Soviet Roulette doesn't often analyze contemporary Russian politics. Yet, if the reader can forgive me a bit of melodrama, Anna Politkovskaya voice cries out from the grave. She was gunned down, killed in the line of duty as so many other Russian journalists have been killed in recent years. Politkovskaya made no pretence to objectivity, but her crusade against Putin's Russia was grounded in integrity, courage, and unrelenting intelligence. Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Acount of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia, which sometimes resembles Bunin's Cursed Days in its apocalyptic but journalistic portrayal of Russia, is a series of staccato bulletins about Russia's amoral and degenerating political climate. Putin is Politkovskaya's bugbear. His brand of politics is authoritarian, cynical, illegal, jingoistic, and corrupt. As a former KGB officer, he represents a return to Russia's sinister past. According to the tough journalist, Putin grossly mismanaged Russia's response to terrorism, plunged Russia into a second brutal war in Chechnya for no good reason, and routinely manipulated the public by pretending to be all things to all people. Only during the election did he learn to properly cross himself, she maintains.
But Putin is no ordinary Russian politician: he and his United Russia party represent the beginning of the end of Russian liberalism and democracy. Under Putin, the press is subverted, the legislative and executive branches of government are merged, human rights are undermined, votes are stolen, truth is obscured, other parties are coerced or bribed to conform to Putin's political strategy, and oligarchs are protected--but only if they bow down to the Putin's administration.
Is this the real Putin? Even in Politkovskaya's book, Putin's political gifts are manifest. He knows how to craft an image of strength and efficiency while simultaneously appealing to Russia's poorer classes. Even so, Politkovskaya's critique is impossible to ignore. Whomever killed her did not silence her: A Russian Diary makes the convincing case that all is not well with Russia and the United Party.
Showing posts with label Bunin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bunin. Show all posts
Friday, August 13, 2010
Friday, October 23, 2009
Conservative Critique of Revolution
The Russian Revolution of 1917 wouldn’t have made sense without the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution defined radical struggle as well as its inevitable byproduct: self-conscious conservatism. The terms, Left and Right, emerged as a result of the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly. So Ivan Bunin’s critique of Red Russia was not a recent invention. Edmund Burke has said it all before in Reflections on the Revolution in France more than hundred years previously.
Burke’s critique of the French Revolution was predicated on a wider critique of the Enlightenment. Although he was a reformer, Burke stood firmly against the notion that society could or should be improved by rationality alone. Burke’s argument is complex, perhaps even a touch defensive, because the case for Revolution was strong. People knew the Ancien Regime was corrupt, abusive, arbitrary, and illogical.
On the face of it, thinking people could no longer accept the principle of autocracy, which allowed the king to rule by divine right with little regard for the welfare of his subjects, the rule of law, or the dictates of reason. The king’s arbitrary power was only the most obviously irrational aspect of pre-revolutionary France. The church ruled vast swathes of land and enjoyed immense privilege, including an exemption from taxation. The aristocracy enjoyed similar rights, which ranged from the right to carry weapons and the right to be executed by a dignified beheading as opposed to a more plebeian hanging.
The French system was rooted in feudalism, which was rooted in local privileges for local aristocrats who exercised enormous influence over the lives of serfs and peasants. The bourgeoisie, while gaining in influence from one decade to the next, were lumped together as a group with everyone in France who had no claim to aristocratic or clerical privilege. In these circumstances, the Revolution had a lot going for it. The new order it promised seemed fairer, smarter, and more efficient, that what it proposed to displace.
Burke rejected the logic of revolution, but respected that logic and made his case without relying on purely religious sentiment. Instead, he maintained that society was a slowly evolving organism that embodied the mystical but important lessons of history. If England’s system of government appeared irrational—with kings, lords, and an uneven electoral franchise—the system had evolved over many generations, contained myriad checks and balances, and worked well enough to preserve the people’s liberty. The conservative approach to politics was applied to Russia. While it might appear that the revolutionaries were overthrowing a destructive autocracy and an exploitative economy, Russian traditions had evolved over time for good reason.
Bunin, for instance, believed that—for all Russia’s flaws--the wisdom of the ages was contained in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Aristocracy, and other traditional institutions. If Old Russia represented a host of injustices, anti-Semitism included, Bunin thought that quick solutions would make things worse—much worse. Quick solutions, based on short-sighted claims to utilitarianism, reason, and universal truth, would result in violence and the triumph of an impoverished conception of humankind. We know now that Bunin turned out to be right: revolutionary Russia did make things worse.
The hubris of revolutionaries helped them to do away with the Tsar, but also with all other institutions that might have put a break on the government’s power, including the Church, the peasant commune, the Duma, independent judiciaries, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, the Jewish Bund, the intelligentsia, the arts, the military, and subject nationalities. Eventually, Stalin even moved against the family as an institution, and private life in general.
Burke’s critique of the French Revolution was predicated on a wider critique of the Enlightenment. Although he was a reformer, Burke stood firmly against the notion that society could or should be improved by rationality alone. Burke’s argument is complex, perhaps even a touch defensive, because the case for Revolution was strong. People knew the Ancien Regime was corrupt, abusive, arbitrary, and illogical.
On the face of it, thinking people could no longer accept the principle of autocracy, which allowed the king to rule by divine right with little regard for the welfare of his subjects, the rule of law, or the dictates of reason. The king’s arbitrary power was only the most obviously irrational aspect of pre-revolutionary France. The church ruled vast swathes of land and enjoyed immense privilege, including an exemption from taxation. The aristocracy enjoyed similar rights, which ranged from the right to carry weapons and the right to be executed by a dignified beheading as opposed to a more plebeian hanging.
The French system was rooted in feudalism, which was rooted in local privileges for local aristocrats who exercised enormous influence over the lives of serfs and peasants. The bourgeoisie, while gaining in influence from one decade to the next, were lumped together as a group with everyone in France who had no claim to aristocratic or clerical privilege. In these circumstances, the Revolution had a lot going for it. The new order it promised seemed fairer, smarter, and more efficient, that what it proposed to displace.
Burke rejected the logic of revolution, but respected that logic and made his case without relying on purely religious sentiment. Instead, he maintained that society was a slowly evolving organism that embodied the mystical but important lessons of history. If England’s system of government appeared irrational—with kings, lords, and an uneven electoral franchise—the system had evolved over many generations, contained myriad checks and balances, and worked well enough to preserve the people’s liberty. The conservative approach to politics was applied to Russia. While it might appear that the revolutionaries were overthrowing a destructive autocracy and an exploitative economy, Russian traditions had evolved over time for good reason.
Bunin, for instance, believed that—for all Russia’s flaws--the wisdom of the ages was contained in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Aristocracy, and other traditional institutions. If Old Russia represented a host of injustices, anti-Semitism included, Bunin thought that quick solutions would make things worse—much worse. Quick solutions, based on short-sighted claims to utilitarianism, reason, and universal truth, would result in violence and the triumph of an impoverished conception of humankind. We know now that Bunin turned out to be right: revolutionary Russia did make things worse.
The hubris of revolutionaries helped them to do away with the Tsar, but also with all other institutions that might have put a break on the government’s power, including the Church, the peasant commune, the Duma, independent judiciaries, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, the Jewish Bund, the intelligentsia, the arts, the military, and subject nationalities. Eventually, Stalin even moved against the family as an institution, and private life in general.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Deep Russian Thoughts a la Jack Handey
This post is a work in progress. I'll be adding favorite quotations related to Russia and the Soviet Union here from time to time.
Nina Berberova,from Alexsander Blok: A Life. “The history of Russia might be the evolution of boredom, transformed over centuries in its vast spaces, under the too-grey sky, into passivity, heavy cruelty, and laziness.”
Ivan Bunin. Quoting Chekhov. "You'll see, when Tolstoy dies, everything will go to the dogs." "You mean literature?" "Everything. Literature included."
Nabokov. The Gift. Koncheyev talking to Godunov-Cherdyntsev in imagined scene. “Don’t forget that the whole of Russian literature is the literature of one century and, after the most lenient eliminations, takes up no more than three to three and a half thousand printed sheets, and scarcely one half of this is worthy of the bookshelf, to say nothing of the bedside table. With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.”
Aleksander Blok. "What is darker wins."
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Nabokov: First Phase of Exile
Lolita—book or movie—seems quintessentially American in many ways. It’s about suburbia, modernity, motels, and road trips. But its hero is vaguely European, and its author is precisely Russian. The first of half of the massive Nabokov biography--Brian Boyd's Vladamir Nabokov: the Russian Years--is dedicated to the Russian years, including his early years in Russia as well as exile in the White Russian Diaspora.
The book spends too much time analyzing the long series of Nabokov’s Russian language novels, but the life is exceptional in every respect. The book begins with a description of Nabokov’s wealth, supremely self-confident, courageous father—who became a popular February Revolution politician until the October Revolution forced him to become one of the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Diaspora. In exile, Nabokov Senior was killed defending another politician during an assassination attempt. Nabokov Junior, who worshiped the memory of his father, didn’t take up the political cause. He didn’t follow in his political footsteps. Instead, he became poet and novelist, eventually the equal of Ivan Bunin.
The magic of Nabokov—aside from the art—stems from his acute intelligence, mastery of Russian as well as English, aristocratic inheritance, love of logic and language, and self-confidence. The paradox is that Nabokov carried the cultural legacy of Russia’s old world with him but also epitomized Western modernity. Of course, Russian cultural modernity predated the revolution. And literary modernism is traditionally associated with an obsession with the past, Proust’s Temps Perdu. So Nabokov’s nostalgia was, in the end, perfectly compatible with innovative writing, modernism, and perhaps even post-modernism. And the life he led, which included displacement, diaspora, exile, multiculturalism, and stints in Petersburg, the Crimea, Berlin, Prague, London, Paris, and America--hints at the affinities between post-modern biography and post-modern literary trends.
The book spends too much time analyzing the long series of Nabokov’s Russian language novels, but the life is exceptional in every respect. The book begins with a description of Nabokov’s wealth, supremely self-confident, courageous father—who became a popular February Revolution politician until the October Revolution forced him to become one of the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Diaspora. In exile, Nabokov Senior was killed defending another politician during an assassination attempt. Nabokov Junior, who worshiped the memory of his father, didn’t take up the political cause. He didn’t follow in his political footsteps. Instead, he became poet and novelist, eventually the equal of Ivan Bunin.
The magic of Nabokov—aside from the art—stems from his acute intelligence, mastery of Russian as well as English, aristocratic inheritance, love of logic and language, and self-confidence. The paradox is that Nabokov carried the cultural legacy of Russia’s old world with him but also epitomized Western modernity. Of course, Russian cultural modernity predated the revolution. And literary modernism is traditionally associated with an obsession with the past, Proust’s Temps Perdu. So Nabokov’s nostalgia was, in the end, perfectly compatible with innovative writing, modernism, and perhaps even post-modernism. And the life he led, which included displacement, diaspora, exile, multiculturalism, and stints in Petersburg, the Crimea, Berlin, Prague, London, Paris, and America--hints at the affinities between post-modern biography and post-modern literary trends.
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