The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Notes

1

‘Space’ here should be understood in the sense of everything around us, not what is beyond the planet.

2

Victory Day – 9 May – the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, is still celebrated as a national holiday in Russia. The peace treaty with Germany was signed late on 8 May, by which time it was already the 9th in Moscow.

3

https://www.facebook.com/mgorskih/posts/864591610296259.

4

https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80_%D0%91%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BA_(%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9) (in Russian). In 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, St Petersburg was renamed ‘Petrograd’, as the original name sounded too German and was thought inappropriate given that Russia was at war with Germany. In 1924, the city was once more renamed. As the place where the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 had begun, and following the death of the leader of the Revolution, Lenin, the city was given Lenin’s name: Leningrad. In 1991 it reverted to its original name, St Petersburg.

5

http://pelevin.nov.ru/romans/pe-genp/1.html (para. 8).

6

This is a phrase that has been used to signify a short conflict aimed at distracting the public’s attention from problems in society. It was first used to describe the war against Japan in 1904–5, which went horribly wrong for Russia and ended in defeat. The need for a ‘small victorious war’ was said to be one of the reasons why President Boris Yeltsin started the ultimately humiliating conflict in Chechnya in December 1994, which ended in June 1996 with the Russian Army forced to retreat in shame and disarray.

7

Putin and many in his circle come from the secret police (FSB or its Soviet predecessor, the KGB); the Ministry of Defence; the Armed Forces; or the Ministry of the Interior. Collectively, these are known as ‘the power ministries’, ‘power’ in the sense of strength – sila – not energy. Those who exercise this sila are known as siloviki.

8

The ‘Cat Stomping Law’ was introduced in January 2013 by the St Petersburg City Council. It levies a fine against anyone making too much noise between the hours of 2300 and 0700, by ‘shouting, whistling, moving furniture, singing, playing a musical instrument or other actions which would disturb the peace and quiet of citizens’. There were proposals put forward that the list should include, ‘loud snoring, loud sex, moving a refrigerator and a cat stomping’. These suggestions were left out of the law, but nevertheless gave it its nickname.

9

Gerhard Schroeder, former German Chancellor, and Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian Prime Minister, each of whom has forged close links with Putin.

10

The first Soviet secret police force was called the Cheka, and those who served in it, Chekists. The KGB and its successor, the FSB, still pride themselves on their connection with the Cheka. The author is here using the term disparagingly, linking it with religion – which the Cheka persecuted mercilessly – to describe Vladimir Putin.

11

https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/2477-konservativnaya-revolyutsiya-smysl-kryma. ‘The Conservative Revolution. The Meaning of Crimea’ (in Russian), 17 March 2014.

12

A number of cities in the USSR were given the title of ‘hero-city’ because of the battles that took place there during the Second World War (or ‘Great Patriotic War’, as Russians call that part which involved the Soviet Union). Sevastopol is one such city.

13

The favourite of Empress Catherine the Great, Grigory Potemkin, is credited with conquering the southern territories and incorporating them into the Russian Empire, including Crimea and a region therein called Taurida. As a result, he was given the name ‘Potemkin-Taurida’. Prokhanov believes that Putin should have similar recognition for seizing back Crimea from Ukraine.

14

Samuel Huntington was an American political scientist, best known for his 1993 theory, the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. He argued that post-Cold War, future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to world peace.

15

The Young Pioneers organization educated children between the ages of nine and fifteen to be loyal to the dictates of the Communist Party and the Soviet motherland. Most children belonged to the Pioneers.

16

The euphemism, ‘the final charge to the south’, was used by the nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as the title of his book on the invasion of Afghanistan, which began at the end of 1979, and which he foresaw as ending with Soviet soldiers ‘washing their boots in the Indian Ocean’. In fact, it ended with the Soviet Army pulling out of Afghanistan in February 1989 with its tail between its legs and a legacy of disillusion and discontent, which contributed to the collapse of the USSR a little over two years later. See note 17 for a reference to Zhirinovsky.

17

The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia was the first political party to register after the Communist Party’s monopoly on power was removed from the Soviet Constitution in February 1990. Led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a fanatical Russian nationalist, the party was reportedly created by the secret police, the KGB, with the express aim of discrediting in the eyes of the Russian people the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. The party was and remains neither liberal nor democratic.

18

http://www.kph.npu.edu.ua/!e-book/clasik/data/mmk/cathedra.html.

19

‘Pulling up their pants and chasing the Komsomol’ is a line from the Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, as he tried to reconcile himself with the new Soviet life in the early 1920s. The Komsomol – the Young Communist League – was the next stage after the Pioneers. It encouraged social activism and further indoctrinated Soviet youth.

20

Sometimes known as the DNR, from the Russian original, Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika. It should be noted that neither this designation nor the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR/LNR) are recognized internationally as separate republics.

21

8 March was always marked in the USSR as International Women’s Day. It is now celebrated more widely around the world. It was one of the dates of the ‘Red Calendar’, introduced by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution as a replacement for the church calendar, with its feast days and saints’ days. The Red Calendar devoted specific days to workers in different areas of society, such as ‘Miners’ Day’, referred to a little later.

22

https://www.colta.ru/articles/society/5329-22-dnya-v-dnr. ‘22 Days in the DNR’ (in Russian), 11 November 2014.

23

Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev led peasant revolts. In Soviet times these were idealized into early examples of uprisings of the common people.

24

Nestor Makhno was commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, which fought for an independent Ukraine during the Civil War. Alexander Antonov led an insurrection in the Tambov Province in Russia against the Bolsheviks.

25

Pavlov was assassinated in 2016.

26

‘Kofemaniya’ is a popular chain of coffee shops in Russia.

27

https://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2013/10/29/obschestvo-ne-spravlyaetsya-s-pritokom-migrantov. ‘Integration: Society Can’t Cope with the Flow of Immigrants’ (in Russian), 29 October 2013.

28

Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (Panther Books, St Albans, 1966; trans. Michael Scammell, pp. 148–9).

29

The Belovezha Accords were so called because, on 8 December 1991, the Presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, meeting in the Belovezha Forest Reserve in Belarus, signed the deal setting up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The establishment of this organization signalled the end of the USSR, although it was only seventeen days later, on 25 December, that Mikhail Gorbachev formally resigned as Soviet President.

30

The Maidan – Freedom Square – as the main square in Kiev was named after the break-up of the Soviet Union, was the centre of the protest movement that eventually brought about the fall of the regime of the pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014.

31

In April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine caused an ecological disaster in the surrounding areas of Ukraine and Belarus. It remains the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

32

In the classic Russian bath-house – the banya – while in the steam room people beat each other with eucalyptus or birch branches to stimulate circulation. Eucalyptus is supposed to be a sign of better quality.

33

Places in Pokémon Go that allow players to collect items such as eggs and more Poke Balls to capture more Pokémon.

34

The State Duma is the lower house of the Russian Parliament. The upper house is the Federation Council, members of which are referred to as ‘senators’. The two houses together are called the Federal Assembly.

35

https://www.interfax.ru/russia/519453. ‘Medinsky says computer games are evil’ (in Russian), 19 July 2016.

36

The Customs Union gives customs-free travel for citizens of the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

37

Following allegations of rigged elections for the State Duma in December 2011, there were mass demonstrations in Moscow, the like of which had not been seen since the last days of the Soviet Union. These demonstrations seemed to convince President Putin that he needed to have a stronger grip on society.

38

https://www.svoboda.org/a/27686926.html Radio Liberty, ‘Kremlin Firewall’ (in Russian), 20 April 2016.

39

The vast majority of the territory of the Soviet Union was ‘closed’ to foreigners: they were not allowed to go there. There were also numerous ‘closed towns’ – sometimes large cities – where even Soviet citizens needed a special pass to live or visit. For foreigners there was no such thing as a visa for the Soviet Union. The visa stipulated the places to be visited and was valid for travel only within a twenty-five-kilometre radius of the centre of that place – provided no ‘closed’ areas fell within it.

40

In 2009 it was announced that the Russian government was to create a place of technological advancement and innovation at Skolkovo, just to the west of Moscow.

41

Oprichnik was the term given to a member of the Oprichnina, an organization established by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to govern a division of Russia from 1565 to 1572. The Telluria of the third title is an imagined republic with large deposits of ‘tellurium’ peacefully snuggled in the Altai Mountains.

42

Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton University Press, 1999).

43

The Zemsky Sobor was a type of feudal parliament, first called by Ivan the Terrible in 1549. In 1613 it elected Mikhail Romanov to the throne, beginning a dynasty which lasted until Nicholas II was removed by the Revolution of February 1917.

1

Moscow-City is the business district of the Russian capital, where the skyscrapers have gone up since the collapse of the USSR. The name was chosen as a direct reference to ‘the City of London’, the British capital’s business district.

2

Stalin ordered the building of seven imposing skyscrapers of similar design, nicknamed ‘wedding cakes’, including Moscow State University, the Ukraina Hotel and the Foreign Ministry. In the post-Soviet period an eighth has been built.

3

A line from the untitled poem, which begins, ‘Now I am dead in my grave with my lips moving’. http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/library/Mandelstam_Poems_Ilya-Bernstein.pdf. ‘The Poems of Osip Mandelstam’, trans Ilya Bernstein (EPC Digital Edition, 2014, p. 40).

4

Peter the Great brutally put down a rebellion by his soldiers known as the streltsy – from the verb, strelyat, meaning ‘to shoot’ – who were protesting about their conditions. Some were publicly executed on Red Square.

5

Within a few months of the Revolution in November 1917, the Bolsheviks moved the Russian capital back to Moscow from Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg, later Leningrad; now once again St Petersburg).

6

https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2008/03/14/stalinskij-proekt-u-stola-vlasti. ‘The Stalinist Project: At the Table of Power’ (in Russian), 14 March 2008.

7

In 1722, Tsar Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks, which carefully delineated the standing of everyone in the military, government and court. ‘Feudalism’ in Russia effectively lasted until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

8

This is what the peasants had to do in tsarist times if the Tsar’s carriage went past.

9

A cargo cult is a belief system among members of a relatively undeveloped society in which adherents practice superstitious rituals hoping to bring modern goods supplied by a more technologically advanced society.

10

https://texty-pesen.ru/zato-my-delaem-rakety.html. Yuri Vizbor, ‘But we build missiles’, words and music (in Russian).

11

In August 1991, hard-liners in the Communist leadership tried to seize power to prevent the President, Mikhail Gorbachev, from signing an agreement with the constituent republics of the USSR, which, they believed, would lead to the break-up of the country. Their so-called coup lasted less than three days and had the effect of speeding up the process of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In 1993, there was a stand-off between the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and his opponents in Parliament. After fighting on the streets of Moscow had left dozens dead, Yeltsin took the decision to send in the tanks and bombard the Parliament building, where his opponents had barricaded themselves in.

12

The Russian (and before that, Soviet) Army used to be staffed by professional officers and conscript soldiers. Under President Putin a category has been introduced of ‘contract’ soldiers, who sign up for a specific period and who are paid, unlike conscripts.

13

https://ria.ru/20150619/1079035580.html. ‘Russian Defence Ministry Orders Research on ‘Colour Revolutions’ (in Russian), 19 June 2015.

14

http://www.strana-oz.ru/2013/2/klassifikaciya-i-ranzhirovanie-ugroz (in Russian).

15

Vladimir Vysotsky was a popular singer of ballads in the 1960s and 1970s whose often humorous songs were regarded as being on the edge of what was acceptable to the Communist leadership. http://vysotskiy-lit.ru/vysotskiy/stihi-varianty/317.htm. Letter to the Editor (in Russian).

16

The Observer, 17 March 1985.

17

https://tass.ru/politika/2536355 (in Russian), 17 December 2015.

18

Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press, 2005).

19

Khatyn is a Belarusian village where the entire population of more than 150 people was slaughtered, mostly burned alive, by the Nazis in retaliation for an attack by Soviet partisans. Eight people managed to survive. Babiy Yar is the site of the mass extermination of the Jews and other residents of Kiev by the Germans in 1941. It is believed that nearly 34,000 Jews were massacred in less than forty-eight hours.

20

Alexander Pushkin, Letter to Pyotr Vyazemsky (8 June 1827).

21

The Russian term is ‘okolofutbol’, literally meaning ‘around football’. It suggests that the hooligan movement is based on football without really being a part of it. ‘The thugs’ game’ conveys the idea, without, perhaps, the irony of the Russian.

22

The Communist International (Comintern), known also as the Third International (1919–43), was an international organization led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that advocated world communism and carried out subversive acts to try to bring this about.

23

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist; Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism; Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, ‘bare life’ and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (see below) informs many of his writings; Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher. His subjects include continental philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, film criticism, Marxism, Hegelianism and theology.

24

A phrase uttered by Putin during a press conference in September 1999, commenting on the Russian air force bombing of the Chechen capital Grozny.

25

https://pora-valit.livejournal.com/1258484.html. ‘Time to call a halt? Everything you need to know about emigration’ (in Russian), Voice of Russia radio station, 21 March 2013.

26

Lubyanka Square is where the KGB/FSB headquarters is; behind this large building is the infamous Lubyanka Prison, to which thousands of political prisoners and innocent people were taken in Stalin’s time and later. The memorial – a large stone brought from the Solovetsky Islands, the scene of a notorious prison camp – was deliberately placed on this spot and unveiled in a ceremony in the more liberal period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership in 1990.

1

The later years of Leonid Brezhnev’s time as General Secretary of the Party, and thus ruler of the Soviet Union, were marked by a lack of economic and political progress. As a result, this period was dubbed ‘the era of stagnation’. Little changed after Brezhnev died in November 1982 and was replaced by Yury Andropov; nor when Andropov died and was replaced by Chernenko in February 1984. It took the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 for the era of stagnation to end.

2

http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault219.html (in French).

3

In June 1996, after the first round of the Russian presidential election and before the decisive run-off vote between Yeltsin and the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin suffered a heart attack. This was kept from public knowledge. After Yeltsin won the second round, it was announced that he had had a heart attack and he subsequently underwent a quintuple heart by-pass operation. Political life in Russia remained in limbo for months.

4

https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/no-putin-no-russia-says-kremlin-deputy-chief-of-staff-40702. ‘“No Putin, No Russia”, Says Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff’, The Moscow Times, 23 October 2014.

5

The branch of science that deals with death.

6

This title is a play on the name of the infamous Russian forgery, first published in 1903, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The fake document is supposed to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. It was translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally. The publishers claimed that these were the minutes of a meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world’s economies. In 1921 it was exposed as a fraud by The Times.

7

The Synod of the Eastern Orthodox Church of 1666–7 introduced reforms that were then adopted by the Russian Church. Those who refused to accept the changes became known as the ‘Old Believers’ and were persecuted. Some fled abroad, others set up communities in Russia’s vast wastelands, some of which were discovered only in Soviet times.

8

Harvey Milk was an American politician and the first openly gay elected official in the history of California, when he served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977–8.

9

Bertrand Delanoë was Mayor of Paris 2001–14; Klaus Wowereit was Mayor of Berlin 2011–14; Ole von Beust was Mayor of Hamburg 2001–10; Glen Murray was Mayor of Winnipeg 1998–2004.

10

In 1966, Andrei Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp for ‘anti-Soviet activity’, because of the opinions voiced by some of the characters in his novels, which had been published in the West. His trial, along with fellow writer Yuli Daniel, was seen as marking the end of the period of liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev (who had been ousted in 1964) and the start of the dissident movement.

11

The dock in Russian courts is usually inside a cage. This is ostensibly to protect those in the courtroom from violent defendants, but in practice is more usually simply a way of denigrating the accused. The principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is often not adhered to in Russian courts.

12

Dedovshchina is institutionalized violence against the new conscripts by the older ones – ‘the grandfathers’ or ‘dedy’ (hence the term). Every year, hundreds of young conscripts suffer permanent injury or even death as a result of this treatment.

13

Vladimir Sorokin, ‘Day of the Oprichnik’ (Penguin Books, 2018; trans. Jamey Gambrell, p. 129).

14

A day’s unpaid work demanded of a vassal by his overlord.

15

‘Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?’ ‘Les Mots du Général’, Ernest Mignon, 1962.

16

The Magnitsky List includes officials shown to have profited from corruption or been guilty of human rights abuses, and prevents them from travelling to countries where this is enforced. It is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer for the Anglo-American businessman Bill Browder, who, after uncovering a multimillion-dollar fraud by senior Russian officials, was arrested on false charges and then murdered while in prison. Browder has made it his mission to try to have a Magnitsky Law adopted in as many countries as possible, thus preventing corrupt officials from travelling abroad to take advantage of their ill-gotten gains.

17

A popular Russian soft drink.

1

In 1954, Crimea was transferred from Russian jurisdiction to Ukrainian jurisdiction, as a gesture to mark three hundred years of unity between Russia and Ukraine. As both republics were part of the Soviet Union, at the time the gesture was largely symbolic. In 1989, following the withdrawal in February of that year of the last Soviet troops which had been conducting a military campaign in Afghanistan since late 1979, the Congress of People’s Deputies declared that the campaign had been a political mistake, ordered by a small group within the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo.

2

http://www.vehi.net/chaadaev/filpisma.html (Letter 1, para. 8) (in Russian).

3

Ilya Oblomov and Andrei Stoltz are the two main characters in the nineteenth-century Russian novel Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov, which is one of the classics of Russian literature of the period. Although the two characters in the novel are friends, they are completely different: the typical Russian landowner (pomeshchik), Oblomov, is lazy and a dreamy character, while Stoltz, of German origin, is energetic and wilful. In Russia, they are usually seen as epitomes of Russian (and Asian) laziness and Western practicality.

4

Khalyava is a peculiarly Russian concept. Basically, it means getting something free, especially if it comes from the state, misusing state funds, having a sinecure job, etc.

5

For a description of ‘The Red Calendar’ and the special days, see Part I, note 21. The type of calendar referred to is printed as a block on cheap paper, with each day being torn off as you go through the year.

6

English language version, Andrews UK Ltd, 2012, p. 266.

7

Vasily Rozanov, The Apocalypse of Our Time (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1977; trans. Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff, pp. 228–9).

8

Sovok is a derogatory name for all things Soviet, and is also the Russian word for a dustpan.

9

Famous Soviet singers of the 1930s–60s.

10

Named after Andrei Zhdanov, who was responsible for that round of purges.

11

Reforms introduced by Petr Stolypin (prime minister, 1906–11) led to a massive deportation of peasants and prisoners to Siberia. A special type of carriage was introduced for these settlers, consisting of two parts: a standard passenger compartment for a peasant and his family and a large zone for their livestock and agricultural tools. After the Revolution, the Cheka/NKVD found these carriages convenient for transporting convicts and exiles: the passenger part was used for prison guards, the cattle part for prisoners.

12

The system of prison camps established across the Soviet Union under Stalin. GULAG is an acronym for Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, the Main Directorate of Camps.

13

https://www.krugozormagazine.com/show/Brodskiy.2107.html. Krugozor magazine (in Russian), February 2014.

14

In 1932–3, Stalin ordered the deliberate creation of a manmade famine in Ukraine, which wiped out millions of Ukrainians. The word Holodomor is the Ukrainian (and Russian) word for famine.

15

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/16/historybooks.features.

16

Varlam Shalamov, The Kolyma Tales, (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1994; Trans John Glad).

17

Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 245).

18

As cited in The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, edited by Siobhan Kattago (Routledge, 2016, p. 255).

19

Etkind, Warped Mourning, p. 245.

20

The Axis Powers before and during the Second World War were Germany, Italy and Japan. Despite formally signing the Tripartite Pact in 1940, they were united by little more than their common enemies. Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania later joined, as did Yugoslavia – for two days.

21

Like Spitting Image, Kukly parodied the politicians of the day. The programme was extremely popular in Russia in the 1990s, and President Yeltsin apparently found his own puppet very funny. Putin, however, was unable to laugh at seeing himself portrayed satirically by a puppet, and the show was closed in 2002. In time, the channel that had shown it, NTV, was also shut down.

22

Vladimir Nabokov, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975, p. 36).

23

Brodsky was expelled from the USSR in 1972 for ‘anti-Soviet activity’. He never published the poem, On the Independence of Ukraine, but he did deliver it on a few occasions at poetry readings.

24

https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2015/07/03/599078-rossiiskoe-obschestvo-ne-vidit-sebya. Russian Society Can’t See Itself (in Russian), 2 July 2015.

25

http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, trans. Carol Diethe, First Essay, Section 10, p. 20).

26

https://mercaba.org/SANLUIS/Filosofia/autores/Contempor%C3%A1nea/Scheller/Ressentiment.pdf. Max Scheler, Ressentiment: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau Der Moralen, p. 101, n. 26; translation into English by Louis A. Coser from the text of 1915.

27

In August 1998 Russia defaulted on its debts and almost overnight the rouble crashed to about a quarter of its value. This made imported goods very expensive, and it acted as a stimulus for Russian industry.

28

https://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/4887-v-strane-pobedivshego-resentimenta. In the Country Where Resentment Has Triumphed (in Russian), 6 October 2014.

29

https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2014/07/28/izbezhat-afganistana-2. Sergei Karaganov: Avoid Afghanistan-2 (in Russian), 28 July 2014.

30

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/46860.

31

For more on Zhirinovsky and his Party, see Part I, notes 16 and 17.

32

Dozhd is the only TV station in Russia not controlled by the government. It broadcasts online.

33

The Dolchstoss im Rücken (‘stab in the back’ theory) was that in the First World War the German Army was ‘undefeated in the field’ and had been ‘stabbed in the back’ – i.e., had been denied support at the crucial moment by a weary and defeatist civilian population and their leaders. This idea gained popularity in Germany in the difficult postwar years of the 1920s and ’30s.

34

Iampolski, In the Country Where Resentment Has Triumphed.

35

The extremist ‘South East Radical Bloc’ (SERB), which started up in Eastern Ukraine when the war began in March 2014, and has since been active in parts of Russia.

36

‘White Guard’ refers to the Russian Civil War of 1917–22, when ‘the Reds’ – the Bolsheviks, who had carried out the Revolution in November 1917 – defeated the supporters of the former Tsarist system and anyone else who opposed them. Collectively, they were known as ‘the Whites’ or ‘the White Guards’. Bunin hated Bolshevism and left Russia in 1920, never to return. He lived most of the remainder of his life in France, until his death in 1953.

37

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2827530. Why Do We Cry and Pray So Bitterly? (In Russian), 12 October 2015.

38

The camps in Kolyma, situated in the far northeastern corner of Russia, were considered the most notorious in the whole GULAG system.

39

Re Holodomor, see above. The siege of Leningrad by the German Army in the Second World War lasted from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, and cost the lives of one and a half million of the city’s inhabitants. Re Dozhd TV, see note 32.

40

Alexievich, Why Do We Cry and Pray So Bitterly?.

41

http://pelevin.nov.ru/texts/pe-t.html (in Russian).

42

Come and See is a Soviet war tragedy film made in 1985 by Elem Klimov, based on the book Out of Fire (referred to in the text) about the Belarusian villages burnt to the ground with their inhabitants by the Nazis.

43

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/requiem/.

44

https://www.mk.ru/politics/2016/11/22/nenakazuemoe-proshloe-nuzhno-li-iskat-palachey-nkvd.html. The Unpunished Past: The NKVD Executioners Should be Sought Out (in Russian), 22 November 2016.

45

https://iz.ru/news/646830. I Fear Justice (in Russian), 23 November 2016.

46

There is a tradition in Russia for wedding parties on the way from the registry office to the wedding breakfast to stop off at various sites of historical or local interest. If it is a war memorial, the bride may even lay her bouquet there. A separate superstition is to rub or touch a part of a bronze statue for luck.

47

https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2016/12/12/70870-utomlennye-eltsinym. Burnt by Yeltsin (in Russian), 12 December 2016.

48

The Church on the Blood was built in 2000–3 on the site where the Ipatiev House stood. Fearing that the House could become a focus for royalist sentiment, in 1977 the Soviet Communist Party ordered it to be knocked down. As First Secretary of the local Party Committee, Yeltsin saw to it that the order was carried out.

49

An obsolete Russian unit of measurement, equivalent to a little over a kilometre.

50

In 1773–4, the Cossack, Yemelyan Pugachev, led a peasant revolt to try to seize the throne from the Empress Catherine II.

51

This is an oft-cited quote from Alexander Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev Rebellion, ‘God save us from seeing a Russian riot, senseless and merciless’.

52

‘The People’s Will’ (Russ: Narodnaya Volya) was a nineteenth-century revolutionary political organization that used terrorism in an attempt to promote reforms in the country. It is best known for killing Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

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Link.

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In both Tsarist and Soviet times prisoners were divided into two groups: criminals (who had broken the law) and ‘politicals’, who were arrested for their political views. This is also a feature of Putin’s regime.