Masha Gessen's books occupy a half a shelf at my house. She's a personal hero of mine. She's an intellectual, historian, activist, and journalist who routinely helps to translate Russia to an American audience. The subject of her books is wide-ranging, and includes monographs on Russia's experiment with a Jewish homeland in the Far East, a feminist punk rock (and protest) group, the fate of the Soviet intelligentsia, Putin, her grandparents' experience in the Soviet Union, and the Boston Marathon bombers' process of radicalization (in both America and various sites of the former Soviet Union). Her latest book, The Future is History, is one of her most ambitious projects to date. Like all of her other books, it is well-researched, well-written, and full of fascinating details about modern Russian history. It also makes an attempt to define totalitarianism and explain its endurance in Russian history.
At times, The Future is History seems overly ambitious. It's difficult to define totalitarianism, explain a long series of political and economic events, and also describe the lived experience of Russians who lived at various stages of the Soviet and post-Soviet experiment. Still, Gessen's ambition is laudable: don't we need to somehow combine a theory of totalitarianism with both an exploration of causality and everyday life? We need to know how the term differs from other anti-democratic political models. We also need to know why people often actively participate in this process. Gessen explores a variety of theories of totalitarianism, including those of Arendt and Fromm, although never firmly settles on one and perhaps can do little more than rehearse previous theories. Indeed, reading Gessen, we are reminded of the genius of Arendt's formulation of problem. In any event, Gessen's exploration of political events and lived experience benefits from the attempt to wrestle with definitions. For her, Putin's state is totalitarianisn not only because it centralizes power, suppresses protests, exploits propaganda, and cheats in elections. Rather, it's totalitarian because it is apolitical and occupies every point on the political spectrum.
Perhaps Gessen's original contribution to theorizing totalitarianism is her examination of sexuality. She believes that the totalitarian state seeks a scapegoat in order to compensate people for their loss of individual rights. This concept recalls anthropologist Girard's theory of sacrifice. He argued that societies use a randomly chosen, blameless victim to sacrifice. The goal is to turn a society in which everyone is fighting everyone into a society where everyone fights only one defenseless victim (or group of victims). But what do people get when they "trade" their rights into the state? Gessen argues that people are seeking greater security and a sense of collective purpose. Although it can feel like you are living "without air," living in totalitarianism can offer a sense of security to people. Perhaps Gessen's last original contribution to the discussion of totalitarianism is her emphasis on the social sciences. She says that the Soviet Union intentionally destroyed almost every method by which Soviet residents could understand themselves. Throughout the Soviet years, men and women were almost incapable of studying modern sociology, history, psychology or other disciplines. Without the resources to truly situate oneself, residents of a totalitarian state are unlikely to be motivated to resist their present conditions.
Showing posts with label Masha Gessen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Masha Gessen. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Sunday, October 22, 2017
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 21st 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
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
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Pussy Riot Continued
Clips from Pussy Riot song lyrics and courtroom speeches, as cited in Masha Gessen's Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot.
"Feminists dispatched on maternity leave."
"Egyptian air is good for the lungs
Turn Red Square into Tahrir"
"LBGT, feminists, stand up to the fatherland!"
"Riot is aborting the system!"
"Fed up with the culture of male hysterics."
"Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist"
"The Church sings the songs of rotten dictators"
"Patriarch Gudnayev believes in Putin
Bitch, better believe in God instead
The Virgin's Girdle can't replace the demos
The Virgin herself is with us in protest!"
"There is a reason Christ was with the fallen women." Nadya
"I think its the prosecution that is affronting Christianity!" Nadya
"Here and now, in this court, we are being desecrated." Nadya
"Pythagoras said that extensive knowledge does not breed wisdom." Nadya
"We serve merely as decorations, as inanimate objects, as bodies delivered to the courtroom." Nadya
"We were sincere in what we said, as we always are." Nadya
"Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will break cement." Nadya
"The inexplicable pleases us, the incomprehensible is our friend." Nadya citing Alexander Vvedensky.
"It happens that two possible rhymes come to mind, a good one and a bad one. I choose the bad one. It is sure to be the right one." Nadya citing the poet Alexander Vvedensky.
"[OBERIUs] paid with their lives to show that they had been right to believe that senselessness and lack of logic expressed their era best." Nadya
"Do you happen to remember why the young Dostoevsky was sentenced to death? He was guilty only of having immersed himself in socialist theory." Nadya
"But our rulers are in a rush to judge, never to show mercy." Nadya
"Freedom is better than unfreedom." Nadya cites Dimtry Anatolyevich Medvedev's famous remark.
"Montaigne expressed it in his Essays in the sixteenth century. He wrote, "It is putting a very high value on one's conjectures, to have a man roasted alive because of them." Nadya
"The regime has will be made to feel ashamed of it for years to come. Its every step has been the quintessence of lawlessness." Nadya
"How did our performance, a small and somewhat absurd act to begin with, balloon into a full-fledged catastrophe? Obviously, this could not have happened in a healthy society." Maria
"A person learns to forget about his liberty starting at a young age." Maria
"I have been in jail for almost six months, and I have realized that jail is Russia in miniature." Maria
"One more thing: the regime is a show that conceals what is in reality chaos. What looks orderly and restrictive is in fact disorganized and inefficient." Maria
"Woe unto the country where simple honesty is perceived as an act of heroism at best and a mental disorder at worst." Maria citing previous dissenter.
"Thus ended our complicated punk adventure at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior" Kat.
"Feminists dispatched on maternity leave."
"Egyptian air is good for the lungs
Turn Red Square into Tahrir"
"LBGT, feminists, stand up to the fatherland!"
"Riot is aborting the system!"
"Fed up with the culture of male hysterics."
"Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist"
"The Church sings the songs of rotten dictators"
"Patriarch Gudnayev believes in Putin
Bitch, better believe in God instead
The Virgin's Girdle can't replace the demos
The Virgin herself is with us in protest!"
"There is a reason Christ was with the fallen women." Nadya
"I think its the prosecution that is affronting Christianity!" Nadya
"Here and now, in this court, we are being desecrated." Nadya
"Pythagoras said that extensive knowledge does not breed wisdom." Nadya
"We serve merely as decorations, as inanimate objects, as bodies delivered to the courtroom." Nadya
"We were sincere in what we said, as we always are." Nadya
"Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will break cement." Nadya
"The inexplicable pleases us, the incomprehensible is our friend." Nadya citing Alexander Vvedensky.
"It happens that two possible rhymes come to mind, a good one and a bad one. I choose the bad one. It is sure to be the right one." Nadya citing the poet Alexander Vvedensky.
"[OBERIUs] paid with their lives to show that they had been right to believe that senselessness and lack of logic expressed their era best." Nadya
"Do you happen to remember why the young Dostoevsky was sentenced to death? He was guilty only of having immersed himself in socialist theory." Nadya
"But our rulers are in a rush to judge, never to show mercy." Nadya
"Freedom is better than unfreedom." Nadya cites Dimtry Anatolyevich Medvedev's famous remark.
"Montaigne expressed it in his Essays in the sixteenth century. He wrote, "It is putting a very high value on one's conjectures, to have a man roasted alive because of them." Nadya
"The regime has will be made to feel ashamed of it for years to come. Its every step has been the quintessence of lawlessness." Nadya
"How did our performance, a small and somewhat absurd act to begin with, balloon into a full-fledged catastrophe? Obviously, this could not have happened in a healthy society." Maria
"A person learns to forget about his liberty starting at a young age." Maria
"I have been in jail for almost six months, and I have realized that jail is Russia in miniature." Maria
"One more thing: the regime is a show that conceals what is in reality chaos. What looks orderly and restrictive is in fact disorganized and inefficient." Maria
"Woe unto the country where simple honesty is perceived as an act of heroism at best and a mental disorder at worst." Maria citing previous dissenter.
"Thus ended our complicated punk adventure at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior" Kat.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Pussy Riot
Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist, has consistently challenged the Putin regime's descent in militarism, xenophobia, authoritarianism and strident homophobia. Although the Russian president currently enjoys enormous popularity at home, his many years in power have helped to undermine Russia's always fragile democratic traditions. Under Putin, the Russian government has systematically dismantled everything associated with liberal democracy, including fair elections, a free press, an independent judiciary, a healthy separation between church and state, and even a basic respect for human rights. Gessen is one of Russia's bravest souls, writing about a regime that has repeatedly ignored the law to attack or perhaps even kill its political and sometimes even cultural opponents. Gessen's book doesn't purport to be dispassionate journalism. Instead, the book is a systematic indictment of Putin's persecution of a group of young punk activists.
Gessen's book is a collective biography of a group of controversial women whose protest in one of Russia's holiest sites brought them both censure and fame. While Gessen doesn't try to portray any of the young women as unblemished victims, she clearly believes their treatment by authorities and jail time, was unfairly harsh to say the least. For the most part, Gessen tries to let the women speak for themselves. This is fortunate for the women, since they all come across as brave, thoughtful, ethical, articulate, and intelligent dissenters. Clearly, Gessen believes that the women of Pussy Riot belong in the same category as Russia's most celebrated political or religious martyrs, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Brodsky, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, and Sinyavsky. In fact, members of Pussy Riot have written courtroom speeches and letter that would could stand up against even Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s justly famous Letter from a Burmingham Jail. Indeed, the strength of Pussy Riots' appeals are that they do what both King and Sinyavsky did in their trials, that is, they alluded to a long and cherished tradition of moral and political thinking. Pussy Riots' protest songs are themselves eloquent artistic expressions of dissent.
Of course, one can't help but sympathize with ordinary Russians, many of whom must have been shocked by Pussy Riots' decision to take over a cathedral in an act of performance art and political protest. After all, how difficult must it be for average folks to understand a message of liberal democracy laced with feminism and punk aestheticism? And how much more difficult must it be for average Russians to make sense of this strange performance when it has almost no access to independent news sources? Ultimately, Pussy Riot members may be lucky to have finally been released from jail at all. Perhaps only the Olympics saved them. The cards were always stacked against them. The Russian government was always fully prepared to employ every means to harrass its most independent citizens, including unorthodox police and judicial actions and, ultimately, cruel and unusual jail sentences.
In the end of course the author, who uses Pussy Riots' own words to make her point, makes her case. As one of the women asserts at her trial, the turth is inherently more powerful than the combined forces of Russian authoritarianism.
Gessen's book is a collective biography of a group of controversial women whose protest in one of Russia's holiest sites brought them both censure and fame. While Gessen doesn't try to portray any of the young women as unblemished victims, she clearly believes their treatment by authorities and jail time, was unfairly harsh to say the least. For the most part, Gessen tries to let the women speak for themselves. This is fortunate for the women, since they all come across as brave, thoughtful, ethical, articulate, and intelligent dissenters. Clearly, Gessen believes that the women of Pussy Riot belong in the same category as Russia's most celebrated political or religious martyrs, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Brodsky, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, and Sinyavsky. In fact, members of Pussy Riot have written courtroom speeches and letter that would could stand up against even Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s justly famous Letter from a Burmingham Jail. Indeed, the strength of Pussy Riots' appeals are that they do what both King and Sinyavsky did in their trials, that is, they alluded to a long and cherished tradition of moral and political thinking. Pussy Riots' protest songs are themselves eloquent artistic expressions of dissent.
Of course, one can't help but sympathize with ordinary Russians, many of whom must have been shocked by Pussy Riots' decision to take over a cathedral in an act of performance art and political protest. After all, how difficult must it be for average folks to understand a message of liberal democracy laced with feminism and punk aestheticism? And how much more difficult must it be for average Russians to make sense of this strange performance when it has almost no access to independent news sources? Ultimately, Pussy Riot members may be lucky to have finally been released from jail at all. Perhaps only the Olympics saved them. The cards were always stacked against them. The Russian government was always fully prepared to employ every means to harrass its most independent citizens, including unorthodox police and judicial actions and, ultimately, cruel and unusual jail sentences.
In the end of course the author, who uses Pussy Riots' own words to make her point, makes her case. As one of the women asserts at her trial, the turth is inherently more powerful than the combined forces of Russian authoritarianism.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Masha Gessen
When I left for my two-week Fulbright visit to Russia, I thought that I'd have a lot to write about. However, my trip came in the midst of mounting tensions related to Russia's seizure of the Crimea and ethnic tensions in the rest of the Ukraine. The diplomatic crisis in the Ukraine overwhelmed me and utterly overshadowed my trip. Where was Russia heading? Why were U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations seemingly worse than they had been than at many points during the Cold War? Although I have always been primarily interested in Russia's early Bolshevik history, my work in Russia, coupled with the Ukrainian situation, pulled me into the present. Who was the man behind the portraits which pervaded Russian academia, and dominated the global headlines?
Upon my return from Russia, I turned toward Masha Gessen's The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. To be honest, I don't know enough about the Russian present to be sure that Gessen is the most objective analysis of Putin's legacy. Although Gessen's journalistic credentials are impeccable, she hardly seems to credit Putin for any sort of political legitimacy. Upon leaving his job, the editor of The Moscow Times excoriated Putin's undemocratic legacy but acknowledged that the autocrat's Moscow was becoming safer, richer, more culturally vibrant, and perhaps more liveable. Even so, Gessen's biography of Putin is a good place to start if one wants to examine the worst aspects of Putin's rise to power. She has done her homework on the man who has helped to eliminate a variety of democratic practices and institutions in order to promote a more stable or at least more powerful Russia. Gessen's Putin is a crude if also wiley man. While it seems unfair grant too much significance to the fact that Putin spent his early years fighting neighborhood toughs in the streets, Gessen provides a great deal of evidence to suggest that Putin's meteoric rise to power was made possible by his status as an active, or at least reserve, KGB officer.
Gessen's overall critique of Putin in power is that he is a ruthless, Soviet-style, autocrat, obsessed with recovering Russia's lost glory and prestige. On the issue of corruptness, Gessen acknowledges that Putin had once made a name for himself by refusing bribes, but then proceeds to say that Putin may now be one of Russia's richest citizens, building a $1 billion vacation house on the Black Sea. Gessen admits that she cannot conclusively prove many of the darkest allegations against Putin, but she seems to several politically-motivated murders, in addition to two incidents of mass terror, either directly or indirectly at Putin's feet. Clearly, Gessen's virulently anti-Putin biography cannot be the last word on either Putin the man or the nation he leads. For many of Gessen's strongest attacks against Russia's strongman aren't contextualized either by Russia's disappointing experience with liberalism, or by the West's imperfect record of respecting the prerogatives of a great power. Even so, in an undemocratic society, an undemocratically elected regime as the burden of proof when it comes to establishing a record for respecting human rights.
In any event, my own travels made me agree with Vladimir Sorokin's recent article on the matter. My strongest impression in Russia came when I went to see the Lubyanka symbol of so much Soviet terror. How could this monument to the secret police's criminal past remain in operation under the auspices of the FSB? In Hungary, the main site of detention and torture is now a museum, appropriately titled The House of Terror. Not so in Russia. Sorokin remembers how the anti-Soviet mob brought down the state of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet Union's secret police. When a few brave members of the crowd scaled the statue to topple the statue of one of the Bolshevik's most repulsive representatives, they were asked to wait patiently for a truck to cart the statue away. The fear was that a falling statue would damage some wiring under the pavement below it. Sorokin recalls how he knew the Russia's emerging revolution was in real trouble. If the Russian people didn't have enough willpower or anger to clarity of historical memory to destroy even this symbol of terror, how would they overthrow the mentality it represented?
Sorokin's perspective corresponds to my own thoughts on the matter. Soviet symbols are everywhere in Russia today, and the cult of personality surrounding Putin closely resembles that of the Soviet apparatchiks who ruled the country for seventy years. Perhaps Russia still awaits the revolution that was promised in 1991 but never really occurred.
Upon my return from Russia, I turned toward Masha Gessen's The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. To be honest, I don't know enough about the Russian present to be sure that Gessen is the most objective analysis of Putin's legacy. Although Gessen's journalistic credentials are impeccable, she hardly seems to credit Putin for any sort of political legitimacy. Upon leaving his job, the editor of The Moscow Times excoriated Putin's undemocratic legacy but acknowledged that the autocrat's Moscow was becoming safer, richer, more culturally vibrant, and perhaps more liveable. Even so, Gessen's biography of Putin is a good place to start if one wants to examine the worst aspects of Putin's rise to power. She has done her homework on the man who has helped to eliminate a variety of democratic practices and institutions in order to promote a more stable or at least more powerful Russia. Gessen's Putin is a crude if also wiley man. While it seems unfair grant too much significance to the fact that Putin spent his early years fighting neighborhood toughs in the streets, Gessen provides a great deal of evidence to suggest that Putin's meteoric rise to power was made possible by his status as an active, or at least reserve, KGB officer.
Gessen's overall critique of Putin in power is that he is a ruthless, Soviet-style, autocrat, obsessed with recovering Russia's lost glory and prestige. On the issue of corruptness, Gessen acknowledges that Putin had once made a name for himself by refusing bribes, but then proceeds to say that Putin may now be one of Russia's richest citizens, building a $1 billion vacation house on the Black Sea. Gessen admits that she cannot conclusively prove many of the darkest allegations against Putin, but she seems to several politically-motivated murders, in addition to two incidents of mass terror, either directly or indirectly at Putin's feet. Clearly, Gessen's virulently anti-Putin biography cannot be the last word on either Putin the man or the nation he leads. For many of Gessen's strongest attacks against Russia's strongman aren't contextualized either by Russia's disappointing experience with liberalism, or by the West's imperfect record of respecting the prerogatives of a great power. Even so, in an undemocratic society, an undemocratically elected regime as the burden of proof when it comes to establishing a record for respecting human rights.
In any event, my own travels made me agree with Vladimir Sorokin's recent article on the matter. My strongest impression in Russia came when I went to see the Lubyanka symbol of so much Soviet terror. How could this monument to the secret police's criminal past remain in operation under the auspices of the FSB? In Hungary, the main site of detention and torture is now a museum, appropriately titled The House of Terror. Not so in Russia. Sorokin remembers how the anti-Soviet mob brought down the state of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet Union's secret police. When a few brave members of the crowd scaled the statue to topple the statue of one of the Bolshevik's most repulsive representatives, they were asked to wait patiently for a truck to cart the statue away. The fear was that a falling statue would damage some wiring under the pavement below it. Sorokin recalls how he knew the Russia's emerging revolution was in real trouble. If the Russian people didn't have enough willpower or anger to clarity of historical memory to destroy even this symbol of terror, how would they overthrow the mentality it represented?
Sorokin's perspective corresponds to my own thoughts on the matter. Soviet symbols are everywhere in Russia today, and the cult of personality surrounding Putin closely resembles that of the Soviet apparatchiks who ruled the country for seventy years. Perhaps Russia still awaits the revolution that was promised in 1991 but never really occurred.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)