas, or balanced forces on its eastern and western flanks.  

The game was always a memorable if exhausting experience.  One played for hours upon hours and often gave up short of a decisive conclusion.  The classical principle of balance of power almost always prevented the game from moving quickly to an end.  If England grew stronger, France and German inevitably combined to overcome the threat before turning against one another.  The Russian position resembled that of all the other powers, except for straddling two fronts.  But its other unique characteristic was its location at the edge of the world.  Although vulnerable on each of its two fronts to potentially superior forces, it faced no enemies to its back and therefore never quite collapsed altogether.  

Thinking about the way Russia was represented on this board game reminds me of the extent to which we think about nations symbolically.  What is Russia?  Russians have of course wrestled with this question for several hundred years.  But even ordinary, armchair gamers are confronted with constructed notions of the Russia nation-state.  In Diplomacy, Russia is a big country,  a threatening country:  by virtue of its four military units, potentially more powerful than any other single country.  In Diplomacy, Russia has a split personality:  its armies and navies are powerful, but hopelessly separated from one another by strategically unfavorable terrain.  Russia is an oriental power, heavily engaged with the other European powers but ultimately unique, situated at the edge of the ideologically constructed zone called Europe.

This notion of a constructed country comes in part from Antoinette Burton, who in turn relies on Benedict Anderson and a host of postcolonial theorists and practitioners.   Burton spends a lot of her time diagnosing Britain.  Who came up with this idea of what Britain means?  Who benefits from this idea?  Who reproduces this idea?  Thinking back on my evening with an old friend, I can’t help but reflect on what Burton might call the contingent or even artificial nature of history.  On a personal level, my idea of Russia, even my love of Russia, was influenced by a hundred different but related circumstances, including a board game, a Russian novel, and the public person of one of Communist Russia’s most famous critics.  If my own definition of Russia has been manufactured in chaotic but not entirely random ways, how should we think about America’s overall perception of Russia and the Russian past?  And why stop there?  Who has gained, and who gains today, by a European or even global thesis that Russia is backward, violent, bipolar, or even soulful?  I’ve spent a lot of time reading about Russia, but much less time thinking about how and why I’ve encountered the texts that I’ve read about Russia. 

I’ll conclude by mentioning one of Antoinette Burton’s books, Archive Stories:  Factions, Fictions, and the Writing of History, a collection of essays by various authors about the strange career of specific historical archives.  Burton’s introductory message reminds us that archives are not themselves ahistorical.  Each archive has a history.  How and why archives were produced and maintained over time, and how they get to us matters a great deal.  If we don’t have Foucault’s understanding of power, which is always already local, and always already contested, we may easily misread the sources, “missing the forest for the trees” as it were. 

Take John Randolph’s essay in Archive Stories, entitled “On the biography of the Bakunin Family Archive.” In Randolph’s essay, we see how Bakunin’s papers have “lived” a long, complicated, and deeply politicized life.  Over time, they have reflected a Romantic cult of sentimentality, supported the Bakunin’s sisters’ intervention in the public sphere, and undergirded Liberal, Bolshevik, and even Thaw political positions.  Looking at the archive as a contested site of evolving political and cultural discursive positions is one way to ensure that the Bakunin papers don’t end up propping up an ahistorical or unexamined myth of Russia as a whole. 

It’s interesting to hear Randolph mix his own personal observations about life in the archive with his broader treatment of the Bakunin papers. For when Randolph reminds us that the women who guard the papers at Pushkin House today are underpaid, we note that the archives not only have a history, but they may have a gender.  At any rate, I remember my own awkward excursion to Pushkin House two years ago.  Not knowing the language, nor even the history of the place, I ventured there as a tourist to the shrine of Russian literary culture.  The goal was mystical, to soak up the religious afterglow of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Bulgakov.

I guess this is the point of Archive Stories, to remind us that such pilgrimages come at a price if they reinforce or reproduce distorted or ultimately harmful views of a people.  For my part, I’ll confess a moment of supreme awkwardness in Pushkin House, a moment that certainly reflects Burton’s concerns about ethnocentric and quasi-imperial attitudes toward the Other.  In the archive, I spoke my own language.  Worse still, I assumed that Russia was in economic free fall, and at one point offered a generous archivist a “tip” for spending so much time walking me through the exhibits.  She refused, of course, but the audacity of my own condescension left me feeling ridiculous.  I too am a part of the history of the Russia “idea.”

This post is dedicated to Alan Calhamer,  inventor of Diplomacy and one of LaGrange Park's finest minds.

Rand and Nietzsche For Kids

My five year old son has been asking me how it is that I have chosen to write a blog about socialism without commenting on the philosophical legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rightly or wrong, the fascist critique of the Revolution was intertwined with an admiration of Nietzsche’s famous aphorisms. What is the relationship between the Superman and socialism? How about the will to power? The tyranny of the weak over the strong? What did the slogan—God is Dead—mean to the socialist project? WWNS, What Would Nietzsche Say about the October Revolution and its aftermath?



Even Francis Peabody, the Christian social theorist referred to in a recent post, felt it necessary to address Nietzsche’s legacy in the context of a full analysis of what he called the Social Question. I tell my son that I’m no philosopher. I’m not equipped to deal with the subject. He replies (our debate is getting old—it often interrupts our attempts to play Good Transformers versus Bad Elmo and his stuffed animal goons) that it’s simply impossible to neglect the twentieth century’s most important philosopher. I don’t get Nietzsche so I don’t really have an opinion. He doesn’t understand that at all.



I recall a moment in my long and sorry graduate school career when I approached a cultural studies professor and asked him whether I might not audit his class. I was a history graduate student but somewhat fraudulently claimed cultural studies as a minor field. The professor (who hailed from the Caribbean and had a deep, Jazz radio sort of voice) invited me to his class, and also to a more mysterious “Foucault Reading Group.” It felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I hadn’t been trained for cultural studies, still less for philosophy.

The conversation among the professor and his graduate students seemed brilliant to me, or perhaps I was merely stupid, or bored silly by years of old fashioned political and social history. A remember one woman with fashionable glasses (and who what other graduate student in Urbana had fashionable glasses?) who dominated the conversation.

When I objected that something she had said wasn’t historically accurate, she coldly and decisively dismissed my comment with something like this: What I’ve said may not be historically true, but if I am speaking of an archeology of knowledge, then wouldn’t it make all the sense in the world? The large circle of her supporters nodded in agreement and I was ashamed.

Inevitably, the Foucault Reading Group turned its attention to one of Foucault’s inspirations, namely Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. I couldn’t keep up with my peers, but I do remember one relevant discussion of Nietzsche’s concept of "resentiment." I recall from this distant time, the term refers to the way weak people will sometimes resent stronger people. It’s a form of bitterness born out of jealousy and a desire to bring people down to their lowest common denominator. It’s related to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as an ideological justification for ensuring that the meek really could inherit the earth, or at least quash anyone who really was worthy of such an honor.

Socialism in this context resembles Ellsworth Toohey (Thank you, Wikipedia) in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. He’s a brilliant but sinister apostle of everything second-rate, incompetent, and ordinary. He resists Howard Roark, the Nietzsche-inspired superman and architect. He knows Roark’s projects are superb, and for precisely this reason he objects to them. As editor, Toohey uses democracy itself (in the form of his readership, who are easily manipulated) to thwart humankind’s natural aristocracy. One can easily imagine that Ayn Rand had Lenin or Trostsky in mind when she created Toohey. The original communist leaders were also brilliant, almost themselves natural aristocrats, who used their genius to implement a system that ruthlessly ensured the triumph of mediocrity.

The socialist project failed, but it made some significant attempts to implement social equality, at least on a theoretical level. In a way that would have horrified Nietzsche, the Communist Party in Russia, as well as China, celebrated the little guy, and move brutally against anyone who had any association with elitism, including priests, aristocrats, kulaks, intellectuals, NEP-men, and former officers, and indeed their families. The system of Soviet mass education and public education were also geared toward leveling out disparities. This was the ultimate expression of currents of modernity that—I would imagine—horrified Nietzsche. Socialism did away with Christianity, but seemed to embody the essence of Christian principles anyway by celebrating the weak at the expense of the strong.