Masha Gessen on Empire and Terrorism

Massa Gessen has become something of a personal hero for me.  She’s a prolific Russian-American (or perhaps American-Russian) who demonstrates indefatigable personal courage with every new literary, historical or journalistic project she takes on.  She’s a champion of civil rights and a worthy inheritor of the rich moral heritage of the Russian intelligentsia.  Her choice of investigative projects reveals her insatiable curiosity, broad knowledge of Russian culture, and firm commitment to democratic politics.  This blog has reviewed a variety of her books, including ones that analyze Putin, the political protest band, Pussy Riot, and the fate of the Russian intelligentsia.   Gessen has a new book out that seems to provide readers with an overview of Russia’s current anti-democratic moment, but before I tackle that book I’ll just mention her small gem, The Brothers:  The Road to an American Tragedy.  In this short book, Gessen writes a sort of textbook on 21^st century terrorism.  

As a student of true crime fiction, I admire Gessen’s contribution to this sometimes-underrated literary genre.  In the tradition of those who, like Capote or Mailer, have move beyond the inhuman elements of vicious crime in order to uncover something wonderfully precious about human nature, Gessen explores the complex, unstable, intercontinental lives of the Boston Marathon bombers.  As an immigrant to America with persistent connections to her native land, and a civil rights activist who has done some work analyzing multiple Chechnya catastrophes, Messen is well placed to tell these stories.  Gessen’s theme is that the genesis of terrorism cannot be located in a strange and unfamiliar location overseas.  In fact, the bombers’ commitment to violence didn’t simple arise as a result of their contact with violent jihadists in Chechnya.   The Boston Bombers were not merely passive recipients of a violent overseas radical ideology. Indeed, Gessen asserts that the elder brother, a man in contact with several strains of American liberalism, can be said to have attempted to radicalize his overseas friends and family.  

To be sure, Gessen does not offer any easy explanations for the violent ideology of her subjects.  Instead, she shows how truly global terrorist ideologies can be.  When Stalin first displaced the residents of Chechnya to Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan, he set in motion a truly international phenomenon.  Indeed, even before Stalin, Russian imperialism meant that local patterns of violence at the periphery of the Russian empire would eventually be replicated at the centers of imperial power, including Moscow.  Of course, Russia’s recent wars in Chechnya are even more directly related to the birth of a global jihadist creed.  With Grozny transformed into one of the most war-torn cities on the planet, its residents would naturally flee to every corner of the earth, including many Russian and American cities. 

The temptation is to see this Chechnya diaspora as bearing responsibility for the violence that was inflicted on Chechnya, but Gessen is at pains to demonstrate that the global ideology of imperialism undergirds the global ideology of Muslim extremism.  In fact, Gessen also dissects America’s strains of imperialism, manifested in anti-Muslim 911 sentiment and governmental overreach.  Her point is to demonstrate that any international ideology of violence emanating from the metropolis, whether it originates in Moscow or Washington, D.C., is likely to breed its inverse creed on the peripheries of empire.  Gessen’s book suggests something powerful about the impact of war and dislocation and imperial power on vulnerable men and women.  But the book also suggests how vulnerable all immigrants are as they struggle to remake their worlds in the midst of a foreign and disorienting culture.  

As an immigrant herself, Gessen seems to instinctively understand that although the overwhelming number of immigrants successfully overcomes every barrier to assimilation, they often do so only after great psychological effort.  In any case, it’s interesting to see that the Boston bombers were somehow both extremely isolated by their attachment to a peripheral culture (e.g., Gessen points out that a girl could be subject to an honor killing for holding hands with a boy from a different ethnic group), and thoroughly immersed in global culture (e.g., they routinely discussed politics with their Cambridge-liberal landlady, spoke multiple languages, and sometimes travelled to visit far-flung relatives).  

Messen’s book reminds me of another book that examines the Janus-head of immigration, the French Intifada.  In this book, the author notes that somehow Tunisian, Moroccan, and Algerian familiarity with French culture easily coexists with its opposite: Antipathy for French racism and colonial attitudes. Like the Boston Bombers, French residents and citizens of North African decent are products of a long history of colonial violence and imperial power in their homelands.  Whether in France, America, or Russia, terrorism is in a sense the almost inevitable reflection of the truly global scale of empire.  This isn’t to lay blame for terrorism on its victims, but only to do as historian of empire Antoinette Burton suggests and analyz   

Sheets' 8 Pieces of Empire

"A return to these horrors was unthinkable, save for the fact that nothing in Russia was unthinkable." Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind.

Lawrence Scott Sheets was a foreign correspondent whose beat somehow became the whole of the former Soviet Union. As such, Sheets had a unique vantage point over the disintegration of the "prison of nations." Over and over again, Sheets visited corners of the former empire which were awash in internecine violence. Sheets' account of the conflagration of the last twenty years, entitled 8 Pieces of Empire: a 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse, isn't overly theoretical: Sheets offers neither historical backdrop nor overarching explanation of two decades of murder, mayhem, militarism, neocolonialism, political fraud, religious extremism, and ethnic anarchy. On the other hand, Sheets' deeply personal, war correspondent approach to the topic of post-Soviet history sheds invaluable light on the horror of the Soviet implosion.

Sheets claims that his book deliberately avoids meta-narrative. That is to say, he argues that if one seeks to tell a single story about the Soviet Union's collapse and political aftermath, one has already missed the main point about the former Soviet Union, and that is that the Empire was fragmenting into many more than the "eight" pieces. Although we can't ultimately afford to do without a unifying theory of post-communist collapse, Sheets' fast-moving, journalistic descriptions of widely discrepant ethnic conflicts gives readers a sense of both the complexity and horror of the events he describes. In fact, Sheets' journalistic forays to far-flung ethnic battlefields is in many respects a useful corrective to the existing meta-narrative of Russia's journey through financial and political chaos into the coercive but putatively stable present of Putin and Medvedev.

What are Sheets' 8 pieces of empire? They include the Russian mainland (St. Petersburg in particular), Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Sakhalin Island, and Afghanistan, but almost all of these fragments of empire threaten to splinter (or have already splintered) into even small pieces. The irony of the book's title is that this isn't really a tale of empire or even geopolitics at all, but rather a very personal examination of one incredibly brave war journalist's decent into a wide variety of humanitarian hells. Over and over again, Sheets put himself in harm's way in order to show the world how bad things had gotten in remote areas of the world.

Chechnya, of course, was the worst place of all. In Chechnya, there were no winners. Grozny, like the rest of the country, was almost completed destroyed by two waves of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Almost nothing, either physical or psychological, was left standing. Kidnapping became endemic. Terrorist attacks, both inside and outside of Chechnya, commonplace. Over time, the staunchest rebels forgot seemed to forget what they were fighting for, other than bloody revenge. Indeed, the only semblance of a moral code in the country now seems to belong to the radical Islamic groups. Having overthrown any hint of secularism or traditional Sufism, the radical Islamic groups advocate Sharia law (which ironically has been implemented by Moscow's puppet government) and jihad in the name of some future pan-Central Asia caliphate.

The saddest element of Sheets' life as a reporter has surely been the number of personal friends, professional colleagues, and sources he has lost over the past twenty years. The juxtaposition of personal and public loss is extraordinarily depressing. Sheets often hints at the psychic toll of these losses, even suggesting that he had to leave field journalism as a result of these numerous traumas, but it is probably impossible to explain how these senseless deaths have ultimately changed him. We may or may not know how the accidental or even deliberate death of a single friend or relative can irrevocably change us. How can we approximate the impact of terrorism, torture, air attacks, and genocide on the soul of the reporter who so often "got there first" to report the news back to an indifferent West?

As a memoir of political reportage, the book makes few political arguments. Sheets has somehow maintained an incredible posture of objectivity in the midst of his travels. While he's not shy about pointing out the faults of an Uzbek dictator or Georgian politician, he seldom offers a prescription to end the chaos. As a reporter rather than a public policy expert, one cannot blame him for doing his job. However, Sheets' brief description of the Soviet and early American experience in Afghanistan is an implicit indictment of American foreign policy. How is that America, then or today, could have so completely overlooked the Soviet experience in that country? Like Chechnya, Afghanistan is unconquerable. As Sheets points out, even some of our closest allies in the country have changed sides countless times over the past few decades. And whatever else we know about the country, it is no oversimplification or ahistorical stereotype to assume that Afghans will go on fighting outsiders, and one another, for many, many more years to come.

"A Bacchanalia of (Russian) Indifference"

Tony Wood reviewed Anna Politkovskaya's Nothing but the Truth: Selected Dispatches in the 24 June 2010 issue of the London Review of Books. Politkovskaya was killed by an unknown assailant or assailants on 7 October 2006 but wrote over 500 articles or editorials in Novaya Gazeta and other journals between 1999 and her death. Most, but not all, of these articles focused on the Russian assault on Chechnya, which she believed had killed countless innocent civilians and poisoned the Russian state. As we know, Politkovskaya was a tenacious reporter whose brave criticism put her life in danger on more than one occasion. She regularly received death threats and was probably poisoned in 2004 according to Tony Wood. The book, Nothing But the Truth, is part of a much larger work that was published in Russia back in 2007. It was filled with tribute articles, reports, testimony, and lots and lots of pieces about Chechnya. In Politkovskaya's opinion, Chechnya was a national disgrace that dishonored the country "from top to bottom."

Who was Polikovskaya? Tony Wood briefly describes her life story. Born in New York in 1968 as a result of her Ukrainian father's translator assignment in the UN, Polikovskaya grew up comfortably in Moscow and eventually studied journalism at Moscow State University. But, in her own words, she became a woman "who observed the Soviet Union as its most disgraceful in the 1970s and 1980s."

Politkovskaya's first job was at Izvestia. Her husband, also a journalist, was another intrepid reporter and, as Wood tells us, was among the first journalists to arrive at the scene of Chernobyl. The two eventually divorced because, in her laconic telling of it, "he partied a lot. Then he left." Of course, Polikovskaya's incorruptible, humane approach to journalism soon brought her some measure of national and even international fame and indeed made her one of Putin's main opponents.

Politkovskaya's reputation as a writer was made by Chechnya. Her stories were profoundly humane, often focusing of the impact of the war on its most vulnerable victims. She was, said one observer quoted by Wood, "like a person without skin, receiving all the signals of misery from everyone." If this heroic woman had blind spots, Wood suggests these were related to Yeltin's grotesque flaws--he bombed the Duma, invaded Chechnya before Putin ever did, chanelled money into the hands of friends, and sold out the country to oligarchs for instance--and the first war in Chechnya, which she failed to condemn.

Of course, Russians as well as Chechnya were suffering mightily during the period in which Politkovskaya wrote. The country had a ruinous social welfare and healthcare system and Wood says that 40 percent of the population was living in poverty. The murder rate was many, many times higher than it was in Western countries such as France and Germany. Fifty-two journalists were killed since 1992 and 80 or 90 of them are assaulted each year. Their vulnerability stemmed from the country's runaway corruption and lack of any other checks to this corruption save independent journalism. So Politkovskaya, martyr of a more humane Russia, had a terrifying job but certainly no lack of materials to write about.

Truth in Grozny

Alexander Sokurov's simple but moving Russian film, Aleksandra, succeeds as a result of the strength of the leading actress, Galina Vishnevskay, who, according to a New York Times' film review, happens to be Rostropovich's wife. Galina Vishnevskay, a former opera star in her own right, joined her dissident husband in opposition to Soviet political and cultural policy and was eventually exiled for her troubles.

Vishnevskay plays a wizened grandmother who visits her officer grandson in Chechnya for ambiguous reasons. Sukorov is subtle enough to allow his leading lady to explore the war zone at her own pace, making human connections to her grandson, anonymous solders, and native Chechens, some of whom hang out listlessly outside of the Grozny military barracks, waiting for something that will surely never come.

The grandmother is strong, haughty, calm, and open to existential enlightenment if not already experienced it. Despite her age, she seems to have a capacity to fully engage everyone and everything she encounters. At one point, she picks up her son's automatic weapon and aims it, betraying not even a trace of diffidence or doubt about its deadly nature. At another point, she befriends Chechen women in the marketplace. Clearly, this is a woman with few illusions about life, a woman who is somehow "beyond good and evil," neither supportive of the war effort nor clearly opposed to it. Is her fatalism a result of her age? Does she hail from a military family? The film offers few answers. As the New York Times film review reminds us, we don't know why she has come to Chechnya. As a Russian, a woman, and an elderly person, she is an outsider in almost every respect. But her status as an outsider doesn't phase her. She is fearless, and elemental. This quality is demonstrated by her willingness to wait in trains or sit in dirt despite the efforts of the young soldiers to accomodate her.

In the end, Sokurov, director of the Russian Ark and many other films, has made a subtle film about a quintessentially Russian woman who fearlessly seeks the truth. While Sokurov doesn't attempt to explain the nature of that truth for his Russian viewers, he seems to be making the important point that this Russian truth can best be located in Grozny, Chechnya. And who can argue with that?

Today's Cursed Days

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.