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."

On Russian Bureaucracy

"If you tell my story, make it funny. Don't make it pathetic, like the way it was..."

Lovers of Tsarist or Soviet literature will be relieved to know that Russian bureaucracy isn't dead. Take the experience of a friend who wants to go to St. Petersburg for an academic conference in late July. This woman, let's call her Madame S in the spirit of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, realized that she's required to secure a visa. This seems like an odd request: Americans and Canadians rarely need a visa to travel anywhere, and certainly not anywhere in Europe. Still, the visa request is reciprocal; and one can't quite blame Russia for demanding that foreigners are treated as poorly as its citizens are treated abroad. But see how difficult the request can be. When my friend went directly to the Russian consulate to secure this visa, she ran intro trouble--nothing dramatic, just low-level bureaucratic noise. The consulate, beautiful and stately on the outside, is dim, windowless, and unadorned on the inside. On Madame S's first visit to the consulate--and the forlorn guests of the consulate told her nobody ever avoids at least a second visit to the consulate before securing a visa--she encountered an old woman who refused to answer any questions, and a skinny, pale-faced man with sad eyes, black hair brushed down over his sickly forehead, and the general countenance and demeanor of a serial killer.

This insouciant and sickly man, who became Madame S' bureaucratic tormentor, spoke neither English nor French very well, and took frequent smoking breaks. While never overtly rude, his mournful eyes seemed to mask a simmering anger. The play between tormentor and tormented occurred in four acts. In act one, Madame S was informed that the consulate did not have any visa applications and so applicants needed to go home first to print one off. Fortunately, one of the consultates supplicants, who had her own tale of woe predicated on the fact that her bank couldn't issue an acceptable certified check or something similar, offered Madame S an extra visa form to fill out. But even this didn't do the trick: Madame S' passport photo was deemed too large to qualify for the application and she was sent back out into the street.

Almost two hours later, our heroine returned to the consulate with a completed application and new photo. Fortunately, even with the absence of nearly two hours, her number hadn't even been called yet. When it was called, Madame S dashed up to the Russian official but, alas, he strode out of the room without apology to smoke. Upon his return, he announced that the new passport photo was not valid either; apparently propriety demanded a different ratio of head to background space. As the workday was ending, Madame S left the consulate and returned the next day, but sadly there was no way to know that the consulate was now closed for two days on account of a national Russian holiday. On her fourth visit to the consulate, Madame S arrived forty-five minutes early but this time was told that, contrary to previous information she had received from Russian academic authorities, she could not easily receive a tourist visa since she was, at least partially, traveling for business reasons.

Not even the required hotel "invitation" was enough to satisfy Official Russia. Madame S did what many of us would have done: she cried like a baby and left the consulate, and Montreal, without a visa. The story isn't unusual: nobody in the consulate had a more satisfying encounter with the visa process. Moreover, while waiting in line, Madame S learned from ethnic Russian travelers that she should expect more of the same, or worse, in Russia itself. Apparently the land of the Hermitage was no tourist paradise. One needed a minder, or guide, to navigate the city. One shouldn't even talk in public for fear of letting others know one's vulnerable status as an outsider.

If Russia has such esquisite appreciation for bureaucracy, its no wonder that she also has connoisseurship in the art of the queue. During the Soviet era, people lined up to wait for goods and services with superhuman patience, as if people could receive religious absolution at every store, government depot, or street corner. Vladimir Sorokon's novel captures the spirit and existential meaning of the Soviet queue. According to Sorokon, Soviet citizens spent, on average, about one third of each day waiting for something. In such conditions, money was meaningless: only time, and your place in the line, mattered. As Sorokon points out, both Russia's private and public history is related to standing in line. In 1896, Nicholas II was coronoted but 2,000 people were crushed to death as a monstrous line for "coronation gifts" spun out of control. At Stalin's death in 1953, history repeated itself, although nobody can be sure exactly how many Soviet men and women died in the orgy of mourning. Russians are accustomed to waiting in line. As Orthodox believers, they stood for services that could last several hours. As Soviets, they waited for "food, goods, tickets, vacations, toilets" and even prison beds.

In Montreal, Madame S experienced the queue as a demeaning expression of the bureacrat's power, and certainly Soviet citizens felt demeaned by the scarcity that pervaded their lives. In Sorokin's fictional queue, Russians resent the store employees who are lackisasically distributing the goods, hate those who precede them in line and therefore diminish their chances for receiving anything,, and despise those that enviously follow them and watch for opportunities to cut in line. On the other hand, Sorokin's queue isn't without merits. At the local level, those in line help each other by trading information--or at least wild rumors--and holding places for comrades who wish to step outside the line to buy alcohol or even simultaneously take up a place in a second line. The line was also a place for political or philosophical discussion. As one person in the line reminds those around him, one shouldn't be so quick to admire either the American economic or political system. In America, one can criticize Ronald Reagan freely but be fired for critizing his boss. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the hegemony of the queue collapsed. Now people were confronted with radical consumer choices. Where once people made due with three types of sausage, they now had 333 sausage selections. The downside to this consumer paradise is that many people can no longer afford that which is theoretically available to them.