Russia's Past, Present, and Future: Day of the Oprichnik

Fiction often captures the essence of an historical moment more effectively than academic analysis or sophisticated reportage.  Certainly Vladimir Sorokin's novella, The Queue, seemed to tell us everything that we needed to know about everyday life in the Soviet Union.  Behind the mask of ideology, propaganda, socialist economic theory, and militarism, ordinary Russians,and especially ordinary Russian women, waited endlessly in line for basic commodities. It mattered little what stores had to offer, people were willing to spend half the day in the street in the vague hope that they would be granted access to some scarce if banal commodity.  Often, Russian men and women entered lines without even knowing what product they would find, if anything, when they finally arrived at the front of the line.  The Soviet queue was in fact not only a fact of quotidian existence, it was a metaphor for the soullessness of the whole Soviet project:  what, after all, were socialist peoples waiting for? Even if they had solved the basic problem of distribution, what could they expect out of a socialist life?

If Sorokin accurately depicts at least one key aspect of Soviet life in The Queue, he's done an even better job of portraying post-Soviet life in Day of the Oprichnik, a science-fiction novel about a suspiciously familiar Russian society with violent, xenophobic, and autocratic tendencies.  The novel's narrator is a key member of the autocrat's quasi-legal enforcement team.  His job is to celebrate violence, participate in state-sanctioned corruption, and, most importantly, to terrorize private citizens. The narrator, a futuristic version of one of Ivan the Terrible's dreaded oprichniks, lives the energetic life of any state-empowered sociopath.  He partakes in rape, murder, shady deals, communal debauchery, and sycophantic adulation of the head of state. 

Day of the Oprichnik exaggerates many of the worst aspects of Putin's Russia.  For instance, just as Russia has turned its back on the United States and the European Union, the leaders of the Sorokin's Russia have physically cut themselves off from the West (and South) by means of a gigantic wall.  The breakdown of Russia's relationship with the West is accompanied by a corresponding economic and technological reliance on China, which, while perhaps a symptom of the author's own sinophobia, certainly seems to have anticipated today's geopolitical realities.   

The interesting thing about Sorokin's novel is that it doesn't merely ridicule Putin's Russia.  Instead, it conflates all of Russia's worst historical epochs.  For the narrator seems to be living with many of the realities of at least three (and possibly more) different historical situations, including the reigns of such dictatorial leaders as Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, and Putin.  Of course, to put Putin in the company of men like Ivan the Terrible and Stalin is to further vilify him.  In any case, the most frightening thing about the narrator's bloodthirsty pursuits, is that they don't seem out of place in any of these historical eras.  When we witness the protagonist's freewheeling ability to operate outside of the law in service of an autocrat, we know that he might have been at home at almost any time in Russia's long history.  If we note that oprichnik is in violent competition with his peers for the favor of the tsar of the future, we know that Stalin's henchmen were equally willing to kill one another to curry favor with their master.  

Thus Day of the Oprichnik depicts a timeless Russia, but that Russia is victim to a political regime that seems to combine the worst elements of both authoritarianism and lawlessness.  On the one hand, the country's political life clearly revolves around a central figure, the tsar or his modern day successors.  Ordinarily, extreme centralization has at least some benefits:  if men and women suffer from oppression, or live in fear, the state does at least offer a degree of political stability and order.  However, in Russia, the autocratic system of government coexists with, or perhaps depends upon, a certain form of political anarchy. The paradox is this:  the state appears all-powerful, but in reality it is founded upon profound uncertainty and insecurity.  To prop itself up, the government fosters a climate of radical and seemingly random terror at almost all levels of society.  Why did Ivan the Terrible carve out an empire within an empire and put the two at odds with one another?   What was the purpose of Stalin's unprecedented purges of even his closest confidants?  Why does Putin imprison a few of Russia's most powerful subjects from time to time?  This seemingly arbitrary violence is in fact a symptom of Russia's longstanding tradition of wedding bureaucratic centralization with state-sanctioned brigandage, as Sorokin's novel of the future suggests.

If Sorokin's Russia has any saving grace, it is only the Russian literary tradition.  For even in a country with longstanding traditions of corruption, political violence, censorship, anti-semitism, xenophobia, and autocracy, the country hasn't completely forgotten about Russia's great humanistic tradition.  Even the narrator has some familiarity with authors such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.  This ineradicable memory of literary tradition seems to be a common theme of many Russian science fiction authors.  In Tatyana Tolstaya book, The Slynx, for instance, a degraded, post-apocalyptic humanity forgets almost every basic element of civilization but can't, apparently, ever forget the names of Russia's most famous authors. Whether authors such as Sorokin or Tolstaya believe the Russian classics will ultimately redeem Russian barbarism is an open question.  For both authors, the names of Russia's great authors survive, but as a form of gibberish.  On the other hand, Sorokin's characters go out of their way to blaspheme the classics, by burning them for example.  But why burn the classics if not out of a fear that these classics do in fact contain some forgotten recipe for humanism in an age of totalitarianism and "perverted science."

Some favorite quotes from the book:

"The Russian people aren't easy to work with.  But God hasn't given us any other people."

"The Russian classics are helpful to the state."

"I look at the fire.  And see The Idiot and Anna Karenina in flames.  I look at the fire.  And see The Idiot and Anna Karenina in flames.  I

"This is our lane.  The government's.  As long as I live and serve the state, I will drive in it."

"Can a foreign oven really bake savory pies like a Russian oven?"

"Just understand, you idiot, we're gaurds.  We have to keep our minds cold and our hearts pure."

"His majesty can't stand cusswords."

"...opponents began to crawl out of the cracks like noxious centipedes.  A truly great idea breeds great resistance.  Our state has always had enemies inside and out, but the battle was never so intense as during the period of Holy Russia's Revival."

"Without you, Your Majesty, nothing works."

"His Majesty awakened in us not simply pride in our country, but compassion for her painful past.  Three Russian children stand streching theird hands out to us from the past of an insulted and injured country.  And we cannot help them at all."

"I blame my brain:  I didn't catch on to an obvious thing!  But then, my education was in the humanities..."

"I tune in to the West.  It's a real stronghold of anti-Russian subversion.  Like slimy reputles in a cesspool, enemy voices team..."

"His Majesty's father, the late Nikolai Platonovich, had a good idea:  liquidate all the foreign supermarkets and replace them with Russian kiosks.  And put two types of each thing in every kiosk, so the people have a choice.  A wise decision, profound.   Because our God-bearing people should choose from two things, not from three or thirty-three."

"Well, this sort of thing isn't for us to decide, but for His Majesty.  From the Kremlin His Majesty sees the people better, they're more visible...His Majest sees everything, hears everything.  He knows who needs what."

"The Kremlin is glorious in clear weather!  It glows.  The Palace of the Russian Government blinds the eyes, it takes your breath away."

"I know all these authors well.  They're famous, distinquished.  Carressed by the love of the people and His Majesty."

""Full and complete transparency,"" as His Majesty says.  And thank God:  We're in our own homeland, nothing to be shy about."

Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx

"No one likes Jackal Demianich much. Who could like a Murza?  Maybe his woman, and, well,  maybe his little kids, but no one else.  That's not what a Murza is there for, to like or not."

"She batted her lone eye."

"Who needs her, we thought, that little old mean-spirited, communal-apartment crone..."

"The squeals, shouts, laughing--you could piss in your pants its so much fun.  Then you light the candles and take a look at the damage.  There's even more laughter then:  just a few minutes ago Zinovy had an eye--now he doesn't!"

"Don't you sometimes think thoughts like:  We should figure out who's to blame, and crush him or stick his head in a barrel?"

"Maybe that's what he should do:  get married.  So what if she has claws?  Claws can be clipped.  You can clip them...That's not the point....Man isn't without defects."

Tatyana Tolstoya's novel, The Slynx, is set in a post-apocalyptic world of inequality and scarcity. In this future Russian world, mutant humans eat mice, steal from one another, and avoid most forms of critical thinking.  A great event known as The Blast eliminated almost all cultural and technological artifacts.  Books are almost unknown, although a great leader, Fyodor Kuzmuch, pretends to have invented whatever poetry and prose his minions can unearth.  The book reminds me of another great work of fantasy, A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I recall reading about twenty years ago.  In both books humanity has all but forgotten the written word.  The analogy on both occasions is the Middle Ages, where monks sometimes strove to preserve literacy, Latin, Christianity, and a Greco-Roman heritage by carefully copying manuscripts in the midst of a sea of barbarity, superstition, and warfare.  

Tolstaya's portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world akin to feudalism naturally also reminds one of Russia's 70-year experience under Communism, where a few poets, novelists, and dissidents sometimes seemed to be acting as the sole preservers of humanism and freedom.  As Lev Tolstoy's great grand niece, the author was well-placed to regret the absence of the robust cultural and humanitarian legacy of the pre-Bolshevik intelligentsia. 

 In Tolstaya's future, the world resembles Soviet society in at least a few particulars.  First, human society, even its degenerated form, is organized under the aegis of a great leader who, much like Stalin, inspires a personality cult and maintains a personal interest in literature.  Second, men and women are organized into classes, just as Soviet society always was if one could see past the rhetoric of socialism.  

In the land of the mysterious and terrifying Slynx, the state's primary defenders are the "murzas," with another group, the sanitorians, functioning as a primitive example of the genus, secret police.  The common folk, or golubushka, are of course strictly forbidden from participating in what they themselves often deride as "freethinking."  But commoners aren't quite at the bottom of the food chain.  Tolstaya's futuristic world includes serfs, or subhumans, severely deformed by mutation and serving others in the most menial capacities.  Most interestingly, Tolstaya has dreamed up a very small group of people called "oldeners" who not only survived the Blast but also gained from that terrible event the ability to survive indefinitely, barring some freak and deadly mishap.  Undoubtedly the author didn't intend to create a replica of Soviet society, but the "oldeners" are certainly redolent of those Soviet citizens who might have remembered pre-Soviet values, whether derived from Christianity, Islam, or democratic liberalism.   

The world of the Slynx reminds one of Soviet Russia, but it's also possible to think of pre-revolutionary Russia or indeed post-revolutionary Russia.  For 19th century Russia was a place in which ignorance, superstition, class exploitation, and illiteracy thrived.  The barbaric state of Russia was of course what made Bolshevik Russia possible in the first place.  So in this sense Tolstaya's dead world refers to Russia's perennial problem.  Although a small minority of Russia's poets, novelists, dissenters, and intellectuals have always aspired to participate in a more enlightened society, these people are usually few and far between, as rare in some ways as Tolstaya's oldeners.  Of course, Tolstaya's age of darkness doesn't depict a total absence of hope for a better future.  However badly interpreted by literal-minded, mice-eating men and women, the poems survive, even Pushkin's hallowed name survives.  

Russian Dreams

All revolutions are alike.  In revolutionary situations, the ruling classes always approach the cataclysm of social ferment without deigning to compromise with society's discontents.  Why should this be so?  Tatyana Tolstaya once stated the obvious:  revolutions don't happen in paradise.  She meant, of course, that radicals are only ever able to overthrow a government when its wickedness is compounded by general misery.  Governments that are overthrown by revolution aren't always as stupid as we make them out to be.

Nicholas II, though no political genius, wasn't necessarily as stupid as he is generally made out to be.  The problem for Nicholas II was that the public in early twentieth century Russia had become so radical that its potential empowerment via constitutionalism was a truly terrifying prospect-- not only to the tsar, the royal family, and aristocratic society, but to the governing classes in general.

One can understand the point more fully by examining a recent revolution such as the one that took place in Tunisia two years ago.  One could well wonder why the ousted president never bothered to offer his people a measure of liberalism and a dash of democracy, if only to stave off violent upheaval.  And yet we see today that the gap between the Tunisian demos and the ruling classes had become wide indeed.  Religious zealots easily won the country's recent elections, and their chances for winning the country's next elections go up in direct proportion to their radicalism.

Here again is the evidence of the chasm that sometimes prevents otherwise reasonable leaders from taking steps to gradually reform a political system in advance of revolutionary tumult.  There's a tautology at work here.  Like Tolstaya said, people revolt because they find the political situation revolting.  And others resist surrendering power peacefully whenever they perceive that their political opponents won't accept such a surrender gracefully.  Whoever finds a way out of this political impasse will have solved a major social problem.

So Russians revolted because Russian leaders feared that they were likely to revolt.  What made Russia the kind of place that couldn't be reformed, only overturned?  It's hard to say.  Most historians point to the absence of a well-developed bourgeoisie, although a few venture to argue that Russians were affected by the antidemocratic legacy of the tatars or the utopian dreams of Slavophile or socialist idealists.  Should we look to an economic explanation for Russian exceptionalism or except the idea that the the Russian soul inevitably eschews the banality of constitutional government?

What is Russia anyhow?  What are Russians?  In some ways, Russia is a country of cataclysm, a place where, to quote Tolstaya again, every historical moment feels like "a Lisbon earthquake." It's sad but Russia is a tale that seemingly can't be told without catastrophe.  Take Andrei Makine's novel, Dreams of my Russian Summers.  Like most novels who venture to depict Russia, Makine's Russia is filled with tragedy.  It's not his fault really.  If you're writing a twentieth century story about Russia, and don't make mention of the Revolution of 1905, World War I, the Civil War, collectivization, famine, brutal industrialization, Stalin's Purges, the gulag, and World War II, you've missed something, haven't you?  Russia wouldn't be Russia without war and rupture and apocalypse.

In Makine's wonderful book, the narrator is tied to two countries:  France and Russia.  What's interesting is that the narrator's version of France is bound up with its greatest authors, especially Proust, Balzac, Flaubert, and Hugo.  The narrator's Russia isn't so literary.  This Russia is wrapped up in war, industrialization, police powers, and empire.  It's great men are Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, and not really Tolstoy or other Russian authors.  In Dreams of my Russian Summers, the narrator's poetical vision of France is wonderfully at odds with the mundane brutality of everyday communism.

The difference between Republic France and Communist Russia ought to be striking:  the narrator's preference for France over Russia would be logical enough under any circumstances.  But it strikes me that this is one reason why people generally become obsessed with other countries.  When we read about another country, we're free to construct an imaginary world, or what the author referred to as an Atlantis.

I'm often struck by the mighty divide that exists between Putin's Russia and the Russia of my dreams.  My Russia consists of a long litany of famous names.  And in my childish imagination, all that one really has to do is decide which name is the best, which the second best, and so on.  I've gone so far as to daydream about my top ten Russian authors.  It's a silly exercise, more befitting a botanist or zoologist than a student of literature, but I do it anyhow.  I'm not original in constructing this list.  I'd put the sequence thus:  Tolstoy;  Dostoyevsky;  Chekhov;  Gogol;  Bulgakov;  Nabokov;  Solzhenitsyn; Pushkin;  Turganev;  Babel;  Saltykov-Shchredrin;  Platonov;  Serge;  Gorky;  Grossman;  Lermontov;  Alexei Tolstoy; Shklovsky; Tatyana Tolstaya; Berberova;  Chukovskaya;  Bely; Zoshchenko; Pautovsky; et cetera and so on. I have a separate list for Russian poets of course.

The point is that Makine gets at the nature of obsession by juxtaposing France and Russia, and making the comparison less about cultural hybridity and more about longing, imagination, dreams, nostalgia, and escapism.

The Wit and Wisdom of Tatyana Tolstaya

I've recently discovered that Alexei Tolstoy is much better than his reputation would you to believe.  His Peter the Great, for example, is filled with adventure, historical sensitivity, and human pathos.   I should probably have read one or more standard biographies of Peter before I embarked on Alexei Tolstoy's beautiful but elliptical work on one of modern Russia's founders.  However, even without that background, I have been able to learn a lot about Peter the Great and his historical context from Alexei Tolstoy.  In fact, the book is so good you wonder why we turn at all to historians rather than fiction writers to give us a sense of what it was really like to live and breath in a completely different atmosphere.  In any event, Lev Tolstoy and Alexei Tolstoy are not the only two Tolstoys with great literary talent. Tatyana Tolstaya is a wonderfully gifted writer as well.  Her Pushkin's Children: Writings on Russia and Russians is filled with wit, wisdom, historical insight, great humanity, and hundreds if not thousands of perfectly crafted bon mots.  I've taken the liberty of placing a few of her gems below.  Pushkin's Children is a collection of disparate writings.  As such, the book sheds light on a variety of different topics in Russian history, literature, politics, and culture.

Her essay on Russian women is particularly revealing. Ostensibly a review of Francine du Plessix's 1990 book, Soviet Women, Tolstaya asks Western readers to avoid easy stereotypes of Russian women since Russian women do possess a great deal of power and historical agency.  Tolstaya's take on Gorbachev is especially enlightening.  Up until this point, I, like many Westerners, didn't quite understand why Gorbachev has been so deeply unpopular in his homeland.  Having helped to dismantle an "evil empire" with less violence than might have been expected, Gorbachev seemed to deserve some level of understanding and respect.  Tolstaya's fiercely indignant assault on Gorbachev serves as a partial anecdote to this outsider's perspective. For to Tolstaya, an unapologetic liberal and "Westernizer," Gorbachev was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the Communist past.  To Tolstaya, Gorbachev's whole career was merely foam on the wave of an undemocratic, privileged, bureaucratic, and corrupt past. Gorbachev had risen to power in a brutal, stupid system, and he wasn't capable of governing without reference to brutal, stupid assumptions.

Tolstaya hated Gorbachev for his sycophantic past, for his ridiculous anti-alcoholism campaign, for his lack of principles, and for his treatment of Yelstin and others.  But it's the hypocrisy of the Western treatment of Gorbachev that seams to call out her deep antipathy for the man.  Gorbachev does not deserve to be lauded for presiding over the end of Communism:  the system had collapsed under its own weight.

Tatyana Tolstaya:

"Women can do everything, and men do all the rest."  Russian proverb.

"Russian men have been recumbent for centuries."

"Of course, I'm a slave, but what right does she have to interfere with my life?"

"Francine Gray, having spoken with dozens of women, noted with surprise that almost all of them talked about men as they would about furniture or other inanimate objects."

"During the four years of war there was only one sex in Russia--women. The men had gone to war."

"Learn to love us when we're filthy dirty.  Anyone can love us when we're clean."  Russian proverb.

"Russia didn't begin yesterday and it won't end tomorrow."

"We Russians don't need to eat.  We eat each other and that satisfies us."  Russian saying attributed by Tayana Tolstoy to Ivan the Terrible's reign.

"...Lenin's initial idea was to hold onto power for no less a period than the Paris Commune once did.  This desire to become a chapter heading in a history text is quite characteristic of bookish, theoretical thinking."

"And how could a Russian revolt be anything other than senseless and merciless, when the Russian government had exhibited a senseless lack of mercy toward its own people for centuries?"

"...In the 1930s, a herdsman was arrested and sent to the Stalinist camps for referring to a cow as "whore" because she made advances to another cow.  His crime was formulated as "slandering the communal farm herd."

"[Russians] mocked the English with their machines, the Germans with their order and precision, the French with their logic, and the Americans with their love of money.  And as a result in Russia we have neither machines, nor order, not logic, nor money."

"Now, our country possess certain peculiarities that verge on the fantastic, and its inner geometry is decidedly non-Euclidean.  Our roads are Mobius strips;  our parallel lines cross as many times as you like;  the sume of the angles of our triangles is infinite."

"When did Gorbachev find out that communism doesn't work?... The answer is simple:  he knew that nothing works while still in his  mother's womb."

"After Stalin's death, people shed genuine tears; after the deaths of Brezhnev and Andropov, people laughed;  after Chernenko's death, they guffawed.  And how could they not?  A man comes to power, declares himself a genius, and kicks the bucket."

"...The struggle of "Russia" with the "West" is a battle with foreign sources of mythic radiation."

"There are no mermaids in parliament."

"...Russians perceive Russian life...as a constant, unending Lisbon earthquake."

"God is free, but that's his own business, and all of you, who love God, are obliged to be His slaves."

"Everyone always says [the Tsar] was such a tyrant.  But why, really?  They always served such fresh creme at court."

"Revolutions don't happen in paradise."

"Russia is, of course, a fantastical country, but not to that extent."

"Prince Michael opts for the tactics of a mad Dadaist:  he draws a horse and captions it a chicken."

"Every cook should know how to run the government."  Lenin.

"The first strikes like a stake, the second dives like a falcon, and the rest flutter around like tiny little birds."  Russian proverb related to swigs of vodka.