Les Miserables

This week I embarked on an overseas trip.  The trip takes me from Chicago to Montreal to Tunis to Budapest to Paris and home again.  It's funny how Russia and its revolution can follow me anywhere.  On the plane, I'm reading Zhivago's Children, about the post-Stalinist intelligentsia, but I also know that I'm landing in a place that only recently sparked the Arab Spring.  In fact, I began dating my current wife when the Tunisian Revolution had just gotten underway. I remember helping her with speech ideas after the fall of the government.  My wife talked about talking to her mother by Skype in code to avoid the prying ears of government officials or spies.

Now that I'm in Tunis, I stay off the subject of revolution, but it's obvious that some Tunisians worry about the aftermath of revolution.  Did revolution change anything?  Are things better or worse than before the revolution?  Did revolution unleash conservative forces that will overturn the progress of women in the country?  Will revolution overthrow all forms of secularism in the country?  The debate about revolution isn't always abstract.  My in-laws claim that the revolution has led to certain forms of social disorder, including random garbage dumps along the beach and "squatter" make-shift homes along the directly behind their home.  My wife says that the revolution engendered the religious prayers that now precede local electrical engineering conferences.

Clearly, Tunisia isn't the place to escape revolution.  Being here reminds me that revolution isn't something that happens every century or so.  In fact, people in all, or almost all countries, are thinking about revolution on some level.  Where there's no possibility of slow, democratic transformations, people are forced to dream about revolution.  You either accept the status quo, or you dream of sudden, dramatic change.

After Tunisia, we're off to Hungary, which of course recently overthrew a communist government, and famously failed to do so in 1956, courtesy of Russian tanks.  After Hungary, we'll stop in Paris, home of Europe's foundational revolution, on the way back to North America.  Paris, more than anywhere else, should remind one of the pervasiveness of revolution.  Or perhaps the Paris leg of my trip would have been more of a vacation from revolutionary themes if I hadn't watched Les Miserables on the plane trip to Tunis?

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.

Soviet Spring

As I said in my last post, I'm slowly adjusting the shock of living in suburbia.  There's a lot to like about the suburbs, and a friend once said that I was a "suburban tourist" because I seemed utterly entertained and delighted by the simple pleasures of the suburban lifestyle, including easy access to shopping malls, safe playgrounds and schools, enormous basement storage areas, and neighbors who, although frequently inebriated, do their best to look out for one another.

I'm still amazed by the suburban house I've purchased.  When I walk into the garage, I stand in wonder, thinking that my car has never had it so good:  having spent the better part of its life sleeping on the streets of Woodlawn, my car must at times ask itself if it has not taken up permanent residence in a spa, padded slipper, or cocoon.  When I walk outside my new home, I'm stunned by the fact that I can see stars in the sky, although I can hear almost nothing.  In all my life, I've never lived in such a remorselessly quiet environment.  Suburban life is no doubt much inevitably more quiet than urban life. When I lived in Lakeview, the whole apartment building shook as the trucks drove by, and television shows were often interrupted by car accidents or screaming matches that spontaneously erupted around three a.m. at the transvestite bar across the street.  When I lived in Woodlawn, the neighbors talked to one another right outside our windows, involving me, quite against my will, in the most intimate details of their lives.  Now, I live in silence, surrounded by silence.  With only one entrance to my subdivision, my home isn't even exposed to the fleeting noise of random traffic.

I experience suburban life as a form of exile and estrangement.  I lived an urban life with my first wife, got divorced, got engaged, then moved to the suburbs.  The difference in lifestyle underscores the difference between my pre-divorced and divorced selves.  Living here in this place, another byproduct of divorce, I wonder how people decide to get divorced in the first place.  One dreads separation from one's family, but when it comes it's much worse than one could have imagined.  If people knew how bad it would be, how hard it is to live apart from one's children, would they proceed with the rupture?

With apologies for the strained and awkward transition between my personal life and my passion for Soviet history, I see a connection between the decision to divorce and the decision to dismantle a country.  The decision to embrace the pain of separation and exile may have its analogy in Soviet history. I think of Gorbachev.  How was it that the statesmen, and men like him, finally decided to pull the plug on the Soviet system?  The decision can't have been an easy.  Taking the plunge would ultimately lead to the end of an empire, the loss of economic stability, and the misery of millions.  The decision to reform Russia led to consequences which, in the short run at least, were even worse than the  problem of communism.

Of course, Gorbachev and his supporters could not have known exactly where they were headed when they decided that "things can't go on like this."  They were even determined to salvage something good from the wreckage of Russian communism. Even so, these Soviet reformers knew the country was sick, mortally sick perhaps, and they eventually decided to risk killing the patient in order to move forward.  They wanted to see around the next corner of history.  

I wonder how long people like Gorbachev waited they made even the first tenuous moves to upset the status quo.  Notwithstanding the myriad indications of Soviet malaise, Soviet would-be revolutionaries or reformers must have trembled as they contemplated undermining the system they knew so well.  Like the decision to divorce, people have a good reason to pause before pursuing radical change.   Change in a deeply flawed system--whether that system be a regime or relationship--breeds pain and suffering, almost in direct proportion to the degree of malaise that permeates the system.  

My fiancee is Tunisian.  When we first met, she was excited about the revolution that was overtaking her country.  She knew her people deserved freedom and change.  But the pain of that change is already evident.  The Soviet experience of revolution wasn't irrelevant.  Somewhat cynically, I told her that the Russians had also been excited about the prospects of radical change in their corrupt society.  This was true both in 1917 and 1989, but in both cases the revolution brought about an enormous harvest of bitterness.  My fiancee was not deterred:  the future could certainly be better than the past.  How could things not get better?  Sadly, Tunisia is now threatened by religious extremism and a strong measure of violent anti-Americanism. Probably the future will be better than the recent past.  Probably the Arab Spring was worthwhile.  And yet one can at least sympathize, if only for a moment, with those moderates who hesitated, if only for a moment, before throwing in their lot with the future.

Tunisian Deserter

The Russian Revolution was of course a unique historical event but all revolutions have something in common, if only a certain demonic energy or a natural rhythm or etiology of revolt. Recently a North African friend told me about her indirect experience with contemporary revolution. She said that the Tunisian Revolution signified the overthrow of boredom as much as it signified the triumph of a new type of politics or economics. Under a dictator who rules for decades, one no longer expects that one day will be different than the next. The experience, I imagine, is like living in Phoenix, Arizona: you may well be comfortable with sun and heat, but you can't be anything other than bored when you wake up on a Saturday morning and stroll outside to see a perfectly blue sky. For better or worse, one day is exactly like the next.

So, among other things, revolution represents an end to boredom. Of course, when my Tunisian friend expresses her confidence in the future, and joy about the birth of a new, democratic order in her homeland, I cannot help but to think about how happy almost everybody seemed to be when the Provisional Government first took power in Russia, or indeed how happy almost all Iranians were when the Shah first fled the country. The point, it would seem, is that revolutions are unpredictable, or worse than that: they inevitably degenerate into violence and radicalism. Or do they? We do well to remember that we were all revolutionaries at some point. The British, the French, the Americans, the Latin Americans---what people doesn't owe its allegiance to a revolutionary moment of some sort?

Today I thought about the Tunisian Revolution when watching the 1933 sound film, Deserter. Deserter, set in Hamburg amidst one of the worst strikes in Wiemar Germany's tragic history, attempts to document just how truly international the Bolshevik Revolution was meant to be. In its early sequences we see a poor German worker attempting to steal a prime cut of meat from a bourgeois restaurant table. Caught in the act, he flees the scene, hounded by angry bourgeois citizens and policemen. Faced with either the crowd's justice, or his own bleak plight as a proletarian, he chooses to commit suicide by throwing himself into a busy street. Soon he's nothing more than a bloody stain on the street, an inconvenience to the rich who are forced to pause momentarily in their open-air cars to allow for the clean-up.

The man's act of desperation symbolizes the revolutionary moment in Germany, just as a poor Tunisian man's self-immolation in the face of adversity and corruption symbolized the revolutionary moment there just a few months ago. Like Gladwell's immensely overrated work, The Tipping Point, one struggles to understand just what it is that turns the slings and arrows of everyday dictatorship into something so intolerable that self-immolation begins to seem like a rational act as opposed to the bizarre act of a madman.

Deserter, originally designed to be a product of collaboration between Bolshevik Russia and Social Democrats in Germany, is about a long and grueling German strike at the shipyards. It's the usual story of strike breakers, fat capitalists, and brutal policemen engaged in a conspiracy to keep hard-working proletarians from enjoying the fruit of their own labor. Opposed to the forces of reaction are the customary heroes of labor, including a feisty and beautiful woman who passes out copies of the Red Courier in spite of police harassment. The twist is that one man, the film's hero, "deserts" the cause of the strikers. Underwhelmed by the logic of class struggle or unconvinced that he bears personal responsibility for the victory of the strikers, one man, Karl Renn, abandons the strikers to their fate at the hands of armed police and at least one tank. Ashamed of his failure to do his duty, the strike council decides to send him (as three other workers who are unable to physically help the cause) on a journey to the Soviet Union to accompany a ship the German workers have constructed.

Once in the Soviet Union, Karl quickly realizes that he hasn't fully understand the world in which he lives. In Russia, Karl and the other German workers see an enthusiastic, healthy, and happy Russian citizenry celebrating a Red Army parade and welcoming them to the country. Scenes of Russian industrial power and mechanized processes imply that Karl is caught up with the romance of Russian economic dynamism. In any case, Karl begins to take note of the international nature of the class struggle. Sensing that he has much to learn from the one nation on earth where the proletariat have taken charge of the mechanisms of power, Karl volunteers his technical expertise to work in a Russian factory. Once there, he makes a name for himself by working hard to help his comrades to achieve their difficult production quotas.

It's unnerving to see just how accurately the film propaganda mirrors what actually took place in the Stalin era. Although Karl is ultimately successful in helping his Russian colleagues to increase production by a factor of 350 percent in 30 days, the film seems to suggest just how insane this production goal or similar goals must have been. The diesel factory montage shows pistons moving feverishly, workers scuttling from one section of the factory to another sweat pouring down their faces, and pressure gauge arrows moving excitedly.

The film also features workers who engaged in self-criticism over the pace of work. Capitalist bosses are not necessary in Communist Russia: when the fate of a proletarian nation is at stake, the production quota simply must be met. We know from history, the five year plans were a recipe for industrial confusion and human disaster. If one looks closely at the factory scenes in this film, one can almost sense the tragedy of industrialization under Stalin. In Communist Russia, work was the equivalent of warfare. It mattered not how many people suffered or died to meet the nation's industrial objectives. And if failure occurred--and how could it not in such a frenetic rush?--then saboteurs must be to blame.

Notwithstanding the madness of Russian-style industrialization, Karl is impressed by what he sees. A portrait of Lenin watches over his deliberations about his future and he ultimately returns to Germany as an enthusiastic supporter of the international class struggle with few doubts about the righteousness of his cause or the inevitability of ultimate victory. Karl has seen the future--the Soviet Union--and it works.