Russia is War

The story of Russia is the story of war. Elem Klimov's 1985 masterpiece, Come and See, captures the fury and horror of Russia's worst war, World War II, as experienced in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The story is told from the point of view of a young boy, whose journey through the battlefields, villages, partisan-filled forests, and wetlands of the Belorussian SSR is the visual equivalent of a journey through hades. The boy, and a young female counterpart, experience as much of the apocalyptic landscape of World War II's Eastern Front as they are mentally capable of processing. In fact, the terrifying events of the war drive each of them, but the boy in particular, to the brink of madness, if not further. The film's method of depicting war is, paradoxically, both naturalistic and surrealistic. The Janus-face of war is probably like that. An ordinary object falls from the sky into an ordinary village, but the resulting carnage is utterly unbelievable. The film moves between gruesome scenes of genocide--stacked bodies, Germans burning villagers alive in a church, a violated woman shuffling, unnoticed, among other sufferers--and the boy's rapidly aging, shocked face. The film, released in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Germany, doesn't ignore Soviet heroism. In fact, we get a glimpse of partisan soldiers, a heroic Soviet guerrilla leader, and boys digging in battlefields to discover weapons with which to combat the invading marauders. But the film is, first and foremost, a testimony to the capacity of men and women to inflict damage on one another, and to suffer.

Anna Akhmatova's Muse

"Neither despair nor shame. Not now, not after, not then."

"That late-night dialogue turned into the delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows."

"And that door that you left half-open I don't have the strength to slam."

My life story, like yours perhaps, could theoretically be told 100 different ways. But I can only tell my story one way: from the perspective of someone who lost his mother at a relatively early age. If I were to write my memoirs, the memoirs of a Russophile blogger, I'd essentially be telling the tale of my mother's absence. By exiting the story when I was only 14 years old, my mother, paradoxically, became the central figure of my life. The chapters of this tale are fragments of a tragedy, dimensions of loss. Accordingly, I couldn't write my autobiography chronologically. I'd need to write the same story ten times over. In chapter one, I'd describe the delightful evolution of chronic gastrointestinal ailments related to the psychosomatic impact of my mother's departure. The characters--my angry stomach, my self-pitying small intestine, my sorrowful large intestine--would be lively and sympathetic.

In chapter two, I'd describe how my past and present lives never seemed to get along: a long-standing and bitter feud between my hopeful present and devastated past always seemed ready to erupt. Chapter three would be a catalog of worry: the reader, who might well regret the absence of plot points and character development, might nevertheless enjoy a long and leisurely tour of everything in life one can be frightened of if only one surrenders to an all encompassing anxiety about the future. Chapter four, which is really a continuation of chapter three's rich theme, would detail how an ordinary person can, under the right circumstances, move through life despite often crippling levels of cowardice. What of chapter five through ten? Well, truth be told, they are not so cheery as the previous four chapters and are, therefore, too personal to relate. The whole work will have to be fictionalized for this one to come out.

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's life story is, objectively speaking, tragic even when measured against the high standards many other famous and not-so-famous Russians previously set in this lamentable category of human achievement. Her first husband, Gumilyov, was executed by the Bolsheviks on trumped-up charges. Her second husband, Nikolay Punin, perished in the gulag, where her son spent the prime of his adult life. Akhmatova self fell victim to a sustained, state-sponsored attack on her poetry and her person. She was called, famously, part nun and part whore, which somehow doesn't now translate in anything one could possibly be ashamed of. No matter--the term wasn't meant as a compliment and she knew it.

The triumph of Akhmatova's life is that, despite one or two regrettable odes to Stalin's grandeur written under duress, she never really compromised with the Soviet regime, either on a political level of at the level of her art. They say that Pasternak was like this: notwithstanding all of the horrors of the Soviet twentieth century, Pasternak didn't let either pessimism or cowardice or fear distort his essentially objective artistic outlook. Is perspective the essence of a poet's genius? Notwithstanding the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, life remains a spectacular mystery, bigger than any mortal's catalog of complaints, no matter how long or grim.

Aside from poetic imperturbability, Akhmatova possessed a powerful imagination. It's in this context, that her complex and artistically charged relationship with Isaiah Berlin should be seen. Berlin, a Russian Empire-born diplomat turned Oxford intellectual historian and philosopher, only met Akhmatova a couple of times. The principle meeting, which caught the attention of the Russian secret police and perhaps led to Akhmatova's ostracism by Soviet cultural authorities, was ill-starred. It was impermissible for Russians to meet with foreigners, and especially foreign diplomats, under any but the most tightly controlled and scripted scenarios. Still, according to the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Dalos' subtle book, The Guest From the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, Berlin emerged from the first meeting with a profound respect for the poet who had once almost personified Russia's Silver Age. And Akhmatova, the artist, came away with something more: a new muse.

In her vivid imagination--which would seem absurd if the poems didn't demonstrate the honesty and profundity of her ideas related to Berlin--the meeting with this "Guest from the Future" had profound personal as well as cosmic implications. This Guest was both her lover and a symbol of the West, which had once again become anathema to Moscow in 1947 . The meeting itself, she told others, inspiring the Cold War. The exaggeration, if that's the right word for it, seems forgivable in the context of artistic creation. In any event, as Dalos demonstrates, Stalin and other leading Soviet authorities did in fact take a direct interest in Akhmatova and Russians then and now seem to accept that somehow Akhmatova's version of events, no matter how poetic or literary, trumps the truth of her detractors.

Yury Olesha on History's Darlings

"We weren't born yesterday. We too have been history's darlings."

"Oh, if only they'd kicked his kidneys in soccer..."

"And so I wander, the last dreamer on earth, on the edge of a cesspool, like a wounded bat..."

When I was in high school, my sister and I were obsessed with a soap opera called Santa Barbara. On winter break we seldom missed an episode. More particularly, we liked to watch the show’s graying patriarch, C.C. Capwell, boil over in anger at everyone around him. Capwell was interesting because he only had one emotional tone or trope, and that was anger. Capwell could brood or sulk or rave, but he was always angry about something or someone. He only had one note on the piano of his feelings, one channel on the television of his emotional range, and that was uncontrollable fury.

Even when Capwell was in love, he seemed to be visibly upset at the object of his affection, and irritated by the unbalanced, uncertain state of romantic arousal. In some ways, Capwell was an emotional cripple. He couldn’t feel what others felt; he was never truly worried, joyful, envious, sad, or hopeful—whatever was going on at the time, Capwell just felt pissed about it. On the other hand, I wondered whether Capwell had developed a special relationship to his pet sentiment, anger. After all, isn’t it true that almost every situation calls for some level of anger if examined closely enough? Perhaps it takes a savant like Capwell, someone specially attuned to rage as a bloodhound is specially attuned to fox or raccoon smells, to register the annoyance that lurks in every human interaction or encounter with the physical universe.

At first glance, one might expect that some human experiences lie entirely outside of the purview of rage. Not so! How exactly did Capwell’s special sensitivity to anger work? Here’s a hypothetical example. A woman, perhaps even Capwell’s daughter, announces that she’s graduating from college. Ordinarily, you’d expect a father to be filled with pride over the achievement of his progeny. Not C.C. Capwell. He’d focus on the negative. Shouldn’t his daughter have gone to a better school? Shouldn’t she have achieved a higher G.P.A.? Shouldn’t others—her aunt for example—have attended this once-in-a-lifetime ceremony? The possibilities for anger, if we are truly open to the emotional experience, are everywhere.

C.C. Capwell has nothing on Nikolai Kavalerov, the drunken, intellectual antihero of Yuri Olesha’s masterful 1927 Soviet novella, Envy. But whereas Capwell was a maestro of irritation, Kavalerov is a virtuoso of another kind of resentment, envy. The ostensible target of Kavalerov’s spite is Andrei Babichev, his benefactor and a successful Soviet bureaucrat to boot. The broader target of Kavalerov’s envy is the entire Soviet order ushered in by the Revolution. Although on the face of things, Kavlerov seems to accept the claims of the champions of the Soviet system--that Soviet cultural life is orderly, modern, and efficient—his venomous envy deconstructs the myth of the new regime. Even as despicable antihero, Kavalerov’s mockery undermines the rhetoric of revolution and defends that which preceded it. If there is a new Soviet man, Homo Sovieticus, should we not mourn the death of the old man? If the new system is more rational than the old one, or more technologically progressive, should we not continue to value the beautifully irrational or delightfully human elements of the old system? Kavalerov, for all of his unenviable qualities, lays out a ridiculous but nevertheless persuasive case that the Revolution, for all its glory, has jettisoned some of the most sublime aspects of the human experience.

Kavalerov's chief complaint is that revolutionary logic has overthrown the reign of human emotions. "The buttercup of pity, the lizard of ambition, the snake of jealousy--these flora and fauna must be driven out of the new man's heart." Kavalerov laments this extinction. As Kavalerov melodramatically complains, "I have been given the honor of conducting the last parade of old-fashioned human passions..."Emotions apparently have something to offer men and women, though he doesn't quite say what. Perhaps they make life more beautiful, perhaps they simply make life more varied and interesting.

It's interesting to note that Kavlerov mourns the defeat of human emotions but seems to hold out the possibility that they will take their revenge on the new order of things. Is it possible to vanquish that which makes us truly human, no matter how reasonable the cause? In 1927 Russia communism must have felt fragile indeed. The Revolution was only a decade old; the Civil War less than that; and Lenin was dead and gone. Notwithstanding the optimism and certainty of the Bolsheviks, many Russians still remembered pre-revolutionary Russia. Conspiracies and revolts were not out of the question. Olesha, although a revolutionary writer, seems to suggest that a backlash might still succeed in overturning the Bolshevik regime. "...I want to gather a multitude around me. So that I have a choice and can choose the best, the most vivid of them, to form a shock troop, sort of a...shock troop of emotions." "Yes, this is a conspiracy of emotions, a peaceful uprising. A peaceful demonstration of emotions."

In the end, Envy isn't really about Kavalerov's envy of Babichev. Rather, it's about the envy of one whole generation of Russians, or one historical epoch even, for another. Even as new Soviet citizens recognized that the absurdly atavistic Old Regime had been flung, in Trotsky's words, onto the "ash heap of history," these same Soviet citizens knew that something valuable had inevitably been lost in that ash heap. Wasn't there a part of every ethnically Russian Soviet citizen--the Russian part perhaps--that envied the future itself? Kavalerov's speech sums up this ambivalent feeling about Bolshevik progress: "Everything flows from this, the new era, everything is drawn to it, it will get the best gifts and exclamations. I love it, this world that's coming toward me, more than life, I worship it and hate it with every fiber of my being! I sob, tears gush from my eyes, but I want to poke my fingers in its clothes and rip. Don't outshine me! Don't take away what might have belonged to me!"

Anxiety, Khrushchev, and the 1950s

My anxiety is almost always related to money. Since my father had a stable job and my parents never worried about how they’d pay the mortgage, I don’t know how or why I came to worry so much about money. Perhaps my fear of poverty can be linked on some level to my mother’s cancer. As she grew sicker, did I conflate the existential fear of being left alone with the more mundane fear of facing economic destitution? However unrealistic that fear of poverty might have been, it was would have been easier to confront that then the approaching death of my mother.

At age 16 I got my first job as a waiter. I remember spreading out the tip money on the bed, tangible reminder that I was, at least on one level, safe and sound. As I grew older, I developed a neurotic attachment to money. I joked that I could sniff out the net worth of anybody, and I developed a theory of economic valuation and labeled it the “kidnapping theorem.” If you want to know how much somebody is truly worth, you have to calculate how much money friends and family would part with in order to get them back.

Chekhov divided his life into two parts: in the first part, he was beaten; in the second part, he wasn’t. Similarly, I divide my life into two parts: in the first part, I had a problem with economic production; in the second part, I had a problem with economic consumption. At first, my jobs as a waiter, production assistant in Hollywood, graduate assistant and adjunct professor, could barely sustain my membership in the middle class. This was a problem with economic production.

Eventually, I emerged from the long shadow of graduate school and gained my first full-time professional jobs. At last, I made a reasonable salary and had access to healthcare and other benefits. Even so, I felt like an East German at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I had access to the labor market, but I also had years of pent up consumer demand. All at once, I felt like I needed to placate what Zizek once called a “plague” of previously dormant consumerist fantasies. More than that, I needed to shoulder the burdens of a bourgeois citizen, so I took lower-paid colleagues out to lunch, bought wedding gifts for friends, and started a family. Whether in the production or consumption phase of my life, I remained anxious about money.

There are essentially two types of people in the world, savers and spenders, by passing through the two phases of my life, I now identify with both. When I earned almost no money, I hoarded what I did make, and felt an almost sensual satisfaction in seeing my modest bank account grow. Although a gentle breeze of misfortunate would have erased my savings from the face of the Earth, I took pride in the account, only fretting that it wouldn’t be enough to ward of ill fortune. Now, taught by others, I realize that I am also a consumer, someone who makes money but derives little satisfaction from anything other than spending. Is it better to be a saver than a spender? I’m not sure. I suspect that they are both the products of a different kind of anxiety. We either decide to try to ward off death by accumulating cash, or we make a play for eternity by buying our way into the existential insulation that things seem to provide.

I am thinking about the nature of anxiety because I’ve just read Peter Carlson’s book, K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushche, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist. K Blows His Top takes us into the heart of America in the 1950s, when, perhaps ironically, America suffered from terrific existential anxiety in the midst of unparalleled economic prosperity and technological progress. Of course, America really was on the edge of a potential nuclear abyss. So there was real rather than neurotic cause for concern. Be this as it may, America has almost always been on the verge of some sort of millennial or eschatological collapse, and we’ve always had enemies who seemed to threaten our existence on at least a political or ideological level.

The 1950s were a unique age, and might have been even without the invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons. We had triumphed spectacularly over the Germans and Japanese, but we still seemed to be powerless in the face of socialist revolution and decolonization. Ignoring our suburban paradises, the world seemed to be appalled by us. Khrushchev, in his three visits to the United States during this period, encapsulated the Janis face of 1950s America. The witty, mercurial dictator pointed to Sputnik, beat his show at the U.N., and promised to bury us. We responded truculently, but the truculence of ordinary Americans who hated Communism masked a deep vein of insecurity. We worried about Khrushchev’s countless quips about the size and range of his missile armada. We also worried that he might have a point when he said that “we”—and he meant white America--weren’t that popular in China, Cuba, the Congo, Harlem, or the Deep South.

It is a truism to say that Khrushchev was motivated by profound insecurity. He was a peasant from a still-developing country who had personally assented to heinous crimes against his own people. He had much to be embarrassed about. But Khrushchev, neurotic genius that he was, was no more neurotic than the country he was visiting. We were, after all, the home of puritan farmers as well as Hollywood decadence; the land of segregation as well as liberty.

The Falseness of Happy Endings

"People often die. We all do. I am warning you. This fact surfaced in literature."

You're sitting alone on a park bench on a perfect day thinking that the world is extraordinarily simple. There's the sky, the grass, and you. But you lay your head down to look at the sky and notice a plane passing overhead. Why is that plane there? Where is it going? How many passengers are on board and where are they each, separately, headed? You avert your gaze but notice a tree between you and the airplane. How old is the tree? Is it younger or older than the park? How long will it continue to live? There's a bug on your arm. Does it know it's on your arm? Is it happy there? There's a bag stuck in the tree. Who lost that bag? What did the bag hold? You put these questions--all of them--aside but are immediately confronted by the sound of a dog barking and the happy screams of children who are playing in the park nearby. Does the dog have a story? Do the children? You can't answer those questions; you haven't got the time. For two flaneurs meander past you, discussing something extraordinarily complex and meaningful. One of them is corpulent. Why can't he get his weight under control? Perhaps he's got a medical condition; perhaps he's greedy. To whom or what should you address yourself? The park is alive with colors, smells, sounds, signs, words, objects, movements, and meanings.

Even in its simplest form, the world is complex. It's plot, and only plot, that pins it down and holds it together. We therefore owe a lot to our storytellers and myth-makers, the writers and novelists who help us to make sense of the chaotic world. We owe almost as much to the literary theorists who help us to make sense of the plot-makers. Thank Viktor Shklovsky, the Soviet novelist and literary theorist who penned The Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot in his final years. Shlovsky's treatise on the relationship between plot and creative genius isn't always easy to follow. But it does point the way toward a clearer understanding of the genius of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Cervantes, Pushkin, Boccaccio and others in the Russian and Western Canon.

What, specifically, does Shklovsky have to say about plot? I'm not sure I'm equipped to say. What fascinates me is the way in which Shklovsky sets out to describe creative genius by demonstrating it, exemplifying it. It's as if he wants to tell us that authors such as Tolstoy, the greatest "commander-in-chief of plot," pick up the old but strangely invisible threads of plot and begin to improvise, jazz-like, on the old themes. Tolstoy understands his literary inheritance on a very deep level, but this understanding somehow allows him to transcend it. The result is new avenues to truth, new doors of perception.

Shklovsky explains all this by showing rather than telling his readers that art, even literary criticism, is open-ended, unexpected, lively, and recursive. Shlovsky's writing, like the writing he describes, is brilliant, complex, contradictory, highly original, and intent on the search for meaning rather than its polished presentation.

Here are just a few of his epigrams:

Crossing the sea that is Lev Tolstoy is not an experience that can be explained in brief.

He said that everybody is guilty and then it turned out that nobody was at fault.

Heaven, as Mark Twain guessed, was a boring place. It was overcrowded.

She lived in the land of the happy.

In Hadji Murad, in the Caucacus, the Chechen says: The rope should be long, the speech--short.

He wrote Hadji Murad all his life. He wrote it better each time. More poetically.

Theirs was a compassionate generation. They felt the falseness of happy endings.

But it helped them as much as a funeral service helps a dead man.

Humankind in the multiplicity of its fate is typecast in contradictory ways, that's the chief method of developing a character. The blacksmith in Pushkin (in Dubrovsky) locks the door of a burning house; then the same blacksmith risks his life to save a cat on the roof.

Sancho Panzo used to say how he preferred to hear the answer first and then the riddle.

Russian literature, great literature, doesn't have endings.

According to rumors, even geniuses, more than others, depend on the very traditions they're violating, they depend on the choice of words, the choice of denouements.

There are as many morals as there are stars in the sky.

The infant has no memory. The infant, Tolstoy said, "is used to the eternity."

The history of literature is the history of the search for heroes.

[Tolstoy] points out that the death of one hero transfers are interest to other heroes.

Tolstoy teaches us that events exist before they are discovered.

Trotsky in Mexico

The case of Trotsky decline and fall has been told many times, and why not? The story is one of the most compelling ones of modern history. Leon Trotsky, one of the most gifted and talented men of the twentieth century, was one of the most influential men of both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions, to say nothing of the Russian Civil War, which he personally helped to bring to a close as Commissar of War and military chieftain of the Red Army. Although a Menshevik before the October Revolution, Trotsky quickly became the most visible Bolshevik leader during the 1917 insurrection, the principle lieutenant of Lenin.

Trotsky’s career as an agitator, revolutionary hero, and finally Politburo member has been well documented by Isaac Duetcher and others. It’s a tragic story insofar as Trotsky’s dynamism, personal courage, revolutionary fame, intellectual prowess, and oratorical gifts, were ultimately no match for Stalin’s political gifts and bloodthirsty tenacity. However, as Bertrand Patenaude, author of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, makes clear: Trotsky never really had a chance. Notwithstanding his public grandeur and ability to perform heroic feats in a revolutionary context, Lenin’s right hand man had severe limitations when it came to factional struggle. He could be vain, haughty, inflexible, and unfriendly—utterly incapable of forming political groups or even maintaining many close friendships. His past as a European revolutionary won him few friends among the Party’s rank and file, most of whom—and especially those promoted by Stalin--had never left Russia. Neither Trotsky’s Jewish ethnicity nor his fetish for Party unity helped him either. Patenaude ascribes this fetish—which prevented him from trying to make any overt bids for personal power--to Trotsky’s attempt to overcome his well-known past as a Menshevik.

Trotsky’s defeat at the hands of Stalin may therefore have been foreordained. What’s perhaps more interesting is the way he operated in exile. Banished from Russia, Trotsky did some things extremely well, and failed at others. Until his death at the hands of Stalin’s assassin in 1940, Trotsky maintained an extraordinarily vigorous schedule as a professional revolutionary and intellectual. His historical and autobiographical writing were inspired. His political analysis was sometimes trenchant (he predicted that Nazi Germany and Communist Russia would become temporary allies), sometimes convoluted--twisted by the strange imperative of defending the Soviet Union as a proletarian state while attacking Stalinism, the historical manifestation of bureaucratic degeneration. His attempts to form a new political order—a Fourth International—hampered by his uneven interpersonal skills and limited organizational capacities as well as by his political isolation in exile.

Nothing about Trotsky’s years in exile are as interesting as his time in Mexico. In Mexico, Trotsky learned of the disappearance of a beloved son, held an affair with Frida Kahlo right under the nose of his benefactor, Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, and contested Stalin’s Show Trials by means of the Dewey Commission and a relentless series of articles, speeches, and press releases. His time in Mexico revealed all of the celebrity’s strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, Trotsky managed the affairs of the Fourth International ineptly, alienating many of his American followers by ideological blindness and interpersonal insensitivity. On the other hand, Trotsky continued to fight Stalinism and Nazism (but also liberal democracy of course) even as he was forced to live a highly regimented and restricted life due to the constant threat of political assassination at the hands of the GPU or even the Mexican Communist Party and its allies.

The threat to Trotsky’s personal safety, as well as that of his wife and grandson, was always very real, if not always believed by his myriad political traducers. Near the end of his life, Trotsky almost fell victim to a paramilitary assault led by the famous muralist Siquieros. In retrospect, it seems almost incredible that Trotsky’s fairly unprofessional security regime could have protected him for so long. One wonders why Stalin didn’t kill him earlier, although Patenaude seems at one point in the text to allow for the possibility that at some point Stalin may have tolerated a living Trotsky to act as scapegoat for everything that went wrong in Communist Russia or abroad.

In the end, Trotsky died courageously, true to his reputation as a man of courage and action. Struck in the head with an icepick by his alleged friend, Jacson, Trotsky cried out and did battle with his assailant. Sadly, the attacker outlived his time in a Mexican jail and eventually found his way to the Soviet Union, where he was rewarded in secrecy for his treachery. The talented Siquieros too outlived his act of cowardice, even today known to the world as a revolutionary artist of the highest order.

Of course, Trotsky is no innocent martyr. He took the sins of October to his grave. As Patenaude remarks, in his last days he protested against the American government for presuming to meddle in his personal affairs, appalled at the thought that a mighty state might take an intrusive interest in the personal affairs of a private individual. One of the leading architects of the Soviet police state saw no irony in his protest. Trotsky’s legacy was at least partially redeemed by his wife, who outlived him by twenty years. Over time, and despite Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union—even in its attack on Finland—Natalia, Trotsky’s great love, defected from Trotskyism, denouncing the Soviet Union and its many client states in Eastern Europe in the process.

Everyday Stalinism

Every ordinary office environment is a window into Soviet political despotism and tyranny. Historians spend an inordinate amount of time asking why radical political ideas associated with liberty and egalitarianism degenerated into political violence and Stalinist terror. But this misses the point: human nature is the natural ally of unmitigated despotism.

Not all men and women are necessarily potential tyrants in the making; but, if given the chance to be political leaders in an undemocratic government, surely one out of every ten office bosses—the despotic tenth to misquote DuBois—has the capacity to set up show trials, launch political purges, and exile or assassinate enemies. Think of that greatest of all office movies, Glenngary Glenn Ross. As Alec Baldwin arrives from “downtown” he strides into the office to terrorize and humiliate his subordinates, and demands that the seasoned salesman played by Jack Lemon put his coffee down, because coffee is reserved “for closers.” Lemon and the rest of the sales staff are incredulous, yet Baldwin proceeds to berate them. “You think I am fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.” In fact, Baldwin tells his hard-working crew of flim-flam men that they’re all fired, but have one week to try to sell enough bogus properties to redeem to regain their jobs.

The film is filled with similar scenes of unbridled masculinity and sadistic insults. Al Pacino’s brazen attack on his weakened supervisor his typical: “Who ever told you that you could work with men?” Kevin Spacey, chastened by his star salesman, has no reply whatsoever. He’s utterly defeated. His only recourse will be to eventually take pleasure in the fact that another salesman, Jack Lemmon, is weaker than he is, made vulnerable despite years of experience, by falling sales figures and a sick daughter who requires care and financial support.

The office, everywhere and at all times, is a playground for the powerful. Why did Bolshevism degenerate into Stalinism? Why did Stalin overcome his rivals? Why was he allowed to create ever more outlandish schemes for disciplining his party and the nation as a whole? Did Stalin suffer from some form of degenerative mental condition that led him to kills friends as well as enemies on a hitherto unimagined scale? These questions are beside the point. To intentionally misquote what a movie producer told a screenwriter in the movie, Barton Fink, we might say the following: “You think you’re the only Stalin around here? I have twenty Stalins on staff.”

Indeed, every office space houses a plethora of hidden dictators, waiting only for the opportunity to thwart conspiracies or anything that even smacks of public opinion or democratic sentiment. More than this, every office houses dozens of potential Molotovs, sycophants ready to praise and support the worst tyrannical tendencies of the newly powerful. If it seems hard to imagine that you’ve overlooked a potential dictator in your own tranquil office of Dilbert cartoons and cat calendars, consider this: not even Stalin was Stalin at first. In fact, if it seems hard to believe that Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamanev and the others overlooked Stalin’s worst tendencies, take comfort in the fact that they weren’t really there. While Lenin’s last testament shows that he was alert to Stalin’s political power and propensity to rudeness, Stalin was generally seen to be a capable and even moderate “team player,” often the most reasonable person in the room. It’s just that over time Stalin gained more power, and came to realize that there were no longer any checks to his own ability to reorder the political world to suit his own neuroses, no matter how fanciful.

Of course, many office leaders terrorize those around them, but even so, they’re brutality is usually tempered by fear: fear of potential lawsuits, whistle-blowers, or governmental or corporate scrutiny. It’s nice to eliminate rivals without cause, but why risk one’s own job security or retirement benefits if there’s a shadow of a chance that the victim will be able to retaliate? But, given the chance that Stalin had, to mete out extreme punishments without any fear of negative consequences, what petty office dictator wouldn’t launch a bloody purge or two?